The Case for a Creator (22 page)

This has to be among the most fascinating scientific discoveries of the century. “Who first noticed this?” I asked.

“Way back in the late 1950s, Hoyle talked about the precise process by which carbon and oxygen are produced in a certain ratio inside stars. If you tinker with the resonance states of carbon, you won’t get the materials you need for building life. Incidentally, recent studies by the physicist Heinz Oberhummer and his colleagues show that just a one-percent change in the strong nuclear force would have a thirty- to a thousand-fold impact on the production of oxygen and carbon in stars. Since stars provide the carbon and oxygen needed for life on planets, if you throw that off balance, conditions in the universe would be much less optimal for the existence of life.

“Anyway—back to your question—most of the research and writing about the fine-tuning has taken place since the early 1980s. There have been hundreds of articles and books written on it from both a technical and popular perspective.”

Physics can get very complicated very quickly. So when I asked Collins to describe one of his favorite examples, I was relieved that he chose one that’s among the easier to envision.

“Let’s talk about gravity,” he said. “Imagine a ruler, or one of those old-fashioned linear radio dials, that goes all the way across the universe. It would be broken down into one-inch increments, which means there would be billions upon billions upon billions of inches.

“The entire dial represents the range of force strengths in nature, with gravity being the weakest force and the strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons together in the nuclei being the strongest, a whopping ten thousand billion billion billion billion times stronger than gravity.
¹⁹
The range of possible settings for the force of gravity can plausibly be taken to be at least as large as the total range of force strengths.

“Now, let’s imagine that you want to move the dial from where it’s currently set. Even if you were to move it by only one inch, the impact on life in the universe would be catastrophic.”

“One inch compared to the whole universe?” I asked. “What kind of impact could that have?”

“That small adjustment of the dial would increase gravity by a
billion
-fold,” he said.

“Whoa!” I said. “That sounds like a lot.”

“Actually, it’s not,” he replied, “Relative to the entire radio dial—that is, the total range of force strengths in nature—it’s extraordinarily small, just one part in ten thousand billion billion billion.”

“Wow, that puts it into perspective,” I said. “What would happen to life?”

“Animals anywhere near the size of human beings would be crushed,” he said. “As astrophysicist Martin Rees said, ‘In an imaginary strong gravity world, even insects would need thick legs to support them, and no animals could get much larger.’
²⁰
In fact, a planet with a gravitational pull of a thousand times that of the Earth would have a diameter of only forty feet, which wouldn’t be enough to sustain an ecosystem. Besides which, stars with lifetimes of more than a billion years—compared to ten billion years for our sun—couldn’t exist if you increase gravity by just three thousand times.

“As you can see, compared to the total range of force strengths in nature, gravity has an incomprehensibly narrow range for life to exist. Of all the possible settings on the dial, from one side of the universe to the other, it happens to be situated in the exact right fraction of an inch to make our universe capable of sustaining life.”

And gravity is just one parameter that scientists have studied. One expert said there are more than thirty separate physical or cosmological parameters that require precise calibration in order to produce a life-sustaining universe.
²¹

As for Collins, he likes to focus on gravity and a handful of other examples that he has personally investigated and which he believes are sufficient by themselves to establish the case for a designer. I decided to ask Collins about another parameter—the so-called “cosmological constant”—a phenomenon so bewildering that it even boggles the mind of one of the world’s most skeptical scientists.

THROWING DARTS AT AN ATOM

Nobel-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, an avowed atheist, has expressed amazement at the way the cosmological constant—the energy density of empty space—is “remarkably well adjusted in our favor.”
²²
The constant, which is part of Einstein’s equation for General Relativity, could have had any value, positive or negative, “but from first principles one would guess that this constant should be very large,” Weinberg said.

Fortunately, he added, it isn’t:

If large and positive, the cosmological constant would act as a repulsive force that increases with distance, a force that would prevent matter from clumping together in the early universe, the process that was the first step in forming galaxies and stars and planets and people. If large and negative, the cosmological constant would act as an attractive force increasing with distance, a force that would almost immediately reverse the expansion of the universe and cause it to recollapse.
²³

Either way, life loses—big time. But astonishingly, that’s not what has happened.

“In fact,” Weinberg said, “astronomical observations show that the cosmological constant is quite small, very much smaller than would have been guessed from first principles.”
²⁴

When I asked Collins about this, he told me that the unexpected, counterintuitive, and stunningly precise setting of the cosmological constant “is widely regarded as the single greatest problem facing physics and cosmology today.”

“How precise is it?” I asked.

Collins rolled his eyes. “Well, there’s no way we can really comprehend it,” he said. “The fine-tuning has conservatively been estimated to be at least one part in a hundred million billion billion billion billion billion. That would be a ten followed by fifty-three zeroes. That’s inconceivably precise.”

He was right—I couldn’t imagine a figure like that. “Can you give me an illustration?” I asked.

“Put it this way,” he said. “Let’s say you were way out in space and were going to throw a dart at random toward the Earth. It would be like successfully hitting a bull’s eye that’s one trillionth of a trillionth of an inch in diameter. That’s less than the size of one solitary atom.”

Breathtaking
was the word that came into my mind.
Staggering.
“No wonder scientists have been blown away by this,” I said.

“I’ll tell you what,” Collins said, “in my opinion, if the cosmological constant were the only example of fine-tuning, and if there were no natural explanation for it, then this would be sufficient by itself to strongly establish design.”

