• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 446 0

agents). But as Darwin showed—and a century and a half of research has proven—the designer is a blind watchmaker (in Richard Dawkins’s apposite phrase). Complex structures can and do arise out of simple systems through blind variation, selection, and adaptation. This is an inevitable outcome of Darwinism, says Ruse: “Whether we like it or not, we are stuck with it. The Darwinian revolution is over, and Darwin won.” As pattern-seeking, storytelling primates who need origin myths, the theory of evolution now fulfills that need for us and has the added advantage that, unlike most origin myths, it is very probably true.

6. Fine-Tuned Universe and Life. Physicist Freeman Dyson won the Templeton Prize valued at $948,000 for such works as Disturbing the Universe, one passage of which is very revealing: “As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.” Mathematical physicist Paul Davies also won the Templeton Prize, and we can understand why in such passages as this from his 1999 book The Fifth Miracle:

In claiming that water means life, NASA scientists are . . . making—tacitly—a huge and profound assumption about the nature of nature. They are saying, in effect, that the laws of the universe are cunningly contrived to coax life into being against the raw odds; that the mathematical principles of physics, in their elegant simplicity, somehow know in advance about life and its vast complexity. If life follows from [primordial] soup with causal dependability, the laws of nature encode a hidden subtext, a cosmic imperative, which tells them: “Make life!” And, through life, its by-products: mind, knowledge, understanding. It means that the laws of the universe have engineered their own comprehension. This is a breathtaking vision of nature, magnificent and uplifting in its majestic sweep. I hope it is correct. It would be wonderful if it were correct.

Such statements are powerful indeed, especially when uttered by prominent scientists not affiliated with the ID movement in any way. Even an atheist like Stephen Hawking occasionally makes statements seemingly supportive of scientistic arguments for God’s existence:

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