The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [68]
Collins removed his green sports coat and tossed it over a chair as we got ready to begin. He has curly, rusty-colored hair and a beard, and the lean physique of a runner (he jogs nearly ninety minutes a day for exercise and meditation). We sat across a plain table from each other, Collins sipping from a mug of his favorite beverage: a concoction of half black and half green tea.
I was anxious to begin. Collins once said that the facts concerning the universe’s remarkable “just-so” conditions are widely regarded as “by far the most persuasive current argument for the existence of God”16—a statement that set a high standard. I pulled out my notebook and started by asking him to give me an overview of what the fine-tuning of the cosmos was all about.
THE IMPRESSION OF DESIGN
“When scientists talk about the fine-tuning of the universe,” Collins said, “they’re generally referring to the extraordinary balancing of the fundamental laws and parameters of physics and the initial conditions of the universe. Our minds can’t comprehend the precision of some of them. The result is a universe that has just the right conditions to sustain life. The coincidences are simply too amazing to have been the result of happenstance—as Paul Davies said, ‘the impression of design is overwhelming.’ 17
“I like to use the analogy of astronauts landing on Mars and finding an enclosed biosphere, sort of like the domed structure that was built in Arizona a few years ago. At the control panel they find that all the dials for its environment are set just right for life. The oxygen ratio is perfect; the temperature is seventy degrees; the humidity is fifty percent; there’s a system for replenishing the air; there are systems for producing food, generating energy, and disposing of wastes. Each dial has a huge range of possible settings, and you can see if you were to adjust one or more of them just a little bit, the environment would go out of whack and life would be impossible. What conclusion would you draw from that?”
The answer was obvious. “That someone took great care in designing and building it,” I said.
“That’s right,” he replied. “You’d conclude that this biosphere was not there by accident. Volcanoes didn’t erupt and spew out the right compounds that just happened to assemble themselves into the biosphere. Some intelligent being had intentionally and carefully designed and prepared it to support living creatures. And that’s an analogy for our universe.
“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. The dials are set too precisely to have been a random accident. Somebody, as Fred Hoyle quipped, has been monkeying with the physics.” 18
This has to be among the most fascinating scientific discoveries of the century. “Who first noticed this?” I asked.
“Way back in the late 1950s, Hoyle talked about the precise process by which carbon and oxygen are produced in a certain ratio inside stars. If you tinker with the resonance states of carbon, you won’t get the materials you need for building life. Incidentally, recent studies by the physicist Heinz Oberhummer and his colleagues show that just a one-percent change in the strong nuclear force would have a thirty- to a thousand-fold impact on the production of oxygen and carbon in stars. Since stars provide the carbon and oxygen needed for life on planets, if you throw that off balance, conditions in the universe would be much less optimal for the existence of life.
“Anyway—back to your question—most of the research and writing about the fine-tuning