The world, my world is beyond my control. Of course, to some extent I have always recognised that, but nevertheless I persisted all my life trying to control it, with disastrous results. This is after all, pretty normal for humans. We see the material world around us. If we pick up a piece of wood and a saw, we can make something, we have to an extent, controlled our environment. We now have a chair to sit on, a table to write on, so we can take that further can’t we? And so we do throughout our lives, work at controlling our environment. We do all the normal things that materialists do, we work one way or another to get money to build a house, to bring up our children in, to be safe and comfortable in. We vote for the politician that we deem most likely to order the nation in a way that suits our interests and who will help the nation to influence the world in away that ensures our continued safety and prosperity.
That is what we do and in doing so, we think little or never beyond that. For beyond that there is seemingly overwhelming evidence that we are born, we live, we die, end of our story. We may dimly be aware that there are some people who believe in some superstition that we don’t actually die, but somehow we go on living in some other world. Then we look around us at the very material, solid world and we see no evidence of that, there is nothing that we can see that points towards this odd belief in a further life somewhere else.
Now I want you to consider all of that material universe that you’ve been happily managing and manipulating all your life from an entirely different perspective, that of quantum mechanics. This is the scientific research that is looking at the very basis of all matter in the universe and how it operates – a fundamental theory in physics which describes nature at the smallest scales of energy levels of atoms and subatomic particles. In other words, physics getting right down to the most basic levels of everything – what it is actually is. The answers emerging may be surprising.
Atoms can be imagined as a nucleus of protons and neutrons, and a surrounding “cloud” of orbiting electrons which “take up space”. However this is only somewhat correct, because subatomic particles and their properties are governed by their quantum nature, which means they do not act as everyday objects appear to act – they can act like waves as well as particles or as pieces of information and they do not have well-defined sizes or positions. In the Standard Model of particle physics, matter is not a fundamental concept because the elementary constituents of atoms are quantum entities which do not have an inherent “size” or “volume” in any everyday sense of the word.
Every aspect of a particle can be expressed as information, and put into binary code. And so subatomic particles may be the bits that the universe is processing, rather like a giant supercomputer. The idea is that the universe emanates from the information inherent within it – or which enters it from an external source. In other words, the Wheeler theory: every ‘it’ – every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself – derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely – even if in some contexts indirectly – from the apparatus-elicited answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.” The universe and everything in it is – information and nothing else. (Francis Collins, The Language Of God.)
I want you to stop and think about that for a bit. It means, that all our experiences to the contrary, everything that seems all too solid in this world is in fact comprised of information and further it is theorised: is dependent upon that information being constantly renewed in order to maintain its material identity. That renewal coming from an extra-universal source.
If that is true, it raises enormous questions about … well everything. Some young and very radical scientists have said that it helps to think of our universe as a hologram : It all seems very real – until you reach out and touch it, in our case until you start to study it and the further back you go all you find is pieces of information emanating from somewhere else.
Lets bring that down to the personal level – the you and me level. Our bodies, looking at it this way, are nothing more than an enormous assemblage of information. That assemblage presumably could be replicated. Perhaps even reassembled after death. If that information is being constantly renewed, then the source of that renewal must know where to send every tiny bit of information in order that our bodies continue to be us. That presupposes that there is knowledge of us, you and me, elsewhere. If that is the case, then just precisely who are we?
This sequence of thinking has begun to lead a number of scientists to start wondering about a “God shaped hole out there somewhere”, as indeed it should. If their theorising is anywhere near true we need an exceedingly good explanation of the source of the renewal information that keeps our universe in existence.
This means, all our experiences to the contrary, that everything solid in this world is in fact comprised of information and further it is theorised: is dependent upon that information being constantly renewed in order to maintain its material identity. That renewal coming from an extra-universal source.
If that is true, it raises enormous questions about … well everything. Some radical scientists have said that it helps to think of our universe as a hologram. It all seems real until you reach out and touch it, in our case until we study it closely and discover an electron ‘paper trail’ emanating from somewhere else. At the me/you level then the body is perhaps no more than an enormous assemblage of information which could be replicated or even reassembled after death. If our information is being constantly renewed, then the source of that renewal must know where to send every particle of information in order that our bodies continue to be us. That presupposes that there is knowledge of you elsewhere. If that is the case, then just precisely who are you? Who am I?
