The Fallacy of the Universe Being Fine-Tuned for Human Life as Proof for the Existence of God

I have written about how the idea that the Universe is fine-tuned for life has become the most common cosmological argument for the existence of God.  Recently, I have been thinking more about the fallacy in this argument.  My thinking has been stimulated by reading some work by Simon Friedrich--particularly, his article on "Fine-Tuning" for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and his book Multiverse Theories: A Philosophical Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

According to many physicists, it is surprising that the Universe supports life--and particularly human life--because this depends precisely on certain fundamental characteristics of the Universe--the quantitative values of some constants of nature, the form of the laws of nature, and the conditions in the early universe.  Even slight variations in these values, laws, and conditions would have made life impossible.  As one example, if the strength of gravity had been only slightly weaker or slightly stronger than it is, stars and planets could not have formed in the way they are today, and thus there would have been no habitable planet for life.  There is a long list of physical constants like gravity that had to be "just right" for a Universe favorable to life to exist.  Sometimes this is called the "Goldilocks principle": the porridge needs to be not too hot and not too cold but just right.

In this way, the Universe appears to be fine-tuned for life.  Why?  Theistic creationists can say that if the Universe is fine-tuned, that must be because there is a divine fine-tuner.  Or is there some better explanation?

From the start, we should recognize that saying the Universe is fine-tuned is a metaphorical use of the term fine tuning.  Metaphor is a form of reasoning in which we understand one thing through its resemblance to something else.  We need to be careful that our metaphorical reasoning does not lead us into the fallacy of equivocation in which we deceptively call two different things by the same name.  And my argument is that the idea of the fine-tuned Universe commits that fallacy of equivocation.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives three definitions of "fine tuning."  The primary definition is "the action or process of tuning a musical instrument very precisely, so as to play at exactly the correct pitch."  The second definition is:  "Originally: the action or process of making minor adjustments to a radio in order to receive or broadcast on specific frequencies.  In later use more generally: the action or process of making minor adjustments to a device, apparatus, etc., in order to achieve a precise setting or calibration."  The third definition is: "The action or process of minor adjustments to something in order to achieve the best or a desired performance; (Economics) the policy or process of making a series of minor changes in monetary and fiscal policy in order to maintain a stable level of aggregate demand, usually that associated with full employment."

Notice that these definitions concern technological devices (such as musical instruments or radios) or social technology (such as planning an economy) in which human beings adjust technological artifacts or social institutions so that they function to satisfy human desires.  The fine-tuning is the product of human fine-tuners.  And we understand how this works because of our common experience of how human beings design, make, and control physical and social tools so that they function in desirable ways.

If this is what we mean by fine tuning, are we right in saying that the Universe is fine-tuned?  Or is this a deceptive equivocation--because the idea of fine tuning assumes human beings as the fine tuners, and it would be ridiculous to assume that the Universe was fine-tuned by human beings?  Presumably, if there were cosmic fine tuners, they would have to be supernatural or transcendent beings with the divine intelligence and omnipotence that allow them to create the Universe as they will.  But our ordinary human experience of human fine tuning tells us nothing about divine fine tuning.

In previous posts, I have shown how the argument for intelligent design is an argument from equivocation in the use of the term "intelligent design."  Both William Dembski and Michael Behe speak of "intelligent design" without clearly distinguishing human intelligent design from divine intelligent design.  We have all observed how the human mind can cause effects that are humanly designed, and from such observable effects, we can infer the existence of human intelligent designers.  But insofar as we have never directly observed a disembodied, omniscient, and omnipotent intelligent designer causing effects that are divinely designed, we cannot infer a divine intelligent designer from our common human experience.

Behe is right that from an apparently well-designed mousetrap, we can plausibly infer the existence of a human intelligent designer as its cause, because we have common experience of how mousetraps and other human artifacts are designed by human minds.  In the same way, William Paley was right that from a well-designed watch, we can plausibly infer the existence of an intelligent human watchmaker.  But from an apparently well-designed organic mechanism (like the bacterial flagellum), we cannot plausibly infer the existence of a divine intelligent designer as its cause, because we have no common experience of how a divine mind designs things for divine purposes.

Dembski has written: "The point of the intelligent design program is to extend design from the realm of human artifacts to the natural sciences."  This sophistical rhetorical strategy of equivocation in the use of the term "intelligent design" hides the fact that while detecting the design of human artifacts is a matter of common observation and inference, detecting the design of divine artifacts is not.

Similarly, if we hear a musical instrument that has been fine-tuned, we can infer the existence of some human fine-tuner, because we understand how musical instruments need human fine-tuners.  But if the Universe appears fine-tuned for life, we cannot say that this proves the existence of a divine fine-tuner, because we have no experience with or understanding of a divine being creating the Universe so that it is fine-tuned for life.

Cosmic Teleology in Big History?

 

 

Here are two models of the universe.  The first is Dante's Christian model, which was generally accepted in Christendom until the 18th century.  Dante's model has the Earth at the center.  Circling around the Earth are the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Beyond that are the fixed stars, and then finally the chrystalline sphere of the Primum Mobile and the Paradise of Heaven.  Beneath the Earth are Purgatory and Hell.

The second model is by Thomas Digges, originally published in 1576.  Digges was an English mathematician and astronomer, who was the first person to explain the Copernican heliocentric model in English, although he modified the Copernican model in two ways.  Like Copernicus, Digges has the Sun at the center.  Circling around the Sun are Mercury, Venus, and the Earth, with the Earth identified as "the great orb carrying the globe of mortality, his circular period determining our years." Beyond the Earth are the orbits of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Unlike Copernicus, Digges described the orbit of fixed stars beyond Saturn as including Heaven: "This orb of stars fixed infinitely up extends itself in altitude spherically, and therefore immovable the palace of felicity garnished with perpetual shining glorious lights innumerable, far excelling over the sun both in quantity and quality the very court of celestial angels, devoid of grief and replenished with perfect endless joy, the habitacle for the elect."  He also departs from Copernicus in that beyond the fixed stars are stars scattered throughout endless space.  Remarkably, unlike the Christian model of Dante, Digges's model does not include a place for Hell.

