RT Article
T1 Does a Delayed Origin for Biological Life Count as Evidence Against the Existence of God?
JF Sophia
VO 56
IS 4
SP 649
OP 669
A1 Dumsday, Travis
LA English
PB Springer Netherlands
YR 2017
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1569314489
AB Many theists have argued that contemporary physics provides evidence for the existence of God, insofar as the fundamental laws of nature display evidence of having been fine-tuned to allow for the emergence of biological life. (See, e.g., the works of Stephen Barr, Robin Collins, Paul Davies, John Leslie, Richard Swinburne, etc.) But some have objected that this evidence needs to be weighed against the conflicting evidence that biological life is a relatively late phenomenon in the universe. For if God really wanted the universe to contain life (esp. intelligent life), such that He specifically designed its laws with this in mind, why would He have set things up in such a way that it took billions of years for life to appear? One can employ this general concern to formulate an argument against intelligent design. In this paper I critically evaluate some existing theistic solutions to this sort of argument, and also propose several new lines of reply.
K1 Atheism
K1 Biology
K1 Design
K1 Fine-tuning
K1 God
K1 Life
K1 Natural Theology
K1 Theism
DO 10.1007/s11841-017-0574-0