Here we are floating on planet Earth, revolving around a non-descript star in the corner of an apparently every-day galaxy, which is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each of which has hundreds of billions of stars. How do you make sense of such a strange predicament?

Hello, I'm Dwight Nelson. Welcome to The Evidence. What's the strangest, most mysterious aspect of this amazing universe we live in? Is it its size? Its beauty? Its order? Or how about the idea that this universe had to be exactly, and I mean exactly as it is in order for you and me to be here. Is there a reason why everything is the way it is? Could it be that the wonders we see in the night sky provide evidence that there is a God behind it all?

Some strange results have come up in about the last 20-30 years, particularly in astronomy and also in quantum physics. Which suggests that the universe actually may have a purpose. And some physicists are now suggesting it now does have a purpose. And this has come out of some findings about the atomic...some of the fundamental numbers in atomic physics.

These are numbers like the mass, the weight of an electron, the weight of a quark, the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic field, about twenty numbers that describe those and other parameter, features of our world, but nobody knows why it is that those numbers have the particular values that they do. Now, you could easily say, who really cares. You change the mass of the electron by a little bit more or a little bit less, does it really matter? And the answer is that it does. You see, it turns out that if you imagine that we had 20 dials right here and we could fill with those 20 numbers at will, even a small change to the values of the known values of those numbers would cause the world as we know it to disappear.

For example, if we go back to say one second after the big bang, at that point the expansion rate and the mass destiny have to have been adjusted to each other just right so that the universe is just at this critical point. If the universe at that point were expanding just one part in the fifteenth decimal place faster, the universe would have flown apart without galaxies ever having a chance to form. On the other hand, if the expansion rate were just a little slower than what we think by one change...a change of one in the fifteenth decimal place, then the universe would have in fact expanded into a maximum size and collapsed and we never would reached the time in the universe in which we are living.

Isn't that amazing? A change of one of the fifteenth decimal place faster or slower and the universe in which we are now living wouldn't exist. How can such careful calibration ever be the result of chance? Physicist Micky Kutzner doesn't think it is.

Suppose we had 25 or 30 walls that were standing in front of us. And each wall were a mile or so long. Supposed you were told that each wall had a hairline crack in it but that it was totally random where that hairline crack would occur. Wouldn't it surprise you if you looked, if you peered into one of those hairline cracks and you could see daylight through the other side of those 25 walls? That would tell you that all of those hairline cracks were lined up perfectly. That's the same thing that we have in the universe with all these fundamental constants adjusted just right for life to exist in the universe. The chances of any one of those are slim. The probability of all of them occurring at once is extraordinarily unlikely.