Both of these models assume that the cosmos is the created and purposeful design of God, who cares for the destiny of human beings as intelligent beings created in God's image, who are mortal in their earthly life, but who will live eternally in the afterlife, either enjoying eternal bliss or suffering eternal punishment.  Both of these cosmic models show a cosmic teleology in that human beings find themselves in a universe purposefully created with them in mind, and in the light of which human life has some cosmic meaning.

Does modern scientific cosmology allow for such cosmic teleology?  And if it does not, does that mean that modern science cannot support any natural teleology that can give some meaning to human life?

Early modern scientists like Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton were theists who thought the cosmic laws of nature studied by scientists were the laws of God, and thus the cosmic order manifested God's purposeful direction.

But today, many (perhaps most) natural scientists think that science must be atheistic, and so it cannot affirm the cosmic teleology of the divine creation stories.  In short, human beings can find no cosmic meaning for their lives, because the cosmos as understood by modern science is utterly pointless.

Recently, however, the proponents of Big History have argued that while the modern scientific account of human history within the history of the whole cosmos cannot support the cosmic origin stories of the Bible and other religious traditions, modern scientific cosmology can tell a scientific origin story that will allow human beings to understand the meaning of human life in the cosmos. 

In Big History: Between Nothing and Everything (2014), David Christian, Cynthia Stokes Brown, and Craig Benjamin argue that the scientific origin story of Big History can "give us a powerful sense of meaning" (2), and if this new origin story is taught to high school students around the world, this could provide us with a shared global understanding of our human place in the universe that could help us confront the greatest threats to human existence on earth today--such as nuclear war and global warming.  Bill Gates has supported their project for providing material for high school teachers to teach Big History.  So that, while previously children were taught the religious origin stories of their various societies, which explained the cosmic meaning of their lives within their social order, the new scientifically grounded Big History can teach children around the world an origin story that depends on scientific evidence rather than religious faith, and which can sustain a global ethics comprehensible to human beings in all societies, who otherwise disagree in their religious beliefs.

By contrast, some scientists today claim that science and religion are compatible, and that the modern scientific understanding of the cosmos, and of the human place within the cosmos, supports the cosmic teleology of the theistic origin stories.  For example, Owen Gingerich is Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science, Emeritus, at Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; and he argues that a scientific history of the cosmos shows evidence of divine purposefulness, because the physical and chemical constants of the universe seem to be fine-tuned for the emergence of a world hospitable to intelligent life.  Thus, science can sustain a cosmic teleology in which human life gains meaning as the fulfillment of God's purposes.  He has laid out his reasoning in two books--God's Universe (2006) and God's Planet (2014). 

Many other prominent scientists have made similar claims about how the fine-tuning of the universe supports a theistic view of human life as the fulfillment of divine purposefulness.  This is a new version of the old argument from design (first stated by Plato)--that if nature looks like it has been intelligently designed, then this must point to a divinely intelligent designer.

Christian, Brown, and Benjamin do not mention such scientific theism as an alternative to their position.  Although they do not explicitly say so, they imply that modern science must be atheistic.  They certainly make it clear that the Biblical origin story must be rejected as false (12-13, 57-58, 60, 64).

My position falls somewhere in between Gingerich and the Big History folks.  I agree with Gingerich that modern science does not dictate atheism, because scientific answers to questions about how things work fall short of answering questions about why they work that way, which are the questions that open up the possibility of divine purposefulness.  Questions about first causes point to the problem of ultimate explanation--that all explanation depends on some ultimate reality that cannot itself be explained.  All explanation presupposes the observable order of nature as the final ground of explanation.  To the question of why nature exists, or why it has the order that it does, there are only two possible answers.  Either we say this is a brute fact of our experience: that's just the way it is! Or we move beyond nature to nature's God as the creator of nature, but then we cannot explain why God is the way He is.  In looking for an ultimate explanation, we must stop somewhere with something that is unexplained--either an uncaused or self-caused nature or an uncaused or self-caused God.

Here, Gingerich says, we move from scientific physics to philosophical or theological metaphysics.  The practice of modern science, Gingerich observes, requires a methodological naturalism that looks for purely natural causes to explain everything, but it does not require a metaphysical naturalism that denies that there is any supernatural reality beyond nature.  And while the scientific account of the cosmos cannot prove the cosmic teleology of divine purposefulness, the scientific discovery that the cosmos is fine-tuned for the emergence of intelligent life makes it at least plausible to believe that this shows a divine purpose at work in the cosmos.

To reach this conclusion, however, Gingerich's view of cosmic history must stop at the present moment, with human intelligent life dominant over the Earth, and thus he refuses to reflect on the cosmic future and the likelihood that in the distant future all life will almost certainly be extinguished, because in that case we might as well conclude that the cosmos has been fine-tuned for eternal death.

Christian, Brown, and Benjamin do reflect on the likelihood that in the remote future the cosmos will be dead, and thus the emergence of life, including intelligent life, can be seen as only one short moment in the early history of the cosmos.  But they do not reflect on how this subverts their claim that Big History is the story of progress in increasing complexity that reaches its highest complexity in the intelligent life of human beings and human collective learning.

My argument is that rather than looking for some cosmic teleology of the universe, we should be satisfied if we can see the immanent teleology of living species, including the human species.  Cosmic teleology is the conception of all of nature as a whole in which all beings serve a cosmic purpose set by an intelligent designer or creator.  By contrast, immanent teleology is manifest in the internal purposiveness of organisms in their generation, their structure, and their activities.  Darwinian biology rejects any cosmic teleology by which the universe as a whole would be seen as ordered to some end or purpose.  Evolution by variation and natural selection explains the purposiveness of species without reference to any forces guiding nature to secure some cosmic scale of perfection.  And yet, although the evolutionary process does not serve goals, the organisms emerging from that process do.  Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care of the young--these and many other activities of organisms are goal directed.  Biologists cannot explain such processes unless they ask about ends or purposes immanent in each species. 

Human beings show such immanent teleology in that the evolved human nature of Homo sapiens includes natural desires and inclinations that are directed to goals or ends, and we can judge the happiness of a human life by how well those goals or ends are satisfied.  I have argued that there are at least 20 natural human desires, and that we judge societies as better or worse depending on how well or how poorly those societies provide the conditions for the harmonious satisfaction of those desires.  This is not a cosmic standard of the good, because this standard of the good is relative to the human species.  Nor is this an eternal standard of the good, because the human good exists only as long as the human species exists.  And modern scientific cosmology teaches us that human beings will exist for only a brief moment in cosmic history.  But for as long as that human species exists, even if it seems fleeting in the huge expanse of cosmic history, the human good is a natural reality.

