SO FINELY TUNED A UNIVERSE
Polkinghorne, John
SO FINELY TUNED A UNIVERSE Of atoms, stars, quanta & God John Polkinghorne I have spent most of my working life as a theoretical physicist and all of my consciously remembered life as part of the...
...And not just among pious scientists like myself, but among scientists who have no particular time for, or understanding of, conventional religion...
...The gift of love is a gift of a true independence...
...The sun has been burning steadily for about 5 billion years and it will continue to burn steadily for about another 5 billion years more...
...Inexplicably, some of the most beautiful patterns thought up by the mathematicians are found actually to occur in the structure of the physical world...
...May the same not also be true of encounter with divine reality...
...The first is the very fertile process which turned a ball of energy into a world containing you and me...
...We're in an area of discourse where knock-down argument or proof is not available...
...That produces some new possibility for life, which is then sifted and preserved in the lawfully regular environment which is necessary for the operation of natural selection...
...Let me give an example of the surprises that the physical world has proved to have in store for us...
...You can always just shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, that's just the way it happens to be, and a bit of good luck for you chaps who are good at mathematics...
...If I were to say, "Bill is at home and he is either drunk or sober," you would expect either to find Bill at home drunk or to find him at home sober...
...I've tried to show how science and theology interact positively, how their mutual relationship is one of friendship in the search for truth and not warfare with each other...
...All those bits we do understand seem to realize that fruitfulness through an interplay between two opposing tendencies which we could describe as "chance" and "necessity...
...Einstein once said," The only incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible...
...So, it's the instinct of a scientist to seek as economic and as extensive an understanding of the world as possible...
...You mustn't turn all the carbon into oxygen...
...For Monod, the role of chance means that ultimately the universe is a tale told by an idiot...
...One is you'll need to make some of the heavier elements beyond iron, and you also have to make accessible for life the elements you've already made...
...That's a very simple robust system...
...The elusive, unpicturable quantum world is found to obey a different kind of logic...
...in the other, our personal encounter with the One who transcends us...
...He's a beguiling philosopher because he does his philosophy by telling stories, which is a very accessible way for those of us who are not professionally trained in philosophy to get the hang of it...
...We're here because we're here and that's it...
...Why do the reason within and the reason without fit together at a deep level...
...We live in a universe that started about 15 billion years ago and it started extremely simple...
...Religious belief provides an entirely rational and entirely satisfying explanation of that fact...
...John Polkinghorne, whose latest book is reviewed on page 23, is the president of Queens' College, the University of Cambridge, and an ordained priest in the Church of England...
...Rather it is a universe which is a creation which has been endowed by its creator with just those finely tuned given laws and circumstances that will make its history fruitful...
...SO FINELY TUNED A UNIVERSE Of atoms, stars, quanta & God John Polkinghorne I have spent most of my working life as a theoretical physicist and all of my consciously remembered life as part of the worshiping and believing community of the church...
...Even the physics of the everyday world, even the physics of Newton, is not as mechanical as Sir Isaac and his followers thought it to be...
...Science begins to describe a world which is sufficiently flexible in its development, a world of true becoming, of which we can consider ourselves as inhabitants...
...In every stage of the fruitful history of the universe there is a interplay between chance and necessity...
...Now, suppose you've figured out how to do that...
...I believe that the Christian God, who is both loving and faithful, has given to his creation the twin gifts of independence and reliability, which find their reflection in the fruitful process of the universe through the interplay between happenstance and regularity, between chance and necessity...
...That's a very surprising discovery...
...Now, we've discovered that, in fact, almost all the everyday physical world is not like that at all how it will behave...
...First, you've got to make carbon by making three helium nuclei stick together...
...And they are just not rich enough in their chemistry to make life possible...
...In the other: why things happen, to what purpose...
...Therefore, the scientific question is "What makes you think this might be the case...
...One is, they have to act as long-term, steady energy sources...
