CHAPTER 3: The Teleological Argument
CHAPTER THREE
THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
The old design argument remains as robust today as ever, being defended in various forms by philosophers and scientists like Robin Collins, Paul Davies, William Dembski, Michael Denton, John Leslie, and others. Although advocates of the Intelligent Design movement have continued the tradition of focusing on examples of apparent design in biological systems, the cutting edge of the contemporary discussion concerns the recently discovered fine-tuning of the cosmos for life.
Scientists used to think that whatever the very early universe might have been like, given sufficient time and some luck, intelligent life forms would eventually evolve somewhere. As a result of discoveries over the last fifty years or so, we now know that that assumption was wrong; in fact, quite the opposite is true.
Astronomers have been stunned by the discovery of how complex and delicate a balance of initial conditions must be present … to permit the existence of intelligent life anywhere at all in the cosmos.
Astronomers have been stunned by the discovery of how complex and delicate a balance of initial conditions must be present in the Big Bang itself if the universe is to permit the existence of intelligent life anywhere at all in the cosmos. This delicate balance of initial conditions has come to be known as the “fine-tuning” of the universe for life. We’ve come to discover that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a complexity and delicacy that literally defy human comprehension.
Two Kinds of Fine-tuning
There are two kinds of fine-tuning. The first involves the constants of nature and the second involves certain arbitrary physical quantities.
(a) The constants of nature. What is a constant? When the laws of nature are expressed as mathematical equations, you find appearing in them certain symbols which stand for unchanging quantities, like the force of gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the subatomic weak force. These unchanging quantities are called constants. The values of these constants are not determined by the laws of nature. There could be universes governed by the same laws of nature, even though these constants had very different values. So the actual values of the various constants are independent of nature’s laws. Depending on the values of those constants, universes governed by the same laws of nature will look very different.
(b) Arbitrary physical quantities. In addition to the constants, there are certain arbitrary quantities that are just put in as initial conditions on which the laws of nature operate. Because these quantities are arbitrary, they’re also not determined by the laws of nature. An example would be the amount of thermodynamic disorder (or entropy) in the early universe. It’s just given in the Big Bang as an initial condition, and the laws of nature then take over and determine how the universe will develop from there. If the initial quantities had been different, then the laws would predict that a quite different universe would evolve.
Now what scientists have been surprised to discover is that these constants and quantities must fall into an extraordinarily narrow range of values if the universe is to be life-permitting. This is what is meant by the fine-tuning of the universe for life.
Before I share a few examples of fine-tuning by way of physics, here are some numbers to help us to appreciate the delicacy of the fine-tuning. The number of seconds in the entire history of the universe is around 1017 (that’s 1 followed by seventeen zeroes: 100,000,000,000,000,000). The number of subatomic particles in the entire known universe is said to be around 1080 (1 followed by eighty zeroes). These are simply incomprehensible numbers.
Being mindful of those numbers, consider the following: The force of gravity is so finely tuned that an alteration in its value by even one part out of 1050 would have prevented a life-permitting universe. Similarly, a change in the value of the so-called cosmological constant, which drives the acceleration of the universe’s expansion, by as little as one part in 10120 would have rendered the universe life-prohibiting. Now here’s a corker: Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the universe’s initial low entropy condition’s existing by chance is on the order of one chance out of 1010 (123), a number which is so inconceivable that to call it astronomical would be a wild understatement.
The fine-tuning here is beyond comprehension. Having an accuracy of even one part out of 1060 is like firing a bullet toward the other side of the observable universe, twenty billion light years away, and nailing a one-inch target!
The examples of fine-tuning are so many and so various that they aren’t likely to disappear with the advance of science. Like it or not, fine-tuning is just a fact of life which is scientifically well-established.
But, you might say, if the constants and quantities had had different values, then maybe different forms of life might have evolved! No, that underestimates the truly disastrous consequences of a change in the values of these constants and quantities. When scientists talk about a universe’s being life-permitting, they’re not talking about just present forms of life. By “life,” scientists just mean the property of organisms to take in food, extract energy from it, grow, adapt to their environment, and reproduce. Anything that can fulfill those functions counts as life. And the point is, in order for life so-defined to exist, whatever form it might take, the constants and quantities of the universe have to be unbelievably fine-tuned; otherwise, disaster results. In the absence of fine-tuning, not even matter, not even chemistry, would exist, much less planets where life might evolve.
The question we face, then, is this: What is the best explanation of the cosmic fine-tuning? Many philosophers and scientists think that the reason that the universe is finely tuned for life is because it was designed to be life-permitting by an intelligent Designer.
But design is not the only alternative; there is also physical necessity and chance. The key to inferring to design as the best explanation will be eliminating these other two alternatives.
THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT: A SIMPLE FORMULATION
This is a logically valid argument, whose conclusion follows necessarily from the two premises. So the only question is whether those premises are more plausibly true than false. So let’s look at them.
