PRIVILEGED PLANET
BY GONZALEZ AND RICHARDS
Chapter 15
A Universe Designed for Discovery
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” - William Shakespeare, Hamlet Act I Scene V, 185-186
DISCERNING DESIGN
Near the beginning of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's 1968 sci-fi masterpiece, 2001. A Space Odyssey, there is a scene that is at once inspiring and terrifying. Human beings have made their first, small steps into space, and the United States has established a colony on the Moon. During their explorations, astronauts unexpectedly uncover a black, domino-like "monolith," buried beneath the lunar surface. When a beam of Sun alights upon the mysterious object for the first time in some four million years, it triggers the transmission of a signal toward Jupiter. For obvious reasons, the United States keeps the discovery secret.
Although no one knows much about the object, one character quickly announces, without doubt or irony, "This is the first evidence of intelligent life off the Earth." We later learn that the monolith has the geometric proportions of one by four by nine (the squares of the first three prime numbers), but we never see any intelligent life other than human beings. In fact, we never learn the purpose of the strange object, even after astronauts discover a giant replica orbiting Jupiter. Still, at no point is there any controversy about the origin of these strange structures. Even initially, no one worries that the lunar monolith might be just a new type of rock. No viewer feels any discomfort that perhaps the characters are jumping to conclusions and that, since they haven't seen any aliens, and know nothing of their intentions, they had best suspend judgment about the origin of the object. No one complains that since they can't falsify the belief that the object is designed, they can't infer that it was. Everyone can tell that it bears the hallmarks of intelligent design—without argument, intricate reasoning, probability calculations, or a forensic investigation. Everyone simply sees that the object is designed.1
Nor do we need strange monoliths being distributed by standoffish aliens to detect design countless times every day. You're doing it right now, simply by reading this text. Even if you were looking at a text in a language you didn't understand, you would still know it was text and not, say, a pattern formed from decaying paper. We usually don't need to know the meaning, function, or purpose of an object to know it is designed. We rarely even know how we do it. We just do it.
For example, when modern Britons first saw Stonehenge on the Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, England, they all knew someone had built it. In its discovered state, it was little more than a disheveled circle of large, rough-hewn rocks. (They have since been tidied up a bit.) But almost everyone recognized that it was more than the product of wind and erosion. Research in the last few decades has revealed that Stonehenge is aligned with seasonal events like solstices, and that its builders may have used it to predict astronomical events like eclipses. But even without this knowledge of its purpose, virtually everyone, to put it philosophically, "infers design" when they see it.
Archaeologists commonly use design reasoning, sifting run-of-the-mill stones from ancient tools, arrowheads, and other artifacts. Design plays an important role in a number of other specialized sciences, such as forensics, fraud detection, cryptography (cracking encoded messages), and notably, SETI. Individuals are sentenced to life in prison or execution on the basis of a scientific judgment that a death was the result of criminal design rather than mere accident. And everyone assumes that, at least in principle, SETI researchers will be able to sift out intelligent extraterrestrial radio signals from background radio noise.
In these examples the designer detected is the natural variety — either a human being or some extraterrestrial creature, the latter still natural or creaturely even if novelists and filmmakers enjoy endowing them with semi-divine qualities. But for most of human history, most individuals have inferred design when viewing certain natural objects and nature as a whole.
In the West, despite the skeptical arguments of philosophers like David Hume, most have continued to believe that nature is designed, at least in part because of the evidence of the senses. In the English-speaking world, William Paley's famous argument in his Natural Theology captured this common intuition. If you were to find a watch lying in a heath, with its intricate and purposeful arrangement of parts, Paley argued, you would reasonably infer that an intelligent agent was responsible for it. As recently as a century ago, his book was still required reading for all undergraduates at Cambridge University.
But times have changed. Charles Darwin is widely touted as having made design explanations superfluous in the biological realm, by proposing that natural selection acting on random variations could mimic the work of an intelligent designer. And the "official" view now among scientists and academics is that the notion of intelligent design is either unscientific or at least superfluous to the practice of all natural science.
[YA LET’S GIVE THEM TEN THOUSAND LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET, PUT THEM IN A BAG TEN FEET UP, OPEN THE BAG, LET THEM FALL TO THE GROUND. LET’S DO THIS 100 THOUSAND TIMES OR A MILLION TIMES, AND SEE IF THEY FORM A CHAPTER OF A BOOK - Keith Hunt]
If one bases one's judgments on the evidence we have discussed in this book, however, it should come as no surprise that we think that conclusion was premature. With that evidence clearly before us, we are finally situated to consider the broader question: What is the best explanation for the origin and features of the universe we have described?2 We have argued at length that the correlation between habitability and measurability contradicts the Copernican Principle. But we think it also challenges the assumption that the findings of natural science inevitably confirm naturalism.
