The Case for a Creator, Chapter 7

Earth's Size

Gonzalez's next assertion strikes me as highly dubious. He claims that, if the Earth were larger than it is, the higher surface gravity would tend to smooth out mountains and ocean basins, producing a perfectly spherical planet with little surface relief. (He provides no numbers on how much bigger the planet could be before this happens.) This would result in a "water world" whose surface was evenly covered by a shallow ocean, and "a water world is a dead world" [p.181] because there would be no continental weathering to wash mineral nutrients into the oceans. "In a water world, many of the life-essential minerals would sink to the bottom. That's the basic problem." [p.181]

Yet again, evolution is smarter than the creationists. Vital minerals sinking to the ocean bottom would suit hydrothermal vent communities just fine - the ocean-bottom ecosystems that use minerals spewing from volcanic fissures in the ocean floor and subsist on chemical energy rather than sunlight. Some biologists even believe that these "black smokers" are where life on Earth began.

"Besides, the salt concentration in a water world would be prohibitively high. Life can only tolerate a certain level of saltiness." [p.181]

Gonzalez's argument here is that in continental environments like marshes, ocean water can evaporate and leave salt deposits behind, preventing the seas from becoming too salty, but this couldn't happen in a water world.

This reminds me of those young-earth creationist lists that offer various "proofs" which directly oppose each other. One of my favorites was the list that claimed, on the one hand, that the Earth must be young because if it was old, erosion would have worn away all the mountains, and on the other hand, the Earth must be young because if it was old, volcanism would have created mountains much higher and larger than we see today.

Gonzalez, allegedly a scientific authority, has made the same elementary blunder here. Salt comes from continents! If we lived on a water world, with no continents to erode and wash material into the ocean, there would be no source of salt. And, yet again, Gonzalez overlooks the fact that some species of Earthlife already can cope with the very salty environments that he claims would make life impossible. They are called halophiles. The green alga Dunaliella salina, for example, can live in water with a 30% salt content (ocean water is about 3% salt).

Plate Tectonics

Next on the list is plate tectonics, which Gonzalez claims is a necessary ingredient for life. The book correctly describes the cause: the natural heat of radioactivity, which keeps the earth's interior hot and causes the continental plates to drift on an underlying sea of semi-molten rock. The churning of the Earth's iron core also creates a dynamo effect that's responsible for the planet's magnetic field.

"The magnetic field is crucial to life on Earth... If we didn't have a magnetic shield, there would be more dangerous radiation reaching the atmosphere." [p.183]

But every few hundred thousand years, the Earth's magnetic field reverses - in other words, the magnetic north and south poles exchange places. (We know this from the geological record: iron crystals in lava align with the geomagnetic field like tiny compass needles, then are frozen in place when the lava cools and hardens.) A full magnetic reversal takes several thousand years from start to finish, and while it's happening, our planet has a greatly weakened magnetic field. Life has obviously survived these events, and no mass extinctions are known to be correlated with pole reversals.

Gonzalez also says that plate tectonics plays a vital role in the carbon cycle, subducting carbonate minerals into the mantle and then reemitting them from volcanoes as carbon dioxide. This does play a role in creating the environment for life on Earth, but again, there's no reason to believe it's an absolute necessity. Carbon dioxide levels have been much higher in past geological periods, and this too did not lead to the extinction of all life.

The Galactic Habitable Zone

Gonzalez's final assertion has to do with the Earth's location in the galaxy. He says that Earth is located in a "safe area" [p.169] of the Milky Way, far from the central supermassive black hole and from active star-forming regions, both of which would have dangerously high levels of radiation. On the other hand, the galaxy's outer regions and globular clusters are composed mostly of older, cooler stars and lack the heavy elements that are cooked up by supernovae and that are needed to form planets and life:

"...[Y]ou can have a whole globular cluster with hundreds of thousands of stars, and yet there won't be a single Earth." [p.170]

Clearly, Gonzalez has a strong point here. Globular clusters lack heavy elements, are too gravitationally unstable, and in all other ways are completely unsuitable for planets. Therefore, we can't possibly have discovered PSR B1620-26b, an extrasolar planet orbiting a dual-star system in the globular cluster Messier 4.

Now, I'll grant that Gonzalez is not entirely wrong: the low metallicity of globular clusters does make them a poor environment for planetary formation. (Another factor may be the stronger ultraviolet radiation in globular clusters that would dissipate protoplanetary disks of gas and dust.) But the existence of PSR B1620-26b shows that it is not impossible. In fact, not only does this planet exist, it's thought to be extremely old - over 12 billion years, over twice the age of the Earth - and presumably formed in an era of the universe when heavy elements are sparser than they are now. This strongly implies that something is wrong with Gonzalez's confident assertions about the probability of planet formation, and very probably indicates that the process is not as difficult or as unlikely as he implies.

As far as extremes of radiation - as with extremes of temperature and salinity, which were discussed in the previous part - once again the creationists have underestimated life's adaptability. There are already Earth species that can survive levels of radiation well in excess of what humans can tolerate. The reigning champion is Deinococcus radiodurans (see also), a bacterium which can survive a dose of 15,000 grays (10 grays is lethal to a human). D. radiodurans has been found living in the cooling water of nuclear reactors. The microscopic animals called tardigrades are nearly as resilient, able to withstand not just high doses of radiation but also high pressure, the vacuum of space, and temperatures well above boiling or just above absolute zero.

