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January 18 - December 26, 2023
(1) evidence from cosmology suggesting that the material universe had a beginning; (2) evidence from physics showing that from the beginning the universe has been “finely tuned” to allow for the possibility of life; and (3) evidence from biology establishing that since the beginning large amounts of new functional genetic information have arisen in our biosphere to make new forms of life possible—implying, as I had argued before, the activity of a designing intelligence.
Origin-of-life simulation experiments increasingly suggested that simple chemicals do not arrange themselves into complex information-bearing molecules, nor do they move in life-relevant directions—unless, that is, biochemists actively and intelligently guide the process.
As Robert Boyle, one of the most important figures of the scientific revolution and the founder of modern chemistry, explained, the job of the natural philosopher was not to ask what God must have done, but what God actually did.
many of the founders of modern science did not just assume or assert by faith that the universe had been designed by an intelligent agent. They also argued for this hypothesis based on discoveries in their fields of study.
Newton not only viewed gravitational action at a distance as a manifestation of God’s power, but he also made many powerful design arguments based upon other biological and astronomical discoveries. Newton viewed the order described by the laws of nature as a mode of divine action, but he also thought that many specific arrangements of matter (each subject to those laws) gave evidence of the design of an “intelligent and powerful being.”
As John Hedley Brooke has pointed out, Newton thought that “knowledge of God’s power and wisdom could be inferred from the intelligence seemingly displayed in the designs of nature.”
Newton not only had a profoundly theistic philosophy of nature, but he also developed several compelling (at least, at the time) arguments for natural theology—that is, arguments for the existence of God based upon observations of complex systems in the natural world.
Hume advanced a theory of knowledge known as radical empiricism. Empiricism asserts that the observation of the natural world through the five senses offers the only sure path to knowledge. As such, it provides the only reliable source of ideas in our minds.
Medieval Muslim scholars developed one of the most famous versions of the cosmological argument, known as the Kalām argument. It asserted that the universe had a temporal beginning—a proposition that philosophers typically sought to justify by showing the logical or mathematical absurdity of an infinite regress of cause and effect. The argument concluded that the beginning of the physical universe must have resulted from an uncaused first cause that exists independently of the universe.
the Kalām argument deduced that the necessary first cause of the universe must transcend the physical universe (since a cause is necessarily separate from its effects)10 and must be personal (since only a personal agent can act discretely to initiate a new line of causation without its action being caused by a prior set of necessary and sufficient material conditions). Finally, proponents of the Kalām argument equated that first transcendent and personal cause with God.
If the past is infinitely old, then getting from the past to the present would be like trying to climb to the surface of the earth from a hole infinitely deep—from a bottomless pit.
Singh continues: “An eternal universe seemed to strike a chord with the scientific community, because the theory had a certain elegance, simplicity and completeness. If the universe has existed for eternity, then there was no need to explain how it was created, when it was created, why it was created or Who created it. Scientists were particularly proud that they had developed a theory of the universe that no longer relied on invoking God.”
Robert Dicke, a leading Princeton University physicist during the 1950s and 1960s, later explained why a finite universe elicited such knee-jerk philosophical opposition among so many scientists. An infinitely old universe “would relieve us,” he said, “of the necessity of understanding the origin of matter at any finite time in the past.”
Hoyle himself acknowledged that he proposed the steady-state model to circumvent what were to him the obvious theistic implications of the big bang theory.
If the material universe (of mass, energy, space, and time) itself came into existence a finite time ago, then matter and energy do not seem to be good candidates as explanations for the origin of the universe. Clearly, matter and energy could not cause themselves to come into existence before they themselves existed.
Jastrow, who was a religiously agnostic Jewish scientist, discussed the obvious theistic implications of the big bang theory. Though he acknowledged that these implications made him personally uncomfortable, he explained that the theory—with its affirmation of a beginning—seems to portray the origin of the universe in terms that closely match what a biblically informed theologian would expect.
the theory of general relativity implies, as Hawking and Ellis wrote, “that there is a singularity in the past that constitutes, in some sense, a beginning of the universe.”
They then applied several powerful mathematical theorems that Hawking, Ellis, and Penrose had developed to show that in such “a geodesically past incomplete universe” certain mathematical contradictions16 would result if there were no singularities.