SEPARATING THE CHAFF FROM THE WHEAT
In 1967, a year before the release of 200I: A Space Odyssey, Cambridge University graduate student and radio astronomer Jocelyn Bell detected an extraterrestrial radio transmission that consisted of steadily timed pulses. She and her thesis adviser quickly found four sources of such signals. The signals' period, and regularity were dissimilar to those with radio signals from then-known natural sources, suggesting that they had an intelligent origin. The signal and others like it were dubbed, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, LGMs (for Little Green Men). Continued research, however, revealed that the signals had come from spinning neutron stars, the remains of supemovae, which they named pulsars. Although Bell had discovered a new kind of star, she had not detected the signal of an ETI.3
Although official SETI research has had a few exciting false alarms, it has not yet had the fortune of detecting an intelligent extraterrestrial signal. But it's easy to imagine what would qualify. In the movie Contact, based on Carl Sagan's fictional novel about SETI, researchers receive a repeating signal of beats and pauses, signifying the sequence of prime numbers from 2 to 101. The viewers and the characters know they have found what they were searching for.
In both these cases, researchers trusted their intuitions. But we can't always do this when it comes to inferring design — especially in natural science, where we try to minimize the negative effects of subjective bias. While we shouldn't assume that all intuitive judgments are false, sometimes they are false. We occasionally get it wrong, royally and embarrassingly wrong. Everyone was right to conclude that the black monolith in 2001 wasn't just a rock. We're surely right to believe that Egypt's pyramids did not evolve from sand dunes. And you're right to think that the black scribbles on this page convey the ideas of human authors. But Kepler was wrong when he thought inhabitants had made the Moon's craters. Percival Lowell was wrong to think Martians had constructed canals. UFO enthusiasts are surely wrong to think that some alien race is responsible for the well-known Face-on-Mars, and children are probably wrong to think that clouds really are designed to look like Disney characters. Still, most of the time, in most situations, when our faculties are working properly, we infer design reliably.
But we want to avoid "false positives," for although we humans are adept and inveterate pattern detectors, we're also pattern imposers. So how do we separate the chaff from the wheat?
CHANCE, NECESSITY, AND DESIGN
Any event or object submits to a few basic types of causal explanations: chance, necessity, design, or some combination of the three. On these three categories hinge the most important disputes in science and philosophy. Within the world, if an event is regular and repetitive, we are prone to attribute it to natural "necessity" —that is, natural law. Because the repetitive signal Jocelyn Bell received was orderly, she thought it might have come from an intelligent source. But she soon realized that it was the result of a natural, law-like activity. Given that a neutron star has certain physical characteristics, and that it is spinning at a certain rate, it will emit a repetitive, pulsing signal, like a lighthouse with a rotating lamp. Bell didn't need to postulate an intelligent agent to explain her discovery.
As we noted in the previous chapter, if an actual event is not necessary, then it is contingent. But a contingent event can be the result of chance or of intelligent design. If you dump out a box full of Scrabble letters, the law of gravity is responsible for the letters falling to the floor. But gravity doesn't determine that the letters be in any particular order. We would normally attribute the particular configuration of the letters to chance.4 On the other hand, if you arrange them to spell out a sentence, their order will take a particular configuration because of design. But in both cases, the specific order of the letters on the floor will be a contingency. So how do we separate chance and design?
A common mistake is to assume that the argument for design is merely a matter of calculating probabilities or complexities. The more improbable or complex an event is, many suppose, the less likely that it is the product of chance and the more likely it is the result of intelligent design. For astronomically low probabilities, this might work. But the fact that an event is merely improbable or that a structure is complex gives little justification for inferring design. After all, improbable events —at least when viewed in isolation —happen all the time by chance. The world is a big place. It has vast "probabilistic resources" at its disposal. Lots of stuff happens. Think how improbable it is that you should be reading this book at just this time. What are the chances that the particular tree used to make the pages of this book should be your book and not someone else's? Quite slim. Flip a coin one thousand times, and you've just participated in an enormously improbable event. (If you doubt it, just try to repeat the same sequence of heads and tails.) Nevertheless, there's no reason to suppose that that event was intentionally planned or contrived.
This is why an argument that complex life is rare in the universe does not by itself allow us to conclude that it must be designed. Since the universe has vast opportunities and locations, such rarity might indicate simply that life is a rare, chance occurrence. For this reason, Don Brownlee and Peter Ward can argue in Rare Earth that complex life is rare in the universe, without concluding that the universe was designed.5 The rarity of habitable conditions and complex life itself weighs against the idea that such life flows inevitably from the laws of physics and chemistry. But that rarity alone might suggest chance or design.
