William Lane Craig: God Is The Best Explanation For The Fine Tuning For Intelligent Life: My Comments.

*Of all of William Lane Craig's arguments for God's existence, IMHO the fine-tuning argument is heads-and-shoulders above any of his others. There certainly seems to be a good dozen or so laws, principles and relationships in physics and chemistry to which if even any one were to be even ever so slightly different, at best life (as we know it) couldn't exist and at worst anything more complex than the elementary particles and associated forces wouldn't exist either. That fine-tuning does indeed suggest an intelligent designer behind the apparent fine-tuning design.

*However, there are alternatives to the supernatural. There is of course pure chance - unlikely but not impossible - the luck of the cards that were dealt. Although if you look closely at things, chance isn't quite as random and improbable as it may seem and as Craig seems to think. Take chemistry: various chemicals have greater affinity for linking up with some chemicals than with some other chemicals, hence are way more likely therefore to join up with the former all things considered - not random, OK? For example Chlorine will readily link up with Sodium but not with Bromine even if both are present. Hydrogen won't combine with Neon but will with Oxygen.

*There's the Multiverse theory which states that the laws, principles and relationships in physics and chemistry are different in every universe and so while 99.999% of universes might be lifeless, a tiny few will turn out to be Goldilocks universes.

*The third possibility is that altering the knobs on those laws, principles and relationships in physics and chemistry could lead to some form of exotic or a different kind of matter (not as we know it) as well as exotic life forms, but again not-as-we-know-it or would recognize it necessarily.

*Finally, and my preferred option is that we exist as virtual beings in a simulated universe, the result of a non-supernatural computer programmer. Software, in order to make any logical sense and have any purpose, must be intelligently designed and fine-tuned to do the job the programmer wants done. But no matter how you slice and dice things, the Universe was NOT designed with you in mind.

A Few Additional Thoughts.

*William Lane Craig argues that God must be the designer behind the apparent fine-tuning for life because pure chance is just so overwhelmingly improbable as to be dismissed completely out of hand. Yet, consider the extremely long train of improbable events that led to the very existence of William Lane Craig. That just one male met and mated with one female; that just one sperm out of millions fertilized that one egg out of multi-dozens, going back hundreds of generations has to give the probability of William Lane Craig's existence as trillions upon trillions to one against. For each person that was conceived and born, like William Lane Craig, there were untold trillions and trillions of potential entities like William Lane Craig who weren't ever given a status of being an actual entity.

*Of course in an infinite Cosmos as noted in my Kalam Argument post, sooner or later William Lane Craig would have to come into (and ultimately go out of) existence, so it is not surprising to find a William Lane Craig existing. But it requires infinity for that to be a certainty. Also a certainty is that over an infinite amount of time, there will appear and disappear an infinite number of William Lane Craigs.

*Further, William Lane Craig asserts that the apparent fine-tuning of the Universe for entities such as himself is obviously the handiwork of God. But, if I were to use a random number generator to randomly select a set of 3-D spatial coordinates (we'll just set time equals now) and then teleported William Lane Craig in his birthday suit to those coordinates, what are the odds William Lane Craig would find those coordinates fine-tuned for his continued existence as a living breathing entity? Virtually nil. He'd either freeze to death, probably while sucking on a hard vacuum, or fry to death.