imagine that you're stuck in some Twisted dystopian future there are billions of Lottery balls and massive silos and your life depends on drawing just one specific ball and if you don't pull the one ball you need it's game over and you couldn't just draw it once you'd have to pull it at least three times in a row now if you actually drew the right one three times in a row you wouldn't be sitting there thinking wow what luck you probably be thinking somehow this Lottery must have been rigged for me that is what fine-tuning is the the universe feels rigged in our favor because the odds of getting all the right conditions for a life permitting Universe by chance are absurdly small it's way more plausible that someone set it up just right here are some of the most wild examples of fine tuning first of all there's the gravitational constant If gravity were even slightly stronger or weaker by one part in 10 to the 40th power Stars wouldn't form properly and without Stars there's no life it's like having a billion dice in them all landing on six the cosmological constant this governs the expansion of the universe if it were just a fraction different by one part in 10 to the 120th power the universe would either collapse on itself or expand too rapidly for Galaxies to form both scenarios equal no life the strong nuclear force this holds the nuclei of atoms together if it were just 2% stronger or weaker no stable elements would exist the electromagnetic force if this Force were even slightly off Adams couldn't hold together forget about water carbon or any building blocks for life now there are plenty of other examples of fine tuning but I think you get the idea now to use another illustration imagine that you're playing poker and someone pulls a royal flesh you probably be thinking wow that's pretty lucky break but what if they hit a royal flush again and again say a dozen times in a row you're not thinking luck anymore you're thinking the dealer and the player are definitely In Cahoots this same goes with the universe it's way more likely that someone rigged it and that points straight to design which sure sounds a lot like God now a skeptic might say sure it seems unlikely that our universe would support life if it were the result of some random physical processes but because we exist we can't observe a universe that doesn't allow life so really the fact that we're here shows that it wasn't really all that improbable at all even if it was just a cosmic accident this is called the anthropic objection or as I like to call it the objection that proves way too much here's why it falls apart imagine you're standing in front of a firing squad you got to hunch that your cousin who's in the squad might have convinced everybody to miss shots are fired and you're still standing it's pretty clear that this wasn't luck the fact that you survived is strong evidence that they intended to miss now the anthropic objection would say well hold on you can only observe this situation because you survived so your survival wasn't improbable at all even if they were trying to kill you but obviously this is sheer nonsense if they kept firing and kept missing it's not luck it's evidence that something else is going on the same goes for the universe the fact that we're here points to design not some Cosmic dice roll now similar to this objection is the so-called puddle analogy a favorite among online atheists meet Doug our philosophical puddle Doug's impressed because his shape fits perfectly into the hole that he's in but what doug doesn't get is that as a puddle he's literally just molding to whatever hole he lands in change the hole Doug reshapes himself now some Skeptics use this to argue that life in the universe is like Doug the puddle they say of course life fits into this universe because we're here if the universe were different we just wouldn't exist to notice this analogy flops hard life's not some fluid that'll fit in any old universe life demands ridiculously specific conditions tweaking even a small thing like the mass of an electron or Quirk and boom no stars no planets no chemistry no life a totally dead Universe Doug the puddle can survive any whole but life can't without a universe that's precisely dialed in now the most well-known objection might be the Multiverse essentially it says sure our universe looks finally tuned but what if there are billions or even infinite universes most of them might be Duds but in one of them namely ours the constants just happen to be right for life it's like saying if you buy enough lottery tickets you're bound to win eventually but there's a lot of problems here for starters there's just no evidence at all for the Multiverse it's pure speculation at this point we can't observe other universes measure them or even know if they exist second it multiplies the problem instead of solving it the Multiverse Theory needs something to produce all these universes like a universe generator but that generator would also have to be fine-tuned to create life committing universes so all you've done at this point is just kick the can down the road one really lame response to the Des argument is to point out that the vast majority of the universe is totally hostile to life so this place just really isn't so fine-tuned after all but this genius take misses the point we're not asking why Earth has water and air we're asking why this entire universe has the precise fundamental constants that it does let's not forget the vast size of the universe isn't some pointless Cosmic Flex universes that are smaller and denser would collapse upon themselves so no the fact that you just can't hit the gritty on the ring of Saturn doesn't exactly crush the fine-tuning argument now another common response is to say that this is just God of the gaps you're just saying I don't know God did it but no the fine-tuning argument isn't about throwing up our hands and saying magic let's think about this in terms of probability what we're asking is what's the probability that an intelligent designer created the universe given how finally tuned it is for life without design the odds of a life permitting Universe are absurd low like 1 in the 10 to the 41st again that's because the constants of the universe could have been anything and most possibilities make life impossible now if we bring in the design hypothesis a designer would have a reason to make the universe that supports life and even if we're being insanely conservative and say that there's really only one in a billion chance that there is a designer and that they would choose a life-friendly universe that's still way better odds than random chance and here's where the math gets fun even if you start with a very low prior probability of a designer like one in the 10 to the 28 the evidence of fine-tuning raises that probability according to Bas theorem to over 99.99% so no matter how skeptical you are at first fine-tuning boosts the odds and favor of design being the best explanation so in short the design argument isn't just some random guess or God of the gaps reasoning it's backed by solid probability and that probability points to the idea that there is a cosmic designer and that is what we mean when we speak of God