"The purpose of my paper," writes Nancey Murphy in today's column, the text of a paper she gave at the American Academy of Religion meeting in November 2001, "is to examine what has been called the anthropic character of the universe, or as I would rather say, the fine-tuning of the cosmological constants from an epistemological perspective. Some scientists, philosophers, and theologians conclude that such dramatic "fine-tuning" cries out for explanation. One possible answer is to postulate a Master Tuner, in which case we have a new sort of design argument."

But how does one come to the conclusion that such "fine tuning" is not a random event? That the fine tuning we find today should lead to us seems patently obvious, for we are here. Other fine tuning, and others would be here. Perhaps it is only the flotsam of the human ego that cries out (albeit tacitly) for the assumption to be true that what had to be, had to be us? It is, no doubt, hard to swallow that it could have been otherwise, and may yet be so.

"So the situation is something like this," observes Murphy, "in the natural sciences we have a phenomenon, the fine-tuning, that cries out for explanation. There are a number of competing hypotheses, each of which might explain it: there is the chance hypothesis, there is the hypothesis of logical necessity, there are the various many-worlds hypotheses, and in addition there is the theological hypothesis. So far, however, there is no way to choose the best explanation."

But there are many better explanations to discuss, so read on to continue the discussion.

Nancey Murphy is Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Seminary, Pasadena, CA. Along with Robert J. Russell and C. J. Isham, she is editor of _Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action_ (Vatican Observatory).

-- Stacey Ake

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Subject: The Anthropic Principle: Epistemological Issues From: Nancey Murphy Email: <nmurphy@fuller.edu>

1. Introduction

The purpose of my paper is to examine what has been called the anthropic character of the universe, or as I would rather say, the fine-tuning of the cosmological constants from an epistemological perspective. Some scientists, philosophers, and theologians conclude that such dramatic "fine-tuning" cries out for explanation. One possible answer is to postulate a Master Tuner, in which case we have a new sort of design argument. What are we to make of such suggestions?

I bring no scientific expertise to this question, but concentrate instead on philosophical and theological issues. In particular I shall discuss the form a design argument must take in light of recent developments in epistemology and philosophy of science. Let me emphasize that an adequate presentation of a design argument following the guidelines presented here, along with a thorough evaluation of the competition, would require a study of much greater length.

In brief, I shall argue that the appropriate way to assess the value of fine-tuning as evidence for God's existence is to consider it in terms of the additional confirmation it provides for already-existing theological theories or (as I would say, research programs).[1] I emphasize that the fine-tuning should not be expected to prove the existence of God.

2. The Nature of Scientific Reasoning

Let us review very briefly how evidence works in science before proceeding to the question of how the fine-tuning provides evidence for creation of the universe by God. There was a long debate in the history of science as to whether scientific reasoning was mainly deductive, as in geometry, or whether it was merely the drawing of inductive generalizations from observations. An important advance in more recent philosophy of science was the recognition of what has come to be called "hypothetico-deductive reasoning." Philosophers now agree that scientific theories are neither mere inductive generalizations from facts nor deductive consequences of first principles. In the first instance they are free inventions of the imagination--hypotheses. However, these hypotheses are then tested by showing that scientific facts follow from them deductively.

The problem with hypothetico-deductive reasoning is that one can usually invent more than one hypothesis to explain any set of data. This is the reason that, however well confirmed a theory may be, scientific knowledge never reaches the level of certitude that we have in mathematics or logic. This factor is important to keep in mind in science; scientific theories always face the danger that some young Einstein will come along and provide a new and better alternative. There is a great deal of more recent work on the acceptability of theories that I shall not go into here. For present purposes, we merely need to keep in mind the problem of competing hypothesis when assessing any arguments for the existence of God that depend on empirical evidence.

3. William Paley's Design Argument

The most famous such argument was William Paley's at the beginning of the nineteenth century.[2] He argued that if he found a stone on the heath and were asked how it came to be there he might answer that

"for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever; nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be enquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch, as well as for the stone?"

Paley answered: "For this reason, and for no other, viz. that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose."[3]

The universe, Paley claimed, is like a watch. For his evidence he turned mainly to anatomy for examples of body parts perfectly adapted to serve their functions. His conclusion was that there must be a divine mind, whose goodness is shown by the fact that we have been created with the capacity for pleasure. And such an intelligent, benevolent creator must be expected to reveal himself to his creatures.

We can construe Paley's argument as hypothetico-deductive in form. The fact or observation to be explained is the order in the world--in particular the remarkable fitness of biological organs for their purposes and the fitness of organisms to their environments. What theory or hypothesis, if true, could possibly explain all this? To Paley, it seemed, only the hypothesis of an intelligent, benevolent creator.

