Q&A: Is Christianity Credible? | Assembly Buildings - Belfast, Northern Ireland

In March 2017 Dr. Craig traveled the island of Ireland on a speaking tour that included various debates, lectures, and meetings. On March 27th he gave a lecture at the Assembly Buildings in Belfast on the topic, "Is Christianity Credible?" Immediately following his talk, Dr. Craig engaged various questions from the audience.

MODERATOR: Perhaps as you're thinking, I might invite Dr. Craig to come back up. I’ll use the chairman’s privilege and ask the first one, and it is this. Dr. Craig, you have in a very fascinating way showed how there has been a revival of interest in Christianity, in orthodoxy among philosophers and scientists, and that in some ways traditional atheism of the 1960s has petered out. How then would you be able to explain the rise of the so-called New Atheists in the last couple of decades?

DR. CRAIG: This is a good question. I think it's very important to understand that the so-called New Atheism spearheaded by people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris is not an academic movement. This is not a movement within academia. This is a movement within pop culture, and the writings of these persons reflect an obsolete scientistic or positivistic view of the world that, as I explained, was characteristic of the 1940s and 50s. They are blissfully unaware of the revolution that has transpired within philosophy over the last half century or so and frankly are still mouthing the popular atheistic slogans from the 1950s. That is why, in fact, these persons have been rather roundly denounced by fellow academics whether atheist or theist. So this is a pop cultural movement and not one that is characteristic of the academy.

MODERATOR: Thank you very much. So, please, if we have our first questioner. And as folks are coming up to the microphone, if you think you've got one ready to ask, maybe you would join the queue at the microphone nearest to you and I'll seek to spot you. I think we have one coming in the middle aisle here.

QUESTION: I wanted to ask you a question that wasn't really addressed or related to anything in the lecture itself but it certainly is linked to the topic of Christianity and trying to have a consistent picture of it and an understanding of it that's rationale. I think it's responsibility or what has been called ultimate responsibility. I think it's important to have an account of that to understand faith because I think the notion that somehow we have to be able to be responsible for our actions is essential to Christianity and faith itself. But it seems difficult to see how that could be the case that we could be ultimately responsible for our own actions. Assuming we have a certain picture of the world. Let's say if we assume that we're responsible for what we do . . . if we do what we do because of how we are then to be responsible for what we do we have to be responsible for how we are. I was wondering how can you go back to be responsible for how you are – how can you be as though self-created, the creator and sustainer of your own ends and purposes. How does that link in with faith? If we can't have that – someone who is self-created, how can we have a God that would punish us for being a certain way?

DR. CRAIG: I think you've highlighted one of the differences between a naturalistic view of human being (which sees man as simply the determined product of sociology and biology) and the very elevated view of humanity that Christianity has which sees us as responsible moral agents able to make significant choices, indeed able to determine our eternal destiny by how we respond to God's grace. I think the key here is to understand that from the New Testament perspective, as I said in the end of the talk, God has not left us to work out by our own devices and cleverness whether or not he exists. Rather, through the witness of the Holy Spirit to every person, God seeks to draw persons to himself by convicting them of sin and by enabling them to respond to his offer of salvation in a free and uncoerced way. So it is ultimately how we react to the drawing of God's Spirit on our hearts that will determine, I think, our eternal destiny. God will bring it to a point to every person where he can overcome those obstacles that are the result of upbringing and conditioning and so forth so as to make a free response to his grace.

QUESTION: . . . Do you think as a God-believer you have to entertain cosmic nihilism as part of your seeking of truth – you have to live without God?

DR. CRAIG: If you were to read my work, you would see that the opening chapter of my book, both Reasonable Faith and On Guard, is an exploration of what you call cosmic nihilism. I think this is what motivates the search for God. I derive great insight from the work of existentialist philosophers like Sartre and Camus as well as Russell and Nietzsche because of their analysis of the human predicament. I think that a consistent atheistic view of the world leads to cosmic nihilism, that is to say, that life is meaningless, valueless, and purposeless and that therefore life is absurd. Then what I argue is that, however, no one can live consistently and happily within the framework of such a worldview. You see atheists themselves betraying their view by affirming meaning to their choices, purposes in life, and the value of certain things especially when they feel that they have been wronged by someone else. What Christianity offers then is a view of the world which is able to be lived consistently and happily. So I definitely think this needs to be considered; it raises the stakes of what is at issue with respect to the existence of God. So I definitely think that this is an important consideration.

