Does God Exist?Намуна

Order from Chaos

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. Genesis 1:1-2 NIV

Once upon a time, there was a little girl with golden hair named Goldilocks. Goldilocks was wandering through the woods when she came upon a house. This was perfect timing because she was just starting to get hungry! She approached the house to see if the owners had any food they would be willing to share with her. After knocking on the door and waiting for several minutes, she decided to just let herself in. As she entered the home, she saw the table was set with three different bowls of porridge. Making herself even more at home, she tried the porridge from each of the bowls. The first two bowls were too hot and then too cold, but the third bowl was just right. She kept wandering until she found herself in the living room. There were three chairs set out. Continuing her habit of using other peoples’ things without asking, she decided to take a seat in each of the chairs. The first chair was way too hard. The second chair was way too soft. That third chair though, that chair was just right. After sitting for a time, Goldilocks started to get tired. So, she headed on upstairs to find a bed to sleep in. (Because that’s what you do when you break into a stranger’s house in children’s stories …) There were three beds. Once again, she tried all three. The first two beds didn’t work at all for her, but that third bed was just right. So she lay down and fell asleep.

If you want to know what happens next, you’ll have to read the rest of the story on your own. No spoilers here! Now, you might find yourself wondering, what in the world does the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears have to do with the existence of God?

I’m glad you asked! The second argument for the existence of God we’ll be looking at, the Fine-Tuning Argument, has been called by some the “Goldilocks Argument.” The argument comes from the fact that the universe appears to be so finely tuned for the existence of life that it would be much more likely the product of an intelligent designer than the product of random chance.

Unlike the Goldilocks story, however, instead of three choices for three different categories, the universe has around 150 different cosmological constants that seem to be just right for life to exist. And the number of possibilities for what these constants could have been are so significant that even atheist scientists have described it as “miraculous.” But, unlike in the Goldilocks story, if any of these constants were changed by the slightest degree, the result would not be that your mouth got burned by some porridge or the chair you sat in was uncomfortable. The result would be a universe that could not sustain life at all.

For just one example of many: Sir Roger Penrose, an atheist scientist, calculated the likelihood of the universe having the level of entropy, the level of disorder, it needed at the beginning of time as 1 in 10^10^123 power. If the level of disorder was just one degree higher or one degree lower, the universe would not have formed into anything. For context, this measurement is so precise, that if you wrote all the zeros in this number side by side, it would stretch from one end of the galaxy to the other! You’re more likely to win the lottery 10,000 times in a row and get struck by lightning every time you won, than for the universe to have the level of disorder necessary to be life-permitting. And this is just one of the nearly 150 qualities that is somehow just right! 

Because of how incredibly precise and unlikely the fine-tuning of the universe is, some atheists like the late Christopher Hitchens, have called this the most compelling argument for the existence of God. 

The two pieces of evidence we’ve looked at so far are the beginning of the universe and the fine-tuning of the universe. When we take these two arguments together, we are starting to see a strong case for the existence of an intelligent creator outside of nature, who seems to have an interest in a universe that can sustain life. 

Tomorrow, we’ll look at another argument that will shine more light on the character of this creator. A creator powerful enough to create something from nothing, and intelligent enough to bring order from chaos.