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Is the universe fine-tuned for life? 2
Saturday 9 May 2009
We are faced with the simple fact that the universe, far from being hostile to life as Weinberg would have us believe, has seemingly bent over backward to accommodate life. As the physicist Freeman Dyson has put it, "The universe knew we were coming."
The mysterious appropriateness of the universe for the evolution of life is something that calls for explanation. There are two main possibilities.
The first is to assert that our universe is not alone. There are a great many universes—perhaps an infinite number of them—and they are all run on different lines with their own laws of nature. The vast majority of them have no life in them because one or other of the conditions were not met. In a few, perhaps in only the one, all the conditions happen by chance to be satisfied and life was able to get a hold. The probability of a universe being of this type is small, but because there are so many attempts, it is no longer surprising that it should have happened. We, being a form of life ourselves, must of course find ourselves in one of these freak universes.
This is a suggestion that has been put forward by some scientists, but that does not make it a scientific explanation. For one thing, the other universes are not part of our universe and so, by definition, cannot be contacted. There is no way to prove or disprove their existence.
The second alternative is simply to accept that the universe is a put-up job; it was designed for life, and the designer is God. Now, one always gets a little bit worried over arguments in favor of the existence of God based on "design." The original argument from design held that everything about our bodies, and those of other animals, is so beautifully fitted to fulfill its function that it must have been designed that way—the designer being God—and therefore you must believe in God. The rug was pulled from under that argument by Darwin´s theory of evolution by natural selection— at least in terms of it being a knockdown proof of God´s existence, one aimed at convincing the skeptic.
So it is that I would urge caution on those religious believers tempted to make too much of this new argument from design, this time based on physics and cosmology. One can neither prove nor disprove God on the basis of such reasoning. All one can say is that if one already believes in God on other grounds—say, on the basis of religious experience—then the simplest explanation might be in terms of a Designer God. For religious believers, such an explanation introduces no fresh assumptions over and above what one already accepts as the explanation of other features of one´s life.
Not that the alternative suggestion, the many-universes argument, is necessarily to be regarded as an atheistic theory. Certainly, it will be the theory favored by atheists. But it could well be that the God who used evolution by natural selection as the means for making intelligent creatures like ourselves (and a whole host of other interesting animals along the way) might well have used the same scatter-gun approach to make not only our life-friendly universe, but a whole host of other interesting universes—universes that carry no life, but could nevertheless be appreciated by God.
From Russell Stannard and Closer to Truth
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