What are the two versions of the Anthropic Principle (Weak and Theological Version) and how could the Anthropic Principle be used to explain a creation design stemming from a higher intellect?
What are the two versions of the Anthropic Principle (Weak and Theological Version) and how could the Anthropic Principle be used to explain a creation design stemming from a higher intellect? Please explain in detail.
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CHAPTER 6ORIGINS AND MIRACLESChance, luck, coincidence, miracle. One of the main topics of thischapter is miracles and what we mean by them. My thesis will be thatevents that we commonly call miracles are not supernatural, but arepart of a spectrum of more-or-less improbable natural events. A mir-acle, in other words, if it occurs at all, is a tremendous stroke of luck.Events don’t fall neatly into natural events versus miracles.There are some would-be events that are too improbable to becontemplated, but we can’t know this until we have done acalculation. And to do the calculation, we must know how much timewas available, more generally how many opportunities were available,for the event to occur. Given infinite time, or infinite opportunities,anything is possible. The large numbers proverbially furnished byastronomy, and the large timespans characteristic of geology, combineto turn topsy-turvy our everyday estimates of what is expected andwhat is miraculous. I shall build up to this point using a specificexample which is the other main theme of this chapter. This exampleis the problem of how life originated on Earth. To make the pointclearly, I shall arbitrarily concentrate on one particular theory of theorigin of life, although any one of the modern theories would haveserved the purpose.We can accept a certain amount of luck in our explanations, but nottoo much. The question is, how much? The immensity of geologicaltime entitles us to postulate more improbable coincidences than acourt of law would allow but, even so, there are limits. Cumulativeselection is the key to all our modern explanations of life. It strings aseries of acceptably lucky events (random mutations) together in anonrandom sequence so that, at the end of the sequence, the finished139
The Blind Watchmaker140product carries the illusion of being very very lucky indeed, far tooimprobable to have come about by chance alone, even given atimespan millions of times longer than the age of the universe so far.Cumulative selection is the key but it had to get started, and wecannot escape the need to postulate a single-step chance event in theorigin of cumulative selection itself.And that vital first step was a difficult one because, at its heart,there lies what seems to be a paradox. The replication processes thatwe know seem to need complicated machinery to work. In the pres-ence of a replicase ‘machine tool’, fragments of RNA will evolve,repeatedly and convergently, towards the same endpoint, an endpointwhose ‘probability’ seems vanishingly small until you reflect on thepower of cumulative selection. But we have to assist this cumulativeselection to get started. It won’t go unless we provide a catalyst, suchas the replicase ‘machine tool’ of the previous chapter. And thatcatalyst, it seems, is unlikely to come into existence spontaneously,except under the direction of other RNA molecules. DNA moleculesreplicate in the complicated machinery of the cell, and written wordsreplicate in Xerox machines, but neither seem capable of spontaneousreplication in the absence of their supporting machinery. A Xeroxmachine is capable of copying its own blueprints, but it is not capableof springing spontaneously into existence. Biomorphs readily replicatein the environment provided by a suitably written computer program,but they can’t write their own program or build a computer to run it.The theory of the blind watchmaker is extremely powerful given thatwe are allowed to assume replication and hence cumulative selection.But if replication needs complex machinery, since the only way weknow for complex machinery ultimately to come into existence iscumulative selection, we have a problem.Certainly the modern cellular machinery, the apparatus of DNAreplication and protein synthesis, has all the hallmarks of a highlyevolved, specially fashioned machine. We have seen how staggeringlyimpressive it is as an accurate data storage device. At its own level ofultra-miniaturization, it is of the same order of elaborateness andcomplexity of design as the human eye is at a grosser level. All whohave given thought to the matter agree that an apparatus as complex asthe human eye could not possibly come into existence throughsingle-step selection. Unfortunately, the same seems to be true of atleast parts of the apparatus of cellular machinery whereby DNA rep-licates itself, and this applies not just to the cells of advancedcreatures like ourselves and amoebas, but also to relatively moreprimitive creatures like bacteria and blue-green algae.
Origins and miracles141So, cumulative selection can manufacture complexity whilesingle-step selection cannot. But cumulative selection cannot workunless there is some minimal machinery of replication and replicatorpower, and the only machinery of replication that we know seems toocomplicated to have come into existence by means of anything lessthan many generations of cumulative selection! Some people see thisas a fundamental flaw in the whole theory of the blind watchmaker.They see it as the ultimate proof that there must originally have been adesigner, not a blind watchmaker but a far-sighted supernaturalwatchmaker. Maybe, it is argued, the Creator does not control theday-to-day succession of evolutionary events; maybe he did not framethe tiger and the lamb, maybe he did not make a tree, but he did set upthe original machinery of replication and replicator power, the originalmachinery of DNA and protein that made cumulative selection, andhence all of evolution, possible.This is a transparently feeble argument, indeed it is obviously self-defeating. Organized complexity is the thing that we are havingdifficulty in explaining. Once we are allowed simply to postulateorganized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as agenerator of yet more organized complexity. That, indeed, is whatmost of this book is about. But of course any God capable of in-telligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein rep-licating machine must have been at least as complex and organized asthat machine itself. Far more so if we suppose him additionallycapable of such advanced functions as listening to prayers and for-giving sins. To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine byinvoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for itleaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say some-thing like ‘God was always there’, and if you allow yourself that kindof lazy way out, you might as well just say ‘DNA was always there’, or’Life was always there’, and be done with it.The more we can get away from miracles, major improbabilities,fantastic coincidences, large chance events, and the more thoroughlywe can break large chance events up into a cumulative series of smallchance events, the more satisfying to rational minds our explanationswill be. But in this chapter we are asking how improbable, howmiraculous, a single event we are allowed to postulate. What is thelargest single event of sheer naked coincidence, sheer unadulteratedmiraculous luck, that we are allowed to get away with in our theories,and still say that we have a satisfactory explanation of life? In order fora monkey to write ‘Methinks it is like a weasel’ by chance, it needs a
The Blind Watchmaker142very large amount of luck, but it is still measurable. We calculated theodds against it as about 10 thousand million million million millionmillion million (1040) to 1 against. Nobody can really comprehend orimagine such a large number, and we just think of this degree ofimprobability as synonymous with impossible. But although we can’tcomprehend these levels of improbability in our minds, we shouldn’tjust run away from them in terror. The number 1040 may be very largebut we can still write it down, and we can still use it in calculations.There are, after all, even larger numbers: 1046, for instance, is not justlarger; you must add 104″ to itself a million times in order to obtain1046. What if we could somehow muster a gang of 1046 monkeys eachwith its own typewriter? Why, lo and behold, one of them wouldsolemnly type ‘Methinks it is like a weasel’, and another would almostcertainly type ‘I think therefore I am’. The problem is, of course, thatwe couldn’t assemble that many monkeys. If all the matter in theuniverse were turned into monkey flesh, we still couldn’t get enoughmonkeys. The miracle of a monkey typing ‘Methinks it is like aweasel’ is quantitatively too great, measurably too great, for us toadmit it to our theories about what actually happens. But we couldn’tknow this until we sat down and did the calculation.So, there are some levels of sheer luck, not only too great for punyhuman imaginations, but too great to be allowed in our hard-headedcalculations about the origin of life. But, to repeat the question, howgreat a level of luck, how much of a miracle, are we allowed topostulate? Don’t let’s run away from this question just because largenumbers are involved. It is a perfectly valid question, and we can atleast write down what we would need to know in order to calculate theanswer.Now here is a fascinating thought. The answer to our question – ofhow much luck we are allowed to postulate – depends upon whetherour planet is the only one that has life, or whether life abounds allaround the universe. The one thing we know for certain is that life hasarisen once, here on this very planet. But we have no idea at allwhether there is life anywhere else in the universe. It is entirelypossible that there isn’t. Some people have calculated that there mustbe life elsewhere, on the following grounds (I won’t point out thefallacy until afterwards). There are probably at least 1020 (i.e. 100billion billion) roughly suitable planets in the universe. We know thatlife has arisen here, so it can’t be all that improbable. Therefore it isalmost inescapable that at least some among all those billions ofbillions of other planets have life.The flaw in the argument lies in the inference that, because life has
Origins and miracles143arisen here, it can’t be too terribly improbable. You will notice thatthis inference contains the built-in assumption that whatever went onon Earth is likely to have gone on elsewhere in the universe, and thisbegs the whole question. In other words, that kind of statisticalargument, that there must be life elsewhere in the universe becausethere is life here, builds in, as an assumption, what it is setting out toprove. This doesn’t mean that the conclusion that life exists all aroundthe universe is necessarily wrong. My guess is that it is probably right.It simply means that that particular argument that led up to it is noargument at all. It is just an assumption.Let us, for the sake of discussion, entertain the alternativeassumption that life has arisen only once, ever, and that was here onEarth. It is tempting to object to this assumption on the followingemotional grounds. Isn’t there something terribly medieval about it?Doesn’t it recall the time when the church taught that our Earth wasthe centre of the universe, and the stars just little pinpricks of light setin the sky for our delight (or, even more absurdly presumptuous, thatthe stars go out of their way to exert astrological influences on ourlittle lives)? How very conceited to assume that, out of all the billionsof billions of planets in the universe, our own little backwater of aworld, in our own local backwater of a solar system, in our own localbackwater of a galaxy, should have been singled out for life? Why, forgoodness sake, should it have been our planet?I am genuinely sorry, for I am heartily thankful that we haveescaped from the small-mindedness of the medieval church and Idespise modern astrologers, but I am afraid that the rhetoric aboutbackwaters in the previous paragraph is just empty rhetoric. It isentirely possible that our backwater of a planet is literally the only onethat has ever borne life. The point is that if there were only one planetthat had ever borne life, then it would have to be our planet, for thevery good reason that ‘we’ are here discussing the question! If theorigin of life is such an improbable event that it happened on only oneplanet in the universe, then our planet has to be that planet. So, wecan’t use the fact that Earth has life to conclude that life must beprobable enough to have arisen on another planet. Such an argumentwould be circular. We have to have some independent argumentsabout how easy or difficult it is for life to originate on a planet, beforewe can even begin to answer the question of how many other planetsin the universe have life.But that isn’t the question we set out with. Our question was, howmuch luck are we allowed to assume in a theory of the origin of life onEarth? I said that the answer depends upon whether life has arisen only
