How Does Multiverse Proposal Affect the Design Argument?

Abstract

Recent observations suggest that many fundamental physical constants and conditions in our universe are fine-tuned for life to exist. This provides an important piece of evidence to support the Design Argument and the existence of God in the philosophy of religion. However, the proposal of multiverse provides a naturalistic account of the fine-tuning phenomena which apparently challenges the Design Argument. In general, most of the multiverse models have specific features and they have to satisfy empirical and logical constraints. Therefore, they may be intrinsically dependent on theistic proposal under the probabilistic Bayesian framework. In this article, I present a Bayesian framework to show how multiverse proposal affects the Design Argument. I show that there exist two specific scenarios in which the inclusion of multiverse proposal can indirectly increase the credence of the Design Argument.