The Sean McDowell Show - Responding to Questions on Fine-Tuning and Intelligent Design (w/ Jay Richards)

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

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What's interesting about this is last night I was at Cal. Pauli San Luis Obispo having a conversation with an atheist for Veritas forum. And he said the one argument that gives him pause is fine-tuning. He's not persuaded by it, hence he's an atheist. But I've heard this over and over again. So we're here with Dr. Jay Richards, who's one of the leading defenders of the fine-tuning argument, author of the Privileged Planet.

We did an interview, of course, we're live-streamed this on a Tuesday. We posted it Friday, and I asked people to post their toughest objections, and we wouldn't skip any. We'd take the toughest ones that people post. Now, I'm an apologist. Jay, you've got a lot of scientific background. You have some philosophical background. But I also invited my colleague Greg Gansel, who is a philosopher and kind of my boss a little bit as well, to weigh in here because you've done some writing on fine tuning as well. So you guys ready to rock and roll?

Yep. Absolutely. All right, let's do it. So these questions were written in on YouTube. Some of these were written in on X. We're going to take some live ones here. If you put the word question in caps and your question is relevant and legible, we will take your tough questions. Okay, here's the first one that came from a skeptic. It's more of a statement, but we'll get your response. And Jay, you're streaming in, so we'll start with you on this one. It says, quote, the constants as they are as they are are actually fine-tuned for death. Only one tiny example of life can be found so far. Earth is tiny, yeah. Christianity doesn't allow you to understand that. So I think this is the classic argument, Jay, that most of the universe is not fine-tuned for life. Most of it is fine-tuned for death.

If there were a fine-tuner, we wouldn't see things set up as they are. your response. Sean, it's a great question. It sort of combines two things, really. So first there is this question of fine-tuning. Is the universe fine-tuned, and is that evidence that it has been fine-tuned? In other words, we can't explain it away. Then there's this second question, okay, what would God as Christians understand God to be?

What would we expect him to do? And very often these objections conflate those two things. So let's just separate them. The fine-tuning argument concerns these fundamental, constants in the universe, these things that are true absolutely everywhere as well as the initial conditions. So things that hold in the entire universe. So the claim is that not that the universe is fine-tuned so that life can be everywhere, it's rather what are the sort of necessary conditions that make any life-permitting universe possible? That's the key idea. So it's not that

the universe that most of the universe is fine-tuned for death. It's that if you look at the range possible universes and you look at the parameters that would need to be fine-tuned, what you discover is they have to be very precisely set within these particular limits in order for any kind of life-permitting universe to exist. Now, you could ask a secondary question. Well, why would God do that? Or why would my understanding of God allow that? And that's an interesting question.

But, of course, I don't think we can presume, I wouldn't do this as a Christian. I wouldn't presume that God must create a universe. if you can create any universe, it has to exist. Like, all of its volume must be continually and everywhere filled with ancient life like human beings. I mean, God doesn't have limited resources. He can do what he wants to do. Let's look at the evidence. But there's nothing, I think, that sort of contradicts the idea or the argument of fine-tuning

or its inference based on these necessary conditions within a narrow life-permitting range compared to the many other ways that the universe could exist. The second question about what God would do, that's a great question, but it really is a theological question. That's really helpful distinction, because there seems to be an assumption in here that if there is a fine tuner, we would find life abundant in the universe, almost like we find life abundant on our planet. But that confuses, like you said, necessary conditions in the universe for any life abundant. to exist anywhere, and then it's a secondary question, why don't we find life on more planets? Well, that now shifts to the mind of the creator, which is a theological question,

and the only way we know the answer to that is if, in fact, the creator told us that. And Greg, do you want to weigh in on this? Well, there's two things I'd like to say, because it is very interesting. The fine-tuning argument and the value of the constants, the precise way they have to be set, gives us lots of information about what a universe tuned for death would be. And these are universes where the constants have these different values. And you can't get heavy elements. It expands too fast or crunches on itself after the big bang.

Those universes aren't fine-tuned for death. They're just tuned for death. The fine-tuning talks about the narrow specificity with which these constants have to, which the value of these constants must have in order to allow the possibility of life. And then to speculate on God's purposes, I think the vision that we're given of God and the scriptures is one of extravagant generosity. And I think he just delights in the beauty of the universe, the galaxies.

I think that's why there are so many species of frogs, because frogs are really cool. And so there's not a stinginess about the creator in terms of just spreading these beautiful things all over the cosmos. Love it. All right, friends. We're here live with Dr. Greg Gansel, a philosopher. Dr. J. Richards, philosopher and scientist,

taking your tough objections to the fine-tuning arguments. We're going to take some live ones here if you write in question in caps, and it's legible and relevant, we will take it. Let's move on to the second one, which I thought was also a good objection. And this person wrote in on the YouTube, the original YouTube video we did, says, doesn't the fact that matter and organisms obey complex rules and physics obeys finely tuned laws lend that intelligent designer didn't create the world? if God is God, why would he have to choose to design Earth so intricately obedient to so many finite laws?

Doesn't this undersell God's ability? Jay, go for it, my friend. Well, again, this is very much a theological argument. In other words, there's always this kind of unstated premise is that if there were a God, he would do it this way. The first question, though, in fine-tuning is, okay, does the universe look fine-tuned? and if so is it fine-tuned. And then we need to develop the sort of, okay, what would that mean if God is the creator? What evidence might bear on that?

