Was the Universe designed for us?

Teleological arguments (from the Greek words telos, meaning “end, aim, goal” and logos meaning “knowledge, science”) are a family of arguments for God’s existence. Like the cosmological, moral, and ontological arguments, there are many arguments that fall under this category. They are largely understood as arguments from design or from fine-tuning. In other words, they take a feature of the universe, namely the universe appears to have been made for a purpose, and reasons that this purpose behind the creation of the universe is an intelligent one.

Space does not allow a full treatment of these arguments but I will outline two of them and give a brief defence of each. The first argument I’ll expound is Dr William Lane Craig’s version. Craig is arguably the most popular modern philosopher to defend the Christian faith, so his arguments are the most well-known modern arguments. Dr Craig argues the cosmological constants at the beginning of the universe were so incredibly fine-tuned the odds they weren’t intelligently designed might as well be impossible. Then, I will give William Paley’s version of the argument. While Dr Craig’s version of the argument should rightly be called a fine-tuning argument, William Paley’s version could be considered an argument from design.

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William Lane Craig’s version

Before giving Dr. Craig’s argument, I should first explain what is meant by fine-tuning in this case. Craig explains in chapter four of his detailed work Reasonable Faith that fine-tuning means “The physical laws of nature, when given mathematical expression, contain various constants (such as the gravitational constant) whose values are not determined by the law themselves…by ‘fine-tuning’ one means that small deviations from the actual values of the constants and quantities in question would render the universe life-prohibiting or, alternatively, that the range of life-permitting values is exquisitely narrow in comparison with the range of assumable values.”

Some examples of these fine-tuned constants include the fundamental constants of such things as gravitation, the weak force, and the strong force. If you were to assign a different value to any of these constants, you would discover the proportion of universes which could support intelligent life is shockingly small. Any further discussion gets pretty technical, so I’ll refer the reader to Reasonable Faith if he/she wishes more information, or if one is not versed in physics, his On Guard, which presents a more accessible version of these arguments to lay readers. Suffice to say, there are many constants that had to be just right in order for our universe to be able to support intelligent life.

Dr Craig does point out some laymen might think if these constants had turned out differently, then other forms of life may have evolved instead. But Craig responds this is not the case, for by “life” scientists have very specific properties in mind for organisms, such as the ability to take in food, extract energy from it, grow, etc. The point of the argument is whatever form this kind of life might take, the constants and quantities had to be precisely fine-tuned.

So the question is, what accounts for the precise fine-tuning at the beginning of our universe that led to such life arising? Craig’s argument runs as follows:

P1: The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.

P2: It is not due to physical necessity or chance.

C: Therefore, it is due to design.

Premise one is easy to defend. These are really the only possibilities that could have fine-tuned our universe. Sometimes an atheist will try to claim premise one fails because it doesn’t account for all the possibilities, but as Doctor Craig says, if anyone comes up with another possibility, we’ll add it to the list and examine it. For now, these three possibilities are the contenders for explaining the fine-tuning of the universe.

For premise two, we need to show that physical necessity and design are not responsible for the fine-tuning of the universe. If they are not, then by logical deduction it must be due to design.

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Is physical necessity responsible? Another way of asking this is, did the universe turn out the way it did because it had to turn out this way? Of course, the answer is no. Certainly there are ways the universe could have turned out other than the way it did, and the vast majority of those ways would have prohibited life from emerging. This alternative requires us to think a life-prohibiting universe is physically impossible, but there is no reason to think so. As Dr Craig writes in Reasonable Faith, “If the primordial mater and anti-matter had been differently proportioned, if the universe had expanded just a little more slowly, if the entropy of the universe were marginally greater, any of these adjustments and more would have prevented a life-permitting universe, yet all seem perfectly possible, physically. The person who maintains that the universe must be life-permitting is taking a radical line which requires strong proof. But there is none; this alternative is simply put forward as a bare possibility.”

So physical necessity can’t explain the fine-tuning. But can chance? Considering how unlikely the existence of a life-permitting universe is, it’s essentially impossible that a life-permitting universe could have arisen by chance. So many constants have to be finely-tuned to within a hair’s breadth that for any one of these to go wrong, a life-permitting universe would not have arisen.

