If you have ever tried to learn to play a stringed instrument, such as a guitar, you have had to learn the important first step – tune the instrument. With a guitar, the six strings must be in tune for music to come out right. One night, a band was getting ready to play for a church service and the musicians were busily getting their instruments tuned together. A five-year-old boy, not using his “inside voice”, loudly proclaimed to his mother and everyone else, “I don’t like that song”. I agree. Today electronic tuners help, but regardless, the instruments must be deliberately tuned together. Imagine that the instruments were stored happily in their cases for a few months, musicians came together, randomly tightened strings and then immediately began to play. What are the chances that the instruments will all be tuned together? That is basically what atheism demands of the universe. Without a mind at the controls, one of these options must be in play:
1. Many independent controls have to be accidentally set precisely right.
2. Some master (yet-to-be-discovered) control really is in control of all of the other controls and this control doesn’t require even more precision.
3. There really exists a literal infinite number of universes (with no explanation for why they exist) and we just happen to be in the one that is in tune.
We will look at these possibilities but first, it is worth recognizing that this is not just an issue raised by Christians looking to prove that their God exists. Physicists and cosmologists of all philosophical, religious and irreligious backgrounds recognize the issue. Here is a recent example:
Here is a report on an interview with Michio Kaku. He is a world-famous theoretical physicist and well known more popularly on the Science Channel.
“When responding to a question about the meaning of life and God, Kaku surprised his interviewer when he revealed that most top physicists do believe in a God because of how the universe is designed. Ours is a universe of order, beauty, elegance and simplicity.
He explained the universe didn’t have to be this way — it could have been ugly and chaotic. In short, the order we see in the universe is evidence of a Creator.”
In my last post in this section, “A Mind behind the Universe and a Deck of Cards”, I used a deck of cards as an example. When a shuffled deck of cards is laid out, it will be in some order. A person could claim, “Gee, the odds of these cards being in this particular order are astronomical. This cannot be just chance.” As I discussed in the post, that is bad logic. The probability of that order after the cards have been revealed is 100%. It just is what it is.
However, if it happens that there is an organization in the arrangement of the cards, such as in the image below, all arranged from aces to deuces, even after the fact, it is very doubtful that a random process is responsible. It is far more likely that ultimately a mind is responsible.
In this post, I will look at just the big, first order arrangement of physics and you can then think about the more probable reason that it is way. Is it more probable that this is just an “it is what it is” case or whether it is more probable that a mind is responsible or whether there could be some other explanation. Both scientists and others describe the universe as “fine-tuned”. We need to have some understanding of what this means. I am far from being a theoretical physicist! My physics minor in undergraduate school was a long time ago. I have to trust the expert’s analysis here. Fortunately, there are many reports to choose from. Sources range from Christian to atheist and they all agree about the basic facts, if not about the explanation.
The basic issue flows from trying to explain three observations.
- The physics of our universe can be described in terms of a series of equations and characteristics.
- These include constants with particular values
- If these values or characteristics, were significantly different, our universe could not support life.
- Some of the values must fall within an incredibly narrow range for life to exist.
Different experts give different lists of which factors to include. Many include 30 different constants. I will use a quote from Wikipedia where it just keys on six. It is a good source for two reasons. First it is available for sharing without permissions. Second, it is useful because it is not a Christian source which helps with those who do not trust Christian apologetic sources.
Martin Rees formulates the fine-tuning of the universe in terms of the following six dimensionless physical constants.
N, the ratio of the strength of electromagnetism to the strength of gravity for a pair of protons, is approximately 10E+36. According to Rees, if it were significantly smaller, only a small and short-lived universe could exist.
Epsilon (ε), a measure of the nuclear efficiency of fusion from hydrogen to helium, is 0.007: when four nucleons fuse into helium, 0.007 (0.7%) of their mass is converted to energy. The value of ε is in part determined by the strength of the strong nuclear force. If ε were 0.006, only hydrogen could exist, and complex chemistry would be impossible. According to Rees, if it were above 0.008, no hydrogen would exist, as all the hydrogen would have been fused shortly after the big bang. Other physicists disagree, calculating that substantial hydrogen remains as long as the strong force coupling constant increases by less than about 50%.
Omega (Ω), commonly known as the density parameter, is the relative importance of gravity and expansion energy in the universe. It is the ratio of the mass density of the universe to the “critical density” and is approximately 1. If gravity were too strong compared with dark energy and the initial metric expansion, the universe would have collapsed before life could have evolved. On the other side, if gravity were too weak, no stars would have formed.
Lambda (λ), commonly known as the cosmological constant, describes the ratio of the density of dark energy to the critical energy density of the universe, given certain reasonable assumptions such as positing that dark energy density is a constant. In terms of Planck units, and as a natural dimensionless value, the cosmological constant, λ, is on the order of 10E−122. This is so small that it has no significant effect on cosmic structures that are smaller than a billion light-years across. If the cosmological constant were not extremely small, stars and other astronomical structures would not be able to form.