And so perfectly legitimate questions, but distinct questions. But it doesn't really make sense to me to say that, well, you know, God being God, he could sort of do anything, right? Of course, he has the power to do anything that is logically within his power to do. That's the definite, something like that is the definition of divine omnipidence. that doesn't mean that God can act contrary to his nature. And as John tells us, right, I'm going to appeal to that sort of theological sources because it's a theological objection in the first chapter of the book of John.

Right in the beginning was the word, was the logos, this idea that God himself is wisdom and reason and order, and he creates a world that reflects that. And so I think if anything, theoretically, if you're a Christian or a Jew, you would expect something like a rational order. You'd expect a world that's generally lawlike rather than catastrophic or chaotic. And that doesn't mean that those bind God. It just means, you know, in the Christian tradition, this is sort of the ordinary ways in which God acts. He creates other things that have their own causal powers. He can still act through those in a secondary way. He can also act directly in the created order because it's his universe. He's not breaking into

anything. And so I think the very fact that matter obeys precise rules that enable life and scientific discovery, which we haven't talked a lot about, I think it points to an intelligence behind these laws. And that's exactly what the view was of the early founders of modern science who proposed laws. Of course, Newton, when he was talking about laws, he presupposed a lawgiver. What's funny is that science is so progressed and I think detached itself from it's really it's theological origins, that we now speak of laws, which are really latently theological categories, as if they're independent. But I think if anything, a law-like universe makes much more sense on the atheism. That's such a good point. It's important to realize how, given the

theistic background of science, even some of the terms that we use have changed. So science used to be the search for the truth about the natural world. Now in many ways, it's the search for a, the naturalistic explanation for something, which begins with a naturalistic premise. So if you approach fine-tuning through that lens, you're going to rule out design from the start. Now, Greg, let me come to you and tell me if you agree with this distinction or not. So when we're studying fine-tuning, we're kind of operating from the bottom up. As Jay talked in our last interview, it's actually an agnostic Fred Hoyle that found

one of the first fine-tuning, quote, coincidences, not looking to prove design. It actually went against his worldview, so it's a bottom-up discovery. But when we ask, why doesn't God do this, now we're asking for a top-down explanation, which we only know again if this God speaks and tells us. So we can know that something is designed, even if we don't know why it is designed, or why the designer did it this way, that's the follow-up question. And just because we don't know why a designer did it one way or not another way, does it mean that something does in favor of the mark of design?

Well, that's exactly right. And I think our, if you have a Christian or a Judaic theistic grid, in other words, if you take the scripture seriously, we are told some of the purposes of God in his creation. And one of the purposes expressed in the first couple of chapters of Genesis is that human beings would cultivate the earth, would explore it, would bring good and true and beautiful and useful things out of this good world. Well, that project is possible only if the world is pretty regular. We need to be able to make predictions about how things are going to act, and we need to be able to general. and we need to be able to generalize our experience in order to know how to cultivate the world.

And so the questions about, well, wouldn't God do it this way, are questions about his purpose. What are his purposes for doing that? And in the religions of the book, we get some of these purposes. Now, there's still lots of speculation about the details of why God did it, but we ought to expect a world in Christianity. that is largely following law-like regularities, because that's part of the purposes of God in creating human beings. That's good, and we totally concede here

that fine-tuning doesn't get us to the God of the Bible. That's not the point. It's consistent with Judaism. It's consistent with Islam. But as Christians, we believe God has spoken and revealed his will. So this helps some degree, but doesn't answer all our questions.

Exactly. All right. That is a stream for now. another time when we get to how we know the Bible is true. Okay friends, we're here live with Dr. Greg Gansel and Dr. J. Richards taking the toughest objections that you have about fine-tuning. Now, I see a question here about the six days of creation contradicting scientific idea that the world is a lot older. Great question, important question. Our focus here is on the fine-tuning argument. And so I'm going to stay dialed in to that one for this. Let's move to another objection

that we got. I like this one. This one says, these factors had to be precisely set as in quote, begs the question. The idea that there was a tuner is supposed to be the conclusion, not the premise. The laws that are apparently tuned are just descriptions of how we see matter behave. They aren't actually laws the sense that a lay person thinks of a law like some kind of command from an outside. Once you realize this, the whole argument disappears. Does your argument disappear because you're begging the question, Dr. Jay? Okay, this is a really important point that folks should remember that the fine-tuning problem or the sort of discovery of fine-tuning that it was a thing, right? Came from scientists that were not looking for this, whether it was Brendan Carr or

Fred Hoyle, as you mentioned, or Martin Reese. They looked at. at the, you know, the constants, the sort of discoveries, what the initial conditions would need to be, and notice this peculiar fact about them, which is that they have these very precise values. Notice what's not being assumed in the argument. They're not assuming that there's a fine tuner. In fact, they generally didn't even believe in a fine tuner. So nothing about the fine-tuning argument, or at least a good form of it, presupposes or assumes a tuner's premise. Now, the question makes a good point.

The laws of physics are mathematical descriptions. They're not sort of independent causal agents. That's absolutely true. But the descriptions are specific numerical values of the constants and initial conditions. And here's the key thing, is that they're contingent inputs that could have been different. That's what was discovered that, okay, this is odd. Presumably, we could have discovered that G, the gravity. Hi, everyone.

