Top Highlights

• The God Temptation here is the temptation to evade, by invoking a designer, the responsibility to explain.
• To succumb to the God Temptation in either of those guises, biological or cosmological, is an act of intellectual capitulation. If you are trying to explain something improbable, it can never suffice to invoke an entity that is, in itself, at least as improbable. If you’ll stoop to magicking into existence an unexplained peacock-designer, you might...
• it’s hard not to feel sympathy for such capitulation. The complexity of a living body, indeed of every one of its trillion cells, is so mind-shattering to anyone who truly grasps it (not all do) that the temptation to buckle at the knees and succumb to a non-explanation is almost overwhelming.
• It calls to mind Julian Huxley’s satire of Bergsonian vitalism: to postulate a mysterious élan vital in explanation for life is like saying that a railway engine is powered by élan locomotif.
• God is simple, for Swinburne, because there is only one of him. Polytheism, he states explicitly, is less simple than (mono)theism. Yet that one entity, unitary though he be, has to be clever enough to calculate, with exquisite and prophetic precision, the exact values of the physical constants that would fine-tune a universe to yield, 13.8 billion...