Is God in the details?

• Author: Silber, Kenneth
• Position: Religion, politics and physics

From cosmic coincidence to conservative cosmopolitics

Victor J. Stenger has created new universes. Lots of them. In some, the stars shine for only a fraction of a second. In others, atoms are the size of tennis balls and a typical day lasts trillions of hours. Stenger achieves these wildly disparate results by altering a few of the underlying "constants" of nature - the mass of a proton, for example, or the strength of the electromagnetic force. He ends up with worlds that look radically different from our own.

Stenger is a theoretical physicist at the University of Hawaii and author of a book titled The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology. His "universes" are computer simulations, the output of a program that he wrote and has named - a bit provocatively - "Monkey God." Stenger does not plan out the universes that he creates; he has allowed particle masses and force strengths to vary randomly, many orders of magnitude different from the levels observed in nature. A lot of the resulting universes, says Stenger, "look pretty funny but still had long-lived stars."

The behavior of stars and atoms in imaginary universes might seem like a topic unlikely to interest anyone who is not a theoretical physicist. Yet Stenger's calculations pertain to an issue that was initially raised by physicists but has lately echoed far beyond the scientific community - even spilling onto the covers of popular magazines and into the world of politics. The issue is an apparent "fine-tuning" of the laws of physics, a set of circumstances without which humans would not exist. And Stenger, with his computer universes, is trying to inject a note of reality into a public discussion that has run far afield of the relevant science.

A Custom-Made Universe

"Science Finds God," trumpeted a Newsweek cover story in July 1998. The article, by journalist Sharon Begley, ranges broadly across modern physics, finding various possible links to theology. Some of these links seem little more than metaphorical; for example, electrons behave simultaneously like waves and particles, and (perhaps similarly) Jesus is understood by Christians to be both human and divine. But Begley also cites what seems like real evidence of divine action: "Physicists have stumbled on signs that the cosmos is custom-made for life and consciousness. It turns out that if the constants of nature - unchanging numbers like the strength of gravity, the charge of an electron and the mass of a proton - were the tiniest bit different, then atoms would not hold together, stars would not burn and life would never have made an appearance."

"Science Sees the Light," announced The New Republic last October. This cover story, by journalist Gregg Easterbrook (and adapted from his book Beside Still Waters: Searching for Meaning in an Age of Doubt), also raises the fine-tuning question. Easterbrook writes: "Researchers have calculated that, if the ratio of matter and energy to the volume of space, a value called 'omega,' had not been within about one-quadrillionth of one percent of ideal at the moment of the Big Bang, the incipient universe would have collapsed back on itself or suffered runaway relativity effects. Instead, our firmament is stable and geometrically normal: 'smooth,' in the argot of cosmology postdocs."

George F. Will seems to be impressed. Citing Easterbrook's book, Will writes in his Newsweek column that the "news from the cosmos" is "staggeringly implausible" and therefore "theologically suggestive." Humanity owes its existence, Will notes, to the delicate balancing of forces in the early universe: "The odds against us were - this is just the right word - astronomical." The conservative columnist muses that soon "the American Civil Liberties Union, People for the American Way, or some similar faction of litigious secularism will file suit against NASA, charging that the Hubble Space Telescope unconstitutionally gives comfort to the religiously inclined."

Easterbrook's article, despite its bold headline, is hedged with uncertainties; he notes that the value of omega and other seemingly improbable features of the universe might yet lend themselves to a naturalistic explanation. A different tone is set by Patrick Glynn, whose 1997 book God: The Evidence asserts that recent scientific developments constitute a "powerful - indeed, all-but-incontestable - case for what once was considered a completely debatable matter of 'faith': the existence of soul, afterlife, and God." Glynn, who served as an arms control expert in the Reagan administration, writes frequently for National Review and other conservative magazines.

Glynn's argument incorporates psychological and medical issues (including reports of "near-death experiences"). But much of his book is about physics. Glynn writes that physicists have discovered "an increasingly daunting and improbable list of mysterious coincidences or 'lucky accidents' in the universe - whose only common denominator seemed to be that they were necessary for our emergence." Even "minor tinkering" with the strength of gravity and other forces, or with the masses of subatomic particles, writes Glynn, "would have resulted in an unrecognizable universe: a universe consisting entirely of helium, a universe...