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Before these things were discovered, it was an open question of what their values were going to be. And so it was actually an empirical realization, the more we learned about the universe, gosh, there are these universal properties that the universe has that needed to be very precisely set. And then when you sort of step back and you say, okay, here's the sort of expectation would be that if there's, going to be a universe, if the universe needs to be very precisely set, what that means is that any particular universe that existed, it would be much more likely that it would be entirely life hostile, that it could not possibly contain life than it would. And so if we have a universe with life and it's precisely fine-tuned to allow for that, and this is the sort of minor premise that's not often revealed, we all know that life is intrinsically interesting in a way that a universe

filled with hydrogen atoms is not. And so that sort of triggers the temptation that you either follow, that, well, gosh, it's fine-tuned. That seems to be evidence that there's a fine-tuner, that there's an agent that's responsible for this. And everyone sort of recognizes that. It's just that some don't want that, right? They don't want that conclusion, and so they construct objections.

That's always the question. And the argument never presupposes that there is a fine-tuner. It's an inference from the evidence of the natural world to a conclusion of a fine tuner. Yeah, I think that the objector raises a good point because the vocabulary we use as shorthand sometimes gives the impression that we're assuming someone set the values. They have to be set precisely. But that's just shorthand for something that's more complicated to say in English, which is the range of values that produces a life-permitting universe is incredibly small compared to the range of possible values.

And that's all we mean by they have to be set precisely. And we discover empirically that this is the range of values, and there's no reason to think that they couldn't be set in all of these other ways. the values couldn't have these other numerical constants. And so the vocabulary kind of lends itself to the worry over begging the question. And I think we just have to say, well, I'm using that as shorthand to describe the range of constants as going to produce a life permitting universe. And so we have to be careful with how we talk that we're not giving the impression that we're

begging the question here. Yeah, I think that's right. So let me shift to a question here, but the key point of wander out is these are not laws of logic. These are not laws of math that have necessity built into them. These laws, as far as we can know, could have been different. They're contingent. But they all seem to be set in a precisely narrow, surprising pattern as if the porridge

is not too hot, not too cold, it's just right, points towards design as the explanation of this feature we see. So it's not begging the question. It's drawing out the best explanation of this feature that we see, although we know intelligent agents can fine-tune systems. Okay, this one we're going to shift to next was posted earlier, but I think if I'm reading it right, it builds on a question that I have here, and I hope Tony 6365, I'm reading this in context. And the There's a few comments here, but it says something to the fact of it's bigoted to have faith if we can't test and find out what is true. Hell and demons have been talked about in the major religions. Would you not be willing to find out the truth to escape them?

Now, underneath this, we all brought hell and demons in here, which is a separate conversation, but this idea that faith should be tested. One of the key objections to intelligent design is it's not testable. And Jay, one of the questions that came in this week on the original video, somebody said if there's an argument, the first question always is whether the argument is falsifiable. What is the counter argument that would nullify it? So, is this blind faith or can we really test this or falsify it? Yeah, so there's a few things going on here.

So first, so let me answer the question at the beginning. Yes, this argument is absolutely falsifiable. On the other hand, there are different ways to test different arguments in science and in life. The falsifiability criterion was proposed by Carl Popper, and the basic idea is that something isn't scientific if you can't sort of at least ideally construct a scenario under which you could prove that it's false. But of course, there are many things that we would consider at least a sort of part of science that aren't falsifiable in that way. So, for instance, is there life somewhere else in the universe? Well, that is very hard to falsify the claim. Somebody wants to say, look, there's their microbial life somewhere in the universe.

You know, we're not going to get to check everywhere in the universe. Because it's a universal claim. Yeah, yeah, exactly. On the other hand, it would be so easy to confirm if a saucer shows up over New York City like it does at Independence Day. Hey, nobody's going to be a skeptic, right? Yep, sure. There turns out there are aliens. And so the question is really whether it's testable.

And I think that isn't a feature of natural science. We want for something to be about the natural world and to be within the domain of science, we want to be able to test our conjectures, our hypotheses, our theories, against some kind of observable evidence and then say, okay, that strengthens or weakens the case. Now, when you're talking about these very large hypotheses, like we're talking about whether the universe has an intelligent cause,

or it doesn't, right? This is a very broad question. It's unrealistic to expect that, okay, it's going to be simply, it can be sort of falsified with one experiment in a lab or something like that. You're going to have evidence for and against it. And so in this case, the question would be, okay, so is there evidence that could count for against these fine-tuning arguments? Absolutely.

I mean, so think what, just think about what the claim is. So the claim is that these values of these universal parameters had to be very narrowly set paired to their possible values in order to produce a life-permitting universe. Well, what if we discovered? Actually, it didn't need to be so precisely set. In fact, there's a wide range of these. In fact, you could sort of vary several of them at once, and maybe one looks fine-tuned, but if you change this one, in fact, there's a wide range in which you could get something

like chemical life like we have in our universe. So, in fact, the whole argument sort of presupposes that we're observing the opposite of that. And so that would count against it. Turns out it doesn't look nearly as fine-tuned as we thought it was. Now, that's not a refutation of theism, but it would weaken the argument. And then when you get to, you know, we haven't talked about it, but when you get to the local fine-tuning arguments, so not the universal properties that persist everywhere, but the things you need in a local planetary environment, the right kind of star,

the distance from the star, the mass of the planet, all these things, you know, all those presuppose certain things. They presuppose that life in this universe is going to be based on carbon. It's going to need liquid water and all those things. If we find life that's based on a completely different kind of chemistry, that would put a major dent in those local fine-tuning arguments. In fact, if we found life that was right, let's say we found a thousand different kinds of life that were just completely different from what the life we observe in the universe.

