Dr. Stephen Meyer

And my counterargument in the debate, and this was really interesting, it's going to be a very current debate going forward, is that, yes, it's always been possible to model the universe into infinity, okay?

This is what Einstein attempted to do.

Remember that he set the cosmological constant at just the right value so he could portray the outward push and the inward push in kind of an equilibrium, right?

But it turned out not to be consistent with the evidence.

And what's going on now is that people are very cleverly reintroducing for completely different ways infinite universe cosmologies.

But what we found in studying all of them is that they have

a high cost, a high cost in terms of credibility or evidential support.

The cost is that number one, most importantly, all of them involve some kind of unexplained fine tuning.

Remember that Einstein's model, he had to fine tune the cosmological constant to get it to balance the gravitational force in order to depict things as static.

Well, if you bring fine tuning in,

Add new fine-tuning, you're just providing additional support for the theistic argument, but on other grounds, okay?

So you're not getting around theism by getting rid of the beginning in your modeling, you're just providing additional support for it.

A lot of the models have very wonky physics, too.

Physics, they invoke physics that violates established physics in order to bring the infinite universe back into currency.

Some of them involve some mathematical sleights of hand.

kind of funky things that other physicists are saying, wait a minute, that's not a move you can actually make.

And lots of them involve postulating purely unobserved ad hoc hypotheses.

So they end up violating Occam's razor because they're so convoluted and baroque in all of the theoretical, pure theoretical postulates.

You invent a kind of force or a field that doesn't

of which we have no experience, but it helps you reposition the universe as being infinite.