Astrophysical Teleological Arguments from Design

Dec. 28, 2025

Psalm 19:1-3 “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands. ² Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.  ³ Without speech or language, without a sound to be heard, their voice has gone out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.” Berean Standard Bible

Romans 1:19-20 “For what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. ²⁰ For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.” Berean Standard Bible

A History of the Teleological Argument

   The teleological argument says that we see evidence for the existence of God by looking at design in nature.

   Plato and Aristotle both used teleological arguments to argue for one God who created the universe, not just the pagan gods. Plato says that before them Socrates taught this, learning it from Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (500 B.C.). Later the Stoics, including the Roman writer Cicero, taught that the design of the cosmos shows a Creator.

   In the second century A.D. Rabbi Meir was told by someone that they didn’t believe in God. Meir then showed him a beautiful poem that he said was created when a cat knocked over a bottle of ink. If the man could not believe the poem came from merely an ink spill, how could this world be created by chance? For more info see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleological_argument.

   The Christian work The Octavius of Minucius Felix (210. A.D) ch.18 p.183. says, “Now if, on entering any house, you should behold everything refined, well arranged, and adorned, assuredly you would believe that a master presided over it, and that he himself was much better than all those excellent things. So in this house of the world, when you look upon the heaven and the earth, its providence, its ordering, its law, believe that there is a Lord and Parent of the universe far more glorious than the stars themselves, and the parts of the whole world.”

   Augustine of Hippo (c.400 A.D.) also taught the teleological argument in City of God book 9 ch.4.

   A modern, very scientific form of this argument, based on the Big Bang Theory, has arisen from the research of atheistic as well as theistic scientists called the anthropic principle.

   Robert Jastrow (an agnostic) in his book God and the Astronomers says that it’s as if the astronomers have climbed and finally reached the top of the mountain of ultimate knowledge, and they found a band of theologians had been sitting there for centuries.

The Big Bang Theory

   Until the early twentieth century, many astronomers used to think the universe was uncreated; stars might come and go, but they thought the universe was pretty much always as it is now. However, in 1929 Edwin Hubble observed the spectra of stars and discovered something amazing. The elements in the stars, mainly hydrogen and helium, showed spectral lines matching emission and absorption of those elements on earth and the sun, with one key difference: they were red-shifted. Just like a car or train sounds lower when it is moving away from you, frequency of light is lowered (red-shifted) if the object is moving away. And with a few exceptions (such as the near-by Andromeda galaxy) galaxies are traveling away from us. They move at the Hubble constant, H₀, about 67-75 km/s times the distance in megaparsecs (3.26 million light-years). (See The Anthropic Cosmological Principle p.374 for more info.) So the farther away they are in parsecs the faster they are moving, sort of like dots on a giant balloon. That means in the past the galaxies were closer together. If you extrapolate, everything would have been in a small, tight ball of plasma energy that exploded about 13.8 billion years ago. To give you an idea of the speed, in three years the universe would only have grown as big as our Milky Way.

   If there was a big bang, then there should be background radiation not associated with any stars. In 1964, Penzias and Wilson discovered cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation confirming this. In other words, if you have space, with no influence of stars or anything else, it has a temperature of about 2.7-5 Kelvin (-450 to -455 °F). Given that, the Big Bang theory predicts about 74% of the mass of the universe would be hydrogen atoms, about 26% helium atoms, and 0.000001% everything else. They have confirmed this. See The Anthropic Cosmological Principle p.419 for more info on the big bang.

   As atheistic physicist Steven Weinberg admitted, the energy density of empty space is “remarkably well adjusted in our favor.” “A Designer Universe?” (New York Review of Books October 21, 1999).

Quoted from The Case for a Creator p.133.

Fine Tuning

   In 1973 Brandon Carter (who coined the term anthropic principle), and in 1973 Christopher Barry Collins and Steven Hawking (an atheist) noticed that only a narrow range of initial conditions could give rise to a universe with stars, galaxies, heavy elements, and material-based life.

   There are about 70 or so constants in the universe, and if the values of any of them differed by much from what they are, there would be no matter-based life. Here are some of them. Except where otherwise specified a value too far off in one direction would mean the universe would not have expanded to permit life, or that things would be too dense for atoms to form. Being off in the other direction would mean that stars and planets would not stick together and we would only have interstellar gas, or in an extreme case, atoms would not even stick together. Here are a few of the constants.

Planck’s Constant: How much energy is in a particle of light?

