This week we move on from the Cosmological Argument to the Teleological Argument, or the Fine Tuning Argument. In the first part of this episode we take a look at how this argument originated with Fred Hoyle’s discovery of where the carbon came from in the universe. By the way, God loves you!
Strobel, L. (2004). The Case for a Creator. Zondervan
Craig, W. L. (2008). Reasonable Faith. Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway.
Meyer, S. (2021), The Return of the God Hypothesis. HarperCollins
Lewis, G. F., & Barnes, L. A. (2016). A Fortunate Universe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“The anthropic answer, in its most general form, is that we could only be discussing the question in the kind of universe that was capable producing us.” Dawkins, The God Delusion, 2008
“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows, nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.” (Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life, 1994)
“The fine-tuning of the Universe for life is the realization that if the laws of physics were different, even just by a little bit, life would not exist.” Lewis and Barnes, A Fortunate Universe, 2016
“What if? What if the laws of physics were different? What if the building blocks, atoms and molecules, had different masses…What if we messed with the stage, playing around with the very space and time underlying the cosmos? What would change in the Universe? And what would it mean for life?” Lewis and Barnes, A Fortunate Universe, 2016
“A common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put the conclusion almost beyond question.” Hoyle, The Universe: Past and Present Reflections, 1982