QUESTION: I really enjoyed your story about how you came to faith. I really resonated with it personally, and I understand that you have a very enlightened view of religion. I wanted to ask what you think, because I'm highly interested in them, coming to God through other religions and other paths of faith and spirituality.

DR. CRAIG: I don't think that anyone can come to a saving knowledge of God if he rejects consciously and intelligently Jesus Christ. Jesus is the only one who has died for our sins, and therefore they're only two persons who can pay the penalty for your moral wrongdoing and guilt – you or Jesus. And if a person deliberately rejects Jesus, he rejects God's gracious provision for sin and thereby separates himself from God. Now, having said that, I think that there could be people in other religions who have never heard of Christ and therefore never rejected him but who can come to a knowledge of God not so much through those religions as in those religions. I think we have examples in the Bible of people like that. People like Job in the Old Testament. Job wasn't a Jew. He wasn't even a member of the old covenant much less the new, and yet God refers to him as “my righteous servant.” So Job was responsive to the light of revelation that God had given him and was justified before God as a result. Does that mean he could be saved apart from Christ? No. What it means is that he could be the beneficiary of Christ's atoning death without having a conscious knowledge of Christ. I think there could be modern-day Jobs in the world today. I sincerely hope (I don't have any confidence, but I sincerely hope) that we'll see Aristotle and Plato in heaven. Because when you read what they wrote, it sounds like Paul's opening chapter of the book of Romans or Acts chapter 17. These men seem to be responsive to the light of general revelation in nature and conscience that God had given them.

QUESTION: If you had the opportunity to have a conversation with Anselm of Canterbury or Thomas Aquinas, what would you most like to ask them or what would you most like to tell them?

DR. CRAIG: I don't even know how to answer that question. I'm sorry, you caught me quite off guard. I read the work of Anselm and Aquinas with great appreciation, but I can't think of any question off the top of my head that I’ve been dying to ask them. So I'll have to think about that one more before I could give an intelligent response.

QUESTION: You mentioned in your talk evidence is finely balanced to convince those whose hearts are open but not to coerce those whose hearts are closed. Why isn’t the evidence for the resurrection more coercive if so much is at stake? People appear to be apathetic, but then why would God make them that way knowing full well where they’d end up, i.e. hell?

DR. CRAIG: Are you asking why isn’t the evidence we do have for the resurrection coercive, or are you saying why didn’t God give more evidence of the resurrection to make it coercive? It wasn’t clear to me what you were asking? Are you saying, “Here’s the evidence we have for the resurrection.” And I said it is not coercive. Are you saying, “Well, yeah it is. This is really compelling. This really is coercive.” Or are you saying, “Yes, the evidence for the resurrection isn’t coercive, but why didn’t God give us more then and make it coercive?” The second one. My belief is that God could certainly have made his existence and the truth of Christianity more evidently true than he has. God could have written his name on every atom – “made by God” – or he could put a neon cross in the stars saying “Jesus Saves.” He could make his existence as plain as the nose on your face. But, as I read the Bible, it's a matter of relative indifference to God to get people to believe that he exists. Rather, his interest is in bringing people freely into a saving love relationship with himself. I think that God knows what evidence is sufficient to do that for those with open minds and open hearts but sufficiently vague so as not to compel people whose hearts are closed. We can trust that God has given evidence of the resurrection which is sufficient for any person who really wants to know the truth. I think that that's all that God needs to do.

QUESTION: Do you believe that it is more important to put an emphasis on the fact that Jesus changed the course of history rather than evidence in the Bible for everything that he did?

MODERATOR: The question seems to be: is it more important to place an emphasis on the fact that Jesus has changed the course of history as an apologetic argument rather than believing everything in the Bible? So I suppose it is a difference between the historical argument and the authority of Scripture.

