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A New Natural Theology?
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11869 |
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BOOK WORLD
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8 / 1987 |
3,563 Words |
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John Polkinghorne
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Let us suppose that your friendly neighborhood deity has offered you the loan of his universe-creating machine. It has a variety of knobs, labeled with the force of nature. If you twiddle the one marked "gravity," you increase or decrease that force in the world you are going to bring into being. Having set the knobs and pulled the handle, you wait a few billion years to see how the universe you have created fares in its development. The insight of the anthropic principle is that unless you have very carefully fine-tuned the settings of these cosmic knobs, your universe will turn out to be pretty dull. Only if you have preset a most delicate balance between your world's forces, closely similar to the balance we observe in our own world, will it prove capable of evolving such complex and interesting systems as you and me.
Only in recent years have we come to understand that we do not live in just any old universe, but rather in one whose fruitful process depends upon an extraordinary series of apparently coincidental collaborations between the forces at work in its physical structure. The first question we must ask about this insight is:
Is it truly significant?
By that question I do not mean, "Is it really the case that the multitude of remarkable circumstances, reviewed by Barrow and Tipler in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle with such encyclopedic thoroughness, are actually necessary for the eventual evolution of carbon-based life on the speck of cosmic dust that we inhabit"? I am sure that Barrow and Tipler are right to claim that in the early history of the universe, the spacings of nuclear levels allowing heavy elements like carbon and iron to form in the interiors of stars, the nature of water, and the chemical properties of carbon are all vitally necessary for out being able to be here to be astonished by them. Rather the question is if it is right to describe this collection of facts, as I have just done, by the somewhat tendentious phrase "fine-tuning necessary for life?" That might be an error for two reasons.
One reason might lie in too narrow a definition of life. It is notoriously difficult to give any definition. But a living system must surely possess such complexity and flexibility in its structure and action that it is open to the future and has a consequent variety of responses to circumstance. In systems as complex as ourselves, this must result in the profound property of self-consciousness. Like the ancient Hebrews, I believe humankind is a psychosomatic unity. I do not think that the Greeks were right to suppose us to be essentially spiritual beings, trapped in the prison of the flesh. For me, the soul is the almost infinitely complex information-bearing pattern of the body, preserved through the continual change of the material that makes us up, and not an ingredient injected into the container of the body. I would defend this position as being thoroughly consistent with the Christian understanding of the nature of men and women.
The only physical systems that we know to have these remarkable properties are carbon-based life, with ourselves as the richest examples. However, our powers to predict, or even to understand, the behavior of matter are pretty limited. Even within the framework of those basic laws of physics that we know well, we often find it difficult to figure out what is going on. (It took more than fifty years to understand the phenomenon of superconductivity in very cold
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