144 The Blind Watchmakeronce, or many times. Begin by giving a name to the probability, how-ever low it is, that life will originate on any randomly designatedplanet of some particular type. Call this number the spontaneousgeneration probability or SGP. It is the SGP that we shall arrive at if wesit down with our chemistry textbooks, or strike sparks throughplausible mixtures of atmospheric gases in our laboratory, andcalculate the odds of replicating molecules springing spontaneouslyinto existence in a typical planetary atmosphere. Suppose that our bestguess of the SGP is some very very small number, say one in a billion.This is obviously such a small probability that we haven’t the faintesthope of duplicating such a fantastically lucky, miraculous event as theorigin of life in our laboratory experiments. Yet if we assume, as we areperfectly entitled to do for the sake of argument, that life hasoriginated only once in the universe, it follows that we are allowed topostulate a very large amount of luck in a theory, because there are somany planets in the universe where life could have originated. If, asone estimate has it, there are 100 billion billion planets, this is 100billion times greater than even the very low SGP that we postulated.To conclude this argument, the maximum amount of luck that we areallowed to assume, before we reject a particular theory of the origin oflife, has odds of one in N, where N is the number of suitable planets inthe universe. There is a lot hidden in that word ‘suitable’, but let us putan upper limit of 1 in 100 billion billion for the maximum amount ofluck that this argument entitles us to assume.Think about what this means. We go to a chemist and say: get outyour textbooks and your calculating machine; sharpen your pencil andyour wits; fill your head with formulae, and your flasks with methaneand ammonia and hydrogen and carbon dioxide and all the other gasesthat a primeval nonliving planet can be expected to have; cook themall up together; pass strokes of lightning through your simulatedatmospheres, and strokes of inspiration through your brain; bring allyour clever chemist’s methods to bear, and give us your best chemist’sestimate of the probability that a typical planet will spontaneouslygenerate a self-replicating molecule. Or, to put it another way, howlong would we have to wait before random chemical events on theplanet, random thermal jostling of atoms and molecules, resulted in aself-replicating molecule?Chemists don’t know the answer to this question. Most modernchemists would probably say that we’d have to wait a long time by thestandards of a human lifetime, but perhaps not all that long by thestandards of cosmological time. The fossil history of earth suggeststhat we have about a billion years – one ‘aeon’, to use a convenient
Origins and miracles145modern definition – to play with, for this is roughly the time thatelapsed between the origin of the Earth about 4.5 billion years ago andthe era of the first fossil organisms. But the point of our ‘numbers ofplanets’ argument is that, even if the chemist said that we’d have towait for a ‘miracle’, have to wait a billion billion years – far longer thanthe universe has existed, we can still accept this verdict withequanimity. There are probably more than a billion billion availableplanets in the universe. If each of them lasts as long as Earth, that givesus about a billion billion billion planet-years to play with. That willdo nicely! A miracle is translated into practical politics by amultiplication sum.There is a concealed assumption in this argument. Well, actuallythere are lots, but there’s one in particular that I want to talk about.This is that, once .life (i.e. replicators and cumulative selection)originates at all, it always advances to the point where its creaturesevolve enough intelligence to speculate about their origins. If this isnot so, our estimate of the amount of luck that we are allowed topostulate must be reduced accordingly. To be more precise, themaximum odds against the origin of life on any one planet that ourtheories are allowed to postulate, is the number of available planets inthe universe divided by the odds that life, once started, will evolvesufficient intelligence to speculate about its own origins.It may seem a little strange that ‘sufficient intelligence to speculateabout its own origins’ is a relevant variable. To understand why it is,consider an alternative assumption. Suppose that the origin of life wasquite a probable event, but the subsequent evolution of intelligencewas exceedingly improbable, demanding a huge stroke of luck.Suppose the origin of intelligence is so improbable that it has happenedon only one planet in the universe, even though life has started onmany planets. Then, since we know we are intelligent enough todiscuss the question, we know that Earth must be that one planet.Now suppose that the origin of life, and the origin of intelligence giventhat life is there, are both highly improbable events. Then the prob-ability of any one planet, such as Earth, enjoying both strokes of luck isthe product of the two low probabilities, and this is a far smallerprobability.It is as though, in our theory of how we came to exist, we areallowed to postulate a certain ration of luck. This ration has, as itsupper limit, the number of eligible planets in the universe. Given ourration of luck, we can then ‘spend’ it as a limited commodity over thecourse of our explanation of our own existence. If we use up almost allour ration of luck in our theory of how life gets started on a planet in
146 The Blind Watchmakerthe first place, then we are allowed to postulate very little more luck insubsequent parts of our theory, in, say, the cumulative evolution ofbrains and intelligence. If we don’t use up all our ration of luck in ourtheory of the origin of life, we have some left over to spend on ourtheories of subsequent evolution, after cumulative selection has gotgoing. If we want to use up most of our ration of luck in our theory ofthe origin of intelligence, then we haven’t much left over to spend onour theory of the origin of life: we must come up with a theory thatmakes the origin of life almost inevitable. Alternatively, if we don’tneed our whole luck ration for these two stages of our theory, we can,in effect, use the surplus to postulate life elsewhere in the universe.My personal feeling is that, once cumulative selection has got itselfproperly started, we need to postulate only a relatively small amountof luck in the subsequent evolution of life and intelligence.Cumulative selection, once it has begun, seems to me powerfulenough to make the evolution of intelligence probable, if not in-evitable. This means that we can, if we want to, spend virtually ourentire ration of postulatable luck in one big throw, in our theory of theorigin of life on a planet. Therefore we have at our disposal, if we wantto use it, odds of 1 in 100 billion billion as an upper limit (or 1 inhowever many available planets we think there are) to spend in ourtheory of the origin of life. This is the maximum amount of luck we areallowed to postulate in our theory. Suppose we want to suggest, forinstance, that life began when both DNA and its protein-based rep-lication machinery spontaneously chanced to come into existence.We can allow ourselves the luxury of such an extravagant theory,provided that the odds against this coincidence occurring on a planetdo not exceed 100 billion billion to one.This allowance may seem large. It is probably ample to accommo-date the spontaneous arising of DNA or RNA. But it is nowhere nearenough to enable us to do without cumulative selection altogether.The odds against assembling a well-designed body that flies as well as aswift, or swims as well as a dolphin, or sees as well as a falcon, in asingle blow of luck – single-step selection – are stupendously greaterthan the number of atoms in the universe, let alone the number ofplanets! No, it is certain that we are going to need a hefty measure ofcumulative selection in our explanations of life.But although we are entitled, in our theory of the origin of life, tospend a maximum ration of luck amounting, perhaps, to odds of 100billion billion to one against, my hunch is that we aren’t going to needmore than a small fraction of that ration. The origin of life on a planetcan be a very improbable event indeed by our everyday standards, or
Origins and miracles147indeed by the standards of the chemistry laboratory, and still besufficiently probable to have occurred, not just once but many times,all over the universe. We can regard the statistical argument aboutnumbers of planets as an argument of last resort. At the end of thechapter I shall make the paradoxical point that the theory we arelooking for may actually need to seem improbable, even miraculous, toour subjective judgement (because of the way our subjective judgementhas been made). Nevertheless, it is still sensible for us to begin byseeking that theory of the origin of life with the least degree of improb-ability. If the theory that DNA and its copying machinery arosespontaneously is so improbable that it obliges us to assume that life isvery rare in the universe, and may even be unique to Earth, our’firstresort is to try to find a more probable theory. So, can we come up withany speculations about relatively probable ways in which cumulativeselection might have got its start?The word ‘speculate’ has pejorative overtones, but these are quiteuncalled for here. We can hope for nothing more than speculationwhen the events we are talking about took place four billion years agoand took place, moreover, in a world that must have been radicallydifferent from that which we know today. For instance, there almostcertainly was no free oxygen in the atmosphere. Though the chemistryof the world may have changed, the laws of chemistry have notchanged (that’s why they are called laws), and modern chemists knowenough about those laws to make some well-informed speculations,speculations that have to pass rigorous tests of plausibility imposed bythe laws. You can’t just speculate wildly and irresponsibly, allowingyour imagination to run riot in the manner of such unsatisfying spacefiction panaceas as ‘hyperdrives’, ‘time warps’ and ‘infinite improb-ability drives’. Of all possible speculations about the origin of life,most run foul of the laws of chemistry and can be ruled out, even if wemake full use of our statistical fall-back argument about numbers ofplanets. Careful selective speculation is therefore a constructive ex-ercise. But you do have to be a chemist to do it.I am a biologist not a chemist, and I must rely on chemists to gettheir sums right. Different chemists prefer different pet theories, andthere is no shortage of theories. I could attempt to lay all these theoriesbefore you impartially. That would be the proper thing to do in astudent textbook. This isn’t a student textbook. The basic idea of TheBlind Watchmaker is that we don’t need to postulate a designer inorder to understand life, or anything else in the universe. We are hereconcerned with the kind of solution that must be found, because of thekind of problem we are faced with. I think that this is best explained,
