Fine-tuning provides compelling evidence that God exists and intended to create living beings. And this sounds very much like the kind of God we find described in Genesis who creates a heavens and earth that are hospitable for life.

One of the remarkable scientific discoveries of the past several decades is that the universe and earth appear fine-tuned for life. Philosopher of science Stephen C. Meyer explains that fine-tuning “refers to the discovery that many properties of the universe fall within extremely narrow and improbable ranges that turn out to be absolutely necessary for complex forms of life…to exist.” It’s important to note that the term fine-tuning/tuned is a neutral description that doesn’t imply the existence of God. It’s a designation routinely used by scientists and scholars of all stripes.

Although scientific findings are always provisional, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that an incredibly powerful and intelligent being designed our universe to support life. In what follows we’ll look at the scientific credibility of fine-tuning, specific examples, possible explanations for it, and consider some objections. Fine-tuning is not surprising if Christianity is true, since God intended to create human and animal life (Genesis 1), but it is surprising on naturalism, where it appears to be an astounding coincidence.

An Established Belief

One will occasionally meet skeptics who believe fine-tuning is an idea invented by Christians but not taken seriously by scientists. The following quotations show this is a misconception.

• Agnostic physicist Sir Fred Hoyle: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”
• Atheist physicist Stephen Hawking: “The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”
• Agnostic physicist P. C. W. Davies: “The entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge, and would be total chaos if any of the natural ‘constants’ were off even slightly.”

“On the face of it, the universe does look as if it has been designed by an intelligent creator expressly for the purpose of spawning sentient beings.”

• Atheist physicist Steven Weinberg: “Life as we know it would be impossible if any one of several physical quantities had slightly different values.”

It’s notable that cosmic fine-tuning was one of the reasons the distinguished atheist thinker Antony Flew changed his mind about God’s existence, as recounted in his 2007 book There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind.

Examples of Fine-Tuning

Philosopher Robin Collins points out, “If the initial explosion of the big bang had differed in strength by as little as one part in 10⁶⁰ [i.e., 1 followed by 60 zeros], the universe would have either quickly collapsed back on itself, or expanded too rapidly for stars to form. In either case, life would be impossible.”

This is a mind-boggling number. Collins likens this improbability to “firing a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and hitting the target.”

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