#1: The Fine-Tuning Argument for God
Rigged lotteries, Lost's best episode, Einstein's biggest mistake, and the explanatory power of design
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Here’s a thought experiment, borrowed from the philosopher Derek Parfit:
Imagine you are entered into two lotteries. In the first, you are lined up with one thousand people, one of whom will be randomly chosen to win the prize. In the second, you pick blindly from one thousand straws; one of the straws is longer than all the others, and if you pick the long straw you win the prize.
Let’s say you win both lotteries. Congrats! Winning either one of them was quite unlikely (1 in 1000, to be exact). But after a closer look, in the first case there isn’t much to be explained. After all, someone had to win, and it was just as likely to be you as anyone else. From anyone else’s perspective, nothing special happened.
What about the second case? The odds were exactly the same. But it’s much harder to deny that your outcome was special, since it was the only outcome that might have surprised anyone. Why was this special result also what happened?
The second lottery is the kind of thing I’m interested in explaining. Especially when the stakes are higher than someone winning a prize. Like, say, the existence of the universe.
Man of Science, Man of Faith
In the Season 2 premiere of Lost, “Man of Science, Man of Faith”, two main characters have a disagreement over whether to open a mysterious metal hatch in the ground. Locke, man of faith, wants to open the hatch, while Jack, man of science, urges caution. Locke turns to Jack and teeters his palms, gesturing to their situation, marooned by plane crash on a remote island with supernatural properties, and says: “Do you really think all this is an accident?”
Do you really think all this is an accident? Since the scientific revolution, science and faith have debated this question in reference to the very existence of the universe. Putting aside the, erm, shortcomings of the major world religions, the idea of an inexplicable, supernatural creator didn’t sit well with the disciples of the Enlightenment. Still, science was a fledgling enterprise, failing its way to answering the small questions without much hope of going after the big ones.
But over the past 100 years, modern physics has advanced our understanding of the world at an unprecedented rate. Physicists now have a set of theoretically grounded and empirically proven models of nature (the major ones being the Standard Model, Quantum Mechanics, and General Relativity). These models, which include relationships between fundamental forces (F=ma) as well as the precise values of physical constants (the charge of one electron), perfectly describe nearly every physical process imaginable, from the microscopic to the galactic.
One might have expected these discoveries to further divide science and faith; after all, faith’s best argument is that despite the best efforts of science, so much of the world’s true nature remains elusive. But when physicists looked at all their new evidence, they came to a shocking conclusion: considering the immutable laws of nature, if certain physical constants had values even slightly different, the universe would have gone haywire from the beginning, precluding the long galactic chain of events leading to carbon-based life on Earth. As the aforementioned Parfit puts it in his wonderful essay “Why Anything? Why This?”
Many physicists now believe that, for life to be possible, various features of the Universe must be almost precisely as they are.
In other words, the values of these fundamental constants are special in the same way it was special for you to draw the longest straw in the second lottery.
Cosmic Fine-Tuning
Instead of saying these values are special, physicists say they are “fine-tuned.” This is because what’s “special” about these values is actually how random they are. It would be less surprising, for instance, if physical constants were found to be mathematically special numbers, like 0, 1, e, or π. In reality, physical constants like proton mass and electric field strength are “random” numbers, usually involving long strings of decimals, that nevertheless appear to all be precisely calibrated for structure, order, and life.
Examples abound. If the gravitational force constant (the baseline strength of gravity’s attractive force) were slightly weaker, planets never could have formed, but if it were slightly stronger, they would explode from the pressure. The mass of the neutron is exactly 1.00137841870 times the mass of the proton. If this ratio were any higher or lower, the balance of hydrogen and helium in the early universe would shift dramatically, precluding the bonding of heavier elements like carbon.
The most astonishing instance of fine-tuning, the one that most urgently demands an explanation, is the “cosmological constant” (Λ). First, a little background. Einstein conceived Λ in 1917 in his quest to prove a static universe, meaning one that was not expanding nor contracting in size. Λ was a phantom variable, cherry-picked by Einstein to save his relativistic equations from collapse by counterbalancing the effects of gravity. In 1931, Hubble proved that the universe was expanding, and Einstein disavowed his constant, eventually regarding it as one of his greatest mistakes.
