Why the Universe’s “Fine-Tuning” Is Not Evidence of Intelligent Design

This entry is in reference to an episode of the “ID The Future” podcast, “The Argument for Design Cosmology” that was released on September 8, 2008.

This episode of the “ID The Future” podcast is fairly long, at nearly 32 minutes.  Because of this, I am not going to address each individual claim made by the guest, Dr. Bruce Gordon (who holds a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science with a focus in the foundation of modern physics), on the concept of the fine-tuning of the fundamental constants of nature.  To be perfectly honest, Dr. Gordon goes into a lot of aspects of cosmology that make my head spin.  Consequently, I will be addressing his most basic claim – and the basic claim put forth by the Discovery Institute on cosmology.

The premise is this:  The most reduced model of physics has a handful of fundamental particles (such as quarks, electrons, neutrinos, and leptons).  It also has four Fundamental Forces (strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational).  In cosmology, there are some “fundamental constants” (or “fundamental values,” since we’re not really sure if they’re constant with time).  The main one that IDers discuss is the Hubble Constant, which is the expansion rate of the Universe.  Another fundamental constant is the speed of light, or the Gravitational Constant (a less well-known one is the Planck Constant that appears a lot in Quantum Mechanics).

One of the big questions of modern theoretical physics and cosmology is why these fundamental particles, forces, and constants have the properties and/or values that they do.  For example, why the mass of the electron is 9.109·10^-31 kg, or the speed of light in a vacuum is 2.998·10⁸ m/s.  Or why the strength of gravity on 2 protons in the nucleus of an atom is only 10^-36 times the strength of the electromagnetic force.

The claim from Intelligent Design – and in this episode professed by Dr. Gordon – is that if any of these were different, even by the smallest amount (he throws out numbers such as to 1 part in 10⁴⁰ for one of them — I do not know enough about particle physics to agree or disagree there) then our Universe would be vastly different and we wouldn’t be here.  As I said in my opening paragraph, I do not have the expertise to pick apart his specific numbers/values on precisely how fine-tuned these need to be, but for the moment let’s take his claims at face-value.

The conclusion from this – the entire point as to why IDers point this out – is that because “material” science has no good explanation for why these values are the away they are, and we could not exist if they were different, then there must have been some guiding intelligence that designed the Universe to be favorable for our development.

At this point, I will state right off the bat:  That conclusion by IDers may be correct.  There may have been some sort of intelligence guiding how our Universe formed such that we could develop the way we did.

However, THAT IS NOT A SCIENTIFIC CONCLUSION.  That conclusion is the logical fallacy of “God of the Gaps.”  The God of the Gaps argument can be reduced to two steps:  (1) There is a gap in scientific knowledge (we don’t know why these constants came out as they did).  (2) The gap is filled by an act of (a) G/god(s) / “intelligence.”  That’s what Dr. Gordon and Casey Luskin (the interviewer) have done, they’ve simply filled the gap of our scientific understanding with a supernatural intelligence.

Besides it being a logical fallacy, there is another reason why it’s not science, and that has to do with the nature of science.  The purpose of science is to derive from evidence the workings of the Universe.  It makes hypotheses and uses natural evidence to test them in order to either support or refute that hypothesis.  By its very nature, science cannot deal with matters of supernatural ideas nor theology because, once you have invoked something that’s supernatural, it is no longer within the natural world (pretty much by definition).

Therefore, once you invoke a supernatural intelligence to make our Universe favorable for life as we know it, then you are no longer in the realm of science.  You cannot test the “intelligence” posit because it is outside nature, and if you were to ask, “Why would an intelligence design it this way?” the answer is a matter of theology (e.g., “You can’t question the mind of God,” or “So that we could live.”).  In addition, this is what has been termed a “science-stopper.”  In other words, if we already have the explanation (“God did it”) then why should we bother with doing any further research?

Science – and this particular podcast program likes to use the term, “materialistic science” as if to differentiate it from ID under the false assumption that ID is a science – does not really know why we live in the Universe we do.  The leading hypothesis deals with a consequence of String Theory, called the “Multiverse.”  The idea behind the multiverse is that our Universe is just one of many Universes, each with their own set of constants, and we really did just get the luck of the draw (akin to the Anthropic Principle).  There’s no known way to test this or to make predictions from it that are testable (that we know of) and so I relegate it to the term of “hypothesis” and not “theory.”  But, it comes about as a consequence of a materialistic paradigm, and so it is still science.  It does not invoke any supernatural argument.

Consequently, whether or not we have a satisfying explanation for why the fundamental properties of our Universe are the way they are, it is not within the realm of science to conclude that the Universe was created this way by (a) G/god(s) or “intelligence.”

Advertisement