DR. CRAIG: I think that's a false dichotomy, if I understand the question. It's not an either-or. I don't think the argument from changing history is a good argument at all because falsehoods can change history. I do not think that Muhammad had a genuine revelation from God that is called the Qur’an, and yet that has certainly changed history. Today something like 1.3 billion people in the world adhere to the religion of Islam. So you cannot judge the truth of a worldview by its impact upon history. Therefore, I think that argument isn't a good one. But that doesn't mean that one's argument for Christianity is based upon everything that the Bible says. What I am suggesting is that when ancient historians look at the New Testament documents, not as a holy inspired book, but as the way they would look at the writings of other ancient historians like Thucydides, Herodotus, and so forth, that the Gospels emerge as pretty credible records of the life and teachings of this first century Jew named Jesus of Nazareth. And among the facts that the Gospels report that are generally accepted by critical historians today are the four that I mentioned – after his crucifixion Jesus was buried in the tomb, the tomb was found empty, there were post-mortem appearances of Jesus to different individuals and groups, and the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised him from the dead. Then the question will be, if those are the facts, how do you best explain them? I can't think of any historical hypothesis that is better than the hypothesis that the original disciples themselves gave, namely, God raised him from the dead. So this is not appealing to everything in the Bible. It's appealing to these core facts that are widely agreed upon by contemporary historians.

QUESTION: What are some of the biggest challenges, if any, facing those considering teaching theology in a university setting, and what advice would you give them?

DR. CRAIG: Let me say that I don't teach theology in a secular university setting. My affiliation is with Talbot School of Theology which is a school of theology and so I do not encounter there hostility or discrimination against my views as a Christian. If I were teaching at a secular university, I think that I would probably emphasize very strongly the rational credibility of the Christian world and life view in the way that I've sketched tonight. There's so much more that could be done. All we've done is look at the thin ice flow on the surface and there's nine-tenths of the iceberg below the surface. I think that would be very strong emphasis in teaching in a secular setting to emphasize the rational credentials of Christian belief.

QUESTION: Isn't it a human condition that we are pattern-seeking animals? Doesn’t telling us to keep our hearts open to “seek and we shall find” exploit that condition thus invalidating any discovery of God within ourselves? Isn't it just an exercise . . . isn’t it just one of the versions of the gambler's fallacy of finding faces in inanimate objects?

DR. CRAIG: I'm going to need help again. I didn't understand the question.

FOLLOWUP: In essence, my question is: since we're just pattern-seeking animals and saying “seek and you shall find” doesn’t that just exploit the fact that we are pattern-seeking animals?

MODERATOR: I think the question had to do or was presupposing that we are simply a higher degree of animal life as human beings. Is that what you're saying? Yes. And so this idea of seeking and finding – is that valid? I suppose it is an anthropological question about the relation of us to the animal kingdom. Is that fair enough? Sorry, I couldn't make out everything.

DR. CRAIG: I think this is related to the earlier question about cosmic nihilism. If atheism is true then I think the most plausible version of atheism is some sort of naturalism; that is to say, we're just relatively evolved primates. And I don't see any reason on such a view of humankind to think that the morality evolved by Homo sapiens on this planet is objectively binding and true. Nor would I see any objective purpose in life for these tiny lifeforms on that speck of dust called planet Earth. I don't think there would be any ultimate meaning or significance to them. I think you've just underlined the same question that the earlier fellow asked; namely, is it true that we are just electrochemical machines that are the products of blind evolutionary processes? Or are we something more? Are we creations of God made in a way that we can know him and find him? I've given some arguments to suggest that the latter is the case.

MODERATOR: If that wasn't for some reason exactly your question, I encourage you maybe to come to Dr. Craig afterwards and see if he can unpack that a little bit more for you.

QUESTION: As a Christian, what do you have to say about how to interpret the Bible to compound the rationality of faith essentially by not denying scientific truths?

DR. CRAIG: Again, I'm not sure I understand the question. It began with a question about biblical interpretation – about how you interpret the Bible. Right? And then you transitioned to science. What is the question there?

QUESTION: Essentially, how would I read the Bible and take things away from it without denying scientific evidence.

DR. CRAIG: Oh. Well, I think that a proper hermeneutical approach to the Bible (that is to say, a prominent theory of literary interpretation) is to try to understand these documents as they were originally written and as the original author would have understood them. I think it's quite illegitimate to try to import modern science into the text. I know there are some Christians who look at Genesis chapter 1 and they try to read modern evolutionary theory back into the text. I think that's just bad hermeneutics. What you want to do is try to understand the way this original ancient author within his horizon would have understood the text, and then it is the task of the systematic theologian to take these texts and their meaning and to formulate a coherent synoptic worldview that takes account of the data of modern science, history, psychology, and so on with the biblical data to craft a coherent worldview (or Weltanschauung). This is what I am burdened to do as a systematic theologian and Christian philosopher – take the data of Scripture, understand it accurately, and then integrate it into a coherent Christian worldview that takes account of the findings of modern science.

