Interlude: The Big Bang and the "Fine-Tuning" of the Universe

Not the Impossible Mission Force, but the impossible mission of (the gravitational) force?

The past month or two I’ve been exploring the argument that consciousness arises from matter versus the argument that matter arises from consciousness, and considering whether it’s more plausibly argued, rationally, that the universe originates from a physicalist source, or a theistic source.¹ In particular, I have been taking to task the physicalist perspective, and an underlying “scientism,” which is the consequence of a laudable rational, naturalist approach to reality developing a bias towards physicalism.

Along the way, I talked about some interesting examples of research (which I got via Bernardo Kastrup’s books) that favor the primacy of consciousness over matter — for one, some new reinforcing evidence that the act of observation has a determinative effect on the nature of particles at the quantum level² and, for another, the emerging evidence that psychedelics actually reduce brain function, rather than stimulating it.

I also talked (somewhat briefly and superficially, I think) about the idea that truly ex nihilo emergence seems unlikely — because it appears that, as Parmenides famously said, “Nothing comes from nothing.” It seems to me that the most common ontological theories of emergence all have a basic “first cause” problem, which is that they reduce to fundamentals that don’t seem to me to really be fully reduced. Meanwhile, I tend to think that something like Spinoza’s argument pertains — that there must be one essential substance that necessarily consists of infinite attributes (though I differ from Spinoza in key ways).

Also, I talked about the fact that the implications of physicalism just don’t feel good.

I’ve been developing an essay further exploring the challenge of the idea of emergence, and what the implications might be, but it’s not finished yet (hopefully I’ll be able to really get into it over winter break, which started yesterday). But in the meantime, I thought it might be interesting to talk about some things that have come to mind from reading a new book by Michel-Yves Bollore and Olivier Bonnassies called God: The Science, the Evidence.

This is an interesting book because it spends its first half outlining some of the most significant cosmological scientific discoveries of the past century or so, and how well they track with the hypothesis of a creator God — a fascinating history that I think is fairly well-summarized in the book — and then spends its second half talking about a wide variety of things, including an uncanny keenness of the Jewish people, going back as early as the 6th century BCE, at least; the miracle at Fatima in 1917; the idea that the Bible is consistently authoritative in many ways (including in its testimony that Jesus is the Son of God); and some rational arguments for the necessity of God. Some of the logic in this latter half of the book I find especially vulnerable to critique, and much of it does not duly consider counterarguments (the part about Jewish people and the miracle at Fatima possibly excepted). I found all of it to be interesting, though, to be sure — though none of it is where I expected the second half of the book to go.

I’m reminded that, when talking about something like the Absolute, one is faced with a wide array of ways to look at a sprawling idea that has become highly compartmentalized into disparate fields in modern academia, and I think it takes a really, really fine touch to try to stitch the work in these disparate domains into a cohesive whole. I’m also reminded that this is one of the things that metaphysics is ultimately called to do, and how abridged our effort has become — in no small part, it seems to me, because of prevailing trends of scientism in the past two or three hundred years.

Big sigh.

Anyway, I thought the history of cosmological science in the book was really great — chock full of interesting details, and chock full of pithy quotes — and I thought it might be interesting to mention a couple of things that really stood out.

One is a summary of all the unlikely cosmological ratios and values that have been discovered in physics in the last century or so, which together are referred to as the “fine-tuning” of the universe.

It turns out surprising number of fundamental principles that need to be exceedingly well-aligned to one another in order for the universe to work. As just one example, they quote an interview with John Lennox, a professor of mathematics at Oxford university, who observes:

[T]he ratio of the electromagnetic force to gravity in the early Universe has to be accurate to about 1/10⁴⁰ in order that we can have the chemistry of the Universe as we now see it. Now 1/10⁴⁰, to get some idea of that, let’s imagine that we covered, say, the whole of Russia with small coins, and we built the piles of coins over the whole of Russia to the height of the Moon, and then we took a billion systems like that, and we painted one of the coins red and we asked you to blindfold a friend and go and find it. They’d have got about 1/10⁴⁰ of finding it, so it’s a very small probability.³

The rate of expansion of the universe also had to be exceedingly precise. Bollore and Bonnaissies quote Alan Guth, a physics professor at MIT, who refers to physicist Robert Dicke:

Bob Dicke told us that if you thought about the universe at one second after the beginning, the expansion rate really had to be just right to 15 decimal places, or else the universe would either fly apart too fast for any structure to form or re-collapse too fast for any structure to form.⁴

The mass density of the universe at critical phases was similarly well-tuned. The weak nuclear force is precisely attuned to allow antimatter to disappear. And the masses of subatomic particles — protons, neutrons electrons — are similarly critical and precise relative to one another.