...One way to look at the world is to take the brute fact of the physical world as your starting point...
...If we were to start with the brute fact of the physical world, that world is described for us at least in part by the laws of science...
...Almost all of the everyday physical world is so exquisitely sensitive that the smallest disturbance produces quite uncontrollable and unpredictable consequences...
...Leslie says in relation to the anthropic principle that there is an even-handed choice between the many universes and the anthropic theories...
...Mutations occur through happenstance...
...How did things begin...
...Not only is that so, but it is mathematics which is the key to the understanding of the basic structure of the physical world...
...He has written the best book about the anthropic principle, called Universes...
...In the trade it is sometimes called the butterfly effect: that the great weather systems of the earth are so sensitive to individual circumstance that a butterfly stirring the air with its wings in Beijing today will have consequences for the storm systems over New England in a month's time...
...It says that the reason within and the reason without have a common origin in that deeper rationality which is the reason of the Creator, whose will is the ground of both my mental and my physical experience...
...In fact, you can't live without it...
...They use different methods: in the one case, the experimental procedure of putting matters to the test...
...Common sense will not be the measure of all things...
...It is open to the possibility of correction, as God's ways and will become more clearly known...
...We've always known that can't be right because we've always known that human beings have the experience of choice and responsibility...
...It seems trivial and obvious...
...Do you shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, that's the way it is...
...That is a world that we can't visualize, but we can understand it using very abstract mathematics, ultimately the mathematics of spontaneously broken, gauge-field theories...
...In particular, you need the chemistry of carbon, which has the ability to make those immensely complicated macro-molecules which are the basis of the possibility of life...
...Nevertheless, many agnostic scientists feel that the rational beauty and the finely tuned fruitfulness of the world suggest that there is some intelligence or purpose behind the universe...
...For life you need a much more complicated chemistry than hydrogen and helium by themselves could sustain...
...What are we to make of all this...
...Actually I don't think that's a very important subject...
...The classic interaction between science and theology concerns the question of origins...
...However, God is not only loving, he is faithful...
...But another way to proceed is to start with the brute fact (if that's the word to use) of God...
...I like that very much...
...Every explanation depends upon certain basic unexplained assumptions...
...Hawking says, "If there is no beginning, what place then for a Creator...
...The search for understanding, which is so natural to a scientist, is, in the end, the search for God...
...Of course, if you think there are other reasons, as indeed I do, for believing that there is a God whose will and purpose lie behind the universe, then that second explanation, that the world is fruitful because it is a creation, becomes the more economic and persuasive explanation...
...If we're going to look for such a total theory, there are basically two alternative strategies, for if we are looking for a total explanation we won't get it for nothing...
...In other words, there is some deep-seated relationship between the reason within (the rationality of our minds-in this case mathematics) and the reason without (the rational order and structure of the physical world around us...
...But more important still, it is also due to another unexpected insight of science gained in the last thirty-four years...
...The actual way we answer the question "How...
...Now, we've discovered that, in fact, almost all the everyday physical world is not like that at all...
...Every atom of carbon inside your body was once inside a star...
...So the speculation that there are many, many other universes is a metaphysical speculation...
...Let me give another example, a scientific discovery of a more specific character that's been made in the last thirty or forty years...
...That raises issues to which theology has to address itself...
...Oddly enough, the corresponding argument applied to a quantum entity like an electron does not work...
...It is difficult to design a fruitful universe...
...To a religious believer, it is the mind of the Creator that is being discerned in that way...
...To see that, we must recognize two things: 1. We must take account of what science has to tell us about the pattern and history of the physical world...
...We can play these intellectual games and, when we do that, a very surprising conclusion follows: Unless the fundamental physical laws were more or less precisely what they actually are, the universe would have had a very boring and sterile history...
...In fact, they seem to have a certain character which actually points beyond themselves...
...Jacques Monod, a great French biochemist, wrote a famous book in the early 1970s called Chance and Necessity...
