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because there is a Grand Designer.
    The idea of a Grand Designer is certainly old , but the important question to ask is whether or not it is true . Simply to say it is old can give the erroneous impression that what is old is necessarily false and has been superseded. Secondly, it can give the further incorrect impression that no one holds it today. However, as we have seen, some of the finest minds in science do hold it. The conviction that there is a Grand Designer, God, the Creator, is held by millions, if not billions of people – vastly more, incidentally, than those who hold the atheist alternative.
    The multiverse
     
    Hawking, therefore, goes too far in claiming that the existence of a Grand Designer is not the answer of modern science. What, then, is Hawking’s preferred answer to what he admits is the “apparent miracle” (of fine-tuning)?
    It is the multiverse. The idea is, roughly speaking, that there are several many-world scenarios, and so many universes (some suggest infinitely many, whatever that means) that anything that can happen will happen in some universe. It is not surprising then, so the argument goes, that there is at least one universe like ours.
    We note in passing that Hawking has once again fallen into the trap of offering false alternatives. This time it is: God or the multiverse. From a theoretical point of view, as philosophers have pointed out, God could create as many universes as he pleases. The multiverse concept of itself does not and cannot rule God out. 40 Hawking does not seem to have provided us with any argument to counter this observation.
    In addition, leaving aside other universes, the physical constants in this universe are fine-tuned. They could have been otherwise, so the theory of the multiverse does not, in any case, annul the evidence of God’s “Grand Design” that is to be perceived in this universe. 41
    What of the multiverse itself? Is it fine-tuned? If it is, then Hawking is back where he started. 42 Where is Hawking’s argument to prove that it is not?
    With his multiverse Hawking moves out beyond science into the very realm of philosophy, whose death he announced rather prematurely. As Paul Davies points out: “All cosmological models are constructed by augmenting the results of observations by some sort of philosophical principle.” 43
    Furthermore, there are weighty voices within science that are not as enthusiastic about the multiverse. Prominent among them is that of Sir Roger Penrose, Hawking’s former collaborator, who shared with him the prestigious Wolf Prize. Of Hawking’s use of the multiverse in The Grand Design Penrose said: “It’s overused, and this is a place where it is overused. It’s an excuse for not having a good theory.” 44 Penrose does not, in fact, like the term “multiverse”, because he thinks it is inaccurate: “For although this viewpoint is currently expressed as a belief in the parallel co-existence of different alternative worlds, this is misleading. The alternative worlds do not really ‘exist’ separately, in this view; only the vast particular superposition …is taken as real.” 45
    John Polkinghorne, another eminent theoretical physicist, rejects the multiverse concept:
    Let us recognize these speculations for what they are. They are not physics, but in the strictest sense, metaphysics. There is no purely scientific reason to believe in an ensemble of universes. By construction these other worlds are unknowable by us. A possible explanation of equal intellectual respectability – and to my mind greater economy and elegance – would be that this one world is the way it is, because it is the creation of the will of a Creator who purposes that it should be so. 46
     
    I am tempted to add that belief in God seems to be a much more rational option, if the alternative is to believe that every other universe that can possibly exist does exist; including one in which Richard Dawkins is the Archbishop of Canterbury,