The Design Argument for God's Existence

https://aish.com/the-design-argument-for-gods-existence/?src=ac
THE DESIGN ARGUMENT FOR GOD’S EXISTENCE
RABBI ELIE FEDER PH.D.
Is there a compelling, science-based argument that God exists? Check this one out.
At some stage, nearly everyone ponders the fundamental question: Does God exist? While we each explore our own paths to answer this question, many turn to science as the ultimate guide for unraveling life's most profound mysteries.

Is there a compelling, science-based argument that God exists?

In this essay, we’ll argue that recent discoveries in modern physics provide an argument that strongly suggests that an intelligent designer, God, is behind the universe and its laws. While this particular argument is based upon discoveries that are only a few decades old, the basic form of the argument follows in the footsteps of the age-old design argument.

A Brief Historical Overview of the Design Argument
The Design Argument essentially says that highly organized or complex phenomena in the universe suggest that an intelligent agent caused them.

The argument was clearly formulated by the 11th-century Spanish Rabbi, Bahya ibn Paquda, in his book, Duties of the Heart, as follows:

There are some people who claim that the world came into being by chance, without a Creator who created it and without a Maker who formed it. It is amazing to me how a rational, healthy human being could entertain such a notion. If such a person heard someone else saying the same thing about a water wheel, which turns to irrigate part of a field or a garden, saying that it came to be without a craftsman who designed it and toiled to assemble it and placed each part for a useful purpose - the hearer would be greatly amazed about him, consider him a complete fool, and be swift to call him a liar and reject his words. And since he would reject such a notion for a mere simple, insignificant water wheel, which requires but little ingenuity and which improves but a small portion of the earth - how could he permit himself to entertain such a notion for the entire universe which encompasses the earth and everything in it, and which exhibits a wisdom that no rational human intellect is capable of fathoming, and which is prepared for the benefit of the whole earth and everything on it. How could one claim that it came to be without purposeful intent and thought of a capable wise Being?

Countless people throughout the ages have shared the basic intuition behind this argument - that the amazing design in our universe implies a designer. But not all intuitions are true. To help ground this intuition, many philosophers, theologians, and scientists have worked on formulating it as an argument. Such attempts go way back to ancient Greek thinkers like Plato and Aristotle, and later to thinkers in the Middle Ages from different religious backgrounds like Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologians.

In more recent times (1802), William Paley proposed his famous analogy, comparing the complexity of life to a watch. Just as one would never believe that a watch happened to emerge by chance without a skilled watchmaker, Paley argued that the same is certainly true for our entire universe which is much more complex than a single watch. This idea was very popular until Charles Darwin's book "On the Origin of Species" in 1859. Darwin showed how complex life forms could develop from simpler ones through natural processes like natural selection and survival of the fittest. Modern-day biologist, Richard Dawkins, following in the footsteps of Darwin, likened evolution to a blind watchmaker that creates new life forms without any need for intelligence.

Just as one would never believe that a watch happened to emerge by chance without a skilled watchmaker, Paley argued that the same is certainly true for our entire universe which is much more complex than a single watch.

While many people are under the impression that modern science has undermined the design argument, the truth is the exact opposite. While the formulation of the design argument exclusively from biology has faced its challenges, it is a mistake to view biology in a vacuum, as life is predicated upon chemistry, which itself is ultimately rooted in physics, the bedrock of the scientific enterprise. Therefore, if design would be manifest in the very laws of physics themselves (Spoiler Alert: It is!), that would provide a much more solid foundation for the design argument and its implication of an intelligent cause of our universe.

The Modern Fine-Tuning Argument
The best version of the design argument from modern physics is found in the fine-tuning of the constants of nature. The constants are approximately 25 unchanging numbers that are built into the basic fabric of our universe and determine the quantities of our laws of nature. For example, one constant is approximately 9.109×10−31, the mass of an electron (in kilograms). You can think of this as determining the weight of every single electron, a fundamental building block in the universe. Another constant, the fine structure constant (1/137.035999084), determines how strongly a negatively charged electron is attracted to a positively charged proton.

Being that scientists seek to make sense of the world around us and develop theories that can explain everything in it, they face the big question of how to explain these seemingly arbitrary numbers. In other words, how can any theory of nature determine precise numbers like the fine structure constant - 1/137.035999084? While this question might seem unimportant to a layperson, in 1985 the great physicist, Richard Feynman, famously dubbed this problem “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics.”

How can any theory of nature determine precise numbers like the fine structure constant - 1/137.035999084? The great physicist, Richard Feynman, famously dubbed this problem “one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics.”