It's like, gosh, it turns out life really, it seems like it can accommodate itself fairly easily to certain initial conditions. And so there are absolutely ways to sort of test and weaken or strengthen these arguments. Jay, there's only one thing I disagree with you on. You said if intelligent life appeared in a saucer above one of big cities,

some people would still doubt it and do conspiracy first podcasts about AI and drones, but otherwise, I agree. Anything you want to add that? That covered it pretty well, anything on falsifiable. That was a great answer. Now, falsifiability actually doesn't apply to arguments. It applies to theories. And it's a criterion of whether a theory should count as empirical science. Can you imagine how it would be falsified empirically? It doesn't mean you have to be able to falsify it

because if a theory is true, it won't be falsified. But like Jay's examples, we can imagine empirical findings that would set the fine-tuning theory as the best answer to these phenomena we're observing, it would set it back. It would say, no, the best explanation might not be an intelligent designer for these phenomena because maybe they don't need to be explained in one of the scenarios Jay talked about or life doesn't need to have these specific features in order to be a living thing. So falsifiability, the way Popper brings it up, I believe, is the mark of something that counts as empirical science. And so the fact that the fine-tuner hypothesis can be falsified in this context,

leads us to believe that the God hypothesis is at least very close to a scientific hypothesis in some context. How we falsify things varies based on the discipline of the claim. So Darwin said, if any complex organ could be demonstrated, it could not possibly have developed by slow incremental stages. That would falsify his theory. First Corinthians 15, Paul says, if Jesus is not risen, that would, falsify a theological view. Similarly, if we discovered that the laws and constants of physics were not actually fine-tuned and it's an illusion, or we found a better explanation, that would falsify fine-tuning. So that doesn't prove that it's scientific,

but it removes one barrier where people say it's not actually a theory, so to speak, and it's not scientific. Okay, let's go to this one. We've got to this one. We've got to through four questions and we've got some other good skeptical ones here jay i'll come to you on this one this individual says it's very clear that random chance can be excluded as rational cause of the fine-tuning parameters in physics and for those who are saying how do we know that go to our last video in which jay talked about just one example of fine-tuning out of dozens that had one to times 10 with 120 zeros after it arguably beyond anything chance could produce and that's just One, this says many YouTube videos, many videos on YouTube make this very clear and obvious.

Could you please explain on top of this why physical necessity cannot count for fine tuning? So rather than chance, how come there couldn't be some necessity in the physical realm that causes this fine tuning? Yeah, this is a tough one because it's not clear because remember we're talking about these bulk properties of the physical universe. And so when we talk about physical, I mean, we've got to decide what that means, but are we talking about matter, space, time, and energy, right? So let's just to sort of include the whole show. But the fine-tuning argument is about the properties of the physical universe itself. So it's not clear what it would mean for there to be a physical necessity to the physical properties of the universe. Now maybe the questioner is thinking, well,

Maybe there's some kind of deeper necessity, or maybe there's some fundamental law behind all of these individual constants that all of the things we're talking about sort of descend from. So there's this like upstream fundamental law. Okay, that would be interesting. It wouldn't solve the problem, though. It would just move the question back because you would inevitably end up with some much more precisely fine-tuned reality. In fact, that'd be really surprising to discover that. I think during our interview, Sean, I think I used the example of like the ultimate pool player

would be a person, not a person that can break the balls and then get, you know, one ball at a time on their first try. It'd be the person that could sink all the, you know, say all the striped balls on their first shot. And so that doesn't really solve the problem of fine-tuning. There's this other kind of necessity, though, the logical necessity.

And so far as I can't even sort of conceive what kind of argument you would construct to say, okay, there's some kind of logical necessity to the physical laws. It seems quite obvious. I mean, the whole discipline presupposes that you can change these variables. If the value of something is three, right, in a law, the value could presumably have been fours. There's nothing that by logic requires it in the same way that logic requires that, you know, something can't be both true and untrue at the same time and in the same sense. And so there's no sort of law of logic that would or that type of necessity that can train these things. And so we're back to just the sort of physical properties of the universe.

Okay. Good stuff. Do you want to weigh on in this one at all? Great. No, that's good. Okay. I love it. It kind of reminds me to make a connection for people. William Dembski has a filter where he recognizes design and this would be like information say in the cell that we've discovered and imagine you're trying to get a sentence that says or imagine like all the works of shakespeare we know that chance cannot produce that specified complexity because every letter is one out of 26 you start doing the math and there's not enough resources in the universe with all the space and time to produce all the works of shakespeare by chance and then when it comes to that kind of information some people say what about some kind of law like necessity like in a crystal you see some

kind of design but that's a repetitive simple information like xy xy not novel information like we see in a text applied to the universe does that scenario apply over like if there was some kind of necessity we'd see more simple repetitive kind of processes or does that not really apply to the tuning the way that it would apply to something like specified complexity in the cell. Sean, the way I would explain that is a specified complexity thing to add to what you just said, there's the complexity or the improbability, so that all the sequence of letters, right, there's also the specification. And so Dempsey says it's not just complexity or improbability that leads us to infer

design, it's a specification, which is kind of a meaningful independent pattern, or just in this case it's meaning, right? So any long string of letters could be... Hey listeners, this is Kelly from the Life Audio team. We're thinking about starting a newsletter, but we want to make sure it's actually useful to you. So we would love to hear from you. Text the word newsletter to 94878 and we'll send you a short survey to take. That's newsletter to 94878. Thanks. We wouldn't infer design because it's like just a random. child letters on the floor. It's precisely that, well, it conforms to the meanings of English

words and sentences and things like that. So it's those combined things. And so how do we apply that argument to these universal characteristics of the universe? Because of course, in Dembski's examples, if you're talking about DNA, for instance, you know, the sequence specificity in certain, you know, lines of DNA, we're presupposing the regular laws of physics and chemistry. Those are sort of the backstory, right? And then we, compare them. When you're talking about the universe as a whole, what are we doing? Well, we're actually, we're comparing the specific details of our universe, right?