If, at some point in the past, space ceased to exist, then there would not at that point have been any place to put anything, whether matter or energy. Indeed, neither matter nor energy can exist in the absence of space and time. Thus, Hawking, Ellis, and Penrose’s singularity proofs (interpreted as a realistic depiction of the history and spatial geometry of the universe) implied that a material universe of infinite density began to exist some finite time ago starting from nothing—or at least from nothing spatial, temporal, material, or physical.
the singularity theorems do not permit one to posit mass-energy or a gravitational field as an eternal, self-existing entity, since “prior to” the singularity neither time nor space existed in our universe.
Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin have shown that all cosmological models in which expansion occurs—including inflationary cosmology,39 multiverses,40 and the oscillating and cosmic egg models—are subject to the BGV theorem.41 Consequently, Vilenkin argues that evidence for a beginning is now almost unavoidable.
No proof can establish any conclusion with certainty, since all proofs must make some assumptions.
Over the years, as Hoyle thought more about the discovery of the exact resonance level of carbon that he had predicted, and especially about all the factors that had to be just right to make carbon relatively easy to produce inside stars, he became convinced that some intelligence had orchestrated the precise balance of forces and factors in nature to make the universe life-permitting.
Longley, like Polkinghorne and Hoyle, argued that the theistic design hypothesis provided an obvious and commonsense explanation for the anthropic fine-tuning evidence. Attempts to explain the evidence by invoking chance alone or multiple other universes (more on that in Chapter 16) seemed to him to betray a kind of metaphysical special pleading, even desperation.
a life-permitting universe depends crucially on its precise expansion rate. Since the discovery of the red shift of the light coming from distant galaxies, astronomers have discovered that if the universe were initially expanding even a smidgeon faster or slower,15 either stable galaxies would not have formed in the universe because matter would have dissipated too quickly for galaxies to congeal or else the universe would have quickly collapsed in on itself. Cosmologists refer to the first scenario as the “heat death of the universe” and the second scenario as the “big crunch.” Neither
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the expansion rate in the earliest stages of the history of the universe would have depended upon the density of mass and energy at those early times. And the density of the universe one nanosecond (a billionth of a second) after the beginning had to have the precise value of 1024 kilograms per cubic meter. If the density were larger or smaller by only 1 kilogram per cubic meter, galaxies would never have developed.
proponents of what came to be commonly known as the “weak anthropic principle” (WAP) argued that we human beings should not be surprised to find ourselves living in a universe suited for life, because if the universe were otherwise, we wouldn’t be here to observe it.
no known law of physics can explain the initial distribution of matter and energy at the beginning of the universe, since the laws describe how various forces or fields act upon specific material conditions once those conditions are present. They do not explain how the conditions arose in the first place; they presuppose them.
in our experience, events or systems that exhibit both extreme improbability and functional specificity invariably result from the activity of a designing mind.
if the physical parameters of the universe were produced by a random or mindless process, we would expect to find a life-prohibiting (non-functional) universe since the overwhelming majority of the possible combinations of physical parameters preclude life.
Scientists have become increasingly, and in some quarters uncomfortably, aware that there is at least one appearance of design in biology that has not been explained by natural selection or any other purely naturalistic mechanism: the information present in even the simplest living cells.
DNA stores the assembly instructions for building the many crucial proteins and protein machines that service and maintain even the most primitive one-celled organisms. It follows that building a living cell in the first place requires assembly instructions stored in DNA or some equivalent molecule.
The specified information in the cell also points to intelligent design not just as an adequate explanation, but as the best explanation (Fig. 9.12). Why? Experience shows that large amounts of specified information invariably originate from an intelligent source.
The fossil record on our planet documents the origin of major innovations in biological form and function. These episodes—if we take the fossil record at face value—often occur abruptly or discontinuously, meaning that newly arising forms bear little resemblance to what existed earlier.
The discovery that DNA stores information as a four-character digital code raised questions about the efficacy of random mutational changes in producing such information—or at least enough of it to produce a novel protein structure and therefore any major innovation during the history of life.
most functional proteins are made of hundreds of amino acids. Even a relatively short protein of, say, 150 amino acids represents one sequence among an astronomically large number of other possible sequence combinations—approximately 10195. That is an enormous number, the digit 1 followed by 195 zeroes. Intuitively, this suggests that the odds of finding even a single functional sequence—a working gene or protein—as the result of random genetic mutations may be prohibitively small, even taking into account the time available to the evolutionary process.
