Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

by Stephen C. Meyer

suffice to say that basic naturalism, or materialism, clearly fails to explain the fine tuning, because none of the popular proposals for doing so—neither brute chance, nor the laws of physics, nor the weak and strong anthropic principles—meets the test of causal adequacy. Indeed, since our experience affirms that finely tuned systems arise from intelligent activity, and since naturalism denies the existence of an intelligent agent before the beginning of the universe, basic naturalism lacks recourse to an entity with the causal powers to produce the effect in question. By contrast, theism and deism affirm the existence of a transcendent intelligent agent prior (either ontologically or temporally) to the beginning of the universe. Thus, theism and deism posit an agent with causal powers—the “right skill set”—to produce the fine tuning of the universe from its beginning, whereas naturalism does not.