richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

extravagant God hypothesis and the apparently extravagant multiverse
hypothesis is one of statistical improbability. The multiverse,
for all that it is extravagant, is simple. God, or any intelligent,
decision-taking, calculating agent, would have to be highly improbable
in the very same statistical sense as the entities he is
supposed to explain. The multiverse may seem extravagant in sheer
number of universes. But if each one of those universes is simple in
its fundamental laws, we are still not postulating anything highly
improbable. The very opposite has to be said of any kind of
intelligence.
Some physicists are known to be religious (Russell Stannard and
the Reverend John Polkinghorne are the two British examples 1
have mentioned). Predictably, they seize upon the improbability of
the physical constants all being tuned in their more or less narrow
Goldilocks zones, and suggest that there must be a cosmic intelligence
who deliberately did the tuning. I have already dismissed all
such suggestions as raising bigger problems than they solve. But
what attempts have theists made to reply? How do they cope with
the argument that any God capable of designing a universe, carefully
and foresightfully tuned to lead to our evolution, must be a
supremely complex and improbable entity who needs an even
bigger explanation than the one he is supposed to provide?
The theologian Richard Swinburne, as we have learned to
expect, thinks he has an answer to this problem, and he expounds
it in his book Is There a God?. He begins by showing that his heart
is in the right place by convincingly demonstrating why we should
always prefer the simplest hypothesis that fits the facts. Science
explains complex things in terms of the interactions of simpler
things, ultimately the interactions of fundamental particles. I (and I
dare say you) think it a beautifully simple idea that all things are
made of fundamental particles which, although exceedingly
numerous, are drawn from a small, finite set of types of particle. If
we are sceptical, it is likely to be because we think the idea too
simple. But for Swinburne it is not simple at all, quite the reverse.
Given that the number of particles of any one type, say electrons,
is large, Swinburne thinks it too much of a coincidence that so
many should have the same properties. One electron, he could
stomach. But billions and billions of electrons, all with the same
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