For decades, scientist Sir Fred Hoyle pioneered research in astrophysics. He started his scientific career as a staunch atheist who saw no evidence of design in the universe. In his early years, he said, “Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves.”

But as his career went on, he discovered something that would rock his atheism—physicists call it “fine tuning.” Fine tuning refers to the discovery that many properties of the universe fall within extremely narrow and improbable ranges that turn out to be absolutely necessary for complex forms of life, or for any life at all. Hoyle’s contribution to the discovery of fine tuning began in the 1950s.

Eventually, Hoyle became convinced that some intelligence had orchestrated the precise balance of forces and factors in nature, to make the universe life permitting. He was overwhelmed by what he called “Cosmic coincidences.” As he put it in 1981:

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces we're speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion, almost beyond question.”