Progressive Creationism vs Darwinian Evolution

I accepted my opponents challenge for this debate because I have not previously debated the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God. The arguments comprise the Anthropic Cosmology Principle, Pro's ref 3, published in the late 80's. Wikipedia has an article summarizing the Anthropic Principle. [1. https://en.wikipedia.org...] I look forward to the debate. Divine intervention, i.e., magic, is not an explanationPro's burden is to prove "progressive creationist theory has more explanatory and predictive power over Darwinian evolution." Creationism in all forms uses magic as an alternative to explanation. That cannot be an explanation, because an explanation clarifies something that is not immediately comprehensible by relating it to things that are comprehensible. Statements are comprehensible if a person can relate them to his previous experience and knowledge. However, magic is not understood by any mortal, so it is not an explanation.The magician Houdini would have an audience member go into a booth on stage and write a word on slate. The slate was then bound in boards so as to be concealed. The audience member would then return to the stage, Houdini would ask him to concentrate on the word, and Houdini would guess the word. Opening the slate revealed that Houdini had guessed correctly. What is the explanation of the feat?One possible explanation is that Houdini used magic to see the slate. Magic is a violation of the laws of nature performed at the will of the magician. Putting aside whether that is the correct explanation, in fact it is not an explanation at all. It says that we have no explanation in terms of the laws of nature comprehensible to us, so we call it "magic" or "a miracle" and leave it unexplained. All the supposed explanatory power of creationism is simply declaring that something will be called a miracle and left unexplained. There is no problem with having unexplained events, the error is claiming that they are explained. The only real explanations in science call upon repeatable natural laws. Houdini put a sign in the booth saying, "If you want this trick to work, writes this word on the slate: _________" That worked reliably with audiences circa 1900. That explanation actually clarifies. Is magic a more powerful explanation?The domain of intelligent design shrinks as science expandsIn the time of the Romans, all manner of events were attributed to the will of gods. Every misfortune was attributed to a god being displeased, and every bit of good fortune to a god being pleased. Science provided explanations that displaced the divine ones. Astronomer Neil Tyson provides a lecture on the many-centuries history of intelligent design. [2. http://tinyurl.com...] Historically, scientists would explain a certain amount and then leave the rest to the inexplicable workings of God. The great Isaac Newton mathematically explained the motion of the earth and moon around the sun, but he couldn't solve the equations for more than three bodies. He then attributed the workings to God. Two centuries later, Laplace solved the math problem, but Laplace then attributed other unsolved problems to inscrutable divine will. By the late 1980's so much had be explained by science that cosmology was the main part left for a magical "explanation." Alternatives to fine tuning by GodThe claim is that the universe is designed specifically for humans. If it's designed just for us, why is so little of the universe suitable for human life? Even supposing that there are other habitable planets, 99.99999+% is thoroughly hostile to human life. Nearly all the universe is vacuum, radiation, stellar heat, or near-absolute-zero cold. All we have for sure is a tiny film of survivable space around one planet, and a one-and-half-mile diameter asteroid that went by last week could have wiped out all the life had it collided. Pro pointed out that "life" is undefined, yet he asserted that the universe is fine-tuned for life. We have found a niche for life in a certain carbon-oxygen-water realm, but no one knows what other sets of parameters might lead to life. If the design of the universe were completely unsuited to human life, it might be perfectly suited to some other life form. Author Douglas Adams argued ". . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in and the hole I find myself in fits me rather neatly, doesn't it?In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' ” [3. http://www.edge.org...] The universe was not made to suit us, rather we were made by evolution to suit the universe.Scientists count about 25 physical parameters that define the working of the universe. We don't know how many of them are actually independent. “However, because the standard model is not mathematically self-consistent under certain conditions (e.g., at very high energies, at which both quantum mechanics and general relativity are relevant), physicists believe that it is underlaid by some other theory, such as a grand unified theory, string theory, or loop quantum gravity. In some candidate theories, the actual number of independent physical constants may be as small as one.” [4. http://en.wikipedia.org...] In fact, not all of the 25 are critically important. Some, like the strength of the strong force, are critical, but others can be varied considerably without much upsetting the design. [4. op cit]To compute the odds of a universe being suitable for life, we have to know how many universes there are. Multiverse theory is that there many hundreds of millions of universes, with only the one we are in visible to us. If the chance of a universe being capable of evolving life is very small, then most of the other universes are lifeless. We only get to see the lucky winner. [In the 2010 book The Grand Design, “Hawking and Mlodinow argue that modern string theory (in particular, the "M-theory" of Edward Witten) leads to a huge ensemble of universes (the multiverse), so that we should not be surprised that our particular universe is life-friendly -- however fantastic the odds, there are so many universes in this ensemble that one life-friendly universe (ours) is bound to appear somewhere ...” [5. http://www.sciencemeetsreligion.org...] There are many versions of multiverse theory, and none have been proven true. They are consistent with all present observational data, so they might be true. Pro has the burden to prove all the theories false, and that no new theory will emerge that provides a scientific explanation. He must prove all scientific alternatives untrue, so the purely magical God-theory. We can suppose that if God exists, He might have chosen to create the universe using a method subject to scientific explanation. Pro must show that God did not choose to do that. The Beginning Pro cites the paper by Borde [Pro's ref. 1] as showing that a universe following inflationary models must contain singularities and must have a finite past. Pro errs in supposing that the multiverse must follow an inflationary model. Time began with the Big Bang in our universe, but the extent of time in the multiverse is unknown. Pro claims that philosophers have shown that infinite past time is impossible. However, in the 19th century arguments by Cantor based upon set theory claimed that time might be infinite. [6. http://en.wikipedia.org...] If it is logically impossible for time to extend to the infinite past, then God must also be subject to that logical restriction. That leads to a requirement for God to have been created. The reason that God cannot create a rock too big for Him to lift is that omnipotence does not extend to logical impossibilities. ----- We don't have a proven scientific theory of the origins of the universe. What Pro offers is not an explanation, and be cannot prove an explanation impossible.