¶1In the 1959 007 novel Goldfinger, the titular villain says once is happen stance, twice is coincidence, the third time it's enemy action. In other words, after a certain number of coincidences, it's no longer a coincidence. You're dealing with a design or a plan. So, in today's episode, I'll examine three coincidences that when taken together make atheism a very improbable bet, one that I would not wager my soul on. So let's start with number three.
¶2The coincidental fine-tuning of the universe. The word teology refers to the study of telos which in Greek means end or purpose. Teological arguments for God say that there is design in the universe that points to God's existence. Or as Psalm 191 puts it, the heavens declare the glory of God. The sky proclaims its builder's craft.
¶3The 18th century theologian William Paley argued that if we walked through a field and found a rock, we would not assume the rock was designed by anyone. But if we found a watch in the same field, even if we didn't know what watches were, we would know that someone designed it. And since living things are much more complex than watches, we can conclude they were designed as well. Now, many atheists say this argument doesn't work anymore because the theory of evolution shows how living things can naturally become complex over time as a species evolves and so God isn't needed. But Paley's argument wasn't restricted just to living things.
¶4He said of the strength of gravity itself that it falls within the limits which utility requires even though they fall within so small a proportion to the range of possibilities. In the past few decades, non-religious scientists have discovered that the range of possible values for the constants and the laws of nature is huge. But the life permitting value within that range is incredibly small. And we are really lucky that it falls within that tiny range. Oh, and don't be cute and say, "This doesn't need to be explained because if it wasn't fine-tuned, we wouldn't be here to notice." That's like saying, "50 trained marksmen shot at me and they all missed." But this doesn't have to be explained because if they hadn't missed, I wouldn't be here to notice.
¶5For example, the renowned physicist Alexander Valenin says of the cosmological constant that quote, "This is the most notorious and perplexing case of fine-tuning in physics." The string theorist Leonard Suskin says it's possible that an unknown agent caused the universe to have a highly improbable low disorder or entropy at its beginning. And to get an idea of the improbable low odds that these values would be life permitting rather than life prohibiting, consider this analogy. Imagine you're playing a game of poker and one player wins 10 hands in a row, all with royal flushes. The odds of this happening by chance alone is 1 in 13.4 for octoacilian or about 1 in 10 to the 60th power. But the odds of the universe being fine-tuned by chance alone are about 1 in 10 to the 136th power.
¶6And that's not twice as large because when you double exponents, things get crazy big as can be seen in the difference between 1 and 10 to the 3 power or a th00and and 1 and 10 to the 6th power or 1 million. In response, some people will say that maybe the laws of nature had to have these values. But this raises the following objection from atheist Richard Dawkins. He writes, "It is indeed perfectly plausible that there is only one way for a universe to be. But why did that one way have to be such a setup for our eventual evolution?
¶7Even many atheists like Dawkins appreciate the force of the fine-tuning argument, as I noted in my previous episode, the argument for God atheists fear the most." >> At some point, certainly we all asked, "Well, which is the best argument you've yet come up against from the other side?" I think every one of us picks the finetuning one >> as as the most intriguing, >> the golden locks. >> Yeah. >> For more on the cosmic fine-tuning argument, see my previous episodes, as well as Luke Barnes and Dr. Lewis's book, A for Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos. And it turns out fine-tuning isn't just restricted to the physical laws of the universe.
¶8A new argument for God proposed by Brian Cutter and Dustin Kummit focuses on the psychoysical laws of nature. This argument shows how coincidental it is that our conscious awareness has specific reactions to things like painful stimuli even though there is no direct link between those two things since you can't see someone's feeling of pain on an MRI for example. Now you might say evolution explains this connection between biology and consciousness because if we did not feel pain then we wouldn't survive as a species. But that's like the claim fine-tuning isn't mysterious. Because if the universe weren't fine-tuned, we wouldn't be here to notice.
¶9Just as the laws of physics that govern how forces interact with each other have to be very precise in order for life to exist, the laws that specify which conscious experiences associate with physical states have to be just as precise. The connections between conscious states and physical states could conceivably have been radically different in all sorts of ways. like where our physical states and behavior are exactly the same but we don't have consciousness and our bodies just respond automatically to behaviors with a very limited consciousness a scenario philosophers call philosophical zombies or pe zombies or there could have been billions of other universes where almost everything is conscious or consciousness only obtains among helium atoms and so human consciousness would never exist but given that among this huge range of possibilities we humans happen to live in the universe with unique human consciousness iousness, then that is a coincidence in need of explanation. And if you say, well, maybe human consciousness is the only kind of consciousness that can exist, then that gets right back to the fine-tuning argument. Since the odds that a universe would exist where human beings can exist at all, is fantastically low.
