Deciphering The Anthropic Principle

In a recent special edition of "U.S. News and World Report" entitled "Mysteries of Faith: Secrets of Christianity", there is an article by Patrick Glynn called "God: The Evidence". In this article, he cites some of the same sources as Professor Richard Dawkins did in his book "The God Delusion", such as Bertrand Russell and Charles Darwin, as an argument FOR the existence of a creator god, whereas in Dawkins' book, they were used as an argument against it. The author says that several scientists are making the case for a creator, however, he only refers to one, Brandon Carter, astrophysicist and cosmologist from Cambridge University, author of the paper "Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology." The article goes so far as to say that "Darwin's theory of natural selection can no longer explain the phenomenon of life." And that it also states that "the vast 15-billion year evolution of the universe, due to a large number of 'coincidences', had been directed toward one goal: the creation of human life."

If this were true, then how could one explain the existence of planets orbiting about stars that may harbor alien life? So far, astronomers have only found Hot Jupiters, gas giants hurtling around their host star in a matter of days, and Super Earths, rocky and icy planets several times the mass of our home planet with world-wide hyperdense oceans that orbit at the edges of their stars' Habitable or Goldilocks Zones. Granted, we have not found the most Earth-like extrasolar planets yet, but that does not mean they do not exist. We found the larger planets first because they tug more on their stars, causing the Doppler-effect "wobble" that planetary astronomers look for. NASA and the European Space Administration are currently collaborating on a project to create a telescope large enough to detect these smaller extrasolar planets. If there was an intelligent Creator that built a universe solely for the existence of life on Earth, why would he create other planets within the Habitable Zones of their respective parent stars?

Glynn: "Carter states (in somewhat of a hair-splitting fashion) that even if our position in the universe was not 'central,' it was 'inevitably privileged to some extent.' ... Indeed, what 20th-century cosmology had come up with was something of an embarrassment: a universe with a definite beginning, expressly designed for life."

Design. There's that word again. As Dawkins has written, "The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. The temptation is a false one as the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer."

Glynn: "Ironically, the picture of the universe bequeathed to us by the most advanced 20th-century science is closer in spirit to the vision presented in the Book of Genesis than anything offered in science since Copernicus." The author states this and then makes no statements to back up this argument. He provides no proof that the universe is as presented in the Bible, instead using the Big Bang theory to support this statement: "By the 1970's, with the big-bang theory fully established, physicists began to think about alternative scenarios for the universe's evolution. ... Carter and other scientists would discover and increasingly daunting and improbable list of mysterious coincidences or 'lucky accidents' in the universe—whose only common denominator seemed that they were necessary for our emergence. Even the most minor tinkering with the value of the fundamental forces of physics—gravity, electromagnetism, the nuclear strong force, or the nuclear weak force—would have resulted in an unrecognizable universe."

Ah, yes. Enter the Divine Knob-Twiddler. From Dawkins: "We have the theist's answer on one hand and the anthropic answer on the other. The theist says that God, when setting up the universe, tuned the fundamental constants of the universe so that each one lay in its Goldilocks zone for the production of life. It is as though God had six knobs that he could twiddle, and he carefully tuned each knob to its Goldilocks value. As ever, the theist's answer is deeply unsatisfying, because it leaves the existence of God unexplained. A God capable of calculating the Goldilocks values for the six number would have to be at least as improbable as the finely tuned combination of numbers itself, and that's very improbable indeed — which is indeed the premise of the discussion we are having. It follows that the theist's answer has utterly failed to make any headway towards solving the problem at hand. I see no alternative but to dismiss it, while at the same time marveling at the number of people who can't see the problem and seem genuinely satisfied by the 'Divine Knob-Twiddler' argument.

Let's turn then to the anthropic alternative. The anthropic answer, in its most general form, is that we could only be discussing the question in the kind of universe that was capable of producing us. Our existence therefore determines that the fundamental constants of physics had to be in their respective Goldilocks zones. Different physicists espouse different kinds of anthropic solutions to the riddle of our existence.

Hard-nosed physicists say that the six knobs were never free to vary in the first place. When we finally reach the Theory of Everything, we shall see that the six key numbers depend on each other, or on something else as yet unknown, in ways that we today cannot imagine. The six number may turn out to be no freer to vary than is the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. It will turn out that there is only one way for a universe to be. Far from God being needed to twiddle six knobs, there are no knobs to twiddle.

Other physicists find this unsatisfying, and I think I agree with them. It is indeed perfectly plausible that there is only one way for a universe to be. But why did that one way have to be such a set-up for our eventual evolution? Why did it have to be the kind of universe which seems almost as if, in the words of theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, 'must have known we were coming'? ... This objection can be answered by the suggestion that there are many universes, co-existing like bubbles of foam, in a 'multiverse'. The laws and constants of any one universe, such as our observable universe, are by-laws. The multiverse as a whole has a plethora of alternative sets of by-laws. The anthropic principle kicks in to explain that we have to be in one of those universes (presumably a minority) whose by-laws happened to be propitious to our eventual evolution and hence contemplation of the problem. (I say 'presumably', partly because we don't know how different alien forms of life might be, and partly because it is possible that we make a mistake if we consider only changing one constant at a time. Could there be other COMBINATIONS of values of six numbers which would turn out to be friendly to life, in ways that we do not discover if we consider them only one at a time?) ... Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. The kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles up to postulate far more luck than out limited human intuition is comfortable with."

The final paragraph of Glynn's article: "As recently as 25 years ago, a reasonable person weighing the purely scientific evidence on the issue would likely have come down on the side of skepticism. That is no longer the case. The burden of proof has shifted. The barrier that modern science appeared to erect to faith has fallen. Of course, the anthropic principle tells us nothing about the Person of God or the existence of an afterlife. But it does offer as strong an indication as reason and science alone could be expected to provide that God exists." The "anthropic principle" consists of the observation that "What we can expect to observe [in the universe] must be restricted by the conditions necessary for our presence as observers."

"Our" presence. Human presence. The statement is nearly pre-Copernican. Who's to say that humans living on Earth are the only intended observers? Again, several extrasolar planets are being discovered everyday and the instruments to detect them are increasing in their sensitivity. To argue that we are the only intended observers of the universe is to be close-minded. Extraterrestrial life may be hurtling around stars in the constellations of Leo and Ursa Major at distances of only 50 light-years from Earth. Think of it this way: If only .01% of all stars had a planet orbiting it, and if .01% of those were in the Habitable Zone, and if only .01% of those had life, and if only .01% of THOSE had intelligent life, there would be literally millions, perhaps billions, of other planets of observers out there.

For more information, please read "God: The Evidence" by Patrick Glynn, published by Prima Publishing 1997 and "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins, published by Houghton Mifflin Company 2006.