The Blind Watchmaker148not by looking at lots of particular theories, but by looking at one as anexample of how the basic problem – how cumulative selection got itsStart – might be solved.Now, which theory to choose as my representative sample? Mosttextbooks give greatest weight to the family of theories based on anorganic ‘primeval soup’. It seems probable that the atmosphere of Earthbefore the coming of life was like that of other planets which are stilllifeless. There was no oxygen, plenty of hydrogen and water, carbondioxide, very likely some ammonia, methane and other simple organicgases. Chemists know that oxygen-free climates like this tend to fosterthe spontaneous synthesis of organic compounds. They have set up inflasks miniature reconstructions of conditions on the early Earth. Theyhave passed through the flasks electric sparks simulating lightning,and ultraviolet light, which would have been much stronger before theEarth had an ozone layer shielding it from the sun’s rays. The results ofthese experiments have been exciting. Organic molecules, some ofthem of the same general types as are normally only found in livingthings, have spontaneously assembled themselves in these flasks.Neither DNA nor RNA has appeared, but the building blocks of theselarge molecules, called purines and pyrimidines, have. So have thebuilding blocks of proteins, amino acids. The missing link for this classof theories is still the origin of replication. The building blocks haven’tcome together to form a self-replicating chain like RNA. Maybe oneday they will.But, in any case, the organic primeval-soup theory is not the one Ihave chosen for my illustration of the kind of solution that we mustlook for. I did choose it in my first book, The Selfish Gene, so I thoughtthat here I would fly a kite for a somewhat less-fashionable theory(although it recently has started gaining ground), which seems to meto have at least a sporting chance of being right. Its audacity isappealing, and it does illustrate well the properties that any satisfyingtheory of the origin of life must have. This is the ‘inorganic mineral’theory of the Glasgow chemist Graham Cairns-Smith, first proposed20 years ago and since developed and elaborated in three books, thelatest of which, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life, treats the origin oflife as a mystery needing a Sherlock Holmes solution.Cairns-Smith’s view of the DNA/protein machinery is that it prob-ably came into existence relatively recently, perhaps as recently asthree billion years ago. Before that there were many generations ofcumulative selection, based upon some quite different replicatingentities. Once DNA was there, it proved to be so much more efficientas a replicator, and so much more powerful in its effects on its own
Origins and miracles149replication, that the original replication system that spawned it was castoff and forgotten. The modem DNA machinery, according to this view, isa late-comer, a recent usurper of the role of fundamental replicator,having taken over that role from an earlier and cruder replicator. Theremay even have been a whole series of such usurpations, but the originalreplication process must have been sufficiently simple to have comeabout through what I have dubbed ‘single-step selection’.Chemists divide their subject into two main branches, organic andinorganic. Organic chemistry is the chemistry of one particularelement, carbon. Inorganic chemistry is all the rest. Carbon isimportant and deserves to have its own private branch of chemistry,partly because life chemistry is all carbon-chemistry, and partlybecause those same properties that make carbon-chemistry suitablefor life also make it suitable for industrial processes, such as those ofthe plastics industry. The essential property of carbon atoms thatmakes them so suitable for life and for industrial synthetics, is thatthey join together to form a limitless repertoire of different kinds ofvery large molecules. Another element that has some of these sameproperties is silicon. Although the chemistry of modern Earth-boundlife is all carbon-chemistry, this may not be true all over the universe,and it may not always have been true on this Earth. Cairns-Smithbelieves that the original life on this planet was based onself-replicating inorganic crystals such as silicates. If this is true,organic replicators, and eventually DNA, must later have taken overor usurped the role.He gives some arguments for the general plausibility of this idea of’takeover’. An arch of stones, for instance, is a stable structure capableof standing for many years even if there is no cement to bind it.Building a complex structure by evolution is like trying to build amortarless arch if you are allowed to touch only one stone at a time.Think about the task naively, and it can’t be done. The arch will standonce the last stone is in place, but the intermediate stages are unstable.It’s quite easy to build the arch, however, if you are allowed to subtractstones as well as add them. Start by building a solid heap of stones,then build the arch resting on top of this solid foundation. Then, whenthe arch is all in position, including the vital keystone at the top,carefully remove the supporting stones and, with a modicum of luck,the arch will remain standing. Stonehenge is incomprehensible untilwe realize that the builders used some kind of scaffolding, or perhapsramps of earth, which are no longer there. We can see only the end-product, and have to infer the vanished scaffolding. Similarly, DNAand protein are two pillars of a stable and elegant arch, which persists
The Blind Watchmaker150once all its parts simultaneously exist. It is hard to imagine it arisingby any step-by-step process unless some earlier scaffolding hascompletely disappeared. That scaffolding must itself have been builtby an earlier form of cumulative selection, at whose nature we canonly guess. But it must have been based upon replicating entitieswith power over their own future.Cairns-Smith’s guess is that the original replicators were crystalsof inorganic materials, such as those found in clays and muds. Acrystal is just a large orderly array of atoms or molecules in the solidstate. Because of properties that we can think of as their ‘shape’,atoms and small molecules tend naturally to pack themselvestogether in a fixed and orderly manner. It is almost as though they’want’ to slot together in a particular way, but this illusion is just aninadvertent consequence of their properties. Their ‘preferred’ way ofslotting together shapes the whole crystal. It also means that, even ina large crystal such as a diamond, any part of the crystal is exactly thesame as any other part, except where there are flaws. If we couldshrink ourselves to the atomic scale, we would see almost endlessrows of atoms, stretching to the horizon in straight lines – galleries ofgeometric repetition.Since it is replication we are interested in, the first thing we mustknow is, can crystals replicate their structure? Crystals are made ofmyriads of layers of atoms (or equivalent), and each layer builds uponthe layer below. Atoms (or ions; the difference needn’t concern us)float around free in solution, but if they happen to encounter a crystalthey have a natural tendency to slot into position on the surface ofthe crystal. A solution of common salt contains sodium ions andchloride ions jostling about in a more or less chaotic fashion. Acrystal of common salt is a packed, orderly array of sodium ionsalternating with chloride ions at right angles to one another. Whenions floating in the water happen to bump into the hard surface of thecrystal, they tend to stick. And they stick in just the right places tocause a new layer to be added to the crystal just like the layer below.So once a crystal gets started it grows, each layer being the same asthe layer below.Sometimes crystals spontaneously start to form in solution. Atother times they have to be ‘seeded’, either by particles of dust or bysmall crystals dropped in from elsewhere. Caims-Smith invites us toperform the following experiment. Dissolve a large quantity ofphotographer’s ‘hypo’ fixer in very hot water. Then let the solutioncool down, being careful not to let any dust drop in. The solution isnow ‘supersaturated’, ready and waiting to make crystals, but with no
Origins and miracles151seed crystals to start the process going. I quote from Cairns-Smith’sSeven Clues to the Origin of Life:Carefully take the lid off the beaker, drop one tiny piece of ‘hypo’ crystalonto the surface of the solution, and watch amazed at what happens. Yourcrystal grows visibly: it breaks up from time to time and the pieces alsogrow . . . Soon your beaker is crowded with crystals, some severalcentimetres long. Then after a few minutes it all stops. The magic solutionhas lost its power – although if you want another performance just re-heatand re-cool the beaker … to be supersaturated means to have moredissolved than there ought to be … the cold supersaturated solution almostliterally did not know what to do. It had to be ‘told’ by adding a piece ofcrystal that already had its units (billions and billions of them) packedtogether in the way that is characteristic for ‘hypo’ crystals. The solutionhad to be seeded.Some chemical substances have the potential to crystallize in twoalternative ways. Graphite and diamonds, for instance, are bothcrystals of pure carbon. Their atoms are identical. The two substancesdiffer from each other only in the geometric pattern with which thecarbon atoms are packed. In diamonds, the carbon atoms are packed ina tetrahedral pattern which is extremely stable. This is why diamondsare so hard. In graphite the carbon atoms are arranged in flat hexagonslayered on top of each other. The bonding between layers is weak, andthey therefore slide over each other, which is why graphite feelsslippery and is used as a lubricant. Unfortunately you can’t crystallizediamonds out of a solution by seeding them, as you can with hypo. Ifyou could, you’d be rich; no on second thoughts you wouldn’t, be-cause any fool could do the same.Now suppose we have a supersaturated solution of some substance,like hypo in that it was eager to crystallize out of solution, and likecarbon in that it was capable of crystallizing in either of two ways. Oneway might be somewhat like graphite, with the atoms arranged inlayers, leading to little flat crystals; while the other way gives chunky,diamond-shaped crystals. Now we simultaneously drop into our super-saturated solution a tiny flat crystal and a tiny chunky crystal. We candescribe what would happen in an elaboration of Calms-Smith’s de-scription of his hypo experiment. You watch amazed at what happens.Your two crystals grow visibly: they break up from time to time andthe pieces also grow. Flat crystals give rise to a population of flatcrystals. Chunky crystals give rise to a population of chunky crystals.If there is any tendency for one type of crystal to grow and split morequickly than the other, we shall have a simple kind of naturalselection. But the process still lacks a vital ingredient in order to give