Complexity, in some cases a synonym for improbability, is equally ambiguous. If you rake up a pile of leaves, the pile will be enormously complex. If the wind blows it apart, it would be almost impossible for even the most industrious and clever team of engineers to reconstruct the pile as it was before. Similarly, if a chimp spends several hours typing on a laptop, he will produce an immensely complex jumble of letters. But in neither case will intelligent design have played a significant role.
At the same time, complexity, or low probability, usually has something to do with detecting design. It's often a necessary condition, even if it's not a sufficient one. One of the reasons the SETI researchers in Contact attribute the string of prime numbers to ETIs is that the sequence is improbable. We know of no natural process that generates such a sequence. And what are the odds of that sequence just happening by chance? But mere improbability is not really the issue, since any non-repetitive pattern of radio signals is improbable. So how did they tell the difference?
A SUITABLE PATTERN
What often seems to be required is the combination of low probability (or complexity) and some sort of suitable pattern, which mathematician and philosopher William Dembski calls a specification.6 When we correctly infer design, it is often because of the presence of these two properties, improbability (or complexity) and specification. Dembski argues that this joint property—specified complexity—is a hallmark of intelligent agency.
Think of Mount Rushmore. Why do we recognize that the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Lincoln were carved into the side of the mountain by skillful sculptors but do not think the rubble of rocks below them was intentionally assembled? Both are compatible with the laws of physics, but neither is determined by them. Both the faces and the pile of rocks are complex. But only the faces tightly conform to a pattern that we recognize as meaningful —namely, the likenesses of four American presidents. In fact, even if you didn't know what these presidents looked like, you would still recognize that the object was a sculpture and not the product of wind and erosion. It is apparent that some intelligent agent (or agents) chose this particular rock shape from the myriad possibilities available.
But the pattern also has to be sufficiently tight. There is an unusual mountain in the New Mexico Rockies called Hermit's Peak. It juts unexpectedly from the ground, seemingly unrelated to the mountains around it. From a distance, and from just the right angle, it vaguely resembles the profile of Abraham Lincoln as if he were lying on his back, especially to climbers who have been drinking too much beer in the hot sun. But no
……
Figure 15.1: The importance of a tight specification. NASA's Viking 1 orbiter took an image of an apparent "Face-on-Mars" in 1976 (left); but the appearance of a face was the result of low resolution and lighting angle. The black dots, one creating a "nostril" on the face, are artifacts of the imaging process. In the much higher resolution image taken by the Mars Global Surveyor in 1998 (right), the structure loses any resemblance to a face.
……
one seriously entertains the possibility that Hermit's Peak was a secret pork-barrel project of the Parks Service or Department of Interior. (Admittedly, the mountain is suspiciously close to Roswell, but that's another story.) The match between it and Lincoln's face is too loose. The same is true of the famous Face-on-Mars. It looks a little bit like a face from a certain angle, with the right camera resolution and lighting; but in other conditions, it doesn't. It lacks the requisite specificity.
In addition, for a pattern to reliably indicate design, it will need to be relevantly independent of the event or structure in question. Otherwise, we could just read a pattern into anything, the way we do with clouds or Rorschach blots.
When scientists imaginatively read a pattern into their data, it's called cherry-picking. With a large enough body of data, it's possible to pull out isolated bits that conform to a pattern. But when one looks at the data as a whole, the pattern dissolves. The recent film A Beautiful Mind illustrates this point nicely. It tells the story of Nobel laureate John Nash, in his descent into paranoid schizophrenia. As a result of his disease, he begins to see coded Soviet messages embedded in mass print media where none really exist.
Dembski gives another example that illustrates the important distinction between a real pattern and a fake one. If an archer draws a small target on a wall, stands back twenty yards, and puts five arrows into the bull's-eye, we will infer that he is skillful—that is, that the event exhibits masterful design. The bull's-eye is the pattern, and it is relevantly independent of the firing of the arrows. Moreover, the target isn't huge. If it were, the pattern match would not be tight enough, since it would be too easy for the archer to hit the bull's-eye. On the other hand, if the archer shoots one shot at a large, blank wall, and then paints the target around the arrow, the pattern will match. No matter how tight the match, however, it's just a fabrication, since the pattern isn't independent of the event. Therefore we could not determine whether the archer is skillful.
When we infer design, we invariably make use of important background knowledge that enables us to recognize a suitable pattern when we see one. The SETI researchers in Contact would not have recognized that the prime number sequence was an intelligent signal if they had not known about prime numbers. The mathematically untutored might never have realized that the transmission wasn't random.
Of course, more can be said about how we detect design.
