DOES THE COSMOS SHOW EVIDENCE OF PURPOSE?

The presentation today is by Victor Stenger, a colleague at the University of Hawaii, who passed away nearly five years ago.  He was an eminent particle physicist, and authored twelve books for general audiences.  His best seller was God:  The Failed Hypothesis.  He was also a columnist for the Huffington Post.

I am summarizing his contribution to Science and Religion.  He wrote this piece two decades ago:

• In Christian Europe  during the Middle Ages, most scientists of the period were clerics, or otherwise connected to the Church.
• Newton himself cites his trying to uncover God's design of the physical universe.
• There thus came a calling of two God books:  Scripture and the Book of Nature.

Stenger explains:

• Cosmologist and Quaker George Ellis said:  The symmetries and delicate balances we obsrve require an extraordinary coherence of condition and cooperation of laws and effects, suggesting that in some sense they have been purposefully designed.

• Advocates of "purpose" site Anthropic Coincidences, where the tiniest change in anything would have made our development impossible.  John Barrow and Frank Tipler in 1986 wrote The Anthropic Cosmological Principle.  A long time ago I read a book by Tipler, another physicist, called The Physics of Immortality, where he proves, using equations, how the world, and us, came to be.  I stopped reading after page 5.

• Anthropic design:  How can the Universe possibly have obtained the unique set of physical constants it has, so exquisitely fine-tuned for life as they are, except by purposeful design--design with life and perhaps humanity in mind?  Read the details by clicking on The Anthropic Principle.

• Inflationary Big Bang has been the standard model of cosmology.  Stenger explains how from nothing, or a vacuum, came something.  I got to admit I don't quite appreciate the logistics and reality as laid out.
• Even more details are provided in his God:  The Failed Hypothesis.
• Further, there are almost surely other universes.

Sometimes The Bible makes more sense than renowned physicists. On the other hand, there are sharper minds than mine, like Michael Shermer (here with Stenger), who calls Stenger the Fifth Horseman of the New Atheism, with the originals being, left to right, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennet and Christopher Hitchens.

My next foray into Science/Religion will feature David Shotwell on FROM THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE TO THE SUPERNATURAL.

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