scientific question and not one that touched on the religious problem, I do not believe that any scientist 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 the stars . . . .”7
Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins views the fine tuning of the universe differently. His book The Blind Watchmaker is subtitled “How the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design.”8 Dawkins rejects the idea that fine tuning is suggestive of a coherent plan, claiming that is instead how he would expect an evolving universe to be. The key issue is the interpretation of fine tuning in the universe; is this best explained as design imparted by God, or do godless naturalistic processes provide a better explanation for this seeming design?
Cosmic Recycling
Stars burn hydrogen and helium at their cores but eventually run out of fuel and burn out. Toward the end of a giant red star’s life, the intense heat and pressure fuses hydrogen and helium to produce the heavier elements—carbon, oxygen, magnesium, silicon, iron, and sulfur—that comprise more than 96 percent of earth’s mass.
Roughly three categories of heavy elements are present on earth. In the earth’s core is a molten mass of iron while the surface mantle is rich in silicon and magnesium oxides. Sand is essentially a silicon oxide. Uranium, thorium, and potassium comprise the second category of essential elements, providing heat through radioactive decay deep inside the earth’s core during the first few billion years of the earth’s existence. The third set of essential elements are carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and phosphorous, which comprise most of the elements in living organisms.
Exploding stars release the core elements as atomic dust that eventually cools and slowly aggregates. NASA scientists have captured spectacular images of star birth in which young stars form and simultaneously eject matter into space. The cycle by which stars explode and reform into new stars, creates an ever increasing proportion of heavier elements so that newer stars contain more heavier elements than old stars. Still, hydrogen and helium comprise almost 90 percent and 10 percent, respectively, of the “cosmic abundance” of the elements in our sun and the most common stars, with only traces of the heavier elements required for life. Cosmic particles ultimately experience a gravitational attraction and form a flat, rotating cloud known as a solar nebula. Nebulae evolve and form disks composed of gas, dust, and rocks orbiting a central sun.
New birth and rebirth of fundamental particles establishes a pattern that recurs throughout the universe. Hydrogen and helium form and fuse under intense pressure to form new elements that are redisbursed as old stars die and new galaxies form. Evolutionary theory is built on the same principle of death and new life that leads to better adapted organisms. Christians believe that Jesus is the pinnacle of this rebirth process, heralding the coming of a new person purged of the troubles of this world and set for eternity with God.
Time Before the Big Bang
Physicists wrestle with the concept of time, generally saying that the concept of a time before the Big Bang does not make sense. Einstein wrote that “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past present and future is only an illusion, however stubbornly persistent.”9 There is no negative, backward-flowing time; time only flows forward from a certain point. And, strange as it may sound, according to modern physicists, before the Big Bang there was no time.
This idea is not new. Over 1,500 years ago St. Augustine thought about the perennial question of what existed before God created the world. Augustine’s answer was that there can be no time without creation,10 meaning that time is one of God’s creations just as much as the physical universe. Because God created all things, including time, he reasoned that there was no time before creation: “For there was no ‘then,’ when there was no time.”11
If God is outside time, then how does God experience time? The classical religious view is that God perceives all cosmic history at the same “time,” raising interesting questions about free will. On one hand, God’s perception seems to imply that he knows the outcome of every event, including all free choices, but on the other hand, if those choices are free and future events are truly open and changeable then how could even God know the outcome? However the question is resolved, this classical theological position places God outside time in a mysterious way in much the same fashion as modern physics places time outside the beginning of the cosmos.
Physicists have devised several clever theories that avoid defining the universe’s precise beginning. In the bouncing universe scenario, the Big Bang causes an expansion just like a balloon being inflated. At a certain point inflation stops with gravity causing the universe to collapse. The process parallels the way a deflating balloon full of air returns a rubbery mass. However the universe has the potential to repeat the process in an endless series of bang-crunch cycles. The universe exists eternally.
Eternal inflation describes an alternative beginning for the universe. A balloon-like universe continues to expand but with small patches at the surface that blister and rapidly expand to form a new universe bubble. Subordinate universes form at these attachment points which can, themselves, continue expanding in an eternally on-going process.
The Achilles heel of these theories is not so much the mathematics, challenging as it is, but the problem of verification. In a very real parallel to the problem of directly observing God, none of these theories can be observed directly. At the heart of cosmology is the difficulty of experimentally verifying processes of extreme size, heat, and density. Despite the Big Bang pushing the beginning of time back 13.7 billion years, the chain of explanation never ends. The question can always be asked: but what caused that? Ingrained into many cultures is the idea that something started this entire process, something that cannot be found using scientific laws. Ultimately individual belief is required to answer the question of where the world came from, either the universe always existed or something, God perhaps, brought the universe into being.
The Big Bang: Chance or Design?
The exquisite tuning of the universe and the amazing development of human life stuns scientists and has reinvigorated the search for life’s grand purpose. Perhaps the universe’s complex, intricate structure was encoded into the Big Bang in the same way that spectacular firework displays are encoded through a precisely orchestrated series of visual displays. Or perhaps this is just luck. Einstein captured this in his enigmatic way, saying “What I am really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way.”12
Physicists measure the size of the universe in terms of light years—the distance light travels in one year, which gives an estimate of the universe’s size at 13.7 billion light years. Compared to an individual person the universe appears astronomically large. But comparing a person to the size of their component atoms make people seem huge. An individual person lies roughly at the geometric mean size between the size of the universe and an atom. The universe’s size and age is intimately related. Small planets will agglomerate over time whereas large planets will collapse on themselves, which places restrictions on the type of planets capable of supporting life.
Two different approaches are taken to describe the universe’s uniquely hospitable conditions for humanity’s existence. The weak anthropic principle states that because there is only data for this universe, then scientists will inevitably find physical constants with values that allow for this universe’s existence. Only because people exist can people reflect on ultimate origins. Even though the physical constants might potentially