For example, many patterns have additional markers that increase our confidence that they are designed. Philosopher of science Del Ratzsch notes that, historically, arguments for the design of certain natural structures have "almost always involved value," to which we attach meaning, and which is habitually associated with mind and intentions.7 Such value is difficult to define, but we usually know it when we see it.
Art and music have a value that trash and mere noise lack. A functioning car has a value lacking in a pile of scrap metal. Similarly, a living organism, with its interlocking complex-ity and myriad functions, has an intrinsic value that inanimate objects lack, just as a fine-tuned habitable universe has an intrinsic value that an uninhabitable one would lack. So when we infer design, we often make a qualitative judgment that has a positive and a negative aspect. We judge that chance and blind natural law are unlikely or incapable of producing certain events or objects, and we discern certain features, such as value, that we tend to associate with intelligent agents.
A COSMIC DESIGN
We have to adapt this explanation a bit, since detecting design within the natural world can be different from detecting the design of the natural world itself. We normally determine that something is designed by contrasting it with what natural laws and chance can do on their own. Designed objects tend to have what Del Ratzsch calls counterflow. They contrast with the way nature will go if left to operate freely. If events or objects are designed, they will stand out in relief against the background of nature's normal structures and activities. This counterflow was at least partly the reason that the lunar colonists in 2001 identified the monolith as an artifact rather than, say, a geometrically gifted rock. Typical rocks tend to have a more, well, "natural" shape. Unlike the monolith, lunar rocks, and large rocks in general, don't have perfect, geometric angles. We sometimes see perfect geometric shapes in nature at the microscopic level in quartz and other pure minerals. And we see spherical structures like planets and stars at the macroscopic level. A large, black, perfectly geometric rectangle at the "human scale," however, stands out against the more irregular background lunar surface, and exhibits features that we tend to associate with intelligent agents.
But how do we make such a contrast when trying to determine the origin of nature and the natural laws themselves, since we don't have such a background contrast? In fact, as already noted, within the natural world, we tend to distinguish between events and objects that are the product of natural necessity and events and objects that are designed.
So how can we tell that nature and its laws themselves are designed, are fine-tuned? What is the relevant contrast against which we discern a meaningful pattern?
Whether we realize it or not, in evaluating the apparent fine-tuning of the universe, we are distinguishing between logical and natural "necessity." When scientists talk about natural necessity, they're referring to what will happen given, say, the law of gravity, as long as no agent interferes. For instance, if you lift a ball off the floor, you haven't violated the law of gravity; you've just interfered with its normal course of operation. But there is nothing about the law of gravity that is necessary in the logical sense. No principle of logic requires gravity to be the way it is. The inverse square law does not have the same status as 2 + 3 = 5 or the claim, "All bachelors are unmarried." The law of gravity did not have to obtain, or to have the actual properties it has. Or to put it differently, there could have been objects that obey a different attractive force from gravity as it is in our universe. There are other possible worlds in which gravity (or some counterpart to gravity) has different characteristics.
When we say the laws of physics appear fine-tuned, what we're saying is that in contrast to the many other possible universes in its "universe neighborhood," ours has just the laws that make it habitable. We're contrasting the laws in the actual universe with other, similar (albeit hypothetical) universes with slightly different laws, as well as with the endless sea of chaotic
……
Figure 15.2: Philosopher and mathematician William Dembski has done seminal work in formalizing important aspects of how we detect the activity of intelligent agents.
……
and disorderly universes that might have existed. We're also recognizing an important distinction between habitable and uninhabitable universes. (We implied this in Chapter Thirteen, but did not make it explicit.) The actual, habitable universe stands out against the many similar but uninhabitable possible ones. The more we learn, the more we realize that if we were just to pick a universe's properties at random, we would almost never stumble across a habitable one. To use Dembski's terms, our universe and our place and time within it appear specified to make possible that most complex of empirical phenomena—technological civilization. Most hypothetical universes in our universe neighborhood do not.
Some objects and events submit to exact probability calculations. Many, including the universe as a whole, might not (unless we restrict the domain of possible universes under consideration). For now, let's assume that we can't determine the exact improbability of the fine-tuning of fundamental laws and constants, and that we can only compare our universe with the range of possible universes in its "neighborhood." That is, we can compare it with other possible universes in which the fundamental constants are just slightly different. This comparison leads to the strong impression that the range of inhospitable universes vastly exceeds the range of hospitable ones in this neighborhood.
