God: The Failed Hypothesis (21 page)

The way it would work for a spaceship is as follows. Inside the ship, the astronauts would not experience any slowing down of their body clocks. They would run at the same rate as other onboard clocks. However, the distance from Earth to their destination would contract, as measured from their own reference frame. An astronomer on Earth would measure the usual distance between astronomical objects but would observe the spaceship clocks to slow down and the astronauts to age more slowly.

Suppose we were able to build a spaceship that could accelerate at a constant one
g,
that is, at the acceleration of gravity on Earth, which would also nicely provide artificial gravity for the astronauts. That ship would reach Alpha Centauri in five years’

Earth-time while only a bit over two years would elapse in shiptime. In eleven years’ ship-time it could reach the center of our galaxy. But during that time, almost 27,000 years would have passed on Earth. In fifteen years’ ship-time the astronauts could reach Andromeda, 2.4 million light-years away. By then, since most of the trip was at near the speed of light relative to Earth, 2.4 million years would have gone by back on Earth. After experiencing the passage of twenty-three years, the astronauts would actually pass the edge of the universe currently observable from Earth, but 13.7 billion years would have elapsed in the reference frame of a long-dead Earth.

If the astronauts wish to stop at any of these places to explore for earthlike planets, then the times must be doubled, since they could accelerate only during the first half of the trip and then would have to decelerate for the second half.

The unavoidable fact seems to be that any humans exploring the universe will effectively cut themselves off from Earth. Even if they traveled to the center of the Milky Way and back, aging forty-four years in the process, they would return to an Earth 104,000 years in the future as measured on Earth clocks. Basically, any humans traveling to the stars would forever leave behind their families, their society, and even their species.

Notice that I have not asserted any technological limitations to argue that spaceflight to distant stars and galaxies is impossible.

While a method for accelerating a spaceship to near the speed of light is beyond any technology we can currently imagine, we cannot rule that out for future generations. Authors also speculate about traveling through
wormholes,
tunnels through space-time that act as shortcuts to other parts of the universe
⁴⁰
. I don’t know if that will ever prove possible, but I doubt it.

But, suppose such explorations do someday take place. How earthlike must a planet be for humans to be able to live there?

Life on Earth evolved under the very special set of conditions that exist here. We are adapted to live on Earth and not just anywhere in space. We would not be overly pessimistic in guessing that space travelers would have to travel tens of thousands of lightyears, at the minimum, before finding a planet they could live on without massive life support.

The suggestion is frequently made that humanity might someday live in outer space, inside space stations orbiting Earth and other planets. However, even if these space stations duplicate all the conditions on Earth, they may not be able to deal with the cosmic rays from which we on Earth are shielded by the atmosphere. The same threat would seem to prohibit lengthy space travel of the type described earlier. Even the Mars missions people dream about would very possibly expose astronauts to life-shortening radiation poisoning. Traveling outside the solar system would kill them.

Perhaps future technologies will solve this problem, too.

Maybe genetic engineering will make new kinds of humans, really a new species, suitable for space travel. And, of course, we can always send automatons.

Whatever the imagined possibilities, the strong conclusion is that humans are not constructed to live anywhere but on this tiny blue speck in a vast universe. Maybe many similar specks exist throughout the universe, but Homo sapiens is unlikely to ever find them. Our species is probably marooned in space, on spaceship Earth, and likely to go extinct long before the sun burns its last hydrogen atom.

However, once we give up the idea that we are special children of God, we can see ourselves as a link in the chain of evolution.

Our descendants, genetically engineered or made of titanium and silicon, unhampered by our brief life spans, may reach other planets. And if we do it right they hopefully will be smarter, kinder, more rational, and free of the superstitions that plague us and threaten our very survival even for a few more centuries.

Even taking the most optimistic view of the future of humankind, though, it is hard to conclude that the universe was created with a special, cosmic purpose for humanity. It seems inconceivable that a creator exists who has a special love for humanity, and then just relegated it to a tiny point in space and time. The data strongly suggest otherwise. Indeed, the universe looks very much like it was produced with no attention whatsoever paid to humanity.

When we take even the most optimistic estimates of the density of intelligent life of all kinds in the universe, those civilizations are still separated by enormous distances with nothing but wasted space in between. It is also hard to believe that the universe was created with a special, cosmic purpose for intelligent life of any kind.

A Life Principle?

Despite the apparent uncongeniality of the universe to complex life, life is present and some people still insist that this alone is remarkable. Physicist Paul Davies suggests that perhaps a
life principle
is “written into the laws of physics” or “built into the nature of the universe.”

But nowhere in current physics, chemistry, or biology do we find any sign of a fundamental life principle, some
elan vital
that distinguishes life from nonlife. Davies speculates, “A felicitous mix of law and chance might be generalised to cosmology, producing directional evolution from simple states, through complex, to life and mind
⁴¹
.” Davies shares this notion with biologists Christian de Duve
⁴²
and Stuart Kauffman
⁴³
. These authors all seem to view the life principle as some previously unrecognized, holistic, teleological law of nature, although what this may be is not at all clear from their highly speculative writings. As discussed in chapter 3, Nancey Murphy and other theologians admit that the traditional notion of a separate soul and body is no longer viable given the evidence from neuroscience.

But, being theologians they have to find God somewhere. If they conclude God does not exist they are quickly out of a job. Some have put their stock in what they call “nonreductive physicalism.” They think they can find a place for God and the soul therein
⁴⁴
.

