Beyond the death of God - scientific challenges to atheism

National Review, May 6, 1996 by Patrick Glynn

The atheistic assumptions of modern society are being challenged by the new science -- which is making many scientists distinctly uneasy.

WHILE our attention has been riveted on the momentous political and ideological realignments that mark the century's end, we have all but overlooked a quiet revolution in scientific understanding with far more radical implications for the modern world view. At issue here is the central premise of the great atheistic modern creeds, whether one speaks of Communism, Fascism, Existentialism, Positivism, or even Freudianism. All these doctrines took as their point of departure the so-called "death of God." More particularly, all rested fundamentally on the conviction -- once thought to be scientifically demonstrated -- that human life arose in the universe as a chance event. Whatever their important divergences from one another, all were essentially responses to, or elaborations of, the central modern idea of the "random universe." The overthrow of the "random universe" by contemporary science is the great unnoticed revolution of late-twentieth-century thought.

The revolution in our vision of the cosmos effected by physics and scientific cosmology over the past quarter-century has been profound -- as far-reaching in its implications for philosophy and human understanding as the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions before it. The remarkable thing is that it has gone largely unheralded. At the philosophical crux of this revolution is a conception known as "the Anthropic Principle" -- from the Greek anthropos, "man." The Anthropic Principle rests on a series of technical observations about the evolution of the universe since the Big Bang. But its upshot is that, far from being an "accident," the existence of human life is something for which the entire universe appears to have been intricately fine-tuned from the start.

The principle was first promulgated by cosmologist Brandon Carter in a now-famous lecture to the International Astronomic Union in 1974. Carter pointed to what he called a number of astonishing "coincidences" among the universal constants -- values such as Planck's constant, h, or the gravitational constant, G. It turns out that infinitesimal changes in the values of any of these constants would have resulted in a universe profoundly different from our own, and radically inhospitable to life.

Since Carter first gave a name to this class of observations, the list of such "coincidences" or "lucky accidents" has vastly expanded. The relative masses of subatomic particles, the precise rate of expansion of the universe in the tiny fractions of a second after the Big Bang, the precise strengths of the nuclear weak force, the nuclear strong force, and electromagnetism -- scientists now understand that minuscule alterations (often as little as one part per million) in these values and relationships, or in scores of others, would have caused catastrophic derailments in the series of events following the universe's beginning. Depending on how one tinkered with these values, one could have emerged with a starless universe or no "universe" at all. And even the slightest tinkering with a single one of these values, most scientists now agree, would have foreclosed the possibility of life.

The philosophical implications of these seemingly highly technical observations are far more radical than most adherents of the modern philosophical vision, many scientists included, have yet been prepared to admit. For if it is valid, the Anthropic Principle overturns the central cosmological assumption -- the assumption of the random universe -- on which the modern atheistic philosophies were based.

TO appreciate the shift in scientific understanding, one need go back no further than Bertrand Russell's classic 1935 volume, Religion and Science, a concise rendition of the then-mainstream modernist vision of the cosmos. In that book, Russell set out to demonstrate how science had successively refuted all the main tenets of religion. The crux of his argument was cosmological.

The modern scientific understanding of the universe, Russell explained, was the product of two major scientific revolutions: the Copernican and the Darwinian. With the sun-centered model of the solar system, Copernicus showed that humanity was not in any sense, as the Bible taught, at the "center" of the universe. Centuries later, Darwin demonstrated that it was no longer necessary to posit an act of divine creation to explain even the origins of human life; rather, the existence of all life, including human life, could be explained entirely by chance mechanisms. Science, Russell explained, had rigorously shown life to be the product not of design, but of pure contingency. In the light of these discoveries, he suggested, it was no longer reasonable to regard humanity as central to the universe or as the creature of some Creator-God. Rather, humanity had become "intelligible," as he put it, only as a "curious accident in a backwater."