By: David Talcott

6 February 2004 The Fine Tuning Argument

For the entire history of the church, Christians have offered arguments and evidence in support of their faith, and today is no exception. But in the past two decades a new and exciting argument has emerged. It is exciting not only because it's of such high quality, but also because of its source: physics. Physicists are beginning to think that fundamental parameters of physics are evidence of an intelligent designer. Out of the midst of a bastion of secularism, modern science, has arisen a new and powerful theistic argument: The Fine-Tuning Design Argument.

Early Church fathers offered proofs of Gods existence from design in the universe that were not very developed or intricate. They were, however, in basic form, clearly and forcefully put forward. St. Augustine provides one example of this kind of proof: "the very order, disposition, beauty, change and motion of the world and of all visible things silently proclaim that it could only have been made by God, the ineffably and invisibly great and the ineffably and invisibly beautiful."¹ In the ensuing years of the middle ages, the design argument changed little from this basic form. During that period, more attention was given to two different theistic arguments: the Ontological Argument and the Cosmological Argument.

With the rise of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries, there came a resurgence of design-style arguments. The whole scientific enterprise at this time was carried on within a Christian context. Scientists began to see the enormous complexity of life on Earth. The culmination of this movement is found in the writings of William Paley, a scientist who wrote around the year 1800. The following excerpt is typical of how he and many of his contemporaries thought about science:

Can it be doubted, whether the wings of birds bear a relation to air, and the fins of fish to water? They are instruments of motion, severally suited to the properties of the medium in which the motion is to be performed: which properties are different. Was not this difference contemplated, when the instruments were differently constituted?²

So we see that the fittedness of wings to air and fins to water makes it look like some intelligent being designed the two to work together. This insight is a more developed sort of argument than those presented prior to the period of modern science.

Of course, this sort of argument fell greatly into disrepute at the end of the 19th century due to the rising popularity of Darwin's Biological Theory of Evolution. Evolution could explain the fittedness of wings to air apparently as well as the design theory. Thus, science could be understood as not offering any significant evidence for the existence of a designer rather than the reality of evolution. In the past two decades Christian Biologists have attempted to revive a biological design argument, and now spearhead a movement known as Intelligent Design. This small community of scientists thinks that there are certain biological organisms, or mechanisms, or other features of biological life which cannot successfully be accounted for on the hypothesis of evolution alone. This movement has the potential to be very successful, but it is too early to tell if the science will turn out to be on their side. The design argument we will look at for the rest of this article is of a different sort than all of those I've discussed so far.³ The Fine-Tuning Design Argument deals with scientific developments in physics, not biology.

To see how the argument works, we must first take detour into realm of physics. In physics there are many fundamental forces and constants which describe the motion and energy of physical objects. Let's consider gravity as an example. Gravity, simply stated, is the attractive force between two objects. There is a mathematical equation which describes the force with which two objects will be attracted to one another. They are always attracted to one another at just the same force-every time you drop a ball you know how fast it's going to fall. It doesn't sometimes fall quickly and other times fall slowly (unless there's wind or some other factor in play). This constant force is simply a brute fact of the universe, it's just how the universe works. It's conceivable that the force of gravity could've been different-balls could fall much quicker or much slower.

In physics, there many different such forces and constants. Estimates of the exact number range from 4 to 40. All of them could have a huge range of different values. They could be higher or lower, stronger or weaker, etc. What is interesting about all of this is that for many of these parameters, in only a very narrow percentage of the possible values is it possible for life to exist. Think about gravity again. If it were a billion times its actual value (which is actually not a big difference if you think about a number line stretching to infinity), then the force would squish every object together. There would be a big crunch of matter clinging to itself. Life would not be possible. Or think if it were many times smaller than it's actual value. Objects would fly apart and never be able to touch one another again. Life wouldn't be possible in the chaos which ensues.

