In The God Delusion you refute every reasoned argument that has been made for the existence of God, including creationism and intelligent design.
However, I find two weak points in your argumentation: first in your discussion of the improbability of our universe, and second in your discussion of the emergence of consciousness. Here I will only talk about the first of these.
Darwinians have demonstrated convincingly that once life (i.e. organic chemistry) got started on Earth, there is no need for God to explain any of the life forms that have since emerged (excepting consciousness, if this is considered to be a form of life). But how improbable was it that organic chemistry got started on Earth? Your answer is: yes, it was exceedingly improbable that organic chemistry got started on Earth. However, we know that our universe contains billions of billions of billions of planets where organic chemistry had a chance to get started, and so it is not at all improbable that it was able to get started on a few or even many of them, even though the number of successful life-forming planets is an infinitesimal fraction of the total. "Anthropic" thinking tends to object, "Given that unsuccessful planets outnumber successful ones by a factor of billions of billions, isn't it wildly improbable that we are lucky enough to find ourselves living on one of the vanishingly few successful ones?" Your answer is, "No. It is a necessity that, if we found ourselves living anywhere, it would have to be on one of the vanishingly few successful life-forming planets. The existence of a few of these is not at all improbable. You and I couldn't exist anywhere else. Given that we do, it had to happen here."
So far, so good. But you realize that the questions and answers can't stop here. The high probability that organic chemistry would have to get started somewhere in our universe is the result of the way our universe is made up. But contemporary physics now understands that the makeup of our universe is itself wildly improbable. That's because its survival for more than a few attoseconds (the time it takes for light to travel the length of three hydrogen atoms) after the Big Bang was only possible because the values of several fundamental constants -- e.g. the strong force binding the components of the atomic nucleus -- happened to be just so. Had any of the values been every so slightly different, the universe as we know it would never have unfolded. There wouldn't have been all these billions of billions of planets, and no organic chemistry.
You then argue that we can resolve the problem of the improbability of the universe in the same way that we resolved the problem of the improbability of organic chemistry getting started on Earth -- by getting beyond anthropic thinking. If our universe is one of many, many, many universes out there in time and space (the multiverse theory), it is not at all improbable that a universe with the values for the fundamental constants that allowed our universe to thrive would sooner or later have popped into existence.
But here is the rub: the argument that a successful life-forming planet is not at all improbable rests on the provable proposition -- based on observation through telescopes -- that there are many, many, many planets in this universe. But the proposition that there are many, many, many universes besides our own rests on no observations at all. Furthermore, there is no conceivable observation that could prove it to be false. Because it is not "falsifiable," the multiverse theory fails the fundamental test that any theory must pass if it is to be accepted as scientific. Indeed, the only thing that can be said in favor of the multiverse theory is that if it is false, and ours is the only universe that ever has been or ever will be, then ours is a miraculous universe. Since science cannot accept the miraculous, science must accept the theory of the multiverse, even though it will never be able to produce any observable evidence for it.
Here you are trying to dispose of the argument that the multiverse hypothesis is no less improbable than the God hypothesis:
"If we are going to permit the extravagence of a multiverse, so the argument runs, we might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb and allow a God. Aren't they both equally unparsimonious ad hoc hypotheses, and equally unsatisfactory? People who think that have not had their consciousness raised by natural selection. The key difference between the genuinely extravagent God hypothesis and the apparently extravagant multiverse hypothesis is one of statistical improbability. The multiverse, for all it is extravagant, is simple. God, or any intelligent, decision-taking calculating agent, would have to be highly improbable in the very same statistical sense as the entities he is supposed to explain. The multiverse may seem extravagent in sheer number of universes. But if each of those universes is simple in its fundamental laws, we are still not postulating anything highly improbable. The very opposite has to be said of any kind of intelligence."
But you confuse probability with plausability. There is no way to estimate the statistical probability of the existence of a second universe, or any number of additional universes. And of course there is no way to estimate the statistical probability that our universe is miraculous. So you cannot argue that the multiverse is statistically more probable than the miraculous universe. The most you can argue is that it is more plausible, and here is one good argument in your favour: we know that one universe exists, so why shouldn't there might be two or more? But science has never been able to confirm the existence of even a one miracle, so why should our universe be the first?
While this is the strongest argument you can make, it is hardly a knockout. Many will answer your questions as to why our universe should be the first miracle with the question, "Why not?" And your best reply will be, "because the multiverse seems more plausible to science."
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