This sequence of thinking has begun to lead a number of scientists to start wondering about a “God shaped hole out there somewhere”, as indeed it should. If their theorising is anywhere near true, we need an exceedingly good explanation of the source of the renewal information that keeps our universe in existence.
The Anthropic Principle
Now that the origin of the universe and our own solar system has become increasingly well understood, a number of fascinating apparent coincidences about the natural world have been discovered that have puzzled scientists, philosophers, and theologians alike. Consider the following three observations:
1. In the early moments of the universe following the Big Bang, matter and antimatter were created in almost equivalent amounts. At one millisecond of time, the universe cooled enough for quarks and antiquarks to “condense out.” Any quark encountering an antiquark, which would happen quickly at this high density, resulted in the complete annihilation of both and the release of a photon of energy. But the symmetry between matter and antimatter was not quite precise; for about every billion pair of quarks and antiquarks, there was an extra quark. It is that tiny fraction of the initial potentiality of the entire universe that makes up the mass of the universe as we now know it.
Why did this asymmetry exist? It would seem more “natural” for there to be no asymmetry. But if there had been complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, the universe would quickly have devolved into pure radiation, and people, planets, stars, and galaxies would never have come into existence.
2. The way in which the universe expanded after the Big Bang depended critically on how much total mass and energy the universe had, and also on the strength of the gravitational constant. The incredible degree of fine-tuning of these physical constants has been a subject of wonder for many experts. Hawking writes: “Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, that even now, 10 thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate? If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in 100 thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size.”
On the other hand, if the rate of expansion had been greater by even one part in a million, stars and planets could not have been able to form. Recent theories involving an incredibly rapid expansion (inflation) of the universe at very early times appear to offer a partial explanation for why the present expansion is so close to the critical value. However, many cosmologists would say that this simply pushes the question back to why the universe had just the right properties to undergo such an inflationary expansion. The existence of a universe as we know it rests upon a knife edge of improbability.
3. The same remarkable circumstance applies to the formation of heavier elements. If the strong nuclear force that holds together protons and neutrons had been even slightly weaker, then only hydrogen could have formed in the universe. If, on the other hand, the strong nuclear force had been slightly stronger, all the hydrogen would have been converted to helium, instead of the 25 percent that occurred early in the Big Bang, and thus the fusion furnaces of stars and their ability to generate heavier elements would never have been born.
Adding to this remarkable observation, the nuclear force appears to be tuned just sufficiently for carbon to form, which is critical for life forms on Earth. Had that force been just slightly more attractive, all the carbon would have been converted to oxygen.
Altogether, there are fifteen physical constants whose values current theory is unable to predict. They are givens: they simply have the value that they have. This list includes the speed of light, the strength of the weak and strong nuclear forces, various parameters associated with electromagnetism, and the force of gravity. The chance that all of these constants would take on the values necessary to result in a stable universe capable of sustaining complex life forms is almost infinitesimal. And yet those are exactly the parameters that we observe. In sum, our universe is wildly improbable.
You may rightly object at this point that this argument is a bit circular: the universe had to have parameters associated with this kind of stability or we would not be here to comment upon it. This general conclusion is referred to as the Anthropic Principle: the idea that our universe is uniquely tuned to give rise to humans. It has been a source of much wonder and speculation since it was fully appreciated a few decades ago. Essentially, there are three possible responses to the Anthropic Principle:
1.There may be an essentially infinite number of universes, either occurring simultaneously with our own or in some sequence, with different values of the physical constants, and maybe even different physical laws. We are, however, unable to observe the other universes. We can exist only in a universe where all the physical properties work together to permit life and consciousness. Ours is not miraculous, it is simply an unusual product of trial and error. This is called the “multiverse” hypothesis.
2. There is only one universe, and this is it. It just happened to have all the right characteristics to give rise to intelligent life. If it hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here discussing this. We are just very, very, very lucky.
