The Case for a Creator (21 page)

If that sounds like my story, it is
³
—but, coincidentally, it’s also the story of Patrick Glynn, a former arms-control negotiator for the Reagan administration and currently the associate director of the George Washington University Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies in Washington, D.C.

Glynn first encountered evolutionary theory while a student in parochial school, immediately recognizing that it was incompatible with the Bible. “I stood up in class and told the poor nun as much,” he recalled.

Convinced that reason was “the only path to truth,” Glynn became a confirmed atheist by the time he received his doctorate from Harvard University in the 1970s. “Darwin had demonstrated that it was not even necessary to posit a God to explain the origin of life,” he said. “Life, and the human species itself, was the outcome of essentially random mechanisms operating over the eons.”

After marrying a Christian and finding himself in frequent debates with her over spiritual matters, Glynn said his mind “became sufficiently open” so that he was willing to check out whether there was any rational evidence for the existence of God. He was hardly prepared for what he would learn:

Gradually, I realized that in the twenty years since I opted for philosophical atheism, a vast, systematic literature had emerged that not only cast deep doubt on, but also, from any reasonable perspective, effectively refuted my atheistic outlook. . . . Today, it seems to me, there is no good reason for an intelligent person to embrace the illusion of atheism or agnosticism, to make the same intellectual mistakes I made.
⁴

What evidence was responsible for this stunning spiritual turnaround? Among the most influential discoveries he encountered in his investigation was the so-called “anthropic principle.” The term, derived from the Greek word
anthropos
for “man,” was coined by Cambridge physicist Brandon Carter, who delivered a ground-breaking paper called “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology” at a prestigious scientific conference in 1973.

The principle, as Glynn learned, essentially says that “all the seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics have one strange thing in common—these are precisely the values you need if you want to have a universe capable of producing life.”
⁵

In his subsequent book
God: The Evidence
, Glynn credits the absolutely incredible fine-tuning of the cosmos as being among the key reasons why he concluded that the universe must have been the handiwork of a master designer.

“As recently as twenty-five years ago, a reasonable person weighing the purely scientific evidence on the issue would likely have come down on the side of skepticism. That is no longer the case,” he said. “Today the concrete data point strongly in the direction of the God hypothesis. It is the simplest and most obvious solution to the anthropic puzzle.”
⁶

THE
PRIMA FACIE
EVIDENCE

Alister McGrath, the erudite theologian who studied molecular biophysics at Oxford and wrote the ambitious three-volume series
A Scientific Theology
, has a penchant for penetrating to the core of complex issues. In the case of the anthropic principle, he managed to summarize the essential challenge in two succinct questions, which he posed with a dash of British understatement: “Is it a pure coincidence that the laws of nature are such that life is possible? Might this not be an important clue to the nature and destiny of humanity?”
⁷

Those two questions formed my roadmap as I sought fresh answers concerning how and why physics so precariously balances life on a razor’s edge. I already knew that an increasing number of scientists and philosophers have been following the clues to their own conclusions in recent decades, including “some who are innocent of any influence from a conventional religious agenda,” in the words of physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne.
⁸

“It is quite easy to understand why so many scientists have changed their minds in the past thirty years, agreeing that the universe cannot reasonably be explained as a cosmic accident,” said Walter Bradley, coauthor of
The Mystery of Life’s Origin
. “Evidence for an intelligent designer becomes more compelling the more we understand about our carefully crafted habitat.”
⁹

For instance, the once-skeptical Paul Davies, the former professor of theoretical physics at the University of Adelaide, is now convinced that there must be a purpose behind the universe.

“Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact,” he said in his book
The Mind of God
. “I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama.”
¹⁰

Saying that “many scientists, when they admit their views, incline toward the teleological or design argument,” cosmologist Edward Harrison has come to this conclusion: “The fine tuning of the universe provides
prima facie
evidence of deistic design.”
¹¹

The eminent astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle put it this way: “I do not believe that any scientists who examined the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars.”
¹²

That observation, and others like it from Hoyle, prompted Harvard astronomy professor Owen Gingerich, senior astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, to comment: “Fred Hoyle and I differ on lots of questions, but on this we agree: a common sense and satisfying interpretation of our world suggests the designing hand of a superintelligence.”
¹³

Oxford-educated John Leslie, who catalogues many anthropic examples in his eye-opening 1989 book
Universes
, said he believes that if ours is the only universe—and there are no scientific data proving any others exist—then the fine tuning is “genuine evidence . . . that God is real.”
¹⁴

In their book
The New Story of Science
, Robert Augros and George Stanciu sum up the inferences of the amazing confluence of “coincidences” that make life possible in the cosmos. “A universe aiming at the production of man implies a mind directing it,” they said. “Though man is not at the physical center of the universe, he appears to be at the center of its purpose.”
¹⁵

Those conclusions aside, I was looking for my own personal answers to the fundamental questions posed by McGrath. I wanted not only to explore the scientific evidence for the universe’s precarious balancing act, but I also wanted to see if the anthropic principle could survive the challenge of a hypothesis which, according to some skeptics, may very well render it obsolete.

