Bill premier unbelievable in the U.K. recently joined the Pan-Sycaste philosophy podcast and the global philosophy of religion project at the University of Birmingham and hosting a panel discussion called The Mystery of Existence.

It featured four philosophers and scientists, two of whom were particularly interested in Richard Dawkins and Richard Swinburne.

This is before a live audience. The main contention between them on the program was God's simplicity or as Dawkins put it, God's complexity.

So did Swinburne straighten Dawkins out on this? We'll see in a moment. But first Bill Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that one can legitimately ask who designed the designer as his primary defeater of theism.

You think Dawkins was arguing for God's complexity in that so-called defeater?

I think Kevin that he was rather assuming God's complexity in pressing that defeater. He has the opinion that in order for an explanation to be the best one, the thing that is doing the explaining needs to be simpler than the thing to be explained.

And he thinks that God or assumes that God is a very complex entity and therefore by positing a divine designer of the universe, we are not making any advance in simplicity and hence a divine designer is not a good explanation of the evident or apparent design in the universe.

So many people, including yourself, try to straighten Dawkins out on this whole thing. And when you see this panel, well, I'm jumping ahead just a little bit, but when you see this panel discussion, you think he has read none of it.

But let's see how it plays out just from watching these clips. Let's go to the first excerpt from Dawkins opening statement. Here's clip number one.

The mystery of existence is indeed a deeply profound mystery and a biologist is perhaps best qualified of anybody to expound this mystery because at least until 1859 it was a total mystery.

The facts of life being both highly complex are almost unbelievably complex and also carrying a gigantic illusion of design, living things appear to have design written all over them.

And until Darwin came along, that's what most people thought, almost everybody thought. Darwin had the, if frontery almost, to realize that it was possible that all this complexity and this illusion of design could come about through blind mechanical forces, evolution by natural selection.

Pushing back before biology, the origin of all things, the origin of the universe, the origin of matter, the origin of the laws of physics.

We need a physics on this, a physicist on this panel. I think we haven't got one because that's where the problem is at present. Biology is essentially solved.

And that was the big one. William Paley in his book on natural theology in 1803 said that physics is comparatively easy.

It's biology that really demonstrates the role of the creator. But nevertheless since biology is solved, we're now pushed back to physics and cosmology as the place where the mystery is now deepest.

And as you know, there's a strong argument to say that these fundamental constants are fine-tuned in the sense that if there were any of them was slightly different from what they are, then we would not have galaxies, we would not have matter, we would not have chemistry, we would not have biology, and we would not have us.

So there are various solutions to this riddle of where the fine-tuning comes from. And I think the one that is most favored at the moment is the multiverse idea.

The other physicists say that it's just we don't yet understand enough. They will come a time when we have a theory of everything, and then we will know why these physical constants have the values that they do and where the laws of physics come from.

Well, he predicts a theory of everything, talks about fine-tuning, talks about multiverses, Bill, among other things. What do you think about this excerpt from his opening statement?

I thought it was very effective as an opening statement. He delivers it with confidence and eloquence.

He gives the impression to the audience that through the biological theory of evolution, design has been explained away, and so just a sort of mopping up needs to be done now to get rid of the fine-tuning in physics, and he's optimistic that can happen.

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