John Gribbin : Even more evidence of intelligent design—even if it is misotheistic

Fellow in Astronomy, Dr. John Gribbin is the latest scientist to admit that the evidence for intelligent design is obvious.

Let us recall that Francis Crick and Richard Dawkins, for example, have admitted that design is obvious; but that it should be ignored because it troubles their adherence to atheism. Thus, Francis Crick took the intelligent alien design route and Richard Dawkins considers alien design a possibility but prefers unintelligent, unguided design; whatever that is—designoid as he terms it; the blind watchmaker.

Richard Dawkins:
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.1

Francis Crick:
Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.2

In other words, the evidence is clear so ignore it and/or explain it away via Victorian Era tall tales.

Now, John Gribbin is admitting the same and making design oh, so simple:

Are we living in a designer universe?...the universe around us was created by people very much like ourselves, using devices not too dissimilar to those available to scientists today…

to create a new universe would require a machine only slightly more powerful than the LHC [Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland]

He states that “This is possible for two reasons” the first of which is that “black holes may” (emphasis added) “act as gateways to other regions of space and time” (which, he adds, “as science fiction aficionados will be well aware”). Secondly, “it takes no energy to make a universe.”
Apparently, black holes “are relatively easy to make” as they “have the potential to inflate and expand in their own dimensions…[which] was precisely what our universe did in the Big Bang, when it suddenly exploded from a tiny clump of matter into a fully-fledged cosmos”—do not ask what clumped the clump?

Furthermore,

The big question is whether that has already happened – is our universe a designer universe? By this, I do not mean a God figure, an "intelligent designer" monitoring and shaping all aspects of life. Evolution by natural selection, and all the other processes that produced our planet and the life on it, are sufficient to explain how we got to be the way we are, given the laws of physics that operate in our universe.

Let us pause for two points of interest: 1) he recognizes intelligent design but will not attribute it to God because 2) evolution by natural selection, and all the other—unknown and un-evidenced—processes that produced our planet and the life on it, are sufficient to explain how we got to be the way we are, given the laws of physics that operate in our universe.
This is interesting as he is relying upon unknown and un-evidenced processes. Moreover, of the many theories as to how life came into being just as many have been experimented upon and failed—quite a few are considered at this link. Furthermore, any successful abiogenesis experiment would only further evidence intelligent design as experiments do not just happen.

Now, even though unknown and un-evidenced processes can, or so we are baselessly told, explain how we got here, “there is still scope for an intelligent designer of universes as a whole. Modern physics suggests that our universe is one of many, part of a ‘multiverse.’” And now we have really come to what is driving John Gribbin—his beliefs about, his selling of his book about, the multiverse.
How so? Because, as he continues with a big “If (emphasis added) and this is an “if” the size of the universe (at least) “If our universe was made by a technologically advanced civilisation in another part of the multiverse, the designer may have been responsible for the Big Bang, but nothing more.”
And another big “if”: “If such designers make universes by manufacturing black holes – the only way to do it that we are aware of – there are three levels at which they might operate” which he lists as:
1) “The first is just to manufacture black holes, without influencing the laws of physics in the new universe.”
2) “The second level, for a slightly more advanced civilisation, would involve nudging the properties of the baby universes in a certain direction.”
3) “The third level, for a very advanced civilisation, would involve the ability to set precise parameters, thereby designing it in detail.”

The basic point is the random chance of creating various black holes and just seeing which one(s) turn into universes and actually manipulating the black holes into fine tuned universes—or something betwixt.

Ok, so, by now you may be asking, “If multiverse alien dwelling intelligent designers are responsible for our universe then who designed the multiverse alien designers?” Indeed, the question of origins is not answered but merely pushed backwards in time into an infinite regress. And why not? After all, anything can happen in the multiverse, right? You better hope not or else the very concept of the multiverse disproves itself and proves God’s existence as I elucidated in the essay Five Finger Death Punch the Multiverse.

John Gribbin continues:

This might sound far-fetched, but…All that is required is that evolution occurs naturally in the multiverse until, in at least one universe, intelligence reaches roughly our level. From that seed point, intelligent designers create enough universes suitable for evolution, which bud off their own universes, that universes like our own (in other words, suitable for intelligent life) proliferate rapidly, with "unintelligent" universes coming to represent a tiny fraction of the whole multiverse. It therefore becomes overwhelmingly likely that any given universe, our own included, would be designed rather than "natural".

This is just a fancy sounding version of the ultimate atheist answer to anything and everything: the it just is of the gaps.

Moreover:

While the intelligence required to do the job may be (slightly) superior to ours, it is of a kind that is recognisably similar to our own, rather than that of an infinite and incomprehensible God.
And the most likely reason for such an intelligence to make universes is the same for doing things like climbing mountains, or studying the nature of subatomic particles – because we can…
This idea provides the best resolution yet to the puzzle Albert Einstein used to raise, that "the most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible". The universe is comprehensible to the human mind because it was designed, at least to some extent, by intelligent beings with minds similar to our own…
Fred Hoyle suggested that the laws of physics…must be "a put-up job". I believe he was right: the universe was indeed set up to provide a home for life…with no need for outside interference. It isn't that man was created in God's image – rather that our universe was created, more or less, in the image of its designers.

Again this is an atheism of the gaps argument; he told us a quaint sci fi story and that is all—nothing more.

So, to reiterate: the evidence for design coming to be recognized more and more to be undeniable. Atheists are still hoping to get people to believe their tall tales about how this can be whilst still denying God. Denying God, that is, and having to rely on the invention of multiple-multiverses instead.

1. 1. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), p. 1
2. 2. Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery (London: Penguin Books, 1988 - 1990, reprint), p.138