So maybe the values of the four fundamental constants, the initial conditions, initial entropy, all these things. We're comparing those to all the other kinds of ways the universe could exist. So we're really comparing the actual universe with other possible values of the universe. And so, and then that's, now we're going to get the probability or improbability or complexity. The claim is that the range of life-permitting universes is much smaller than the range of possible universes that are lifeless. So that gets you the complexity or the improbability. What's the specification?

The specification is a life itself. Everyone knows. Richard Dawkins knows. The atheist on the street corner knows that there's something interesting about life intrinsically that's, you know, it's a pile of hydrogen atoms or something is not interesting. in the same way life is. That's why we watch documentaries about living things. So everybody recognizes that.

So there is a specification and there's an improbability. You have both of these. It's just when you're talking about the universe as a whole, you're not comparing different states within the universe. You're comparing the actual universe with the range of other possible ways the universe could have been. Jay, that is such a helpful connection because there's a big difference between the laws of physics as they exist being sufficient to a good.

explain the origin of information when they generate law-like patterns such as we see in crystals and the origin of those laws themselves which exist within a narrow range and point towards a pattern of being made so to speak to allow the complexity and origin of life so complexity within is different than explaining the origin of those laws themselves. Very, very helpful distinction. Okay, let's go back to our skeptics here, and I'll throw this to both of you and have you way in here again, Greg. Again, we are live with Dr. Greg Gansel and we're here with Dr. J. Richards,

taking your toughest questions on fine-tuning. You know what, let's take this one. I like this. This is live from, I can't even pronounce the name, but it says, is there any serious objection to fine-tuning. They say multiverse plus anthropic selection seems strongest, but it just pushes the question back. And we talked about that last J-time. Last time, Jay, you addressed the multiverse theory. But in your estimation, are there any serious objections to fine-tuning that really challenge or potentially overturn it? I would say the one that Germo Gonzalez and I struggled

with back in, let's say, 2002 when we were writing the book, The Privileged Planet, which talks a lot about the local fine-tuning stuff, but it also talks about the cosmic fine-tuning, is this idea that, well, okay, how do you sort of, you can run probability calculations on the sort of possible arrangements of base pairs in DNA or something like that? How do you run a probability on all the possible universes? And so there's not a probability distribution, is the way probability theorists put it. And so it's sort of like, how do you attach a number to this? So that's a sort of complicated question.

And we have a complicated way of answering it in the book. But that kind of key thing would just be that you don't need an exact probability distribution to recognize fine tuning. In fact, if you just think about normal life, we do this all the time. We recognize that, okay, that thing, there's no way that happened by chance. It looks very much like a setup. and we're actually really good, except in the boundary cases, at doing this. We don't routinely run actual probability calculations.

It would be sort of like, but the way I think of it, you know, Greg and I have said several times, the fine-tuning argument is just this idea that there's this narrow range of sort of properties that a universe needs to have in order to be life permitting compared to all the other, the alternatives. Think about it like it's a dartboard, right? And so there's this big dartboard,

there's just a lot of places on the board that are not the bullseye, and there's a huge amount of space outside the board that's not the bullseye. So that's why somebody sort of throws five darts now and the bullseye, we think, okay, they're obviously skilled. That's designed. Right. Now, somebody could say, well, okay, but actually, it depends on the size scale. Because, you know, let's say that rather than the kind of normal size scale,

and we're thinking maybe millimeters or inches, it seems impressive. But think about how, you know, let's go down to the, the rate, of a proton or something like that, right? There's so many places that that dark could have landed in there. And in fact, there's really kind of no, you know, you could just infinitely divide the sort of range of space within that bull's eye. And so there's kind of no way to get a probability distribution because you could always just, at least mathematically,

you could just keep getting more and more high resolution on this. That's sort of what the argument is, is that, well, you know, how do you sort of do the numbers on this? fact, we generally know what the relevant levels of resolution are on fine-tuning. Friend Robin Collins, the philosopher, has done a really good job. But it's the kind of thing that's like, that's a complicated kind of philosophical objection that we did spend a lot of time on. And so I think it's a serious objection.

I just don't think it's about this positive. And I think, if anything, it requires something of the argument that we just never require of arguments like this. And the fact that people who are themselves skeptical of the existence of God or anything like God themselves recognize the problem, I think is testimony to that. That it's just like, look, there's a real problem here to be explained. And we're not going to explain it away with some sort of complicated artifact of a particular type of probability theory. Well said. Do you want to add anything to that?

I'd like to take up the many universe response because I think you're right in what you said on the Friday podcast about it pushes. the problem back. But there's also another problem with the multiverse. And I published a paper on this, and I looked up all of these definitions in philosophical reference books for naturalism. And most of these definitions said naturalism is a commitment that what science tells us is true. Anything that can be a scientific entity, we can say that might exist. The problem is the multiverses aren't scientific. They sound scientific, but a lot of understanding of a scientific explanation is I'm trying to explain something by bringing it under the laws of physics to say, oh, now I can understand why this happens. Now, the problem is the other universes have different laws than ours.

