(Spirituality, Vol.13, May/June 2007, No.72, pp.167-171)
Introduction
On 24 July 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edward Aldrin landed on the surface of the moon. While they were below, astronaut Michael Collins piloted Apollo XI around the moon, waiting to return them to earth. Later on, when all three were safely back, they were asked about their experience. Neil Armstrong spoke of the moon having ‘a stark beauty all its own’. All three spoke of the beauty of the earth when seen from the moon. Michael Collins described it as looking like ‘a blue and white jewel against a background of black velvet’. Another word he used to describe it was ‘fragile’. (1)
Some significant realities
Science is increasingly letting us know just how fragile is the planet we inhabit. The universe is a curve, not a straight line, or a confused mass. If it were a little more curved it would collapse, imploding on itself in a cosmic crunch; a little less curved, and every planet, star, and galaxy would fly apart from each other – and so would every atom of matter in each of them. (2)
‘If the strength of gravity were slightly greater than it is, the balls of gas that condensed into stars would keep collapsing until they formed black holes’. (3) And earth’s gravity has got to be at its present level for human beings to survive. If it were more powerful, we wouldn’t be able to move; we’d be rooted to the spot. If it were less, we would take off into the air with our first step. (4)
In 1952, W. D. Schuman discovered a natural radio signal, resonating as a standing wave around the earth and beating with a constant pulse at about 7.8 Hz. The dominant brain frequency of all vertebrates so far tested is close to the value of 7.8 Hz. Of what significance is the similarity between the two? It seems a remarkable coincidence, and nature usually has a purpose in her coincidences. (5)
The level of oxygen in the air is a constant 21%. It remains close to that level whether in the rainforests of Brazil, over the vast expanse of the Pacific, or the industrial conurbations of Europe and Asia. If there were a higher level of oxygen, things could catch fire spontaneously, even, for example, wet grass. If it were at a lower level, we would suffocate. (6)
‘If the laws of physics were tweaked ever so slightly, the world as we know it would not exist. With just tiny changes in the values of some of the numbers that go into the laws, no one would be around to marvel and wonder at any of this. The cosmos seems fine-tuned for existence, in an almost-too-good-to-be-true manner’. (7)
‘If the mass of the neutrino were not precisely tuned, there would be no Earth-like planets and hence no life as we know it’. (8)
‘The fine-tuning doesn’t stop there. Life is carbon-based. Carbon is one of the elements cooked up, from helium, inside stars through nuclear fusion. Yet the recipe for carbon is as unforgiving of error as the most finicky soufflé instruction…’ (9)
Cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbit from elliptical to nearly elliptical to elliptical again; rhythmic shifts in the angle of its orientation to the Sun – its tilt and pitch and wobble; changes in solar radiation; tectonics and volcanoes – these are among the main factors influencing long-term climatic change. (10)
John Cornwell, Director of the Science and Human Dimension Project at Jesus College, Cambridge, says, ‘The strength of the attractive nuclear forces is so peculiarly precise that were it even slightly different hydrogen would be a rare element, stars like the sun could not exist, and the emergence of life would have been impossible. Had the nuclear forces been weaker, on the other hand, hydrogen would not burn, and there would be no heavy elements, and hence, again, we would not have a universe hospitable to creatures like us. The universe, moreover, is constructed on such a scale that stars in a typical galaxy are twenty million miles apart; were the distances between stars just two million miles, life could not have survived on our planet’. (11)
‘We have a paradoxical situation. Proteins can’t exist without DNA and DNA has no purpose without proteins. Are we to assume, then, that they arose simultaneously with the purpose of supporting each other? If so: wow’. (12) ‘If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?’ (13)
Cornwell quotes Sir Martin Rees, the British Astronomer Royal: ‘The prerequisites for any life – long-lived stable stars, a periodic table of atoms with complex chemistry, and so on – are sensitive to physical laws and could not have emerged from a Big Bang with a recipe that was even slightly different’. He went on, ‘Many recipes would lead to stillborn universes with no atoms, no chemistry and no planets; or to universes too short-lived or too empty to allow anything to evolve beyond sterile uniformity’. (14)
Three things are clear from the above:
- humans had no part in bringing these situations about;
- we have no control over them and do not even understand them;
- we are utterly dependent on them.
Questions arising
Rees was emphatic about the strangeness of this circumstance, ‘The distinctive and special-seeming recipe is a fundamental mystery that should not be brushed aside merely as a brute fact’. (15) Is it, in Rees’ phrase, ‘a brute fact’? Is it just a fluke? How does one account for it?