This is not enough for Gingerich.  He rejects the Biblical literalism of the scientific creationists who claim that science confirms the six-days-of-creation story in Genesis, because he doubts that this poetic story was meant to be a literal history of the origin of the cosmos, and because he doubts that any empirical science could confirm such a story.  He also rejects Intelligent Design Theory (like that promoted by the Discovery Institute), because he sees no scientific evidence that God had to intervene miraculously to create each form of life that could not have arisen by a natural evolutionary process,  And yet he is a theistic evolutionist, who believes that God did have to act as First Cause of the laws of nature: He knew how to make a universe that could make itself.  So he agrees with the Intelligent Design theorists that the evidence of design in nature points to divine final causes.  But he does not see that they have provided any mechanisms for the efficient causes necessary for any scientific explanation (God's Universe, 73).  I have made the same point against the Intelligent Design theorists: what they offer is not a scientific explanation unless they can explain exactly when, where, and how the Intelligent Designer created all the irreducibly complex forms of life.

Although Gingerich does not believe that science can prove the existence of God as First Cause, he does believe that there is evidence of fine-tuning or the anthropic principle that becomes comprehensible only if one believes that this fine-tuning is the purposeful work of a Creator.  There are many parameters of physics and cosmology that are set at precise values, such that if there were even a slight deviation from these values, the universe would not be hospitable to any form of life or to intelligent life.  There can be as many as 34 of these finely tuned parameters.  For example, if the expansion rate of the universe had been slightly larger, no stars and planets could have formed; and if it had been slightly smaller, the universe would have collapsed before any stars and planets could have been formed.  The nuclear energy level ratio of carbon to oxygen is set precisely, so that if it had been larger, the universe would contain insufficient oxygen for life, and if it had been smaller, the universe would contain insufficient carbon for life.  If the earth were closer to the Sun, it would be too hot to sustain life.  If it were farther away from the Sun, it would be too cold to sustain life.  Just as Goldilocks found the bowl of porridge that was neither too hot or too cold but just right, it seems that the universe is just right for the emergence of intelligent life. 

Gingerich sees only two possible ways to explain why the universe is so precisely fine-tuned for the evolution of intelligent life on Earth.  We either say that this all happened through an astonishing sequence of accidents.  Or we say that it was intentionally planned by the Creator.  Gingerich thinks the latter is much more plausible, because it is easier to believe that the Creator intentionally set the finely-tuned parameters of the universe to make it inevitable that not just life, but intelligent human life would emerge on a planet just like the Earth.  He endorses the statement of Paul Davies "that the laws of nature are rigged not only in favor of complexity, or just in favor of life, but also in favor of mind.  To put it dramatically, it implies that mind is written into the laws of nature in a fundamental way" (God's Universe, 38).  It's as though nature has been designed so as to be hospitable to minds that can contemplate nature.

It is easier to believe that the universe's being finely tuned for intelligent life is purely accidental if one believes in the multiverse theory accepted by some scientists today.  If our universe is only one of many universes, and if each of those universes has a different set of natural laws and natural physical and cosmological parameters, then we might imagine that through a random evolution of universes, at least one universe could have arisen like ours hospitable to intelligent life.  The problem with this, however, as Gingerich and other scientists have observed, is that this is a purely imaginary conception, for which we have no observational evidence, because we have no way of stepping outside our own universe.  For this reason, many scientists think the theory of multiverse is not a scientific theory at all, because it is not empirically testable.

Even if from the standpoint of the present moment, we as intelligent beings can look back on 13.8 billion years of cosmic history and see ourselves as the purposeful peak of that fine-tuned evolutionary history, which is what Gingerich does, we might wonder about the remote future of the cosmos.  Is the cosmos so fine-tuned for life and intelligent life that such life will continue forever?  Gingerich never asks that question or considers what scientific cosmology would suggest about the distant future of the cosmos.

Although Gingerich quotes from Paul Davies as saying that the universe seems rigged to favor the emergence of not just life but intelligent life, he does not quote Davies' remarks about what the universe will look like in the very remote future.  He imagines "an inconceivably dilute soup of photons, neutrinos, and a dwindling number of electrons and positrons, all slowly moving farther and farther apart.  As far as we know, no further basic physical processes would ever happen.  No significant event would occur to interrupt the bleak sterility of a universe that has run its course yet still faces eternal life--perhaps eternal death would be a better description."

So if we look at the entire history of the cosmos, we see that during the first 10 billion years, there was no life; and then after a few billion years of life, the universe became eternally dead again.  So now life, including intelligent life, seems to be only a momentary event in cosmic history.  Now, it seems that the cosmos has been fine-tuned for an eternity of mindless death.

Or would Gingerich dispute this scenario of the universe as eternally expanding into an utterly dead universe?  Would he defend what John Barrow and Frank Tipler, in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), call "The Final Anthropic Principle (FAP): Intelligent information-processing must come into existence in the Universe, and, once it comes into existence, it will never die out."  Or would Gingerich agree with Martin Gardner's flippant remark that this should be called the "Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (CRAP)"?

Of course, one way to preserve human intelligent life forever would be for human beings at death to pass into an afterlife, going either to Heaven or Hell.  Gingerich recognizes that Heaven is included in Digges's Copernican model of the universe, but Gingerich does not say whether this could be compatible with modern scientific cosmology.  He does suggest, however, in one of his articles, that if one accepts the multiverse theory, then one might imagine that Heaven could be located in one of those alternative universes. Dinesh D'Souza, in Life After Death: The Evidence (2009), has elaborated this idea.  But as I have argued in some other posts, it is hard to imagine how any of the traditional conceptions of human immortality--such as the mind living separated from the body or the resurrection of the body to eternal life--make any sense.