A common objection to this argument is that no matter how "improbable" the existence of our actual universe, it's no more improbable than the other possible ones. We can now see why this is not a persuasive objection. It's not a simple improbability that leads us to believe there's something fishy that needs explaining. It's the presence of a telling pattern, a pattern we have some reason to associate with intelligent agency. There is a famous joke about a man who comes home early to find his wife in bed and his sleazy next-door neighbor naked in the bedroom closet. When the husband interrogates him, the neighbor nonchalantly replies, "Everybody's gotta be someplace." Now the reason no one would accept this wily use of probability theory is that there is a meaningful, and in this case highly suspicious, pattern of circumstances.
Related to the crucial role of meaningful patterns, as we mentioned above, is that arguments for design usually involve some tacit judgment of value. When considering universes, everyone recognizes, unless they're trying to avoid a conclusion they find distasteful, that a habitable universe containing intelligent observers has an intrinsic value that an uninhabitable one lacks. Living beings have some value, however difficult to describe, that inanimate objects don't have. That value redounds to a universe that allows for the existence of complex life. Theorists tacitly admit that they share this judgment when they try to explain away the fact that our universe appears fine-tuned for the existence of complex life.
THE CORRELATION AS A MEANINGFUL PATTERN
Of course, this argument is quite abstract: we have to compare the properties of the actual universe with other possible ones. This is not a fatal flaw, but perhaps it's a deficiency, since we have only one actual universe to observe. Our comparisons must be mediated by theoretical judgments about other possible universes. In contrast, the correlation between habitability and measurability is more empirical, since it allows comparisons within the observable universe. Taking the universe as a given, we can compare and contrast the conditions required for habitability and measurability, and can, at least in theory, make more or less specific calculations about their individual probabilities. We have a large universe with many diverse configurations of planets, stars, and galaxies. Highly habitable and measurable environments stand out in contrast with most other regions of the universe.
It's because these conditions are highly improbable, or at least quite rare, that we can see that the correlation forms an interesting pattern. If the universe were perfectly homogenous in this regard, and everywhere compatible with observers and observing, the most we could say is that the universe is generally open to scientific discovery and that it is, in some sense, "rationally transparent."8 This might be suggestive, but we wouldn't have anything tangible to contrast with our immediate surroundings. As it is, we know that the laws of physics and initial conditions, themselves fine-tuned, are compatible with a wide range of local conditions, only a few of which are habitable. It's intrinsically interesting, and surprising, to find that those few habitable places are also the ones most conducive to diverse types of scientific discovery.
As we noted above, to infer design reliably, normally a pattern must be independent from the event or object in question. We must guard against reading a pattern off of an event, or artificially imposing a pattern on it. For instance, there is a matching pattern between the presence of habitable environments and life. We will only find life in habitable settings. Moreover, these settings are exceedingly rare. Nevertheless, the two elements are obviously dependent, since life will by necessity only exist in areas where it is possible. No one should be surprised to find living beings restricted to environments compatible with their existence, to recall the Weak Anthropic Principle. The situation might be the result of design, but this pattern alone provides inadequate evidence for that conclusion.
In contrast, there's no obvious reason to suppose that habitable environments would also be the ones most conducive to diverse types of scientific discovery. Being habitable and being measurable are distinct properties. We could compile separate lists of the properties that contribute to habitability and those that contribute to measurability. We could analyze one without ever making reference to the other. There is no logically necessary connection between the two.
Moreover, the high degree to which our local environment is congenial to scientific discovery can't be attributed to a selection effect in the same way that habitability alone sometimes can be.9 While the conditions required for habitability provide for this high degree of measurability, this capacity to measure was itself rarely if ever necessary for our existence. For instance, having perfect solar eclipses or stable polar ice deposits or tree rings, or being able to view the stars or determine their temperature and composition, or having access to the cosmic background radiation was irrelevant to the needs of ancient man. That is, knowledge derived from such phenomena provided no survival advantage to our ancestors.
If we did not know otherwise, in fact, we might even expect that the habitability of an environment would detract from its measurability. For instance, intergalactic space, which is obviously low on the scale for habitability, is "better" for seeing distant galaxies than is the surface of a planet with an atmosphere. We might suspect that this is generally true. An Aristotle or a Ptolemy might reasonably have conjectured that a setting with all the conditions for life probably will hinder our knowledge of the universe. But when we combine the various phenomena that need measuring and observing, it turns out that the opposite is the case.
In a sense, we're surprised to discover that these conditions correlate in the actual universe. This discovery calls for an explanation beyond an appeal to blind chance or necessity. It's at least a striking coincidence. As Agatha Christie's detective heroine, Miss Marple, wisely observes, "A coincidence is always worth noticing. You can always discard it later if it is just a coincidence."10 That is, if it's just due to chance. But the correlation between habitability and measurability seems to be the result of more than mere chance. On the contrary, it is a peculiar and telling pattern.
