Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig, today and excurses

on Natural Theology, Part 16.

For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Today we want to continue our discussion of the design argument for God's existence based upon

the fine-tuning of the universe. We saw that the fundamental constants and boundary conditions

of the universe are fine-tuned for the evolution and existence of embodied conscious agents

in a degree that is incomprehensible and incomprehensibly delicate as well as complex. And there are three explanations for this

incredible fine tuning available in the literature. One is physical necessity that the constants

and quantities have to have the values they do. The other is chance, and the third is design.

Now we've already seen that the first alternative, that this is a matter of physical necessity,

is highly implausible. This is contrary to the best evidence of science. The best evidence

indicates that these constants and

quantities are independent of the laws of nature and that there is nothing physically that

would determine that they should have the finely tuned values that they do. So that leads

us then to the second alternative, and that is chance. Could the

fine-tuning of the universe just be the result of chance? Now according to this alternative,

it's just an accident that all of the constants and quantities fall into the infinitesimal life-permitting range.

We just basically lucked out.

The fundamental problem with this explanation is that the chances of a life-permitting universes existing are so remote that this

alternative becomes unreasonable.

Now sometimes people will object that it's meaningless to speak of the probability of

a fine-tuned universe is existing because there is after all only one

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