:. www.geocities.com/leydensjar -> My Own Words -> Was the world designed by an Intelligent Creator?

Preamble/Disclaimer/Author's Note: This is an essay I did for a History and Philosophy of Science subject ("Science, Philosophy, History" with Neil Thomason.) I am in the process of redrafting it into a longer piece that will include more background information, and more analysis of the conjectures. If you have any suggestions or comments I'll be interested to hear from you.

Technical Note: I converted this from a Word document, then cleaned up the HTML code as much as I could. If you are having trouble viewing this page, drop me a line at [email protected]

 

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Was the world designed by an Intelligent Creator - a dialogue.

Persons of the Dialogue
Sean, God

Scene
The Starbucks in Lygon Street

Sean speaks:

   Sean.  Thanks for joining me, God.  I was actually expecting the Metatron [1] .  Coffee?

   God.  Double espresso, thank you.  The Metatron can be so impersonal.  Besides, for such an important topic, I thought I should come Myself.

   Sean.  Indeed.  People could also say that it immediately answers the claim I wish to pose today:  “The scientific evidence shows that the world has been designed by an intelligent creator.” 

   God.  Perhaps, though let us approach this in the correct manner.  I want to make sure I’m here; I’m feeling a little fuzzy around the edges...

   Sean.  That is assuming that you are the Intelligent Creator that the claim talks about.  Who are you?  Are you God, Yahweh or Allah [2] ?  If we arrive at the conclusion that an Intelligent Creator exists though scientific evidence, is it the same Creator that is described in religion?  But I am getting ahead of myself.

   God.  Let us begin with the evidence we need, then.  I brought my Bible, and there is a lovely description at the start about how I got the universe going.

   Sean.  We cannot use the Bible, however.  We wish to use “scientific” evidence, and I’m afraid I cannot use the Bible as such.

   God.  How is it different to scientific inscriptions such as journal articles or experimental results?  In effect, these articles are eyewitness accounts, the same way in which others claim that the Bible is an eyewitness account.

   Sean.  The chief difference is repeatability.  Journal articles and experimental results are publish are not to be intended to be taken as Bible, no pun intended.  Using the same methods and processes as published, other scientist may be able to replicate the same results.  There are instances when this has not happened, and subsequently the research is ignored.  For instance, Pons and Fleischmann’s cold fusion experiment in 1989.  After months of trying, other scientist found that they could not repeat the results.  Pons and Fleischmann’s results are not only disregarded, but the scientist’s themselves are largely ignored by the scientific community (Collins and Pinch 1993) .  Could I repeat the results in the Bible?  For instance, if I was to go to a wedding in Cana and drank some water, would I be surprised to find it had turned to wine?

   God.  There are communities who do use the Bible as scientific evidence.

   Sean.  Indeed.  The Creationist spring instantly to mind: their motto is “View the evidence through the Bible glasses.” [3]   However, let us disregard these groups.

   God.  Very well.  What do we know?  The universe is here.  Did it have a beginning?

   Sean.  Evidence seems to point to a beginning.  In 1929, an astronomer named Edwin Hubble made the observation that all distant galaxies are moving rapidly away from us (Hawking 1996) .  He had noticed that light from these galaxies was redder than expected, so had possibly been shifted to the red part of the light spectrum.  To account for this shifting, he suggested that the galaxies were moving away.  This implied that there was a time when these galaxies were much closer together.

   God.  So if we wind back the clock far enough, theoretically there was a time when all of the galaxies, even all of the universe, were in the same place.

   Sean.  Correct.  It is thought that the entire universe sprang from a single explosion, the Big Bang as Fred Hoyle called it.  Actually, he didn’t believe that it happened, being a “steady state” man [4] , so he was being flippant when he named it.  The name caught on (McEvoy and Zarate 1998) .

   God.  That will teach him, careless talk and all that.

   Sean.  This raises the question:  did the universe spring into existence by accident, or by design.  If the evidence points to design, then it also points to a designer.

   God.  This could be answered by looking for a reason why the universe was created.  However to answer this would be to assume that I exist, and to presume to know My reasons. 

   Sean.  Indeed.  Instead, let us look at the fact that the universe that I live in has life in it.  As such we need to answer the question keeping in mind the anthropic principle; astrophysicist Brandon Carter articulated this:  “[any models of] the universe must be such as to admit conscious beings in it at some stage” (Davies 1983).  It is claimed by some scientists that there are far too many coincidences in the universe that are necessary for life to exist.  For instance, the way the four fundamental physical forces [5] evident in the universe seem to be “fine tuned”.  For instance, if we were to change the charges of the electron and proton by even a small amount – say, a 1 percent offset – would lead to enormous repulsion.  Basic elements would not have been created after the Big Bang, nor would earth, nor life (Greenstein 1988) . 

