The Case for a Creator (31 page)

And yet there was more—a whole new dimension of evidence that suggests this astounding world was created, in part, so we could have the adventure of exploring it.

THE POWER OF AN ECLIPSE

The story begins with an unabashed love for solar and lunar eclipses that helped drive a young Guillermo Gonzalez into a life-long study of stellar mysteries.

Mesmerized by the partial eclipses he had witnessed as an amateur astronomer, Gonzalez longed to see the zenith of them all: a total eclipse of the sun, where the moon just barely covers the sun’s photosphere. He finally got his chance in 1995. Aware that an eclipse was going to occur on October 24 of that year, he scheduled his research so he could witness the event in northern India, one of the few places where it was going to be fully visible.

“One thing about eclipses,” he told me, “is that a seasoned astronomer could be standing next to someone from a remote village, and they would both have tears in their eyes. They’re both in awe. At my eclipse camp, as soon as the total phase of the eclipse ended, when you could see the sun’s beautiful corona and it was relatively dark, people spontaneously applauded as if rewarding a show. It was just so beautiful!”

Gonzalez photographed the eclipse and made scientific measurements. But he wasn’t done. His mind wouldn’t let go of an insight:
eclipses are better viewed on Earth than they would be from any other planet in our solar system
.

“There’s a striking convergence of rare properties that allow people on Earth to witness perfect solar eclipses,” he said. “There’s no law of physics that would necessitate this. In fact, of the nine planets with their more than sixty-three moons in our solar system, the Earth’s surface is the best place where observers can witness a total solar eclipse, and that’s only possible for the ‘near-term’ future.
⁴²

“What’s really amazing is that total eclipses are possible because the sun is four hundred times larger than the moon, but it’s also four hundred times further away. It’s that incredible coincidence that creates a perfect match. Because of this configuration, and because the Earth is the innermost planet with a moon, observers on Earth can discern finer details in the sun’s chromosphere and corona than from any other planet, which makes these eclipses scientifically rich.

“What intrigued me,” he said, “was that the very time and place where perfect solar eclipses appear in our universe also corresponds to the one time and place where there are observers to see them.”

That “coincidence” was so fascinating to me that I asked him to repeat his last statement before we continued. After he did, he added: “What’s more, perfect solar eclipses have resulted in important scientific discoveries that would have been difficult if not impossible elsewhere, where eclipses don’t happen.”

“What discoveries?” I asked.

“I’ll give you just three examples,” he said. “First, perfect solar eclipses helped us learn about the nature of stars. Using spectroscopes, astronomers learned how the sun’s color spectrum is produced, and that data helped them later interpret the spectra of distant stars.

“Second, a perfect solar eclipse in 1919 helped two teams of astronomers confirm the fact that gravity bends light, which was a prediction of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. That test was only possible during a total solar eclipse, and it led to general acceptance of Einstein’s theory.

“Third, perfect eclipses provided a historical record that has enabled astronomers to calculate the change in the Earth’s rotation over the past several thousand years. This enabled us to put ancient calendars on our modern calendar system, which was very significant.”

Richards, who had been listening intently, spoke up. “What’s mysterious,” he said, “is that the same conditions that give us a habitable planet also make our location so wonderful for scientific measurement and discovery. So we say there’s a correlation between
habitability
and
measurability
.

“Not only does the specific configuration of the Earth, sun, and moon allow for perfect eclipses, but that same configuration is also vital to sustaining life on Earth. We’ve already discussed how the size and location of the moon stabilizes our tilt and increases our tides, and how the size of the sun and our distance from it also make life possible here.

“Our main point,” he concluded, “is that there’s no obvious reason to assume that the very same rare properties that allow for our existence would also provide the best overall setting to make discoveries about the world around us. In fact, we believe that the conditions for making scientific discoveries on Earth are so fine-tuned that you would need a great amount of faith to attribute them to mere chance.”

HABITABILITY AND MEASURABILITY

Prompted by the study of perfect solar eclipses, Gonzalez and Richards began to investigate the incredible convergence of habitability and measurability in scores of other settings. They came up with a wide range of examples that merely served to amplify their amazement.

“For example,” said Gonzalez, “not only do we inhabit a location in the Milky Way that’s fortuitously optimal for life, but our location also happens to provide us with the best overall platform for making a diverse range of discoveries for astronomers and cosmologists. Our location away from the galaxy’s center and in the flat plane of the disk provides us with a particularly privileged vantage point for observing both nearby and distant stars.

“We’re also in an excellent position to detect the cosmic background radiation, which is critically important because it helped us realize our universe had a beginning in the Big Bang. The background radiation contains invaluable information about the properties of the universe when it was only about three hundred thousand years old. There’s no other way of getting that data. And if we were elsewhere in the galaxy, our ability to detect it would have been greatly hindered.”

Richards offered a few other illustrations. “The moon stabilizes the Earth’s tilt, which gives us a livable climate—and it also consistently preserves the deep snow deposits in the polar regions. These deposits are a tremendously valuable data recorder for scientists,” he said.

“By taking core samples from the ice, researchers can gather data going back hundreds of thousands of years. Ice cores can tell us about the history of snowfall, temperatures, winds near the polar regions, and the amount of volcanic dust, methane, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They record the sunspot cycle through variations in the concentration of beryllium-10. They even record the temporary weakening of the Earth’s magnetic field forty thousand years ago. In 1979, scientists identified a tentative link between nitrate spikes in an Antarctic ice core with nearby supernovae. By taking deeper cores, it might be possible to catalog all nearby supernovae of the last few hundred thousand years—something that would be otherwise impossible.”

