If Bertrand Russell was free to draw such sweeping cosmological and
theological conclusions from Darwin and Copernicus, with the general
blessing of the Western scientific elite, how is it that Carter's radical
conceptual challenge to these conclusions -- based, unlike Russell's free-
form speculations, on a detailed scientific account of the universe's
evolution -- has been so widely disparaged? After indoctrinating
generations of students into the myth of the two revolutions (who among us
was not exposed to this hackneyed version of modern scientific history in
our secondary and college educations?), the scientific community as a
whole might be expected to pause and carefully assess whether Carter's
simple observation had not exploded the whole concept. But the a priori
commitment to the atheist notion of the random universe has proved so
powerful in our time as to send many scientists scurrying to find logical,
and sometimes illogical, arguments to explain away the massive evidence
that threatens to refute it.
The first line of defense has been logical hair-splitting. The
Anthropic Principle has been said to be a tautology, since we could not
expect to observe a universe that was not capable of producing us. This is
the purest sophistry, since it pretends to ignore the surprise we register
at stumbling upon such a multitude of coincidences. It evades the question
rather than attempting to answer it. It is as if to say, We would not be
observing the elephant we see standing in our living room if the elephant
had not gotten there in the first place. True, but nonsense. This
essentially tautological formulation sometimes has been called the "weak
Anthropic Principle." It is "weak" in more ways than one.
Coincidences do not prove, but they suggest, sometimes powerfully.
Indeed, our ability to detect and infer from coincidences plays a critical
role in our basic capacity to interpret and find our way in the world
around us. Without such ability, life would be for us a tale told by an
idiot. If a detective investigating a crime, for example, stumbles on a
series of mysterious coincidences, he will look for a human hand behind
them. The hand may not be there, or may not be found. But the presumption
will favor the existence of such human intervention, and a good detective
will follow the trail of evidence until the supposition is disproved or
proved. He will not take refuge in platitudes to the effect that
"coincidences are a part of life."
The second line of defense has been a resort to imagination or
fantasy. Our universe has been said to be simply one of billions of
universes existing either in sequence or in parallel -- none of which, of
course, save our own, we can detect. Given the supposed existence of these
billions of universes, the fact that one (ours) happened to hit on the
precise combination of values and relationships to produce life would not
be surprising. This is actually a very old, pre-scientific argument, a
traditional mainstay of the atheist case -- invoked by Diderot and Hume
and dating back to the Epicureans of Roman times -- that, given an
infinite duration, nature, acting randomly, would eventually assemble the
order we see around us. A monkey at a word processor, over infinity, would
eventually type the works of Shakespeare, or so it is supposed.
Each of these proposals is a grand balloon of speculation anchored to
a tiny grain of scientific hypothesis. To be sure, scientists are not yet
certain whether the present universe is a one-time event or whether, at a
certain point, it collapses back in on itself, only to begin the cycle of
expansion anew. That there is an oscillating sequence of universes remains
at least theoretically possible, though the present evidence suggests
otherwise. The somewhat different "parallel universes" idea rests on a
highly theoretical proposal advanced by Hugh Everett in 1957 to solve the
"problem of measurement" in quantum mechanics. Everett proposed that all
the possibilities implicit in matter before it is actually observed --
before, for example, light in its fuzzy "wave" state is observed and
collapses into a photon particle -- actually exist in reality. Everett
imagined that, at each observation, reality was infinitely branching out.
My eye would observe one photon with certain properties in this universe,
while, in effect, copies of "me" would be observing photons with the other
possible properties in a series of parallel universes ad infinitum. It is
a powerful speculation, and a theoretically interesting way of posing the
genuine paradoxes implicit in the quantum theory -- but it is just that, a
speculation. There appears to be no way that such parallel universes could
be detected, even in theory; certainly, no one has stumbled on them so
far.