MODERATOR: I'm going to allow you the privilege of just explaining, in case there was a specific issue where you felt that the scientific data and Scripture were at variance, did you want to put that to Dr. Craig?

QUESTION: I suppose the one I’ve come across most commonly is the belief that the Earth was created in seven days. Some people believe quite strongly, “The Bible says it is this, so it has to be this.”

DR. CRAIG: He asked about whether the [Earth] was created in six 24-hour days. I would underline what I said there. I think it's illegitimate to try to read modern science back into this ancient text. We need to understand it as the author would have understood it. I think that when you read a text in that way that there are some indications in the text itself (wholly apart from modern science) that suggests that this author is not thinking of seven consecutive 24-hour days. For example, the seventh day is clearly not a 24-hour period of time. It never ends. We're still in the seventh day of God's Sabbath rest. So at least the seventh day is not twenty-four hours long. Moreover, I think there are indications in the text that the author is thinking of long periods of time elapsing. For example, on the third day when the vegetation and fruit trees are created, God does not say, “Let there be vegetation . . . let there be fruit trees. And it was so.” No. The text says, “And God said let the earth bring forth vegetation bearing seed after its kind and fruit trees bearing fruit after its kind, and it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation bearing seed after its kind and fruit trees bearing fruit after its kind.” We all know how long it takes for an apple seed to sprout, grow into a sapling, grow into a tree, finally reach maturity and blossom, and bear apples. Unless the author of Genesis 1 was imagining this like time-lapse photography where the little tree pops out of the ground and it grows up and all the branches shoot out and the flowers and then there's leaves and apples popping out all over the place, he must have thought that this took a long period of time. He knew how long it takes for trees to grow. I don't think that this author of this ancient text did think that what he was describing was like time-lapse photography. Therefore that suggests again that this could be a considerable amount of time and that therefore we're not talking about seven consecutive 24-hour periods of time.

QUESTION: You said earlier that evidence is certainly sufficient to prove God is real. So do you think the argument for religious experience is viable for proof of God’s existence?

DR. CRAIG: I haven’t worked on the argument for religious experience. My friend Kai Man Kwan, who is a professor of philosophy at Hong Kong Baptist University, has written a doctoral thesis on this and defended the argument from religious experience. You might look at the chapter in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology that I and my colleague J. P. Moreland edited. I understand religious experience to be not an argument for God's existence but rather the claim that we are justified on the basis of our experience in believing in God unless and until we have a defeater of that experience to suggest that it is wholly delusory. I think of it on the analogy of sense experience. On the basis of my five senses I believe that there's a world of physical objects around me that I am perceiving. If this were an argument from sense experience then I'd be vulnerable to the skeptic who says, “How do you know you're not a brain-in-a-vat of chemicals being stimulated by electrodes by a mad scientist to think that you're in Belfast in an auditorium surrounded by people?” There's no way you could refute that. You can't get outside your senses to verify their veridicality. But if it's not an argument but rather the claim that this is a properly basic belief that is grounded in experience which you are perfectly rational to hold unless and until you have a defeater of that sense experience then I think it's perfectly rational to believe that there is a world of physical objects around me. In the same way, for the person to whom God is experientially real, I think in the same way that is a properly basic belief grounded in his experience of God which he is perfectly rational to believe unless and until he has some sort of defeater of that experience that would show that it's a psychological delusion. And there is no such defeater. So that's how I would understand religious experience and the justification of belief in God.

QUESTION: How do we reconcile the Christian view of man and man as distinct from other animals, and man as a special creation of God with the modern scientific views around the similarities between humans and higher functioning primates? I heard on the radio about a month back about a study that showed that under certain circumstances chimpanzees can be demonstrated to make decisions that almost appear to be moral. For me that had always been something I considered to be exclusively human – moral decisions. I don’t know if that is anything you’ve thought about.