   Max Planck won the Nobel Prize in 1918 for discovering that light energy is emitted and absorbed in particles or “quanta” instead of continuously.

   Planck’s constant (h) relates the energy [e] of a photon light particle to its frequency (ν) (the Greek letter nu) as E = hν. The value is 6.62607015 × 10^(-34) Joule-seconds. It can be considered the “quantization factor for energy. Likewise Planck time, which is 10^(-43) seconds, is the quantization of time. The Planck distance, (), is the quantization of length. It is 1.616 * 10(-32) millimeters. In other words things are only continuous down to these levels; below these it is sort of like pixelated blocks. See The Anthropic Cosmological Principle p.369-371 for more info.

   Planck, in a lecture given in a conference Religion and Natural Science in 1937, stated: “Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations. To the former He is the foundation; to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized worldview.” Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, translated by F. Gaynor. 1949. p.184

Four Known Physical Forces

   There are four known physical forces in the universe: the strong nuclear force that holds an atomic nucleus together, and weak nuclear force that determines radioactive decay, fission, and fusion, electromagnetism, and gravity.

Strong Force: We exist because of 7.65 Mev (million Electron volts) resonance

   In chemistry class did you ever wonder why an atomic nucleus has positively charged protons, yet it does not fly apart? (There are no negatively charged particles in the nucleus.) The answer is that there is an even stronger force keeping the nucleus together. So they called this force “the strong force”. (They were not very creative with their naming.)

   The strong nuclear is an attractive force carried  by eight types of massless particles called gluons. It is the force that binds quarks into protons and neutrons. Residual strong force “leaks out” of the quarks to bind protons and neutrons together into an atomic nucleus. This is despite the positive proton charges wanting to make the nucleus fly apart. The strong force only operates over a short range, but within the nucleus it is 100 times stronger than electromagnetic forces. It has a very limited range because gluons and quarks interact with each other, vaguely like molecules sticking in a rubber  ball.

   Gluons have three types of “charges” which are not called charges but rather called “colors” to differentiate them from electromagnetism, which has just one charge: positive/negative. The colors are called red/anti-red, green/anti-green, and blue/anti-blue.  were first speculated by Murray Gell-Mann in 1962. They were experimentally confirmed in 1979. See https://www.britannica.com/science/gluon, https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/1njpcj8/what_exactly_are_the_strong_and_weak_nuclear_force/, and https://www.space.com/gluons-carriers-strong-force-explained for more info.

   If the strong nuclear force were only 2% larger, all hydrogen would have fused into helium, and stars would not live very long. If it was slightly weaker, there would be no elements except hydrogen and helium. If the strong force were just slightly different it would not hit a “resonance level”, called the Hoyle State, of three helium nuclei, , and that would make carbon-12 (and all organic compounds) very scarce.

   However, oxygen-12 is slightly off the resonance level. That is good, or else all carbon would be immediately converted to oxygen. Fred Hoyle predicted these two things in 1957 based on his calculations with no experimental proof. He showed this to future Nobel Laureate William Fowler who found it outrageous and said it “smacked of religion rather than science.” Nevertheless, a few months later Fowler’s team experimentally proved Hoyle was correct. For more info see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple-alpha_process and Kragh, Helge. When is a prediction anthropic? Fred Hoyle and the 7.65 MeV carbon resonance. https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/5332/1/3alphaphil.pdf

   Fred Hoyle denied the Big Bang and touted panspermia, that life on earth could not have started by chance, so it was carried here from another planet. Hoyle was an atheist but later thought that the odds of so many “cosmic accidents” were too great. Later Hoyle thought the universe was due to an intelligent force that, as he put it, was a “superintellect that monkeyed with physics.”  See The Case for a Creator p.131 and https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/120808/what-kind-of-superintellect-that-monkeyed-with-physics-did-sir-fred-hoyle-have for more info.

The Weak Force

   Weak nuclear force is not a force that is attractive or repulsive. Rather, it governs elementary particles decaying or combining, such as a neutron decaying into a proton plus electron plus anti-electron neutrino. It can change the “flavor” of quarks. The weak force was first experimentally observed in 1896 by Henry Becquerel and explained by Enrico Fermi in 1933. Some think the weak force is related to the flux of neutrinos that bathe our universe.

   Like the strong force, the range of the weak force is very limited. That is because the one (chargeless) Z boson and two W bosons and that carry the weak force are very massive. It is the range of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of the W boson, about h / (2 π c * mass of the w boson). See The Anthropic Cosmological Principle p.294 for more info.