3. There is only one universe, and this is it. The precise tuning of all of the physical constants and physical laws to make intelligent life possible is not an accident, but reflects the action of the one who created the universe in the first place.
Regardless of one’s preference for option 1, 2, or 3, there is no question that this is potentially a theological issue. Hawking, quoted by Ian Barbour, writes, “The odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications.”
Going even further, in A Brief History of Time, Hawking states: “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”
Another distinguished physicist, Freeman Dyson, after reviewing this series of “numerical accidents,” concludes, “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.”
And Arno Penzias, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who co-discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation that provided strong support for the Big Bang in the first place, states, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five Books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.”
Perhaps Penzias was thinking of the words of David in Psalm 8: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him?”
So where should we come down on the three options listed above? Let’s approach it logically. To begin with, we have the observation of the universe as we know it, including ourselves. We then wish to calculate which of these three possible options is most likely. The problem is, we don’t have a good way of deciding the landscape of probabilities, except perhaps for option 2. For option 1, as the number of parallel universes approaches infinity, then the likelihood of at least one of them having the physical properties for life could be substantial. For option 2, however, the probability will be vanishingly small. The likelihood of option 3 depends on the existence of a Creator who cares about a nonsterile universe.
On the basis of probability, option 2 is the least plausible. That then leaves us with option 1 and option 3. The first is logically defensible, but this near-infinite number of unobservable universes strains credulity. It certainly fails Occam’s Razor. Those categorically unwilling to accept an intelligent Creator will argue, however, that option 3 is not simpler at all, since it requires the action of an extra-universal being. It could be argued, however, that the Big Bang itself seems to point strongly toward such a being-Creator, since otherwise the question of what came before is left hanging in the air.
If one is willing to accept the argument that the Big Bang requires a Creator, then it is not a long leap to suggest that the Creator might have established the parameters (physical constants, physical laws, and so on) in order to accomplish a particular goal. If that goal happened to include a universe that was more than a featureless void, then we have arrived at option 3.
In trying to judge between options 1 and 3, a particular parable by philosopher John Leslie comes to mind. In this parable, an individual faces a firing squad, and fifty expert marksmen aim their rifles to carry out the deed. The order is given, the shots ring out, and yet somehow all of the bullets miss and the condemned individual walks away unscathed.
How could such a remarkable event be explained? Leslie suggests there are two possible alternatives, which correspond to our options 1 and 3. In the first place, there may have been thousands of executions being carried out in that same day, and even the best marksmen will occasionally miss. So the odds just happen to be in favour of this one individual, and all fifty of the marksmen fail to hit the target. The other option is that something more directed is going on, and the apparent poor aim of the fifty experts was actually intentional. Which seems more plausible?
One must leave open the door to the possibility that future investigation in theoretical physics will demonstrate that some of the fifteen physical constants that so far are simply determined by experimental observation may be limited in their potential numerical value by something more profound, but such a revelation is not currently on the horizon. Furthermore, as with other arguments…no scientific observation can reach the level of absolute proof of the existence of God. But for those willing to consider a theistic perspective, the Anthropic Principle certainly provides an interesting argument in favour of a Creator.” (Francis Collins, The Language Of God.)
So have we just proven scientifically, the existence of God? The answer is “no” because we cannot prove the existence of anything outside this universe. What we’ve done is open up the question beyond the “supernatural”. That word has, unfortunately, acquired a wrong meaning, ghosties and ghoulies sort of meaning, whereas in fact it consists of ‘super’ and ‘natural’, in other words something above and beyond natural. If for instance, an intelligent being of any sort at all exists outside our universe, that would be supra-natural – that is natural, but beyond the processes of this universe. The arguments presented above point in the direction of at least one such extra-universal being who could have caused the Big Bang and have controlled it to the point that the universe evolved in such a way that we could eventuate.
This doesn’t mean that science has proved the existence of God; it hasn’t and it can’t. What it has done is open open up the question of “if not God, then the onus is on you to provide a credible alternative” and it has vastly narrowed the possibilities of a credible alternative.
The Language of God by Dr Francis Collins, Head of the Human Genome Project, is available from Amazon as an audio book and for Kindle. We thoroughly recommend it.
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