Gingerich writes: "I accept as a final cause that the physical constants have been fine-tuned to make intelligent life in the universe possible and that this is evidence for the planning and intentions of a Creator God" (God's Planet, 152).  The planning and intentions of the Biblical God include not just making intelligent life in the universe possible, but divine judgment of human intelligent life in the afterlife so that the saved are eternally rewarded in Heaven and the damned are eternally punished in Hell.  This is conveyed in Dante's cosmic model.  It is only partly conveyed in Digges's cosmic model, which has a place for Heaven, but not for Hell, which shows the modern decline in the belief in Hell.  Does Gingerich's modern cosmic model have places for both Heaven and Hell in the afterlife, and if so, can this be compatible with the modern scientific conception of the cosmos?

Christian, Brown, and Benjamin offer no prospects for eternal life in the afterlife, and they actually see the remote future of the universe as eternal death.  Relying on the work of Nikos Prantzos, in Our Cosmic Future: Humanity's Fate in the Universe (2000),  they paint a bleak picture:

"In the very remote future, countless billions of billions of billions of years from now, the universe will start getting more and more boring.  The gaps between galaxies will increase so that observers will see fewer objects in the skies until eventually each galaxy will seem to be a self-contained universe of its own.  Star formation will cease, and the number of stars will start diminishing until finally there will no longer be any stars at all.  And no stars will surely mean no planets, no biospheres, and no living organisms.  The universe will be dead again, and any complex structures will be slowly broken down, beginning with living organisms, progressing to planets, and eventually to stars.  The Goldilocks conditions that made it possible to create planets and life will no longer exist.  The universe will become a place inhabited by clouds of chemicals, including, perhaps, great lumps of iron.  Where there are clumps of matter, they will either form black holes or eventually get gobbled up by black holes, which will graze on the slim pickings left in an increasingly empty universe.  Eventually, gazillions of gazillions of years from now (gazillions is not a technical term, by the way, but we hope you know what we mean), even the black holes will leak energy and begin to evaporate.  The universe will get simpler and simper and bigger and bigger forever and ever and ever and . . ." (304)

They say that this "bleak picture" should actually be "quite satisfying" to us if we see that what this means is that "we have the good fortune to live in the springtime of the universe," before it collapses into perpetual disorder without complexity or life.

What they call the "Goldilocks conditions" seem to correspond to what Gingerich and others call "fine tuning."  But here the finely tuned conditions for the emergence of ever greater complexity in cosmic history, culminating in the complexity of intelligent life, disappear in the remote future.  This seems odd, because after Christian, Brown, and Benjamin have organized all of their Big History of the universe around the theme of increasing complexity leading to intelligent human life, they point in the last three pages of their book to an endless future history with no complexity or life. 

In David Christian's TED lecture, he concludes his "big history of everything in 18 minutes" with the "near future" (the next 100 years), and he is silent about the "remote future" (the death of the universe many billions of years in the future).  Does this show that the proponents of Big History would rather ignore the remote future of the universe, because that contradicts their story of progress towards complexity and intelligent life?  Is this myth rather than science?

Now it seems that there is no cosmic teleology of progress, because it all ends in perpetual dead disorder.  If this Big History gives us any "powerful sense of meaning," it must be not a cosmic meaning but the immanent meaning inherent in the striving of living beings including ourselves.

Bertrand Russell expressed this thought well:

"That all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction . . . and the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins--all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand"

"I am told that that sort of view is depressing and that if people believed it, they would not be able to go on living. . . . But nobody really worries about what is going to happen millions of years hence.  Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out . . ., it is not such as to render life miserable.  It merely makes you turn your attention to other things."

So how do we explain the powerful but illusory appeal of the cosmic teleology of fine tuning the universe for intelligent life?  Perhaps the best way of explaining this comes from Douglas Adams's account of "puddle theory":

"Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact, it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!'  This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be all right, because this World was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for."

And, indeed, Christian, Brown, and Benjamin argue that Big History should teach us about the fragile vulnerability of human life in its dependence on life-sustaining ecological conditions, and thus we need to be on the watch out for threats like global warming.  But they also suggest that no matter what we do, we might survive for a few more centuries, or even thousands of years, if we're lucky, but as billions of years pass, the Sun will begin to expand, and the Earth will be too hot for any kind of life.

But if we could imagine ourselves somehow being there to observe the end of all life and the approaching darkness of cosmic death, we could say: Well, it was good while it lasted.

Some of my other posts on Big History can be found here, here, here, here, here., and here.

Some posts on teleology can be found here, here, and here.

Some posts on immortality can be found here, here, here., here, here, and here.

Some posts on Intelligent Design Theory can be found here, here, and here.

Looking at the Evolutionary History of the Cosmos Through the James Webb Space Telescope: What Will This Tell Us About the Meaning of Our History in the Cosmos?

The Launch of the James Webb Space Telescope into Space

First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope 

 

         At the Center of this Hourglass Structure, A Star Is Being Born in Nebula L1527

                                  A Three Quarter View of the James Webb Space Telescope

                           The Bottom of the Telescope, the Side Facing the Sun and the Earth

Ever since the emergence of human self-conscious awareness, human beings have wondered about how the world came to be, how humans came to be, and how the human place in the world illuminates the meaning of human life.  To answer their questions, human beings have told themselves myths about cosmic history, and generally these myths have appealed to religious beliefs about the powers of supernatural beings. 

Now, modern natural science is attempting to explain the evolutionary history of the cosmos from the Big Bang (about 13.8 billion years ago) to the present and into the future through natural laws that do not depend on supernatural beings.  We must wonder whether that can be done--whether this modern scientific story can fully explain cosmic history, and whether that story can replace those religious myths in a way that explains the meaning of human life.  Or must that scientific story always be limited by the unknown and unknowable depths of the cosmos?  And if so, will those limits to scientific knowledge show the need for religious myths (true myths?) to fully explain the cosmos and the meaning of human life within the cosmos?  Or is it reasonable to choose scientific reason over religious revelation even as we recognize the inevitable limits of natural reason in explaining everything?

The James Webb Space Telescope will help us to think about those questions. 

LOOKING THROUGH A TELESCOPE TO SEE THE HISTORY AND MEANING OF THE COSMOS

For thousands of years, in the Western World, astronomy was understood through a religious conception of the universe as a divinely created order that constituted a moral cosmology supporting a divine law to guide human life.  It was a geocentric cosmos.  The Earth was at the center.   Circling around the Earth were the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.  Beyond that were the fixed stars, and then finally the crystalline sphere of the Primum Mobile and the Paradise of Heaven.  Beneath the Earth were Purgatory and Hell.  

