And They Think Some of Us Are Weird

A priceless scene appears in the movie, “Expelled”, when Ben Stein asks the leading proponent of Darwinism and atheism, Richard Dawkins, how life began. After sputtering for a few moments, Dawkins offers the thought that some advanced creature from outer space may have seeded life on earth, exposing the fact that Darwinists, who have an answer for everything, have no answer for this most basic question.

Now that we know that every key relationship in the universe is based on six numbers (see note 1), that these relationships are crucial to life, and that there would be no life and no universe as we know it if any one of these six numbers was changed in the slightest degree, even the most committed atheists have had to admit that this can be no coincidence. They therefore have come up with an explanation that is so far-fetched and unprovable, we must just throw up our hands at the lengths they are willing to go to deny that this elegant design was, well, designed.

Their new invention is that there must be an infinite number of universes out there – with huge numbers of them resembling ours, but most of them far different from ours or extinct. Ours may be the only one that randomly inherited the extraordinary circumstances of these six key numbers (and other equally compelling phenomena). I’m sure Richard Dawkins approves of this new theory, and, given the number of scientists and academics who Ben Stein revealed have been blackballed for even allowing discussion of design in the fabric of life, I wonder how many of them support this theory with their fingers crossed behind their backs.

A Universe Built For Us

Tim Folger, Discovery Magazine December, 2008 (Excerpt)

“A sublime cosmic mystery unfolds on a mild summer afternoon in Palo Alto, California, where I've come to talk with the visionary physicist Andrei Linde. The day seems ordinary enough.

Cyclists maneuver through traffic, and orange poppies bloom on dry brown hills near Linde's office on the Stanford University campus. But everything here, right down to the photons lighting the scene after an eight-minute jaunt from the sun, bears witness to an extraordinary fact about the universe: Its basic properties are uncannily suited for life. Tweak the laws of physics in just about any way and - in this universe, anyway - life as we know it would not exist.

Consider just two possible changes. Atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles.

Atoms wouldn't exist; neither would we. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would 'be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve. There are many such examples of the universe's life-friendly properties - so many, in fact, that physicists can't dismiss them all as mere accidents.

"We have a lot of really, really strange coincidences, and all of these coincidences are such that they make life possible," Linde says
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Physicists don't like coincidences. They like even less the notion that life is somehow central to the universe, and yet recent discoveries are forcing them to confront that very idea. Life, it seems, is not an incidental component of the universe, burped up out of a random chemical brew on a lonely planet to endure for a few fleeting ticks of the cosmic clock. In some strange sense, it appears that we are not adapted to the universe; the universe is adapted to us.

Call it a fluke, a mystery, a miracle. Or call it the biggest problem in physics. Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multiverse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn't even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable nonreligious explanation for what is often called the "finetuning problem" - the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

"For me the reality of many universes is a logical possibility," Linde says. “ Discovery Magazine

Note 1: “Just Six Numbers”, Martin Reese, Basic Books, 2000, New York