In chapter twelve, The Design Argument: Cosmic Fine-Tuning, Groothuis states there is enough design evident at multiple levels of nature to infer that there is a Designer. However, there is also evidence of deformity, decay and disease, indicating that the design is often less than optimal. Thus, there is enough evidence to believe in a Designer, but not enough to claim a perfect creation. There is enough deformity to warrant the idea of the fall, but not enough to deface the idea of design entirely.
Other Design Arguments
In addition to the older arguments for design, Groothuis in this chapter will appeal to newer and rather spectacular findings in cosmology.
Design Detection
Antony Flew, one of the twentieth century’s leading atheist philosophers renounced atheism in 2007 on the basis of the evidence for a Designer and a Creator and wrote his bestseller book There is a God.
William Dembske developed an “explanatory filter” which filters out chance and checks for the three marks of contingency, complexity and specificity to determine intelligent design. The contingency mark rules out natural law that would form a salt crystal. The complexity mark means the greater the complexity the less the probability the event or object came about by chance. The specification mark means the result was not fabricated but specified.
The faces of the Presidents on Mount Rushmore pass all three tests.
Fine-Tuning Design
It is now contended by many physicists including Stephen Hawking that the universe is fine-tuned for life. Many aspects of the universe are closely calibrated and make human life possible. For theists, the is result of a Designer.
The Physics of Fine-Tuning
Everything had to be just right for the big bang to produce the universe (this is argument of Groothuis) which even Stephen Hawking admits: If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million, million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached present size. On the other hand, if the expansion rate at one second had been larger by the same amount, the universe would have expanded so much that it would be effectively empty now (The Theory of Everything, p. 104).
Objections to the Fine-Tuning Argument
There are five objections to the fine-tuning argument
1. Truism objection. The truism objection is sometimes called the weak anthropic principle (WAP). There is a panoply of finely turned factors in the universe, all of which are necessary for our existence. But so what? If they weren’t there, we would not be here to notice.
2. Inscrutable odds objection. No Designer can be inferred from the apparent fine-tuning, since the odds of the universe occurring by chance or by design are indiscernible.
3. Chance, one universe objection. This fine-tuned universe is the result of chance: an undirected random effect of the big bang.
4. The multiverse theory. Faced with the evidence that the fine-tuning of the universe is best explained by a Mind, naturalists such as Steven Weinberg and Martin Rees have posited that our human-permitting universe is simply one of a vast (perhaps infinite) array of universe which increases the odds of only one being fine-tuned for life. The most popular of these theories more recently is the inflationary theory, which claims that the big bang triggered an endless progression of universes, with one succeeding another.
Even if an actual infinity of universes were not impossible, the existence of such an assembly is colossally improbable. There is yet no independent evidence for multiple universes.
5. More-fundamental-law objection. Another theory that accounts for fine-tuning without a Designer is the appeal to an yet unknown an impersonal natural law that is more fundamental than any of the laws we now know. While physicists hope for “a theory of everything,” it has not been found; thus, it cannot count against the design hypothesis.
6. Pantheism and design. The god of pantheism is impersonal. The inference to a Designer contradicts the idea of an impersonal being, since design requires intelligence