God's Undertaker: Has Science buried God?

Designer universe

Copernicus was responsible for a revolution in scientific thinking.

By overturning the idea that the earth was fixed at the centre of the universe he began a process of demoting the earth’s significance that has resulted in the widespread view that the earth is a fairly typical planet orbiting a fairly typical sun which is positioned in one of the spiral arms of a fairly typical galaxy which, the multiverse theorists will add, is in a fairly typical universe. This cutting of earth down to size is sometimes known as the Copernican Principle.

However, several avenues of research and thought combine to call this principle into serious question. For the remarkable picture that is gradually emerging from modern physics and cosmology is one of a universe whose fundamental forces are amazingly, intricately, and delicately balanced or ‘fine-tuned’ in order for the universe to be able to sustain life. Recent research has shown that many of the fundamental constants of nature, from the energy levels in the carbon atom to the rate at which the universe is expanding, have just the right values for life to exist. Change any of them just a little, and the universe would become hostile to life and incapable of supporting it. The constants are precision-tuned, and it is this fine-tuning that many scientists (and others) think demands an explanation.

Critical elements

For life to exist on earth an abundant supply of carbon is needed. Carbon is formed either by combining three helium nuclei, or by combining nuclei of helium and beryllium. Eminent mathematician and astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, found that for this to happen, the nuclear ground state energy levels have to be fine-tuned with respect to each other. This phenomenon is called ‘resonance’. If the variation were more than 1% either way, the universe could not sustain life. Hoyle later confessed that nothing had shaken his atheism as much as this discovery. Even this degree of fine-tuning was enough to persuade him that it looked as if ‘a superintellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology’, and that ‘there are no blind forces in nature worth talking about’.

Parameters of nature

However, in terms of the tolerance permitted, this example pales into insignificance when we consider the fineness of the tuning of some of the other parameters in nature. Theoretical physicist Paul Davies tells us that, if the ratio of the nuclear strong force to the electromagnetic force had been different by 1 part in 10¹⁶, no stars could have formed. Again, the ratio of the electromagnetic force-constant to the gravitational force-constant must be equally delicately balanced. Increase it by only 1 part in 10⁴⁰ and only small stars can exist; decrease it by the same amount and there will only be large stars. You must have both large and small stars in the universe: the large ones produce elements in their thermonuclear furnaces; and it is only the small ones that burn long enough to sustain a planet with life.

To use Davies’ illustration, that is the kind of accuracy a marksman would need to hit a coin at the far side of the observable universe, 20 billion light years away. …

Although we are now in realms of precision far beyond anything achievable by instrumentation designed by humans, the cosmos still has more stunning surprises in store. It is argued that an alteration in the ratio of the expansion and contraction forces by as little as 1 part in 10⁵⁵ at the Planck time (just 10^-43 seconds after the origin of the universe), would have led either to too rapid an expansion of the universe with no galaxies forming or to too slow an expansion with consequent rapid collapse. …

Faced with not one, but many such spectacular examples of fine-tuning, it is perhaps not surprising that Paul Davies says, ‘It seems as though someone has fine tuned nature’s numbers to make the universe... The impression of design is overwhelming.’ …

We should note that the preceding arguments are not ‘God of the gaps’ arguments; it is advance in science, not ignorance of science, that has revealed this fine-tuning to us. In that sense there is no ‘gap’ in the science. The question is rather: How should we interpret the science? In what direction is it pointing?

The anthropic principle

This perception on the part of scientists, that the universe has to be very precisely structured in order to support life, has been called the anthropic principle (Greek: anthropos = man). …

Some scientists and philosophers maintain that we ought not to be surprised at the order and fine-tuning we see in the universe around us, since if it did not exist then carbon based life would be impossible, and we would not be there to observe the fine-tuning. In other words they use the anthropic principle against the inference of design. However, as philosopher John Leslie points out, ‘that sounds like arguing that if you faced a firing squad with 50 guns trained on you, you should not be surprised to find that you were alive after they had fired. After all, that is the only outcome you could possibly have observed Ð if one bullet had hit you, you would be dead. However, you might still feel that there is something which very much needs explanation; namely why did they all miss? Was it by deliberate design? For there is no inconsistency in not being surprised that you do not observe that you are dead, and being surprised to observe that you are still alive.’

Leslie argues that the fine-tuning argument presents us with a choice between, at most, two possibilities. The first of these is that God is real. The only way to avoid that conclusion, according to Leslie, is to believe in the so-called ‘many worlds’ or ‘multiverse’ hypothesis (popularised in David Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality), which postulates the simultaneous existence of many, possibly infinitely many, parallel universes in which (almost) anything which is theoretically possible will ultimately be actualised, so that there is nothing surprising in the existence of a universe like ours. …

God or multiple universes

But many scientists feel that an explanation which involves undetectable universes and represents in addition an extreme violation of the Occam’s Razor principle of searching for theories that do not involve unnecessary multiplication of hypotheses, goes well beyond science into metaphysics. There is much speculation and very little evidence.

It should, however, be pointed out that, although Leslie may be correct in suggesting that fine-tuning means that either there is a God or a multiverse, logically these two options are not mutually exclusive, although they are usually presented as such. After all, parallel universes could be the work of a Creator. Furthermore, as philosopher of physics Michael Lockwood has observed, Leslie’s firing squad argument for this universe is not actually negated by postulating a multiverse. The element of surprise and need for explanation exists within whichever universe in which the fine-tuning is being observed. After all, the probability that a given person obtains a run of ten sixes in throwing a dice is not altered by the fact that there may be many people throwing dice in the same city at the same time.

Not God of gaps

In closing, we need to emphasise the fact that the arguments we have used from cosmology and physics are arguments based on standard contemporary science that enjoys widespread acceptance. They are not arguments that involve challenging any of the mainstream claims of science, and, as we have pointed out above, they are certainly not ‘God of the gaps’ arguments: they do not reduce to ‘Science can’t explain it, therefore God did it’. It is for these two reasons that fine-tuning arguments, for example, gain a ready hearing from most scientists, even though they may agree or disagree with the conclusions we have drawn from them. Such arguments have the ring of being compatible with authentic scientific activity.

God’s Undertaker (978-07-459-5303-8, paperback, £8.99) is available from your local Christian bookshop or directly from the Lion Hudson website: http://www.lionhudson.com