Excerpt 3 from Edge of Knowledge/The Known Unknowns: Life is Fine Tuned for the Universe, Not the Other Way Around

While Evolution belies the claim that Earth was designed for life, the notion that the Universe was designed for Life has resurfaced, inspired by a misplaced understanding of cosmology.

When it comes to the open question of the origin of life, one might think Darwinian evolution would have been sufficient to quell the ongoing debate about the possibility of a cosmic design for life, many people continue to find this possibility seductive, and recent developments in cosmology have only stoked the fires. In this excerpt from The Edge of Knowledge/The Known Unknowns I briefly describe why the resurgence of interest in this idea is misplaced.

One should state at the outset that there isn’t a shred of evidence to suggest design in nature, and there is plenty of evidence against it. But, as I have previously stressed, absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence. Therefore, one cannot prove there is not a hidden grand designer. One can just argue that there appears to be no need for one. And one can debunk the many tired and false arguments that claim to show such a need.

The existence of the diversity of life on earth and its particularly spectacular fitness for its surroundings, was, for millennia, taken as proof of the need for a creator. All that changed with Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who demonstrated that natural selection, along with standard biology, could naturally result not only in diverse species, but species that appeared to be providentially designed for their surroundings.

In other words, they demonstrated that the earth wasn’t fine-tuned to fit life, but that only life that was fine-tuned (by evolution) to fit the earth would survive.

I emphasize this point because for some reason the same debate has surfaced again, but this time in cosmology. The point is stressed over and over again by people who believe that there must have been an intelligent creator for our universe, that if any one of a number of fundamental constants took values that were even slightly different than their actual values, life as we know it could never have evolved.

This statement on its own is not incorrect. And it took on a new higher profile when a non-zero value of the energy of empty space (dark energy) was discovered, and its value was 120 orders of magnitude smaller than one might naively expect it to be on the basis of particle physics arguments. In other words, it seemed impossibly small. If it were even an order of magnitude or so larger, then galaxies would probably not have formed, and without galaxies there would be no stars, and without stars, no planets, and without planets, no people…

The conclusion drawn by some, on the basis of this fact, is that the fundamental constants of nature were, of necessity, pre-tuned so that we might be here today. What more evidence could there be for a divine planner?

There are many things wrong with this argument, however. Not least is the fact that if the energy of empty space was precisely zero, a value that most physicists had thought was a natural expectation, then the universe would be more fit for life over the long term than it is now.

More important …It is true that if the parameters of the universe were different, we might not be here, but since we have no idea what the complete set of possibilities are for life, especially what the possibilities would be if the laws of physics were slightly different, then who are we to say that there wouldn’t be some different kind of life that could arise in such a universe? A black cloud perhaps [from the famous science fiction story by Fred Hoyle]?And I expect in such a universe these lifeforms would be wondering why their universe was so fine-tuned for their existence!

The point is that the universe isn’t fine-tuned for life. Rather, life on earth arose because it could. Just as in the case of biological evolution, life is fine-tuned for the universe, rather than the other way around.

The existence of life in our universe seems miraculous, but it need not be a miracle. The mysteries surrounding the origin of life, its variety, and its possible future are fascinating and provocative. The fact that we don’t yet fully understand these things is not evidence for God or that we live in some vast video game created by some more advanced civilization (which of course begs the question of whether they live in a video game, and so on). Rather, it is simply evidence of not understanding, and that motivates trying to find out the answers. Hoyle’s black cloud, and the considerations that stem from it, should give us some cosmic humility. Not only are we not likely to be special gifts of creation, but the possible existence of lifeforms with nothing in common with us lends further incredulity to the incredibly non-humble suggestion that the universe was made for us…