How can a perfect god create an imperfect universe?
This universe is perfect! It is humanity's definition of perfection that falls short. It is based upon the flawed vision of human ego.
Yeah... No. It really isn't. Earth is not perfect, humans are not perfect, animals are not perfect.
Sure if you look at the small scale of a human lifetime or even a human sized object you could find faults and say things are less than perfect. However when you look at the universe as a whole and the beauty of how it works it is simply amazing! You can't say the Universe is imperfect in any meaningful sense.
Scientists have nailed down certain forces and balances that had they been even a tiny, tiny bit different we might have just had loose particles of matter and no stars or just a giant clump with no empty space. We got just the right Universe to support life on our world and maybe others too. There are so many ways that might not have happened if our Universe had not been exactly as it is. Yes our Universe is quite perfect at being a Universe that we can exist in. It is exactly what it needs to be and that is all we can ask for.
If someone knows of a more perfect Universe out there for comparison than I would love to know.
Let's assume, for the moment, that the Universe really is perfectly set up for life, and human life at that.
Does that imply the Universe was created that way on purpose?
No. It absolutely does not.
Here's an analogy. I just rolled a die 10 times and got the sequence 3241154645. The odds against that particular sequence coming up are astronomical. Over 60 million to one.
Does that mean that this sequence was designed to come up?
Or think of it this way. The odds against me, personally being born? They're beyond astronomical. The chances that, of my mom's hundreds of eggs and my dad's hundreds of millions of sperm, this particular sperm and egg happened to combine to make me? Ridiculously unlikely. Especially when you factor in the odds against my parents being born...and against their parents being born...and their parents, and theirs, and so on and so on and so on. The chances against me, personally, having been born are so vast, it's almost unimaginable.
But does that mean I was destined to be born?
Does that mean we need to concoct an entire philosophy and theology to explain The Improbability of Greta-ness?
Or does it simply mean that I won the cosmic lottery? Does it simply mean that my existence is one of many wildly improbable outcomes of the universe... and if it hadn't happened, something else would have? Does it simply mean that some other kid would have been born to my parents instead... a kid whose existence would have been every bit as unlikely as mine?
Yes, life on Earth is wildly improbable. And if it hadn't happened, some other weird chemical stew would have arisen on Earth, one that didn't turn into life. Or life would have developed, but it would have evolved into some form other than humanity. Or the Earth would never have formed around the Sun, but some other unlikely planet would have formed around some other star. If life on Earth hadn't happened, something else equally improbable would have happened instead. We just wouldn't be here to wonder about it.
And that doesn't even take into account the mind-boggling vastness of space -- the mind-boggling majority of which is not hospitable to life in the slightest. The overwhelming majority of the universe consists of unimaginably huge vastness of impossibly cold empty space...punctuated at rare intervals by comets, asteroids, meteors (some of which might hit us, by the way, also negating the "perfectly designed for human life" concept), cold rocks, blazing hot furnaces of incandescent gas, the occasional black hole, and what have you. The overwhelming majority of the universe is, to put it mildly, not fine-tuned for life.
Why was the 93- billion-light-years-across universe created 13.73 billion years ago...just so the fragile process of human life in one tiny solar system could blink into existence for a few hundred thousand years, a billion years at the absolute most, and then blink out again? Why could an asteroid or a solar flare or any number of other astronomical incidents wipe out that life at any time?
If the universe was "fine-tuned" for life to come into being, why is the ridiculously overwhelming majority of it created to be so inhospitable to life? (Even if there's life on other planets, which is hypothetically possible, the point still remains: Why is the portion of the Universe that's hospitable to life so absurdly minuscule?)