The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [67]
In their book The New Story of Science, Robert Augros and George Stanciu sum up the inferences of the amazing confluence of “coincidences” that make life possible in the cosmos. “A universe aiming at the production of man implies a mind directing it,” they said. “Though man is not at the physical center of the universe, he appears to be at the center of its purpose.” 15
Those conclusions aside, I was looking for my own personal answers to the fundamental questions posed by McGrath. I wanted not only to explore the scientific evidence for the universe’s precarious balancing act, but I also wanted to see if the anthropic principle could survive the challenge of a hypothesis which, according to some skeptics, may very well render it obsolete.
While studying the fine-tuning issue, I came across the writings of an articulate, physics-trained philosopher who has done his own original research on the issue. I especially liked his reputation—he was known as being careful and conservative in his calculations, unwilling to make judgments that exceed the bounds of the data. In short, just what I was looking for.
A few phone calls later, I was on a plane for Pennsylvania and a picturesque campus of redbrick buildings situated not far north of the Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg.
INTERVIEW #4: ROBIN COLLINS, PHD
As a seventh-grade student, Robin Collins sent away for several free booklets from the Atomic Energy Commission—and a love for physics was born. 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) and then entered a doctoral program in physics at the University of Texas in Austin.
His other love was philosophy—in fact, it was his third major in college. This expertise came in handy while working on his doctorate in an office he shared with a group of graduate students that included an atheist and an agnostic. As for Collins, he had been a Christian since his last year of high school.
The four of them ended up sparring late into the night about philosophical and theological issues, which Collins found so stimulating that he decided to pursue a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. The legendary Alvin Plantinga, perhaps the best American philosopher of modern times, supervised Collins’s dissertation.
It was a stray comment by Plantinga in class one day that first exposed Collins to the issue of the fine-tuning of the universe. Captivated by the concept, Collins delved deeply into the subject and soon found a perfect wedding between his expertise in physics and philosophy.
Not only did his training in physics equip him to understand the often-complex mathematical equations in the field—sometimes prompting him to politely correct the errors of more famous scholars—but his experience in philosophy aided him in formulating rigorous arguments from the evidence. Now, after years of research and analysis, he has emerged as one of the most informed and persuasive voices on the anthropic principle.
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: Readings in the Philosophy of Religion; Philosophy of Religion: A Reader and Guide; and Reason for the Hope Within. Funded by a grant from the Pew Foundation, he’s currently completing a book titled The Well-Tempered Universe: God, Fine-Tuning, and the Laws of Nature. In addition, he has spoken at numerous symposia and conferences at Yale, Concordia, Baylor, Stanford, and elsewhere, including a plenary address at the 2003 Russian-U.S. conference on God and Physical Cosmology held at Notre Dame.
After serving as a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University, Collins has spent the last decade doing research, writing, and teaching at Messiah College, where he is currently an associate professor of philosophy. That’s where I connected with him on a warm Saturday afternoon.
Collins