From here:
Outspoken evangelical geneticist Francis Collins revealed that combative atheist Richard Dawkins admitted to him during a conversation that the most troubling argument for nonbelievers to counter is the fine-tuning of the universe.
“If they (constants in the universe) were set at a value that was just a tiny bit different, one part in a billion, the whole thing wouldn’t work anymore,” said Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, during the 31st Annual Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif.
These constants regarding the behavior of matter and energy – such as strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, and the speed of light – have to be precisely right during the Big Bang for life as we know it to exist.
“To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability,” said the world renowned scientist.
“That forces a conclusion. If you are an atheist, either it is just a lucky break and the odds are so remote, or you have to go to this multiverse hypothesis, which says that there must be almost an infinite number of parallel universes that have different values of those constants,” explained Collins to Christian scholars of various disciplines in the audience. “And of course we are here and so we must have won the lottery, we must be in the one where everything worked.”
Ironically, employing the multiverse theory to explain the fine tuning of the universe requires more blind faith than belief in a Creator; yet it’s a faith that eminent scientists like Dawkins and Hawking are willing to embrace in their eagerness to avoid acknowledging that there really is a God. The fact that the multiverse theory lacks empirical testability and is unfalsifiable, places it in the same category as belief in fairies, a belief which Dawkins compares to religious faith and frequently enjoys deriding: such is the measure of his desperation to flee from God.
In other atheist news, Polly Toynbee will go where Dawkins fears to tread: into a debate with William Lane Craig. Toynbee doesn’t possess the intellectual equipment to avoid being trounced; it should be fun.
From here:
The President of the British Humanist Association (BHA), Polly Toynbee, is to debate the existence of God with eminent Christian philosopher William Lane Craig, when he visits the UK for a tour of speaking engagements in October.
Leading British atheists Richard Dawkins and A C Grayling have both declined the invitation to debate with Craig.
