[escepticos] Anthropic Design:Does the Cosmos Show Evidence of Purpose?

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Anthropic Design:
Does the Cosmos Show Evidence of Purpose?
Victor J. Stenger

February 20, 1999

 To be submitted to Skeptical Inquirer

 Claims that scientists have uncovered supernatural purpose to the universe
have been widely reported recently in the media. The so-called anthropic
coincidences, in which the constants of nature seem to be extraordinarily
fine-tuned for the production of life, are taken as evidence. However, no
such interpretation can be found in scientific literature. All we currently
know from fundamental physics and cosmology remains consistent with purely
natural processes.



Poking Out of the Noise
For about a decade now, an ever-increasing number of scientists and
theologians have been asserting, in popular articles and books, that they
can detect a signal of cosmic purpose poking its head out of the noisy data
of physics and cosmology. This claim has been widely reported in the media
(see, for example, Begley 1998, Easterbrook 1998), perhaps misleading lay
people into thinking that some kind of new scientific consensus is
developing in support of supernatural beliefs. In fact, none of this
reported evidence can be found in the pages of scientific journals, which
continue to operate within a framework in which all physical phenomena are
natural.
 The data are said to reveal a universe that is exquisitely fine-tuned for
the production of life. As the argument goes, this precise balancing act is
exceedingly unlikely to be the result of mindless chance. An intelligent,
purposeful, and indeed personal Creator must have made things the way they
are.

As cosmologist and Quaker George Ellis explains it: "The symmetries and
delicate balances we observe require an extraordinary coherence of
conditions and cooperation of laws and effects, suggesting that in some
sense they have been purposefully designed" (Ellis 1993: 97). Others have
been less restrained in insisting that God is now required by the data and
that this God must be the God of the Christian Bible (see, for example, Ross
1995).

The fine-tuning argument is based on the fact that earthly life is very
sensitive to the values of several fundamental physical constants. Making
the tiniest change in any of these, and life as we know it would not exist.
The delicate connections between physical constants and life are called the
anthropic coincidences (Carter 1974, Barrow and Tipler 1986). The name is a
misnomer. Human life is not singled out in any special way. At most, the
coincidences show that the production of carbon and the other elements that
make earthly life possible required a delicate balance of physical
parameters.

 For example, if the gravitational attraction between protons in stars had
not been many orders of magnitude weaker than their electrical repulsion,
stars would have collapsed long before nuclear processes could build up the
chemical periodic table from the original hydrogen and deuterium.
Furthermore, the element-synthesizing reactions in stars depend sensitively
on the properties and abundances of deuterium and helium produced in the
early universe. Deuterium would not exist if the neutron-proton mass
difference were just slightly displaced from its actual value, and deuterium
was were neutrons were stored for their later use in building the elements.

 The existing relative abundances of hydrogen and helium also implies a
delicate balance of the relative strengths of the gravitational and weak
nuclear forces. A slightly stronger weak force and the universe would be 100
percent hydrogen. A slightly weaker weak force would give a universe that
was 100 percent helium. Neither of these extremes would have allowed for the
existence of stars and life as we know it based on carbon chemistry. Barrow
and Tipler (1986) list many other such "coincidences."



Interpreting the Coincidences
The interpretation of the anthropic coincidences in terms of purposeful
design should be recognized as yet another variant of the ancient argument
from design that has appeared in many different forms throughout the ages.
The anthropic design argument asks: how can the universe possibly have
obtained the unique set of physical constants it has, so exquisitely
fine-tuned for life as they are, except by purposeful design--design with
life and perhaps humanity in mind?
This argument, however, has a fatal flaw. It makes the wholly unwarranted
assumption that only one type of life is possible --the particular form of
carbon-based life we have here on earth. Even if this is an unlikely result
of chance, some form of life could still be a likely result. It is like
arguing that a particular card hand is so unlikely that it must have been
fore-ordained.

 Based on recent studies in the sciences of complexity and "Artificial Life"
computer simulations, sufficient complexity and long life appear to be
primary conditions for a universe to contain some form of life. This could
happen with a wide range of physical parameters, as has been demonstrated
(Stenger 1995). The fine-tuners have no basis in current knowledge for
assuming that life is impossible except for a very narrow, improbable range
of parameters.

 Curiously, this new design argument asserts that the universe is so
congenial to life that it must have had a purposeful creation. This is in
direct conflict with the old design argument, used against evolution, which
asserts that the universe is so uncongenial to life that life must have been
specially created.
Since all scientific explanations until now have been natural, then it would
seem that the first step, before asserting purposeful design, is to seek a
natural explanation for the anthropic coincidences. Such a quest would avoid
the invocation of supernatural agency until it is absolutely required by the
data.



The Natural Scenario
For almost two decades, the inflationary big bang has been the standard
model of cosmology (Guth 1981, 1997; Linde 1987, 1990, 1994). We keep
hearing, again from the unreliable popular media, that the big bang being is
in trouble and the inflationary model is dead. In fact, increasingly
accurate observations continue to support the inflationary big bang, while
no viable substitute has been proposed that has near the equivalent
explanatory power.
 The inflationary big bang offers a plausible, natural scenario for the
uncaused origin and evolution of the universe, including the formation of
order and structure--without the violation of any laws of physics. These
laws themselves are now understood far more deeply than before, and we even
are beginning to grasp how they too could have come about naturally. This
particular version of a natural scenario has not yet risen to the exalted
status of a scientific theory. However, the fact that it currently cannot be
ruled out demonstrates that no rational basis exists for introducing the
added hypothesis of supernatural creation. Such a hypothesis is simply not
required by the data,

 According to this scenario, by means of a random quantum fluctuation the
universe "tunneled" from pure vacuum ("nothing") to what is called a false
vacuum, a region of space that contains no matter or radiation but is not
quite nothing. The space inside this "bubble" of false vacuum was curved,
and a small amount of energy was contained in that curvature. This
ostensible violation of energy conservation is allowed by the Heisenberg
uncertainty principle for sufficiently small time intervals. The bubble then
inflated exponentially and the universe grew by many orders of magnitude in
a tiny fraction of a second. (For a not-to-technical discussion, see Stenger
1990).

