Too Perfect to Be an Accident: The Universe Was Fine-Tuned for You

A Universe That Fits Us Like a Glove

Imagine a safe with a dozen dials. To open it, every dial has to land on exactly the right number. Now imagine you walk into a room, find the safe already open, and learn that the dials are set to values that would have been very hard to hit by chance. You would probably wonder whether someone had been there before you.

That is roughly the picture that many physicists describe when they talk about the physical constants of our universe. The strength of gravity, the strength of the force that holds atomic nuclei together, the mass of the electron, the energy locked into empty space: each of these numbers looks as though it was set to a value that lets stars burn, carbon form and chemistry happen. Change some of them by small amounts, according to a number of calculations, and the result is a universe with no stars, no heavy elements, or no atoms at all.

The idea has a name, fine-tuning, and it has attracted serious attention from scientists who hold very different beliefs about God. Stephen Hawking wrote in A Brief History of Time that “the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted.” Paul Davies has said there is broad agreement that the universe is fine-tuned for life. Fred Hoyle, an astronomer who began his career as a convinced skeptic of religion, was moved enough by one of these coincidences to write that a common-sense reading of the facts suggests someone has deliberately arranged the physics.

This article’s thesis is that the fine-tuning evidence is one of the strongest places where modern physics and the Christian claim that the universe was made on purpose seem to meet. For readers of faith, it is a reason to feel that the universe they live in looks like what they would expect if it were created. That is a fair and reasonable way to read the evidence, and many serious scholars do read it that way.