Signposts of the Divine

National Review, April 21, 2003 by Joshua Gilder

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, by Stephen M. Barr (Notre Dame, 312 pp., $30)

Anyone who read Superman comics as a kid will remember Bizarro World. This was a planet, way out in the far reaches of space, where everything was exactly the opposite of Earth: Instead of being round, Bizarro World was a cube; evil genius Lex Luthor was a good guy; and Superman had no superhuman powers.

When I was ten, this made perfect sense to me. If space were infinite, then there would be an infinite number of planets, and Bizarro World just had to be one of them. Not only that, but if there were an infinite number of planets then there had to be another planet exactly like this one, with someone exactly like me, who was at that moment thinking exactly the same thing at exactly that moment! As one might imagine, this was a topic of long and involved discussions among myself and my ten-year-old friends, and we all agreed that in an infinite universe, not only could anything happen, everything must happen.

Of course, we then grew up and learned to our great disappointment that it had been discovered that space was not, indeed, infinite. Space started with the Big Bang, it had a certain age -- about 14 billion years -- and a quantifiable amount of mass and energy, so there would, of course, be only a limited number of planets. It seemed that Bizarro World was out, not to mention my cosmic doppelganger. Too bad, but as they say, one grows up and puts away childish things.

Apparently, however, we put them away too soon. As Stephen Barr, a physicist at the University of Delaware, recounts in this lucid and engaging survey of modern physics and its relation to religious belief, Bizarro-type theories have gained increasing favor among scientists. The reasons are varied, but a primary impetus is to attempt to explain away the overwhelming scientific evidence that has been accumulating over the last several decades suggesting that the universe has been intricately designed for the emergence of intelligent life.

It was astrophysicist Brandon Carter who got the ball rolling in the 1970s by remarking how many of the fundamental laws of physics are "fine tuned" for life. Barr itemizes several of these "anthropic coincidences," such as the strong force, one of the four basic forces in nature, which happens to hold atomic nuclei together. Lucky for us it isn't 10 percent stronger, because then no element besides hydrogen 1 would be able to form (rather than the nearly 100 elements we have in nature). Not only would it be impossible to fabricate life with only hydrogen to work with, there would be nothing to sustain it, because nuclear fusion, which powers the stars, would never get off the ground. The universe would be cold, dark, and lifeless. Then again, if the strong force were only 4 percent stronger, stars would burn so hot and so fast that life would have no chance.

In language that will be accessible to most lay readers, Barr explains several of these deep "coincidences," including the infinitesimal, but positive, value of the cosmological constant: If it were equal to -1, the entire universe would have expanded and collapsed in 10-43 seconds. An ever-growing list of these anthropic coincidences has been identified -- from the fundamental laws of physics to the location of our galaxy and our sun within the galaxy -- with no apparent reason why any of these absolutely critical phenomena should be the way they are, and why all of them just "coincidentally" fall within the exceedingly narrow parameters that make life possible.

This apparent design and fine tuning of the universe for life has caused massive heartburn to those in the scientific community committed to philosophical materialism -- the view that matter, or meaningless physical force acting at random, is all there ever was or ever will be. When asked what role there was for God in his deterministic worldview, the French mathematician Laplace remarked, "I have no need for that hypothesis."

Laplace's complacent determinism would hold sway well into the 20th century, but as the anthropic coincidences continued to pile up in the 1980s and 1990s, the materialists found themselves in increasingly desperate need of some hypothesis if they weren't to be forced to accept the unpalatable conclusion that the universe may indeed have been designed for life. The biggest problem for the materialists was the end of the concept of an infinite universe. In one of this book's more entertaining sections, Barr quotes the despondency of many scientists in confronting the implications of the Big Bang. Sir Arthur Eddington remarked that "the notion of a beginning [to the universe] is repugnant to me"; the German physicist Walter Nernst complained that "to deny the infinite duration of time would be to betray the very foundations of science."

What it actually betrayed was the materialist prejudices of so many scientists at the time. For as long as the universe was infinite, anything and indeed everything -- including something as miraculous and seemingly designed as life -- could, and by necessity would, occur simply by the operations of chance. Given the severe time limitations imposed by the Big Bang, however, the probability of random processes producing the complex world we see around us is effectively zero. And so, seemingly drawn from the musty back rooms of comic-book warehouses, a modified Bizarro World hypothesis was reintroduced in various scientific guises.