Even Plato and Aristotle endorsed pagan versions of this religious astronomy.  But Aristotle noted that this cosmic model was based mostly on traditional myths that could be known by faith or trust (pistis) but not by scientific study, because the planets and stars were so far away from the Earth that they could not be known very well by sense experience.  Aristotle thought that biology was a more empirically grounded science than astronomy because plants and animals could be directly observed by human beings.

This changed with the invention of the telescope in 1608.  The word telescope was coined from two Greek words for "far-seeing."  In 1609, Galileo built his own telescope and turned it toward the night sky.  He could see the mountains and craters of the Moon, the planets, and a ribbon of light stretched across the sky that would later be identified as the Milky Way galaxy.  He could also see that Copernicus was right about the heliocentric Solar system, with the Earth revolving around the Sun.  The telescope had extended the range and clarity of the human visual system deep into the night sky.

In 1633, the Catholic Inquisition condemned Galileo as a heretic for endorsing the Copernican heliocentric theory of the Earth as moving around the Sun, because this seemed to deny those Biblical passages that spoke of the fixity of the Earth. Galileo was sentenced to house arrest, and his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was put on the Church's Index of Prohibited Books.

By the middle of the twentieth century, Pope Pius XII praised Galileo as an intellectual hero and declared in his 1950 encyclical Humani Generis that there was no necessary conflict between Biblical faith and the theory of evolution. Pope John Paul II apologized for the condemnation of Galileo, and in 1996 he declared that the Church did not oppose Darwin's theory. A few years ago, I wrote a short essay on John Paul's statement.

After Galileo first turned his telescope to the sky, for the next three and a half centuries, telescopes became larger and more complex in ways that improved the depth and accuracy of astronomical observations.  But all of these telescopes were limited by their location on the Earth because of the distorting effects of the Earth's atmosphere.  By the middle of the 20th century, astronomers began to think about the possibility of sending telescopes into space beyond the atmosphere of the Earth.  This dream was fulfilled in 1990 when five astronauts onboard the space shuttle Discovery released the Hubble Space Telescope into an orbit around the Earth about 340 miles above the surface.  

Hubble did indeed produce stunning images of the cosmos that allowed for the study of cosmic history over billions of years.  But in the 1990s scientists began to think about new space telescopes that could detect objects up to 100 times fainter than Hubble can, and objects much earlier in the history of the universe.

The James Webb Space Telescope was designed to employ infrared astronomy to detect high-redshift objects that are very early in the history of the universe and very distant.  Infrared light also passes more easily through dust clouds than visible light.  As light travels through space, it is stretched by the expansion of the universe.  Consequently, many of the most distant objects shine in infrared light, which is longer in wavelength than visible light.  Unaided by optical instruments, the human visual system can see only a narrow portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.  The Hubble telescope captures a slightly broader portion of the spectrum, including the near ultraviolet and the near infrared.  The James Webb telescope captures a much broader spectrum, including the near and midinfrared spectrum.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on Christmas Day one year ago.  It was placed in a halo orbit, circling around a point in space known as the Sun-Earth Lagrange point, approximately 930,000 miles beyond the Earth's orbit around the Sun.  The combined gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun allow the James Webb spacecraft to orbit the Sun in the same time that it takes the Earth.

James Webb has four key goals: to search for light from the first stars and galaxies that formed in the universe after the Big Bang, to study galaxy formation and evolution, to study star formation and planet formation, and to study planetary systems and the origins of life.

One example of the stunning images produced by James Webb is the image of the star Earendel.

                                                           James Webb Views Earendel

Earendel is the most distant individual star ever seen.  It was first detected by the Hubble Telescope early in 2022, but then a better image of it was captured by the James Webb Telescope.  Its light took 12.9 billion years to reach the Earth.  This means that this is what this star looked like shortly after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, only 900 million years from the Big Bang.

The many ways in which the James Webb Telescope might contribute to our understanding of the cosmos is surveyed in a recent article in the New York Times and in a series of articles in the latest issue of Scientific American (December, 2022). The broadest coverage of the work with James Webb can be found at the NASA website.

This coverage of the James Webb research fails, however, to probe the deep philosophic and theological questions that should arise from this research--questions about the limits of natural scientific knowledge, the mystery of First Cause, the mystery of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life, and the cosmic teleology of human purposefulness.

THE LIMITS OF NATURAL SCIENCE

The fundamental assumption of modern natural science is that to understand nature we must engage in both thinking and looking.  In thinking about nature, we speculate about what nature might be like, and we formulate theories or hypotheses about the order of nature.  But thinking is not enough.  We must also look at nature:  we must engage in observations or experiments that will test our theories or hypotheses and either verify or falsify them.  Many scientists agree with Karl Popper that conjectures about nature that cannot be falsified by empirical observations or experiments do not count as scientific knowledge.

But as I have noted previously, some critics of this Popperian philosophy of science have argued that it ignores the fact that the human experience of the world cannot extend into the fundamental depths of nature, and therefore we can only speculate about that deepest reality of nature, without being able to empirically test our speculations.  The fundamental constituents of nature are either too small, too far away, or too far in the past to be observed directly by us or indirectly through our instruments, and thus nature's secrets are buried so deep or so far away that we have no way to test our theoretical speculations about them.

So, for example, while the James Webb Telescope can expand our vision ever deeper into the cosmos, there will always be a cosmic horizon beyond which we cannot look.  And although we might push that cosmic horizon ever closer to the Big Bang, we will never be able to look beyond the Big Bang to see what there was before the beginning of time.  Consequently, we might speculate that we are living in only one of many (infinite?) possible universes, but we can never test that multiverse speculation because we cannot in principle ever look beyond our universe.

THE MYSTERY OF FIRST CAUSE

The limits of natural science are manifested in those fundamental mysteries of nature that might never be resolved--such as the mystery of First Cause as conveyed by the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?  I have written about this previously.

I have written about the debate between William Lane Craig and Sean Carroll over this question.  Craig presents a syllogism for the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God as supported by modern natural science.

1. If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

Craig claims that (1) is "obviously true," because no one believes that things just "pop into existence" without a cause, and if the whole universe came into existence at some point in time, the cause must have been transcendent--namely, a divine First Cause.

