In this episode, Trent Horn examines three major coincidences that make atheism increasingly difficult to accept: the fine-tuning of the universe, the strange reality of objective moral facts, and the massive number of miracle claims throughout history. Taken together, these point toward a universe that looks far more like the product of design, purpose, and divine action than random chance.

The Argument for God Atheists Fear the Most: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jgh9M2z8n0

It’s the Strongest Argument for God in History (SCCC pt 7): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk-2FdSVy10

Answering a Muslim Apologist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtVW7y4r4cE

The BEST EVER Cumulative Case for God: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erpKBoPQxN0

Miracles PROVE Catholicism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lk2W9mKTzIQ

To support this channel: https://www.patreon.com/counseloftrent

[NEW] Counsel of Trent merch: https://shop.catholic.com/apologists-alley/trent-horn-resources/

Be sure to keep up with our socials!
https://www.tiktok.com/@counseloftrent
https://www.twitter.com/counseloftrent
https://www.instagram.com/counseloftrentpodcast

Transcript:

In the 1959 novel Goldfinger, the titular villain says, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

In other words, after a certain number of coincidences, it’s no longer a coincidence you’re dealing with. It’s a design or a plan.

So in today’s episode, I’ll examine three coincidences that, when taken together, make atheism a very improbable bet—one that I would not wager my soul on.

Coincidence #3: The Fine-Tuned Universe

Let’s start with number three: the coincidental fine-tuning of the universe.

The word teleology refers to the study of telos, which in Greek means “end” or “purpose.” Teleological arguments for God say that there is design in the universe that points to God’s existence. Or, as Psalm 19:1 puts it, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the sky proclaims its builder’s craft.”

The eighteenth-century theologian William Paley argued that if we walked through a field and found a rock, we would not assume the rock was designed by anyone. But if we found a watch in the same field, even if we didn’t know what watches were, we would know that someone designed it. And since living things are much more complex than watches, we can conclude they were designed as well.

Now, many atheists say this argument doesn’t work anymore because the theory of evolution shows how living things can naturally become complex over time as species evolve, and so God isn’t needed.

But Paley’s argument wasn’t restricted just to living things. He said of the strength of gravity itself that it falls within the limits which utility requires, even though those limits fall within so small a proportion of the range of possibilities.

In the past few decades, non-religious scientists have discovered that the range of possible values for the constants and laws of nature is huge, but the life-permitting value within that range is incredibly small. And we are really lucky that it falls within that tiny range.

Oh, and don’t be cute and say this doesn’t need to be explained because if it weren’t fine-tuned, we wouldn’t be here to notice. That’s like saying fifty trained marksmen shot at me and all missed, but this doesn’t have to be explained because if they hadn’t missed, I wouldn’t be here to notice.

For example, the renowned physicist Alexander Vilenkin says of the cosmological constant, “This is the most notorious and perplexing case of fine-tuning in physics.” The string theorist Leonard Susskind says it’s possible that an unknown agent caused the universe to have a highly improbable low disorder, or entropy, at its beginning.

To get an idea of the improbably low odds that these values would be life-permitting rather than life-prohibiting, consider this analogy.

Imagine you’re playing a game of poker and one player wins ten hands in a row, all with royal flushes. The odds of this happening by chance alone are 1 in 13.4 octodecillion, or about 1 in 10 to the 60th power. But the odds of the universe being fine-tuned by chance alone are about 1 in 10 to the 136th power.

And that’s not twice as large, because when you double exponents, things get crazy big, as can be seen in the difference between 1 in 10 to the third power, or 1,000, and 1 in 10 to the sixth power, or 1 million.

In response, some people will say that maybe the laws of nature had to have these values. But this raises the following objection from atheist Richard Dawkins. He writes, “It is indeed perfectly plausible that there is only one way for a universe to be. But why did that one way have to be such a setup for our eventual evolution?”

Even many atheists like Dawkins appreciate the force of the fine-tuning argument, as I noted in my previous episode, “The Argument for God Atheists Fear the Most.”

For more on the cosmic fine-tuning argument, see my previous episodes, as well as Luke Barnes and Geraint Lewis’s book A Fortunate Universe: Life in a Finely Tuned Cosmos.

Psychophysical Harmony and Consciousness

And it turns out fine-tuning isn’t just restricted to the physical laws of the universe.

A new argument for God proposed by Brian Cutter and Dustin Crummett focuses on the psychophysical laws of nature. This argument shows how coincidental it is that our conscious awareness has reactions to things like painful stimuli, even though there is no direct link between those two things. You can’t see someone’s feeling of pain on an MRI, for example.