‘The nub of the conundrum… was phrased by Einstein, with customary theological flourish, “Could God have made the world any different?”’ (16)
What puzzled Einstein was why the world is so understandable. ‘He once said that the only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that is comprehensible. Why can we figure it out so well? Why is science possible?’ (17)
That the universe turned out right for us – ‘Was it all just a lucky chance? That would seem a counsel of despair, a negation of all our hopes of understanding the underlying order of the universe’. (18) ‘What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?’ (19)
Some answers that are offered
The whole universe is ‘so uniquely designed that it has these bio-friendly laws which bring forth life wherever they can. Life is not some one-off chemical fluke, but is written into the laws of the universe and pre-programmed to emerge’. (20)
The physical universe has been endowed with a deep anthropic fruitfulness. (21)
‘Why not admit… that the absolutely free and special act whereby the Creator willed humanity to be the crown of his work so profoundly influenced and organized beforehand the progress of the world prior to man’s coming that now this coming seems to us, in accordance with the Creator’s choice, to be the natural outcome of all the antecedent processes of life-development? All things are for man’. (22)
‘The chances of an earth hospitable to humanity emerging from the Big Bang are 1 in 10-to-the-power-of-fifteen; but there are 10-to-the-power-of-twenty-two stars, so the odds are not as long as they seem’.(23) (This means, incidentally, that just when you may think you have proven the existence of God by a new application of the argument from design, the argument is snatched from you – and the one who snatches it is God. This is all to the good, because the “God” whose existence is “proven” by the argument from design is an idol. For a parable analogous to this, see 1 Samuel 4.1b-11)
‘One of the hardest ideas for humans to accept is that we are not the culmination of anything. There is nothing inevitable about our being here. It is part of our vanity as humans that we tend to think of evolution as a process that was, in effect, programmed to produce us’. (24)
Is the question a false one anyway?
Freeman Dyson, a British physicist, wrote in his autobiography, Disturbing the Universe, in 1976, ‘The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming’. (25)
‘Doesn’t that look as if this universe was rather specially planned and designed with a view to getting us at the end of the line? Not necessarily. So far it’s really just a tautology. It only amounts to saying that we can’t observe a universe in which we can’t exist. So naturally the universe we see is the universe in which the conditions for our existence are being met’. (26)
‘We live in a world that seems just right for life-forms like ours – which is in a way tautological, since obviously if the world were very different we would not be here to wonder about these things’. (27) And, ‘If life-forms like us can exist only in a universe with three spatial dimensions, it is no surprise indeed to find that the Universe we live in does indeed have only three spatial dimensions!’ (28)
The anthropic principle can be paraphrased as ‘We see the universe the way it is because we exist’. (29) ‘It is a bit like a rich person living in a wealthy neighbourhood not seeing any poverty’. (30) We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to observe it.
Last words
It seems that the universe has to be the way that it is, if it is to be at all. But does it contain within itself the reason for its own existence? Does any of the above answer the old question of why anything exists rather than nothing?
‘The universe is the ultimate free lunch’. (31)
‘“What is God?” I asked the earth, and it replied: “I am not God”; and everything on earth made the same declaration. I asked the sea, the deep and its living things, and they replied: “We are not God”. I asked the winds that blow, and all the air and its inhabitants replied: “I am not God”. I asked the sky, the moon and the stars, and they replied: “Neither are we the God you seek”. I asked everything within me: “Speak to me of God; since you are not God, tell me something about God”. And they cried out in a loud voice: “It is God who made us”. My request was born of my reflection and their beauty was their response. Then I turned to myself and asked: “Who are you?” The reply came back: “A person”. God, then, is the life of our life’. (32)
References
1) Michael Collins, An Astronaut’s Journey, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, New York, 1974, pp.470, 471.
2) Diarmuid Ó Murchú, Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics, Crossroad Publishing Company, New York, 1997, pp.99-100.
3) Michael Reagan (ed.), The Hand of God: Thoughts and Images reflecting the Spirit of the Universe, Templeton Foundation Press, Philadelphia and London, 1999, p.18.
4) Ross Thompson, The Spirituality of Matter, SPCK, London, 1990, p.217, who calculates that the odds against getting gravity and electromagnetism right are about 1 to 10-to-the-power-of-60 against.
5) Ó Murchú, op. cit., p.70.
6) James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford University Press, New York, 1979.
7) Reagan, op. cit., p.16.
8) Reagan, op. cit., p.18.
9) Ibid.
10) See Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Black Swan, Doubleday, London, 2004, pp.510, 512, 516, 517.
11) John Cornwell, “The universe – a divine recipe?” The Tablet, 9 March 2002, p.4.
12) Bryson, op. cit., p.352.
13) Paul Davies, quoted by Bryson, op. cit., p.353.
14) Cornwell, op. cit., p.5.
15) Cited by Cornwell, op. cit., p.5.
16) Cited by Cornwell, op. cit., p.5.
17) John Polkinghorne, Quarks, Chaos and Christianity, Triangle, London, 1994, p.24.
18) Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, Bantam Press, London, 1996, p.151.
19) Hawking, ibid., p.209.
20) Paul Davies, The Fifth Miracle, Penguin, London, l998.
21) See Polkinghorne, op. cit., p.42.
22) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe, translated from the French by Gerald Vann OP, Fontana, London, 1970, p.92.
23) Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor: how my faith survived the church, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 2001, p.3.
24) Bryson, op. cit., p.539, citing Ian Tattersall.
25) Cited by Bryson, op. cit., p.294.
26) Beatrice Bruteau, God’s Ecstasy: the Creation of a Self-Creating World, Crossroads Publishing Company, New York, 1997, p.65.
27) Michael White and John Gribbin, Stephen Hawking: a life in science, Viking, London, 1992, p.215.
28) White and Gribbin, op. cit., p.261.
29) Hawking, op. cit., p.140.
30) Ibid.
31) Ibid., p.147.
32) Saint Augustine, The Confessions, 10.6b.