However, any life principle, if it exists, may be one of the type of so-called emergent principles found in chaos and complexity theory that naturally arise from the nonlinear, dissipative, but still purely local interactions of material particles
⁴⁵
. These cannot be called new laws of physics since they follow from already existing laws, if not by direct, mathematical proof, then by computer simulations that involve no new principles. Indeed, as we have seen, such simulations indicate that complexity evolves from simplicity by familiar, purely reductive physical processes without the aid of any overarching holistic guiding principle
⁴⁶
.

A Tiny Pocket of Complexity

It is commonly thought that the universe is an intricately complex place. However, taking an overview we can see that this is a selection effect resulting from the fact that we and our planet are relatively complex. Most of the matter and energy of the universe exhibits little structure and shows no sign of design. We noted above that 96 percent of the mass of the universe appears to be composed of dark matter and dark energy whose exact natures are unknown but that are definitely not composed of familiar atomic matter. As far as we can tell, these components have little structure.

The very low-energy photons in the cosmic microwave background radiation are a billion times more plentiful than the atoms in galaxies. These particles are spread uniformly throughout the universe to one part in a hundred thousand. They move around almost completely randomly, as if they were a gas in thermal equilibrium having maximum entropy and at a temperature only three degrees above absolute zero on the Kelvin scale. The little structure that is seen is understood as the remnant of random fluctuations that took place in the early universe and helped trigger galaxy formation. Again, absence of design is evident.

Physicist Max Tegmark has argued that the universe contains almost no information, that is, it has on the whole no structure
⁴⁷
.

He suggests that the large information content that we humans perceive results from our subjective viewpoint. According to quantum mechanics, the universe is perfectly random, a superposition of all possible realities. However, the very act of observation selects out only one of those realities. Some quantum mystics, such as the popular author Deepak Chopra, interpret this as an ability of humans to “make our own reality
⁴⁸
.” However, the evidence clearly indicates otherwise
⁴⁹
. If we could make our own reality we would all continue to look like we did when we were twenty. But even Chopra is aging along with the rest of us. The reality that is selected by our observations is just a toss of the dice.

Even if Tegmark is off the mark, any huge, random universe, regardless of its properties, will naturally develop at least a few tiny pockets of complexity within a vast sea of chaos, which is just what we seem to see in our universe. We do not need either a designer or multiple universes to account for such rare deviations as are consistent with chance.

It is rather amusing that theists make two contradictory arguments for life requiring a creator. Sometimes you hear these from the same people. In the fine-tuning argument, the universe is so
congenial
to life that the universe must have been created with life in mind. But, if it is so congenial, then we should expect life to evolve by natural processes and a sustaining God is unnecessary.

In the second argument, the universe is so
uncongenial
to life that life could not have occurred by natural processes and so must have been created and be sustained by the constant actions of God.

There is a third and much simpler possibility that fits the data far better; we are just the product of circumstance and chance.

If God created matter with human life in mind, he did not use very much of it for his purpose. If God created order, he did not make much of that either. The observed universe and the laws and parameters of physics look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God. From this we can conclude, beyond a reasonable doubt, that such a God does not exist.

In a paper appearing just as this book was going to press, Roni Harnik, Graham Kribs, and Gilad Perez have constructed a universe without any weak nuclear interactions[]. They find that this universe undergoes big bang nucleosynthesis, matter domination, structure formation, and star formation. Stars burn for billions of years, synthesizing elements up to iron and undergoing supernova explosions, dispersing heavy elements into the interstellar medium. Chemistry and nuclear physics are essentially unchanged. This is one more example, to be added to those discussed above, where a claim that certain parameters of the universe, in this case those of the weak interaction, are fine-tuned for life.

Notes

¹
Hugh Ross,
The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Greatest Scientific Discoveries of the Century Reveal God,
rev. ed. (Colorado Springs: Navpress, 1995), pp. 138-45.

²
Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards,
The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery
(Washington, DC: Regnery, 2004), p. 335.

³
Clifford M. Will,
Was Einstein Right? Putting General Relativity to the Test
(New York: Basic Books, 1986).

⁴
Voltaire,
Candide
(1759), as quoted in the
TalkOrigins
archive, online at
http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CI/CI302.html
(accessed June 5, 2005). The full text in English is available online at
http://www.literature.org/authors/voltaire/candide/
(accessed June 5, 2005).

⁵
Center for Science and Culture, online at
http://www.discovery.org/csc/fellows.php
(accessed June 6, 2005).

⁶
Barbara Forrest and Paul R. Gross,
Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

⁷
Tommy Nguyen, “Smithsonian Distances Itself from Controversial Film,”
Washington Post,
June 2, 2005.

⁸
Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee,
Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe
(New York: Copernicus, 2000).

⁹
David J. Darling,
Life Everywhere: The Maverick Science of Astrobiology
(New York: Basic Books, 2001).

¹⁰
Ibid., pp. 95-110.

¹¹
Richard Swinburne, “Argument from the Fine-Tuning of the Universe” in
Modern Cosmology and Philosophy,
ed. John Leslie (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), pp. 160-79; George Ellis,
Before the Beginning: Cosmology Explained
(London, New York: Boyars/Bowerdean, 1993); Ross,
The Creator and the Cosmos;
Patrick Glynn,
God: The Evidence
(Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1997); Dean L. Overman, A
Case Against Accident and Self-Organization
(New York, Oxford: Rowman & Littleneld, 1997).

¹²
Brandon Carter, “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology” in
Confrontation of Cosmological Theory with Astronomical Data,
ed. M. S. Longair (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974), pp. 291-98, reprinted in
Modern Cosmology and Philosophy,
ed. John Leslie (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), pp. 131-39.