It was O.K. at the start!

Dear Readers:

Your humble reporter spent a good part of yesterday afternoon reading an article on the evidence for a God, or Creator, because of the remarkable, or might we say incredible list of circumstances that transpired to make our Universe the way it is, and conducive to our existence. (Here!)

I found it interesting because the author used many of the same arguments I wrote about in my book A Brief History of Western Religion" (The Plain Truth About God!) where I looked at aspects of The Fine Tuned Universe and also The Rare Earth Hypothesis.

Now just so we are all singing from the same page I should qualify what I wrote about these two theories. (Fine Tuned and Rare Earth)

Fine-tuning refers to the surprising precision of nature’s physical constants and the beginning state of the universe. In the 1950s, Cambridge University astronomer Fred Hoyle recognized the precision of the energy match up, called carbon resonance, and made the following observation: "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."

Hoyle’s remark should be understood not as a confirmation of a God, but rather an acknowledgement of how startling it is that the Universe has the exact properties that enable the existence of life.

WHICH LEADS US DOWN THIS PATH:

Fine-Tuning vs. Irreducible Complexity

Before continuing the discussion, it is important to distinguish these pointers to Mother Nature from the biological arguments of irreducible complexity, which have a similar form.

Fine-tuning provides examples of how nature is able to produce the current complexity of life, and when one reflects upon the unlikelihood of these examples, it may have the potential to point to a creator.

In the case of irreducible complexity, however, the argument is advanced to suggest that nature cannot account for our present state of existence without relying upon direct, miraculous, divine intervention somewhere in the process. 

In other words, fine-tuning says there might be something to a Supreme Being, while irreducible complexity mistakenly says that it couldn’t be anything else but GOD!

Now there's the rub, bunky ................, according to the evidence presented in my book, we can't know for sure just Who, or What God is, so human hubris that we have all the answers shouldn't be dragged into the conversation!

AND THAT'S WHEN THE FIGHT STARTED FOLKS!

I left the actual existence and nature of God as an open question in my book, while the guy who wrote this article went on to explain how all the scientific evidence could do nothing else but not only confirm a God, but also describe a specific version of God that he was comfortable with! (There's that hubris raising it's ugly head again!)

That's where he lost me!