Premise 1: The fine-tuning of the universe is due to physical necessity, chance, or design.
The first premise is unobjectionable, because it just lists the three alternatives available for explaining the fine-tuning. If someone has a fourth alternative, he’s welcome to add it to the list, and then we’ll consider it when we come to premise 2. But there doesn’t seem to be another alternative to the three listed here.
Premise 2: It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
So the crucial premise is the second premise, that the fine-tuning is not due to physical necessity or chance. Let’s examine each of these alternatives in turn.
According to the first alternative, physical necessity, the universe has to be life-permitting. The constants and quantities must have the values they do, so that a life-prohibiting universe is physically impossible.
Now on the face of it, this alternative seems fantastically implausible. It would require us to say that a life-prohibiting universe is a physical impossibility. But why take such a radical view? We’ve seen that the constants are not determined by the laws of nature; so why couldn’t they be different? Moreover, the arbitrary quantities are just boundary conditions on which the laws of nature operate. Nothing seems to make them necessary. So anyone who opts for this explanation of fine-tuning is taking a radical line. He needs to furnish some proof. But there is none; the alternative is put forward as a bare possibility.
Sometimes scientists do talk of a yet-to-be-discovered “Theory of Everything” (TOE). But like so many of the colorful names given to scientific theories, this label is very misleading. A successful TOE would enable us to unify the four basic forces of nature (gravity, the weak force, the strong force, and electromagnetism) into a single force carried by a single kind of particle. But it wouldn’t even attempt to explain literally everything. For example, the most promising candidate for a TOE to date, so-called M-Theory or super-string theory, only works if there are eleven dimensions. But the theory itself cannot explain why just that particular number of dimensions should exist.
Moreover, M-Theory doesn’t predict uniquely a life-permitting universe. It permits a vast range of around 10500 different possible universes, all consistent with the same laws but varying in the values of the constants of nature. Almost all of these possible universes are life-prohibiting.
This so-called “cosmic landscape” of worlds permitted by M-Theory has become something of a phenom lately. It’s important to understand that the landscape is just a range of possibilities. Some people have misinterpreted it to mean that all these different universes actually exist. Some have thought it undermines the argument for design because the landscape must include life-permitting worlds like ours. But the cosmic landscape is not real; it’s just a list of possibilities. It describes the range of universes that are consistent with M-Theory.
There is no evidence that a life-permitting universe is physically necessary.
That range is so huge (10500 different possibilities) that some explanation is needed why a life-permitting universe exists, since life-permitting universes are a practically infinitesimal part of the landscape. So you can’t say that life-permitting universes are physically necessary, since on M-Theory, at least, that’s clearly false.
There’s no evidence that a life-permitting universe is physically necessary. Quite the contrary, all the evidence indicates that life-prohibiting universes are not only possible but far, far more likely than any life-permitting universe.
The fundamental problem here is that the chances of a life-permitting universe’s existing are so remote that this alternative becomes unreasonable.
That leads to the second alternative: Could the fine-tuning be due simply to chance? According to this alternative, it’s just an accident that all the constants and quantities fell into the life-permitting range. We basically just lucked out!
The fundamental problem here is that the chances of a life-permitting universe’s existing are so remote that this alternative becomes unreasonable.
Sometimes people will appeal to the example of a lottery in order to justify the chance alternative. In a lottery where all the tickets are sold, it’s fantastically improbable that any one person should win, yet somebody has to win! It would be unjustified for the winner, whoever he may be, to say, “The odds against my winning were 20 million to one. And yet I won! The lottery must have been rigged!”
In the same way, they say, some universe out of the range of possible universes has to exist. The winner of the universe lottery would also be unjustified to think that because his universe exists, this must have been the result of design, not chance. All the universes are equally improbable, but one of them, by chance, has to win.
This analogy is actually very helpful because it enables us to see clearly where the advocate of chance has misunderstood the argument for design, so that we can offer a better, more accurate analogy. Contrary to popular impression, the argument for design is not trying to explain why this particular universe exists. Rather, it’s trying to explain why a life-permitting universe exists. The lottery analogy was misconceived, because it focused on why a particular person won.
The correct analogy would be a lottery in which billions and billions and billions of white ping-pong balls were mixed together with just one orange ping-pong ball, and you were told that one ball will be randomly selected out of the horde. If it’s orange, you’ll be allowed to live; if it’s white, you’ll be shot.
Now notice that any particular ball that is randomly selected is equally improbable: No matter which ball rolls down the chute, the odds against that particular ball are fantastically improbable. But some ball must roll down the chute; this is the point illustrated by the first lottery analogy. That point, however, is irrelevant because we’re not trying to explain why this particular ball was picked.
