The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [76]
“You would also have to have the right background laws in place. For instance, without the so-called principle of quantization, all of the electrons in an atom would be sucked into the atomic nuclei. That would make atoms impossible. Further, as eminent Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has noted, without the Pauli-exclusion principle, electrons would occupy the lowest orbit around the nucleus, and that would make complex atoms impossible. 45 Finally, without a universally attractive force between all masses—such as gravity—stars and planets couldn’t form. If just one of these components was missing or different, it’s highly improbable that any life-permitting universes could be produced.
“And keep in mind,” he added, “you would need to make trillions upon trillions upon trillions upon trillions of universes in order to increase the odds that the cosmological constant would come out right at least once, since it’s finely tuned to an incomprehensible degree. And that’s just one parameter.”
“What’s your conclusion then?” I asked.
“It’s highly unlikely that such a universe-generating system would have all the right components and ingredients in place by random chance, just like random chance can’t account for how a bread-maker produces loaves of edible bread. So if a many-universe-generating system exists, it would be best explained by design.”
“That means,” I said, “that when scientists appeal to the theoretical existence of many universes to avoid the implications of the fine-tuning of our universe, they still can’t escape design.”
“Exactly,” he declared. “Theists have nothing to fear from the idea that there may be multiple universes. There would still need to be an intelligent designer to make the finely tuned universe-generating process work. To modify a phrase from philosopher Fred Dretske: these are inflationary times, and the cost of atheism has just gone up.”
THE SUPERMIND
I thought for a few moments about Collins’s explanation. Certainly it made sense that generating universes would require the right mechanisms, the right ingredients, and the right precision—all earmarks of intelligent design. But I was still mentally wrestling with something else. To me—admittedly, not a physicist—the whole concept of multiple universes seemed absurd.
I found myself agreeing with the iconoclastic Gregg Easterbrook, a contributing editor for the Atlantic Monthly, who researched the discoveries and theories of modern science. He was characteristically blunt in his assessment. “The multiverse idea rests on assumptions that would be laughed out of town if they came from a religious text,” he wrote. “[The theory] requires as much suspension of disbelief as any religion. Join the church that believes in the existence of invisible objects fifty billion galaxies wide!” 46
When I mentioned my skepticism to Collins, he listened carefully. “There’s a reason you feel that way,” he said. “You see, everything else being equal, we tend to prefer hypotheses that are natural extrapolations of what we already know.”
I wasn’t sure what he was driving at. “Could you give me an illustration of that?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Let’s say you found some dinosaur bones. You would naturally consider them to be very strong evidence that dinosaurs lived in the past. Why? Because even though nobody has ever seen dinosaurs, we do have the experience of other animals leaving behind fossilized remains. So the dinosaur explanation is a natural extrapolation from our common experience. It makes sense.
“Let’s say there was a dinosaur skeptic, however. He was trying to rationalize away the bones you found. Let’s suppose he claimed he could explain the bones by proposing that a ‘dinosaur-bone-producing field’ simply caused them to materialize out of thin air.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
“And that’s exactly what you would tell the skeptic,” Collins continued. “You’d say: