Is God in the details? - religion, politics and physics

Reason, July, 1999 by Kenneth Silber

Clearly, these conservatives have found an interpretation of cosmology that is congruent with their political beliefs. Yet that doesn't mean the interpretation is presented insincerely. Ronald Bailey has speculated in REASON that conservative opponents of Darwinism might be following a tenet of philosopher Leo Strauss: that religious belief is unfounded but still required by society. (See "Origin of the Specious," July 1997.) But in God: The Evidence, Glynn denounces the Straussian position; moreover, he traces his own spiritual crisis and recovery of religious belief with considerable emotion. He clearly means what he says about both God and the anthropic principle.

Nor is there any reason to doubt the sincerity of Bork, Will, or other conservatives who have discovered evidence of design in the laws of physics. In many cases, however, there is plenty of reason to doubt their knowledge. Bork and Will make sweeping statements about the universe based on a cursory reading of popular accounts. The Wall Street Journal's and The Washington Times' reviewers of Glynn's book accept at face value his misleading definition of the anthropic principle. Glynn devotes four pages to a puerile analogy about monkeys with typewriters. (Yes, if the monkeys are assumed to be unchanging beings with limited capacities, they would never type Shakespeare. It does not follow that the universe is subject to similar constraints.)

It is hard to believe that the "anthropic" conservatives have contemplated the full implications of their position. There is, to begin with, a theological puzzle. Why would an omnipotent or highly powerful deity need to fine-tune physical laws? Such tinkering seems to set limits on what the Fine Tuner can do. Did this entity have no choice but to produce carbon-based life - or would other physical laws have generated other types of life? (If the latter, then the fine-tuning argument collapses.) If the laws of physics were not compatible with our type of life - and yet we were here - wouldn't that be evidence for God?

Moreover, if there is now evidence for God's existence, what happens if the evidence doesn't hold up under scrutiny? Religious faith need never be damaged by a scientific advance; one can always believe that a powerful deity intervenes in the universe while erasing all proof of such intervention. But evidence can be overturned or reinterpreted any time (as appears to have already happened with the "fine-tuning" of omega). Won't society be harmed if the strength of gravity or the mass of the proton turn out not to have the religious implications that conservatives have publicized?

Finally, what does the apparent fine-tuning in physics imply for biology? Glynn claims that the fossil record shows that "natural selection is not the magic bullet biologists once thought it was." Bork states that the complexity of organisms could not have evolved unaided. But if the cosmos is precisely fine-tuned for the development of life, then why is further tinkering required? The traditional argument for design is that nature is too inhospitable for life to have evolved. The "anthropic" design argument is that nature is eerily hospitable to life. If both are true, it's a strange universe indeed.