HANDMADE UNIVERSE

In Bringing Down the House, author Ben Mezrich tells the story of six MIT students applying their skills in logic and mathematics to counting cards and other trickery, who travel to Las Vegas and make millions. They were able to swing the odds in their favor. After a series of winning streaks, they found themselves followed by house detectives who asked them to leave and never return.

How were they discovered? In one sense, they weren’t. No one actually ever caught them cheating, but the MIT students did do something that was a dead giveaway: they won. Repeatedly they beat the odds, and when the dealers and house detectives in Las Vegas observe someone repeatedly beating the odds, they suspect intelligent design: someone is not playing by the laws of random chance but by a carefully reasoned system, like card counting.

The fine-tuning in the universe is astounding and unimaginably improbable. It could be all coincidence or chance, or maybe there are multiple universes, raising the odds and probability of life, but a good detective would be wise to consider the distinct possibility that intelligent design lies behind the observable phenomena.

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