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

by Stephen C. Meyer

Richard Dawkins’s claim that the universe has just the properties that we should expect if “there was no purpose, no design . . . nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”19 In fact, however, the hypothesis of materialism does not lead naturally to the expectation of a finely tuned universe capable of sustaining life. Since in our experience fine tuning results from intelligent agency, and since naturalism denies the existence of any intelligent agent preexisting the universe, philosophical naturalists should not expect to observe a universe in which life depends upon exquisite fine tuning. Instead, they should expect a universe in which all phenomena can be explained by reference to the fundamental laws of physics. But, as we have seen, those laws themselves do not explain either the fine tuning of the initial conditions of the universe or the contingent features of the physical laws