So they cannot be brought into congruence with the laws of physics as we know them. And so they're completely outside scientific explanation. And there's no causal relationship between those universes and ours. There's no way to get information. They're not actually empirically testable in principle. It's not just we can't find them, but they're outside the range of any possible empirical testing. And I think that this isn't decisive,

but it puts a lot of pressure on the multiverse theory. Now, people tend to be flippant about it. So, well, maybe there's a multiverse. And I think we can press people and say, so either, you're telling me either an intelligent designer exists or these non-scientific, non-naturalistic, speculative possibilities are real. You have to believe they're real in order to use this as an alternative to the designer.

So I think there's a lot more pressure that we can put on the multiverse hypothesis as it's employed in this conversation. I love it. That's a great response. Now, before we go back to the questions, two quick announcements. Cliff and Stuart Connecly have a new book out called Demolishing Doubt. They asked me to write the Ford, which was really cool. So tomorrow, my son, Scott, and I are interviewing Clefellie. Cliff and Stuart Connectly.

We actually already interviewed him. I think it's their first interview on this, and we're releasing it on this channel tomorrow at noon. Super fun. First interview I've done with my son. I've interviewed him, but this is the first father-son interview we thought would be fun of Cliff and Stuart Connectly.

Don't miss that tomorrow. We have 14 questions for him. I did not prep them with any of the questions. And also, Friday, I have an interview Friday and Tuesday with Stephen Meyer is back. because it turns out Sir Roger Penrose, one of the most influential scientists over the past 50 years on the doctoral committee of Stephen Hawking,

responded to one of my videos in which I interviewed Steve. And I got to tell you, even though he thinks we're wrong, I was like thrilled that he's paying attention to what we're doing in this channel. And Steve Meyer, we have a two-part series coming up where this is considered one of the most,

I would say one of the most forceful models that maintains, that challenges the idea of a big bang that we argue points towards a big banger. And Steve does a careful, very critical, gracious response. So this is at the forefront of conversations about cosmology and design. You will not want to miss part one on Friday. All right. Back to the tough questions. Here's one.

I'll throw this over to you, Jay. It says, perhaps this is a naive response. But doesn't an argument from necessity require something that can have a need? For example, for life to exist, the gravitational constant needs to be exactly what it is among other constraints. But in this formulation, life needs the exact gravitational constant. So if you have life, you can conclude that the gravitational constant must be what it is. But if life doesn't exist yet, how can it necessitate a gravitational constant? Okay, so the idea would be that fine-tuning claims that life sort of would have to backward cause the constants, I suppose, or something like that.

I think that's right. Yeah, and so this confuses conditional with causal necessity. And so maybe, you know, the problem is there are different types of necessity. So I think we've been speaking of this clearly. But the basic idea is the constants were set, whatever their cause, to particular values that make life possible. right? So the word possible is actually that's the language of necessity. Things can be possible or impossible. They can be necessary or they can be impossible, right? So fine-tuning claims that they need to be set a certain way for life to be possible, but it's not like, well, life has some kind of

need, some future life has a need that then backwards causes the constant. But really the simple way of distinguishing it is just that it confuses conditional with causal necessity. That's the technical way to say it. So necessity to explain fine-tuning, you know, and I think maybe the way the question is thinking, the concepts would need to be sort of logically required or something independently of life. But the claim is really simple, just like all every single day. We know that there are certain necessary conditions that are required for something to happen.

You know, if a car is going to explode, oxygen is almost certainly going to be present. It doesn't follow that, you know, the car explosion backwards caused the presence of oxygen. That's not how these things work. It's just that certain kinds of events have necessary conditions for them to happen. They're not sufficient conditions and you don't need to invoke backwards causation to explain it. That's great. I think that the way to break that down is there's a difference between necessary and sufficient conditions. and just because something is necessary doesn't mean it has any causal power or influence to generate anything.

That distinction is vital. I think we covered that one. You want to jump in? You're good? Okay. Very good. All right. Here's a good.

Let's have we got some great responses here. Okay. This one, let me read this one. It has some depth to it, but I think when we get down to it, it's a pretty basic, important question. It says, given the recent James Webb's. Space Telescope data showing fully mature galaxies, where the Big Main Model predicted infant ones, the previous fine-tuning coefficient of 10 to 120th appears insufficient. To keep the deep-time model alive, the required precision for initial density fluctuations

must now be adjusted to an even finer degree. What is the current calculated value of the fine-tuning in light of the James Webb Space Telescope? How many more zeros would we have to write on a piece of paper or is at this level of precision? How much longer? How long must such a piece of paper be accommodated? So I won't keep going on, but this person basically says, have we moved from fine-tuning to hypertuning

because we're learning more and more remarkable precision because the discoveries at the James Webb Space Telescope? Okay, so, Sean, this is one of these really complicated questions. try to sort of boil this down. So here is the basic idea is the James Webb Space Telescope has allowed us to see because if you're looking, the deeper you look into space, you're actually looking backwards in time. So the farther away you can resolve something in your telescope, because light has a finite speed, you're really sampling different times of the universe. And so the James Webb Space Telescope's allowing us to imagine it just sort of peer into the very, very early

stages of the universe's history. And the presumption of the current models of how the universe would develop requires that it takes a certain amount of time after the universe heals sufficiently in elements form to get stars and to get galaxies. It takes a lot of time to do that. You're not just getting galaxies right away. And so what's weird is that... Hi, everyone. If you've been injured in an accident that was not your fault, listen up. We have legal professionals standing by to answer your questions for free. Call now and find out if you have a case and how much it's potentially worth. Call 800-712-2-2-2-3-00. I'm here with spokesman John Wolfe. So, John, tell everyone listening who should call right now. Well, Maria, first

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Take advantage of this opportunity and call now 800. 712, 2,300. Advertisement sponsored by Legal Help Center may not be available in all states, not available in California. We're discovering at this very early stage of the universe things that look like mature galaxies.