DR. CRAIG: I think that the distinction between human persons and other animals is that we have souls. We have rational souls. So I do not think that we are just material objects – brains in electrochemical machines. In that sense we are different from animals. We are created in the image of God in that we are minds – we are souls – connected with the body. So any sort of evolutionary account of human origins will be an account of the origin of the body – of the physical mechanism. But it won't say anything about the soul as a creation of God. I see it as the soul that marks us off as distinct from animals. I would disagree with the claim that there is anything in the animal kingdom that is moral. What they're probably talking about would be certain behavior patterns like reciprocity, empathy, even altruism. These sorts of behaviors are exemplified by social animals like baboons and even elephants, even pigs. But there isn't any moral quality to that. It's just purely behavioral, whereas in human beings I think because we are souls, we are moral agents who can make free decisions about how to behave for which God holds us accountable.

QUESTION: Can you summarize your evidence for Christianity in your speech? I think . . . a large bit of your speech is arguments against atheism, instead of evidence for Christianity. For example, at the front bit you spend time painting an image of atheists and then in the second bit you say disproving atheist ideas like your argument against the Big Bang Theory is sound. But that's only one of the theories of the universal origin. So disproving that doesn't . . . prove Christianity. So can you summarize your evidence?

DR. CRAIG: If I understood the question, you’ve completely misunderstood my talk this evening. Did you say that I presented arguments against atheism but no arguments in favor of Christianity? OK. Because that is the exactly opposite. I didn't give any arguments against atheism tonight. What I gave was positive arguments for theism. I gave arguments for the existence of a creator based upon the origin of the universe at a point in the finite past and evidence for the existence of a cosmic designer on the basis of the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the Big Bang for intelligent life. These two data points, as I say, seem to me to cry out for a creator and designer of the cosmos. Then I appealed to the historical evidence concerning Jesus of Nazareth as a basis for believing that God raised him from the dead in vindication of those allegedly blasphemous claims for which he was crucified. That is to say, this creator and designer has verified those claims that he is the revelation of God. So this case tonight is entirely a positive one in favor of Christian theism. Now, again, you may not regard it as a proof if by proof you mean coercive. But that was what I spent the first part of my talk on. I don't think that the evidence needs to be coercive. It just needs to make faith reasonable. That's the name of the ministry that I’m involved in – Reasonable Faith. And I think the person who believes in a creator and designer of the universe who has revealed himself in Jesus is perfectly reasonable to do so. I hope to have discharged my responsibility as you've laid it out this evening.

MODERATOR: I think to be fair to the question about how is that affirmative of Christianity was covered in the second part on the resurrection and the person of Jesus Christ.

DR. CRAIG: Right. The first part gets you a kind of generic monotheism – a creator and designer of the universe. Now, that is a significant conclusion because that already rules out many of the world's great religions – the pantheistic religions such as Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, as well as atheistic religions like Confucianism. It leaves you with the great monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and deism. Of those four remaining candidates, which all affirm the existence of a creator and designer of the universe, which one has the best claim to being true? There I think the evidence concerning the radical personal claims and the resurrection of Jesus gives good grounds for thinking that it's Christian theism that is true.

QUESTION: My question is probably more a thought experiment. If what you believe to be true was in fact false, how different do you think the world would look today?

DR. CRAIG: It would mean we're lost in cosmic nihilism. It would mean that fellow is right who was up here at the mic earlier – that there's no ultimate meaning, no ultimate value, no ultimate purpose to life, and that therefore life is absurd.

MODERATOR: How would the world look? History. That might be true individually, existentially, but would the world actually be any better or worse?

DR. CRAIG: I'm not concerned about that. As I said to someone else – the girl in the wheelchair – I don't think you judge the truth of a worldview by its impact upon history. So it just doesn't matter whether the world would be better or worse if what I said is true or false because you don't judge the truth of a view by how it impacts the world. If I were speaking as a sociologist, the impact of Christianity upon the history of mankind is incalculable. Just think of its contributions to art, medicine, the founding of universities, the raising the status of women, relief of the poor and orphanages, and so forth. Its contributions to literacy. Remember the book, How the Irish Saved Civilization several years ago. As Europe plunged into the Dark Ages, it was only in the Irish monasteries that literacy and writing was preserved for the West when it then began to surge again. So the contribution of Christianity to the world has been absolutely enormous, and so if you took this away – if it were removed – the world would be all the worse for that.

QUESTION: You have spoken already tonight a little bit about Genesis. I would like to ask how does the doctrine of original sin factor into a view of creation and macroevolution?