Now, you might say evolution explains this connection between biology and consciousness, because if we did not feel pain, then we wouldn’t survive as a species. But that’s like the claim that fine-tuning isn’t mysterious because if the universe weren’t fine-tuned, we wouldn’t be here to notice.

Just as the laws of physics that govern how forces interact with each other have to be very precise in order for life to exist, the laws that specify which conscious experiences associate with physical states have to be just as precise.

The connections between conscious states and physical states could conceivably have been radically different in all sorts of ways. Our physical states and behavior could be exactly the same, but we might not have consciousness, and our bodies could just respond automatically to behaviors with a very limited consciousness—a scenario philosophers call philosophical zombies, or “zombies.”

Or there could have been billions of other universes where almost everything is conscious, or consciousness only obtains among helium atoms, and so human consciousness would never exist.

But given that among this huge range of possibilities, we humans happen to live in the universe with unique human consciousness, then that is a coincidence in need of explanation. And if you say, “Well, maybe human consciousness is the only kind of consciousness that can exist,” then that gets right back to the fine-tuning argument, since the odds that a universe would exist where human beings can exist at all are fantastically low.

For more on the argument from psychophysical harmony, see the video from Apologetics Squared linked below.

Coincidence #2: Moral Facts

Number two: the strange coincidence of moral facts.

The Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky famously said that if there were no God, all things would be permitted. But to be fair, a lot of atheists think this is silly, and the moral argument for God can become silly if you push it too far.

For example, if you say you can’t have morality without God, that’s not quite right. You can have morality without God, just like you could have football without God. You could just have mutually agreed-upon rules that make everyone want to play the game of life together.

The deeper problem is if we believe, unlike football, that moral rules don’t come from human beings, yet human beings are obligated to obey them.

What if the moral rules that govern the universe are part of the universe itself? It’s just a fact of reality, for example, that it’s wrong to torture innocent people for fun.

Even many atheists admit we need to have bedrock moral intuitions that don’t rely on other intuitions for their truth. The philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong says the most sophisticated and complex arguments regularly come down to, “But surely that is immoral.” Hence, without some move like this, there would be no way to construct and justify any substantive moral argument.

Now, some people say moral facts don’t exist because people disagree with moral facts, or they don’t know that certain behaviors are always wrong. Bart Ehrman raised this objection to Sean McDowell, which is why Ehrman had to bite the bullet and say genocide and other evils are not universally wrong.

[Clip plays.]

But moral disagreement doesn’t disprove the objectivity of morality any more than mathematical disagreement disproves the objectivity of mathematics. In a math class, there is one right set of answers on a test, but the students will get different answers because they might err in their reasoning. And the same is true for morality.

C.S. Lewis once said, “We all learned the multiplication table at school. A child who grew up alone on a desert island would not know it. But surely it does not follow that the multiplication table is simply a human convention, something human minds have made up for themselves and might have made different if they liked.”

Even philosophers who reject moral facts admit that if they existed, their existence would be really weird. In The Miracle of Theism, J.L. Mackie said moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful God to create them.

This is why many atheistic moral realists, or people who believe immaterial moral facts do exist in a godless universe, will say that they’re just brute facts, or they follow from the nature of things in the universe, or they’re just self-evident truths. And many laypeople will take a similar path. They’ll say, “It’s just obvious that it’s wrong to rape and murder people, and no further explanation is needed.”

Disturbing Moral Implications Without God

What is more difficult, though, is trying to explain very particular moral facts that go beyond these generic examples.

In my debate with Destiny on the Whatever podcast, he conceded that his worldview could not condemn in principle intentionally altering fetuses in the womb so they could be used as brainless organ farms, or even as toddler sex dolls.

Jeff McMahan, a respected pro-choice philosopher, says it would be permissible to kill a healthy, orphaned newborn to use his organs to save three sick children. McMahan admits most people will find this implication intolerable, and he confesses that he cannot embrace it without significant misgivings and considerable unease.

I’ve also used examples of stomach-churning, non-procreative sex acts that don’t fall under the definition of rape in dialogues, because many people believe it is a fact that these acts are wrong, but they struggle to apply a more basic moral fact, like the wrongness of rape, to explain why these acts are wrong.

Philosophers like Peter Singer have flirted with the permissibility of bestiality, and he said there needs to be a serious and open discussion on animal ethics and sex ethics. David Benatar, another respected philosopher, says that if a person believes there is nothing immoral about casual sexual hookups, for example, then he has no grounds to object to some forms of bestiality and necrophilia, since, as he says, animals are not always harmed by sexual activity with them, and living people can give consent to the use of their later dead bodies by necrophiles.

