“In the last thirty-five years,” Craig said, “scientists have been stunned to discover that the Big Bang was not some chaotic, primordial event, but rather a highly ordered event that required an enormous amount of information. In fact, from the very moment of its inception, the universe had to be fine-tuned to an incomprehensible precision for the existence of life like ourselves. And that points in a very compelling way toward the existence of an Intelligent Designer.”

“ ‘Fine-tuned’ is a subjective term,” I pointed out. “It could mean a lot of things. What do you mean by it?”

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “Scientifically speaking, it’s far more probable for a life-prohibiting universe to exist than a life-sustaining one. Life is balanced on a razor’s edge.”

As an example, he cited Hawking’s writings. “He has calculated,” Craig said, “that if the rate of the universe’s expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have collapsed into a fireball.”21

In short order, Craig proceeded to go down a list of several other mind-boggling statistics to support his conclusion.22 Among them:

  • British physicist P. C. W. Davies has concluded the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for the formation of stars—a necessity for planets and thus life—is a one followed by at least a thousand billion billion zeroes.23
  • Davies also estimated that if the strength of gravity or of the weak force were changed by only one part in a ten followed by a hundred zeroes, life could never have developed.24
  • There are about fifty constants and quantities—for example, the amount of usable energy in the universe, the difference in mass between protons and neutrons, the ratios of the fundamental forces of nature, and the proportion of matter to antimatter—that must be balanced to a mathematically infinitesimal degree for any life to be possible.25 “All of this,” said Craig, “amply supports the conclusion that there’s an intelligence behind creation. In fact, the alternate explanations just don’t add up. — The Case for Faith: A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity by Lee Strobel
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