Beyond Probability: What the Universe Suggests About God

“So, why do you believe in God?” A few months ago I would’ve rolled my eyes and answered, “I don’t”. In fact, for my entire life I considered myself a spiritual atheist, someone who appreciated awe and beauty, but didn’t believe in a personal God. But then I lost my son. Grief did something I didn’t expect. It shattered me, but it also peeled back everything I thought I knew. The logic I clung to started to feel hollow. I kept asking: Is this all just random? Am I really supposed to believe that love this deep, loss this painful, and life this complex are just evolutionary accidents? That’s when I started searching—not for comfort, but for answers. I turned to science, probability, and the structure of the universe itself—and what I found pointed to something I’d never seriously considered before: design.

I also revisited something I’d buried long ago: a near-death experience (NDE) I had when I was younger. I’d dismissed it back then, explained it away, but in my grief, it returned with a clarity I couldn’t ignore. It felt real. It was real. And I wasn’t alone in that. In After, Dr. Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, (2021) notes, “many experiencers reinterpret their entire belief system after their NDE, moving from religious skepticism to a direct, embodied understanding of a divine presence” (Chapter 14). Experiences like these, challenge the idea that only what can be measured is real. They hint at something more, something purposeful. That realization opened the door. I began to see the universe differently: its constants, its balance, its elegant precision. Too ordered to be accidental. I don’t believe in God because I need to or want to. I believe because the evidence points to design.

“Just because the universe looks finely tuned doesn’t mean it was designed. Couldn’t it just be chance?” That’s a fair question. But the more I investigated it, the less “chance” made any rational sense. What scientists call the fine-tuning of the universe refers to the incredibly specific and precise values of the physical constants that govern everything, gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and more. If even one of these values were slightly different, life wouldn’t exist, not just human life, but any form of complex matter. For example, if the gravitational constant were off by just one part in 10⁶⁰, stars wouldn’t have formed. If the cosmological constant, which governs the expansion of the universe, were off by even one part in 10¹²⁰, the universe would have either collapsed or expanded too fast for galaxies to form (Collins, 2009). As philosopher Peter Kreeft explains, “If there is no first cause, then the whole chain of causes that we call the universe has no explanation, which is absurd” (Kreeft, n.d.).

This leads into what’s known as the Argument from Design. The idea is that the universe appears to be finely tuned for life, and that fine-tuning must be the result of either chance, necessity, or design. But necessity doesn’t hold up, because there’s no scientific reason the constants of nature had to be the values they are they could have been otherwise. And chance? The odds of all these constants aligning just right for life are so astronomically low that chance isn’t just improbable—it’s irrational. Even if we accept that life began by sheer chance—despite the astronomical odds—there’s still something strange. If chance alone explains life, why did it only happen once? Why, in over 3.5 billion years, did all life on Earth trace back to a single origin: a species of blue-green algae? As biologist Nick Lane notes, “All complex life on Earth shares the same basic chemistry and traces back to the same singular event” (2015). If chance is truly enough, shouldn’t it have happened again, at least once? But it didn’t. Every plant, animal, bacterium, and human is just a branch off the same singular tree. Not a forest—just one tree. That’s why I no longer see belief in God as a leap of blind faith—it’s chance that demands the bigger leap. Even when stretched to its most generous interpretation, chance fails to account for the elegance, precision, and singular origin of life. Compared to the coherence of design, it simply doesn’t hold up. 

