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if you were designing a universe for
life
i suspect you might design it
differently there is
no evidence of design or purpose to our
universe
in the middle of species
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are we really just insignificant specs
in an accidental universe
do we really just suck
those are some dramatic claims but not
everyone thinks that way
in fact some very distinguished
scientists disagree
freeman dyson a world-renowned physicist
and mathematician says and i quote
the more i examine the universe and
study the details of its architecture
the more evidence i find that the
universe in some sense must have known
that we were coming
so maybe it's not an accident that earth
is habitable
we caught up with physicist bijan namadi
who was a senior engineer at nasa's jet
propulsion lab for over 16 years
what we've discovered in the last few
decades
is that the properties of the universe
in general
and our planet in particular are
fine-tuned not just for
our survival but actually for our
thriving our benefit so earth is not
just habitable
it's better than that it's hospitable
it's like this imagine you're a space
explorer and you land on a distant
planet
there's no water no oxygen and it's 300
degrees below zero
you're screwed but then off in the
distance you see a structure
and the closer you get the more it looks
like a house
when you open the door you find it's
been filled with warm breathable air
you take off your spacesuit and find a
faucet with drinkable water
and a refrigerator stocked with healthy
and delicious food
what's your first thought the house and
everything in it was the product of a
mindless natural process
or that it was designed to take care of
you to meet your needs
and that someone prepared it as a home
for human beings
like you our planet
earth is that home
our planet is a terrestrial planet it
has water and carbon both necessary for
life
it has an oxygen nitrogen atmosphere in
just the right proportion
for life to thrive we have plate
tectonics to circulate minerals
we have a magnetosphere that protects us
from harmful radiation
our moon stabilizes our axial tilt
giving us a stable climate
and we have gas giant planets
particularly jupiter
cleaning up the solar system from comets
and asteroids that could harm us
and we are located in the habitable zone
of a very stable energetic star
which itself is located in the habitable
zone of
a metal rich mature galaxy so the earth
is apparently exceedingly rare there is
no design or purpose to our universe
still stuck on that even though the
earth meets exactly the conditions
needed to sustain life
well what about our universe and the
precise settings of its physical laws
that
keep things in order what they call
fine-tuning
cosmological physicist frank tipler
explains
fine-tuning in physics refers to the
fact
the observed fact that were we to modify
the constants of nature just slightly
life would never appear in this universe
imagine you have a universe app where
you can mess with the universal laws of
physics from the beginning of time
starting with gravity too strong and the
stars would be unstable and deadly to
life
too weak and the stars would struggle to
create carbon and oxygen
again no life
we got stephen meyer who holds a phd
from cambridge to break it down the
force of gravity is not too strong not
too weak the speed of light not too fast
not too slow
the ratios of these fundamental forces
are delicately balanced
it's the just right universe that makes
life possible
so it's got to be exact but materialists
say we just got lucky with gravity
now let's set our universe app to random
and tap the button
what are the chances that the app will
lock onto a gravity setting that just
happens to allow
life to emerge scientists have crunched
the numbers
and the answer not good
you mean not good like one out of a
hundred
i'd say one out of a million actually
for gravity it's worse worse than one
chance in a billion
times a trillion times a trillion
so you're telling me there's a chance
yeah
yeah we all love rooting for long shots
but here's the thing
it's not just gravity there are many
other physical laws that also have to be
just
so for life to emerge in the universe
and some of them are even more
fine-tuned
even more unlikely than gravity without
fine-tuning
our universe would be a horror story
even stephen king couldn't imagine
the very construction of the world and
the fact that we seem to be the only
blue populated planet
in the universe it makes you have to
believe
that if we happened by accident
it would make winning the lottery look
like flipping coin
so i have a tendency to believe in
intelligent design
nobel prize winning physicist charles
townes seemed to agree by stating and i
quote
intelligent design as one sees it from a
scientific point of view
seems to be quite real this is a very
special universe
it's remarkable that it came out just
this way but of course materialist
scientists claim they have a better
answer
there's an obvious and easy naturalistic
explanation in the form of the
cosmological multiverse
the multiverse acknowledges that the
conditions necessary to make life in
this universe are incredibly improbable
but it posits the existence of multiple
billions of
other universes and we just happen to be
in that lucky universe
keep in mind that there's no evidence
that these other universes actually
exist
there are no experimentally tested laws
of physics
telling us that these other universes
exist
no evidence for leprechauns no evidence
for unicorns
no evidence for the existence of other
universes
with different values of these
fundamental
constants and there's still another
problem with the multiverse explanation
the new mechanisms that have been
proposed as possible
ways of generating new universes
themselves require fine tuning
so in order to explain the fine-tuning
you have to posit prior universe
generating mechanisms
that themselves require fine-tuning and
so in the end you're left right where
you started right where you started
the many aspects of nature that have
been fine-tuned for life are
overwhelming
all of this evidence shows you are not
insignificant
you are not an accident and you
don't suck someone had you in mind
someone had us all mine we are not
materialists
we see the human soul we experience
love we live with purpose
we fight for justice we are the quiet of
jordan and we will be
quiet no longer
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you