The controversial premise, he says, is (2).  Previously, traditional proponents of the Cosmological Argument have made logical arguments for why the universe could not be eternal and so must have an absolute beginning in time.  But now, beginning in the 20th century, we have scientific empirical evidence from astrophysical cosmology supporting the theory of the Big Bang--most importantly, evidence for the expansion of the universe and evidence from the second law of thermodynamics that the universe has moved from an original state of low entropy to high entropy.

Craig says that the scientific support for premise (2) coming from Big Bang cosmology is "religiously neutral," but when the empirical truth of premise (2) is combined with the metaphysical truth of premise (1), the logical conclusion supports the existence of a transcendent cause of the universe that must be God.

There are, however, good reasons to doubt those two premises as scientific statements rather than affirmations of religious faith.

Premise (1) is not "obviously true," because while we all have experience of how natural causes work within the universe to bring things into existence, we do not have experience with how transcendent causes work outside the universe to bring the universe itself into existence. 

Carroll makes this argument, and Craig refuses to answer it.  Craig just repeats how silly it sounds to say that things "just pop into existence" without a cause.  But as Carroll observes, the language of "popping" implies a context within which cause and effect relationships make sense.  So we can sensibly ask why the chicken crossed the road, because we have a contextual understanding of what roads are, what might be on the other side of a road, what might motivate chickens to cross a road, etc.  We have a context here of things interacting within a universe governed by natural laws.

But if we try to ask why the universe exists, we have no context outside the universe that would make it possible for us to seek a causal explanation.  Indeed, to even talk about transcendent causes implies that our natural experience of causality inside the universe has no application here.  Thus, Craig is employing the sophistical technique of equivocation: if it's silly within our natural experience of the universe to say that things can just "pop into existence," then it is also silly standing outside our natural universe to say that our universe could have come into existence without a cause.  This is a fallacious inference, because our ordinary experience of causality within the context of the universe does not necessarily apply outside that context.

THE MYSTERY OF FINE-TUNING FOR HUMAN LIFE

Part of the mission of the James Webb Space Telescope is to locate and study the exoplanets (the planets beyond the Solar System) that have the conditions favorable to life, or even to intelligent life.  Although intelligent life might be rare in the universe, and although it might even turn out to be uniquely found only on the Earth, it is remarkable that some of the physical and chemical constants of the universe appear to be finely tuned for the emergence of life and intelligent life.

Some astrophysicists, such as Owen Gingerich, believe that this evidence of fine-tuning or the anthropic principle becomes comprehensible only if one believes that this fine-tuning is the purposeful work of a Creator.  There are many parameters of physics and cosmology that are set at precise values, such that if there were even a slight deviation from these values, the universe would not be hospitable to any form of life or to intelligent life.  There can be as many as 34 of these finely tuned parameters.  For example, if the expansion rate of the universe had been slightly larger, no stars and planets could have formed; and if it had been slightly smaller, the universe would have collapsed before any stars and planets could have been formed.  The nuclear energy level ratio of carbon to oxygen is set precisely, so that if it had been larger, the universe would contain insufficient oxygen for life, and if it had been smaller, the universe would contain insufficient carbon for life.  If the earth were closer to the Sun, it would be too hot to sustain life.  If it were farther away from the Sun, it would be too cold to sustain life.  Just as Goldilocks found the bowl of porridge that was neither too hot or too cold but just right, it seems that the universe is just right for the emergence of intelligent life. 

Gingerich sees only two possible ways to explain why the universe is so precisely fine-tuned for the evolution of intelligent life on Earth.  We either say that this all happened through an astonishing sequence of accidents.  Or we say that it was intentionally planned by the Creator.  Gingerich thinks the latter is much more plausible, because it is easier to believe that the Creator intentionally set the finely-tuned parameters of the universe to make it inevitable that not just life, but intelligent human life would emerge on a planet just like the Earth.  He endorses the statement of Paul Davies "that the laws of nature are rigged not only in favor of complexity, or just in favor of life, but also in favor of mind.  To put it dramatically, it implies that mind is written into the laws of nature in a fundamental way" (God's Universe, 38).  It's as though nature has been designed so as to be hospitable to minds that can contemplate nature.

It is easier to believe that the universe's being finely tuned for intelligent life is purely accidental if one believes in the multiverse theory accepted by some scientists today.  If our universe is only one of many universes, and if each of those universes has a different set of natural laws and natural physical and cosmological parameters, then we might imagine that through a random evolution of universes, at least one universe could have arisen like ours hospitable to intelligent life.  The problem with this, however, as Gingerich and other scientists have observed, is that this is a purely imaginary conception, for which we have no observational evidence, because we have no way of stepping outside our own universe.  For this reason, many scientists think the theory of multiverse is not a scientific theory at all, because it is not empirically testable.

Even if from the standpoint of the present moment, we as intelligent beings can look back on 13.8 billion years of cosmic history and see ourselves as the purposeful peak of that fine-tuned evolutionary history, which is what Gingerich does, we might wonder about the remote future of the cosmos.  Is the cosmos so fine-tuned for life and intelligent life that such life will continue forever?  Gingerich never asks that question or considers what scientific cosmology would suggest about the distant future of the cosmos.

Although Gingerich quotes from Paul Davies as saying that the universe seems rigged to favor the emergence of not just life but intelligent life, he does not quote Davies' remarks about what the universe will look like in the very remote future.  He imagines "an inconceivably dilute soup of photons, neutrinos, and a dwindling number of electrons and positrons, all slowly moving farther and farther apart.  As far as we know, no further basic physical processes would ever happen.  No significant event would occur to interrupt the bleak sterility of a universe that has run its course yet still faces eternal life--perhaps eternal death would be a better description."

If we look at the entire history of the cosmos, we see that during the first 10 billion years, there was no life; and then after a few billion years of life, the universe became eternally dead again.  So now life, including intelligent life, seems to be only a momentary event in cosmic history.  Now, it seems that the cosmos has been fine-tuned for an eternity of mindless death.

A NATURAL TELEOLOGY OF HUMAN MEANING?

Gingerich looks to the fine-tuning of the universe as evidence for a cosmic teleology--for a cosmos that has been created purposefully to bring about the emergence of human beings, which thus gives cosmic meaning to the place of human beings in the universe.