One might point out that no matter how the universe turned out, it would be equally improbable. So we should not be surprised that our universe turned out the way it did. After all, winning the lottery is extraordinarily improbable and yet people do win. Perhaps we just won the “cosmic lottery”. But Dr Craig responds with an analogy: Suppose you have a tub filled with a billion billion billion black balls and you place one white ball in it. When you draw the lottery of balls, each ball has an equally improbable chance of being selected, but that’s not what’s at issue here. It’s true that each ball has an equally improbable chance of being selected but it is overwhelmingly more probable that a black ball will be selected than a white one. That’s the sense in which it is meant that a life-permitting universe is extraordinarily implausible.

So premise one is true because it exhausts all the possibilities put forth. Premise two is true because neither physical necessity nor chance can account for the astronomically implausible life-permitting universe we find ourselves in. So the conclusion necessarily follows.

William Paley’s version

Norm Geisler, in his Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics, calls this the most popular form of the argument. I would tend to agree. The church I grew up in did not do any sort of apologetics training or teaching of any sort, but I still heard about Paley’s “watchmaker argument”. Paley expounded this argument in his 1804 book Natural Theology.

Paley’s argument, in brief, is suppose you were taking a walk somewhere, say in a desert, and you came across a watch lying on the ground. You could deduce that it was dropped there by someone and that it had a designer. Everything about the watch shows design. The universe, by comparison, is much larger and much more complex than a simple watch. And yet the universe also shows many signs that it was designed. If something as simple as a watch needed a designer to make it, we must conclude that the ever more complex universe required a designer, as well.

Geisler, in his aforementioned book, summarizes the argument as follows:

1. A watch shows that it was put together for an intelligent purpose (to keep time): a) It has a spring to give it motion. b) It has a series of wheels to transmit this motion. c) The wheels are made of brass so that they do not rust. d) The spring is made of steel because of the resilience of that metal. e) The front cover is of glass so that one can see through it.

2. The world shows an even greater evidence of design than a watch: a) The world is a greater work of art than a watch. b) The world has more subtle and complex design than a watch. c) The world has an endless variety of means adapted to ends.

3. Therefore, if the existence of a watch implies a watchmaker, the existence of the world implies an even greater intelligent designer (God).

William Lane Craig points out many philosophers believe David Hume’s objections to design arguments have effectively dealt a crushing and fatal blow to Paley’s argument, though Craig points out Paley’s book was published nearly 30 years after Hume’s critique of these arguments. Paley’s argument is not vulnerable to most of Hume’s objections. Indeed, Geisler points out while Hume used his own argument to anticipate objections, Hume did not do justice to Paley’s argument. See Geisler’s entry on William Paley in Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics and Frederick Ferre’s Introduction to Natural Theology: Selections by William Paley for more on that discussion.

This is a very powerful argument. Anyone who really looks at the world around us can see the elements of design. The human body has elements to it which are self-sustaining and work toward keeping the body alive and functioning. The respiratory system, digestive system, etc. all work in tandem toward that end. Looking at the world, we have the water cycle, in which water falls from the sky to water plants and fill lakes, the water on the ground evaporates and returns to the atmosphere, where it becomes clouds again and the water falls to the ground. We have various ecosystems on earth that keep the planet alive and thriving. Everything about the universe and the world around us, like that tiny watch, screams design. Even biologist Richard Dawkins, in his God Delusion, says scientists take a design stance to nature, in which things appear to be designed but, Dawkins asserts, scientists must constantly remind themselves that any appearance of design in nature is but an illusion. One day perhaps Dawkins will realize that he and other scientists are just trying too hard to avoid what is right in front of their noses.

We built this city

Briefly, I outlined two teleological arguments for the existence of God: William Lane Craig’s argument from fine-tuning, and William Paley’s watchmaker argument. Craig’s argument is good for those who are well-versed in physics but I think Paley’s argument is much more intuitive and accessible.

It would be ridiculous to assert the article you’re reading now was not designed. Clearly, this collection of letters, punctuation, and spaces have come together for a purpose – to enlighten readers on a specific type of argument. Just so, it is ridiculous to assert this world and this universe, as infinitely complex as they are, also arose by chance. Not only are the odds of that astronomically stacked against it, but anyone who takes a serious look at how the world functions can only come away with one conclusion: this world, too, was made with a purpose.

Clinton Wilcox is a staff apologist for Life Training Institute. He specializes in training pro-life people to make the pro-life case more effectively and persuasively. He is also a certified speaker and mentor for Justice for All. You can read his blog and follow him on Twitter.