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Fine Tuning Favours God
The comedian, Eddie Izzard, is rather funny on
his acute observations about the fine tuning of the
shower control. Most of us will agree there is a
tiny position on the dial between freezing-cold and
scalding-hot (at least there was in the bathroom of
my childhood). Then there was the hazard of
anyone else in the house touching any other tap!
You were only ‘safe’ if no one else in the house
was awake, and if you had the keen senses of a
safe-breaker cracking the combination of a vault.
Turns out that this Universe is so finely tuned, it puts the capricious
shower control to shame. The conditions required to support Life
on Earth are so definitive that the odds of them happening by
chance really take faith to believe in them! It’s like blindfolding an
archer to shoot an arrow to hit a target as small as a playing card –
then putting that target on the other side of this Universe… billions
and billions and billions of miles away. Even if the arrow had
sufficient momentum to reach that far, the slightest deviation – by a
billionth, billionth of a degree would mean missing the mark by a
huge margin.
The odds of us being here are ‘impossible’ without the intervention
of the Grand Design of a Benevolent Creator. Some of the
important stages in the sustainability of Life include the pace of the
expansion of the Universe after the supposed Big Bang – it’s just
right, the creation of carbon as an element, and the creation of
DNA – the code for all biological Life.
Here are three of the key components of the ‘fine tuning’ argument.
Firstly, the force of Gravity is ‘just right’ for stars and planets and
galaxies to form. The tiniest variation in the strength of Gravity
would have meant the Big Bang would have produced either the
Big Ball or the Big Mess.
Secondly, all biological Life is Carbon-based. The conditions for
Carbon to be formed have to be ‘just right’ (forces of strength and
electromagnetism). The slightest deviation results in the three
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