“Isn’t it possible there are multiple universes, and we just happen to be in the one where conditions worked out?” That’s the multiverse theory, and yeah, I came across that too when I was searching. At first, it sounds like a clever workaround: if there are infinite universes out there, each with different values for the physical constants, then of course one of them might randomly support life, and we just happen to be in that one. But the problem is there’s no direct evidence for it. The multiverse is a hypothesis built on speculative physics. We can’t observe or test any of these other universes, and even the mechanisms that supposedly create them, like cosmic inflation or string theory, remain theoretical. Physicist Dr. Paul Davies captures it well when he states, “The multiverse is not a scientific theory at all. It’s a metaphysical proposal” (2007). It also violates Occam’s Razor, which says that the simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions is usually best. To explain fine-tuning through the multiverse, you must assume the existence of an infinite number of unobservable universes, each with different physical laws, plus a mechanism capable of generating them. That’s a lot of complexity just to avoid the idea of intentional design. In contrast, the design argument points to one intelligent cause—a simple, purposeful explanation that actually fits the evidence without inventing a bunch of unseen possibilities. So yes, I looked at the alternatives, but each felt like a stretch—more like avoiding the implications of fine-tuning than explaining them. When I laid out all the options, design wasn’t just plausible—it was the only explanation that made real sense to me.

“Even if something intelligent caused the universe, how do you know it’s God?” That’s a fair challenge. I’ll be honest, this argument doesn’t prove every detail about God. It doesn’t tell us exactly who the designer is, what that being is like, or whether it’s personal in the way many religions describe. But what it does show is that the most reasonable explanation for the universe’s fine-tuning is an intelligent cause, something beyond space, time, matter, and chance. We’re talking about a cause powerful enough to shape the laws of physics, and precise enough to calibrate dozens of constants to values that allow life to exist. That level of intentionality doesn’t sound like randomness, and it doesn’t come from necessity. It suggests intelligence. Collins (2009) notes, “The chances of all the dial settings being right by accident is so overwhelmingly small that we must conclude that there is some cosmic fine-tuner.” The design argument doesn’t claim to explain everything, but it explains far more than its alternatives. It makes sense of the data we have without multiplying assumptions or relying on unprovable and complicated speculation. It’s not a leap of faith, it’s a step toward coherence. So no, I can’t prove God like a math problem. But based on everything I’ve studied, scientifically, philosophically, and personally, design is not just a possibility. It’s the most honest and reasonable conclusion I’ve found.

“But aren’t you just believing in God now because you’re grieving? I mean… isn’t that what people do—find comfort in religion when life falls apart?” I get why you’d ask that. Yes, grief was involved, but not how you would assume. Grief was the catalyst that forced me to confront everything I thought I knew—but it wasn’t the reason I started believing. I didn’t turn to faith for comfort; I turned to reason for clarity. I investigated physics, probability, and philosophy, not to soothe my pain, but to make sense of a world that suddenly felt unbearably chaotic. What I found didn’t quiet the consistent ache of grief, but it did challenge the idea that life is just random. The sheer precision built into the fabric of the cosmos, the fact that all life traces back to one improbable beginning, and the absence of any second origin story—all of it pointed away from chaos and toward intention. Toward design.

So no, I don’t believe in God because it’s easier. I believe because design offers the most coherent explanation for why anything exists at all. Random chance can’t account for the delicate balance of life-permitting conditions or the singularity of our biological origin. And the multiverse? That story collapses on itself by not offering any real answers. While the design argument doesn’t tell us who the designer is, it points unmistakably to intention, intelligence, and purpose. As Blaise Pascal once wrote, “Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them” (1670/2008).  Faith is an extension of reason, not its rejection. This isn’t blind faith – it’s the result of asking hard questions and following the evidence wherever it led. And for me, that path led—unexpectedly, honestly, and logically—to God.

References

Collins, R. (2009). The teleological argument: An exploration of the fine-tuning of the universe. In W. L. Craig & J. P. Moreland (Eds.), The Blackwell companion to natural theology (pp. 202–281). Wiley-Blackwell.

Davies, P. (2007, November 24). Taking science on faith. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/24/opinion/24davies.html

Greyson, B. (2021). After: A doctor explores what near-death experiences reveal about life and beyond [Kindle version]. St. Martin’s Essentials.

Kreeft, P. (n.d.). The first cause argument. Retrieved from http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/first-cause.htm

Pascal, B. (2008). Pensées (A. J. Krailsheimer, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work published 1670)

PragerU. (2016, January 25). Where do good and evil come from? | 5 minute video [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xliyujhwhNM

Thucydides. (1963). History of the Peloponnesian war (R. Warner, Trans.). Penguin Classics.