Chanel, Vuitton, Lauren, Armani…God?:
Design in Our Finely Tuned Universe
Hello again everyone…
I wanted to get this out over the week-end, but I was busy soaring 50 miles per hour through the trees and over valleys 200 feet off the ground suspended from a pulley on a thin cable…!t was a blast, you should try it! (The guys and gals at Alpine Adventures Zip-lining were great!)
New Hampshire is beautiful in the fall…especially when observed dangling from a cable in the air. Every time I observe the beauty inherent in nature, I wonder at the intricacy and detail it encompasses, and the fine tuning required for any life to be sustainable on earth at all.
Did the beauty of nature and life on earth evolve as an accident of nature, or is there reason to think there’s something more behind it’s finely tuned design?
So far we’ve been talking about reasons behind the idea that our universe had a beginning, must have been created, and the creator had to be a personal being.
Today I’ll finally move off this line of reasoning to discuss whether there is good reason to think that the universe was designed. Specifically, I’ll be talking about the fine tuning of the universe.
By ‘fine tuning’ of the universe I mean that things like temperatures, distances, and mathematical constants had to have the precise values they do in order for life to have existed at all…there are many pre-requisites to the possibility of life in the universe.
The principle behind this fine-tuning is called the anthropic principle. This principle basically says that the only kind of universe humans can occupy is a universe similar to the current one. Due to the precise fine tuning of the universe, we can conclude that it was designed from the beginning. The fine tuning we see was put in place to control or govern the process of creation of life.
The purpose of this article is not to debate the possibilities of how God created, how old the universe is, or whether the Big Bang was an actual event or something else occurred at the beginning…the point is that however it happened, the existence of the finely tuned values in the state of the universe indicate that a designer must have been involved.
Dr. Peter Kreeft describes some more specifics in his book ‘Fundamentals of the Faith.’ gives the example of the formation of the carbon molecule. Had temperatures been 1 trillionth of a degree hotter or colder, the carbon molecule, the basis for all life on earth, would never have been created.
Hugh Ross, an astrophysicist, lists over two dozen examples in A “Just Right” Universe: Chapter Fourteen, The Creator and the Cosmos.
Example: The precise # of electrons we have in the universe must be equivalent to the number of protons…to an accuracy of 10 to the 37th power. Otherwise electromagnetic forces would have to overcome gravitational forces in such a way that planets and stars and galaxies would never have formed. (According to the accepted secular theories on the mechanism for formation of these bodies.)
10 to the 37th power is meaningless to me with out an analogy, and Dr. Ross offers one to help us ‘get it’ :
Cover the entire North American Continent with dimes…and pile them to the moon. (About 239,000 miles high). Find 1 billion other continents the same size as North America and pile dimes 239,000 miles high on all of them. Paint one dime red, blindfold a friend, and ask them to pick a dime.
The chances that they randomly pick the right dime is 10 to the 37th power.
The cosmological constant is responsible for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. It is finely-tuned to be within 10 to the 120th power.
There are dozens of parameters that have to be accurate to this kind of precision in order for a life-permitting universe to exist…the gravitational constant, the strong and weak nuclear force constants, the mass of electrons in relation to the mass of protons, the expansion rate of the universe, the average distance between galaxies, the decay rate of protons, the polarity of the water molecule, the way in which stars explode, their distances away from us…and the list goes on.
It’s not just the amounts, or specific numbers, but how they relate to each other that makes our universe work.
Dr. William Craig, in his article “Does God Exist?” cites Roger Penrose of Oxford University in saying “I cannot even recall seeing anything else in physics whose accuracy is known to approach, even remotely, a figure like one part in 10 to the 10th power.”
10 to the 10th power is no where near the accuracy required for just one of the constants necessary for life in our universe.
Given the number of finely tuned constants, even if the universe is 13 or 14 billion years old like modern science suggests (Earth suggested to be 4 or 5 billion), probability theory shows that a life-sustaining universe occurring randomly is basically impossible…and that’s just to get a planet on which life could possibly exist.
So far I’ve said nothing about the beginning of biological life, which is just as complex…and the most strident atheistic evolutionist will even tell you that there is no known mechanism for the origin of organic life…or just how DNA developed it’s complex information system…but we’ll touch on these things another time.
There is no good reason that these constants should have the values they have (unless designed for life) and random chance just doesn’t make sense.
In order to save the appeal to chance, it’s proponents had to come up with the idea that there are an infinite number of universes…a ‘World Ensemble’ of universes… and ours is but one part. With an infinite number, one would have to have the arrangement of finely tuned laws of nature that permitted life.
There is no evidence for this. We have no other universes to observe and measure. Also remember we discussed previously that Borde, Guth and Valenkin have proven that an expanding universe cannot be infinite…and this would apply to the multiverse as well…and with a finite time, there would also have to be a finite number of universes…
That’s enough to chew on for one day…so after leaving a comment (hint) and signing up for updates and your free report on the authenticity of the resurrection (top right margin) make sure you come back next time!
Until Then!
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