In response, some people might say that there is a moral law in this particular universe that says it is wrong to create genetically modified humans to kill or enslave, or that it’s wrong to engage in non-procreative sex acts with animals or objects.

But isn’t that a massive coincidence?

We just happen to have these particular non-basic moral views, and we live in a universe where these views are the objective facts about reality.

In fact, one of the most famous arguments against moral realism is called the evolutionary debunking argument. It says that we have no reason to trust that we know universal, immaterial moral facts if the way we get to those facts is through an evolutionary process that shaped our minds to believe truths that help us survive—not necessarily truths that help us be moral.

Moral beliefs sometimes help us survive, but they aren’t all geared toward a moral end, as can be seen in those who defended the morality of eugenics.

The philosopher Sharon Street calls this the Darwinian dilemma for moral realists and says, “The Darwinian dilemma notes the striking coincidence between the independent normative truths posited by the realist and the normative views that evolutionary forces push us toward, and challenges the realist to explain this coincidence.”

The dilemma isn’t a problem for religious moral realists who believe that God is the foundation of moral facts, and that he has an interest in making sure his creatures are aware of and know these moral facts.

For more on this, see my previous episode on the strongest moral argument for God’s existence.

Coincidence #1: Miracles

And finally, number one is the coincidence about miracles.

In the past, I’ve been hesitant to use miracles and the paranormal in my case for God’s existence. I remember when Mike Licona did that in his 2017 debate with Matt Dillahunty, which included the famous trashcan story.

[Clip plays.]

As someone who believes in supernatural forces, I’m open to accepting this account. But many atheists just chuckle at these kinds of stories and consider them urban legends.

But once you start tabulating all the accounts of miracles and the paranormal, the entire collection becomes a lot harder to dismiss. Maybe not all of them are true, but it would be a massive coincidence if it turned out every single one of these claims were false, which would have to be the case in order for atheism to be true.

This was the conclusion that Joe Schmid and I reached in our conversation about his reversion to Catholicism, especially when you add all the other cosmic coincidences together that we covered in this episode.

[Clip plays.]

Now, an atheist might say that lots of religions have miracle claims, and since they all can’t be true, that means they all must be false. But as Joe and I noted in our discussion, Catholic theology allows for these other miracle claims in non-Christian religions.

For example, many of these claims are nowhere near as well-evidenced as Christian miracle claims, and so they have natural explanations. See my episode on the Muslim claim that Muhammad split the moon for just one example of that.

And for those that don’t have a natural explanation, they could be examples of God showing his love without affirming contradictory theology, like a miraculous healing. Or they could be examples of a demonic attempt to imitate God, as I propose in my dialogue with Hayden Carroll on Mormonism.

But remember that while theism can be true even if the vast majority of miracle claims are false, atheism cannot be true if even one miracle claim is correct.

Now, in response to that, a lot of atheists might say, “Isn’t it a massive coincidence that all alien abduction accounts are false? Isn’t it more likely at least one of them is true?”

No, because those are different than miracle accounts.

First, accounts of miracles are much more widespread and don’t seem to be merely a cultural artifact like alien abduction stories, which only became popular in the 1960s following the Betty and Barney Hill case.

Second, there are no cases of thousands of people claiming to have seen an alien abduction in the same way thousands of people claim to witness miracles like Marian apparitions at Fatima or Zeitoun.

Third, alien abductions don’t leave behind the kind of physical evidence that can be examined in things like Eucharistic miracles.

Alien abductions have a very low prior probability of happening, given the absence of evidence for aliens and the positive evidence that aliens have not visited Earth due to the practical difficulties of interstellar travel. So we already have good reasons to doubt alien abduction stories, whereas we have evidence for God’s existence that we’ve covered earlier and no similar empirical defeats for God’s existence.

So the prior probability that God would exist is nowhere near as low as aliens. In fact, given God’s simplicity as undivided being itself and God’s ability to explain a contingent world that doesn’t have to exist, this raises the prior probability of God existing to a level that at least warrants serious investigation, not lighthearted dismissal.

For more on modern miracles, see Craig Keener’s two-volume work on miracles, as well as other recent books on miracles in the description below.

And that’s just a start when it comes to the evidence for God, Christ, and his Church. If you’d like an exhaustive account of the evidence, check out Joe Schmid’s seven-hour breakdown of the reasons he reverted to his Catholic faith and his ten-hour case for miracles linked below.

Thank you all so much for watching. And if you want to help us continue to make great content like this, be sure to support us. Thank you all so much, and I hope you have a very blessed day.