One reason we often prefer an explanation to its competitors is that it resolves our sense of surprise. It offers what philosopher John Leslie calls a "tidy explanation."11
Design provides just such a tidy explanation here. Think of it this way: If the physical universe were designed so that any observers would find themselves in an environment conducive to many diverse scientific discoveries, then the correlation would be just what they would have expected.
Although this evidence might not prove that the cosmos was designed, it would surely confirm it. To put it another way, if we assume that the universe is designed at least in part to allow intelligent observers to make discoveries, the correlation between life and discovery we observe is what we would expect. In contrast, if the cosmos exists by chance and if intelligent observers like human beings are simply a rare and purposeless dross in that indifferent cosmos, we would not expect this. It would be an inexplicable fluke. Whatever the exact probabilities, clearly the correlation is much more likely given design than given chance (which here means "no design"). A universe designed for discovery resolves our surprise. Shrugging our shoulders and chalking it up to chance, or some impersonal and unintended process, does not.
The (undesigned) multiverse scenario is also deficient, since it does not make the existence of any particular kind of universe more likely. In fact, it's utterly indiscriminate. No matter what kind of universe existed —a pure hydrogen universe, a black hole universe, an utterly chaotic universe —it would be equally consistent with the hypothesis of a world ensemble (of course, no one would be around to form the hypothesis, but that's another matter). Even most of its habitable universes would not contain habitable oases for observers that are also the best overall places for observing.
Not so with design. We all recognize an intrinsic interest and value in a discoverable universe consistent with complex, living observers like ourselves, which would be lacking in these other universes. Like winning the lottery twice in a row, to find those observers just where they can best make diverse discoveries is doubly telling. This is the sort of universe that an intelligent agent would have some interest in designing.12 It's a fishy pattern, and we know it.
In this case, the pattern we detect has apparently been transmitted through natural laws and initial conditions, although laws and conditions that allow for a significant degree of freedom at the local level. The design, so far as we can tell, is embedded or encoded in the laws and initial conditions themselves. In this case, the artifact of intelligence is the cosmos itself. Although this differs from our usual way of detecting design within the world, there's no reason in principle that we cannot detect design transmitted by laws.
Imagine if, in 2030, the United States and China become bitter enemies, and through a complicated turn of events, complicated as only international relations can be, the countries move to the brink of war. On Christmas Eve, American and Chinese diplomats meet in Jerusalem to begin their final, fragile round of negotiations. At midnight in Jerusalem, however, while diplomats are reaching for another pot of coffee, some Israeli astronomers notice a striking new pattern of craters on the Moon. Focusing their telescopes, they resolve a group of identical craters, which very precisely spells out "Glory to God in the highest, and on Earth, peace among those whom he favors!" in both English and Mandarin. The Chinese and American astronomers confirm that the craters were formed by simultaneous impact from a dense cluster of asteroids moving in normal trajectories through the Solar System. Moreover, so far as they can tell, the pattern was mediated through natural laws and the initial conditions of the Big Bang. The asteroids hadn't been perturbed from their normal courses. Nevertheless, everyone would still recognize a setup. Such highly specified crater configurations are not merely rare but unique, the English and Mandarin languages are clearly independent of the impacts, and the crater pattern matches them very closely. Moreover, the timing of the message's formation fits tightly with world events. To put it somewhat differently, the event is much more likely if we assume a setup.
Similarly, habitable environments are exceedingly rare. The fact that they are also the best overall places for scientific discovery forms a relevantly independent pattern. So we have good reason to suspect that things have been intentionally arranged, even if this came about through the interaction of natural laws and initial conditions.
The correlation not only suggests design but also design that bears a specific purpose. Detecting design is often easier than discerning purpose or meaning. For instance, museums often house artifacts that are clearly designed, although the purposes of the artifacts have been lost to antiquity. Similarly, the American colonists in 2001: A Space Odyssey knew they were dealing with an alien artifact, even though they had no idea what it was or what it did.
Nevertheless, detecting a purpose usually enhances our confidence that something is designed. For example, a detective may be fairly certain that a husband murdered his wife. Still, discovering that the husband had recently taken out a large life insurance policy on his wife will increase the detective's suspicion.
With the correlation, the pattern we discern is not in an object but a particular situation, but this does not prevent us from seeing the pattern. The first, low-budget season of Star Trek contains an episode called "Arena." The story involves an advanced alien race, the Metrons, who capture Captain Kirk as well as the captain of another alien vessel, of the Gorn race. As punishment for invading their space, the Metrons transport Kirk and the Gorn captain to an uninhabited planet to fight to the death, telling them that they—the Metrons—will provide the weapons. But once transported, Kirk and the Gorn captain see no obvious weapons other than large rocks.