Another example of the strange correlation between habitability and measurability, Richards said, is the clarity of our atmosphere. “The metabolisms of higher organisms require from ten to twenty percent oxygen in the atmosphere—which is also the amount needed to facilitate fire, allowing for the development of technology,” Richards said.
⁴³
“But it just so happens that the very composition of our atmosphere also gives it transparency, which it wouldn’t have if it were rich in carbon-containing atoms, like methane. And a transparent atmosphere allows the science of astronomy and cosmology to flourish.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Doesn’t the water vapor in our atmosphere cause cloudiness that can hinder astronomy? That’s why putting a telescope in space has been such a breakthrough.”

“Actually, astronomers prefer a partly cloudy atmosphere to one that’s completely cloudy or always windy and dusty,” Gonzalez said. “Besides, we’re not saying that every condition of measurability is uniquely and individually optimized on Earth. Our argument depends on what’s called an optimal negotiation of competing conditions.

“As Henry Petroski said in his book
Invention by Design
, ‘All design involves conflicting objectives and hence compromise, and the best designs will always be those that come up with the best compromise.’
⁴⁴
To come up with discoveries in a wide range of scientific disciplines, our environment must be a good compromise of competing factors—and we find that it is.”

Another interesting connection between habitability and measurability involves plate tectonics. As Gonzalez and Richards explained earlier, plate tectonics is essential to having a livable planet. One byproduct of the movement of these crustal plates is earthquakes, which, in turn, have provided scientists with research data that would otherwise be difficult to obtain.

“Thousands of seismographs all over the planet have measured earthquakes through the years,” Richards said. “In the past few decades, scientists have been able to use that data to produce a three-dimensional map of the structure of the Earth’s interior.”

Over and over again, he said, the extraordinary conditions that create a hospitable environment on Earth also happen to make our planet strangely well-suited for viewing, analyzing, and understanding the universe.

“Is that merely some sort of cosmic quirk?” Richards asked. “Are we just lucky? I think wisdom entails the ability to discern the difference between mere coincidence and a meaningful pattern. We have more than a coincidence here. Much more.”

THE TRILEMMA OF LIFE

When trying to explain the existence of life, said Gonzalez and Richards, we face a trilemma. One possibility is that some natural necessity, like the laws of physics, inexorably leads to life. Advocates of SETI—the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence—like that possibility. However, more and more scientific discoveries are showing how incredibly improbable it is to marshal the right conditions for life. Many scientists are concluding that intelligent life is, at minimum, far rarer than was once thought. In fact, it may very well be unique to Earth.

The second possible explanation is chance: life is a fluke. Create enough planets circling enough stars and the odds say at least one of them will have life. Brownlee and Ward, who wrote
Rare Earth
, seem to gravitate toward this explanation.

But there’s also a third possibility: life was created. After studying all of the extraordinarily rare circumstances that have contributed to life on Earth, and then overlaying the amazing way in which these conditions also open the door to scientific discoveries, Gonzalez and Richards have landed in this camp.

“To find that we have a universe where the very places where we find observers are also the very best overall places for observing—
that’s
surprising,” Richards said. “I see design not just in the rarity of life in the universe, but also in this very pattern of habitability and measurability.”

I turned toward Gonzalez. “What’s your conclusion?” I asked.

“My conclusion, frankly, is that the universe was designed for observers living in places where they can make scientific discoveries,” he replied. “There may be other purposes to the universe, but at least we know that scientific discovery was one of them.”

Ever the theologian, Richards jumped back in. “In the Christian tradition, this is quite at home,” he said. “Christians have always believed that God testifies to his existence through the book of nature and the book of Scripture. In the nineteenth century, science effectively closed the book of nature. But now, new scientific discoveries are reopening it.”

“But if the universe was designed with us in mind, why is it so incredibly vast?” I asked. “There’s a lot of empty space out there. Isn’t that wasteful and unnecessary?”

“Because the universe was designed for discovery, we need something to discover,” Richards replied. “The universe is vast and we’re small, but we have access to it. That’s what is amazing. We can see background radiation that has come from more than ten billion light years away.”

“Plus,” added Gonzalez, “we needed supernovae to build up the heavy elements so life-bearing planets could develop. And one particular type of supernovae is incredibly useful as a ‘standard candle.’ Type 1a supernovae have ‘calibratable liminosities’ so we can use them to determine distances and to probe the expansion history of the universe. So, again, we see the connection between habitability and measurability.”

Richards made one other interesting observation. “Darwin once complained that pollen couldn’t have been designed. After all, he said, look at the waste! Millions upon millions of particles are produced, but very, very few are used in the development of flowers.

“However, what he didn’t realize was that pollen is one of the most useful tools we have in the scientific exploration of the past, in part, because it can be dated through Carbon 14. When we find pollen in lake sediments and ice cores, we can use it to gauge how old the layered deposits are and what the ancient climate was like.

“Darwin only looked at pollen from a biological standpoint; when we look at the big picture, we see it has another use he never anticipated. Perhaps the same is true in many other instances throughout the universe.”

A CHERISHED GROUP OF CREATURES

I pushed my chair back from the table as if I had just consumed a hearty meal. In a sense, I had. Gonzalez and Richards had served me a remarkable feast—fact upon fact, evidence upon evidence, discovery upon discovery that compelled an incredible conclusion. As I sat there and digested the data, my mind turned to the book
God and the Astronomers
,
which I had been reading on the airplane just prior to our interview.

In one chapter, John A. O’Keefe describes how he went away to school at the age of fourteen and began to get into arguments with his roommate about God. These encounters turned him toward astronomy, a field where scientists were beginning to find new and exciting evidence about the possibility of a Creator.