So they seem to be able to come together much more quickly, right? And so I think the question is intuition is right. Okay, if anything, all the fine-tuning arguments that we developed prior to this data actually presupposed that there was more than enough time back there, right, to sort of form these mature galaxies. And so if anything, gosh, it may be that something has to be even more fine-tuned in order to sort of bootstrap these galaxies into existence so quickly. I don't know that anybody's tried to run that calculation, but I do think it's one of those, again, I mean, maybe we need, we need, we need to. to add a zero to the, or, you know, go from one in 10 to the 10 to the 123 to 1 in 10 to the

124 power on the initial entropy or something in order to account for that. But of course, that's just making it more fine-tuned. But in some ways, look, these numbers are so astronomical that I doubt there will be a lot of people that say, okay, I was a total atheist. But, you know, what's great about it, though, is the universe still holds these surprises. I mean, I think the theory that we were holding was fairly reasonable. And then we develop a very expensive telescope so we could peer deeper and deeper back in time. And we discover, man, things are different than we thought.

And if anything, harder than we thought. So I think if anything, that's sort of moving us in the direction of greater fine-tuning. Which, by the way, goes back to a question we had earlier about falsifiability. A prediction looking through the James Webb Telescope would be that we would find increased fine-tuning, that we might find new examples of fine-tune. As we look back in time, it should match the presence since these constants haven't changed. And this is what we discover.

So it's a kind of theory that's put out there that's actually testable. Now, I have one for you, Greg, because you teach philosophy here. With me, in fact, soon you'll be teaching in our apologetics program, a class or two, which is kind of exciting. But before this, you were doing a lot of scholars. they work, but at Yale, having a lot of spiritual conversations with people. So I asked you this because a question came through and it says, fine-tuning seems to be a very

intellectual answer and could be written off on the street when evangelizing. How can we use fine-tuning in a practical way? Well, that is a great question. And the questioner is right. In a conversation with somebody, there are a couple of things that happen. if a person is generally skeptical about the existence of God, and that person might kind of lose patience with the technicalities of an argument. And this is going to be common with the fine-tuning

and with things like the Kalong cosmological argument. And in part that is because these arguments are somewhat abstract and don't seem to many people immediately to touch the person. And this is why in many conversations, arguments such as a moral argument can be better conversation generators because people hold their moral views and the nature of morality and what is it about very closely. It's much easier to dismiss some cosmological theory. in the middle of a conversation.

At the same time, I think we can use fine-tuning and use the Kalam cosmological argument to push against a very common misconception that the more science grows, the smaller the room for God. And we can point to these things by saying, starting in the early decades of the 20th century,

scientific progress has actually opened up the reasonable possibility for the existence of God. And we can say, depending on how old you are, we can say, in my own lifetime, fine-tuning has been put on the map. These are new discoveries, and they are very established in the scientific community. Nobody disputes the facts. and they open up room for a reasonable belief in God. So it can be very helpful to undermine the alleged conflict between science and religion. Do either of you have a favorite way where you just try to make fine-tuning as simple as possible? Now, I realize when we use illustrations and make things simple,

some precision can be lost and can potentially be inaccurate. But I've heard people say things like, well, you know, a big bang requires a big banger. If the universe had a beginning, it points towards a beginner. And there's something intuitive about that where people go, oh, I get it. And then, of course, we need to defend it and lay out the premises. Do either of you all come over to you, Jay first, like if you're explaining to your kids, fine-tuning, is there a way you would do it for just a kid or a person on the street without the philosophical or scientific training.

Yeah, and that's, I mean, that's everyone for the most part, right? I mean, a set of people that studies this. I mean, I'm guessing it's one or two percent of the population, which is why, as a Christian, I'm really glad people don't need to know these arguments in order to be rational and believing in God. Exactly. Like Greg said, I completely agree about if you can get someone to realize,

not just that they think certain things are right or wrong, but that they have moral knowledge, right? So he said, look, you know everyone that has functioning faculties knows that it is wrong, always, and everywhere to torture a small child for the fun of it. It's not just that cultures that believe that, you know, had a sort of Darwinian advantage. And so they survived to the present. You just, you know that as much as you know anything. If you're mistaken about that, you know, how much more likely are you to be mistaken about some complicated theory? And so I think if people can just simply see that, oh, there's this thing called moral knowledge.

It's not about the physical properties of the universe. It's this other thing, and it constitutes knowledge. That in some ways, that's sort of a quicker pathway than some of these complicated arguments. I was going to talk about fine-tuning or really sort of the Big Bang cosmological argument. I use an intuitive version of the column cosmological argument. I just basically say, look, the question, we're not going to prove something to you mathematically, but here are the kind of two basic alternatives.