Of course, these are microscopic creatures, not large, complex life. But how do we know that the adaptations they possess couldn't have been transferred to creatures more like us? The Earth's environment has never been so extreme as to provide an evolutionary pressure in that direction, but there's no obvious reason to believe it's impossible. (Withstanding high doses of radiation is mainly a matter of DNA repair mechanisms.)

The creationists who parade these horribles before us want us to believe that life is fragile, just barely clinging to existence, and even a small perturbation to the environment would spell our doom. (One wonders why they're not more fervent about opposing global warming, if that's so.) But the evolutionary record reveals precisely the opposite: life is a tenacious phenomenon, able to survive in a wide variety of environments from the frozen arctic to the boiling-hot vents on the ocean floor, from arid deserts to salt-saturated ponds, and even in the vacuum of space. It's worth wondering whether, if creationists like Strobel were willing to acknowledge the true breadth and depth of life's history, they might be willing to give it more credit for being able to flourish in unlikely places.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 7

Most of chapter 7 focuses on Guillermo Gonzalez's "privileged planet" hypothesis. This argument, as he uses it here, consists of listing every way in which our planet or our solar system could have been different, and concluding that every single one of them would be completely fatal to life.

Throughout this chapter, neither Strobel nor Gonzalez ask any of the obvious follow-up questions, such as whether different kinds of life could exist in these conditions, whether life like Earth's could have adapted, or even whether there are living things on Earth that already deal with very similar challenges (as we'll see, in many cases, there are). Instead, their reigning assumption is that life as a whole is as fragile as a soap bubble, and even a single change to Earth's parameters would have been catastrophic for the entire biosphere.

There are more arguments tossed out in this chapter than I could do justice to in a single post, so I'm splitting my responses up into several parts. This is the first post of what will either be two or three.

Jupiter

According to Gonzalez, the presence of Jupiter in our solar system "acts as a shield to protect us from too many comet impacts" [p.173]. Jupiter's enormous mass and gravitational pull "deflects comets and keeps many of them from coming into the inner solar system, where they could collide with Earth with life-extinguishing consequences... If you want to get an idea of the stuff that probably would have hit the Earth [without Jupiter], look at the surface of the moon." [p.174]

I'm not sure what point Gonzalez thinks he's making here. Is he saying that Jupiter's gravitational pull somehow shields the Earth but not the Moon? The two are so close, in astronomical terms, that any reputable scientist would find this laughable. Rather, the Moon's surface preserves evidence of the kind of bombardment that both the Earth and the Moon were subjected to early in the history of the solar system, Jupiter's presence notwithstanding. The Moon, which has no erosion, still bears these scars, while the Earth has largely erased them.

Although there's no denying that Jupiter's gravitational shield has deflected many cosmic objects that could otherwise have made it into the inner solar system, I'm far from convinced that this is an absolute necessity. As just mentioned, Earth did suffer a heavy bombardment early in its history, but that did not prevent life from forming here (soon after the bombardment had ended, in fact). Today, most of the lingering planetesimals and other stray rocks left over from the solar system's formation have been cleaned out, and large impacts on our planet are relatively infrequent, Jupiter or no. And even when Earth has been hit by large objects, although mass extinctions ensued, life as a whole did not die out.

Earth's Orbit

Next on Gonzalez's list is the low eccentricity of the Earth's orbit - i.e., the shape of our orbit is nearly circular. This keeps us in what he calls the "circumstellar habitable zone", the Goldilocks region where liquid water can exist and the planet neither overheats, like Venus, nor freezes, like Mars.

"So if the Earth's distance from the sun were moved by, say, five percent either way, what would happen?" I asked.
"Disaster," came his quick reply. "Animal life would be impossible." [p.174]

What Gonzalez ignores here is that the Earth's climate is not wholly determined by the solar flux. The composition of our atmosphere - the concentration of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like water vapor, methane and carbon dioxide - determines how much of the Sun's warmth our planet retains. In fact, we depend on a moderate greenhouse effect to sustain life. "Circumstellar habitable zone" or no, the Earth's surface temperature would be below freezing if not for our atmosphere.

It's not hard to believe that a change in atmospheric composition could keep our planet livable even if we were closer to, or farther from, the Sun. In fact, the Sun's output of energy is not a constant, but has changed dramatically - not by a mere 5%, but by as much as 30% - over the lifetime of our solar system. Yet the Earth's geologic records show that it's had a warm surface and liquid water throughout that time. This is the so-called faint young sun paradox, and the favored scientific explanation does invoke changes in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.

And even if the Earth's temperature did vary due to a more elliptical orbit, there's no reason to believe that would have been disastrous for life. Richards claims, "It doesn't do you any good to have melted water for four months and then have the whole planet freeze up again" [p.174]. I'm sure that would come as a surprise to the arctic species that already cope with very similar conditions: a brief, warm growing season followed by months of dark and cold. In fact, some geologists believe that around 700 million years ago, nearly the entire planet was covered with ice, and that did not extinguish life either.

The Moon

ID advocates are particularly enamored of the Moon, especially since we've learned that it formed from a gigantic impact early in the solar system's history - the kind of unlikely event that they love to use as evidence of divine providence. Quoth Gonzalez:

"There was a remarkable finding that the moon actually stabilizes the tilt of the Earth's axis... The tilt is responsible for our seasons." [p.179]

He does not explain why the existence of seasons is a prerequisite for life; nor does he address the obvious point that equatorial and arctic regions, which experience little seasonal variation, support plenty of life.

