How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [10]
Why is the universe so close to the dividing line between collapsing again and expanding indefinitely? In order to be as close as we are now, the rate of expansion early on had to be chosen fantastically accurately. If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been less by one part in 1010, the universe would have collapsed after a few million years. If it had been greater by one part in 1010, the universe would have been essentially empty after a few million years. In neither case would it have lasted long enough for life to develop. Thus one either has to appeal to the anthropic principle or find some physical explanation of why the universe is the way it is.
That explanation, at the moment, is a combination of a number of different concepts revolutionizing our understanding of evolution, life, and cosmos, including the possibility that our universe is not the only one. We may live in a multiverse in which our universe is just one of many bubble universes all with different laws of nature. Those with physical parameters like ours are more likely to generate life than others. But why should any universe generate life at all, and how could any universe do so without an intelligent designer? The answer can be found in the properties of self-organization and emergence that arise out of what are known as complex adaptive systems, or complex systems that grow and learn as they change. Water is an emergent property of a particular arrangement of hydrogen and oxygen molecules, just as consciousness is a self-organized emergent property of billions of neurons. The entire evolution of life can be explained through these principles. Complex life, for example, is an emergent property of simple life: simple prokaryote cells self-organized to become more complex units called eukaryote cells (those little organelles inside cells you had to memorize in beginning biology were once self-contained independent cells); some of these eukaryote cells self-organized into multi-cellular organisms; some of these multi-cellular organisms self-organized into such cooperative ventures as colonies and social units. And so forth. We can even think of self-organization as an emergent property, and emergence as a form of self-organization. How recursive. No Intelligent Designer made these things happen. They just happened on their own. Here’s a bumper sticker for evolutionists: Life Happens. In The Life of the Cosmos, cosmologist Lee Smolin explains how this property of emergence and self-organization out of complexity works:
It seems to me quite likely that the concept of self-organization and complexity will more and more play a role in astronomy and cosmology. I suspect that as astronomers become more familiar with these ideas, and as those who study complexity take time to think seriously about such cosmological puzzles as galaxy structure and formation, a new kind of astrophysical theory will develop, in which the universe will be seen as a network of self organized systems. Many of the people who work on complexity … imagine that the world consists of highly organized and complex systems but that the fundamental laws are simply fixed beforehand, by God or by mathematics. I used to believe this, but I no longer do. More and more, what I believe must be true is that there are mechanisms of self-organization extending from the largest scales to the smallest, and that they explain both the properties of the elementary particles and the history and structure of the whole universe.
There may even be a type of natural selection at work among many universes, with those whose parameters are like ours being most likely to survive. Those universes whose parameters are most likely to give rise to life occasionally generate complex life with brains big enough to achieve consciousness and to conceive of such concepts as God and cosmology, and to ask such questions as Why?
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