In our last lesson, we learned that the universe had a beginning and needs a Maker. But here is something even more amazing: the universe is not just made. It is made perfectly. So perfectly that even tiny changes would make life impossible.
Did you know that the universe runs on invisible rules? Scientists call them constants - numbers that control how everything works. How strong is gravity? How fast does light travel? How tightly do atoms hold together?
These numbers could have been anything. But they are set to exactly the right values to allow life to exist. If any of them were even slightly different, there would be no stars, no planets, no water, and no you.
If gravity were just a tiny bit stronger, every star would be a giant that burns out too fast for life to develop. If it were a tiny bit weaker, stars would never form at all. The setting is perfect - like someone turned the dial to exactly the right number. Scientists say the odds of this happening by accident are like throwing a dart from one side of the universe and hitting a target the size of a coin on the other side. On the first try.
Scientists have found that there are more than 100 of these "dials" in the universe, and every single one is set to exactly the right value for life. Not close to the right value. Exactly right.
Imagine you knocked a box of cereal off the kitchen counter one morning during breakfast. Instead of making a mess, all the pieces landed on the floor and spelled out your name and your parents' names, perfectly. Imagine what the chances of that just happening by coincidence would be! You'd probably say... that's impossible! Actually... it is not really impossible - it is just that the chances of it actually happening are so very very small - you might as well call it impossible.
That is what the universe looks like. Every dial, every setting, every number - all perfectly tuned for life. As if someone very smart and very powerful set them all on purpose.
"Maybe we just got lucky?"
Try this fun game with a friend. Flip a coin four times and try to guess every flip correctly - heads or tails, four in a row. It is really hard. You might get one or two right each time, but to get all four right isn't very likely. You will get at least one wrong almost every time. Now imagine you had to do that 100 times in a row, never getting a single set of four wrong. That is closer to the odds of the universe's settings being right by accident. At some point, "luck" stops being a good explanation. It becomes obvious that it was not an accident... it was by design.
Scientists have found that the universe's settings are perfectly tuned for life. What does this suggest?