Gonzalez goes on to say that if the Moon were not there, Earth's axial tilt could vary wildly, and if it were much more massive, it could slow down the Earth's rotation far more than it does. Either way, he worries, "you could have large temperature differences between day and night." [p.180]

Again, there are already species on Earth that cope with large temperature swings between day and night. The Sahara Desert, for example, sees diurnal variations of almost 100°F, but is not lifeless - the major limiting factor for life is the availability of water, not the temperature.

It's probably true that living on Earth would be more difficult if there were more frequent asteroid impacts, or more drastic temperature swings, or more chaotic seasonal variation. But this is a far cry from saying that life on Earth would be impossible. Based on the climactic extremes that other living species and even other human societies already deal with, we have every reason to believe that life would continue to thrive, even in the presence of the parade of horribles that Gonzalez invokes.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 7

To start off his interview, Lee Strobel asks Gonzalez and Richards about humankind's great demotion: the medieval religious belief that we were at "the center of the universe, sort of the throne of the cosmos, the most important place that everything revolved around" [p.160] and the overturning of this belief by science, which proved that we are not at the center of the universe either physically or metaphysically. Richards claims, however, "that this historical description is simply false" [p.161].

To counter this argument, Richards cites Dante's Divine Comedy, in which "the surface of the Earth is an intermediate place" between the heavenly spheres and the circles of the underworld. In fact, he calls it a "cosmic sump". "[C]learly, this is not the stereotype that we've been given that the center of the universe prior to Copernicus was the preeminent spot." [p.162]

But what Richards has passed over is the role that Earth plays in this cosmology. It's not, as Richards' dismissive description implies, a place of no importance. On the contrary: according to this belief system, Earth is the axis of creation. It's the stage where God's plan of salvation plays out, the place where everyone's eternal destiny will be decided, the cosmic arena where everything that's ever going to happen happens. And let's not forget that the most important series of events in all of Christian history - the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus - took place on the Earth. Far from being unimportant, this belief system makes the Earth the place of supreme importance for God's plan and for humankind's ultimate destiny.

Without Strobel noticing, Richards then goes on to contradict the argument raised just several pages prior:

"It was the Enlightenment that made man the measure of all things. When you really think about it, Christian theology never actually put man literally in the center... it was never the case that everything was literally created solely for us." [p.162]

This flatly contradicts the passage from Michael Denton, quoted by Strobel and discussed in my last entry in this series, which describes the hypothesis that "every characteristic of reality exists [to create a livable habitat] for mankind" as "very far from a discredited prescientific myth" [p.158]. Strobel passes over this contradiction without noticing or remarking on it.

Strobel next raises the question of Copernicus, Galileo, and Giordano Bruno, three famous figures who were persecuted for opposing the geocentric cosmology of their day. Unusually, Richards doesn't adopt the usual evangelical apologetic of blaming it all on the cruel, dogmatic Catholic church. (Note that he's affiliated with the Acton Institute, a libertarian Catholic think tank.) Instead, he tries to exonerate the church and even argues that some of the treatment they received was justified!

"First of all," Richards said, "some claim Copernicus was persecuted, but history shows he wasn't; in fact, he died of natural causes the same year his ideas were published." [p.163]

This is a rather odd apologetic. If Richards wants to prove that the Catholic church refrained from persecuting scientists, it certainly doesn't help his case. It could equally well be argued that the only reason Copernicus wasn't persecuted is because he died before the church had the opportunity.

Indeed, the way Copernicus and his associates handled his discovery strongly suggests that they feared the church's response. When Copernicus' masterpiece, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, was published by his friend Andreas Osiander, Osiander added a foreword emphasizing that the heliocentric theory could be treated only as a mathematical convenience, and didn't have to imply anything about the true nature of reality. Copernicus himself began the work by reprinting a letter from a friend, who was a Catholic cardinal, praising his observational skills. He follows this with a long, apologetic preface addressed to Pope Paul III in which he admits that his theory is new and shocking, that for a long time he wrestled with whether to publish it at all, but that he was finally persuaded to do so by the urging of his friends. (Read the text of De Revolutionibus online; see also). And despite all this effort toward placating the church, Copernicus' work was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books later, during the Galileo affair. It would not ultimately be removed until 1835 (!).

And about that famous Galileo affair:

"As for Galileo, his case can't be reduced to a simple conflict between scientific truth and religious superstition. He insisted the church immediately endorse his views rather than allow them to gradually gain acceptance..." [p.163]

Considering that the ID movement has insisted public schools immediately endorse their views rather than wait to gain scientific acceptance, this is a laughably hypocritical charge.

"...he mocked the Pope, and so forth. Yes, he was censured, but the church kept giving him his pension for the rest of his life." [p.163]

First off, please take notice that Richards appears to be arguing that mocking the Pope is a legitimate reason to punish someone.

Second, it's ludicrous how Richards tries to soft-pedal Galileo's fate. What actually happened is that Galileo was summoned to Rome to appear before the Inquisition, where he was imprisoned for the duration of his trial before a jury of ten cardinals. When he was finally judged to be suspect of heresy, his book was banned and he was forced to recant on his knees under threat of torture; and when he had humiliated himself by abjuring his own work, he was then sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life. (Here's an excellent reference on Galileo's trial.)

"[Giordano] Bruno's case was very sad," Richards continued. "He was executed in Rome in 1600. Certainly this is a stain on church history. But again, this was a complicated case. His Copernican views were incidental. He defended pantheism and was actually executed for his heretical views on the Trinity, the Incarnation, and other doctrines that had nothing to do with Copernicanism." [p.163]

Evidently, we're meant to take from this that burning someone for their religious ideas is somehow more acceptable than burning them for their scientific ideas.