Davies writes that "many" scientists find the "parallel universes"
idea "a preferable hypothesis to the belief in a supernatural design." But
it is no more than a preference, and a very odd one, given what scientists
so often preach in advertisement of their own profession. Praising science
at the expense of religion in 1935, Russell boasted: "The scientific
temper of mind is cautious, tentative, and piecemeal." "The way in which
science arrives at its beliefs is quite different," he wrote, "from that
of medieval theology. . . . Science starts, not from large assumptions,
but from particular facts discovered by observation or experiment." That
so many members of a profession which prides itself above all on the
dictum, "Just the facts, ma'am," would show a "preference" for wild
speculations about unseen universes for which not a shred of observational
evidence exists suggests something about both the power of the modern
atheistic ideology and the cultural agenda of many in the scientific
profession. By embracing the "parallel universes" as a last bulwark
against the all-too-threatening suggestion of "supernatural design," the
mainstream scientific community has in effect shown its attachment to the
atheistic ideology of the random universe to be in some respects more
powerful than its commitment to the scientific method itself. The modern
scientific mind -- which contentedly believed it had refuted the religious
world view on the basis of pure observation and fact -- has been
scandalously unwilling to admit that the facts on which it based its
presumptive conclusions were not, in reality, what they appeared to be.
The final line of defense against the Anthropic Revolution has been a
kind of scientific legalism. The Anthropic Principle is said to fail the
test of falsifiability (a contention which, in fact, remains in technical
dispute). Since, it is argued, no observation or set of observations could
prove or disprove the Anthropic Principle as a theory, it is not properly
"scientific." On such grounds, Heinz R. Pagels, executive director of the
New York Academy of Sciences, in 1987 urged dismissal of the Anthropic
Principle as "needless clutter in the conceptual repertoire of science."
But this is the moral equivalent of the courts' exclusionary rule --
throwing out the entire murder case on the basis of a minor legal
technicality. Whether the Anthropic Principle meets the technical
qualifications of a formal scientific theory is irrelevant to what it
suggests about the fundamental nature of the universe. Scientists may not
"need" the Anthropic Principle as a theory for narrow purposes of
scientific investigation (though in fact it has spurred a host of
interesting discoveries); but the moment they begin to speculate -- as
they so often freely do -- about what scientific discovery tells us about
the nature of the universe at large, this elephant in the living room can
hardly be overlooked. The double standard at work here is breathtaking: a
host of scientists, from Russell to Richard Dawkins to Carl Sagan, are
free to use loose surmises based on Darwin's theory to buttress the public
case for atheism; but the moment scientists begin marshalling rather
considerable and persuasive evidence for the opposite case, their
speculation risks being branded by colleagues as "unscientific."
The Anthropic Principle does not settle the question; it is not a
proof of God. But it alters the presumption; it shifts the burden of
proof. One cannot help wondering, if the nineteenth century's
understanding of the universe had been as broad and deep as our own,
whether the long and miserable "death-of-God" phase of Western history
would have taken shape at all. Had Carter been around to offer his
observations, say, a year or two after Darwin's The Origin of Species,
would Western minds have so readily accepted Darwin's picture of a
universe based on pure contingency as the final word? Would the notion of
the cosmos as a blind, impersonal mechanism, throwing up human existence
as a bad joke or "a curious accident in a backwater," have achieved its
stranglehold on the modern philosophical, political, and literary
imagination? Would we have had to endure the special horrors perpetrated
on humanity by unprecedentedly ruthless political ideologies -- e.g.,
Communism, Nazism, Fascism -- that are centrally founded on the
philosophical idea of the "death of God"?
Even if one took the Anthropic Principle as definitive proof of the
"argument by design" for God's existence, it would not exhaust the "God
question." To argue that there is a guiding intelligence behind, above, or
within the universe is not the same as arguing for a benign, personal
Deity. To echo Pascal, the God of the Anthropic Principle is not yet the
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There remain other thorny questions,
perhaps most obviously the problem of evil, for theologians and
philosophers to sort out. But had the Anthropic Principle been part of the
nineteenth-century scientific and philosophical world view, the starting-
point of twentieth-century philosophical debate might have been very
different. It should certainly be different today.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Chuck Warman
cwarman@sol.wf.net
"The abdication of Belief / Makes the Behavior small."
--- Emily Dickinson