On March 15th, Professor John D. Barrow of Cambridge was named the winner of this year’s Templeton Prize. The prize is awarded for “progress towards research or discoveries about spiritual realities.” Barrow is famous for his work on the "Anthropic Principle."
"Simply stated, the Anthropic Principle is an account of the “seemingly incredible coincidences that allow for our presence” in the Universe. The existence of carbon-based life, which is what humans are, is dependent on a series of independent variables, what Astronomer Royal Martin Rees calls “just six numbers.” These include “the particular energy state of the electron to the exact level of the weak nuclear force,” to name but two.
If any of these values were off by even an infinitesimal amount, carbon-based life like us would be impossible—so would science, which is the act of observing nature. Barrows argues that the universe that “emerged out of the big bang . . . was already governed by laws that were fine-tuned to encourage the rise of carbon-based life forms.”
This is what prompted Freeman Dyson, “the best physicist never to win a Nobel Prize,” to say that “it appears that the universe knew we were coming.”
Not surprisingly, this kind of talk makes today’s evolutionary establishment—orthodox materialists, after all—nervous because it suggests that perhaps blind chance and purposelessness don’t govern the cosmos. This prompted evolutionists to look for an alternative to the Anthropic Principle, one that would keep intelligence and purpose out of the picture.
Charles Colson's Breakpoint article, from which the above quotes were taken, needs to be read in full. It's excellent. See especially the links at the end of Colson's article.