But rather than looking for some cosmic teleology of the universe, we should be satisfied if we can see the immanent teleology of living species, including the human species.  Cosmic teleology is the conception of all of nature as a whole in which all beings serve a cosmic purpose set by an intelligent designer or creator.  By contrast, immanent teleology is manifest in the internal purposiveness of organisms in their generation, their structure, and their activities.  Darwinian biology rejects any cosmic teleology by which the universe as a whole would be seen as ordered to some end or purpose.  Evolution by variation and natural selection explains the purposiveness of species without reference to any forces guiding nature to secure some cosmic scale of perfection.  And yet, although the evolutionary process does not serve goals, the organisms emerging from that process do.  Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care of the young--these and many other activities of organisms are goal directed.  Biologists cannot explain such processes unless they ask about ends or purposes immanent in each species. 

Human beings show such immanent teleology in that the evolved human nature of Homo sapiens includes natural desires and inclinations that are directed to goals or ends, and we can judge the happiness of a human life by how well those goals or ends are satisfied.  I have argued that there are at least 20 natural human desires, and that we judge societies as better or worse depending on how well or how poorly those societies provide the conditions for the harmonious satisfaction of those desires.  This is not a cosmic standard of the good, because this standard of the good is relative to the human species.  Nor is this an eternal standard of the good, because the human good exists only as long as the human species exists.  And modern scientific cosmology teaches us that human beings will exist for only a brief moment in cosmic history.  But for as long as that human species exists, even if it seems fleeting in the huge expanse of cosmic history, the human good is a natural reality.

The evidence of cosmological fine-tuning does not clearly show a fine-tuning for human life.  If we look at the entire history of the cosmos, we see that during the first 10 billion years, there was no life, during the first 13 billion years, there was no human-like intelligent life, and in the remote future, as the Sun and the other stars burn out, the universe will become dark, cold, and dead.  We could conclude that the universe has been fine-tuned for an eternity of mindless death, and so from the point of view of the universe, we are utterly insignificant.

But it does not follow from this, however, that if the universe does not care about or for us, our lives have no meaning.  Even if our lives have no cosmic meaning, they still have human meaning for us.  The universe doesn't care.  But we care about ourselves and others.

Even if the universe does not care about or for us, and even if we can never fully understand that universe, we still want to probe as far as we can into the awesome depths of that universe, and the James Webb Space Telescope will help us do that.

A Universe From Nothing? Craig, Carroll, and Krauss on the Cosmology of Theism and Naturalism

In the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the entry on "Nothingness" starts by asking, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and immediately answering, "Well, why not?"

In a previous post, I have suggested that that might well be the best response to this question, because the existence of the universe is a brute fact that cannot and need not be explained, and the idea of absolute "nothing" that comes from the Christian theological idea of creation ex nihilo is not rationally comprehensible since it is beyond our natural experience of the world.

But some people insist that the existence of the universe needs to be explained, and particularly if the universe had a beginning in the Big Bang, then there must be a transcendent cause for the universe coming into being.  And that transcendent cause must be a powerful disembodied mind--God.  In this way, the modern cosmologists who believe that the universe began in the Big Bang might seem to be supporting a crucial premise for the cosmological argument for the existence of God. 

Moreover, many modern cosmologists accept the anthropic principle--that the universe has been fine-tuned to provide the conditions for the emergence of human life--and thus they seem to be endorsing a premise for the teleological argument for the existence of God, as the intelligent designer of a universe that is purposefully designed to be habitable for human beings.

That's the claim of William Lane Craig and other Christian apologists who think modern science does indeed support some of the premises for some of the classic arguments for the existence of God.  As I have indicated in some previous posts (here, here, and here), some modern scientists--Owen Gingerich, for example--agree with Craig about this.  But most do not.  Sean Carroll and Lawrence Krauss are two cosmologists who have debated Craig and argued that modern science supports naturalism rather than theism.  Here are two videos of these debates:

A transcript of the Craig/Carroll debate along with other papers on the debate has been published in God and Cosmology: William Lane Craig and Sean Carroll in Dialogue, edited by Robert Stewart (Fortress Press, 2016).  Carroll has elaborated his arguments in his wonderful book The Big Picture: On the Origin of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016).  Krauss has laid out his reasoning for a purely naturalistic account of origins in A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (Free Press, 2012), with an Afterword by Richard Dawkins.

Here is Craig's syllogism for the Cosmological Argument:

1. If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

Craig claims that (1)  is "obviously true," because no one believes that things just "pop into existence" without a cause, and if the whole universe came into existence at some point in time, the cause must have been transcendent--namely, a divine First Cause.

The controversial premise, he says, is (2).  Previously, traditional proponents of the Cosmological Argument have made logical arguments for why the universe could not be eternal and so must have an absolute beginning in time.  But now, beginning in the 20th century, we have scientific empirical evidence from astrophysical cosmology supporting the theory of the Big Bang--most importantly, evidence for the expansion of the universe and evidence from the second law of thermodynamics that the universe has moved from an original state of low entropy to high entropy.

Craig says that the scientific support for premise (2) coming from Big Bang cosmology is "religiously neutral," but when the empirical truth of premise (2) is combined with the metaphysical truth of premise (1), the logical conclusion supports the existence of a transcendent cause of the universe that must be God.

There are, however, good reasons to doubt that those two premises are really scientific statements rather than affirmations of religious faith.

Premise (1) is not "obviously true," because while we all have experience of how natural causes work within the universe to bring things into existence, we do not have experience with how transcendent causes work outside the universe to bring the universe itself into existence. 

Carroll makes this argument, and Craig refuses to answer it.  Craig just repeats how silly it sounds to say that things "just pop into existence" without a cause.  But as Carroll observes, the language of "popping" implies a context within which cause and effect relationships make sense.  So we can sensibly ask why the chicken crossed the road, because we have a contextual understanding of what roads are, what might be on the other side of a road, what might motivate chickens to cross a road, etc.  We have a context here of things interacting within a universe governed by natural laws.

But if we try to ask why the universe exists, we have no context outside the universe that would make it possible for us to seek a causal explanation.  Indeed, to even talk about transcendent causes implies that our natural experience of causality inside the universe has no application here.  Thus, Craig is employing the sophistical technique of equivocation: if it's silly within our natural experience of the universe to say that things can just "pop into existence," then it is also silly standing outside our natural universe to say that our universe could have come into existence without a cause.  This is a fallacious inference, because our ordinary experience of causality within the context of the universe does not necessarily apply outside that context.

