In 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? Many have accepted the cultural narrative that he’s obsolete—that as science progresses, there is less need for a “God” to explain the universe. Yet it turns out that the rumors of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place—science itself.
Here’s the story: The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion—1 followed by 27 zeros—planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion—1 followed by 24 zeros—planets capable of supporting life.
With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon. Scientists listened with a vast radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were not merely random. But as years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researchers have discovered precisely bubkis—0 followed by nothing.
What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.
Let’s stop there for just a moment. He is talking about how Sagan highlighted those two parameters and now there are beyond fifty.
Dr. Craig: Yes, he says in the article that there are now around 200 known parameters which are necessary for a planet to be life-supporting, and every one of them must be met or life would be impossible. These will include things like a solar system that has a large Jupiter-like planet in it which will act as a vacuum cleaner to suck away destructive asteroids and meteors. A moon. The correct distance from the star. The position in the galactic arm. The type of atmosphere. The mass. On and on it goes. His claim is that given these many parameters, there ought to be no planets in the universe that are life-supporting, not even our own. It is highly, highly improbable that even we should be here.
Kevin Harris: If he had stopped there, I think the article would have been incomplete. If he just talked about our particular solar system and the right distance from the sun and so on. But he goes on and gets into William Lane Craig territory here when he says, “There’s more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all.”
https://www.reasonablefaith.org/media/reasonable-faith-podcast/god-explodes-the-wall-street-journal/