 As the bubble expanded, its curvature energy was converted into matter and
radiation, inflation stopped, and the more linear big bang expansion we now
experience commenced. The universe cooled and its structure spontaneously
froze out, as formless water vapor freezes into snowflakes whose unique
patterns arise from a combination of symmetry and randomness.

 In our universe, the first galaxies began to aggregate after about a
billion years, eventually evolving into stable systems where stars could
live out their lives and populate the interstellar medium with the complex
chemical elements such as carbon which are needed for the formation of life.

 So how did our universe happen to be so "fine-tuned" as to produce us
wonderful, self-important carbon structures? As I explained above, we have
no reason to assume that ours is the only possible form of life and perhaps
life of some sort would have happened whatever form the universe
took--however the crystals on the arm of the snowflake happened to be
arranged by chance.

 If we have no reason to assume ours is the only life form, we also have no
reason to assume that ours is the only universe. Many universes can exist,
with all possible combinations of physical laws and constants. In that case,
we just happen to be in the particular one that was suited for the evolution
of our form of life. When cosmologists refer to the anthropic principle,
this is all they usually mean. Since we live in this universe, we can assume
it possesses qualities suitable for our existence. The atmosphere of the
earth is not transparent to the region of electromagnetic spectrum from red
to blue because human eyes are sensitive to that range. Humans evolved eyes
sensitive to that range because the atmosphere is transparent to it.

 Stronger versions of the anthropic principle, which assert that the
universe is somehow actually required to produce intelligent
"information-processing systems (Barrow and Tipler 1986), are not taken
seriously by most scientists or philosophers.

 The existence of many universes is consistent with all we know about
physics and cosmology (Smith 1990, Smolin 1992, 1997, Linde 1994, Tegmark
1997). Some theologians and scientists dismiss the notion as a gross
violation of Occam's razor. It is not. No new hypothesis is needed to
consider multiple universes. In fact, it takes an added hypothesis to rule
them out-- a super law of nature that says only one universe can exist. But
we know of no such law, so we would violate Occam's razor to insist that
only one universe exists. Another way to express this is with lines from T.
H. White's The Once and Future King: "Everything not forbidden is
compulsory."

The hundred billion galaxies of our visible universe, each with a hundred
billion stars, is but a grain of sand on the Sahara that exists beyond our
horizon that grew from the original bubble of false vacuum. An endless
number of such bubbles can very well exist, each itself nothing but a grain
of sand on the Sahara of all existence. On such a Sahara, nothing is too
improbable to have happened by chance.



Acknowledgments
I have greatly benefited from discussions on this subject with Ricardo Aler
Mur, Samantha Atkins, John Chalmers, Scott Dalton, Keith Douglas, Ron Ebert,
Simon Ewins, Jim Humphreys, Bill Jefferys, Kenneth Porter, Wayne Spencer,
Quentin Smith, and Ed Weinmann.
This is a much abridged version of a longer essay entitled The Anthropic
Coincidences: A Natural Explanation to appear  in the Skeptical
Intelligencer.



References
Barrow, John D. and Frank J. Tipler 1986. The Anthropic Cosmological
Principle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Begley, Sharon 1998. "Science Finds God." Newsweek July 20, 46.

Carter, Brandon 1974. "Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle
in Cosmology," in M. S. Longair, ed., Confrontation of Cosmological Theory
with Astronomical Data. Dordrecht: Reidel, 291-298, Reprinted in Leslie
1990.

Easterbrook, Greg 1998. "Science Sees the Light." The New Republic October
12, 24-29.

 Ellis, George 1993. Before the Beginning: Cosmology Explained. London, New
York: Boyars/Bowerdean.

Guth, Alan 1997. The Inflationary Universe. New York: Addison-Wesley.

Linde, Andre 1987. "Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology," Physics
Today 40, 61-68.

Linde, Andrei. 1990. Particle Physics and Inflationary Cosmology. New York:
Academic Press.

Linde, Andre 1994. "The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe." Scientific
American, November, 48-55.

Ross, Hugh 1995. The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Greatest Scientific
Discoveries of the Century Reveal God. Colorado Springs: Navpress.

Smolin, Lee 1992. "Did the universe evolve?" Classical and Quantum Gravity
9, 173-191.

Smolin, Lee 1997. The Life of the Cosmos. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Smith, Quentin 1990. "A Natural Explanation of the Existence and Laws of Our
Universe." Australasian Journal of Philosophy 68, 22-43.

 Stenger, Victor J. 1988. Not By Design: The Origin of the Universe. Buffalo
NY: Prometheus.

Stenger, Victor J. 1990. "The Universe: The Ultimate Free Lunch." European
Journal of Physics 11, 236.

Stenger, Victor J. 1995. The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern
Physics and Cosmology. Amherst, N. Y.: Prometheus Books.

Tegmark, Max 1997. "Is 'the theory of everything' merely the ultimate
ensemble theory?" To be published in Annals of Physics.



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Victor J. Stenger is a Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii. He
is the author of Not By Design: The Origin of the Universe (Prometheus
Books, 1988), Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses
(Prometheus Books, 1990), and The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern
Physics and Cosmology (Prometheus Books, 1995).

un saludo
Pedro J. Hernández
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