Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

This single-panel comic satirizes the "fine-tuning argument" for the existence of God. A priest enthusiastically tells a child, "Just imagine how fine-tuned the universe is! Why, if there weren't just the right composition of elements in Earth, we might not have tectonic plates! And then there'd hardly be any earthquakes at all!"

The fine-tuning argument is a theological claim that the universe's physical constants are so precisely calibrated that they must have been designed by a creator. The comic lampoons this by having the priest apply the same logic to earthquakes -- natural disasters that cause enormous human suffering. The absurdity of being grateful for the precise conditions that enable earthquakes highlights the cherry-picking inherent in the fine-tuning argument: proponents celebrate the conditions that allow for life and beauty while ignoring that the same "fine-tuning" also produces devastating natural disasters.