¶10For more on the argument from psychophysical harmony, see the video from apologist squared, linked below. Number two, the strange coincidence of moral facts. The Russian author Fedor Dostki famously said that if there were no God, all things would be permitted. But to be fair, a lot of atheists think this is silly. And the moral argument for God can become silly if you push it too far.
¶11Like if you say you can't have morality without God. You can have morality without God just like you could have football without God. You could just have mutually agreed upon rules that make everyone want to play the game of life together. But the deeper problem is if we believe, unlike with football, that moral rules don't come from human beings, yet human beings are obligated to obey them. What if the moral rules that govern the universe are part of the universe itself?
¶12It's just a fact of reality, for example, that it's wrong to torture innocent people for fun. Even many atheists admit we need to have bedrock moral intuitions that don't rely on other intuitions for their truth. The philosopher Walter at Armstrong says the most sophisticated and complex arguments regularly come down to but surely that is immoral. Hence without some move like this there would be no way to construct and justify any substantive moral theory. Now some people say moral facts don't exist because people disagree with moral facts or they don't know that certain behaviors are always wrong.
¶13Bart man raised this objection to Shawn McDow which is why man had to bite the bullet and say genocide and other evils are not universally wrong. Are there circumstances that would make that okay or is it universally wrong to do what the Nazis did against the Jews? >> I don't have any access to any kind of universal objectivity. I'm a human being and I have um thoughts and views. So do you.
¶14You agreed with me that torturing a child for adult entertainment is wrong. That's a universal moral truth. >> Oh, no. I don't think it is. >> Okay.
¶15You don't think? >> No. In the ancient world, um, for example, people who are also human beings often practice child sacrifice. But moral disagreement doesn't disprove the objectivity of morality any more than mathematical disagreement disproves the objectivity of mathematics. In a math class, there is one right set of answers on a test, but the students will get different answers because they might heir in their reasoning.
¶16And the same is true for morality. CS Lewis once said, "We all learn the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human minds have made up for themselves and might have made different if they liked. Even philosophers who reject moral facts admit that if they existed, their existence would be really weird.
¶17In the miracle of theism, JL Mackey said, "Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all powerful God to create them." This is why many atheistic moral realists or people who believe immaterial moral facts do exist in a godless universe will say that they're just brute facts or they follow from the nature of things in the universe or they're just self-evident truths. And many lay people will take a similar path. They'll say it's just obvious that it's wrong to rape and murder people and no further explanation is needed. What gets more difficult though is trying to explain very particular moral facts that go beyond these generic examples. In my debate with Destiny on the Whatever podcast, he conceded that his worldview could not condemn in principle intentionally altering fetuses in the womb so they could be used as brainless organ farms or even as toddler SCX dolls.
¶18Jeff McMahon, a respected pro-choice philosopher, says it would be permissible to kill a healthy orphan newborn to use his organs to save three sick children. McMahon admits, "Most people will find this implication intolerable, and I confess that I cannot embrace it without significant misgivings and considerable unease." I've also used examples of stomach churning, non-procreative sex acts that don't fall under the definition of rape in dialogues because many people believe it is a fact that these acts are wrong, but they struggle to apply a more basic moral fact like the wrongness of rape to explain why these acts are wrong. Philosophers like Peter Singer have flirted with the permissibility of beastiality and he said there needs to be a serious and open discussion on animal ethics and sex ethics. David Benitar, another respected philosopher, says that if a person believes there is nothing immoral about casual sexual hookups, for example, then he has no grounds to object to some forms of beastiality and necrilia. since as he says animals are not always harmed by sexual activity with them and living people can give consent to the use of their later dead bodies by necroiles.
¶19In response, some people might say that there is a moral law in this particular universe that says it is wrong to create genetically modified humans to kill or enslave or that it's wrong to engage in non-procreative sex acts with animals or objects. But isn't that a massive coincidence? We just happen to have these particular non-basic moral views and we live in a universe where these views are the objective facts about reality. In fact, one of the most famous arguments against moral realism is called the evolutionary debunking argument. It says that we have no reason to trust that we know universal immaterial moral facts if the way we get to those facts is through an evolutionary process that shaped our minds to believe truths that help us survive.