The lizard-like Gorn is extremely strong, but Kirk seems somewhat brighter. Before long, Kirk notices a strange abundance of certain minerals such as diamonds, sulfur, potassium nitrate (saltpeter), and coal. "This place is a mineralogist's dream!" he exclaims, dismayed that he can find nothing as simple and useful as a large club.
But eventually he realizes that all the ingredients for gunpowder are present, along with the hardest known substance —diamonds —for projectiles. Rather than supplying him with ready-made weapons, the Metrons have provided the ingredients, which require him to apply his own ingenuity. Once he recognizes a set-up, he begins searching for the rest of the materials he needs. He quickly finds a felicitously shaped hollow tree trunk, which allows him to construct a cannon. With one shot, Kirk wounds the Gorn, but he decides not to kill him. He thus saves himself while impressing the Metrons with his resourcefulness and capacity for mercy.
Although Kirk's intelligence was a prerequisite for success, his surroundings clearly have been set up for this purpose. In fact, the situation is a more fitting challenge than a simple cache of weapons would be, because Kirk must use his intellectual skills to forge a weapon himself. But no amount of genius would have allowed Kirk to make a cannon without the right ingredients.
Now, the presence of so many disparate elements, all necessary for making a cannon, is not just a coincidence. We know this in part because, of the countless planets in the universe, few are so well stocked, even those that look strikingly like certain parts of Southern California. We see that the situation is purposefully arranged to allow an inhabitant with enough intelligence to create a cannon. In fact, we begin to realize that the Metrons are a highly intelligent race precisely because of the intriguing fit between the "arena" and Kirk's background knowledge. A less advanced culture would have put Kirk and the Gorn captain in a fighting rink with ready-made weapons, as in the title fight for the World Wrestling Federation. The Metrons have given Kirk and the Gorn captain a real challenge.
We can often discern that a pattern in a situation like this one has been designed, even if we're ignorant of other basic facts.
But what about the situation we've described in this book? Is it such a situation? Consider one last illustration.
Imagine a mountain climber who decides to climb a high, desolate mountain on the island of Hawaii. Unknown to the climber, it happens to be Mauna Kea. In fact, he knows so little about astronomy and geography that when he reaches the top, he is shocked to see several man made structures. A closer inspection reveals, among other things, two large telescopes peering out of the openings in two massive white domes. Although he doesn't recognize the famous Keck telescopes, or know anything about how they are built, he recognizes that they are telescopes. But more important for our purposes, he realizes why they are perched atop this mountain and not, say, in downtown Honolulu. Astronomers put telescopes where viewing conditions are best. Telescopes don't exist on mountaintops because of some blind necessity of nature. They're put there for good reason. And appealing to chance in this case is really no explanation at all.
Analogously, our environment has many rare and disparate elements crucial for making scientific discoveries and observations. Those same elements make our environment hospitable to the existence of observers. The rare places with observers are the best overall places for observing. If an otherwise ignorant climber can recognize the purpose in putting telescopes on high mountains, we should be able to see purpose in this striking correlation. Like the telescopes atop Mauna Kea, this isn't just an independent pattern. It's a meaningful one.
INTIMATIONS OF THE PATTERN
But if the correlation is a meaningful pattern, why have so few noticed it? One reason, perhaps, is that most of those acquainted with the relevant evidence have been discouraged from considering design, or of speaking publicly about it. Surely another reason is that much of the evidence necessary for making our argument is of fairly recent vintage. Nevertheless, although no one has developed the argument in any detail, some have caught glimpses of it.
Biologist Michael Denton and historian Hans Blumenberg independently noticed the amazing fit between a habitable atmosphere and a relatively transparent and therefore scientifically useful one.13 In fact, during our work on this book we encountered the following passage from Denton:
What is so striking is that our cosmos appears to be not just supremely fit for our being and for our biological adaptations, but also for our understanding. Our watery planetary home, with its oxygen-containing environment, the abundance of trees and hence wood and hence fire, is wonderfully fit to assist us in the task of opening nature's door. Moreover, being on the surface of a planet rather than in its interior or in the ocean gives us the privilege to gaze farther into the night to distant galaxies and gain knowledge of the overall structure of the cosmos. Were we positioned in the center of a galaxy, we would never look on the beauty of a spiral galaxy nor would we have any idea of the structure of our universe. We might never have seen a supernova or understood the mysterious connection between the stars and our own existence.14
He never develops the argument or argues for an astonishingly wide and deep-ranging correlation, but clearly he is sniffing down the same trail.
