The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [69]
Physics can get very complicated very quickly. So when I asked Collins to describe one of his favorite examples, I was relieved that he chose one that’s among the easier to envision.
“Let’s talk about gravity,” he said. “Imagine a ruler, or one of those old-fashioned linear radio dials, that goes all the way across the universe. It would be broken down into one-inch increments, which means there would be billions upon billions upon billions of inches.
“The entire dial represents the range of force strengths in nature, with gravity being the weakest force and the strong nuclear force that binds protons and neutrons together in the nuclei being the strongest, a whopping ten thousand billion billion billion billion times stronger than gravity. 19 The range of possible settings for the force of gravity can plausibly be taken to be at least as large as the total range of force strengths.
“Now, let’s imagine that you want to move the dial from where it’s currently set. Even if you were to move it by only one inch, the impact on life in the universe would be catastrophic.”
“One inch compared to the whole universe?” I asked. “What kind of impact could that have?”
“That small adjustment of the dial would increase gravity by a billion-fold,” he said.
“Whoa!” I said. “That sounds like a lot.”
“Actually, it’s not,” he replied, “Relative to the entire radio dial—that is, the total range of force strengths in nature—it’s extraordinarily small, just one part in ten thousand billion billion billion.”
“Wow, that puts it into perspective,” I said. “What would happen to life?”
“Animals anywhere near the size of human beings would be crushed,” he said. “As astrophysicist Martin Rees said, ‘In an imaginary strong gravity world, even insects would need thick legs to support them, and no animals could get much larger.’ 20 In fact, a planet with a gravitational pull of a thousand times that of the Earth would have a diameter of only forty feet, which wouldn’t be enough to sustain an ecosystem. Besides which, stars with lifetimes of more than a billion years—compared to ten billion years for our sun—couldn’t exist if you increase gravity by just three thousand times.
“As you can see, compared to the total range of force strengths in nature, gravity has an incomprehensibly narrow range for life to exist. Of all the possible settings on the dial, from one side of the universe to the other, it happens to be situated in the exact right fraction of an inch to make our universe capable of sustaining life.”
And gravity is just one parameter that scientists have studied. One expert said there are more than thirty separate physical or cosmological parameters that require precise calibration in order to produce a life-sustaining universe. 21
As for Collins, he likes to focus on gravity and a handful of other examples that he has personally investigated and which he believes are sufficient by themselves to establish the case for a designer. I decided to ask Collins about another parameter—the so-called “cosmological constant”—a phenomenon so bewildering that it even boggles the mind of one of the world’s most skeptical scientists.
THROWING DARTS AT AN ATOM
Nobel-winning physicist Steven Weinberg, an avowed atheist, has expressed amazement at the way the cosmological constant—the energy density of empty space—is “remarkably well adjusted in our favor.” 22 The constant, which is part of Einstein’s equation for General Relativity, could have had any value, positive or negative, “but from first principles one would guess that this constant should be very large,” Weinberg said.
Fortunately, he added, it isn’t:
If large and positive, the cosmological constant would act as a repulsive force that increases with distance, a force that would prevent matter from clumping together in the early universe, the process that was the first step in forming galaxies and stars and planets and people. If large and negative,