While studying the fine-tuning issue, I came across the writings of an articulate, physics-trained philosopher who has done his own original research on the issue. I especially liked his reputation—he was known as being careful and conservative in his calculations, unwilling to make judgments that exceed the bounds of the data. In short, just what I was looking for.

A few phone calls later, I was on a plane for Pennsylvania and a picturesque campus of redbrick buildings situated not far north of the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg.

INTERVIEW #4: ROBIN COLLINS, PHD

As a seventh-grade student, Robin Collins sent away for several free booklets from the Atomic Energy Commission—and a love for physics was born. He went on to earn degrees in physics and mathematics at Washington State University (with a grade point average a scant 0.07 points shy of perfection) and then entered a doctoral program in physics at the University of Texas in Austin.

His other love was philosophy—in fact, it was his third major in college. This expertise came in handy while working on his doctorate in an office he shared with a group of graduate students that included an atheist and an agnostic. As for Collins, he had been a Christian since his last year of high school.

The four of them ended up sparring late into the night about philosophical and theological issues, which Collins found so stimulating that he decided to pursue a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. The legendary Alvin Plantinga, perhaps the best American philosopher of modern times, supervised Collins’s dissertation.

It was a stray comment by Plantinga in class one day that first exposed Collins to the issue of the fine-tuning of the universe. Captivated by the concept, Collins delved deeply into the subject and soon found a perfect wedding between his expertise in physics and philosophy.

Not only did his training in physics equip him to understand the often-complex mathematical equations in the field—sometimes prompting him to politely correct the errors of more famous scholars—but his experience in philosophy aided him in formulating rigorous arguments from the evidence. Now, after years of research and analysis, he has emerged as one of the most informed and persuasive voices on the anthropic principle.

Collins has written about the topic for numerous books, including
God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science
;
The Rationality of Theism
;
God Matters: Readings in the Philosophy of Religion
;
Philosophy of Religion: A Reader and Guide
; and
Reason for the Hope Within
. Funded by a grant from the Pew Foundation, he’s currently completing a book titled
The Well-Tempered Universe: God, Fine-Tuning, and the Laws of Nature
. In addition, he has spoken at numerous symposia and conferences at Yale, Concordia, Baylor, Stanford, and elsewhere, including a plenary address at the 2003 Russian-U.S. conference on
God and Physical Cosmology
held at Notre Dame.

After serving as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, Collins has spent the last decade doing research, writing, and teaching at Messiah College, where he is currently an associate professor of philosophy. That’s where I connected with him on a warm Saturday afternoon.

Collins’s office was so utterly dominated by stacks and shelves and piles and boxes and heaps of books that there was nowhere for us to sit, so we commandeered a conference room nearby. The room was awash in the afternoon sun, which streamed through a large window and created dancing pools of light on the carpet.

Collins removed his green sports coat and tossed it over a chair as we got ready to begin. He has curly, rusty-colored hair and a beard, and the lean physique of a runner (he jogs nearly ninety minutes a day for exercise and meditation). We sat across a plain table from each other, Collins sipping from a mug of his favorite beverage: a concoction of half black and half green tea.

I was anxious to begin. Collins once said that the facts concerning the universe’s remarkable “just-so” conditions are widely regarded as “by far the most persuasive current argument for the existence of God”
¹⁶
—a statement that set a high standard. I pulled out my notebook and started by asking him to give me an overview of what the fine-tuning of the cosmos was all about.

THE IMPRESSION OF DESIGN

“When scientists talk about the fine-tuning of the universe,” Collins said, “they’re generally referring to the extraordinary balancing of the fundamental laws and parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe. Our minds can’t comprehend the precision of some of them. The result is a universe that has just the right conditions to sustain life. The coincidences are simply too amazing to have been the result of happenstance—as Paul Davies said, ‘the impression of design is overwhelming.’
¹⁷

“I like to use the analogy of astronauts landing on Mars and finding an enclosed biosphere, sort of like the domed structure that was built in Arizona a few years ago. At the control panel they find that all the dials for its environment are set just right for life. The oxygen ratio is perfect; the temperature is seventy degrees; the humidity is fifty percent; there’s a system for replenishing the air; there are systems for producing food, generating energy, and disposing of wastes. Each dial has a huge range of possible settings, and you can see if you were to adjust one or more of them just a little bit, the environment would go out of whack and life would be impossible. What conclusion would you draw from that?”

The answer was obvious. “That someone took great care in designing and building it,” I said.

“That’s right,” he replied. “You’d conclude that this biosphere was not there by accident. Volcanoes didn’t erupt and spew out the right compounds that just happened to assemble themselves into the biosphere. Some intelligent being had intentionally and carefully designed and prepared it to support living creatures. And that’s an analogy for our universe.

“Over the past thirty years or so, scientists have discovered that just about everything about the basic structure of the universe is balanced on a razor’s edge for life to exist. The coincidences are far too fantastic to attribute this to mere chance or to claim that it needs no explanation. The dials are set too precisely to have been a random accident. Somebody, as Fred Hoyle quipped, has been monkeying with the physics.”
¹⁸