...It involves a leap, but a leap into the light rather than the dark...
...Nonetheless, we can take the same scientific picture of the interplay between happenstance and regularity, but offer an alternative interpretation, a more evenhanded interpretation, which lays as much emphasis on the necessary half as upon the chance half of the process...
...We've learned that the physical world, whatever it is, it isn't mechanical, even at the everyday level...
...If you're made from Stardust, there's got to be some dust from stars around for you to be made of...
...The second question is: Given we've got a universe with fine-tuning (given we've got the right ground rules), how does it actually come about that the world makes itself...
...And, you've got to have stars of the right sort...
...You've got to have stellar explosions...
...There is an intrinsic strength to the force of gravity built into the fabric of our universe, into the specification of what sort of world we live in...
...It is simply this: that we can understand the physical world, that it is intelligible to us in its rational transparency...
...That is the heart of my Christian faith and hope...
...But, wait a minute...
...Long-term energy sources are indispensable because it takes billions of years for life to develop, and you must have what physicists call main sequence stars which are steadily-burning, long-lived stars...
...But that's only part of the story, because the stars have another tremendously important thing to do...
...The first example is a fact about the physical world which is very familiar to us, a fact indeed that makes science possible...
...not just any old gravity, but gravity of a particular type and a particular strength...
...You can't sit back and feel satisfied, because carbon is not enough...
...2. We must understand that religious belief, just like scientific belief, is motivated understanding of the ways things are...
...And, if you're very clever, you can arrange in the explosion that the neutrinos, as they blow-off the outer layer of the star, then make those heavier elements like zinc and so on that you couldn't make inside the star itself...
...But independence by itself can easily degenerate into license and chaos...
...The two disciplines are concerned with the exploration of different aspects of human experience: in the one case, our impersonal encounter with a physical world that we transcend...
...Essentially all energy here on earth comes from the sun, either directly or indirectly through fossil fuels...
...We understand many bits of that process quite well...
...The history of the universe has been astonishingly fruitful, and we understand many steps in that evolving, fruitful process...
...I want to defend the second strategy and to explain why I believe that, if we are driven by the desire to have as comprehensive and unified an understanding as possible, we shall find it in a scheme of things that has a place for belief in God...
...That's how somebody like David Hume would proceed...
...In fact, gravity is a very weak force...
...Our world and our lives are the fulfillment of a purpose...
...But there is traffic across the border in both directions...
...It is in sustaining the fruitful process of the world that God is at work as the Creator...
...It is something more subtle and more supple...
...We have no adequate, scientific motivation for thinking of any other universe but the universe of our direct experience...
...Human beings are the most complicated physical systems that we have encountered in our explorations of the world...
...John Leslie, a philosopher at Guelf University in Canada, writes about these questions...
...A characteristic of scientific thought is the drive for synthesis...
...Rather, we're looking for insights which are intellectually satisfying...
...Now, the world-that exquisitely sensitive world-is an intrinsically unpredictable world...
...In a Brief History of Time, my friend and former colleague, Steve Hawking, says that if you think about quantum cosmology and how quantum mechanics fuzzed out the very early universe, then, though the universe has a finite age, it has no dateable beginning...
...For example, we live in a universe which has gravity in it...
...Those of us who learned classical physics, learned that subject by thinking about certain tame, predictable systems, like a steadily ticking pendulum...
...We can sit on our chairs because electro-magnetism holds them together, and it holds us together as well...
...The fact that we now know that the universe did not spring into being ready made a few thousand years ago but that it has evolved over a period of 15 billion years from its fiery origin in the Big Bang, does not abolish Christian talk of the world as God's creation, but it certainly modifies certain aspects of that discourse...
...Of course the point where Monod puts in the knife is the word "blind...
...We're all made from the ashes of dead stars...
...If you are to have a fruitful universe, one of the things you've got to have in it are stars...
...That's a very surprising discovery...
