Return of the God Hypothesis: Breakthroughs in Physics, Cosmology, and Biology Seeking Evidence for the Existence of God

by Stephen C. Meyer

Appealing to some as yet undiscovered law to explain the fine tuning of the physical constants seems implausible for another related reason. Natural laws by definition describe phenomena that conform to regular or repetitive patterns. Yet the idiosyncratic values of the different physical constants and initial conditions constitute a highly irregular and nonrepetitive ensemble. It seems unlikely, therefore, that any more fundamental laws could explain why all the fundamental constants have exactly the values they do—why, for example, the permittivity constant in Coulomb’s law should have the value 8.85 x 10−12 Coulombs2 per Newton-meter, and the electron mass should have exactly the value of 9.11 x 10−31 kilograms, and the electron charge to mass ratio is exactly 1.76 x 1011 Coulombs per kilogram, and the fine-structure constant should have the value .00729, and the Higgs field vacuum expectation has the value of 246 GeV.17 These constants specify a highly irregular array of values that describe either ratios between completely different types of quantities or completely different quantities (e.g., mass, charge, and energy) or quantities without units at all. As a group, they do not exhibit the kind of regular pattern that is at all likely to be subsumed under a single physical law. Considerations of causal adequacy reinforce the above arguments. In our experience, we have often observed intelligent agents producing finely tuned systems, whether in a digital computer, an i...