But what Richards says here is a half-truth at best. Bruno was not a scientist like Copernicus or Galileo; his cosmological views flowed from his mystical, pantheistic religious beliefs, not from direct observation. Nevertheless, it's striking how his ideas resemble the modern, scientific conception of the cosmos. He believed that the Sun was a star just like all the others, that the Earth and the other planets revolved around it, and that there were an infinite number of other stars each with their own planetary systems and living beings. And whether or not this was the charge that resulted in his execution, the record clearly shows that it was one of the charges laid against him at trial.

In sum, far from supporting his thesis, Richards has only undermined it: The church did insist on a cosmology that put Earth at the metaphysical center of creation, and it did persecute scientists and other freethinkers who dared to offer an alternative view. This embarrassing historical record doesn't fit well with the story he wants to tell, so it's no surprise that he tries to cover it up. Unfortunately for him, the facts are not so malleable nor so accommodating.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

This past summer, I was visiting the New York Botanical Gardens when serendipity struck: this beautiful little creature alighted on a stone railing around the edge of a pool, staying just long enough for me to snap this shot:

I think, though I'm not an expert, that this is a blue dasher, Pachydiplax longipennis.

I don't usually like close-up photos of insects - they have an eerie, alien feel that I find disturbing. (I admit it, I'm a mammal chauvinist.) But this one is one of the rare exceptions. Looking at it again, it's hard for me not to feel admiration for this sleek, graceful creature.

With its iridescent blue scales, its impossibly frail and transparent wings, its delicate jointed legs, it scarcely seems to belong to nature at all. It looks almost like a device, a tiny whirring clockwork machine made by some detail-obsessed jeweler - except, of course, that we humans haven't yet learned to make machines of such fine and precise workmanship, nor any that pack so many marvelous capabilities into such a small package.

So much of its head is taken up by those huge, gorgeous compound eyes, it seems it has scarcely any room for a brain to process the information they take in. Yet dragonflies have keen eyesight, and are blurringly fast and acrobatic fliers - and imagine how well-tuned their organs of balance must be, to control their pitch, roll and yaw in three-dimensional space at such speeds, a task that would overwhelm a human vestibular system. And though they seem so clumsy, so fragile - adult dragonflies can only fly, not walk, and their wings can't be folded in like a beetle's but must be held out at all times - on their own small scale, they are fearsome and effective predators. And of course, like all living things, dragonflies have one more astounding ability that human-designed devices can't match: they can make copies of themselves from the raw materials of their environment!

All in all, despite all our brains, we humans can't create anything nearly as clever, as intricate, as adaptable, or as beautiful as a dragonfly. But we shouldn't feel too bad: when it comes to forging machines, we've had barely a few hundred years of practice. Evolution has had hundreds of millions of years to refine its designs, to hone and sharpen them against the ruthless grindstone of natural selection. With that much of a head start, and with all the resources of a planet to use for trial and error, it's no wonder that even this blind algorithm produces results of a beauty and craftsmanship we can't match.

And yet, the stunning truth is that we ourselves are products of the same evolutionary process. Look at your hands, your arms, and imagine tens of millions of years of natural selection pushing and tugging on them like a sculptor kneading clay, slowly molding flesh and bone into new shapes. Imagine the skeins of DNA coiled in your cells, woven out of evolution like a tapestry from a loom. Imagine the unbroken chain of your ancestors stretching back into the misty recesses of time, each one only subtly different from the last - but even subtle changes add up, until you reach a point, untold millions of generations ago, where the ancestral lines of human and dragonfly merge into the same track.

This knowledge should fill us with awe. The fact of universal common descent via evolution means that I and this glittering blue dragonfly, no matter how distant the links, are related. When I snapped that picture, it was a family reunion, of sorts - and the admiration I felt for its intricacy and beauty is the same kind of admiration I'd feel for any talented relative whose glory reflects, even if only a little, on his siblings and cousins.

The human species is like a hiker who, having scaled a long and arduous path, can finally stop at a vantage point and look back on the journey he's taken. Looking out across the landscape, we can see our fellow travelers, each one taking a different course from all the rest, all of them spreading out from a single point of origin in the far distance. Why should we not feel a sense of kinship for all the other beings who are traversing life's winding, contingent paths along with us? And why should we not marvel all the more that our astonishing existence is not the result of deliberate planning, but of a glorious, messy, freewheeling cauldron of chance?

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 7

Chapter 7 of Case is about the argument from planetary fine-tuning. This time, Strobel has two interviewees: Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Wesley Richards, both affiliated with the Discovery Institute. Since we're keeping count of scientific "authorities", which is whom Strobel claims to be interviewing, let me point out for the record that Gonzalez has a legitimate Ph.D in astronomy from the University of Washington. Richards, meanwhile, is another Christian theologian, with a Ph.D from Princeton Theological Seminary.

You may have heard of Guillermo Gonzalez from a fracas in 2007, when he was denied tenure at Iowa State University. Naturally, the Discovery Institute went into a frenzy of claims that it was entirely due to anti-ID prejudice - despite Gonzalez's unimpressive publication record and failure to attract significant research funding during his time there (remember: authorities!). But even if his pro-ID views played a role in the decision, that would be entirely appropriate, since tenure decisions are supposed to be based on the quality of the candidate's work. For the record, Gonzalez is now a professor at Grove City College, a private Christian university in Pennsylvania - the kind of place where those strictly-scientific, not-in-any-way-motivated-by-religion ID folks seem to keep ending up. (Bill Dembski, for another example, is now a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.)

