(Excepted from our series “The New Scientific Evidence that Points to the Existence of God – Part 2.” Edited for publication. See our store at jashow.org to order this entire series.)
Dr. John Ankerberg: Stephen, in one of our programs together, you told a fascinating story, first of all, of how scientists discovered that our universe had a beginning. Then you talked about why that discovery supports a God hypothesis, that God really exists and is involved in our world.
Today we’re going to look at a second discovery that is bringing the God hypothesis back into currency today among some of the most prominent scientists of the last century. One such example is the famed Cambridge University astrophysicist Fred Hoyle. He started out as a very staunch atheist, and then he changed his mind based on the discoveries about the origin and structure of the universe, it’s ironical, that he himself made. Hoyle discovered something known as the fine tuning of the universe.
So, can you first describe what exactly physicists mean by fine tuning, then give us a couple examples of it?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Yes, absolutely. Physicists have discovered that there are very important fundamental parameters, physical parameters of the universe, that must fall within very precise ranges or within slight tolerances, such that if those parameters were a little bit outside those ranges, by even a little bit, life would not be possible. We couldn’t get stable galaxies; we couldn’t form planetary systems around those galaxies; in some cases, we couldn’t even get basic chemistry off the ground. Anything more than hydrogen atoms would be impossible unless you get these parameters just right. So oftentimes physicists talk about a “Goldilocks” universe, where the fundamental forces are not too strong, not too weak; the force that causes the expansion of the universe is not too strong or too weak; the masses of the elementary particles are not too heavy, not too light; the speed of light is not too fast, not too slow. Everything falls within this sweet spot, this...
Dr. John Ankerberg: Everything is just right.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Just right, as in the Goldilocks and the Three Bears story. One physicist, Luke Barnes, a physicist from Australia, has written a very important book called The Fortunate Universe. And he’s emphasizing this very “just right” character of all these different physical parameters.
So, a couple examples. The force of gravity turns out to be very important. If it’s a little bit stronger, then the stars would burn up too quickly, and we would never get the heavy elements that form within the stars. If it’s a little weaker, the atoms within the stars wouldn’t overcome electromagnetic repulsion and would never form into heavier elements that are needed; for example, carbon.
Another example is the mass of the quark, one of the elementary particles. The lighter—bad result; a little heavier—bad result. And in each case, the ranges in which the sweet spot resides are extremely small in relation to the possible range of values or strengths of these parameters.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. So, let’s go back and talk about Fred Hoyle for a moment. What was his role in discovering some of those fine-tuning parameters; and how one of them rocked his worldview and led him to abandon atheism and affirm the existence of some kind of super intellect behind the universe. First of all, who was Sir Frederick Hoyle, and what role did he play discovering some of the most important fine-tuning parameters?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, we encountered Sir Fred Hoyle, Professor Hoyle, in the previous discussion of the big bang. He formulated an alternative hypothesis to the big bang because he was, as he put it, “metaphysically opposed” to the idea that the universe should have a beginning. He was quite explicit that he thought the big bang had clear theistic implications. He was a committed, philosophical naturalist or atheist. And so, he wanted to come up with a theory that would preserve his naturalistic “no god” worldview.
And the steady state was the theory he came up with, later refuted by the discovery of the cosmic background radiation. But Hoyle was very committed initially in his career to that philosophical perspective, of a more materialistic or atheistic perspective.
But he was working in the 1950s on trying to explain a puzzle that greatly interested him, which was how do we explain the abundance of carbon in our universe. And for all intents and purposes, he realized that carbon was essential for life. Carbon forms long chain-like molecules that can store information, for example, in the DNA molecule; it stores information, and it has a lot of carbon in it. So he realized that carbon was essential for life. But it was very hard to conceive how carbon might have originated.
And the standard way of thinking about the origination of heavy chemical elements was that they would gain elementary particles one at a time and gradually build from simple elements, like hydrogen and helium, up to more complex elements like carbon. Carbon has an atomic weight of 12.
And there was a term of art that the physicists came up with to describe the problem. They called it the five-nucleon crevasse. And what they realized was that if you added a proton or a neutron—protons and neutrons are also called nucleons—so if you add one of those things one at a time, you can get from hydrogen to helium, no problem. But then if you add one more proton or neutron and have an element with five nucleons, those are highly unstable, and they fall apart very quickly. They have a very short half-life. So it was really hard to imagine how you got from helium, with an atomic weight of four, to carbon with an atomic weight of 12.
So one theory was, we’ll combine three helium molecules, each with atomic weight four, and we’ll get to 12. But getting three to collide all at the same time was astronomically improbable, and no one thought that was plausible. So Hoyle came up with the idea that, well, maybe you could get two heliums to combine to make a beryllium, atomic weight eight, and then that beryllium would separately combine with the helium, and then you’d get a carbon molecule, atomic weight 12.
Voila! Problem solved—except for one thing. When he did the calculations on the energies associated with those constituent parts of a carbon, he found that the resulting carbon had an energy level that was above the energy level of the carbons we most typically observe. And it had a precise value: 7.65 MeV.
And so he went out to Caltech, and he pigeonholed a physicist out there named Willy Fowler. And he said, “Would you do some experiments to see if you can find a carbon that has this excited energy level,” called a resonance.
And we found some actual audio recordings of interactions between Hoyle and these guys, and Willy Fowler talking about what a nut job he thought Hoyle was at first. But he was finally persuaded to do the experiment. And, lo and behold, he found a carbon with exactly that resonance, the one that Hoyle had predicted, with that level of precision. They were blown away. And Hoyle was blown away, because it implied: very difficult to make carbon, but there is a way to do it.
And then he got thinking about, well, what would have to happen inside the stars for this combination to occur to develop a carbon? And he realized that for the beryllium and the helium to come together, they’d have to overcome an electromagnetic repulsion, which means that gravity would have to be very precise in its strength to heat things up enough to overcome that repulsion. And that meant that gravity had to be fine-tuned.
And, in fact, here’s the exact problem. If the gravitational attraction is too weak inside the star, the temperature won’t get high enough for those two atoms to combine sufficiently often to generate an abundant supply of carbon. On the other hand, if the gravitational attraction is too strong, what’s called nucleosynthesis will happen much too quickly, cause the star to burn up, and you don’t get heavy elements. And the tolerance was very, very small, a very fine sweet spot in relation to the natural range of values. Big exponential number: I think it’s 1 in 1035, the fine tuning that’s required.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Wow.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: And then Hoyle realized, to get the gravity right, there had to be a whole bunch of other fine-tuning parameters that had to be just right. And so later, as he was reflecting on his own discovery and subsequent discoveries of other fine-tuning parameters that physicists revealed, he was quoted as saying, “A common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics… [and] chemistry,” in order to make life possible. He says there are no random forces in nature. Everything is finely tuned and that suggests a fine tuner. And so he shifted from his earlier strident atheism to a kind of proto-theism. And I had the opportunity my first or second year in grad school to meet and talk with Hoyle. He gave a talk on the origin of life. And I told him about some of the things that I was thinking about as far as the digital code in DNA and how that pointed to a designing intelligence. And when he heard me say intelligence, he pulled me aside and he said, “Yes, there’s no question that if we could invoke an intelligence, it would explain a lot about what we see both in the universe and in life.” So he had a major shift of worldview as a result of his own discoveries about fine tuning.
(Discussion will continue in Part 2)