As Carroll says, our natural experience of causality is in the context of time, so that things happen now because of things that happened in the past.  But if the beginning of the universe in the Big Bang was the beginning of time, then there is no context of time for that beginning--there is no "before" the beginning.  So while "popping into existence" sounds silly, "there was a first moment of time" does not sound so silly.

Consequently, while the "principle of sufficient reason"--that for everything there must be a causal explanation--might hold true for our ordinary experience of how things work within the universe, this principle does not necessarily apply to what things are like outside the universe, because none of us has ever stood "outside the universe" to see if the principle of sufficient reason holds true there.  Standing "outside the universe"--experiencing the transcendent--is a matter of religious imagination that is beyond our empirical experience of the world and thus beyond empirical science.

Therefore, premise (1) of Craig's syllogism might be a statement of religious faith, but it is not a statement of scientific truth.

The same can be said about premise (2).  As with Craig's premise (1), there is an implied equivocation in his premise (2).  "The universe began to exist."  What exactly is being stated here?  There are two possibilities.  The universe began to exist out of nothing.  Or the universe began to exist out of something. 

Craig's argument requires that he equivocate between these two different statements.  The universe began to exist out of nothing is the Christian theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo.  But, then, this would deny Craig's claim that this premise is "religiously neutral."  In fact, that the universe began to exist out of nothing is not a scientific statement at all, because there is no human observational experience of absolute "nothing" that would make the study of "nothing" part of empirical science. 

By contrast, the claim that the universe began to exist out of something can be a scientific statement, because there is human observational experience of how things can originate out of something.

Both Christian apologists like Craig and atheistic cosmologists like Krauss fail to acknowledge this point.  Both sides refuse to admit that origin from something and creation from nothing are utterly different.

The title for Krauss's book A Universe From Nothing is wrong.  The proper title would be A Universe From Something.  Krauss proposes a model of how the universe could have evolved from a multiverse by the laws of relativistic quantum theories out of the empty space of quantum vacuum states into the universe as we observe it today.  Aha, there you are, he proclaims, a universe from nothing without any need to posit a divine creator!  But notice that there is no absolute "nothing" here.  He assumes at the origin of the universe the reality of the laws of quantum mechanics and of quantum vacuum states.   That's not nothing!  That's something! 

In a way, he even admits this when he writes: "to be fair, to make any scientific progress in calculating possibilities, we generally assume that certain properties, like quantum mechanics, permeate all possibilities.  I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with, or at least I don't know of any productive work in this regard" (176-77). 

So where are the laws of quantum mechanics supposed to have come from?  He has no idea.  And if our universe came out of the multiverse, where did the multiverse and the laws governing it come from?  He has no idea.  He can explain how the universe might have come from something, but not how it might have come from nothing.

In his lectures, Krauss likes to tell the story of how the first cosmologist to propose a Big Bang theory of the universe was a Jesuit priest--Georges Lemaitre--and how, when Pope Pius XIII in 1951 pointed to Lemaitre's Big Bang theory as scientific evidence for divine creation of the universe from nothing, Lemaitre criticized the Pope for failing to see how this scientific theory had nothing to do with the Christian doctrine of creation. 

But what Krauss doesn't say is that Lemaitre explained that the theory of the Big Bang is not a theory of how the universe could arise "out of nothing," but rather it is a theory of how the universe could arise from what Lemaitre called a "primeval atom," or from a hyper-dense sphere of cold matter, disintegrating through radioactivity into an expanding universe, or from what some people called "the cosmic egg."  Lemaitre thus separated the scientific theory of the universe's origin from something and the religious doctrine of the universe's creation from nothing.  Here Lemaitre was in agreement with St. Thomas Aquinas, who declared that "It is by faith alone do we hold and not by any demonstration that can be proved, that the world did not always exist. . . . that the world began to exist is an object of faith, but not of demonstration or science" (Summa Theologica, I, q. 46, a. 2).

Krauss says nothing about this, because he wants to claim that his scientific theory of origin is actually an explanation of "a universe from nothing," which Lemaitre denied as a scientific claim.  (My understanding of Lemaitre's position depends greatly on John Farrell's book The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaitre, Einstein, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology [2005].  Farrell has kindly confirmed in an email message that my interpretation is correct.)

Oddly, Craig makes exactly the same mistake as Krauss, because Craig repeats the Pope's claim that Big Bang theory confirms the scientific truth of creation from nothing, without answering Lemaitre's objections.

But, then, what about  Craig's Teleological Argument?  Here is how he frames it:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.

2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.

3. Therefore, it is due to design.

By "fine-tuning of the universe," Craig is referring to certain fundamental constants and quantities, such as the gravitational constant and the amount of entropy in the early universe, that apparently must be exactly as they are for a universe hospitable to life to emerge.

In his response to Craig, Carroll admits that this teleological argument from fine-tuning is "the best argument that theists have when it comes to cosmology" (47).  Nevertheless, he offers five reasons why theism is not a solution to the purported fine-tuning problem:

1. Fine-tuning for life is dubious at best.

2. God doesn't need to fine-tune anything. He's God.

3. Fine-tunings may be only apparent.

4. The multiverse is an obvious naturalistic explanation for fine-tuning.

5. Theism fails as an explanation for purported cosmological fine-tuning, because theism is so badly defined that it does not make precise falsifiable predictions about how God has fine-tuned the universe.

As I indicated in my post on Owen Gingerich (here), the evidence of cosmological fine-tuning does not clearly show a fine-tuning for human life.  If we look at the entire history of the cosmos, we see that during the first 10 billion years, there was no life, during the first 13 billion years, there was no human-like intelligent life, and in the remote future, as the Sun and the other stars burn out, the universe will become dark, cold, and dead.  So we could conclude that the universe has been fine-tuned for an eternity of mindless death, and so from the point of view of the universe, we are utterly insignificant.

It does not follow from this, however, that if the universe does not care about or for us, our lives have no meaning.  As Carroll argues, and I agree, even if our lives have no cosmic meaning, they still have human meaning for us.  The universe doesn't care.  But we care about ourselves and others.  Showing how this supports a naturalistic account of human morality and politics will be the subject of my next post.