There are two basic ways of explaining how these parameters came to have the values that they do: chance and an intelligent designer. Which is more likely? Well, on the hypothesis of chance, what's the probability that all of the values would fall within the life-permitting range? In general, to find the probability of something you divide the part by the whole. In this case, we would divide the number of life-permitting values by the total number of possible values. Doing this for each constant and then multiplying the answers together to find the probability of all of them happening at once gives an answer somewhere near 1 x 10-¹⁰⁴. That's the number one followed by 104 zeros. In other words, the probability is tiny, vanishing, and all but zero.

But what about the other option, that of an intelligent designer? What's the probability that these parameters would have life-permitting values if we assume this hypothesis? Well, it seems hard to say. How do we predict what an intelligent designer would do? Perhaps we can't with any degree of certainty. But, what does seem clear is that the probability of an intelligent designer designing a life-permitting universe is much greater than 1 x 10-¹⁰⁴. We can imagine many very plausible reasons which would drive an intelligent designer to create a life-permitting universe. He could desire fellowship with other sentient beings, or desire to display his majesty and wisdom to sentient beings, or simply create sentient beings out of love that they might experience His goodness. That these forces and constants come to have the values that they do is more probable on the hypothesis of an intelligent designer than on the hypothesis of chance. At least on the intelligent designer hypothesis we can tell a plausible story about why the universe exists. On the hypothesis of chance, all we can say is that there's a 1 out of 10-¹⁰⁴ probability of these forces and constants having the values that they do...and we just got lucky.

The fine-tuning argument is not susceptible to evolutionary objections the way the Paley-style argument is. The fine-tuning argument does not rely upon biological claims which evolution could also claim to explain. No Darwinian mechanism could explain why these forces and constants have the values that they do. Thus, the fine-tuning argument is a significant advancement in the history of the design argument.

As Christians, this means several things for us. First, we can wonder at the goodness and wisdom of God, who indeed created this world uniquely suited for our existence. Just as the Sabbath was made for man, so too was this universe made for man-it is a testimony to His great care for us. Second, we can be encouraged. In a world that is constantly attacking Christianity and saying that it has no rational foundation it is encouraging to see the truth of the Gospel vindicated in the discipline of science. This argument is a torch which Christians can brandish against the onslaught of non-Christian thought in our age. Which brings me to the third application, a confidence when we see or hear someone demeaning Christianity. Whether it's on TV or a neighbor in our backyard we can know that there's new scientific evidence which they must reckon with, and in which in all likelihood they don't even know exists. We can be emboldened to stand up against the scoffers of our age.

Christians have for ages believed that God's handiwork is clearly seen in nature. What's new and exciting is that now scientists, statisticians, and philosophers have finally caught up and given the argument a scientific basis that will not easily be overcome.⁴

The author will soon be adding a "Technical Addendum" for those who wish to see more detailed scientific evidence.

Footnotes:

1 De Civitate Dei, Soliloquy I, I, 3. Cited in A History of Philosophy, Vol II: Medieval Philosophy by Frederick Copleston, p 69.

2 Paley, The Works of William Paley, London: T. Nelson & Sons, 1853, p.498; cited in Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought, David N. Livingstone, Eerdmans Publishing, Grand Rapids, MI, 1984. This resource was relied upon for other information in this paragraph.

3 Some will want to say that the fine-tuning design argument is part of the Intelligent Design Movement. Perhaps that's right due to William Dembski's centrality to the Intelligent Design movement and the fact that Dembski's arguments are a species of the fine-tuning argument. However, Intelligent Design as it is referred to generally means the biological arguments typified by Michael Behe and Jonathan Wells. Nevertheless, I would grant the point, for it is not worth quarreling over a definition.

4 For further reading on the Fine-Tuning Design Argument, first see "The 'Just So' Universe: The Fine-Tuning of Constants and Conditions of the Cosmos" in Signs of Intelligence, William A. Dembski and James M. Kushiner, ed. Baker Book House Company, 2001, Grand Rapids, MI. For those interested in more thorough readings, see essays in God and Design, Neil A. Manson, ed. Routledge Publishing, 2003, New York, NY.