Is Our Biophilic Universe the Best Argument from Design for Our Creator God?

Zia H Shah

Epigraph:

وَمَا خَلَقْنَا السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضَ وَمَا بَيْنَهُمَا إِلَّا بِالْحَقِّ

“We have not created the heavens and the earth and all that is between the two, but in accordance with the perfect truth (mathematics) and wisdom.” (Al Quran 15:85)

Written and collected by Zia H Shah MD, Chief Editor of the Muslim Times

Majority of the leading scientists, mathematicians and philosophers today in the Western world are atheists. More than three fourth of them. So, unless the Muslims, the Christians and the Jews are able to academically establish God the Creator, theism is challenged. This is or should be the most fundamental question for every believer. Additionally, the only argument that the Quran offers for accountability and Afterlife other than the authority of the prophets is the first creation of God or our physical universe: Surah Yasin’s Lucid Argument About the Afterlife.

Our biophilic universe is now perhaps the best argument from design by the theists. Its best merit is appreciated by first reading about it and then hearing different cosmologists’ and physicists’ opinion about it. In my view what makes such a review easy and useful is to divide the experts into three groups:

  1. The believers of theism
  2. The ambivalent, these include pantheists and agnostics
  3. The architects of smoke screens and these will be mostly atheists

The characterization of the universe as finely tuned intends to explain why the known constants of nature, such as the electron charge, the gravitational constant, and the like, have their measured values rather than some other arbitrary values. According to the “fine-tuned universe” hypothesis, if these constants’ values were too different from what they are, “life as we know it” could not exist.[1][2][3][4] In practice, this hypothesis is formulated in terms of dimensionless physical constants.[5]

In 1913, the chemist Lawrence Joseph Henderson wrote The Fitness of the Environment, one of the first books to explore fine tuning in the universe. Henderson discusses the importance of water and the environment to living things, pointing out that life as it exists on Earth depends entirely on Earth’s very specific environmental conditions, especially the prevalence and properties of water.[6]

In 1961, physicist Robert H. Dicke claimed that certain forces in physics, such as gravity and electromagnetism, must be perfectly fine-tuned for life to exist in the universe.[7][8] Fred Hoyle also argued for a fine-tuned universe in his 1983 book The Intelligent Universe.[9] Hoyle wrote: “The list of anthropic properties, apparent accidents of a non-biological nature without which carbon-based and hence human life could not exist, is large and impressive.”[10]

Belief in the fine-tuned universe led to the expectation that the Large Hadron Collider would produce evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model, such as supersymmetry,[11] but by 2012 it had not produced evidence for supersymmetry at the energy scales it was able to probe.[12]

Physicist Paul Davies said: “There is now broad agreement among physicists and cosmologists that the Universe is in several respects ‘fine-tuned’ for life. But the conclusion is not so much that the Universe is fine-tuned for life; rather it is fine-tuned for the building blocks and environments that life requires.”[13] He also said that “‘anthropic‘ reasoning fails to distinguish between minimally biophilic universes, in which life is permitted, but only marginally possible, and optimally biophilic universes, in which life flourishes because biogenesis occurs frequently.”[14] Among scientists who find the evidence persuasive, a variety of natural explanations have been proposed, such as the existence of multiple universes introducing a survivorship bias under the anthropic principle.[5]

The premise of the fine-tuned universe assertion is that a small change in several of the physical constants would make the universe radically different. Stephen Hawking observed: “The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. … The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.”[4]

The first response by the agnostic, atheist or pantheist scientists to a finely tuned universe has been to come up with multiverse theory. But that may also be a smoke screen as it pushes the mystery a step further. So, now rather than asking the question where did our biophilic universe come from, we need to solve the mystery, where did the multiverse or universe generating factory come from?

So, now without further adoo let us hear the three types of responses to the finely tuned universe:

The Believers

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The ambivalent

The interviewers of majority of these videos, Robert Lawrence Kuhn will also fall into this category.

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The architects of smoke screens

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My rebuttal to the learned scholar Michio Kaku: what if our solar system had all the other planets except for earth? After all our solar system does not have infinite planets, so why do we have one at a suitable distance from the sun?

References

  1. ^ Jump up to:a b c Rees, Martin (3 May 2001). Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe (1st American ed.). New York: Basic Books. p. 4.
  2. ^ Gribbin. J and Rees. M, Cosmic Coincidences: Dark Matter, Mankind, and Anthropic Cosmology pp. 7, 269, 1989, ISBN 0-553-34740-3
  3. ^ Davis, Paul (2007). Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe Is Just Right for Life. New York: Orion Publications. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-61859226-5.
  4. ^ Jump up to:a b Stephen Hawking, 1988. A Brief History of Time, Bantam Books, ISBN 0-553-05340-X, pp. 7, 125.
  5. ^ Jump up to:a b c “Fine-Tuning”. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), Stanford University. 22 August 2017. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
  6. ^ Henderson, Lawrence Joseph (1913). The fitness of the environment: an inquiry into the biological significance of the properties of matter. The Macmillan Company. LCCN 13003713. OCLC 1146244. OL 6554703M.
  7. ^ R. H. Dicke (1961). “Dirac’s Cosmology and Mach’s Principle”. Nature. 192 (4801): 440–41. Bibcode:1961Natur.192..440D. doi:10.1038/192440a0. S2CID 4196678.
  8. ^ Heilbron, J. L. The Oxford guide to the history of physics and astronomy, Volume 10 2005, p. 8.
  9. ^ Hoyle, F., The Intelligent Universe (London: Michael Joseph Ltd, 1983).
  10. ^ Profile of Fred Hoyle at OPT Archived 2012-04-06 at the Wayback Machine. Optcorp.com. Retrieved on 2019-08-02.
  11. ^ Rosaler, Joshua (20 September 2018). “Fine Tuning Is Just Fine: Why it’s not such a problem that the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t found new physics”. Nautil.us. NautilusThink Inc. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
  12. ^ Wolchover, Natalie (20 November 2012). “As Supersymmetry Fails Tests, Physicists Seek New Ideas”. Quanta Magazine. Retrieved 18 January 2020.
  13. ^ Smith, W. S., Smith, J. S., & Verducci, D., eds., Eco-Phenomenology: Life, Human Life, Post-Human Life in the Harmony of the Cosmos (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer, 2018), pp. 131–32.
  14. ^ Davies (2003). “How bio-friendly is the universe”. Int. J. Astrobiol. 2 (115): 115. arXiv:astro-ph/0403050. Bibcode:2003IJAsB…2..115D. doi:10.1017/S1473550403001514. S2CID 13282341.

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