The Blind Watchmaker152rise to evolutionary change. That ingredient is hereditary variation, orsomething equivalent to it.Instead of just two types of crystal, theremust be a whole range of minor variants that form lineages of likeshape, and that sometimes ‘mutate’ to produce new shapes. Do realcrystals have something corresponding to hereditary mutation?Clays and muds and rocks are made of tiny crystals. They areabundant on Earth and probably always have been. When you look atthe surface of some types of clay and other minerals with a scanningelectron microscope you see an amazing and beautiful sight. Crystalsgrow like rows of flowers or cactuses, gardens of inorganic rose petals,tiny spirals like cross-sections of succulent plants, bristling organpipes, complicated angular shapes folded as if in miniature crystallineorigami, writhing growths like worm casts or squeezed toothpaste.The ordered patterns become even more striking at greater levels ofmagnification. At levels that betray the actual position of atoms, thesurface of a crystal is seen to have all the regularity of a machine-woven piece of herringbone tweed. But – and here is the vital point -there are flaws. Right in the middle of an expanse of orderlyherringbone there can be a patch, identical to the rest except that it istwisted round at a different angle so that the ‘weave’ goes off in anotherdirection. Or the weave may lie in the same direction, but each row has’slipped’ half a row to one side. Nearly all naturally occurring crystalshave flaws. And once a flaw has appeared, it tends to be copied assubsequent layers of crystal encrust themselves on top of it.Flaws can occur anywhere over the surface of a crystal. If you likethinking about capacity for information storage (I do), you can imaginethe enormous number of different patterns of flaws that could becreated over the surface of a crystal. All those calculations aboutpacking the New Testament into the DNA of a single bacterium couldbe done just as impressively for almost any crystal. What DNA hasover normal crystals is a means by which its information can be read.Leaving aside the problem of read-out, you could easily devise anarbitrary code whereby flaws in the atomic structure of the crystaldenote binary numbers. You could then pack several New Testamentsinto a mineral crystal the size of a pin’s head. On a larger scale, this isessentially how music information is stored on the surface of a laser(‘compact’) disc. The musical notes are converted, by computer, intobinary numbers. A laser is used to etch a pattern of tiny flaws in theotherwise glassy smooth surface of the disc. Each little hole etchedcorresponds to a binary 1 (or a 0, the labels are arbitrary). When you playthe disc, another laser beam ‘reads’ the pattern of flaws, and aspecial-purpose computer built into the player turns the binary
Origins and miracles153numbers back into sound vibrations, which are amplified so that youcan hear them.Although laser discs are used today mainly for music, you couldpack the whole Encyclopaedia Britannica onto one of them, and read itout using the same laser technique. Flaws in crystals at the atomiclevel are far smaller than the pits etched in a laser disc’s surface, socrystals can potentially pack more information into a given area. In-deed DNA molecules, whose capacity for storing information hasalready impressed us, are something close to crystals themselves.Although clay crystals theoretically could store the same prodigiousquantities of information as DNA or laser discs can, nobody issuggesting that they ever did. The role of clay and other mineralcrystals in the theory is to act as the original ‘low-tech’ replicators, theones that were eventually replaced by high-tech DNA. They formspontaneously in the waters of our planet without the elaborate’machinery’ that DNA needs; and they develop flaws spontaneously,some of which can be replicated in subsequent layers of crystal. Iffragments of suitably flawed crystal later broke away, we could im-agine them acting as ‘seeds’ for new crystals, each one ‘inheriting’ its’parent’s’ pattern of flaws.So, we have a speculative picture of mineral crystals on the primevalEarth showing some of the properties of replication, multiplication,heredity and mutation that would have been necessary in order for aform of cumulative selection to get started. There is still the missingingredient of ‘power’: the nature of the replicators must somehow haveinfluenced their own likelihood of being replicated. When we weretalking about replicators in the abstract, we saw that ‘power’ mightsimply be direct properties of the replicator itself, intrinsic propertieslike ‘stickiness’. At this elementary level, the name ‘power’ seemsscarcely justified. I use it only because of what it can become in laterstages of evolution: the power of a snake’s fang, for instance, to propa-gate (by its indirect consequences on snake survival) DNA coding forfangs. Whether the original low-tech replicators were mineral crystalsor organic direct forerunners of DNA itself, we may guess that the’power’ they exercised was direct and elementary, like stickiness.Advanced levers of power, like a snake’s fang or an orchid’s flower,came far later.What might ‘power’ mean to a clay? What incidental properties ofthe clay could influence the likelihood that it, the same variety of clay,would be propagated around the countryside? Clays are made fromchemical building blocks such as silicic acid and metal ions, which arein solution in rivers and streams having been dissolved – ‘weathered’ —
The Blind Watchmaker154out of rocks further upstream. If conditions are right they crystallizeout of solution again downstream, forming clays. (Actually the’stream’, in this case, is more likely to mean the seeping and tricklingof the groundwater than a rushing open river. But, for simplicity, I shallcontinue to use the general word stream.) Whether or not a particulartype of clay crystal is allowed to build up depends, among other things,upon the rate and pattern of flow of the stream. But deposits of clay canalso influence the flow of the stream. They do this inadvertently bychanging the level, shape and texture of the ground through which thewater is flowing. Consider a variant of clay that just happens to havethe property of reshaping the structure of the soil so that the flowSpeeds up. The consequence is that the clay concerned gets washedaway again. This kind of clay, by definition, is not very ‘successful’.Another unsuccessful clay would be one that changed the flow in sucha way that a rival variant of clay was favoured.We aren’t, of course, suggesting that clays ‘want’ to go on existing.Always we are talking only about incidental consequences, eventswhich follow from properties that the replicator just happens to have.Consider yet another variant of clay. This one happens to slow downthe flow in such a way that future deposition of its own kind of clay isenhanced. Obviously this second variant will tend to become com-mon, because it happens to manipulate streams to its own ‘advantage’.This will be a ‘successful’ variant of clay. But so far we are dealing onlywith single-step selection. Could a form of cumulative selection getgoing?To speculate a little further, suppose that a variant of a clay improvesits own chances of being deposited, by damming up streams. This is aninadvertent consequence of the peculiar defect structure of the clay. Inany stream in which this kind of clay exists, large, stagnant shallowpools form above dams, and the main flow of water is diverted into anew course. In these still pools, more of the same kind of clay is laiddown. A succession of such shallow pools proliferates along the lengthof any stream that happens to be ‘infected’ by seeding crystals of thiskind of clay. Now, because the main flow of the stream is diverted,during the dry season the shallow pools tend to dry up. The clay driesand cracks in the sun, and the top layers are blown off as dust. Eachdust particle inherits the characteristic defect structure of the parentclay that did the damming, the structure that gave it its dammingproperties. By analogy with the genetic information raining down onthe canal from my willow tree, we could say that the dust carries’instructions’ for how to dam streams and eventually make more dust.The dust spreads far and wide in the wind, and there is a good chance
Origins and miracles155that some particles of it will happen to land in another stream, hithertonot ‘infected’ with the seeds of this kind of dam-making clay. Onceinfected by the right sort of dust, a new stream starts to grow crystalsof dam-making clay, and the whole depositing, damming, drying,eroding cycle begins again.To call this a ‘life’ cycle would be to beg an important question, butit is a cycle of a sort, and it shares with true life cycles the ability toinitiate cumulative selection. Because streams are infected by dust’seeds’ blown from other streams, we can arrange the streams in anorder of ‘ancestry’ and ‘descent’. The clay that is damming up pools instream B arrived there in the form of dust crystals blown from streamA. Eventually, the pools of stream B will dry up and make dust, whichwill infect streams F and P. With respect to the source of their dam-making clay, we can arrange streams into ‘family trees’. Every infectedstream has a ‘parent’ stream, and it may have more than one ‘daughter’stream. Each stream is analogous to a body, whose ‘development’ isinfluenced by dust seed ‘genes’, a body that eventually spawns newdust seeds. Each ‘generation’ in the cycle starts when seed crystalsbreak away from the parent stream in the form of dust. The crystallinestructure of each particle of dust is copied from the clay in the parentstream. It passes on that crystalline structure to the daughter stream,where it grows and multiplies and finally sends ‘seeds’ out again.The ancestral crystal structure is preserved down the generationsunless there is an occasional mistake in crystal growth, an occasionalalteration in the pattern of laying down of atoms. Subsequent layers ofthe same crystal will copy the same flaw, and if the crystal breaks intwo it will give rise to a sub-population of altered crystals. Now if thealteration makes the crystal either less or more efficient in thedamming/drying/erosion cycle, this will affect how many copies it hasin subsequent ‘generations’. Altered crystals might, for instance, bemore likely to split (‘reproduce’). Clay formed from altered crystalsmight have greater damming power in any of a variety of detailed ways.It might crack more readily in a given amount of sun. It might crumbleinto dust more readily. The dust particles might be better at catchingthe wind, like fluff on a willow seed. Some crystal types might induce ashortening of the ‘life cycle’, consequently a speeding up of their’evolution’. There are many opportunities for successive ‘generations’to become progressively ‘better’ at getting passed to subsequentgenerations. In other words, there are many opportunities forrudimentary cumulative selection to get going.These little flights of fancy, embellishments of Cairns-Smith’s own,concern only one of several kinds of mineral ‘life cycle’ that could have
156 The Blind Watchmakerstarted cumulative selection along its momentous road. There areothers. Different varieties of crystals might earn their passage to newstreams, not by crumbling into dust ‘seeds’, but by dissecting theirstreams into lots of little streamlets that spread around, eventuallyjoining and infecting new river systems. Some varieties might engineerwaterfalls that wear down the rocks faster, and hence speed intosolution the raw materials needed to make new clays furtherdownstream. Some varieties of crystal might better themselves bymaking conditions hard for ‘rival’ varieties that compete for rawmaterials. Some varieties might become ‘predatory’, breaking up rivalvarieties and using their elements as raw materials. Keep holding inmind that there is no suggestion of ‘deliberate’ engineering, either hereor in modern, DNA-based life. It is just that the world automaticallytends to become full of those varieties of clay (or DNA) that happen tohave properties that make them persist and spread themselves about.Now to move on to the next stage of the argument. Some lineages ofcrystals might happen to catalyse the synthesis of new substances thatassist in their passage down the ‘generations’. These secondary sub-stances would not (not at first, anyway) have had their own lineages ofancestry and descent, but would have been manufactured anew byeach generation of primary replicators. They could be seen as tools ofthe replicating crystal lineages, the beginnings of primitive’phenotypes’. Cairns-Smith believes that organic molecules were promi-nent among non-replicating ‘tools’ of his inorganic crystalline rep-licators. Organic molecules frequently are used in the commercialinorganic chemical industry because of their effects on the flow offluids, and on the break-up or growth of inorganic particles: just thesorts of effects, in short, that could have influenced the ‘success’ oflineages of replicating crystals. For instance, a clay mineral with thelovely name montmorillonite tends to break up in the presence ofsmall amounts of an organic molecule with the less-lovely namecarboxymethyl cellulose. Smaller quantities of carboxymethylcellulose, on the other hand, have just the opposite effect, helping tostick montmorillonite particles together. Tannins, another kind oforganic molecule, are used in the oil industry to make muds easier todrill. If oil-drillers can exploit organic molecules to manipulate theflow and drillability of mud, there is no reason why cumulativeselection should not have led to the same kind of exploitation by self-replicating minerals.At this point Cairns-Smith’s theory gets a sort of free bonus of addedplausibility. It so happens that other chemists, supporting more con-ventional organic ‘primeval soup’ theories, have long accepted that
Origins and miracles 157clay minerals would have been a help. To quote one of them (D. M.Anderson), ‘It is widely accepted that some, perhaps many, of theabiotic chemical reactions and processes leading to the origin on Earthof replicating micro-organisms occurred very early in the history ofEarth in close proximity to the surfaces of clay minerals and otherinorganic substrates.’ This writer goes on to list five ‘functions’ of clayminerals in assisting the origin of organic life, for instance ‘Con-centration of chemical reactants by adsorption’. We needn’t spell thefive out here, or even understand them. From our point of view, whatmatters is that each of these five ‘functions’ of clay minerals can betwisted round the other way. It shows the close association that canexist between organic chemical synthesis and clay surfaces. It is there-fore a bonus for the theory that clay replicators synthesized organicmolecules and used them for their own purposes.Cairns-Smith discusses, in more detail than I can accommodatehere, early uses that his clay-crystal replicators might have had forproteins, sugars and, most important of all, nucleic acids like RNA. Hesuggests that RNA was first used for purely structural purposes, as oildrillers use tannins or we use soap and detergents. RNA-likemolecules, because of their negatively charged backbones, would tendto coat the outsides of clay particles. This is getting us into realms ofchemistry that are beyond our scope. For our purposes what matters isthat RNA, or something like it, was around for a long time before itbecame self-replicating. When it finally did become self-replicating,this was a device evolved by the mineral crystal ‘genes’ to improve theefficiency of manufacture of the RNA (or similar molecule). But, once anew self-replicating molecule had come into existence, a new kind ofcumulative selection could get going. Originally a side-show, the newreplicators turned out to be so much more efficient than the originalcrystals that they took over. They evolved further, and eventuallyperfected the DNA code that we know today. The original mineralreplicators were cast aside like worn-out scaffolding, and all modernlife evolved from a relatively recent common ancestor, with a single,uniform genetic system and a largely uniform biochemistry.In The Selfish Gene I speculated that we may now be on thethreshold of a new kind of genetic takeover. DNA replicators built’survival machines’ for themselves – the bodies of living organismsincluding ourselves. As part of their equipment, bodies evolved on-board computers – brains. Brains evolved the capacity to communicatewith other brains by means of language and cultural traditions. But thenew milieu of cultural tradition opens up new possibilities for self-replicating entities. The new replicators are not DNA and they are not
158 The Blind Watchmakerclay crystals. They are patterns of information that can thrive only inbrains or the artificially manufactured products of brains — books,computers, and so on. But, given that brains, books and computersexist, these new replicators, which I called memes to distinguish themfrom genes, can propagate themselves from brain to brain, from brainto book, from book to brain, from brain to computer, from computer tocomputer. As they propagate they can change – mutate. And perhaps’mutant’ memes can exert the kinds of influence that I am here calling’replicator power’. Remember that this means any kind of influenceaffecting their own likelihood of being propagated. Evolution under theinfluence of the new replicators – memic evolution – is in its infancy.It is manifested in the phenomena that we call cultural evolution.Cultural evolution is many orders of magnitude faster than DNA-based evolution, which sets one even more to thinking of the idea of’takeover’. And if a new kind of replicator takeover is beginning, it isconceivable that it will take off so far as to leave its parent DNA (andits grandparent clay if Cairns-Smith is right) far behind. If so, we maybe sure that computers will be in the van.Could it be that one far-off day intelligent computers will speculateabout their own lost origins? Will one of them tumble to the hereticaltruth, that they have sprung from a remote, earlier form of life, rootedin organic, carbon chemistry, rather than the silicon-based electronicprinciples of their own bodies? Will a robotic Cairns-Smith write abook called Electronic Takeover! Will he rediscover some electronicequivalent of the metaphor of the arch, and realize that computerscould not have sprung spontaneously into existence but must haveoriginated from some earlier process of cumulative selection? Will hego into detail and reconstruct DNA as a plausible early replicator,victim of electronic usurpation? And will he be far-sighted enough toguess that even DNA may itself have been a usurper of yet moreremote and primitive replicators, crystals of inorganic silicates? If he isof a poetic turn of mind, will he even see a kind of justice in theeventual return to silicon-based life, with DNA no more than aninterlude, albeit one that lasted longer than three aeons?That is science fiction, and it probably sounds far-fetched. Thatdoesn’t matter. Of more immediate moment is that Cairns-Smith’sown theory, and indeed all other theories of the origin of life, maysound far-fetched to you and hard to believe. Do you find bothCairns-Smith’s clay theory, and the more orthodox organic primeval-soup theory, wildly improbable? Does it sound to you as though itwould need a miracle to make randomly jostling atoms join togetherinto a self-replicating molecule? Well, at times it does to me too. But
Origins and miracles 159let’s look more deeply into this matter of miracles and improbability.By doing so, I shall demonstrate a point which is paradoxical but all themore interesting for that. This is that we should, as scientists, be evena little worried if the origin of life did not seem miraculous to our ownhuman consciousness. An apparently (to ordinary human con-sciousness) miraculous theory is exactly the kind of theory we shouldbe looking for in this particular matter of the origin of life. Thisargument, which amounts to a discussion of what we mean by amiracle, will occupy the rest of this chapter. In a way it is an extensionof the argument we made earlier about billions of planets.So, what do we mean by a miracle? A miracle is something thathappens, but which is exceedingly surprising. If a marble statue of theVirgin Mary suddenly waved its hand at us we should treat it as amiracle, because all our experience and knowledge tells us that marbledoesn’t behave like that. I have just uttered the words ‘May I be struckby lightning this minute’. If lightning did strike me in the sameminute, it would be treated as a miracle. But actually neither of thesetwo occurrences would be classified by science as utterly impossible.They would simply be judged very improbable, the waving statuemuch more improbable than the lightning. Lightning does strikepeople. Any one of us might be struck by lightning, but the probabilityis pretty low in any one minute (although the Guinness Book ofRecords has a charming picture of a Virginian man, nicknamed thehuman lightning conductor, recovering in hospital from his seventhlightning strike, with an expression of apprehensive bewilderment onhis face). The only thing miraculous about my hypothetical story is thecoincidence between my being struck by lightning and my verbalinvocation of the disaster.Coincidence means multiplied improbability. The probability of mybeing struck by lightning in any one minute of my life is perhaps 1 in10 million as a conservative estimate. The probability of my inviting alightning strike in any particular minute is also very low. I have justdone it for the only time in the 23,400,000 minutes of my life so far,and I doubt if I’ll do it again, so call these odds one in 25 million. Tocalculate the joint probability of the coincidence occurring in any oneminute we multiply the two separate probabilities. For my roughcalculation this comes to about one in 250 trillion. If a coincidence ofthis magnitude happened to me, I should call it a miracle and wouldwatch my language in future. But although the odds against thecoincidence are extremely high, we can still calculate them. They arenot literally zero.In the case of the marble statue, molecules in solid marble are
160 The Blind Watchmakercontinuously jostling against one another in random directions. Thejostlings of the different molecules cancel one another out, so the wholehand of the statue stays still. But if, by sheer coincidence, all themolecules just happened to move in the same direction at the samemoment, the hand would move. If they then all reversed direction at thesame moment the hand would move back. In this way it is possible for amarble statue to wave at us. It could happen. The odds against such acoincidence are unimaginably great but they are not incalculably great. Aphysicist colleague has kindly calculated them for me. The number is solarge that the entire age of the universe so far is too short a time to writeout all the noughts! It is theoretically possible for a cow to jump over themoon with something like the same improbability. The conclusion tothis part of the argument is that we can calculate our way into regions ofmiraculous improbability far greater than we can imagine as plausible.Let’s look at this matter of what we think is plausible. What we canimagine as plausible is a narrow band in the middle of a much broaderspectrum of what is actually possible. Sometimes it is narrower thanwhat is actually there. There is a good analogy with light. Our eyes arebuilt to cope with a narrow band of electromagnetic frequencies (the oneswe call light), somewhere in the middle of the spectrum from long radiowaves at one end to short X-rays at the other. We can’t see the raysoutside the narrow light band, but we can do calculations about them,and we can build instruments to detect them. In the same way, we knowthat the scales of size and time extend in both directions far outside therealm of what we can visualize. Our minds can’t cope with the largedistances that astronomy deals in or with the small distances that atomicphysics deals in, but we can represent those distances in mathematicalsymbols. Our minds can’t imagine a time span as short as a picosecond,but we can do calculations about picoseconds, and we can build com-puters that can complete calculations within picoseconds. Our mindscan’t imagine a timespan as long as a million years, let alone thethousands of millions of years that geologists routinely compute.Just as our eyes can see only that narrow band of electromagneticfrequencies that natural selection equipped our ancestors to see, so ourbrains are built to cope with narrow bands of sizes and times. Presumablythere was no need for our ancestors to cope with sizes and times outsidethe narrow range of everyday practicality, so our brains never evolved thecapacity to imagine them. It is probably significant that our own bodysize of a few feet is roughly in the middle of the range of sizes we canimagine. And our own lifetime of a few decades is roughly in the middleof the range of times we can imagine.We can say the same kind of thing about improbabilities and miracles.
Origins and miracles 161Picture a graduated scale of improbabilities, analogous to the scale ofsizes from atoms to galaxies, or to the scale of times from picosecondsto aeons. On the scale we mark off various landmark points. At the farleft-hand end of the scale are events which are all but certain, such asthe probability that the sun will rise tomorrow — the subject of G. H.Hardy’s halfpenny bet. Near this left-hand end of the scale are thingsthat are only slightly improbable, such as shaking a double six in asingle throw of a pair of dice. The odds of this happening are 1 in 36.1expect we’ve all done it quite often. Moving towards the right-handend of the spectrum, another landmark point is the probability of aperfect deal in bridge, where each of the four players receives a com-plete suit of cards. The odds against this happening are2,235,197,406,895,366,368,301,559,999 to 1. Let us call this onedealion, the unit of improbability. If something with an improbabilityof one dealion was predicted and then happened, we should diagnose amiracle unless, which is more probable, we suspected fraud. But itcould happen with a fair deal, and it is far far far more probable thanthe marble statue’s waving at us. Nevertheless, even this latter event,as we have seen, has its rightful place along the spectrum of events thatcould happen. It is measurable, albeit in units far larger thangigadealions. Between the double-six dice throw, and the perfect dealat bridge, is a range of more or less improbable events that dosometimes happen, including any one individual’s being struck bylightning, winning a big prize on the football pools, scoring a hole-in-one at golf, and so on. Somewhere in this range, too, are thosecoincidences that give us an eerie spine-tingling feeling, like dreamingof a particular person for the first time in decades, then waking up tofind that they died in the night. These eerie coincidences are veryimpressive when they happen to us or to one of our friends, but theirimprobability is measured in only picodealions.Having constructed our mathematical scale of improbabilities, withits benchmark or landmark points marked on it, let us now turn aspotlight on that subrange of the scale with which we, in our ordinarythought and conversation, can cope. The width of the spotlight’s beamis analogous to the narrow range of electromagnetic frequencies thatour eyes can see, or to the narrow range of sizes or times, close to ourown size and longevity, that we can imagine. On the spectrum ofimprobabilities, the spotlight turns out to illuminate only the narrowrange from the left-hand end (certainty) up to minor miracles, like ahole-in-one or a dream that comes true. There is a vast range ofmathematically calculable improbabilities way outside the range ofthe spotlight.
162 The Blind WatchmakerOur brains have been built by natural selection to assess probabilityand risk, just as our eyes have been built to assess electromagneticwavelength. We are equipped to make mental calculations of risk andodds, within the range of improbabilities that would be useful inhuman life. This means risks of the order of, say, being gored by abuffalo if we shoot an arrow at it, being struck by lightning if weshelter under a lone tree in a thunderstorm, or drowning if we try toswim across a river. These acceptable risks are commensurate with ourlifetimes of a few decades. If we were biologically capable of living for amillion years, and wanted to do so, we should assess risks quitedifferently. We should make a habit of not crossing roads, for instance,for if you crossed a road every day for half a million years you wouldundoubtedly be run over.Evolution has equipped our brains with a subjective consciousnessof risk and improbability suitable for creatures with a lifetime of lessthan one century. Our ancestors have always needed to take decisionsinvolving risks and probabilities, and natural selection has thereforeequipped our brains to assess probabilities against a background of theshort lifetime that we can, in any case, expect. If on some planet thereare beings with a lifetime of a million centuries, their spotlight ofcomprehensible risk will extend that much farther towards theright-hand end of the continuum. They will expect to be dealt a perfectbridge hand from time to time, and will scarcely trouble to write homeabout it when it happens. But even they will blench if a marble statuewaves at them, for you would have to live dealions of years longer thaneven they do to see a miracle of this magnitude.What has all this to do with theories of the origin of life? Well, webegan this argument by agreeing that Cairns-Smith’s theory, and theprimeval-soup theory, sound a bit far-fetched and improbable to us. Wenaturally feel inclined to reject these theories for that reason. But ‘we’,remember, are beings whose brains are equipped with a spotlight ofcomprehensible risk that is a pencil-thin beam illuminating the farleft-hand end of the mathematical continuum of calculable risks. Oursubjective judgement of what seems like a good bet is irrelevant towhat is actually a good bet. The subjective judgement of an alien witha lifetime of a million centuries will be quite different. He will judge asquite plausible an event, such as the origin of the first replicatingmolecule as postulated by some chemist’s theory, which we, kitted upby evolution to move in a world of a few decades’ duration, wouldjudge to be an astounding miracle. How can we decide whose point ofview is the right one, ours or the long-lived alien’s?There is a simple answer to this question. The long-lived alien’s
Origins and miracles 163point of view is the right one for looking at the plausibility of a theorylike Cairns-Smith’s or the primeval-soup theory. This is because thosetwo theories postulate a particular event – the spontaneous arising of aself-replicating entity – as occurring only once in about a billion years,once per aeon. One and a half aeons is about the time that elapsedbetween the origin of the Earth and the first bacteria-like fossils. Forour decade-conscious brains, an event that happens only once per aeonis so rare as to seem a major miracle. For the long-lived alien, it willseem less of a miracle than a golf hole-in-one seems to us – and most ofus probably know somebody who knows somebody who has scored ahole-in-one. In judging theories of the origin of life, the long-livedalien’s subjective timescale is the relevant one, because it isapproximately the timescale involved in the origin of life. Our ownsubjective judgement about the plausibility of a theory of the origin oflife is likely to be wrong by a factor of a hundred million.In fact our subjective judgement is probably wrong by an evengreater margin. Not only are our brains equipped by nature to assessrisks of things in a short time; they are also equipped to assess risks ofthings happening to us personally, or to a narrow circle of people thatwe know. This is because our brains didn’t evolve under conditionsdominated by mass media. Mass reporting means that, if an improb-able thing happens to anybody, anywhere in the world, we shall readabout it in our newspapers or in the Guinness Book of Records. If anorator, anywhere in the world, publicly challenged the lightning tostrike him if he lied, and it promptly did so, we should read about itand be duly impressed. But there are several billion people in the worldto whom such a coincidence could happen, so the apparentcoincidence is actually not as great as it seems. Our brains are probablyequipped by nature to assess the risks of things happening to ourselves,or to a few hundred people in the small circle of villages within drum-range that our tribal ancestors could expect to hear news about. Whenwe read in a newspaper about an amazing coincidence happening tosomebody in Valparaiso or Virginia, we are more impressed by it thanwe should be. More impressed by a factor of perhaps a hundred million,if that is the ratio between the world population surveyed by ournewspapers, and the tribal population about whom our evolved brains’expect’ to hear news.This ‘population calculation’ is also relevant to our judgement ofthe plausibility of theories of the origin of life. Not because of thepopulation of people on Earth, but because of the population of planetsin the universe, the population of planets where life could haveoriginated. This is just the argument we met earlier in this chapter, so
164 The Blind Watchmakerthere is no need to dwell on it here. Go back to our mental picture of agraduated scale of improbable events with its benchmark coincidencesof bridge hands and dice throws. On this graduated scale of dealionsand microdealions, mark the following three new points. Probability oflife arising on a planet (in, say, a billion years), if we assume that lifearises at a rate of about once per solar system. Probability of life arisingon a planet if life arises at a rate of about once per galaxy. Probability oflife on a randomly selected planet if life arose only once in the uni-verse. Label these three points respectively the Solar System Number,the Galaxy Number and the Universe Number. Remember that thereare about 10,000 million galaxies. We don’t know how many solarsystems there are in each galaxy because we can only see stars, notplanets, but we earlier used an estimate that there may be 100 billionbillion planets in the universe.When we assess the improbability of an event postulated by, forinstance the Cairns-Smith theory, we should assess it, not againstwhat we subjectively think of as probable or improbable, but againstnumbers like these three numbers, the Solar System Number, theGalaxy Number and the Universe Number. Which of these threenumbers is the most appropriate depends upon which of the followingthree statements we think is nearest the truth:1. Life has arisen in only one planet in the entire universe (and thatplanet, as we saw earlier, then has to be Earth).2. Life has arisen on about one planet per galaxy (in our galaxy, Earth isthe lucky planet).3. The origin of life is a sufficiently probable event that it tends toarise about once per solar system (in our solar system Earth is thelucky planet).These three statements represent three benchmark views aboutthe uniqueness of life. The actual uniqueness of life probably liessomewhere between the extremes represented by Statement 1 andStatement 3. Why do I say that? Why, in particular, should we rule outa fourth possibility, that the origin of life is a far more probable eventthan is suggested by Statement 3? It isn’t a strong argument, but, forwhat it is worth, it goes like this. If the origin of life were a much moreprobable event than is suggested by the Solar System Number weshould expect, by now, to have encountered extraterrestrial life, if notin (whatever passes for) the flesh, at least by radio.It is often pointed out that chemists have failed in their attempts toduplicate the spontaneous origin of life in the laboratory. This fact is
Origins and miracles 165used as if it constituted evidence against the theories that thosechemists are trying to test. But actually one can argue that we shouldbe worried if it turned out to be very easy for chemists to obtain lifespontaneously in the test-tube. This is because chemists’ experimentslast for years not thousands of millions of years, and because only ahandful of chemists, not thousands of millions of chemists, are en-gaged in doing these experiments. If the spontaneous origin of lifeturned out to be a probable enough event to have occurred during thefew man-decades in which chemists have done their experiments, thenlife should have arisen many times on Earth, and many times onplanets within radio range of Earth. Of course all this begs importantquestions about whether chemists have succeeded in duplicating theconditions of the early Earth but, even so, given that we can’t answerthese questions, the argument is worth pursuing.If the origin of life were a probable event by ordinary humanstandards, then a substantial number of planets within radio rangeshould have developed a radio technology long enough ago (bearing inmind that radio waves travel at 186,000 miles per second) for us tohave picked up at least one transmission during the decades that wehave been equipped to do so. There are probably about 50 stars withinradio range if we assume that they have had radio technology for onlyas long as we have. But 50 years is just a fleeting instant, and it wouldbe a major coincidence if another civilization were so closely in stepwith us. If we embrace in our calculation those civilizations that hadradio technology 1,000 years ago, there will be something like amillion stars within radio range (together with however many planetscircle round each one of them). If we include those whose radio tech-nology goes back 100,000 years, the whole trillion-star galaxy would bewithin radio range. Of course, broadcast signals would become prettyattenuated over such huge distances.So we have arrived at the following paradox. If a theory of the originof life is sufficiently ‘plausible’ to satisfy our subjective judgement ofplausibility, it is then too ‘plausible’ to account for the paucity of lifein the universe as we observe it. According to this argument, thetheory we are looking for has got to be the kind of theory that seemsimplausible to our limited, Earth-bound, decade-bound imaginations.Seen in this light, both Cairns-Smith’s theory and the primeval-souptheory seem if anything in danger of erring on the side of being tooplausible! Having said all this I must confess that, because there is somuch uncertainty in the calculations, if a chemist did succeed increating spontaneous life I would not actually be disconcerted!We still don’t know exactly how natural selection began on Earth.
166 The Blind WatchmakerThis chapter has had the modest aim of explaining only the kind ofway in which it must have happened. The present lack of a definitelyaccepted account of the origin of life should certainly not be taken as astumbling block for the whole Darwinian world view, as itoccasionally – probably with wishful thinking – is. The earlierchapters have disposed of other alleged stumbling blocks, and the nextchapter takes up yet another one, the idea that natural selection canonly destroy, never construct.
A Fatal Logical Flaw in Anthropic Principle Design Arguments Author(s): Gilbert Fulmer Source: International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Apr., 2001, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Apr., 2001), pp. 101-110 Published by: Springer Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/40018863JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/termsSpringer is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to International Journal for Philosophy of ReligionThis content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:55:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
A fatal logical flaw in anthropic principle design arguments GILBERT FULMER Southwest Texas State University, USA ^J^ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 49: 101-110,2001. jq, W^ © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. I For enduring appeal to philosophers, scientists, and laypersons, no other argument for the existence of God can match the teleological. Though many previous versions have been widely discredited, new ones continually appear. In recent years the Anthropic Principle Design Argument (APDA) has emerged as a rising star in the teleological firmament. I will argue, however, that this argument fails to establish the existence of God because it is logically incoherent. The term “anthropic principle” means different things to different writers, and the variants can differ in philosophical significance.1 The notion I examine here claims that the universe is “fine tuned” for life, perhaps even human life, in that many very fundamental facts of the universe must be almost precisely as they are for life to exist. Natural laws and constants are said to be so precisely adapted for life that it could not have evolved if they had been more than very slightly different. For example, Paul Davies says, [There is] impressive evidence that life as we know it depends very sensitively on the form of the laws of physics, and on some seemingly fortuitous accidents in the actual values that nature has chosen for various particle masses, force strengths, and so on.2 These values are apparently “accidents” because they are not logically neces- sary consequences of more fundamental laws. (Necessary truths like the three-sidedness of triangles give no appearance of being accidents.) Since they are not consequences of other laws, these “accidents” could have been other than they are; and it is fortunate for us that they are not, since any significantly different values would not allow the universe to sustain life. There is an enormous number of these “fortuitous” crucial values, from the boiling point of water to the mass of the neutrino, so the conjunction of all the “correct” ones had to be exquisitely precise for life to exist.3 But theThis content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:55:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
1 02 GILBERT FULMER APDA insists that so exact a balance is far too improbable to have occurred by chance. Therefore the conclusion is drawn that this universe must have been uniquely designed for life. And some suspect that design requires a Designer. John Leslie cites scores of examples of “fine tuning,” and concludes from them that . . . quantitative considerations contribute strongly to a modern theist’s Design Argument. Tiny changes in fundamental constants would have made life’s evolution very unlikely. Look again at that figure of one part in 100100, representing how accurately gravity may have to be adjusted to the weak force for the cosmos not to suffer swift collapse or explosion. Recall the claim that changing by one part in 1040 the balance between gravity and electromagnetism could have made stars burn too fast or too slowly for life’s purposes.4 However, a fatal logical flaw vitiates the APDA; it concludes that we can know that only a universe with almost precisely the same laws and constants as our own could sustain life. But the argument proves at most that a universe differing from ours only in one or a few respects could not sustain life. It does not follow that one with more or greater differences could not; such a universe might be as suitable for life as this one, or more so. The APDA claims to show scientifically that a different universe could not support life; but scientific calculations about conditions in hypothetical very different universes are meaningless, since their only possible basis is the laws and constants of the universe we know. Therefore, they can tell us nothing about the probability of life in actual or possible universes with different fundamental laws or constants. Such hypothetical other universe might be as good as or better than this one for sustaining life. So there is no support for the claim that a universe fit for life is hugely improbable, and thus no argument for a Designer. This flaw in the APDA could not be removed or corrected by any revision or refinement, because they fallacy is integral to the argument’s own structure. II According to the APDA, scientific calculations prove that many fundamental characteristics of the universe must be almost precisely as they are in this universe for life to exist. I cite here only a few examples. … it is unimaginably more probable that the universe should be life- prohibiting rather than life-permitting, and the best explanation for the cosmos as it is may well be intelligent design.5This content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:55:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE DESIGN ARGUMENTS 1 03 … if water did not have such a high boiling point, life as we know it would be impossible . . . Thus, the anomalous character of water is seen to be related to its capacity to support life, and it is this relationship that seems to point in the direction of an Intelligent Designer.6 The properties of matter … on the smallest scale and on the scale of the whole universe appear uniquely suited to life . . . Life is not accidental. Though man is not at the physical center of the universe, he appears to be at the center of its purpose. Hence, the New Story [of science] again leads to a mind that directs the whole universe, all the laws of nature and all the properties of matter, to a goal. To that mind we give the name God.7 And Leslie, as noted, offers many more example, arguing that To guard against one disaster by tinkering with these or those factors would be likely only to introduce some new disaster because each factor enters into so many vital relationships.8 In other words, changing these factors would have unpredictable and prob- ably “disastrous” results, because of their interdependence. To summarize, the APDA says that even a slight deviation from the values of existing laws and constants would have produced a universe that could not support life. And so a universe suitable for life was too improbable to have occurred by pure chance; it was very probably designed by intelligence. Ill Of course, this argument has been challenged. Stephen J. Gould denies that the universe needs any explanation at all, since any complex universe would be improbable. “We could look at any outcome and say, ‘Ain’t it amazing . . .’ “9 John Earman believes little weight can be placed on the arguments of the anthropic theorists, because they are too ready to accept conclusions that suit their predilections. “Excessive caution is not one of the faults of anthropic theorists.”10 Stephen Grover says the “many-universes” theory is all the explanation required. This theory holds, as a consequence of quantum mech- anics, that there must be an infinite number of actually existing universes; therefore it is highly probable that at least one would have the characteristics ours has. And obviously we could only exist in one that can support life.11 The notion that many universes may actually exist is fascinating, but I have no need for that hypothesis. My criticism of the APDA goes deeper than these others. It does not depend, like Gould’s, on preferred sorts of explanation, or, like Grover’s, on controversial factual claims. My argument requires only what the APDA itself requires: that many fundamental facts of our universeThis content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:55:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
1 04 GILBERT FULMER are not logically necessary, and therefore the real universe could have been otherwise than it is. The APDA depends on the claim that we can know it is very improbable that other universes, with different laws or constants, could support life. Therefore, to refute the APDA I need only show that we cannot know this. And it follows from the structure of the APDA itself that we cannot. So the APDA is incoherent on its own terms. IV When Davies says the laws and constants are “seemingly fortuitous acci- dents,” this means that they are not logically necessary – that they do not appear to follow from more fundamental principles. Yet anthropic theorists seem not to recognize the implications of their premise that laws could have been different. They stress the large number of values that could be different; yet they always envision minor changes in a single value, leaving everything else unchanged. For example, Davies says “life as we know it depends very sensitively … on the values nature has chosen. . . .” And of course this is true if it means life identical in every particular to that in our universe. But this is hardly more than tautological: change details and details will be changed. The APDA purports to show that there is (at least probably) a Designer, by showing that this universe is well designed for life. But if life is the goal, its value is surely not in its biochemical specifics. Philosophers argue endlessly about what has intrinsic value; but none, I think, has nominated deoxyribo- nucleic acid; DNA’s value is that it is instrumental in producing life. The value of life may be sentience, rationality, spirituality, poetic sensitivity or whatever. Take your pick – it could in a different universe be produced by natural laws different from those we know. This is why I say APDA supporters seem not to recognize the implications of their premise. They concentrate on one change at a time, and calculate its results, concluding that a universe differing form ours in that one respect could not support life. Like Davies, they imagine a difference in some law producing the conditions under which life appears in our universe; but they never consider that the conditions which life requires could also be different. If many laws were different life could occur under very different conditions from those which give rise to it in our universe. For example, it is logically possible that under numerous different natural laws simple hydrogen atoms could produce life forms having the same capabilities as the life we know: sentience and all the rest. Absurd? Of course – given the natural laws that exist in this universe. But the APDA implies that all those laws could have been other than they are. If many laws were different, they might combine to support life as well or better.This content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:55:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE DESIGN ARGUMENTS 1 05 Actually, APDA supports must assume that most of the facts of this universe are unchanged, because the putatively scientific arguments they invoke to prove that different laws and constants would make life impossible are based on just those laws. For example, Davies tells us that if the mass of the neutrino had been ten times greater, “the gravitating power of the primeval background would have caused a drastic alteration in the expansion of the universe . . .”12 But how do we calculate what would happen in hypothetical universes having greater neutrino mass? Obviously, we can make those calcu- lations only by using the scientific laws of this universe – the laws which the APDA says could be other than they are. That is, we can imagine the results of changing one condition of this universe only on the supposition that the rest are not changed. Davies unintentionally illustrates this point. We can write down the equations of physics and then tinker with them a bit to see what difference it makes. In this way theorists can construct artificial-model universes to test mathematically whether they can support life.13 But “the equations of physics” can only mean the equations we have learned from observation of the existing universe. We can indeed “tinker” with them “a bit,” imagining minor alterations in the facts of this universe. But all our hard- won scientific knowledge of our universe is knowledge of our universe. If several, or many, of the fundamental facts in some hypothetical other universe were different, those equations would not apply. Therefore, predictions about different universes are impossible unless most of the basic facts of our universe are assumed to remain unchanged. In particular, science cannot show that greatly different universes could not support life as well as this one. V Leslie seems to try to address the issue of greatly different universes. He says, The theist need not claim that of all logically possible universes only a small fraction would contain life. He need look only at universes in “the local area” of possibilities, ones much like ours in their basic laws but differing in their force strengths, ones much like ours in their basic laws but differing in their force strengths, particle masses, expansion speeds and so on. A parable may help. A wasp on a wall is surrounded by a fairly wide area free of all insects. Just one bullet is fired. It hits the wasp. Was it fired by an expert, probably? In tackling this we need not careThis content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:55:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