Most remarkable of all, they say, is the fine-tuning of the “cosmological constant,” which controls a key balance that drives the expansion of the universe itself — a mystery in two parts. First, when physicists calculate the amount of energy that is present in the universe, their calculations differ from what is observed by about 10¹²⁰, indicating that something appears to be buffering this expected amount of energy. And two, this 1/10¹²⁰ of the expected energy that is actually observed turns out to be exceptionally necessary for the formative expansion of the universe. They offer a quote from Leonard Susskind of Stanford on the topic:

Most fine-tunings are 1% sorts of things—in other words, if the thing is 1% different, everything is bad, and the physicist could say, ‘Maybe those are just luck.’ On the other hand, this cosmological constant is tuned to one part in ten to the one hundred twenty power (1/10¹²⁰). Nobody thinks that’s accidental . . . That’s the most extreme example of fine-tuning.⁵

Just to be clear, for folks who aren’t the “mathiest,” when we’re talking about the difference between one chance in 10⁴⁰ (i.e., the one penny in all those billions of scenarios of pennies stacked to the moon) and one chance in 10¹²⁰, or eighty orders of magnitude greater, it’s worth noting that one million seconds (10⁶) is eleven days, while a billion seconds (10⁹) is thirty-one years. So while 10⁴⁰ is an almost inconceivably big number, 10¹²⁰ is an almost inconceivably bigger number, (making 1/10⁴⁰ and 1/10¹²⁰ just as inconceivably small).

Bollore and Bonaisses explain that this is where the idea of the multiverse comes from, because the fine-tuning of the universe is so unfathomably precise that the most compelling way to explain it in physicalist terms — i.e., in terms of unwilled, random occurrences — would be to posit an unfathomably large, perhaps infinite number of universes, with ours being one of the exceedingly rare ones in which these forces aligned in such a way as to create a viable system that didn’t either collapse in on itself, say, or never turn into anything more than a vast field of gas.

An alternative hypothesis, of course, is that there is only one universe, and this fine-tuning is actually the will of God working visibly in material reality. This is the way that Bollore and Bonnassies lean with it. Personally, I’m skeptical that it could be that simple. But in terms of Ockham’s razor, I do think you have to admit that the God hypothesis feels like the simpler one. The idea that the fine-tuning of the universe is the expression of some kind of will, or vector, or intention, does seem more economical to me than the hypothesis of a multiverse of infinite universes — the overwhelming majority of which are empty, or filled with nothing but protons, or otherwise abortive somehow — and it seems to me that the only thing that makes the multiverse hypothesis seem more epistemologically viable is a strong, essentially a priori desire to leave the idea of a creator God off the table.

Like Bernardo Kastrup, Bollore and Bonnaisses talk about this physicalist bias in science. Interestingly, they point out that a surprising number of physicists and mathematicians have actually been pretty theistic — Einstein and Gödel being two notables — and they are also attentive to a number of scientists in the 20th century who through their research into the origins of the universe found themselves pushed from the atheistic end of the continuum at least somewhat in the direction of the theistic end.

But they also observe that one of the reasons the Big Bang hypothesis was resisted initially was because it seemed too outright theistic. For many scientists, a Big Bang too strongly suggested the universe had a beginning. And a clear beginning sounded too much like the act of a Creator. I thought that was pretty interesting.

Was the Big Bang a singular, initiatory act of divine will? Does the fine-tuning of the universe show that will further at work? If so, it seems to me these together would be uncannily concrete demonstrations of God, almost like feeling the kick of a baby from a hand on her mother’s belly — only it’s the living God conspicuously kicking at the wall of the physical universe. As I said, though, I doubt it’s that simple, and I suspect the empirical dance with God will continue to be a coy and elusive one for some time to come.

It is interesting to think about, though. The design of our reality does seem to be exceedingly precise. One wonders if it won’t ultimately be possible to do away with all the other hypotheses one day, and to sit restfully in the idea that our universe is the conspicuously deliberate act of an ordering Mind.

1. If you’re wondering where all the reflection on Christianity has gone in these posts, by the way, or if it seems like a significant backpedaling from earlier reflection, I would say that I still think of this as an essentially Christian reflection. I’m very interested in trying to articulate what seems to me to be a truly viable systematic Christian theology, and it seems to me that all of this discussion pertains, and is actually pretty essential for articulating, for instance, a viable metamodern conception of the “God of Abraham.”

2. Robert Lanza has an interesting book about this called Biocentrism, in which he leans hard into this quantum evidence and argues, fascinatingly, that all of reality is actually being created in real time by the act of consciousness being projected on it.

3. I got this from Bollore and Bonnassies, but they got it from here: John Lennox, “Design of the Universe,” interview in Glad You Asked, small group evangelism resource (2008).

4. Again, Bollore and Bonnassies for me. But they got it from here: “10 Questions for Alan Guth, Pioneer of the Inflationary Model of the Universe,” interview by Christina Couch, July 1, 2016.

5. Me: ibid. Them: Leonard Susskind in Sir Martin Rees, “What We Still Don’t Know: ‘Are We Real?’” television episode, 48:28, aired 2004 on Channel 4 (UK), beginning at 17:17.