...We are not clever enough to see very far ahead...
...We're all made from the ashes of dead stars...
...otherwise you've lost the carbon...
...You've got to do that, but you must not overdo it...
...Monod's is a serious challenge...
...That parable translates well into thinking about a finely tuned and fruitful universe...
...I believe that science and religion are friends and not foes...
...For example, mathematics also describes the counter-intuitive, unpicturable quantum world...
...Because there was a little bit more matter here than there that matter exerted a little bit stronger gravitational pull, and draws more matter to itself in a sort of snowballing process...
...What do we make of that...
...The theoretical physicist Paul Dirac discovered something called quantum field theory which is fundamental to our understanding of the physical world...
...And, it seems that the interplay between those two tendencies, chance as the origin of novelty, and necessity as the sifter and preserver of the novelty thus produced, is the prime way in which the fruitfulness of the universe is realized...
...I want to take absolutely seriously the possibility of religious belief in a scientific age...
...The first approach is the strategy of atheism...
...That is the drive behind the present activity in particle physics, which is looking for a grand unified theory-a GUT, as scientists say in our acronymic way...
...In other words, it's only a very special universe, a finely tuned universe, a universe in a trillion, you might say, which is capable of having had the amazingly fruitful history that has turned a ball of energy into a world containing human life...
...That's actually quite hard to do and it depends upon very delicate aspects of the nuclear forces...
...It's a possible explanation and in fact it's called the "many-universes" interpretation...
...If you can just tune the nuclear forces right, you can make all the elements up to iron inside the stars, but iron is the most stable of all the nuclear species and you can't get beyond iron inside the stars...
...The other possibility is that there is more going on than has met the eye and the sharpshooters are on our side...
...No life could develop in a universe of that character...
...They ask different questions: in the one case, how things happen, by what process...
...Let me illustrate why...
...It was tame, it was predictable, it was controllable...
...It's no good making carbon, oxygen, and all that, and leaving them locked up, useless, inside the cooling core of a dying star...
...I'd like to conclude with a quotation which in many ways summarizes what I'm trying to do as a physicist and as a priest...
...Monod argued that "Pure chance, absolutely free, but blind lies at the basis of this stupendous edifice of evolution...
...Here are two examples...
...Scientists do not ask "Is that reasonable...
...That is why science and religion must be friends.the search for God...
...The gift that science gives to theology is rather different-for it is to tell theology what the physical world is actually like in its structure and in its history...
...I can't believe Dirac's ability to discover that theory, or Einstein's ability to discover the general theory of relativity, is a sort of spin-off from our ancestors having to dodge saber-toothed tigers...
...Bernard Lonergan once said, "God is the all-sufficient explanation, the eternal rapture glimpsed in every Archimedean cry of Eureka...
...The two fit together like a pair of gloves...
...People wrongly think that the theological doctrine of Creation is concerned with how things began...
...One is that many, many, many executions are taking place today and just by luck you happen to be the one in which they all miss...
...Basically it's the balance between the force of gravity and the electromagnetic forces...
...That is a different question from "Is that reasonable...
...The early universe was very simple, and because the early universe was very simple it produced only very simple consequences...
...God is the God of all times and all places...
...So, you've got to get all these balances right, and so on, and so on, up to iron...
...Why, we should ask, are our minds so perfectly shaped to understand the deep patterns of the world around us...
...That's a rational explanation...
...Something much more profound, much more mysterious, is going on...
...In other words, out of the scientific understanding of the world arise questions which seem to direct us beyond science itself to a deeper level of intelligibility...
...Why is mathematics so unreasonably effective in understanding the physical world...
...How does it realize its in-built fruit-fulness, its in-built potentiality...
...There comes a time when Johnny has to be allowed to ride his bicycle into dangerous traffic on his own...
...That doesn't seem to me to be a very rational approach to this issue...
...Theology offers science a deeper, more comprehensive understanding than would be obtained from itself alone...