Either the material universe has always existed, so you wouldn't say, well, it's always existed, so it doesn't need an explanation, or it hasn't always existed, in which case it needs something other than itself to bring it into existence. And try to get people to recognize, okay, yeah, if something hasn't always existed,

it can't be the ultimate explanation. The thing that's going to explain everything else needs to be something, right? They didn't come into existence out of nothing. And then so that's, right, just the two hypotheses, sort of either the universe, physical universe explains itself or something outside it does. Well, we know the universe doesn't explain itself because we know it has an age and it has a finite past. And then that in some ways that can sort of get you there. And then

you start talking about the properties of the universe because that one, you know, it only takes a couple one or two or three minutes to kind of set it up. It's very hard without just using a mental image like the dartboard or something. Right. Well, what? Well, what? With my kids, I would talk about playing poker because I taught him how to play poker at a very young age. And what are the odds of getting dealt a royal flush? I looked it up on Wikipedia one time, and I can't remember the number. It's something like 1 in 700,000, Royal flush in spades, for example. And so you think, suppose you have a card shuffling machine in Vegas, and you're playing poker,

and you get dealt five royal flushes in a row. Is it reasonable to believe that the card shuffler has not been tampered with? And, well, what about 20 royal flushes in a row? And so that can help people see that at a certain point, it becomes unreasonable to believe that a specified complexity could happen simply by chance. It just is not reasonable. And so you're going to think somebody fixed.

the machine. I think that can help you with the odds. I think the dartboard example also helps you. That's a great example. I like the Royal Flesh. You get one you go maybe, and by the way, I googled it really fast, which we take it for what it's worth. It says one in 649,740 hands. 0.0002%.

So one, you go, well, I guess it happens. Two, almost for sure not. Three is a solid case. Yeah. Well, we're talking about fine tuning. I couldn't do the math, but it would be, I don't know how many thousands or millions of royal flesheses. Would it be that insane, Jay? It would be, yeah, there's no way to conceive it. And notice how it's not like our standards are all that high. I mean, so this would be, you know, the example. So let's say it's one in 700,000 times four, right? Well, that's a big number. It's nothing like almost any of these fine tuning variables. And yet everyone would immediately infer, I suspect at two, we would probably think something's fishy. And I would almost wonder if one, I don't think I've ever seen a real loyal flush, but I honestly think it would be reasonable to think on the second one, something weird's happening. Three, you know something's happening, right? And this is a tiny, insignificant number compared to some of these fine-tuned variables for which, you know, this is why I tend to think, okay, at some point adding numbers to these things, it sort of misses the point.

Because if someone's decided, kind of nothing is going to count in favor of the universe actually being fine-tuned, then you're sort of wasting your breath trying to, come up with more examples. Jay, I've told you this many times. Love your book The Provedge Plan. It's so fascinating. One of my favorite apologetics books. You wrote it, I think, 2005, the first version? 2004. Yeah, first version 2004. And then you did a 20-year update. We came on, we talked about that, did response to that. Now, we don't have time to go into it here. We've been talking about fine-tuning kind of the laws of physics and the constants and cosmology. what you referred to as local fine-tuning is more for there to be life on our planet. We need a certain core and a certain sun of a certain distance of a certain age and outer planets and a moon and a certain tilt.

That's a local kind of fine-tuning we didn't even go into that if anything just adds the improbability of naturalism and points further towards design. That'll be a conversation for another time. But maybe as we wrap up, one of the things I'm doing this month is we've had Doug Axon. Friends, if you miss that, he made such a compelling case from biology to life. We had Stephen Myron to make a case from the origin of the universe towards a source outside of the universe. We had you on for fine-tuning. It's because I really want to use my channel to talk about this movie called The Story of Everything. I've seen an early copy.

It's so interesting. It's fascinating. Tell us about that movie because it's come. coming up really soon. It is. In fact, I think it opens in theaters around the country on the 30th here, just in a couple of days. This movie, a theatrical release documentary, has really, it's been about four years in the making. In fact, I remember the first interviews happened sort of at the end of the COVID lockdowns.

But it's a magnificent, you know, it's an hour and a half long sort of extended treatment of these issues. It really focuses on the origin of the universe so that, you know, the Big Bang cosmology, the fact the universe had a beginning, all the fine-tuning evidence that we've talked about here tonight, this afternoon tonight. And then also the origin of life and the complexity and these information reality in life. And then also the beauty of the natural world, which is sort of something in addition to these things. And so it's delightful. It's really nice to be able to honestly be in 2026 when you can have really. really, really, really high definition imagery. It's amazing. Yeah, just begin to get a sense of the grandeur and the beauty of life at both

at very small scales, at human size scales, and then the grandeur of the universes at a whole at very large scales. It's magnificent. I haven't seen a film, whether for believers or unbelievers, that is going to better visualize and explain the arguments. So even if somebody's not convinced, at least steel man it and understand it given what's at stake here with whether or not the universe is designed and the movie, the story of everything, huge fan. And by the way, some people think you're given so much time for this, you're getting sponsored. Nope, Discovery Institute is not paying me a penny.

I'm doing this because I'm a fan in the sense of grateful for it in my own life, believe in intelligent design, and just want to partner with organizations that I think are doing good work. So check out the story of everything. Pick up a copy of their privileged planet. And before you click away, make sure that you think about studying with us at Biola. Our other guests today, Greg Gansel, teaches in the MA philosophy program, which I did over 20 years ago. No exaggeration to say that it was life-changing and game-changing for me, my worldview, my belief system, my confidence. Greg, you'll be teaching some of the apologetic classes with me coming up.

We actually have a master's distinctly in science and religion. but in all three of those programs, we cover and talk about a lot of what we did today. Make sure you hit subscribe. We've got the two videos coming up again. You will not want to miss this. Steve Meyer on Friday, and then again on Tuesday,

we're doing a deep dive response to the new book Battle of the Big Bang, which lays out a couple dozen models that kind of challenges the Big Bang model and leans in towards an eternal universe and specifically to Sir Roger Penrose. I am honored that he responded to a video on my channel, and he deserves a careful, thoughtful response,

and we're going to do that. All right, subscribe, click below. We'll see you next time. Dr. Jay Richards, thanks for joining us. This was fun. My pleasure. See you, Jay. Hey, friends.

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