Long Odds on an Ordered Cosmos Some years ago I was asked by a colleague, a teacher of students for the ministry, what I thought of the Anthropic argument for God. As it happened, this was some thirty years after I ceased work as a nuclear weapons scientist to become a priest, and had written an early paper on the subject. I replied that just as I did not then think the argument held water, I still did not. In what follows I hope to show why this is the case despite the much more detailed knowledge of the cosmos which has been developed over the past few decades.
There is no doubt that anthropism can present a powerful case. The presence of observers, in a complex, long–lived universe – the condition that the universe be hospitable to observers – does depend crucially on the fine-tuning of certain fundamental constants of nature. If the masses of the proton, neutron, electron and neutrino along with the Planch constant and the mass associated with the cosmological constant are chosen randomly, the odds against their conspiring to produce such a universe are 10229 to 1.
This is long odds and implies a very high degree of order. But order does not imply an Orderer and in any case a cosmos as complex as ours requires a high degree of order to account for its survival and its creativity. The question at issue is whether 10 followed by 229 zeros is evidence of design, for it is design which implies a Designer. Professor Keith Ward of Oxford thinks it does and in his book God, Chance and Necessity (Oxford, 1996) states on page 52: ‘The existence of the laws of nature does not render God superfluous. On the contrary it strongly implies that there is a God who formulates such laws and ensures the physical realm conforms to them.’ Newton’s contemporary Samuel Clarke said something like that three hundred years ago, with the suggestion that God nudges planets back into orbit when, because of their imperfections, they stray.
The Historical: Causality and Falsifiability Ward’s conclusion that God is implied by cosmic structure seems to reduce God to the status of a concept in a scientific theory; or, it suggests that science has come to an end at the point at which God is invoked as an explanatory hypothesis. Neither of these is acceptable and both rest on a misunderstanding of the meaning of the concept of a law of nature.
The underlying assumption here is that law is imposed or prescriptive in a mechanical, clockwork universe. Samuel Clarke adds the third element, the Platonism which thinks that this world is an imperfect copy of a Heavenly Idea and therefore not wholly comprehensible without remainder, on its own terms.
This is unrecognisable as theology by anyone who is not a deist, and as science by anybody at all. So we consult Leibniz, another contemporary of Newton, who, unlike Newton, refused to invoke occult qualities in order to dig himself out of the hole created for theology by a mechanistic cosmology. To Newton’s idea of absolute time he asked the question whether it made sense for God to have created everything a year earlier and asserted that space and time are relational, that the universe is a collection of things in relationships which define space and time. In more explicit terms, Alibis asserted the principle of sufficient reason as basic to an understanding of nature, along with the appeal to the historical as an essential aspect of the study of the cosmos.
Science, we are suggesting, is a matter of explaining things in the world in terms of other things in the world, holding that the universe is intelligible on its own terms.
This involves an invocation of causality as a fundamental cosmological theory, first expressed by Charles Lyell in the 1830s, who wrote ‘...all former changes of the organic and inorganic creation are referable to one uninterrupted course of physical events, governed by the laws now in operation.’ As we know, it is not quite plain sailing from here on. As Karl Popper has pointed out, what marks off scientific statements from others is that the former, or one or more of their consequences, are falsifiable by experiment. This makes scientific doctrine essentially rather ad hoc, good-enough-for-now. Popper compares the growth of science to pushing piles into a swamp: you go down as far as is necessary to support the structure you wish to build.
Does Cosmic Order Imply an Orderer?
John MacDonald Smith reassesses the ‘anthropic’ argument for the existence of God. sof 74 November 2005 12 An Evolving Cosmos With these thoughts in mind we can look for a scientific, rather than a theological explanation of the very remote probability that there be a long-lived, complex cosmos hospitable to life. The key to this is explanation in terms of past history, or evolution. In Dreams of a Final Theory (page 74) Steven Weinberg traces the ancestry of the piece of chalk used by Thomas Henry Huxley, ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’, to illustrate his lectures to the British Association in 1868, nine years after the publication of The Origin of Species. In principle, it can be traced back through many and varied changes, to the Big Bang itself.
But what of the Big Bang? Does that not point to a creative First Cause? In fact it does not, because there is a properly scientific theory with empirically falsifiable implications which accounts for the Big Bang and the finetuning of the cosmic constants all at the same time. In The Life of the Cosmos Lee Smolin offers an evolutionary account of cosmic origins, in which black holes are the crucial agencies for the production of new space-time regions or universes.
An imploding black hole is the ‘parent’ of a young cosmos, which will not necessarily be an exact copy of its parent!: there may well be random variations of the values of cosmic constants in the ‘offspring’. Some of these will inhibit black hole production – remember how finely-tuned are the constants in our own universe – and will not ‘reproduce’. There will, therefore, be a tendency for universes which maximise black hole populations to predominate because non-productive universes will die out. It does not, of course, follow that the more fecund universes will all be complex, or evolve life because that depends on other factors and in any case the smallest variations in cosmic constants can result in substantial changes.
For instance, carbon is crucial to the evolution of life.
Sinolin is able to show that the quantity of carbon involved in creating life is radically dependent, both ways, on the weak nuclear force. Indeed, he points out that black hole population is dependent on twenty parameters in particle physics and cosmology, each of which can vary up or down and that therefore the theory can be falsified Forty times over, should black hole population be substantially increased by small variations or if no clear pattern emerges. He reports eight cases in which a parameter-change results in a dramatic decrease in black hole population, and so far there is no instance of a large increase.
Smolin suggests that this evolutionary theory of cosmic development is strictly parallel with evolutionary biological theory and therefore insistence on small random variations in cosmic constants has a basis in reality. The fine-tuning of cosmic constants is susceptible of a straightforward scientific explanation, and the God of the gaps explanation is unnecessary. The cosmos is evolutionary but so far, cannot on its own terms be shown to be teleological. From this point of view it does not matter whether the cosmic evolution theory turns out to be true: many theories in science have not. What matters is that it exists.
A growing understanding of the things in the universe as distinct and different entities, rather than anonymous ‘particles’ deepens our knowledge of the cosmic causal nexus, as an evolutionary set of relationships, in which the values of the cosmic constants are crucial to its hospitality to life. In addition, it can be understood on its own terms, hence appeal to external intervention or teleology cannot be sustained. Yet this apparently negative truth can be the spur to a deeper understanding and exploration that is not only scientific but also spiritual.