Choice in Dying

Let’s begin this instalment of our series on Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion by listening to this little clip of Lewis Wolpert in his debate with William Lane Craig:

Lewis Wolpert on Fine Tuning

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This seems to me to say almost all that needs to be said about the fine tuning argument. We can find the same position taken by John Allen Paulos in his delightful little book, Irreligion. There he lays out the argument, as used by the religious, in step by step form, and it is clear that the conclusion simply does not follow.

1. The values of the physical constants, the matter-anti-matter imbalance, and various other physical laws are necessary for
human beings to exist.
2. Human beings exist.
3. The physics must have been fine-tuned to the constants’ values to make us possible.
4. Therefore the fine-tuner, God, exists. [28]

As Paulos says, “… the jump from 1 and 2 to 3 in the argument … is one of the weakest aspects of this argument. What does follow from Assumptions 1 and 2 above is simply that the values of the constants are what they are.” (loc. cit.) This position, taken by Wolpert and Paulos, is essentially the same position that is taken by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion. There it will be remembered he makes the statement that

The anthropic principle, like natural selection, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence. [136]

Peter S. Williams, in his reply to Dawkins, “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” says, basically, ‘Hey! Wait! That surely can’t be right, can it?’ Dawkins, he thinks, is conflating two things, and he finds the conflation in the very next sentence:

I think the confusion arises in thee religious mind because the anthropic principle is only ever mentioned in the context of the problem that it solves, namely the fact that we live in a life-friendly place. [136]

Now this, says Williams, is just wrong. The problem that needs to be solved, he suggests, ”is that a life-friendly place exists.” It does not, as he says, ”provide an explanation of any kind for the question of why a situation propitious to our existence should exist in the first place.” I’m not sure that there is a difference here. What Williams suggests is that the anthropic principle says that the improbability of a life-friendly place existing is so great that it demands an explanation. But how great is that? What probability do we need before we could say that, without a designer, a life-friendly planet might exist? When would a religious person be likely to say, ‘Well, yes, now that you mention it, if the probability is that high, then perhaps it might have happened purely by chance.”? Is the probability very high that the religious believer would ever be satisfied? (Perhaps we might even give this probability principle a name as well!)

Now, of course, it is possible to imagine different scenarios. For example, we might make some kind of a rough calculation as to the number of planets in the universe that might be conducive to carbon-based or other life forms. Dawkins supposes, based on the estimate of the number of planets in our galaxy, that there may be as many as a billion billion available planets in the universe (137). Supposing that the origin of DNA based life was really, as Dawkins says, “a quite staggeringly improbable event,” (138) so as to occur in only one out of a billion planets, it would still have occurred in a billion planets. Now, we have to ask the religious believer: If DNA based life has arisen on a billion planets in our universe, does this still seem so improbable as to need a designer?

Dawkins says that the beauty of the anthropic principle is that

… it tells us, against all intuition, that a chemical model need only predict that life will arise on one planet in a billion billion [that is, this one] to give us a good and entirely satisfying explanation for the presence of life here. [138]

And this, of course, is precisely the point that Lewis Wolpert makes in the opening clip. We’re here! So life has arisen here, however improbable.  Of course, this might not stop us from wondering why it should have arisen in only one planet in a billion billion, if this is the only planet on which life has arisen. But we have no reason to think that, since this planet is friendly to life, and since the conditions exist in the rest of the universe for other places that may be friendly to life to exist, this is the only place where life has arisen, and, in fact, a reasonable calculation of the statistical probability of life on other planets in the universe would be, granted only one chance in a billion, really quite a lot of life in the universe: a billion solar systems with at least one life-bearing planet!

Light Echoes From Red Supergiant Star V838 Monocerotis

Of course, then the question arises as to how probable it is that the universe should be one in which life is possible — which leads us into the cosmological fine tuning issue, or the cosmological version of the anthropic principle. Are the values for the fundamental constants so immensely improbable that the only explanation could be a designing intelligence which tuned the values so as to produce – well, us? Of course, from the Christian view, all that exists was created just so that we could exist, and come to know and respond to God’s love – all this staggering immensity, breathtaking stellar events which have the power to reduce the contemplative person to profound awe, the terrifying power of the natural world, of seas and storms and earthquakes, the teeming variety of life, the wonders of consciousness, or the stupendous achievements of the human mind — and this itself raises questions of probability that the religious seldom consider. How probable is it that all of this should have been created for the purposes italicised in the last sentence, that all of this vast immensity should be focused just on us?!

But if we do come to the fine tuning of the universe, the first point to make is that, however improbable, it just is, as Wolpert says, and we can scarcely complain of its improbability. Nor does it justify a leap from Paulos’ premises 1 and 2 to 3 and then to 4. It simply does not follow. But even here, as physicists are discovering, the probability that our universe may only be one in a multiverse, a universe of universes, is not 0 (zero), and this would mean that our being in a life-friendly universe may not be improbable at all. And the existence of a “Divine Knob-Twiddler”, as Dawkins says, is “at least as improbable as the finely tuned combination of numbers itself, and that’s very improbable indeed.” (143)

As Dawkins says, the anthropic answer is to the problem raised by fine tuning

… is that we could only be discussing the question in the kind of universe that was capable of producing us. [144]

This may be very improbable indeed, but which is more improbable, that there should be such a universe — there is — or that it was created by a fine-tuner just for us? I won’t belabour the point further, though Dawkins has a number of important comments to make on the difference between a divine creator (immensely complex) as an explanation for what exists, and a genuinely simple explanation in terms of processes capable of generating complexity, beginning from simple beginnings, as in the big bang, or the first living cell, however life originated.

Indeed, as Dawkins points out, the postulation of a divine designer or cause of the universe is “a total abdication of responsibility to find an explanation.” (155) After all, just saying that a god did it is not an explanation. It doesn’t tell us how god did it, or what processes god used. Even the Bible acknowledged the need to provide something as the means of creation. In the mind of the priestly writer of the first chapter of Genesis the means was simply the spoken word. God spoke, and, as with any despot anywhere, it was done. From the point of view of early peoples, for whom the power of language must itself have seemed almost magical — that it should be able to derive order from chaos — which is why science is so fascinating, surely — the idea that the world was created by the sheer power of language makes considerable sense. But at least an effort at an explanation is offered. By turning this into myth, theologians have turned explanation into mystery. God, as creator, becomes inaccessible and remote, and the old anthropomorphism is turned into sheer assertion.