In biology, survival depends upon maintaining present function. Natural selection, therefore, cannot look forward or devise plans that anticipate future needs or desirable outcomes.
Epistemology is the subdiscipline in philosophy concerned with the basis of knowledge and questions about “how we know what we know.” Epistemic support refers to any evidence, axiom, or chain of reasoning that provides justification for a given proposition or belief.
by systematically evaluating the explanatory power of competing hypotheses and by eliminating those that lack causal adequacy or plausibility given our background knowledge, alternative hypotheses can often be eliminated, sometimes leaving only one plausible explanation. In such cases, the method of inference to the best explanation can help scientists arrive at a definitive, if not absolutely certain, conclusion.
if it’s possible that one pattern of evidence might provide reason for affirming naturalism over theism, then it’s also logically possible that a different pattern of evidence might give us better reason to affirm theism over naturalism.
recent scientific discoveries concerning biological and cosmological origins might be “just what we should expect” if a transcendent and intelligent designer acted to produce life and the universe. Since these same observations of nature may not be what we would expect assuming scientific materialism (or other nontheistic worldviews), the God hypothesis could in principle provide the best metaphysical explanation of the relevant scientific evidence.
scientists rarely prove theories (or laws) with absolute certainty from empirical evidence. Consequently, deductive entailment involves a far stronger standard of epistemic support than empirical science can attain. And if the natural sciences can’t attain that standard, then natural theology (based as it is upon observations of the natural world) can’t either.
Arguably, proponents of an oscillating-universe and eternally chaotic inflation models have tacitly acknowledged the “unexpectedness” of a finite universe, given a naturalistic worldview, by the elaborate, and arguably contrived, cosmological models they have formulated to avoid the conclusion of an ultimate beginning.
it makes no sense metaphysically to say that the universe of space and time, matter and energy began to exist a finite time ago and also to affirm that “before that” (i.e., in time) time or space or matter or energy already existed as well. Since space, matter, and energy are fundamental features of the universe, the proposition “The universe began to exist a finite time ago” implies that those features of the universe came into existence as well.
Many philosophers think that there is no compelling a priori reason to regard either a naturalistic or a theistic worldview as much more probable than the other.17 If so, we can also employ Bayesian reasoning to affirm that the probability of the theistic hypothesis given the evidence of a cosmic beginning is greater than the probability of basic naturalism given that same evidence.
because the evidence indicates that the universe has not existed infinitely, but instead began to exist, it would seem to require—by the principles of causality and sufficient reason—a cause. Saying otherwise undermines one of the basic presuppositions of scientific investigation and indeed of reason itself, namely, that “whatever begins to exist must have a cause.”
If at some finite point in the past the physical universe did not exist, then a pantheistic god would not have existed either. If the pantheistic god did not exist before the universe began, it could not cause the universe to begin to exist. Thus, pantheism does not meet the test of causal adequacy.
we lack experience of undirected material processes producing obviously finely tuned systems—ones exhibiting both extreme improbability and functional specificity. Computers, engines, meaningful sequences of letters, and recipes arise from purposeful “fine-tuners,” not undirected processes.
since our experience affirms that finely tuned systems arise from intelligent activity, and since naturalism denies the existence of an intelligent agent before the beginning of the universe, basic naturalism lacks recourse to an entity with the causal powers to produce the effect in question. By contrast, theism and deism affirm the existence of a transcendent intelligent agent prior (either ontologically or temporally) to the beginning of the universe. Thus, theism and deism posit an agent with causal powers—the “right skill set”—to produce the fine tuning of the universe from its beginning,
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since we have a greater reason to expect an exquisitely finely tuned universe capable of hosting life given theism than naturalism, the observation of a finely tuned life-permitting universe provides greater support for theism. We can again state that conclusion using Bayesian symbolism: P(T | Eft) >> P(Nb | Eft). In other words, theism (or deism) provides a better explanation for the cosmic fine tuning than does basic naturalism.