The great clue to solving the mystery of the constants came from the surprising discovery of fine-tuning - the fact that the specific values of the constants are not arbitrary, but are highly fine-tuned to allow our complex universe to emerge. In the latter half of the 20th century, scientists discovered that if these numbers were slightly different, there would be no atoms, molecules, planets, life, stars, or galaxies.

The most remarkable case of fine-tuning surfaced with the 1998 discovery that the cosmological constant (a number that determines the expansion rate of the universe) was fine-tuned to about 120 decimal places! If it was even a little bigger, then the early universe would have expanded too quickly and galaxies would never have been able to form. Likewise, if it were a little smaller, then the early universe would have collapsed on itself, preventing galaxies' emergence.

Despite the universally accepted recognition of fine-tuning, the problem remained how to interpret this amazing discovery. No one - theists and atheists alike - thinks that it could be a lucky coincidence - the odds are simply too incomprehensibly small. Yet, the straightforward interpretation is clear: the scientific knowledge that the constants are fine-tuned directly indicates that the cause of the constants is intelligent. This follows from the definition of intelligence as the selection of one possibility from a set of larger possibilities for the purpose of achieving an objective.

Scientists’ Alternative: The Multiverse
Many scientists loathe to accept the existence of an intelligent cause; it sounds too similar to the God they automatically reject as impossible. Their most prominent alternative is the multiverse, which posits the existence of an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes, each with different values for the constants. Given all these universes, it would be no surprise that we find ourselves in a universe with the right constants of nature. After all, the universes with the wrong constants don’t have any intelligent observers to wonder about these questions in the first place.

Some immediately dismiss the multiverse for being speculative and unscientific.

Some immediately dismiss the multiverse for being speculative and unscientific. After all, it clearly deviates from the well-established scientific method rooted in the process of hypothesis, experimentation, and observation. Even though we are sympathetic to this serious charge, we think it’s helpful to to see why, even in its own framework, the multiverse fails to be a good scientific explanation for fine-tuning.

For a multiverse theory to be able to explain fine-tuning without an intelligent cause, it must establish three premises:

There are an infinite number of universes;
The values of the constants vary between universes;
Our universe is the typical universe with intelligent observers.
It’s fairly obvious why multiverse scientists must justify the first two premises. If there aren’t a massive number of universes, then it will still be unlikely for the constants of nature to have the right values by chance alone. And if there are infinitely many universes but they all have the same fine-tuned constants, obviously nothing is gained.

The need for the last premise is a bit more subtle. The best way to see why it’s necessary is to notice that without this premise, an infinite varied multiverse could literally explain anything and everything. This is because it predicts that everything possible will occur somewhere in the infinite varied multiverse. (To take this to an extreme, it even predicts a universe in which a heavenly voice declares to all humanity that all multiverse theories are false!) But the problem is that a theory that can explain anything and everything, in truth explains nothing at all. Seen from this perspective, a multiverse theory based exclusively on the first two premises fails to be able to explain anything in particular, such as the observed values for the constants of nature. (This is in contrast to the theory of an intelligent cause which explains a universe with order, structure, and complexity, but would fail to explain chaos and disorder.)

Multiverse scientists can get out of this problem if they can establish the third premise - that our universe is a typical, or a likely universe with intelligent observers. If so, scientists would only be able to explain our universe as a result of random chance but wouldn’t be able to equally explain all other possible universes with intelligent observers (like those with heavenly voices falsifying the multiverse).

The difficulty with rescuing the multiverse and establishing this third premise is that it’s impossible to naturally determine which universes are typical in an infinite varied multiverse. This is because not only does an infinite varied multiverse contain every possible universe, it contains an infinite number of copies of every type of universe. In the words of physicist Alan Guth, “In an eternally inflating universe, anything that can happen will happen; in fact, it will happen an infinite number of times.”

The problem is that if there are truly an infinite number of every type of universe, it becomes impossible to compute probabilities in a straight-forward manner, a necessary step for determining which universes are typical. This is the crux of the devastating measure problem and is the reason why some scientists reject the multiverse as being nonscientific.

While there is much more to say about fine-tuning and about why the multiverse is a bad philosophical theory, to fully clinch the argument it’s even more important to formulate a clear, coherent, compelling idea of God that answers commonly raised questions against the theory of an intelligent cause. Nevertheless, we hope this basic presentation can help you appreciate that the fine-tuning argument from modern physics is a prime representative of the modern world.

For a more detailed version of this argument as well as two additional design arguments from modern physics, see https://www.physicstogod.com/3-proofs-of-god-from-science.

Click here to comment on this article
https://aish.com/the-design-argument-for-gods-existence/?src=ac