Fine-Tuning

Note: Last Updated 7/29/2024.

Gavin Ortlund:

When we look up at the sky on a summer night, observing the moon, the stars, the sounds of insects and owls, the smells, and so on, . . . it feels like music. Many of us . . . have moments where the intricacy and order of the universe we inhabit compels us to think instinctively, “This cannot all be an accident!” Such experiences are generally not dependent on having a science degree. They are common and come in the midst of everyday life from a variety of sources—while watching a Planet Earth documentary, for instance, or visiting Niagara Falls, or seeing an ultrasound picture of your baby growing in the womb. Lots of design arguments play on this perception, without appealing to technical knowledge (sometimes called “naïve teleological arguments”).

     But in the modern era this popular-level perception of design was widely perceived as discredited by various objections raised by David Hume and then by evolutionary science. It is only recently that design arguments have been revitalized in relation to current scientific knowledge, particularly from the realm of physics. What might be called the cutting edge of design arguments appeals to the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, the initial conditions of the universe, and physical constants like the speed of light, the cosmological constant, the gravitational constant, and many others. Unless these were set in exactly the way that they are, with unimaginable precision, the universe could not sustain life in the way that it does. Yet these values do not seem to be physically necessary. We can quite easily imagine our universe being different and thus nonpermitting of life. So the question is, Why are all these constants exactly right? Did we just get lucky?

     Scientific discoveries throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have thus reinforced the common intuition, viewed more skeptically during earlier periods of modernity, that our world is designed. Even some settled atheists have been convinced by these revitalized design arguments. It is not hard to find scientists without religious commitments marveling at the intricacy and exquisite calibration of the world we inhabit, particularly as understood from the standpoint of modern science. The atheist astronomer Fred Hoyle put it memorably in an often repeated quote: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

(Gavin Ortlund, Why God Makes Sense in a World That Doesn’t: The Beauty of Christian Theism, [Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021], pp. 60-62.) Preview.

Gregory of Nazianzus, Archbishop of Constantinople (c. 329-390):

How could this universe have had foundation or constitution, unless God gave all things being and sustains them? No one seeing a beautifully elaborated lyre with its harmonious, orderly arrangement, and hearing the lyre’s music will fail to form a notion of its craftsman-player, to recur to him in thought though ignorant of him by sight.

(Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 28.6; trans. St Gregory of Nazianzus, On God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius, Popular Patristics Series, Number 23, trans. Lionel Wickham, [Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002], p. 41. Cf. NPNF2, 7:290.) See also: ccel.org.

William Paley:

     In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. …there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. …Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.

(William Paley, Natural Theology: Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, [Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1860], pp. 5, 6, 13.)

Note: See further: Abiogenesis (The Origin of Life).

Josh D. McDowell, Sean McDowell:

Imagine you are trekking through the mountains and come across an abandoned cabin. As you approach the cabin, you notice something very strange. Inside, the refrigerator is filled with your favorite food, the temperature is set just as you like it, your favorite song is playing in the background, and all your favorite books, magazines, and DVD’s are sitting on the table. What would you conclude? Since chance would be out of the question, you would likely conclude that someone was expecting your arrival.

     In recent decades, scientists have begun to realize that this scenario mirrors the universe as a whole. The universe seems to have been crafted uniquely with us in mind. “As we look into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked to our benefit,” says physicist Freeman J. Dyson, “it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.” This is why British astronomer Fred Hoyle remarked, “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces speaking about in nature.” Physicists agree that life is balanced on a razor’s edge.

     Consider a couple of examples. First, if the law of gravity varied just slightly, the universe would not be habitable for life. In relation to the other forces in nature, gravity must be fine-tuned to one part in 1040 (that’s one part in 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000). Second, Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking observed that, “If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it even reached its present size.”

     There are actually nineteen such universal constants that must each be perfectly fine tuned. Clearly, the odds against us being here are vanishingly small. In fact, Oxford physicist Roger Penrose concluded that if we jointly considered all the laws of nature that must be fine-tuned, we would be unable to write down such an enormous number since the necessary digits would be greater than the number of elementary particles in the universe.

     The evidence for design is so compelling that Paul Davies, a renowned physicist at Arizona State University, has concluded that the bio-friendly nature of our universe looks like a “fix.” He put it this way: “The cliché that ‘life is balanced on a knife-edge’ is a staggering understatement in this case: no knife in the universe could have an edge that fine.” No scientific explanation for the universe, says Davies, can be complete without accounting for this overwhelming appearance of design. Some try to explain away the fine-tuning by positing the existence of multiple universes, but the empirical evidence for them is nonexistent. The most economical and reliable explanation for why the universe is so precisely fine-tuned is because a Creator—God—made it that way.

(Josh D. McDowell, Sean McDowell, More Than a Carpenter, [Crownhill: Authentic, 2011], pp. 55-57.)

καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria