In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth…And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. (The Holy Bible: Genesis, The Authorized King James Version)

Man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind. (George Gaylord Simpson, The Meaning of Evolution, p. 145)

The question whether our universe was a consequence of intelligent design of God or it came into existence by accident, is contentious, which cannot be answered with positive certainty. There are views – religious and scientific – about it but there is no definite knowledge.

The religious view derives its validity from the Genesis story in the Bible according to which the world was created in six days. The creation of man was instantaneous and not gradual as the theory of evolution prescribes. Although not many people now believe in the six-day creation story literally, the religionists believe that the theistic God –God of the Bible - exists and he created the universe according to a plan, which is called the intelligent design. Such people are called “theistic evolutionists. The name implies that they consider evolution to be a process initiated and guided by God, presumably in order to bring about the existence of human beings,” (Darwinism: Science or Philosophy, by Phillip E. Johnson, Ch. 4).

Do they have a positive evidence for their claim? There is no evidence per se apart from the divine revelation; if you do not believe in divine revelation then of course there is no independent proof.

The biologists who claim that the human beings are the result of long and gradual evolution by natural selection likewise do not have any concrete proof to show that God does not exist and that God did not create the universe. They can explain the evolution of man from the primitive form of life which many religionists also are now prone to believe, to some extent, but how did the primitive life itself come into being or how did the universe come into existence, they have no definite answers for these questions. Many dissidents reject Darwin’s theory of natural selection outright in as much as “macroevolution” (evolution from one species to another) is concerned. They claim there is no direct evidence of macroevolution having taken place ever. On the other hand, many biologists believe they have found sufficient evidence on “intermediates” (transitional species between two others), which bears out the basic theory of evolution.

Anthropic Principle and Fine-Tuned Universe

Our universe is characterized by about 20 cosmic constants, which have specific values. If these values were even slightly different from what they are, life, as we know it, will not be possible in the universe. Our universe thus seems to be special and finely tuned for life to exist. This is the gist of the anthropic principle although there are other variants also.

Much has been made of this fact by the creationists. They have used it in defense of their intelligent design argument. They suggest that God has assigned these particular values to these constants to create an ambience in which life could exist. The creationists also base their argument on the theory of big bang. They argue that since the universe was created at a given time, the universe thus began to exist at that particular time. It didn’t exist before (although it is probably meaningless to talk about ‘before’ because time was also created with the big bang; there was no ‘time’ before the big bang). It is God who created the universe with a big bang, they insist.

Kalam Argument for the Creation of Universe

This argument dates back to the medieval Islamic philosophy of Mutakallamun. Al-Ghazali used it to defend the creation of universe by God in refutation of the Aristotelian concept according to which the universe is eternal, i.e., it has always been there. Al-Ghazali argued at length in his “The Incoherence of the Philosophers” (1) and this argument is still used by the creationists. William Lane Craig (2) summarized the essence of this argument in the form of a syllogism as follows:

·Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
·The universe began to exist.
·Therefore the universe has a cause of its existence.

This cause is the Final Cause, i.e., God. This argument has an inherent weakness (fallacy) and has been refuted by the philosophers and is not very popular these days, except among the creationists. The skeptical philosophers raise the question: If everything that exists has a cause, who created God?

The argument is on shaky ground otherwise also because it is invoking the theory of big bang as its raison d’etre. However, since science is not final like divine revelation, it continuously revises and refines itself as more information becomes available. Many scientists now believe that our big bang was not a unique event; other big bangs are occurring every now and then. Although our universe started with a big bang, it is not essentially the inception of the megaverse of which our universe is only a tiny part.

Argument of “Accident”

The theory of big bang was a great intellectual setback to the scientists who believed in the eternity of the universe. The earliest cosmological theory of ‘steady state’ was founded on the belief that the universe was eternal. Einstein fudged his theory of general relativity, which predicted an expanding universe, to obtain a steady state solution. He introduced a constant in his equations, which he called ‘cosmological constant’ for this purpose. Later, when Hubbel’s astronomical observations showed that the universe was expanding, Einstein confessed to the biggest error of his life, i.e., the introduction of the cosmological constant. However, the cosmological constant, which Einstein had arbitrarily introduced like a fudge factor has a life of its own. It has become an essential part of the modern cosmological theories.

The expanding universe concept led to the concept of the big bang. By turning the clock backward, there was a point in time (t=0) when all the mass of the universe was concentrated on a point, which then exploded with a big bang. The point is called a ‘singularity’ because the mass density at it is infinite. The infinite density became a real headache for the theorists.

Relief for this theoretical logjam was provided by the theory of quantum mechanics. It was argued that it was wrong to extrapolate theory of general relativity to the singularity at t=0. Close to this point, the fabric of the space-time continuum breaks down and the space becomes grainy for which theory of general relativity becomes invalid. String theory and subsequently the M theory, which was based on ‘membranes’ (shortened to ‘branes’) were developed, which did away with the problem caused by the singularity but inadvertently created their own problems. These problems pertain to the fact that the theory predicts numerous universes in addition to the one on which we live. According to Quevedo (3), “..even if the (string) theory is unique, the number of different universes that appears as solutions to its equations is extremely large. One solution, for example, is a flat Minkowsky spacetime in 10 dimensions. Another is a universe similar to ours that has four flat space-time dimensions and an additional six dimensions that are curled up at extremely small scale. These ‘hidden’ dimensions correspond to a class of spaces known as Calabi-Yau spaces. The crux of string theory is that these 6D spaces can fix the physical properties of the observable universe such as the type and number of elementary particles and the forces that act between them. There are at least 10,000 Calabi-Yau spaces, each of which is defined by a number of parameters called moduli that determine its size and shape. Each value of these parameters gives rise to different physics in the 4D observable world, but the trouble is that all values are equally valid solutions.”

Now, the argument in support of creation of our universe by accident goes like this: All these numerous universes have their own cosmic constants. The probability that one of them (universes) or some of them will have the right values for life to exist is extremely small and quite random. Our universe acquired the right kind of constants by happen stance.

After the formation of the galaxies and our solar system, theory of biological evolution kicked in and, in due time, the homo sapiens were evolved.

Many of the scientists believe in this statistical argument without batting an eye; however, there are others who do not. One of the exceptions is the Nobel Laureate Charles Townes who won the Templeton Prize (Templeton Prize is annually awarded to a living person for work contributing to the “progress toward research or discoveries about spiritual realities) also for the current year. He wrote, “The fact that the universe had a beginning is a very striking thing…How do you explain that unique event without God.” This reverberates back to the Kalam argument.

Townes won his Nobel in 1964 for “fundamental work in quantum electronics which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers on the maser-laser principle.” He shared his prize with two Russians.

Conclusion

The present views about the creation of our universe are largely conjectural and subjective although the proponents of the ‘accident’ argument base their logic on scientific theories. These theories however are without sufficient empirical evidence and do not have the force of a verified theory. The theorists have combined the cosmological theories with the theory of biological evolution to construct their vision. Describing this wedlock, Tanner Edis (4) wrote, “Multiple universes lead to another speculative but interesting idea. If the physics in a ‘baby universe’ derives from the parent, but can be slightly different, this would be like passing information from generation to generation with some chance for this information to mutate. The stage is set for Darwinian evolution. This idea is not that bizarre. Life is a peculiar sort of order, falling between the regimentation of a crystal lattice and the boiling chaos of a gas….. So it is quite possible that the anthropic coincidences in our universe are due not just to physical constraints, but also to quasi-Darwinian processes.”

The naivety of the existing intellectual turmoil is aptly illustrated by Hull (5). While interviewing the scientists who were engaged in the controversies, he asked them, “Do you think that science is provisional, that scientists have to be willing to reexamine any view that they hold, if necessary? All the scientists whom I interviewed reported affirmatively. Later, I asked, ‘Could evolutionary theory be false?’ To this question, I received three different answers. Most responded quite promptly that, no, it could not be false. Several opponents of the consensus then current responded that not only could it be false but also it was false. A very few smiled and asked me to clarify my question. ‘Yes, any scientific theory could be false in the abstract, but given the current state of knowledge, the basic axioms of evolutionary theory, are likely to continue to stand up to investigations.”

The veracity of a scientific theory is not determined by a democratic vote. It is true or false by its own merit. The theory of evolution has not yet reached that stage where it stands or falls by its own merit. It suffers from extreme extrapolation.

The critics do not pick so much on evolutionary process, it is the mechanism of Darwin’s natural selection, which is targeted. Had there been a convincing proof (empirical evidence) of this mechanism, the critics would have been silenced.

If a unified theory (theory that unifies all the four fundamental forces of nature) is developed, it might clarify some of the points of contention. It is still not certain if it will throw sufficient light on the ontology of God. The question of God might remain as the ultimate unanswered question.

References

1.Al-Ghazali, “The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” tr. Marmura,
M.E., Brigham Young University Press, Utah, 1997.
2. William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, “Theis, Atheism, and Big
Bang Cosmology,” Clarendon Paper backs, Oxford, 1995, p.4.
3.Fernando Quevedo, “The String Theory Landscape,”
Physicsweb, November 2003.
4.Tanner Edis, “The Ghost in the Universe: God in Light of Modern Science,” Promotheus Books, 2000, pp. 91-93.
5.Hull, D., “Science as a Process: An Evolutionary Account of
Social and Conceptual Development of Science,” University of Chicago Press, 1988, quoted by John Wilkins in “Evolution and Philosophy: Is Evolution Science, and What Does ‘Science’ Mean?” http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/evolphil/falsity.htm.