But, moving on. As I said, this chapter is devoted to Gonzalez and Richards' argument that a multiplicity of factors make the Earth uniquely suited for life - indeed, that it's the only planet in the galaxy or even the universe that is so disposed - and that fine-tuning by God is the only way to explain this. Lest you think I'm exaggerating, here's a passage from Michael Denton's Nature's Destiny that Strobel favorably quotes in the introductory remarks of this chapter:

No other theory or concept ever imagined by man can equal in boldness and audacity this great claim... that all the starry heavens, that every species of life, that every characteristic of reality exists [to create a livable habitat] for mankind... But most remarkably, given its audacity, it is a claim which is very far from a discredited prescientific myth. [p.158]

Strobel also cites Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee's book Rare Earth, an argument by two non-ID-affiliated scientists that complex, intelligent life is an extremely unusual phenomenon. But Ward and Brownlee don't believe that life as such is necessarily rare - they believe that microbes, which are far more resilient than us large, fragile creatures, may be more common in the cosmos. Remarkably, even this is too much for Strobel to accept: "...Ward and Brownlee uncritically buy into the idea that microbial life may very well be more prevalent" [p.156, emphasis added].

I want to focus on this before moving on to the rest of the chapter. After all, if you think about it, this is a very curious position for Strobel to take. As we've said before, intelligent design, according to its founders, is supposed to be about science. And science is based on observation. Since we've never done any close-up observation of any planet outside our solar system, there should be no grounds for excluding the possibility that there may be life on one of them. Even if one agrees with every argument that's given later on in this chapter, it doesn't follow that life is a one-of-a-kind unique event, only that it's rare. Yet Strobel is clearly uncomfortable with the idea that any life of any form might exist elsewhere in the universe, even if it's only extremophile alien microbes.

Why should this be problematic? After all, didn't he just spend the previous chapter arguing that the laws of the cosmos have been fine-tuned to extraordinary precision to allow for life to exist? It would be incredibly wasteful to go to that much trouble just for the sake of one tiny planet in a universe of ten billion trillion stars. If intelligent design is being presented as a scientific hypothesis, it seems to be an a priori possibility that the intelligent designer might have created life on many different planets. Shouldn't this hypothesis be given at least some consideration?

But instead, Strobel brushes past it without a backward glance, and this tells us something. When discussing an issue where the truth is still unknown - and the question of extraterrestrial life surely qualifies - a genuinely scientific book would present the competing possibilities and evaluate them fairly (remember "teach the controversy"?). For a journalist like Strobel, this would be an ideal place to interview people with different views and see how they stack up.

This book, however, ignores every alternative and homes straight in on the conclusion that its author has clearly chosen ahead of time: that life on Earth is a one-of-a-kind unique phenomenon. And since this conclusion isn't supported by scientific evidence (how could it be?), it must derive from the author's personal religious faith. In other words, this chapter is another piece of evidence showing what we all knew already - that this book's claim at being "science" is really just a pretense, a form of window dressing, that uses scientific language to disguise a conclusion that comes first and foremost from evangelical Christian religious beliefs.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 6

In his frequently-maligned (but less-frequently read and understood) book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins offers what I think is an underappreciated argument against all varieties of supernatural design, the "Ultimate 747" argument.

Briefly stated, it goes like this: If we accept ID advocates' reasoning, complexity and organization require a designer. Yet it stands to reason that any designer that could create a complex, organized thing must be an even more complex and organized being in its own right, and therefore even more in need of a designer of its own to explain its existence. If we consider it unlikely that creatures as complex as human beings simply exist by chance, requiring no designer, a fortiori we should consider it even more unlikely that a supernatural, human-designing deity could just happen to exist with no outside explanation. Why do we need a human-designer, but not a human-designer-designer? (The allusion, of course, is to the infamous creationist argument that evolution is like a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a 747 jumbo jet.)

This argument applies with a vengeance to the claims made by Lee Strobel and Robin Collins in this chapter. Collins claims that it's absurd to invoke as-yet undiscovered laws of physics to explain why the universe (or the multiverse) exists, when we already have a perfectly suitable candidate:

"We see minds producing complex, precision machinery all the time. So postulating the existence of a supermind - or God - as the explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe makes all the sense in the world. It would simply be a natural extrapolation of what we already know that minds can do." [p.146]

Similar to William Lane Craig's argument from the last chapter, this innocent-looking paragraph smuggles in all kinds of Christian presuppositions.

First of all, it is not a natural extrapolation from "intelligent beings can create machines" to "intelligent beings can create universes". The former entails working within the cosmos and the laws of physics to shape matter to our advantage. The latter entails actually creating that matter and those laws of physics. These are completely qualitatively different abilities. One is a natural endeavor, following the principles of natural law; the other transcends natural law, by definition making it a supernatural power.

But more importantly, look carefully and you'll see where the theistic presuppositions try to slide past. Human minds are also contingent entities, brought into existence by prior causes and existing on a material substrate. Are these also traits that we should apply to God? If not, why not, since we have no experience of any mind for which these two conditions are not true? Would this not also be a "natural extrapolation" from what we know of minds?

The thread of Strobel's reasoning, if followed consistently, leads inescapably to the conclusion that God, no less than human beings, needs a prior cause and a designing intelligence of his own to "fine-tune" the conditions for his existence. Of course, this leads to absurdity, for how do we explain the existence and fine-tuned nature of that designing intelligence? These 747s just keep getting bigger and bigger the more we try.