...Of course, science itself can no more dictate to religion what it is to believe than religion can prescribe for science what the outcome of its inquiry is to be...
...That is why science and religion must be friends...
...And we can play similar games with all the other fundamental forces of nature...
...When we look at the rational order and transparent beauty of the physical world, revealed through physical science, we see a world shot through with signs of mind...
...But the power of mathematics to illuminate and give understanding of the physical world is not just confined to the everyday world...
...Moreover, many people have an outdated picture of the physical world...
...You've got to have the stars and you've got to have the galaxies that contain the stars...
...Two insights about the process of the world come to us from science...
...They know that when we move into regimes far away from everyday experience, all sorts of surprising things can happen...
...If you were to alter either of those forces, you would put the stars out of kilter...
...When the universe was about a billion years old, there just happened to be a little bit more matter here than there...
...This insight is called the anthropic principle: a world capable of producing anthropoi (complicated "consequences" comparable to men and women) is a very special finely tuned universe...
...It is our expectation that it is precisely theories characterized by mathematical beauty which will describe the structure of the world...
...Such a physical world is capable also of being open to God's providential interaction and his agency...
...We can again say, "What would the universe be like if electromagnetism were weaker, or if it were stronger...
...Modern science already presents us with a picture of the physical world that is unpredictable in detail and open to the future...
...You'd have stars that either burned up very rapidly, that lived just for millions of years rather than billions of years, or you'd have stars that were very turbulent and unstable and flared up and died down, and that would be disastrous...
...Unlike either the natural theology of the late Middle Ages or the eighteenth century, it doesn't claim to talk about proofs of God...
...I'm not against metaphysics...
...the learned would say that you have used the distributive law of logic...
...By "chance," I mean simply happenstance-just the way things happen to be...
...Every atom of carbon inside your body was once inside a star...
...One possibility is that maybe there are lots and lots of different universes, all with different given physical laws and circumstances...
...Once again, you can shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, that's just the way it happens to be...
...That's true intellectually...
...Any theory of the world proceeds from some set of basic assumptions...
...Yet, at a subsidiary but supportive level, there are also hints of God's presence which arise from our scientific knowledge...
...In such a world of true becoming, with its open future, we can begin to understand our own powers of agency, our own powers to act and bring things about...
...That's how scientists picture the universe: it started so uniform and began to get a bit grainy and lumpy...
...The only place you can make those heavier elements is inside the right sort of stars, and it's pretty difficult to make the stars do that...
...When we think about those steps and our understanding of them, we reach a very surprising conclusion...
...If our minds didn't fit the world around us, we just wouldn't have survived in the struggle for existence...
...It answers the question, why do things exist at all...
...This essay has been adapted from a lecture given at Connecticut College in New London, Connecticut...
...Those are slippery words...
...By itself, I think that is correct...
...But, of course, that's the one in which we live, because we couldn't appear anywhere else...
...Ex nihilo nihil fit, nothing comes from nothing...
...You've got to make oxygen for example...
...Thus, though big-bang cosmology is very interesting scientifically, theologically it is insignificant...
...so that science by itself is found not to be sufficiently intellectually satisfying...
...That begins through chance, happenstance, and develops through necessity, snowballing through the attractive force of gravity...
...But if we take the laws of nature as discerned by science seriously, and if we look at them carefully, we will find that they are not sufficiently intellectually satisfying in themselves...
...Your eyes are bandaged and you are tied to the stake...
...The biblical doctrine of Creation isn't about that...
...I think that suggests the insufficiency of a merely scientific view of the world...
...Our whole picture of the physical world is much more hospitable to the presence of both humanity and divine providence than would have seemed conceivable a hundred years ago...
...Theology can take that striking fact and make it profoundly comprehensible...
...It's true about our experience of the everyday world of rocks and trees where we have to dodge the rocks and miss the trees...
...He tells the following story...