DR. CRAIG: How does the doctrine of original sin factor into creation? I am inclined to think that the doctrine of original sin requires the existence of an original human pair which the Bible calls Adam and Eve. So I'm inclined to think that Adam and Eve are not just symbolic figures but actual people that really lived, and it was through them that then sin entered into the human race with all of its catastrophic consequences.

QUESTION: My question is quite similar. If there weren’t six 24-hour days of creation then there must have been death before the sin entered into the world.

DR. CRAIG: If you deny six consecutive 24-hour days of creation then there would be death before the human Fall. Right. I see nothing in the Scripture to suggest that there was no animal death prior to the human Fall. When you read Genesis chapter three about the consequences of the Fall, it involves the cursing of the ground, pain in childbirth, things of that sort. But there's no suggestion whatsoever that there was no animal death before the Fall. Indeed, when God gives Adam dominion over the fish of the sea what else could that mean but fishing – eating fish? How else would you have dominion over the fish of the sea? When you turn to Romans 5, clearly Paul is talking about human death, not animal death. There's no suggestion in Romans 5 that animal death is a result of the human Fall. So I just don't have any problem theologically with saying that there was animal death prior to the Fall of mankind into sin.

QUESTION: You mentioned New Atheism as a popular cultural movement. I find quite often atheists who have been reading Dawkins and Hitchens – they would . . . bring up evil in the world and mentioning the Old Testament . . . the atrocities. I wondered how would you counter that argument and reconcile God with being good and the Old Testament stories?

DR. CRAIG: All right. A terrific question that opens a Pandora’s Box. So let me try to be brief. I defend what C. S. Lewis called “mere Christianity.” That is to say, those central doctrines or truth claims of the Christian faith – principally that God exists and that he has revealed himself decisively in Jesus by raising him from the dead. What you do with these Old Testament stories of the invasion of Canaan and other sorts of things is in-house discussion among Christians. If you believe that God exists and raised Jesus from the dead – that's enough; you ought to become a Christian. And then it's an in-house discussion what you want to do with these other things. If you're interested in this topic I can recommend no better book than Paul Copan’s book Is God a Moral Monster? in which he explores Old Testament ethics in great detail, and I think sheds a good deal of light on these troublesome passages. You also might look at my question of the week number 16 on our ReasonableFaith.org website where I deal with the question of the invasion of Canaan and expelling the Caananites from the land.^[1] I argue there that there's no inconsistency between God's being all-loving and all-good and his commanding the Israeli army's to go into Canaan and drive them out and to kill those who stay behind and try to resist. And no one, to my knowledge, has yet offered a refutation of my argument in that question. They have simply responded emotionally to it, but haven't engaged the argument itself.

QUESTION: We talked about intelligent design earlier on in terms of the universe. One of the responses from the atheist side would be that we are just one of multi-universes throughout the world. As Christians, how do we then counter that argument that they come back with?

DR. CRAIG: The questioner is quite right that the argument over the fine-tuning of the universe that I explained basically comes down in today's discussions between two options: either an intelligent designer of the universe, or the multiverse. What is the multiverse? The multiverse is the hypothesis that there exists an infinite number of unseen, randomly ordered, parallel universes. The idea there is that in that ensemble of universes finely-tuned worlds like ours would appear by chance somewhere in the ensemble, and so there's no need to explain the fine-tuning by recourse to a designer. Look at my book Reasonable Faith or On Guard for a discussion of the multiverse hypothesis. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has offered what I think is a crushing objection to the multiverse as an explanation of fine-tuning, and it is this. In order for this objection to even get off of the ground, the multiverse proponent would have to show that the preponderance of observable universes in the ensemble are finely tuned. And he cannot show that. Indeed, the most probable observable universe would be a universe in which a single brain fluctuates into existence out of the quantum vacuum with illusory perceptions of the external world. A simple world like that (a single brain) is incomprehensibly more probable than a vast finely tuned universe like ours. So it's simply not the case that observable universes are probably finely tuned. Therefore the argument from the multiverse can't even get off the ground. If you believe that the multiverse is the explanation for the fine-tuning then you are rationally obligated to believe that your brain is all that exists and that everything else – these other people, this auditorium, the Earth, your body, everything you perceive is an illusion of your brain. And no sane person believes such a thing. So Penrose says that the multiverse hypothesis is worthless as an explanation of fine-tuning.

Well, with that final question, let me just say thank you very much for entertaining us here in Belfast. I've enjoyed our time together this evening. I wish you God's very best blessing.