The only way to escape an infinite regress of ever-greater intelligent designers is to assume that, at some point, complexity arose from simplicity. And we know of only one algorithm capable of doing that: the algorithm of evolution, which has amply demonstrated its ability to create marvelously complex, intricate and well-adapted systems from simpler precursors. But once you admit that this can happen, what need is there for a designer at all? Why not follow the (abundant) evidence, conclude that human beings arose from a process of evolution, and cut off the recursion at the earliest possible step?

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 6

For those who accept the premises of the cosmological fine-tuning argument - that the physical laws of the universe could have been different, and that there's only a small prior probability they would have taken on the values to produce intelligent beings - there are two possible explanations. One is that these values were chosen by a god or other creative power. Another one, which has found favor with some cosmologists in recent years, is that there are a vast number of parallel universes which instantiate all the possible values, and we naturally find ourselves in one of the universes conducive to beings like ourselves.

In chapter 6, Lee Strobel pours scorn on this second possibility. He calls it a "metaphysical escape hatch to avoid the fine-tuning evidence for a designer" [p.139], and quotes some of his ID fellow-travelers who say that this explanation "does seem to betray a metaphysical desperation" [p.140]. He also quotes William Lane Craig, who describes this as an "outlandish theory" invented because "some people will hypothesize anything to avoid" [p.140] the ID explanation.

Something I've occasionally observed is that religious apologists will crank up the intensity of their polemic when logic alone doesn't get them the answers they want, and that seems to be what's going on here. There is no solid proof that parallel universes exist, but neither is there any way to disprove them; of course, both these points are also true of the intelligent-designer hypothesis. Since these explanations both account for the observations equally well, there is no obvious way to choose between them, and the ID explanation does not stand out as a clear winner. The sudden sharp increase in the hostility of Strobel's language is probably deliberate, a smokescreen deployed to obscure that rhetorically inconvenient fact. (And didn't he say in an earlier interview that "motive-mongering" is an irrelevant tactic and that every explanation should stand or fall on its own merits? Evidently, this has been forgotten.)

Note also the careful framing, in which Strobel's wording is chosen to imply that a supernatural designer should be the default explanation. This may sound good to Christian readers, but it's not how science works. Every hypothesis has to prove itself superior to its competitors by making verified predictions and producing supporting evidence. No explanation wins just by casting aspersions on its rivals. If Strobel and his ID compatriots want to win this fight, they would be well advised to figure out some concrete predictions that ID makes that differ from those made by multiverse hypotheses (many of which do make testable predictions, even if some of the tests are presently beyond our ability to carry out).

For whatever reason, after spending several pages sneering at multiverse hypotheses, Strobel next resorts to a fallback explanation: even if there were parallel universes, that would still indicate design! As Robin Collins says:

"My wife and I have a bread-making machine... To make edible bread, we first needed this well-designed machine that had the right circuitry, the right heating element, the right timer, and so forth. Then we had to put in the right ingredients in the right proportions and the right order - water, milk, flour, shortening, salt, sugar, yeast..."

"Now, let's face it: a universe is far more complex than a loaf of bread. My point is that if a bread machine requires certain specific parameters to be set in order to create bread, then there has to be a highly designed mechanism or process to produce functional universes. In other words, regardless of which multiple-universe theory you use, in every case you'd need a 'many-universes generator'..." [p.142]

No matter how cleverly worded they are or how many intervening steps they contain, cosmological arguments for theism always reach a point where they lapse into special pleading. The above paragraph is the point where Robin Collins does it. Do we need a "many-universes generator"? Then why don't we also need a "god generator", to produce the sort of intelligent designer that is capable of producing universes? Why does one need a further explanation while the other does not?

Any explanation for the origin of the universe is susceptible to such recursive questioning. Either the causal chain regresses forever, or we find a place where we have to stop and declare "that's just the way it is". The point is that creationists have no rational warrant for stopping the regression at the place most convenient for them. They have no justification for declaring that this step absolutely requires a further explanation, but that step is the one for which no further explanation is necessary. In the absence of evidence, that line can always be moved one step forward or one step backward.

It's not out of the realm of possibility that one day we will discover the scientifically supported explanation for the ultimate cause of all things. But that day hasn't come yet; we probably don't even know the right questions to ask. There's ample reason for all of us to be patient and humble when it comes to the question of ultimate origins. We still have much to learn, and in the meantime, creationists should cease polluting the discussion with empty buzzwords like "metaphysically necessary", or claiming that there "has to be" a supernatural explanation. These are not arguments, they're just professions of faith.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 6

The cosmological fine-tuning argument is one of the more interesting claims in the intelligent-design movement's toolkit. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it's the best argument they have. I'll let Robin Collins make the point as strongly as he can:

"Over the past thirty years or so, scientists have discovered that just about everything about the basic structure of the universe is balanced on a razor's edge for life to exist. The coincidences are far too fantastic to attribute this to mere chance or to claim that it needs no explanation." [p.131]

The fine-tuning argument usually takes the form of claiming that the underlying physical constants of the universe need to be precisely calibrated for beings like us to exist, and even a tiny change one way or another would result in a cosmos completely incompatible with life. ID advocates will point to examples like the strength of gravity, the value of the cosmological constant, the binding energy of protons and neutrons - and they love to stack up the zeroes when describing the allegedly inconceivable odds:

"The fine-tuning has conservatively been estimated to be at least one part in a hundred million billion billion billion billion billion. That would be a ten followed by fifty-three zeroes. That's inconceivably precise." [p.133]

I said that the fine-tuning argument is the best argument ID has. Of course, this isn't to say that it proves the existence of a god, just that it's not blatantly wrong like the design argument or the ontological argument. It does seem to be true that a small change in the physical constants would result in a drastically different universe and would make life like ours impossible. This doesn't prove the existence of a god (or some other superintelligence that controls the values of the constants), but that is one possible way to explain the observation.