Q, the ratio of the gravitational energy required to pull a large galaxy apart to the energy equivalent of its mass, is around 10E−5. If it is too small, no stars can form. If it is too large, no stars can survive because the universe is too violent, according to Rees.
D, the number of spatial dimensions in spacetime, is 3. Rees claims that life could not exist if there were 2 or 4 dimensions of spacetime nor if any other than 1 time dimension existed in spacetime.
What kind of design specs would you need to specify to end up with a universe that would be potentially habitable? Alan Lowne, CEO of Saelig Co. put described one of the specifications this way:
The strength of gravity has to be exactly right for stars to form. But what do we mean by “exactly”? Well, it turns out that if we change gravity by even a tiny fraction of a percent—enough so that you would be, say, one billionth of a gram heavier or lighter—the universe becomes so different that there are no stars, galaxies, or planets. And with no planets, there would be no life. Change the value slightly, and the universe moves along a very different path. And remarkably, every one of these different paths leads to a universe without life in it. Our universe is friendly to life, but only because the past 13.7 billion years have unfolded in a particular way that led to a habitable planet with liquid water and rich chemistry.
http://saeligcoinc.blogspot.com/2018/05/the-fine-tuning-of-universe-what-does.html
Agnostic author Paul Davies goes through a number of examples in his book, “God and the New Physics”. Here is one example:
“The observed universe seems to depend very sensitively on the precise matching of the explosive vigour to gravitating power. Just how sensitively is revealed by a calculation. At the so-called Planck time (10-43 seconds) the matching was accurate to a staggering one part in 10E+60. That is to say that had the explosion differed in strength by only one part in 10E+60, the universe as we perceive it would not exist.”
I really cannot grasp what type of precision that is. He provided an analogy to help:
“To give some meaning to these numbers, suppose you wanted to fire a bullet at a one-inch target on the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away. Your aim would be accurate to the same part in 10E+60.”
Conclusions:
We are seeing a set of approximately 30 different characteristics of our universe that occur just within that narrow range that allows us to exist. Falling outside of that range doesn’t just mean that life could not exist on earth, but such that planets could not exist. Science does not tell us why these constants fall fortuitously within these ranges.
Going back to the first, I considered basically four possible scenarios as follows:
1. Many independent controls have to be set precisely right.
Here the question is: Is it more reasonable to assume that this is pure chance (It just is what it is) or that it was controlled by some sort of designer? Just as when a deck of cards begins to be revealed, and the first 3 are aces, random doesn’t seem to describe the card pile. The more that are revealed, the less likely that becomes. Here we see an organization of the values. It is not unreasonable to extrapolate that they were selected with a purpose. Even those hostile to the Christian faith cannot dismiss this claim with reason.
2. Some master (yet-to-be-discovered) control really is in control of all of the other controls and it doesn’t require such precision.
We have learned a lot of physics over the last 100 years. It is not unreasonable that we will learn a lot more over the next 100 years. Is it likely that the constants will turn out to be controlled by some undiscovered factor that will simplify the origin of the universe and explain why stars and planets exist? Would this mean that the fine-tuning was just an illusion caused by our ignorance? We don’t know what the future will bring. The trend over the last 100 years has been the opposite of the simplification. More new factors have been added and more and more precision is required than what we knew before. I would not be surprised to find some of the factors to be partially dependent on one another and for some to simplify. I think it is highly unlikely that the design specifications will really reduce much.
3. There really exists a literal infinite number of universes (with no explanation for why they exist) and we just happen to be in the one that is in tune.
This hypothesis predicts the existence of vast numbers of universes that we have no evidence for. It is hard to prove that vast numbers do not exist, but what are they like? Infinity is a concept that is invaluable for mathematics but really has no bearing on physical realities. This goes back to the points from the Muslim Ghazali in the Kalaam argument. William Lane Craig discusses this here: https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/existence-nature-of-god/the-kalam-cosmological-argument/.
Aside from this, if there were a vast number of universes, the question would be: why are they there? Where did they come from? I think we should settle for understanding the universe that we know exists and why it is here and why it is the way that it is.
The fine-tuning of the universe points to a mind that caused it to exist and to be tuned such that advanced life could exist here. Alone, this does not prove that this mind is the God of the Bible. It is, however, very consistent with that.
The Old Testament Book of Proverbs described the origin of the earth this way:
The LORD by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens; by his knowledge the deeps broke open, and the clouds drop down the dew. Proverbs 3:19-20 (ESV)
The Bible portrays the Creator as a being who exists in dimensions beyond our own, who is omnipotent and omniscient. It says that He created this universe with us in mind. Those are the characteristics required to explain the fine-tuning that we see in nature. The Bible reveals that this Creator desires a relationship with us. He desired it so much that he accommodated us to the remarkable degree that He chose to stoop to our level.
“in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Philippians 2:5-8 (ESV)
References:
Davies, Paul, 1983, God and the New Physics, Penguin Press
Additional discussion:
https://thecenterbham.org/2018/05/03/the-fine-tuning-of-the-universe-what-does-it-mean/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/
https://www.discovery.org/m/securepdfs/2018/12/List-of-Fine-Tuning-Parameters-Jay-Richards.pdf
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