How a dice can show that God exists

Is the universe that produced us just a result of a chance roll of the cosmic dice? Justin Brierley, presenter of the apologetics debate show Unbelievable?, explains why his die proves otherwise.

With thanks to Peter Ould for help with the maths.

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Some footage was sourced from Vimeo under the creative commons attribution license:

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Unbelievable? engages in fundamental questions on Christianity with the intention to openly discuss different opinions between Christians and non-believers.

Each Saturday, in the award-winning programme Unbelievable, Justin Brierley asks questions like:

Is there evidence for God? Can we trust the Bible? Did Jesus rise from the dead?

Justin tackles these and other issues, on a show that gets Christians and non-believers talking to each other.

[monkeyt]

I thought this was an unbiased channel about debates and discussions. I was wrong.

[Flurgburglr]

So if something very unlikely happens a God must be behind it. Ah, got it.

[alessioradaelli]

Appealing to the fine tuning of the laws of nature is counterproductive for your position:
A god which is bound to certain rules in order to create life is either not omnipotent or not a designer because he simply followed a predetermined set of rules.
And by the way the Universe isn't exactly a so nice and friendly place to live in. The most part of it is inhospitable to life and full of dangers that could cause our extinction

[tonyporco]

I can testify to this a little bit from personal experience. When I was a kid and played Monopoly, I always wondered why I so rarely rolled a 2 or a 12, especially when I was 2 spaces from Boardwalk. Similarly, when playing Dungeons and Dragons, I noticed that very few people who rolled the dice honestly had ability scores of 17 or 18 (or 3 or 4, for that matter).

[Shunarjuna]

I have two questions;
1. How do you know it was on the 1st "roll" that the universe landed this way. We weren't around before so for all we know it could have been the 10^56th "roll".
2. It seems to me like you are assuming God needs to work within certain bounds or laws in order to make his own universe work. Is God above the laws of nature or bound by them?

[VictorGarcia-dqcb]

Classic but ultimately weak argument.

You assume that the fundamental constants of reality *CAN* adopt any value, and that every value is equally likely to manifest. Mathematically that's perfectly posible. But we don't know if that makes sense in the physical world.

So, we don't know whether the constants are "fine tuned" or not, because we don't know *IF* they can be tuned.

[ciarandudley]

The problem with arguments [for the existence of God] from probability is that they stop short at “possibly”; but what is more persuasive are the arguments from the ACTUALITY of the universe. However, the sciences make use of stochastic/probabilistic methods of reasoning all the time and therefore this kind of argumentation is perfectly valid and should at least offer some good food for thought.

“Everybody knows that the dice our loaded/Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed...” -Leonard Cohen

[jeremyg]

This is poorly reasoned. But that shouldn't be surprising considering you don't seem to understand time before the universe (all your dice rolls happen outside of the current universe in the way you want to talk about it - with the 'perfect' roll coming up 'the first time' when this universe started). Not to mention this video seems to imply because math, time, and the universe are hard to imagine, it must be God. Which is nonsense and promotes ignorance. We are an emergence part of the universe, not why it was created. Stop trying to personify the universe and make it some fairly land created solely for humanity.. when you can ba rely find humanity on this single planet in the whole universe that your God made for us only. Besides all the other things wrong with your weak arguements that have been pointed out.

[garywood]

Any sequence of specific dice throws has that same probability. It only makes sense if you're predicting it ahead of time. You can't retrospectively assert the probability of something. The retrospective probability is 1.

[JAYDUBYAH]

Wow the universe we find ourselves in is the only kind of one we could be in... it’s almost a tautology.

[jeremyhewitt]

To bad most in the comments section don't understand the idea that there blind faith in chance is filled with more uncertainty and unreasonable faith towards an utter unbelievable notion that chance is the ultimate cause. Although I do believe most have the presupposition that science will figure it out, they mock with the God of the gaps argument but their sheer skepticism is there own God of the gaps. Great video Justin! Great pod casts as well!

[vlaw]

Lol I realize now that this is just a christian propaganda channel. Unsubscribed.

[EkafEmanresu]

This is a bad argument, you may not calculate a posteriori the probability of something happening and assume that, because it was an unlikely event, that means it was intended. Unlikely things happen all the time, that doesn't mean it was rigged. For that to have any significance you must assume we are the intended result, which you can't possibly know.

Someone wins the lottery, and afterwards he calculates the probability of that happening, he comes to the conclusion that it was extremely unlikely, so he assumes it was intended for him to win. Is he right?

The answer is no, someone was going to win the lottery anyway and it would be more or less equally unlikely for other person to win.

There are many examples of really unlikely things happening everyday, that doesn't mean anything.

Also in this particular case is worse because we don't really know if the conditions of the universe that allowed us to exist could be any other way, maybe they can't, which makes calculating the probabilities even more useless (and again would only be significant if you assume we are the intended result).

[brochestedbs]

The world is not perfectly adapted for us to exist.   We adapted to live here.

[nakkadu]

How did he work out the odds of the universe expansion rate being just right? There's only one universe we can observe and the expansion rate worked out for us....so based on that the odds are 100%.

[Closertotruth]

Those that deny the that the Universe is finely tuned for life don't understand why the theory of the multiverse exists. And if you find the idea of the multiverse problematic because there is no evidence for it then you clearly serve to demonstrate the concept that for many "the problem is not the absence of evidence for design, it's the suppression of it."

[edgarmatzinger]

Summary: I don't know how probability works, therefor god.

[JAYDUBYAH]

Straw man. That’s not what atheists say. The whole construction of the question is also just fallacious, and even if it was not it’s still a god of the gaps argument.

[streglof]

God of the gaps fallacy. "I can't explain that, therefor God" Until it CAN be explained and then you have one less argument for God. There are several scientific hypotheses for why the fundamental constants have their value, one of them being the multiverse hypothesis, stating that there are an infinite amount of universes, each having different universal constants, each resulting in a universe with different laws of physics. Out of all those variants, at least one arose with the right properties for life to arise.

[pilgrimpiper]

I am a Christian and I believe that God created the universe but the argument in this video is not good proof. I believe it makes errors about probability. Ultimately proof of the reality of Christ is found if we are willing to follow Him; He then makes Himself and The Father real to us.