However, there's a follow-up question that needs to be asked. Assume for the sake of argument that the constants can vary at random. Now the question is this: How many different sets of physical constants would allow for life of any sort?

After all, if you're going to calculate how likely it is that the laws of the cosmos would allow for life to exist, you need to know two things: how many possible sets of laws are there, and how many of those sets of laws permit life. Strobel and Collins assume that the first number is a very large one (Strobel says the odds against any particular set of values are "infinitesimal" [p.135]), but never even ask how large the second is. If there are a trillion trillion possible universes, but two-thirds of those could give rise to intelligent beings of some kind, then the odds against our being here are not very large!

Granted, any kind of life that could exist if the physical constants were altered would probably be extremely different from us. We might not even recognize it as life if we encountered it. But Collins is far too hasty in dismissing the possibility out of hand without any real evidence. For instance, he says, if the force of gravity was stronger relative to the other fundamental forces:

"As astrophysicist Martin Rees said, 'In an imaginary strong gravity world, even insects would need thick legs to support them, and no animals could get much larger.' In fact, a planet with a gravitational pull of a thousand times that of the Earth would have a diameter of only forty feet, which wouldn't be enough to sustain an ecosystem. Besides which, stars with lifetimes of more than a billion years - compared to ten billion years for our sun - couldn't exist if you increase gravity by just three thousand times." [p.132]

Granted, those would be serious problems for life like us. What about life not like us?

The American physicist Robert Forward, who died in 2002, was a prolific scientist (he published hundreds of papers during his lifetime, far exceeding the scientific output of the entire ID movement so far). He was also a science fiction writer. Among his novels was Dragon's Egg, which describes an intelligent species living on the surface of a neutron star. They're made of ultra-dense matter and are the size of sesame seeds, so the massive gravity and smaller diameter of their world aren't problematic, and because nuclear reactions occur much more quickly than chemical reactions, their existence is greatly accelerated relative to ours (their "year" is about 30 seconds long), thus answering Collins' concern about shorter stellar lifespans. Although this is obviously speculative fiction, nothing in it is impossible according to our current understanding. Forward described his book as "a textbook on neutron star physics disguised as a novel".

Collins also says that if the strong nuclear force were slightly weaker, our universe would be composed purely of hydrogen, and:

"...regardless of what they may show on Star Trek, you can't have intelligent life forms built from hydrogen. It simply doesn't have enough stable complexity." [p.134-135]

Fred Hoyle - the astronomer whom Strobel favorably quotes earlier in this chapter as recognizing the apparently fine-tuned nature of the universe - did not agree with this. Like Forward, he was both a scientist and a science fiction writer. His 1957 novel The Black Cloud depicts an enormous alien intelligence in the form of a sentient interstellar cloud of hydrogen (plus, to be fair, some other trace elements). Hoyle said of the novel, "there is very little here that could not conceivably happen" (source).

Neither of these novels are science textbooks, of course. It may well be that Hoyle's or Forward's visions of alien life are ultimately not possible in our universe. But even if you believe their conclusions are unfounded, there is little more reason to believe Collins' strategic pessimism. If we had known only the physical laws of our universe, we could hardly have predicted, from first principles alone, that it would contain life. We simply don't have the knowledge to proclaim with confidence what other interesting possibilities may be inherent in other sets of physical laws. In the set of possible worlds, there may be strange lifeforms we've never even dreamed of. There are no grounds for Strobel's confidence that our universe is the only possible one that could give rise to life and sentience.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator

During World War II, American forces fighting in the Pacific set up bases on remote islands whose people had had very little prior contact with other civilizations. These people, with technology at a Stone Age level, were amazed by the strange visitors and the almost miraculous cargo they brought with them - chocolate, cigarettes, radio, steel tools. When the war ended and the soldiers left, some tribes went to desperate measures to summon them back, forming religions - cargo cults - which tried to induce the soldiers to return through sympathetic magic. Some of them went so far as to make mock military uniforms, cut "runways" in the jungle, or build "control towers" out of bamboo. The most famous surviving cargo cult is the following of John Frum, which I've written about before.

I mention all this because a friend sent me this bizarre article from a group calling itself the Spiritual Science Research Foundation, "How does prayer work? A spiritual perspective". It's an excellent example of what (to borrow a phrase from Richard Feynman) we might call "cargo cult science".

This article is clearly intended to mimic the form of a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It has an abstract, a section discussing the "mechanism" of prayer, plenty of colorful graphics and charts, and plenty of technical-sounding talk about which postures increase the efficacy of one's prayers by what percentage:

But for all its glitzy graphics and pseudotechnical jargon, this article is no more science than a cargo cult's bamboo control tower will attract real airplanes. It imitates the form while completely misunderstanding the essence of what it's trying to recreate.

The essence of science lies in answering two questions: how do you know that? and how can I test it? Both these answers are missing from the SSRF's prayer article, which spews forth assertion after ludicrous assertion without making the slightest effort to explain how its author came by any of this knowledge. Just take a few examples:

A person at the 50% spiritual level will more often than not pray for his spiritual progress... a person who prays for the death of another person will be helped by a negative subtle entity from the 4th Region of Hell... The subtlest frequencies are generated when one pays gratitude along with the prayer... Prayer increases the particles of the subtle basic sattva component in the vital body sheath... In our life, 65% of events happen as per destiny... Prayers of people who are below the 30% spiritual level lack potency... By touching the wrists to the chest, the Anaahat chakra is activated and it helps in absorbing more sattva frequencies... In some cases people hold hands and pray. This is also a spiritually incorrect practice... All other things being equal, using the recommended mudraa (posture) for prayer helps to improve the chances of one’s prayer being answered by 20%.