One of the reasons some Christians objected to Darwinian evolution was that it spoiled this very popular apologetic argument. In effect, Darwin proposed a competing hypothesis to explain biological adaptation: a combination of random variation with natural selection.

But long before Darwin, and shortly before Paley published his own book, the philosopher David Hume had pointed out the vulnerability of arguments like Paley's: there are alternative hypotheses. First, the universe shows a great deal of order, but there is disorder and evil as well. So how can we know that it was created by one, all-good God? Perhaps it was created instead by a team of juvenile or superannuated deities working together? Or perhaps the universe is more like an organism than a watch, and it was produced by propagation. Or perhaps it is merely a fortuitous arrangement of atoms.[4]

4. Fine-Tuning and Design

It is one of the ironies of history that Darwinian evolution was seen as the final blow to Paley's design argument (despite Hume's earlier critiques). Yet evolutionary biology is itself an important contributor to the new scientific knowledge that seems, once again, to call for a theory of divine design. This is because the fine-tuning arguments themselves all depend on asking the question: what conditions need to be fulfilled in the universe to allow life to evolve?

So what are we to make of the fine-tuning? There are many who claim that it needs some sort of explanation. Can we conclude that the explanation must be that it is the work of the Christian God, or would this argument be subject to the same sorts of criticisms that Hume has already raised, 200 years ago?

The important question to investigate first is whether there are any scientific explanations of the fine-tuning. In fact a variety of nontheistic hypotheses have been proposed, either to explain the fine-tuning or else to try to explain away our sense that it needs explaining. Four types of competing hypotheses are, first, the various versions "anthropic principle"; second, pure chance; third, mathematical (or logical) necessity; and fourth, many universes. I shall explain each of these briefly in turn.[5]

The weak anthropic principle claims that it is a simple mistake to be surprised to find that the universe is suited to life, and that there is nothing to explain. The universe cannot be observed without observers and so, of course, any universe that contains observers must be one that permits life.[6]

The second suggestion is that, while it is amazing that the universe should have turned out to be life-supporting, this is just a matter of chance and there is nothing more to be said. This claim can be taken in either of two ways. It might be taken as a statement about the limits of our knowledge: this is just the way the universe happens to be and there is no further explanation. (This sounds like Hume's "fortuitous arrangement of atoms.")
However, some authors make it sound as though the chance hypothesis is a sort of metaphysical claim--the claim that Chance, with a capital 'C,' is somehow the ultimate principle behind reality. In either case, we have a meta-scientific claim, and one that cannot be confirmed independently by scientific evidence.

Another suggestion is that it will someday be shown that there is only one set of numbers that can be used to solve the equations comprising the basic laws of nature. If so, this would, in a sense, provide a scientific explanation for the fine-tuning of the individual constants, masses, and other quantities. It would provide no ultimate explanation, however, because we still can wonder at the coincidence that the only possible universe is also life-supporting, and at the fact that this one-and-only possibility is instantiated--the old question why there is something rather than nothing.

A natural move to explain the fine-tuning (or to explain it away) is to propose that we are in but one of vastly many universes. This might be because there is a very long or infinite series of universes. After an initial Big Bang a universe develops and then, finally, the expansion ceases, gravitational attraction pulls it back together and there is a Big Crunch. After this, another Big Bang, and so on indefinitely. This explanation requires an additional assumption, namely, that for some reason all of the universes in this series are different. This assumption would allow for random variation of the cosmological constants. By chance, then, one or more of these vastly many universes should be expected to have the right numbers for life and, of course, it is only in such a universe that there would be observers, like ourselves, to wonder at our being here. There are other, more exotic suggestions involving quantum theory, "chaotic inflation," and so on, that provide tenuous reasons for thinking that our empirical universe may be one of many. One or another of these many-universes explanations looks to be the most promising for straightforward scientific status.

Now, the important point for our argument is that if all of these proposed explanations, especially the various many-worlds hypotheses, could be eliminated, the fine-tuning would then provide rather striking confirmation for the theistic hypothesis. But because we cannot definitively eliminate them, we need to consider the relative strength of the evidence supporting each.

I am in no position to give an up-to-date account of the status of these various quasi-scientific hypotheses. What can fairly be said of all of them, I believe, is that they are so highly speculative that none has much (if any) empirical confirmation apart from the role it plays in explaining the fine-tuning itself. A friend, who is himself a cosmologist, pointed out that such work is supported in Britain by funds budgeted for mathematics rather than science. This shows, he said, how far this sort of work is removed from empirical science.

