The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [70]
Either way, life loses—big time. But astonishingly, that’s not what has happened.
“In fact,” Weinberg said, “astronomical observations show that the cosmological constant is quite small, very much smaller than would have been guessed from first principles.” 24
When I asked Collins about this, he told me that the unexpected, counterintuitive, and stunningly precise setting of the cosmological constant “is widely regarded as the single greatest problem facing physics and cosmology today.”
“How precise is it?” I asked.
Collins rolled his eyes. “Well, there’s no way we can really comprehend it,” he said. “The fine-tuning has conservatively been estimated to be at least one part in a hundred million billion billion billion billion billion. That would be a ten followed by fifty-three zeroes. That’s inconceivably precise.”
He was right—I couldn’t imagine a figure like that. “Can you give me an illustration?” I asked.
“Put it this way,” he said. “Let’s say you were way out in space and were going to throw a dart at random toward the Earth. It would be like successfully hitting a bull’s eye that’s one trillionth of a trillionth of an inch in diameter. That’s less than the size of one solitary atom.”
Breathtaking was the word that came into my mind. Staggering. “No wonder scientists have been blown away by this,” I said.
“I’ll tell you what,” Collins said, “in my opinion, if the cosmological constant were the only example of fine-tuning, and if there were no natural explanation for it, then this would be sufficient by itself to strongly establish design.”
I had to agree. The way I saw it, if the universe were put on trial for a charge of having been designed, and the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant were the only evidence introduced by the prosecution, I would have to vote “guilty”—assuming there was no hidden naturalistic explanation. Statistically, this would be a far stronger case than even the DNA evidence that is used to establish guilt in many criminal trials today.
Collins continued. “Now, think about adding together the evidence for just the two factors I’ve discussed so far—the cosmological constant and the force of gravity,” he said. “This would create an unimaginably stronger case. When you combine the two, the fine-tuning would be to a precision of one part in a hundred million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. That would be the equivalent of one atom in the entire known universe!”
And Collins wasn’t through. “There are other examples of fine-tuning,” he said. “For instance, there’s the difference in mass between neutrons and protons. Increase the mass of the neutron by about one part in seven hundred and nuclear fusion in stars would stop. There would be no energy source for life.
“And if the electromagnetic force were slightly stronger or weaker, life in the universe would be impossible. Or consider the strong nuclear force. Imagine decreasing it by fifty percent, which is tiny—one part in ten thousand billion billion billion billion, compared to the total range of force strengths.”
“What would happen if you tinkered with it by that amount?”
“Since like charges repel, the strong nuclear force would be too weak to prevent the repulsive force between the positively charged protons in atomic nuclei from tearing apart all atoms except hydrogen,” he said. “And regardless of what they may show on Star Trek, you can’t have intelligent life forms built from hydrogen. It simply doesn’t have enough stable complexity.”
I knew Collins could go on and on, but I needed a way to visualize the implications of these increasingly abstract concepts. “Go back to your Martian biosphere illustration,” I said.
“Okay,” he replied. “Set aside the issue of how the biosphere got there in the first place. Let’s say when you found it, there were twelve dials that controlled the conditions inside the dome. Each dial