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In its April 12, 2003, edition, The New York Times carried an article by the famous astrophysicist Paul Davies entitled "A Brief History of the Multiverse." In this article, Prof. Davies attempts to defend the claim that there may be an infinite number of universes, and that our universe just happened to be suitable for life, which is the latest argument in which materialist thinkers have sought refuge in the face of the finely tuned design in the universe.
We first need to briefly set out why materialists developed such an argument. For thousands of years, the divine religions and philosophies that accept the existence of God have maintained that there is purpose and design in the universe, whereas materialists—those who claim that nothing exists apart from matter—have rejected the existence of purpose and design. A series of astronomical and physical discoveries in the twentieth century, however, revealed that the design in the universe was so clear as to be undeniable.
These discoveries revealed that at the moment the universe began, all variables—from the speed of the Big Bang to the strength of the four fundamental forces, from the structure of the elements to that of the Solar System in which we live—were exactly what was required to support life. This tremendous discovery, which scientists in the 1970s announced and described as the Anthropic Principle, clearly invalidated the materialist argument for non-design.
In his article in The New York Times, Paul Davies summarizes this fact and admits the inevitable conclusion; the existence of God:
Why is nature so ingeniously, one might even say suspiciously, friendly to life? What do the laws of physics care about life and consciousness that they should conspire to make a hospitable universe? It's almost as if a Grand Designer had it all figured out.
However, although regarding the design in the universe as proof of the existence of God, Prof. Davies rejects this fact. In order to account for the origin of the design in the universe, he resorts to the multiverse theory, the last refuge, as we have already seen, of the materialists.