5. Further Confirmation

But what of the designer hypothesis? Has it any additional confirmation apart from its value in explaining the fine-tuning? The answer, quite obviously, is, "yes." First, let us remember that a Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) theist's design hypothesis is already tightly woven into a vast network of theory--we call these theories "theology."[7] For example, Christians claim not only to know that "some intelligent being" designed the cosmos, but also we claim to know that this being is the God of Abraham and Sarah, the Father of Jesus Christ.

In a number of my own writings I have claimed that there are a variety of forms of data available to confirm theological theories, including Christians' experiences in prayer and historical events. In addition, I wish to call attention to one additional kind of support from science--in this case, from the domain of the social sciences--that gives the designer hypothesis a tremendous explanatory edge over the other accounts of fine-tuning. There is a very significant phenomenon that cries out for explanation. It is simply this: the existence of religion. Most people in most societies in most historical eras have had some sort of religion. It is one of the most powerful forces in human life. What causes it? How are we to explain this phenomenon? In the past century or two a variety of competing, nontheistic hypotheses have been invented to explain the phenomenon of religion. There was Sigmund Freud's psychological hypothesis, which stated that believers are looking for the perfect father. There are a number of versions of the sociological hypothesis, which claim that religions exist because they provide social cohesion.

So the situation is something like this: in the natural sciences we have a phenomenon, the fine-tuning, that cries out for explanation. There are a number of competing hypotheses, each of which might explain it: there is the chance hypothesis, there is the hypothesis of logical necessity, there are the various many-worlds hypotheses, and in addition there is the theological hypothesis. So far, however, there is no way to choose the best explanation.

The human sciences investigate a very different phenomenon that also cries out for explanation: the phenomenon of religion. It, too, has a variety of possible explanations. The point is that the theological hypothesis is in a sense doubly-supported. Of course the quantitative term is misleading. It is not that it has exactly twice as much support as the other hypotheses. It is, rather, that independent confirmation of a theory, confirmation from an entirely different source, makes a great deal of difference in evaluating the theory. Unlike all of its competitors in cosmology, the designer hypothesis does have independent confirmation. So, from the point of view of philosophy of science, if we could fill in all the details here, we could argue that the design hypothesis, at least for the present, is the best available explanation of the fine-tuning.[8]

6. Summary

It is time to sum up. What this paper has been about is an attempt to answer the question: What can we make of the fine-tuning of the universe epistemologically and theologically. I began with the suggestion that fine-tuning provides grounds for a new design argument. To consider this possibility, though, it was necessary to be explicit about how our views of arguments based on matters of fact have changed since the heyday of natural theology. I claimed that any argument for design based on fine-tuning would have to be hypothetico-deductive in form--that is, the hypothesis that God created the universe with the intention of its producing intelligent life, and tuning the numbers to make this possible, would be shown to be acceptable if it turned out to be the best available explanation for the facts in question.

However, the relative merits of competing hypotheses can only be determined by seeing how coherently each fits into a network of other well-supported theories. I noted on the one hand that most of the Design hypothesis's competitors had no network of theories to cohere with, and some seemed incapable of confirmation by means of any facts whatsoever. The Design hypothesis, on the other hand, could be shown to fit into a Christian (or other) theological research program, thus tying it to previously related facts and in this regard as on firmer empirical footing.[9]

Notes:

1 See Nancey Murphy, Theology in the Age of Scientific Reasoning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990) for a "rational reconstruction" of theology consistent with Imre Lakatos's concept of a scientific research program.

2 In William Paley, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802).

3 Quoted by Elmer Sprague, in "William Paley," Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards, ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 6:20.

4 David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779).

5 For a more detailed account and evaluation, see George F.R. Ellis, "The Theology of the Anthropic Principle," in Russell et al. eds., Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature, 367-405; for a more popular presentation, see Ellis, Before the Beginning: Cosmology Explained (London and New York: Boyars/Bowerdean, 1993).

6 See John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

7 Or theological research programs; see note 1.

8 For a more detailed argument, see my "Evidence of Design in the Fine-Tuning of the Universe," in Robert J. Russell, Nancey Murphy, and C. J. Isham, eds., Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (Vatican City State and Berkeley: Vatican Observatory and Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, 1993), 407-435.

9 Much of this paper is excerpted from Nancey Murphy, Reconciling Theology and Science: A Radical Reformation Perspective (Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 1997), chap. 3. For a more adequate treatment of the issues, see my "Evidence of Design in the Fine-Tuning of the Universe," op. cit., and other literature in that volume.

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Published   2002.05.02