Cosmic coincidences part 1

New Scientist magazine this week has an article that discusses some of the unlikely happenings that occurred in the universe en route to the arrival of us.

In the first moments of the Big Bang matter and antimatter were present in equal amounts. The thing is that when these two come into contact with one another they wipe each other out in a spray of photons, so in theory that's all that should be left of the universe.

However the reality is another matter, so to speak. Matter won the day over antimatter and in doing so creating a universe that really does matter.

Something tipped the balance in favour of matter and in doing so allowed a universe to develop in which life could exist.

Something seems to have favoured the creation of matter at a crucial moment within the first instants after the big bang.

My causes

I just watched an interesting programme in which Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs decided to put his faith to the test and invite four leading atheists to challenge him.

One of the four was a scientist who felt that because science could explain, or has the potential to explain, everything that he is, then there is no room and no need for God. The way he framed his position brought home to me some key issues in sharp clarity:

- The atheist has to have faith that God cannot be one of those causal forces and...
- The atheist has to believe that God cannot work through the medium of any of the other causal forces... to get to the point where they don't believe that there is a God
- Many believers fail to grasp the reality of some of the myriad causal forces that contribute to the making of each one of us

These forces are indeed wide ranging. They involve nature and nurture, culture and genetics, history and biology - a spicy cocktail if ever there was one, but included in that list, and indeed running through it, I include God.

Another gap closed?

I just bought a copy of The Times for the first time in months - so it worked!

The current commotion is all about pre-release comments from Prof Stephen Hawking, author of an upcoming book The Grand Design. What has he said?

Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

We'll have to wait until the book is published to find out the full story, but essentially we're talking about origins, origins of the universe and the Big Bang. The religious problem exists for people whose belief in God is fuelled by things that science can't explain - the gaps. However, before the atheists get too excited, for many believers this just isn't the way they understand God.

God is not squeezed inbetween like intellectual Polyfiller, rather he is the potter who shapes the Universe he created. In a way that means that there shouldn't be any gaps. As Dr David Wilkinson, astrophysicist and theologian, said today

The God Christians believe in is a God who is intimately involved with every moment of the universe's history, not just its beginnings

Hawking concluded his previous book by saying that if we could unify the physics of the Big Bang we should 'know the mind of God', and perhaps this next work will be his answer, but one thing is for sure: God's mind is not deciphered entirely by equations. However revealing they may be, there is a limit to the efficacy of science in this domain. Dr Lee Rayfield, Bishop of Swindon, put it like this

His conclusion does not change the remarkable coherence between the nature of our universe and the understanding Christians have about the nature and character of God.

Still, the storm in a teacup will continue for at least as long as The Times' serialisation goes on. Dawkins will continue to buzz like a high energy particle at straw men and soft targets, but the real loser will be truth. Some people will be turned off science by the comments, others religion. What a shame. As theoretical physicist Prof Chris Isham lamented...

I groaned when I read this. Stephen's always saying this sort of thing - he loves the publicity.

And I'll be buying the book on the back of it. Sucked in!

Ancient Near East beliefs

It seems clear that the creation accounts of early Genesis were designed to undermine the prevalent myths of the time. The following example comes from Egypt, dating to around 2000 years ago. The full text can be found here.

Serve God, that he may do the like for you, with offerings for replenishing the altars and with carving; it is that which will show forth your name, and God is aware of whoever serves Him. Provide for men, the cattle of God, for He made heaven and earth at their desire. He suppressed the greed of the waters, He gave the breath of life to their noses, for they are likenesses of Him which issued from His flesh. He shines in the sky for the benefit of their hearts; He has made herbs, cattle, and fish to nourish them. He has killed His enemies and destroyed His own children, because they had planned to make rebellion; He makes daylight for the benefit of their hearts, and he sails around in order to see them

The Instruction of Merikare

Asa Gray...

Darwinian teleology has the special advantage of accounting for the imperfections and failures as well as for the successes. It not only accounts for them, but turns them to practical account... So the most puzzling things of all to the old-school teleologists are the principles of the Darwinian,... it would appear that in Darwinian evolution we may have a theory that accords with, if it does not explain, the principal facts, and a teleology that is free from the common objection.. if {a theist} cannot recognize design in Nature because of evolution, he may be ranked with those of whom it was said 'Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe'

Darwiniana, 1876, as quoted in Barrow and Tipler

The Weak Anthropic Principle

Barrow and Tipler offer this definition:

"The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirement that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so"

Here's an example.

We observe that we exist at a point in the life of the universe where carbon is readily available (it wasn't this way earlier on).

But then this would have to be so - because if there wasn't any carbon then there wouldn't be any us.

The Anthropic Principle

In the perspective of these violences of matter and field, of these ranges of heat and pressure, of these reaches of space and time, is not man an unimportant bit of dust on an unimportant planet in an unimportant galaxy in an unimportant region somewhere in vastness of space?

No! The philosopher of old was right! Meaning is important, is even central. It is not only that man is adapted to the universe. The universe is adapted to man. Imagine a universe in which one or another of the fundamental dimensionless constants of physics is altered by a few percent one way or the other? Man could never come into being in such a universe. That is the central point of the anthropic principle. According to this principle, a life-giving factor lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design the world.

John A Wheeler's Foreword to 'The anthropic cosmological principle' by John Barrow and Frank Tipler