I had to agree. The way I saw it, if the universe were put on trial for a charge of having been designed, and the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant were the only evidence introduced by the prosecution, I would have to vote “guilty”—assuming there was no hidden naturalistic explanation. Statistically, this would be a far stronger case than even the DNA evidence that is used to establish guilt in many criminal trials today.

Collins continued. “Now, think about adding together the evidence for just the two factors I’ve discussed so far—the cosmological constant and the force of gravity,” he said. “This would create an unimaginably stronger case. When you combine the two, the fine-tuning would be to a precision of one part in a hundred million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That would be the equivalent of one atom in the entire known universe!”

And Collins wasn’t through. “There are other examples of fine-tuning,” he said. “For instance, there’s the difference in mass between neutrons and protons. Increase the mass of the neutron by about one part in seven hundred and nuclear fusion in stars would stop. There would be no energy source for life.

“And if the electromagnetic force were slightly stronger or weaker, life in the universe would be impossible. Or consider the strong nuclear force. Imagine decreasing it by fifty percent, which is tiny—one part in ten thousand billion billion billion billion, compared to the total range of force strengths.”

“What would happen if you tinkered with it by that amount?”

“Since like charges repel, the strong nuclear force would be too weak to prevent the repulsive force between the positively charged protons in atomic nuclei from tearing apart all atoms except hydrogen,” he said. “And regardless of what they may show on
Star Trek
, you can’t have intelligent life forms built from hydrogen. It simply doesn’t have enough stable complexity.”

I knew Collins could go on and on, but I needed a way to visualize the implications of these increasingly abstract concepts. “Go back to your Martian biosphere illustration,” I said.

“Okay,” he replied. “Set aside the issue of how the biosphere got there in the first place. Let’s say when you found it, there were twelve dials that controlled the conditions inside the dome. Each dial had an incredibly huge range of possible settings. When you departed, you left the dials at random and as a result no life was possible in the biosphere.

“Then you come back a year later. When you look at the dials, you’re amazed to find that each one of them has been carefully calibrated to just the right setting so that life is flourishing in the dome. Twelve dials, twelve different factors—all optimally set for life.

“Do you know what the headline would be in the newspaper the next day? It would say:
extraterrestrial life exists
. We would take that as proof that an intelligent being had landed and set those dials precisely where they needed to be for life.

“And I’m saying that the dials for the fundamental properties of the universe have been set like that. In fact, the precision is far greater. This would be totally unexpected under the theory that random chance was responsible. However, it’s not unexpected at all under the hypothesis that there is a Grand Designer.”

READY, AIM, FIRE!

Few concepts stretch the mind as much as the fine-tuning of the universe. For example, Oxford physicist Roger Penrose said one parameter, the “original phase-space volume,” required fine-tuning to an accuracy of one part in ten billion multiplied by itself one hundred and twenty three times. Penrose remarked that it would be impossible to even write down that number in full, since it would require more zeroes than the number of elementary particles in the entire universe! This showed, he said, “the precision needed to set the universe on its course.”
²⁵

As
Discover
magazine marveled: “The universe is unlikely. Very unlikely.
Deeply, shockingly unlikely
.”
²⁶

In light of the infinitesimal odds of getting all the right dial settings for the constants of physics, the forces of nature, and other physical laws and principles necessary for life, it seems fruitless to try to explain away all of this fine-tuning as merely the product of random happenstance.

“As long as we’re talking about probabilities, then theoretically you can’t rule out the possibility—however remote—that this could occur by chance,” Collins said.

“However, if I bet you a thousand dollars that I could flip a coin and get heads fifty times in a row, and then I proceeded to do it, you wouldn’t accept that. You’d know that the odds against that are so improbable—about one chance in a million billion—that it’s extraordinarily unlikely to happen. The fact that I was able to do it against such monumental odds would be strong evidence to you that the game had been rigged. And the same is true for the fine-tuning of the universe—before you’d conclude that random chance was responsible, you’d conclude that there is strong evidence that the universe was rigged. That is, designed.

“I’ll give you another illustration,” he continued. “Let’s say I was hiking in the mountains and came across rocks arranged in a pattern that spelled out,
welcome to the mountains robin collins
. One hypothesis would be that the rocks just happened to be arranged in that configuration, maybe as the result of an earthquake or rockslide. You can’t totally rule that out. But an alternative hypothesis would be that my brother, who was visiting the mountains before me, arranged the rocks that way.

“Quite naturally, most people would accept the brother theory over the chance theory. Why? Because it strikes us as supremely improbable that the rocks would be arranged that way by chance, but not at all improbable that my brother would place them in that pattern. That’s a quite reasonable assumption.

“In a similar way, it’s supremely improbable that the fine-tuning of the universe could have occurred at random, but it’s not at all improbable if it were the work of an intelligent designer. So it’s quite reasonable to choose the design theory over the chance theory. We reason that way all the time. Were the defendant’s fingerprints on the gun because of a chance formation of chemicals or because he touched the weapon? Jurors don’t hesitate to confidently conclude that he touched the gun if the odds against chance are so astronomical.”

While random chance was insufficient to explain away the anthropic “coincidences,” perhaps there were other alternatives to the conclusion that the universe was the handiwork of a designer. It was time to put some of those to the test.

“What if there’s some undiscovered principle that makes the universe the way it is?” I asked. “Maybe the elusive Theory of Everything that physicists have been seeking for so long will turn out to require the parameters of physics to have exactly the values they do.”

Collins was unperturbed by the idea. “It wouldn’t bother me a bit,” he replied. “It simply moves the improbability of the fine-tuning up one level.”