Roger,
I never said all events unfold by chance and magic. I was specifically talking about the PROBABILITY of events happening, not how those events (your birth, earth’s trip around the sun etc) unfolded.
I’m focussing on probability because the fine-tuning argument that theists put forth is a probability argument. It concludes that since cosmological constants have very precise values which make life possible, this could not have happened without supernatural intervention.
I was trying to tell you that this is a wrong conclusion because it presupposes teleology (i.e producing life and humans was the goal of the universe), and it also ignores the fact that the current set of cosmological values was only one among trillions of alternatives.
You then ask:
“How can they be constant and assume random values?”
They’re constant in the present universe, i.e they assumed their values during the birth of the universe and have stayed constant ever since. That’s why we call them cosmological “constants”. But during the birth of the universe, these parameters could have assumed any of countless other values, which is where the random chance factor comes in. This is much like how a particular lottery ticket can win during one draw and another can win during another draw of the same batch.
The values the universe ended up with determined its properties. Galaxies, stars, planets and life came about as mere byproducts of those properties. In other words, life was constrained by the cosmological constants, not the other way around.
As Lawrence Krauss puts it in his new article:
“…Once again, it likely confuses cause and effect. The constants of the universe indeed allow the existence of life as we know it. However, it is much more likely that life is tuned to the universe rather than the other way around. We survive on Earth in part because Earth’s gravity keeps us from floating off. But the strength of gravity selects a planet like Earth, among the variety of planets, to be habitable for life forms like us. Reversing the sense of cause and effect in this statement, as Metaxas does in cosmology, is like saying that it’s a miracle that everyone’s legs are exactly long enough to reach the ground.”
We fully expect life to flourish in a universe where the constants favor it. It would only be surprising if life was present in a universe with the wrong parameters. You further say:
“ I am real, life is real, and God is real, not based on speculation.”
I will agree that the former two are real, but I will not agree that God is real because the former two have observational and empirical support, while God doesn’t have that. Where’s the evidence?