Davies also says: “A careful study suggests that the laws of the universe are remarkably felicitous for the emergence of richness and variety. In the case of living organisms, their existence seems to depend on a number of fortuitous coincidences that some scientists and philosophers have hailed as nothing short of astonishing.”

He further states: “The scientific quest is a journey into the unknown. . . . But through it all runs the familiar thread of rationality and order. We shall see that this cosmic order is underpinned by definite mathematical laws that interweave each other to form a subtle and harmonious unity. The laws are possessed of an elegant simplicity.”

British scientist Fred Hoyle theorized that nuclear reactions that led to the formation of two elements essential to life, carbon and oxygen, produced a balanced relative amount of these elements only because of a fortunate accident.

He gives another example: “If the combined masses of the proton and electron were suddenly to become a little more rather than a little less than the mass of the neutron, the effect would be devastating. . . . Throughout the Universe all the hydrogen atoms would immediately break down to form neutrons and neutrinos. Robbed of its nuclear fuel, the Sun would fade and collapse.” The same would be true of the billions of other stars in the universe.

Hoyle concluded: “The list of . . . apparent accidents of a non-biological nature without which carbon-based and hence human life could not exist, is large and impressive.” He says: “Such properties [essential to life] seem to run through the fabric of the natural world like a thread of happy accidents. But there are so many of these odd coincidences essential to life that some explanation seems required to account for them.”—Italics ours.

He also stated: “The problem is to decide whether these apparently coincidental tunings are really accidental or not, and therefore whether or not life is accidental. No scientist likes to ask such a question, but it has to be asked for all that. Could it be that the tunings are intelligently deliberate?”

Paul Davies writes: “Hoyle was so impressed by this ‘monstrous series of accidents,’ he was prompted to comment that it was as if ‘the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars.’” Who or what is responsible for this “monstrous series of [fortunate] accidents”? Who or what produced this speck of a planet, teeming with an almost endless variety of millions of exquisitely formed plants and creatures?