Similarly, physicist John Barrow has discussed the value of a universe with three spatial dimensions for both life and the high fidelity of information transmission so vital to scientific discovery.15
Reminiscent of our first chapter, historian of science Stanley Jaki recently argued that the Earth-Moon system contributes not only to Earth's habitability but to scientific discovery as well.16
Finally, Michael Mendillo and Richard Hart of Boston University anticipated the discovery described in Chapter One. In 1974, they presented a paper called "Total Solar Eclipses, Extraterrestrial Life, and the Existence of God," which was later reported and excerpted in Physics Today.17 They argued, with comic precision, the following:
Theorem
An exactly total solar eclipse is a unique phenomenon in the Solar System.
Lemma
There are observers on Earth to witness the remarkable event of an exactly total solar eclipse.
Conclusion
A planet/moon system will have exactly total solar eclipses only if there is someone there to observe them. As only Earth meets this requirement, there is no extraterrestrial life in the Solar System.
Corollary
In a system composed of nine planets and 32 moons, for only Earth with its single moon to have exactly total solar eclipses is too remarkable an occurrence to be due entirely to chance.
Therefore, there is a God.
Although their argument is tongue-in-cheek, it exploits our sense that there's something suspicious about finding the best eclipses just where there are observers to enjoy them. What they did not consider is that the same conditions necessary for producing perfect solar eclipses are also important for the existence of observers. And they never imagined that similar correlations would exist in other areas. These facts are highly suggestive, even if they don't pack quite as much theological punch as Hart and Mendillo's conclusion. If the correlation stopped with eclipses, of course, we might chalk it up to coincidence. But as we have argued, eclipses are just the beginning.
We live in a universe with laws and initial conditions finely tuned for the existence of complex life. Although narrowly constrained, they do not inevitably give rise to such life. They are necessary but not nearly sufficient for it. In extremely rare pockets of that universe, conditions are congenial to the existence of beings who can observe the starry heavens above and ponder the meaning of their existence. In at least one of these places, despite struggle and adversity, some came to believe that the world around them was a rational, orderly universe, accessible not only to rational thought but also to careful investigation. Centuries of study, amplified by technological tools and innovation, have given rise to an unparalleled knowledge of the world around us. The combination of those preliminary discoveries now gives rise to another: The same rare conditions that have sustained our existence also make possible a stunning array of discoveries about the universe.
There is a purposeful value in this. Because of it, and only because of it, can our aspirations for scientific knowledge and discovery be satisfied. Careful investigation, study, and observation of the natural world ultimately succeed. With enough persistence, the natural world discloses itself to us in ways that we do not, and sometimes cannot, anticipate.
Once perceived, the thought creeps up quietly but insistently: The universe, whatever else it is, is designed for discovery.
What better mandate could there be for the scientific pursuit of truth? Scientific discovery enjoys a sort of cosmic prestige, but a prestige apparent only to those open to the possibility that the cosmos exists for a purpose.
…………………………
AND SO SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY AND WHAT WE CAN DISCOVER, HAVE DISCOVERED, POINTS MORE TO A DESIGN AND SO A DESIGNER, THAT GAVE US A BEAUTIFUL BLUE PLANET TO EXPLORE AND UNDERSTAND, AND FROM WHICH WE HAVE A WONDERFUL PLATFORM, TO EXAMINE THE GLORIOUSNESS, THE POWERFULNESS, THE UNBELIEVABLE VASTNESS OF AN EVER EXPANDING UNIVERSE.
THERE WAS AND IS A GREAT PURPOSE FOR THE CREATION OF THIS UNIVERSE, THAT CAME, AS MOST SCIENTISTS NOW ADMIT, THAT CAME OUT OF NOTHING; A UNIVERSE THAT AT SOME DISTANT POINT IN THE PAST DID NOT EXIST! THEN—— WAM—— THE UNIVERSE WAS BORN!
AND SCIENTISTS ARE ON THIS POINT, IN HARMONY WITH WHAT THE HOLY BIBLE HAS ALWAYS TAUGHT—— THE UNIVERSE WAS NOT, AND THEN IT WAS—— THEN IT CAME INTO BEING WITH ALL ITS NATURAL LAWS.
THEN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM CAME INTO BEING; AND A RELATIVELY SMALL BLUE PLANET WAS FORMED WITH ITS MOON, IN JUST THE RIGHT PLACE FROM ITS SUN, TO GIVE AN EMENSE WORLD OF LIFE.
THERE IS A MIND-BENDING REASON WHY YOU WERE BORN!
YOU NEED TO STUDY FROM THIS BLOG AND FROM MY WEBSITE [For my website go to—— WAYBACK MACHINE—— type in keithhunt.com——
choose 2017 and April or May—— all links should work] THE REASON MANKIND WAS PUT ON THIS EARTH.
Keith Hunt
No comments:
Post a Comment