...We thought the everyday physical world was all like that...
...A more familiar example of this process is provided by biological evolution...
...We want to have as unified an understanding as we possibly can...
...And the God who is faithful will surely endow his creation also with the gift of reliability...
...Though these are two different questions the ways we answer them must bear some consonant relationship to each other...
...I want to hold these two parts of me together, and to enjoy their friendly relationship...
...That means making another helium nucleus stick to the carbon you already made and turn the carbon into oxygen...
...in the other, the commitment of trust which must underlie all personal encounter, whether among ourselves or with the reality of God...
...Theology is the drive to find the most profound and comprehensive understanding of our encounter with reality...
...What do you do...
...We can play intellectual games and say, "I wonder what the universe would be like, and what its history would have been like, if gravity had been a bit different-if it had been much stronger, or even a little bit weaker than it is...
...Parents know that...
...God is as much the Creator today as he was 15 billion years ago...
...No need to seek an explanation of this...
...Scientists play intellectual games, and they play those games with a serious intent...
...In fact, I think we're living in an age where there is a great revival of natural theology taking place...
...But faith is not a question of shutting one's eyes, gritting one's teeth, and believing the impossible...
...Leslie rightly says that's surely not a rational response to what's going on...
...One of the reasons why cosmologists can talk with great confidence about the very early universe is that the very early universe was so simple, just an expanding ball of energy...
...That revival of natural theology is taking place, not on the whole among the theologians, who have rather lost their nerve in that area, but among the scientists...
...Now that's a very interesting scientific speculation, but there's no particular theological mileage in it...
...That revived natural theology is also revised in the sense that it is more modest in its ambitions...
...It's not concerned with temporal origin, but with ontological origin...
...and a question that is open to the possibility of enlarging our understanding of how things are...
...Yet, the world that started so simple has become very rich and complex through its evolving history, with human life being the most interesting consequences of that history...
...I want to sketch out these encouragements to religion...
...You've got to make sure that your stars are such that when they come to the end of their natural life, which is about 10 billion years, some of them will explode as su-pernovae and so will scatter out into the environment those chemical elements that they've made...
...You are about to be executed...
...Who lit the blue touch paper of the big bang...
...If those nuclear forces were in any way slightly different from the way they actually are, the stars would be incapable of making the elements of which you and I are composed...
...The center of my faith lies in my encounter with the figure of Jesus Christ, as I meet him in the Gospels, in the witness of the church, and in the sacraments...
...My Christian belief in this age of science has to be motivated belief, based on evidence that I can point to...
...If there are lots and lots of them (and there would really have to be rather a lot) then just by chance, in one of them, the laws and circumstances will be such as to permit the development of carbon-based life...
...as if we knew beforehand what the world is going to be like...
...This is the insight that is rather ineptly named chaotic dynamics...
...Remember, science simply assumes the intelligibility of the world...
...Twentieth-century science has seen the death of a merely mechanical view of the world...
...You'll have made the elements, but they won't be of any use to bring about life...
...In other words there was a purpose at work of which you were unaware...
...points on to the question "Why...
...Our mathematical friends sit in their studies, and out of their heads they dream up the beautiful patterns of mathematics...
...If you take a pendulum and slightly disturb it, or you are slightly ignorant about how it is moving, the slight disturbance only produces slight consequences, the slight ignorance produces only slight errors in your estimation of We thought the everyday physical world was tame, it was predictable, it was controllable...
...The discovery was first made in relation to attempts to make models of the earth's weather systems...
...I believe I can do so, not without puzzles, of course, but I hope without dishonesty and without compartmentalism...
...The second approach is the strategy of theism...
...It is theologically naive to answer other than by, "Every place, as the Sustainer of the universe in Being...
...But my instincts as a scientist, as someone who is searching for understanding, is not to be as intellectually lazy as that...
...The nuclear furnaces that burn inside the stars are the source of the chemical elements which are the raw materials of life...