1 06 GILBERT FULMER whether distant areas of the wall bear many insects. There is only one insect locally ! In cosmology our wasp becomes a small “window” inside which various constants had to fall, for life to evolve . . . And hitting a window can be impressive even when the area might contain one or two other small windows.14 Leslie supposes here that we could calculate the conditions that would exist after changes in the universe. He imagines changes in “force strengths, particle masses, expansions speeds, and so on.” And it is no doubt possible to calculate the effect of a small change in any one of these. But, as Leslie has said, all these and countless more factors “enter into so many vital rela- tionships” that tinkering with them would produce imponderable results. For example, if force strengths were changed, any calculation of the effects of the change on the universe would involve values for particle masses and expan- sion speeds; but these, too, are subject to change. Drawing the conclusion that life would be impossible after a change seems easy when only one value is imagined as different. But when the changes are multiplied, any basis for scientific calculations is quickly lost. A staple of the APDA literature, strik- ingly exemplified by Leslie’s article, is the multiplicity of critical numbers. And the APDA presupposes that they are all subject to change. Therefore, scientific information about this universe can support no inferences about the results. No doubt some combinations of changes would make life impossible; but others might just as well make it more abundant. The problem with Leslie’s parable, and his argument, is that it requires us to know what we cannot know: that the surrounding area is free of other targets, i.e., that any alternative universes differing in more ways than one from ours would be unable to support life. Thus he assumes that the bullet that hit the wasp was the best shot possible in that “local area.” But just how local is the area? Is it any larger than the wasp itself? No doubt Leslie’s calculations succeed in showing that there could be worse universes; it would be possible to miss the wasp. But Leslie’s project is to develop a design argument for an expert marksman – i.e., a creator who designed the universe for life. For this he needs to show (to mix metaphors) that the universe we inhabit is a local peak of suitability for life – that is, that any slight change would make it worse. Instead he has shown, at best, that there are some slight changes which would. He needs to show that we are at the top of a peak; he has shown at most that we are not at the bottom of a valley. Perhaps we are on a plateau, or a hillside. However, a perch halfway up the slop gives Leslie no support; it is hardly an argument for God to prove that this is not the worst of all possible worlds. Returning to the wasp parable, Leslie may have shown that there are worse shots in the vicinity of the wasp;This content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:55:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE DESIGN ARGUMENTS 1 07 what he needs to show is that there is none better. But he cannot show this. For all we can know, the wasp might have alighted on the head of a poisonous snake which is about to bite a small child. In this case, the marksman who hit the wasp did not make the best shot at all – he would have done much better to have shot in an inch lower and killed the snake! Likewise, a universe changed in several or many respects might be as good for life as ours, or better. The initial reaction that such an outcome is wildly against the odds comes entirely from our experience with this universe. To conclude that other universes would be similar to this one would beg the question.15 VI It should be apparent now that scientific knowledge is completely irrelevant to evaluating the APDA, because the facts on which that knowledge is based could be different in other universes. The APDA’s own hypothesis of different fundamental facts invalidates all inferences based on the facts we know; the structure of the argument itself disqualifies conclusions about universes where these facts might be different. The irrelevance of science may seem surprising; the APDA is often taken to be the quintessentially scientific argument for the existence of God, because it appeals to so many massive scientific calculations. Supports of the APDA shower us with detailed numbers to show how even slight differ- ences in the fundamental facts of the existing universe would have made life impossible. But we have just seen that scientists can only calculate what would happen in slightly different universes by assuming in their calcula- tions that the other laws and constants remain unchanged, since the laws and constants of this universe are the only basis they have to do any calcula- tions at all. Thus Craig has no basis for saying that “. . . it is unimaginably more probable that the universe should be life-prohibiting rather than life- permitting . . .” It could just as well be that life-sustaining properties are of a very high probability. Science can provide no relevant information here, because its foundation is undercut by the hypothesis of different basic facts. By way of analogy, the fundamental law of the United States of America is its written Constitution; accordingly, the United States Supreme Court can overturn statutory laws it deems unconstitutional. But the Constitution can be changed by the amendment process; could the Supreme Court overturn a constitutional amendment as unconstitutional? No, because pronouncements of constitutionality can be based only on the Constitution as it exists, and that is just what the amendment would change. Any judgment that the amendmentThis content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:55:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
1 08 GILBERT FULMER was unconditional would be based on the Constitution before amended; but afterward such a judgment would be vitiated. The whole program of the APDA is founded on deductions about what would be possible or impossible in some imaginary universe with different natural laws. Its central claim is that our universe is known to be the only one that could sustain life, because all others can be shown to be unsuitable. But we have just seen that the APDA itself makes this impossible to show. By its own terms, then, the APDA cannot support its conclusion. VII Thus the APDA is incoherent, because its initial assumption renders it power- less to support its conclusion. The argument needs to have it both ways. On one hand, it requires that the fundamental facts of this universe could have been otherwise; this is the only reason for saying that our own universe is improbable – indeed, too improbable to have occurred by chance. On the other hand, in order to argue that hypothetical other universes would be unsuitable for life, the APDA must make calculations based on the very same fundamental facts which it just said could be different in those universes. So the APDA is in a logical cleft stick of its own making: if the facts of this universe could not have been otherwise, no Anthropic Principle Design Argument can be constructed in the first place. But if these facts could have been different, then the argument cannot support the conclusion that other possible universes would be unsuitable for life. Either way, the Anthropic Principle Design Argument is logically flawed in its basic conception. The new teleological argument for a designing God fails to show that our universe is uniquely or even especially suitable for life. Therefore it provides no support for the conclusion that the universe must have been designed by a Creator.16 Notes 1. A useful survey of some of these variations is M. A Corey’s God and the New Cosmol- ogy: The Anthropic Design Argument (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), esp. pp. 1-9. On the term “Anthropic Principle” Corey notes, “. . . [I]t could be argued that the cosmological evidence that has been recruited in support of the Anthropic Principle can properly be said … to support only a Biocentric Principle, and not any type of Anthropic Principle per se” (p. 7). The evidence, he is saying, supports only a universe designed to produce life; but I would stress that life in universes with different laws would not necessarily have to take just the same biochemical form as it does in this one. UnderThis content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:55:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE DESIGN ARGUMENTS 1 09 different laws, for example, carbon-based DNA might be replaced by something wholly different that served the same function for life forms in that universe. 2. Paul Davies, The Mind of God (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), p. 199; emphasis added. 3. The facts about the universe which are claimed by various anthropic principle theorists to be fine tuned are very numerous. Corey, op. cit., ch. 4, cites a number of them, including but not limited to: the origin of matter, the prevalence of matter over antimatter, the total amount of matter in the universe, dark matter, the time frame for galaxy formation, the “roughness” of the universe, the size of the universe, the temperature of nuclear stability, deuterium in star formation, the ratio of protons to neutrons, the charge of electrons and protons, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, the gravitational constant, and the value of the strong nuclear force. 4. John Leslie, “The Prerequisites For Life in Our Universe,” in G. V. Coyne, S. J., M. Heller, and J. Zycinski, eds., Proceedings of the [1987] Cracow Conference (Specola Vaticana, Citta del Vaticano, 1988), p. 248. Emphasis original. It should be noted that Leslie uses the term “Anthropic Principle” in a very different sense from that used here; in his sense the Principle apparently refers to the idea that only a universe suitable for life could be observed by living beings (p. 230). In this usage the “Anthropic Principle” runs counter to the teleological argument which Leslie provisionally supports. 5. William Lane Craig, in William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 268. 6. M. A. Corey, op. cit., p. 106. 7. Robert M. Augros and George N. Stanciu, The New Story of Science (New York: Bantam, 1984), pp. 69-70. 8. John Leslie, op. cit., p. 238. 9. Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo’s Smile (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), p. 395. 10. Ibid., p. 313. 11. Stephen Grover, “Cosmological Fecundity,” Inquiry (Oslo, Norway), v. 41 no. 3 (Sept. 1998), p. 277. 12. Paul Davies, The Accidental Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) quoted, Corey, op. cit., p. 61; italics supplied. 13. Paul Davies, op. cit., p. 175; emphasis added. 14. John Leslie, op. cit., pp. 249-250. 15. We should keep in mind that the Universe we live in is, to all appearances, not very well suited for life at all. As physical cosmologists are fond of saying, the Universe is three- quarters hydrogen and one-quarter helium – with traces of everything else! And, of course, even on the most optimistic estimates of life throughout the Universe, it makes up only a vanishingly small portion of those traces. 16. For the sake of brevity and simplicity, I have been speaking as though supporters of the APDA must regard all natural laws and constants as candidates for replacement; that is, that none of them are logically necessary. Strictly speaking, the APDA could be developed on the supposition that all but one or a very few laws and constants are logically neces- sary. In this case the argument would be that in the few areas where alternatives were possible, just those most favorable to life were chosen; my criticism would then be blunted because the wide-scale alterations I envisage would not be possible after all: only the slight changes usually considered by the APDA would, in fact, be possible. But this line is not promising for the APDA: first, its proponents always insist that it gains enormous strength from the very fact that so very many different lines of argu- ment converage: so many constants are so exactly adapted to life. Therefore this defenseThis content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:55:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
110 GILBERT FULMER would require supporters to abandon all but one or a very few of the numerous “coinci- dences” that are cited, and would thus greatly weaken the overall claim of the APDA. Second, nothing in the APDA literature ever suggests that any laws or constants might be necessary; rather, everything in the discussion suggests that none is. Address for correspondence: Gilbert Fulmer, Department of Philosophy, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, TX 78666, USA Phone: (512) 245-3141; Fax: (512) 245-8335; E-mail: [email protected] content downloaded from 130.182.4.15 on Tue, 01 Sep 2020 05:55:14 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
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