   If the weak force were weaker, then there would be almost no heavy elements out in space.

The Electromagnetic Force

   Electricity and magnetism are actually the same force, as one can see with an electromagnet. But just how strong is it?

   The fine structure constant (α) is a dimensionless value that gives the strength of the electromagnetic force. It is If it were weaker there would be no molecules. If it was stronger than no chemical reactions. Defining the elementary charge of a particle as e, α  = 2π * e^2/hc = (7.29720 +/- 0.00003) * 10^(-3).

Gravity

   The gravitational constant (G) determines how strong gravity is. A higher value would mean a much shorter life for stars. A lower value would mean no stars.

   The ratio of electromagnetic force to the gravitational force in a hydrogen atom (e^2 / [G * m(electron) * m(proton)) ] has to be about 10^39 for material life to exist.

The Cosmological Constant for the Universe Expansion

   The Cosmological constant (Λ) (The Greek letter Lambda) for the energy density of empty space and the expansion of the universe. It is very close to zero, but if it was slightly stronger the universe would have expanded so fast that there would be no clumping into stars or galaxies.

   The ratio of gravity vs. the expansion of the Universe is important. If the expansion rate was 10^(-15) smaller, then the universe would have collapsed on itself before any stars formed.

Neutron, Proton, and Electron Mass

   It is also important that the ratio of a proton to an electron is 1836.152673426 to 1. A neutron is made up of an electron plus a proton plus a massless anti-electron neutrino. So, adding the mass of an electron to the mass of a proton you get 1 + 1836.15… = 1838.683662.

   These numbers don’t add up. The anti-election neutrino energy is converted to part of the mass of the neutron and contributes about 1.531 electron masses. Free neutrons are not stable though. They decay with a half-life of 613.9 seconds.

   There is a tiny difference in mass between up and down quarks. This ensures that protons are stable and free neutrons decay. If this was different there would be no atoms and if even bigger no protons.

Other fine-Tuned Constants

Density Fluctuation (Q) is the measure of ripples or lumpiness in density in the early universe. It is about 10^(-4). If it was 10^(-5) then no galaxies. If it was greater than 10^(-3), then the universe would have no stars, only black holes. See The Anthropic Cosmological Principle p.414-417 for more info.

The speed of light c in the famous equation E = mc^2. Changing this would change the energy  output of stars and nuclear reactions.

The Pauli Exclusion Principle says that two fermions (such as electrons) around an atom cannot occupy the same state. If this was not true, then all the electrons would collapse to the lowest state right around the nucleus.

Conclusion

   Let’s pretend for a minute that God in one moment decided to double the length of a centimeter and everything was double the length and eight times the volume? How would we know, because every yardstick that could measure it would also be doubled. But we could tell from the speed of light, unless it was also doubled. But then the amount of energy you could get from nuclear fission or fusion would be four times as much, unless the mass of everything was reduced by a factor of four. But that would not work, and stars and planets would not form unless the Gravitational constant were quadrupled. But that would not work unless the strength of electromagnetism were also increased by a factor of four. But the distribution of elements in the universe might be difference unless the strong force was also quadrupled. But then the weak force might need a new value to balance the other forces. But the weak force and electromagnetic force would also differ in Planck’s constant were different, otherwise the energy from a particular wavelength of light would be different. There are a total of 70 constants to balance. If the balancing act did not occur, then there would be no long-lived stars, and no material life.

   Some atheists can look at all this and conclude: we must be very, very, very, very lucky; otherwise we would not observe these things because we wouldn’t be here.

References

Barrow, John. D and Frank J. Tipler. The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford University Press. 1986,

Geisler, Norman L. and Frank Turek. I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist. Crossway. 2004.

Moreland, J.P. Scaling the Secular City : A Defense of Christianity. Baker Book House 1987.

Schroeder, Gerald L. The Science of God : The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom. Simon and Schuster. 1997.

Slusher, Harold S. and Thomas P. Gamwell. Age of the Earth. Institute for Creation Research. 1978.

Strobel, Lee. The Case for a Creator. Zondervan. 2004.

Van Till, Howard J. The Fourth Day. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 1986.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayU6dDtu0hU preview by Michael Ray Lewis, an ex-atheist and now a Christian filmmaker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Derham

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Turner_(naturalist)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonardus_Lessius

https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1658/1/Anthropic_Explanations_in_Cosmology_.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton-to-electron_mass_ratio

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe

https://pml.nist.gov/cuu/Constants/index.html

by Steven Morrison, PhD.