One of the nail-in-the coffin arguments for me becoming a Christian, years ago, begins with the assertion that when something looks designed, it actually makes the MOST sense to hypothesize that it probably had a designer.
No one thinks your car evolved. No one thinks the books on your shelf wrote themselves. And no one thinks that the clothes you’re wearing are the result of a bunch of threads blowing into each other the right way for millions of years.
Why? Because those things just don’t happen.
Far from being a “god of the gaps” excuse, looking at something complex and concluding that it is more likely to have a designer than to have arisen out of nothing and all on its own makes FAR MORE logical sense.
We resist this idea (ok, *I* did, as an atheist…and I bet we all know people that currently do, too!) because the notion that everything arose out of nothing and just organized itself into something more complex than humanity’s best engineering feat has been drilled into our heads since childhood and repeated throughout our education from very smart and reliable people. It creates a sort of bias in our minds.
The cosmological constant
That’s a fancy way of saying “the energy density of the vacuum of space”. And whether you care to delve into its intricacies or not, the fact that it’s fine-tuned to a degree of 10^120 is hands-down evidence of a designer.
If it weren’t EXACTLY what it is, eg. any higher or lower, the universe would either explode or collapse in on itself.
Elements of life
Bringing it a little more close to home, there are a number of finely-tuned “settings” that have to be just so in order for life to even be possible.
One of those is that the basic elements required for life to exist, and there are 40 of them, have to be able to bond together and form molecules.
…and atoms.
Before we can even think about molecules, though, let’s talk about atoms.
The “strong nuclear force” is a term that talks about how effectively (or not) protons and neutrons are able to stick together…in other words, whether the core of an atom can even hold together or not.
If this force were any stronger or weaker, again, life would be impossible. We’d either only be able to form one type of atom, or atom formation would be impossible. Neither variation, of course, is capable of supporting the atoms…which build the molecules…which build everything else…required for life to exist.
Gravity
There are so many constants in the universe that are fine-tuned and that we simply take for granted, but one of the most well-known among these is gravity.
If the gravitational force constant were larger, stars would all burn up due to being too hot. And if it were lower, they would be too cool, making nuclear fusion impossible (read: No stars).
A few other recognizable factors include the distances between stars, galaxies, planets, and more. In each case, as was the case before, tiny variations in these numbers would all be catastrophic for the existence of life.
Either something came from nothing, or there was a cause…are you God-curious? Then read on…
