The Lottery Objection
Summary
Imagine that you have bought a lottery ticket. There are millions of tickets, but only one will win. It doesn’t follow from the fact that, because your winning ticket was chosen, from all the many millions of losing tickets, that this must have been the result of something more than a random selection. Anything which is statistically unlikely, still can happen.
The mistake that defenders of the Fine Tuning argument make is to assume that when something happens which is unlikely, there must be a more plausible explanation of it than that it arose naturally.
It is not surprising that we are in a universe where the conditions were just right for beings of our kind to emerge, since there would be no chance whatsoever of us emerging elsewhere. So the fact that we are here cannot be taken as proof of God’s design.
Furthermore, the Fine Tuning argument is also vulnerable to the range of criticisms of traditional versions of the Design Argument outlined above.
