theists as proof of celestial design: the so-called "fine tuning of the
universe." It turns out that the existence of a universe that permits
life as we know it depends heavily on the size of certain constants in
the laws of physics. If, for example, the charge of the electron were
slightly different, or if the disparity in mass between a proton and a
neutron were slightly larger, or if other constants varied by more than a
few percent, the universe would differ in important ways. Stars would
not live long enough to allow life to emerge and evolve, there would be
no solar systems, and the universe would lack the elements and the
complex chemistry necessary for building organisms. In other words, we
inhabit what is called a "Goldilocks universe," where nature's laws are
just right to allow life to evolve and to thrive. This observation is
called "the anthropic principle."
At first glance, its explanation appears trivial. As Miller says,
"Taking as a starting point the observation that you and I are alive, at
least in the immediate present, it's obvious that we must live in a
universe where life is possible. If we didn't, we wouldn't be here to
talk about it. So, in a certain sense the fact that we live in a
life-friendly universe merits little more than a big 'Duh.'" True. But
this raises a deeper question: why do the constants of the universe just
happen to have those life-promoting values? The answer given by
creationists is that this is no accident: a beneficent God (or an
intelligent designer) crafted those physical laws precisely so that
somewhere in the universe intelligent life would evolve—life so
intelligent that it could work out the laws of physics and, more
important, apprehend their creator. This answer—known as the strong
anthropic principle—is scientifically untestable, but it sounds so
reasonable that it has become one of the biggest guns in the creationist
arsenal. (It is important to grasp that anthropic principles concern
the conditions required for the existence of any life, and say nothing about the inevitability of complex and intelligent life.)
Also, scientists have other explanations, ones based on reason rather
than on faith. Perhaps some day, when we have a "theory of everything"
that unifies all the forces of physics, we will see that this theory
requires our universe to have the physical constants that we observe.
Alternatively, there are intriguing "multiverse" theories that invoke
the appearance of many universes, each with different physical laws; and
we could have evolved only in one whose laws permit life. The physicist
Lee Smolin has suggested a fascinating version of multiverse theory.
Drawing a parallel with natural selection among organisms, Smolin
proposed that physical constants of universes actually evolve by a type
of "cosmological selection" among universes. It turns out that each
black hole—and there are millions in our universe—might give rise to a
new universe, and these new universes could have physical constants
different from those of their ancestors. (This is analogous to mutation
in biological evolution.) And universes with physical constants close to
the ones we see today happen to be better at producing more black
holes, which in turn produce more universes. (This resembles natural
selection.) Eventually this process yields a population of universes
enriched in those having just the right properties to produce stars (the
source of black holes), planets, and life. Smolin's theory immensely
raises the odds that life could appear.
The idea of multiple universes may seem like a desperate move—a Hail
Mary thrown out by physicists who are repelled by religious
explanations. But physics is full of ideas that are completely
counterintuitive, and multiverse theories fall naturally out of
long-standing ideas of physics. They represent physicists' attempts to
give a naturalistic explanation for what others see as evidence of
design. For many scientists, multiverses seem far more reasonable than
the solipsistic assumption that our own universe with its
10,000,000,000,000,000 planets was created just so a single species of
mammal would evolve on one of them fourteen billion years later.
And yet Miller seems to favor the theological explanation, or at least gives the anthropic principle a theological spin:
The scientific insight that our very existence, through evolution,
requires a universe of the very size, scale, and age that we see around
us implies that the universe, in a certain sense, had us in mind from
the very beginning. . . . If this universe was indeed primed for human
life, then it is only fair to say, from a theist's point of view, that
each of us is the result of a thought of God, despite the existence of
natural processes that gave rise to us.
Miller equates the faith of religious believers with physicists' "faith" in a naturalistic explanation for physical laws:
Believers . . . are right to remind skeptics and agnostics that one of
their favored explanations for the nature of our existence involves an
element of the imagination as wild as any tale in a sacred book: namely,
the existence of countless parallel simultaneous universes with which
we can never communicate and whose existence we cannot even test. Such
belief also requires an extraordinary level of "faith" and the
nonreligious would do well to admit as much.
Well, physicists are not ready to admit as much. Contrary to Miller's
claim, the existence of multiverses does not require a leap of faith
nearly as large as that of imagining a God. And some scientific
explanations of the anthropic principle are testable. Indeed, a few
predictions of Smolin's theory have already been confirmed, adding to
its credibility. It may be wrong, but wait a decade and we will know a
lot more about the anthropic principle. In the meantime, it is simply
wrong to claim that proposing a provisional and testable scientific
hypothesis—not a "belief"—is equivalent to religious faith.
(Jerry A. Coyne, "Seeing and Believing," The New Republic [4 February 2009] [italics and ellipses in original])
Note from KBJ: There are two hypotheses that explain the data: theism and multiverses. Coyne says that the latter does not "require a leap of faith nearly as large as that of imagining a God." Really? How do you quantify such a thing? And then he says, in effect, "Just you wait! There will be evidence for the multiverse theory in due course." The theist can say that as well. The question is what it is reasonable to believe now. I don't see any difference, epistemically, between the two hypotheses, and this means that theists are at no epistemic disadvantage vis-à-vis atheists such as Coyne. Postulating God to explain the data is no more embarrassing than postulating the existence of reproducing universes.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 