Saturday Afternoon: Sustaining Life on Planet Earth

3/16/2010 4:12:44 AM #

I hope we will be able to see the full extent of these presentations in article form, either in BYU Studies or in a symposium publication.  I am especially interested in Hollis Johnson's topic concerning the Anthropic Universe.  The standard narrative about science and religion, so ubiquitous that it is mentioned in every book and almost every essay on the topic, concerns Galileo's church trial for promoting the Copernican view of the solar system in preference to the geocentric universe of Ptolemy.  The essayist inevitably will proceed to talk about the importance of the "Copernican Principle", namely that earth and mankind with it were demoted from an exalted place in the center of the universe, and that successive advances in science have progressively but inexorably pushed mankind to a status of an ordinary, mediocre entity barely noticeable and nowhere near center stage in a vastly larger universe.  

Yet that entire narrative distorts the meaning of the Copernican theory, in the service of a "Principle of Mediocrity" that in fact has been invalid since quantum physics combined with cosmology to explain the origin of our universe.  First of all, the Ptolemaic universe put earth at the center because that was the WORST possible location in the universe, the furthest one could get from the celestial spheres where God and the angels dwell.  As Dante's Divine Comedy showed, Ptolemy's universe had the center of the universe occupied by Satan himself!  To turn the earth form the universe's garbage dump into a celestial planet was a definite PROMOTION in status, which was the reason the Catholic Church was upset at Galileo.  Thus, the "Copernican Principle of mediocrity" is a misrepresentation of that cleric's theory, making it the opposite of what he actually suggested.  

As to the modern universe as science knows it:  We now understand that there are over a dozen constants, numbers that represent features of the physical universe, which appear to be arbitrary, not dictated by any theory of physics.  Yet to alter any of these constants by a small amount, in some cases as little as 1%, would prevent the formation of living things in our universe, as suns could not form, or would burn out too quickly for the development of complex life, or would not form elements like carbon and oxygen essential to life, or other universal catastrophes would ensue. In other words, the universe that science has observed turns out to be finely tuned to create complex life on planets like our earth.  This has been the subject of books like the (non-religious) Rare Earth and the (religious) Privileged Planet.  

So far, there is nothing in science that dictates these constants as a logical consequence of first principles of physics.  They appear to be as arbitrary as the numbers in the last Powerball Lottery.  Thus, the probability of our universe coming into being through random processes appears to be diminishingly unlikely.  In the world of ordinary experience, when unlikely things happen, the most likely cause is a decision by a person.  Thus, when one 767 passenger jet hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center, it at first seemed possible that it was a terrible but random accident, due to either flaws in pilot performance, or the design or construction of the aircraft.  However, when only a few  minutes later, a second 767 hit the OTHER tower, everyone immediately realized it was part of a diabolical plan.  While it was vanishingly possible that there could be two such accidents close together in time, the far more likely cause was an intentional plan by evil men--and that was before we knew about the Pentagon attack and the crash of United Flight 93 after its passengers called their families on the ground and learned what had happened to the other 3 planes.  

Thus, the most likely cause of the unlikely event of our universe having all the dials set for intelligent life is another intelligence.  

Many scientists try to escape this logic by embracing one of the variations in the hypothesis of multiple universes.  If there are an infinite number of universes, then the random variation of the constants of nature could produce any number of life-sustaining universes among so many others.  However, the prospect of believing in an infinite number of universes, none of which we can observe, as an alternative to believing in a single universe with a highly intelligent and capable designer, does not have any particular advantage to offer.  What is more, among an infinite array of universes, we cannot rule out one of them being home to a being that is both highly intelligent and capable, the functional equivalent of God.  And if there is one such universe, the logic of mathematics says there must be in fact many of such universes.  And there is no way to preclude the possibility that one of the universes in which such a god exists is in fact OUR universe.  

As noted in the presentation, the notion that these facts MUST be simply random facts with no meaning, whose cause cannot be examined, is to abandon the scientific enterprise.  The competing idea that there must exist some physical principle that requires the constants to be in their precise settings is simply a matter of faith, since there is no evidence in science of this being the case.  

Thus, the true narrative of modern science is NOT the "Copernican Principle" that mankind is mediocre and a sideshow in the universe.  Rather, it tells us that the universe appears, to the precision of our scientific instruments, to have been created specifically to be hospitable to us and others like us.  That is, life on earth, and mankind in particular, appear to give meaning to the unique character of the universe.  Without us, or others like us, the whole purpose of the entire universe would have been frustrated.  

Raymond Takashi Swenson