...A famous theoretical physicist, Eugene Wigner, once asked...
...We understand what makes stars burn in that sort of way...
...That happenstance produced something lasting through the operation of "necessity," or lawful regularity...
...You've got to make lots more elements...
...We can take electromagnetism, the force that holds matter together...
...In fact, the very early universe made only the two simplest chemical elements, hydrogen and helium...
...That might surprise you if you have ever walked out of a second story window, but the force of gravity is intrinsically very weak...
...Mathematics is the free explor-ation of the human mind...
...Start with the brute fact of matter as your unexplained basis...
...God is not a God of the edges, with a vested interest in beginnings...
...They pull the trigger, the shots ring-out-you've survived...
...When we use mathematics as a key to unlock the secrets of the universe, something very peculiar is happening...
...You've got to get the right balance between gravity and electromagnetism to make the stars act as acceptable energy sources for life...
...In other words, one can appeal to the will of an agent, the purpose of a Creator, as the basic unexplained starting point for understanding the world...
...The future is genuinely new, not just rearrangement of what was there in the past...
...The great triumphs of the science in the eighteenth century, and the further discoveries of the nineteenth century, encouraged a mechanical, rather deterministic view of the physical world...
...Yet reliability by itself can easily rigidify into a merely mechanical world...
...Twelve highly-trained sharpshooters have their rifles leveled at your heart...
...You've still got two problems left that you've got to solve...
...Let me emphasize that both are metaphysical explanations...
...That was chance-happenstance- getting things going...
...The sort of game they play is this: when we think of the universe we live in, it is characterized by certain types of scientific laws and certain types of basic forces that go with those laws...
...It's also true of our mathematical thinking of that world, which I suppose amounts to a little elementary arithmetic and a little elementary Euclidean geometry...
...In part, that is due to the cloudy fitfulness of quantum theory...
...That's just the way it is...
...The stars have two jobs that are absolutely indispensable to the fruitful history of the universe...
...The Christian God is a God of love and the gift of love is always the gift of independence, the genuine otherness of the beloved...
...That is obviously true, but it's only true up to a point...
...Of course, a religious stance involves faith, just as a scientific investigation starts by commitment to the interrogation of the physical world from a chosen point of view...
...But the many-universes interpretation is a metaphysical speculation just as positing the existence of a creator is a metaphysical speculation...
...Theology has the power to answer a question, namely the intelligibility of the world, that arises from science but goes beyond science's ability to answer...
...For Monod, the role of chance, of happenstance, in the evolving history of the universe subverts the religious claim thatthere is a purpose at work in the world...
...That is a rather significant fact about the world, or so thought Einstein...
...What do we make of the fact that the world we live in is fruitful only because its basic scientific constitution is of a very special, very finely tuned character...
...I hope I've given some idea of how making elements is a very complicated process, which depends for its fruitful-ness on a very delicate, fine-tuned balance between the nuclear forces that control these processes...
...He suggests that there are only two rational explanations of that amazing incident...
...Moreover, we look for theories in physics which in their mathematical expression are economic and elegant...
...That translates into the idea that this is not just any old universe...
...I believe that the grandest unified theory that you could ever conceivably reach is a theological understanding of the world...
...That is a gain for science...
...In other words, we seek theories which have about them an unmistakable character of mathematical beauty...
...A God who is loving will endow his creation with its own due freedom, its own due independence...
...One popular answer is that evolutionary biology explains it all...
...I respectfully suggest that when God came to create the world he was faced with a dilemma...
...We can't know about all those butterflies in Beijing...
...In both the intelligibility of the world and the finely tuned fruitfulness of the world, we see insights arising from science, but calling for some explanation and understanding which, by its very nature, will go beyond what science itself can provide...
...A fruitful universe has to become lumpy at some stage...
...The other explanation, is, of course/that the sharpshooters are on your side and they missed by choice...
Vol. 123 • August 1996 • No. 14