The article goes on and on, throwing out these statistics as if they were well-established facts, never attempting to explain how any of this knowledge was acquired. Nor does it make any effort to explain how an interested person might test any of this to confirm for themselves that it's true.

What seems clear is that groups like this (and others) are envious of science - of its precision, of its demonstrated success, of the esteem it enjoys from the public. They want to claim some of that authority for themselves, which is why they ape the form and language of a scientific paper, hoping that the credulous will be deceived by the resemblance into thinking that their beliefs are scientifically verified as well. Yet despite its pretense of scientific language, this article is essentially no different from any other religious book, making bald assertions which the believer is required to take on faith.

The Case for a Creator, Chapter 6

Chapter 6 of Case is about the cosmological fine-tuning argument, but before I get to that, I want to say a few words about Strobel's next choice of interview subject.

The interviewee in chapter 6 is Robin Collins, another prominent ID advocate. Granted, the areas of Collins' interest lie mainly in physics and cosmology. But Collins himself is not a physicist, nor a cosmologist, nor even a practicing scientist. His undergraduate major was physics; he began a physics Ph.D program which he did not complete, and ended up getting a Ph.D in philosophy instead. He's now an associate professor of philosophy at a private Christian university, Messiah College.

Of course, Strobel describes Collins' background in the most glowing terms possible:

He went on to earn degrees in physics and mathematics at Washington State University (with a grade point average a scant 0.07 points shy of perfection)... Collins delved deeply into the subject and soon found a perfect wedding between his expertise in physics and philosophy... his training in physics equip[ped] him to understand the often-complex mathematical equations in the field... Collins has written about the topic for numerous books, including God and Design: The Teleological Argument and Modern Science; The Rationality of Theism; God Matters;... and Reason for the Hope Within. [p.128-129]

My intent isn't to cast aspersions on Collins' academic background, nor am I claiming he doesn't have the ability to speak knowledgeably about cosmology. What I'm doing is pointing out the increasingly wide gap between Strobel's claimed intentions and the reality of whom he's interviewing for this book. Remember what he said in chapter 2:

My approach would be to cross-examine authorities in various scientific disciplines about the most current findings in their fields. [p.28]

If the term "authorities" means anything in this context, it must refer to practicing, qualified scientists with a preeminent degree of achievement and expertise recognized as such by other workers in their field. No other definition makes sense. But even by an extremely generous accounting, Strobel is nowhere close to meeting that standard. So far, he's interviewed:

• Jonathan Wells - holder of a legitimate degree in biology, but spends far more time doing PR for the intelligent-design movement than actual science. Even the Discovery Institute's C.V. page lists only one peer-reviewed publication by Wells in the past eighteen years, in an obscure Italian journal called Rivista Biologica (but plenty of press releases and editorials in non-peer-reviewed popular press outlets).

• Stephen Meyer - worked as a geophysicist for a time, holder of a degree in the history and philosophy of science. As far as I know, has written only one scientific paper ever, which was a literature review presenting no new data, and which was only published because an ID-sympathetic editor sidestepped the journal's normal process of peer review.

• William Lane Craig - professional Christian apologist and theologian. Not a scientist.

• Robin Collins - professional Christian philosopher and theologian. Not a scientist.

I'm not saying that Lee Strobel can't talk to these people. For a Christian apologetics book, they'd be perfectly understandable choices. But this book isn't presented as an ordinary, run-of-the-mill apologist tract listing philosophical arguments for Christianity made by theologians. It's presented as a book about science, one that shows how scientists are making discoveries that support the existence of God. Consider these quotes from the dust jacket:

"Could it be that the world looks designed because it really is designed? Increasing numbers of scientists are coming to that conclusion."

"...Strobel shares what more and more scientists are saying about the complex, manifestly purposeful order that pervades nature."

"The Case for a Creator shows how science itself is steadily nailing the lid on atheism's coffin..."

And then there's the subtitle of the book itself: A Journalist Investigates Scientific Evidence That Points Toward God. The vast gulf between this lofty, triumphalist rhetoric and the reality of Strobel's interview subjects - a motley collection of Christian philosophers, spin doctors, and professional apologists, with no scientific output to speak of - is something that ought to be hammered home at every opportunity.

In the introduction to this chapter, Strobel tries to dazzle us by listing all the scientific luminaries who allegedly find the fine-tuning argument persuasive - Paul Davies, Fred Hoyle, Owen Gingerich, and more, not to mention Allan Sandage from a previous chapter. But this begs the question, why isn't he interviewing any of these people? Why isn't he interviewing prestigious scientists working on the cutting edge of their fields, people who'd be happy to explain how their peer-reviewed research gives dramatic support to intelligent design?

In fact, the reality is the opposite: the more outspoken an advocate for ID is, the less they publish and the less real science they do. Strobel does his best to inflate his subjects' credentials, but to someone who's not impressed by Templeton fellowships and Washington Times editorials and wants to see actual scientific research and accomplishment, not only are these people far from being "authorities", their résumés are paper-thin. Real scientists don't spend all their time writing press releases; real scientists spend their time doing science - running the experiments, writing papers, publishing in peer-reviewed journals. None of the most prominent ID advocates seem to have any interest in those activities.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Case for a Creator