   God.  So before I set the universe in motion, I do a little fine-tuning the Great Control Panel of All Creation.  There was a designer, quod erat demonstrandum.

   Sean.  No, this isn’t the end.  I think you know a rebuttal to this argument.

   God.  Perhaps...

   Sean.  Go ahead!  Embrace Mill [6] !

   God.  All right.  Let us suppose you can only observe a universe that is consistent with your own existence.  One could observe these “coincidences” as being deliberately engineered with people in mind.  However, we are looking for scientific evidence that a Creator exists.  To point to the coincidences is the same as going with a “gut feeling”.  Another rebuttal is the many-universes theory: there are an infinite number of universes with slightly different laws and “tunings”, and you live in the one where the tunings are set to x, y, and z (Davies 1983) .  This still answers the anthropic principle, but is very complex, and there is not definite evidence that the universe operates like this.  I think to expect a binary answer from the question of the existence of an Intelligent Designer, either a single yes or single no, is narrow-minded.  As Paul Davies remarked, “the design argument can’t be categorised as right or wrong, but merely suggestive to a greater or lesser degree” (Davies 1982) .

   Sean. Given that, one could suggest that we could conclude that the evidence, although not proving the Designer’s existence outright, is leaning towards this conclusion.

   God.  You seem uncomfortable with this.

   Sean.  I am.  This view of Greenstein’s and Davies’ – the elegant and ‘fine-turned’ laws of physics and the universe – seems to be incomplete.  To me, their arguments are leaving areas of physics, currently not explained by science, to the realm of metaphysics.  Why is the ratio of the mass of an electron to a proton what it is?  Because God said so, and if it wasn’t, life wouldn’t be possible.  Why is there a second law of thermodynamics? 

   God.  Because without it the universe would be really weird, and we would all have perpetual motion machines.  All right, you’re not satisfied with a Designer making the elegant laws.  Do scientist have an explanation for why the laws of the universe are what they are?

   Sean.  No.  I guess when people ask, “How do the laws work?” the best answer scientists can give is “Very well, thank you very much.”   It could be argued that if the laws of physics and other initial constants were not as they are, we would not be here discussing this problem. 

   God.  So being a scientist makes you an atheist?

   Sean.  Not at all.  Many scientists believe fervently in a God.  Michael Faraday’s belief in You inspired his work in magnetic fields (Bodanis 2000) .  Even Stephen Hawking finishes his The Brief History of Time with the line:  “...for then we would know the mind of God” (Hawking 1996) .  The diversity of opinions within science is not only testament to the fact that there is no definite evidence of the existence/non-existence of Designer, but also suggests that Your existence is unimportant to the ‘scientific process’.  Your existence was used to explain theories of nature that seemed to have intelligence behind their actions; for instance, Aquinas’ argument that the movement of bodies that lacked consciousness must be evidence of Your Hand.  However, four centuries later, Newton’s laws of motion helped explain away Your involvement in these physical moments.  That being said, Newton believed that the solar system could not have formed by the chance interaction of forces (Davies 1982) .  Newton also believed that once the solar system was put into motion, You would still regularly re-arrange the planets.

   God. I bet that help explain a few observations!  So, we cannot say conclusively whether I do or do not exist from scientific evidence.  However, if we were to lean towards the “does exist” side of things, what sort of God does that make me?

   Sean.  Indeed.  Are You the same God that a pious man reaches through religion?  Was Jesus You made flesh?  This poses another question: did You wind up the universe, set it going, and walked away [7] ?  Or are You an interventionist God, coming back to Your Creation to tinker and sprinkle the odd miracle here and there?  Do You listen to prayers?

   God.  These are very theological questions, and are a little out of our realm of discussion.  But to come to Me through science is to not come the way of religion.  That would make Me a different God from the ones dictated by religion.

   Sean.  It has also been said that the Gods of religion are the same, and the different religions are different interpretations of how we should worship Him.  Perhaps we could look at the God achieved through science in this light.

   God.  Again, this is getting away from our own topic.  For that matter, I haven’t yet told Me which way you’re leaning.

   Sean.  I have to admit; I’m leaning towards the “does not”.

   God.  So how to you explain having coffee with Me?

   Sean.  That’s a poser.  I’ll have to stop writing and think about that for a moment-

Bibliography

Bodanis (2000). E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation. London, Macmillan.

Collins, H. and T. Pinch (1993). The Golem: What everyone should know about science. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Davies, P. (1982). The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World, Touchstone Books.

Davies, P. (1983). God and the New Physics. London, Penguin Books.

Greenstein, G. (1988). The Symbiotic Universe: life and the cosmos in unity, Morrow.

Hawking, S. (1996). The Illustrated A Brief History of Time. London, Bantam Press.

McEvoy, J. and O. Zarate (1998). Introducing Stephen Hawking. Cambridge, Icon Books.