Why "God" Is Irrelevant to Our Understanding of the Universe

An argument for the existence of God is that life on Earth--and matter itself--could not possibly have come into being unless the universe were structured  just right.This belief is based on the "Goldilocks'' or fine-tuned universe proposition. In addition, Earth had to be just the right distance from the sun which itself had to have certain properties, as does the solar system itself as a whole. Further, our planet itself once created had to develop in a certain way for life come into existence and flourish. And without the the hand of God that made all these pieces of the puzzle fall into place, none of us would be here today.

However, consider this: If there were an all-powerful supreme being, he could have made the laws of the universe come out any which way he wanted for matter and life to exist. So with that in mind, the universe in which we live and the set of rules by which it operates are just one of the infinite number of possibilities of the way that he could have caused his creation  to turn out. And what makes us  humans think we're so special anyway?  Maybe there are other strains of life elsewhere in  the universe that are unimaginably different from Earth's carbon based creatures. As Star Trek's Spock would say to Captain  Kirk, ''It's life, Jim, but not as we know it.''

But we do know that there are likely millions of planets just in our own which itself is just one of countless worlds.   Who knows how many of them may host life?  Even if only a minuscule percentage  do, some of them may be home to sentient beings.  Come  to  think of it, there are many forms of life right here in our own world that exist in extremely ''un-Earth-like'' conditions.. Two random examples are bacteria living in the gastric acid of our gut, and sea life creatures at the bottom of the Mariana Trench which has a thousand times the atmospheric pressure bearing down on it than (and hence pushing outward from their innards)  than at sea level.

Alternatively,  deists believe that a supreme being created the universe and then it left alone to unfold on its own. Now  if one maintains that there is God but that the universe had to develop the way it did for life to have come into existence, then how can God be considered all powerful--or perhaps the universe and God are one and the same  in which case, so are  deism and pantheism.

Speaking of deism, an organization called the the World Union of Deists,  sees  the creation of the universe as the'' Word of God''  and hence a miracle but supposedly not in the biblical sense  but rather as ''This Deistic idea of a miracle, one in which a miracle is an act of The Supreme Intelligence/God, is based on reason and not on faith."

The universe is an amazing place all right, and since there's no scientific evidence for the existence of  a supreme being within the framework  of  natural law, offering a "God'', deistic or otherwise as an explanation for the the complexity of the cosmos just muddies the waters. Occam's razor  states that the simplest explanation of a phenomena is usually the correct one. In this case, that would eliminate a God from the equation. The simplest explanation in this case is that our universe with its own set of laws may be part of a multiverse in which other such universes have their own ''Goldilocks'' physical laws. In that case, then isn't it possible that a supreme being could have created the multiverse as well? Not really. If there's no evidence of that our own universe was created by a supreme being, why would other universes be any different?

Then  of course there are those who say that there has to be a supreme being because the Big Bang  couldn't have caused itself or just come out of nowhere (actually the latter may have been possible.  See  A universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss.)  Yet that leads to the question, if  God created the universe / multiverse, then  who created God? Believers will always fall back on First Cause and that God is eternal. But that's not an answer. it's a paradox that can only be resolved with a self-creating supreme being, which makes even less sense. And to muck things up even further it's debatable that time even existed before the Big Bang.

However, there is a future for the universe, and it's not pretty. Over  the next several trillion to the almost nth power years, the universe will either continue to expand, and eventually  the stars will die out, the galaxies will come undone and the cosmos will become a cold, dead entity, or on the other hand if gravity prevails, the universe will collapse back in on itself  in a Big Crunch. In either case, of course life will cease to exist. That leads  to the question: why would an eternal supreme being create a universe with a ''use by'' date  in  the first place?* 

Finally, the day well may come when humans make contact with beings from other worlds who are superior to our kind. The day may also come when biological sciences can create life in a test tube, and from there human beings (we're already part way there with rudimentary cloning) and other forms of life as yet undreamed of.  What will humanity's relationship  with these beings, both those that are extraterrestrial and those that  we have artificially created? And  What will be  the response of  those who claim that the ''hand (or word) of God'' is the only source of life--when man has also become an originator of living beings? And if human-created life evolves separately from mankind, will its descendants in some  distant future speculate on how their own seemingly anthropic universe came into being just as we do today in ours?

*See also ''The Universe Is Disappearing, And There’s Nothing We Can Do To Stop It" and ''How Will the Universe End? | Space Time'', two  excellent articles that I  discovered after I published this post.