The relevant point is that whichever ball rolls down the chute, it is overwhelmingly more probable that it will be white rather than orange. Getting the orange ball is no more improbable than getting any particular white ball—but it is incomprehensibly more probable that you will get a white ball instead of an orange one. So if the orange ball rolls down the chute, you certainly should suspect that the lottery was rigged to let you live.
So in the correct analogy, we’re not interested in why you got the particular ball that you did; rather, we’re puzzled by why, against overwhelming odds, you got a life-permitting ball rather than a life-prohibiting ball. That question is just not addressed by saying, “Well, some ball had to be picked!”
In the same way, some universe has to exist, but whichever universe exists, it is incomprehensibly more probable that it will be life-prohibiting rather than life-permitting. So we still need some explanation why a life-permitting universe exists.
So some theorists have embraced a Many Worlds Hypothesis in order to defend the alternative of chance. According to that hypothesis, our universe is but one member of a World Ensemble or “multiverse” of randomly ordered universes, preferably infinite in number. If all of these other universes really exist, then by chance alone life-permitting worlds will appear somewhere in the World Ensemble. Since only finely tuned universes have observers in them, any observers existing in the World Ensemble will naturally observe their worlds to be finely-tuned. So no appeal to design is necessary to explain fine-tuning; it’s pure chance.
It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on what is happening here. The current debate over fine-tuning has now become a debate over the Many Worlds Hypothesis. In order to explain fine-tuning we are being asked to believe not merely that there are other unobservable universes, but that there is an infinite number of such worlds and, moreover, that they randomly vary in their fundamental constants and quantities. All this is needed to guarantee that a life-permitting universe like ours will appear by chance in the ensemble.
This is really quite extraordinary. It’s a sort of backhanded compliment to the design hypothesis, for otherwise sober scientists would not be adopting so speculative and extravagant a view as the Many Worlds Hypothesis unless they felt absolutely compelled to do so. The fact that proponents of chance are turning to the Many Worlds Hypothesis to rescue the alternative of chance is perhaps the best evidence that the appeal to chance is in trouble.
But is the Many Worlds Hypothesis the best explanation? One problem for the Many Worlds Hypothesis is that the multiverse itself may also involve fine-tuning. In order to be scientifically credible, some plausible mechanism must be suggested for generating the many worlds. But if the Many Worlds Hypothesis is to be successful in attributing fine-tuning to chance alone, then the mechanism that generates the many worlds had better not be fine-tuned itself! For if it is, then the problem arises all over again.
But the proposed mechanisms for generating a World Ensemble are so vague that it’s far from evident that the physics governing the multiverse will be free of any fine-tuning. For example, if M-Theory is the physics of the multiverse, then it remains unexplained, as we have seen, why exactly eleven dimensions exist. And the mechanism that actualizes all the possibilities in the cosmic landscape may involve fine-tuning. So the postulate of a World Ensemble is by itself not enough to justify the alternative of chance.
Moreover, many theorists are skeptical of the Many Worlds Hypothesis itself. Why think that a World Ensemble actually exists? We saw that the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem requires that even a multiverse must have a beginning; in that case, the mechanism that generates the many worlds has been chugging away for only a finite amount of time. So by now, there may well be only a finite number of worlds in the World Ensemble, which may not be enough to guarantee the appearance of a finely tuned universe by chance alone. And why think that the universes are randomly ordered? There’s no evidence that the sort of World Ensemble required by the Many Worlds Hypothesis actually exists.
By contrast, we have good independent reasons for believing in a Designer of the cosmos, as the cosmological and kalam arguments show.
Finally, the Many Worlds Hypothesis faces what may be a devastating objection. Remember Boltzmann’s Many Worlds Hypothesis? What sank Boltzmann’s hypothesis was the fact that if our world is just a random member of a World Ensemble, then it is vastly more probable that we should be observing a much smaller orderly universe. It turns out that a parallel problem faces the Many Worlds Hypothesis as an explanation of cosmic fine-tuning.
Roger Penrose has pressed this objection forcefully. He points out that the odds of our universe’s initial low entropy condition’s existing by chance alone are one chance out of 1010 (123). By contrast the odds of our solar system’s suddenly forming by the random collision of particles is one chance out of 1010 (60). This number, says Penrose, is “utter chicken feed” in comparison with 1010 (123). What that means is that if we are but a random member of a World Ensemble, it is far more likely that we should be observing an orderly universe no larger than our solar system, since a world of that size is so unfathomably more probable than a fine-tuned universe like ours.
In fact, we wind up with the same sort of illusionism that plagued Boltzmann’s hypothesis: A small patch of order with the illusion of a wider universe is more probable than a fine-tuned, real universe. Carried to its logical extreme, this has led to what theorists have called “the invasion of the Boltzmann brains.” For the most probable observable universe is one which consists of a single brain which pops into existence by a random fluctuation with illusory perceptions of the external world! So if you accept the Many Worlds Hypothesis, you’re obligated to believe that you are all that exists and that this book, your body, the earth, and everything you perceive in the world are just illusions.