¶20not necessarily truths to help us be moral. Moral beliefs sometimes help us survive, but they aren't all geared towards a moral end, as can be seen in those who defended the morality of eugenics. The philosopher Sharon Street calls this the Darwinian dilemma for moral realists and says, "The Darwinian dilemma notes the striking coincidence between the independent normative truths posited by the realist and the normative views that evolutionary forces push us toward and challenges the realist to explain this coincidence." But the dilemma isn't a problem for religious moral realists who believe that God is the foundation of moral facts and he has an interest in making sure his creatures are aware of and know these moral facts. For more on this, see my previous episode on the strongest moral argument for God's existence. And finally, number one is the coincidence about miracles.
¶21In the past, I've been hesitant to use miracles in the paranormal in my case for God's existence. I remember when Mike Lacona did that in his 2017 debate with Matt Dillah Hunty, which included the famous trash can story. >> So, as they're playing the Ouija board, all of a sudden, they saw the lid, the metal lid on the can just lift up and hover over the can for a moment, and then it launched itself against the wall, hits the wall, goes flat against the wall, and it's as though someone was holding it against the wall, and then it just slid down real slowly down the wall. And then when it hit the ground, it started to spin like a like a coin. >> As someone who believes in supernatural forces, I'm open to accepting this account.
¶22But many atheists just chuckle at these kinds of stories and consider them urban legends. But once you start tabulating all the accounts of miracles in the paranormal, the entire collection becomes a lot harder to dismiss. Maybe not all of them are true, but it would be a massive coincidence if it turned out every single one of these claims were false, which would have to be the case in order for atheism to be true. This was the conclusion that Joe Schmid and I reached in our conversation about his reversion to Catholicism, especially when you add all the other cosmic coincidences together we covered in this episode. A common thread I'm seeing here, miracle claims, cosmic fine-tuning, psychophysical harmony would just be it.
¶23You have two options. Either reality really looks like it was crafted for a particular grand story and it was or it really looks like it was crafted for a grand story and it's a giant coincidence. >> Gigant. It's not just a giant coincidence. It's coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence.
¶24>> It's just I couldn't do and I wasn't going to risk as well just like waking up and seeing Jesus and it's like why didn't you believe? And I was like, well, you see, I just thought that all these doctors were wrong. All the medical reports were fabricated. >> Now, an atheist might say that lots of religions have miracle claims, and since they all can't be true, that means they all must be false. But as Joe and I noted in our discussion, Catholic theology allows for these other miracle claims in non-Christian religions.
¶25For example, many of these claims are nowhere near as well evidenced as Christian miracle claims, and so they have natural explanations. See my episode on the Muslim claim that Muhammad split the moon for just one example of that. And for those that don't have a natural explanation, they could be examples of God showing his love without affirming contradictory theology, like a miraculous healing. Or they could be examples of a demonic attempt to imitate God, as I propose in my dialogue with Hayden Carroll on Mormonism. But remember that while theism can be true even if the vast majority of miracle claims are false, atheism cannot be true if even one miracle claim is correct.
¶26Now, in response to that, a lot of atheists might say, "Isn't it a massive coincidence that all alien abduction accounts are false? Isn't it more likely at least one of them is true?" No, because those are different than miracle accounts. First, accounts of miracles are much more widespread and don't seem to be merely a cultural artifact like alien abduction stories, which only became popular in the 1960s following the Betty and Barney Hill case. Second, there are no cases of thousands of people claiming to have seen an alien abduction in the same way thousands of people claim to witness miracles like Marian apparitions at Fatima or Zetun. Third, alien abductions don't leave behind the kind of physical evidence that can be examined in things like eucharistic miracles.
¶27Finally, alien abductions have a very low prior probability of happening given the absence of evidence for aliens and the positive evidence that aliens have not visited Earth due to the practical difficulties of interstellar travel. So, we already have good reasons to doubt alien abduction stories. Whereas we have evidence for God's existence that we've covered earlier and no similar empirical defeaters for God's existence. So the prior probability that God would exist is nowhere near as low as aliens. In fact, given God's simplicity as undivided being itself and God's ability to explain a contingent world that doesn't have to exist, this raises the prior probability of God existing to a level that at least warrants serious investigation, not light-hearted dismissal.
¶28And for more on modern miracles, see Craig Keenir's two volume work on miracles, as well as other recent books on miracles in the description below. And that's just a start when it comes to the evidence for God, Christ, and his church. If you like an exhaustive account of the evidence, check out Joe Schmid's 7-hour breakdown of the reasons he reverted to his Catholic faith and his 10-hour case for miracles, link below. Thank you all so much for watching, and if you want to help us continue to make great content like this, be sure to support us at trenhornpodcast.com. Thank you all so much and I hope you have a very blessed day.