Tim Ross’s talk on “Can we prove the existence of God”

A Modern Cosmological Argument – The Goldilocks Enigma

Paul Davies, a cosmologist with no particular religious axe to grind says this about the universe:

• “One of the most significant facts – arguably the most significant fact – about the universe is that we are a part of it... For life to emerge and then evolve into conscious beings like ourselves, certain conditions have to be satisfied.”

“Now, it happens that to meet these various requirements, certain stringent physical conditions must be satisfied in the underlying laws of physics that regulate the universe, so stringent in fact that a bio-friendly universe looks like a fix – or ‘a put-up job’, to use the pithy description of the late British cosmologist Fred Hoyle. It appeared to Hoyle as if a super-intellect had been ‘monkeying’ with the laws of physics. He was right in his impression. On the face of it, the universe does look as if it has been designed by an intelligent creator expressly for the purpose of spawning intelligent beings. Like the porridge in the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears, the universe seems to be ‘just right’ for life, in many intriguing ways.”

• The Goldilocks Enigma. Paul Davies. Penguin Books, pp2-3.

This feature of the universe has been called Fine Tuning. Scientists have noticed that the laws of physics are so finely tuned that if they were tweaked very slightly life could exist at all.

Paul Davies describes this like having a Creation Machine with lots of knobs on it for all the various laws of physics and conditions needed to produce a universe capable of developing intelligent life. Each one of the knobs has to be set very precisely. Tweak these knobs very slightly either way and life would not emerge.

The problem that scientists are facing is that some of the knobs are so finely tuned as to be beyond the possibility of chance.

An Example of Fine Tuning – Dark Energy

One essential property of the universe is something called Dark Energy, and it’s the extremely precise value for Dark Energy that’s got scientists worried. It turns out that for the universe to be in a stable enough state for life to exist the value for Dark Energy must be accurate to 1 in 10¹²⁰.

So what is 1 in 10¹²⁰?

If you have a knob with 10 numbers on it and you spin it at random, you would have a 1 in 10 chance of getting the number you want.
If you had a knob with a million numbers on it, your chances of hitting the right number at random are 1 in a million (1 with six zeros after it ), or 1 in 10⁶.
On the Creation Machine this means that the knob for the Dark Energy setting has all the numbers from 1 to 10¹²⁰ but only one of them is the right one for life. So getting the right value for Dark Energy involves a 1 in 10¹²⁰ chance (1 with one hundred and twenty zeros after it).
 

There is widespread agreement among physicists and cosmologists that this number is too big to allow any element of chance.

And Dark Energy is just one of many finely tuned knobs on the Creation Machine.

So, Fine Tuning puts the existence of the universe beyond the possibility of chance. At the moment there are really only three plausible explanations:

The universe just is this way. It exists and we exist. If it didn’t we wouldn’t be here. Life is irrelevant to the existence of the universe. There is no reason for it to exists, it just does, and it did all happen by an amazingly mysterious chance we don’t fully understand. Paul Davies calls this the ‘absurd universe’.

• The problem with this is that both science and theology agree that everything has a reason or cause.
• The universe is just one of a larger number of universes called the multiverse. Given enough universes one of them was bound to come up with the right ingredients for life.
• The problem with this is that scientists are now doing what they are accusing theologians of, they are appealing to something outside the universe as the cause of the universe’s existence. They have also merely shifted the question of the universe’s origin up a level – where does the multiverse come from?
• The other problem with the multiverse idea is that it would need a virtually infinite number of universes in order to produce one capable of sustaining life – it has been calculated that the minimum number would be in the order of 10¹⁰¹²⁰ – whatever that is!
• The universe was designed and created by an intelligent designer. Scientists do not like this explanation because it is not a scientific one. It cannot be proved by experiment or mathematical model.

Occam’s Razor

“Occam’s Razor” is a device used to help resolve conflicting arguments. It goes something like this:
When there are conflicting solutions to a problem, the simplest solution, the one makes the fewest assumptions as possible, is usually the best one.

So, which is the simplest explanation? The universe exists for no reason at all, the universe exists because of an even more remote probability than the existence of dark energy, or the universe exists because God created it.