No sane person believes that he is a Boltzmann brain. On atheism, therefore, it is highly improbable that there exists a randomly ordered World Ensemble. With the failure of the Many Worlds Hypothesis, the last ring of defense for the alternative of chance collapses. Neither physical necessity nor chance provides a good explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe.
Conclusion: Therefore, it is due to design.
So what about design? Is this explanation better than physical necessity or chance, or is it equally implausible?
Detractors of design sometimes object that on this hypothesis the Cosmic Designer himself remains unexplained. This objection is what Richard Dawkins calls “the central argument of my book” The God Delusion.6 He summarizes his argument as follows:
Dawkins’ argument is jarring because the atheistic conclusion “Therefore, God almost certainly does not exist” doesn’t follow from the six previous statements even if we concede that each of them is true. There are no rules of logic which would permit such an inference. Dawkins’ argument is plainly invalid.
Rejecting design arguments for God’s existence does nothing to prove that God doesn’t exist or even that belief in God is unjustified.
At most, all that follows from Dawkins’ argument is that we should not infer God’s existence on the basis of the appearance of design in the universe. But that conclusion is quite compatible with God’s existence and even with our justifiably believing in God’s existence. Maybe we should believe in God on the basis of the cosmological argument or the moral argument. Maybe our belief in God isn’t based on arguments at all but is grounded in religious experience or in divine revelation. The point is that rejecting design arguments for God’s existence does nothing to prove that God doesn’t exist or even that belief in God is unjustified. Dawkins’ lack of philosophical depth is plainly on display here.
But does Dawkins’ argument succeed even in undermining the argument for design? Not at all, for several of the steps of Dawkins’ argument are plausibly false. Step 5 refers to the cosmic fine-tuning which has been the focus of our discussion. Dawkins has nothing by way of explanation for it, and therefore the hope expressed in step 6 represents nothing more than the faith of a naturalist.
Moreover, consider step 3. Dawkins’ claim here is that one is not justified in inferring design as the best explanation of the complex order of the universe because then a new problem arises: Who designed the Designer?
This claim is flawed on at least two counts. First, in order to recognize an explanation as the best, you don’t need to have an explanation of the explanation. This is an elementary point in the philosophy of science. If archaeologists digging in the earth were to discover things looking like arrowheads and pottery shards, they would be justified in inferring that these artifacts are not the chance result of sedimentation and metamorphosis, but products of some unknown group of people, even though they had no explanation of who these people were or where they came from. Similarly, if astronauts were to come upon a pile of machinery on the back side of the moon, they would be justified in inferring that it was the product of intelligent agents, even if they had no idea whatsoever who these agents were or how they got there.
In order to recognize an explanation as the best, you don’t need to be able to explain the explanation. In fact, such a requirement would lead to an infinite regress of explanations, so that nothing could ever be explained and science would be destroyed! For before any explanation could be acceptable, you’d need an explanation of it, and then an explanation of the explanation of the explanation, and then. … Nothing could ever be explained.
So in the case at hand, in order to recognize that intelligent design is the best explanation of the appearance of design in the universe, one needn’t be able to explain the Designer. Whether the Designer has an explanation can simply be left an open question for future inquiry.
As a pure mind without a body, God is a remarkably simple entity.
Second, Dawkins thinks that in the case of a divine Designer of the universe, the Designer is just as complex as the thing to be explained, so that no explanatory advance is made. This objection raises all sorts of questions about the role played by simplicity in assessing competing explanations. For example, there are many other factors besides simplicity that scientists weigh in determining which explanation is the best, such as explanatory power, explanatory scope, plausibility, and so forth. An explanation that has broader explanatory scope may be less simple than a rival explanation but still be preferred because it explains more things. Simplicity is not the only, or even most important, criterion for assessing theories.
But leave those questions aside. Dawkins’ fundamental mistake lies in his assumption that a divine Designer is just as complex as the universe. That is plainly false. As a pure mind without a body, God is a remarkably simple entity. A mind (or soul) is not a physical object composed of parts. In contrast to the contingent and variegated universe with all its inexplicable constants and quantities, a divine mind is startlingly simple. Certainly such a mind may have complex ideas—it may be thinking, for example, of the infinitesimal calculus—but the mind itself is a remarkably simple, spiritual entity. Dawkins has evidently confused a mind’s ideas, which may, indeed, be complex, with a mind itself, which is an incredibly simple entity. Therefore, postulating a divine mind behind the universe most definitely does represent an advance in simplicity, for whatever that’s worth.
Therefore, of the three alternatives before us—physical necessity, chance, or design—the most plausible of the three is design. So now we have a third argument for the existence of God.