Then, in 1998, a remarkable discovery was made: not only is the universe expanding, but the rate of its expansion is accelerating all the time. More than eighty years after Einstein clumsily plugged it into his equations, the cosmological constant was revived, this time with a clear meaning (the energy density of empty space, also known as “dark energy”) and a clear value (really really really small, but not quite zero).
It turns out that when you’re dealing with the one force in the universe that directly counteracts gravity, things get pretty finicky. Any smaller (or, heaven forbid, negative) and the universe would have collapsed in on itself a long time ago; any bigger and the universe expands far too quickly, things fall apart, and again, we don’t live to tell about it on Substack. The craziest part is that the observed value of the all-important Λ differs from the expected theoretical value by a factor of… ~10^120. This is widely known as “the largest discrepancy between theory and experiment in the history of science.” And now we’re back to our original question: Why was this special result also what happened?
Or, as Wittgenstein put it:
‘Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.’
The Watch and The Watchmaker
In William Paley’s Natural Theology, published in 1800, he planted the seeds for how we might interpret evidence of fine-tuning. Here’s his famous formulation, lightly edited for clarity:
In crossing a beach, suppose I hit my foot against a stone. Suppose I were asked how the stone came to be there. I might possibly answer that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever. It would be difficult to show that this answer is absurd.
But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be asked how the watch happened to be in that place. I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given.
Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other: namely, that when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive -- what we could not discover in the stone -- that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose. If the different parts had been differently shaped from what they are, of a different size from what they are, or placed after any other manner or in any other order than that in which they are placed, either no motion at all would have been carried on in the machine, or none which would have answered the use that is now served by it.
This brings us to the inference we think is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker-that there must have existed, at some time and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer, who comprehended its construction and designed its use.
No such inference forces itself upon the stone.
Full disclosure, I added in that last sentence. A professor of mine said it once, and I could swear he attributed it to Paley, but now I can’t find it anywhere. But I love it, and hopefully, Paley doesn’t mind.
If you’re anything like me, and you witnessed someone draw the one straw out of one thousand that wins them the lottery, your first thought was the same as Paley when he saw the watch, only more cynical: the game was rigged!
This is basically how many physicists respond to fine-tuning: these things look a little too purposeful to be accidental. All the more so because the values of many physical constants aren’t bound; their range of possible values is literally infinite. For one of them to be right might be a coincidence. But for all of them to be right suggests that the game was indeed rigged. Physicists call this rigging “design.”
We might imagine the creation of the universe as a series of darts thrown onto an infinite board. Each dart determines the value of one constant. Thinly spread across the board are tiny bullseyes corresponding to the optimal values of each constant. Now, given the reality that basically every dart found its bullseye, what’s more likely? That the darts were thrown randomly, or that someone threw them with the intention of creating a universe of order, structure, and life?
The latter option sounds a lot like God. It’s an easy leap from design to intelligent design, and many leading physicists and philosophers consider the fine-tuning argument the best evidence yet for the existence of a higher being. There you have it: a point for faith, straight from the mouth of science.
(There are a few popular objections to the design argument. The first is known as the “anthropic principle”. It goes like this: of course the universe’s constants have values fine-tuned for life. If not, we wouldn’t be around to ask the question! This is a fun, intuitive mindfuck, but it’s ultimately circular logic, and it doesn’t explain anything.
The more “scientific” objection proposes the existence of a “multiverse,” wherein our universe is just one of a very large number created at the Big Bang. This view treats creation like the first lottery; with so many universes, one was bound to have the right constants, and that’s the one we find ourselves in. I’d encourage anyone to go down a YouTube rabbit hole on multiverse theory, but since a feature of the multiverse is our inability to ever see the other universes, this too looks like an explanatory dead end.)
I find all of this fascinating, which is why I just wrote 1200 words on it. But I also think that this method - explaining apparent coincidences as features of design - is powerful beyond esoteric questions about the nature of the universe.
For one, you can’t think about design without thinking about the motivations of the designer. Questions come to mind. Why is it so hard to control your data on the internet? Why do more women than men die in car crashes? Why are financial markets so opaque? Why don’t Americans directly elect their president?
Some of these questions have easier answers than others. We should certainly be wary of allowing our desire for order to supersede our commitment to logic, which is the domain of conspiracy theories. But if you’re looking for meaning - cosmic, religious, or otherwise - design isn’t a bad place to start.
Recommendations
“Everything is Broken,” an essay by Alana Newhouse, editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine, that doesn’t fit neatly into any political spectrum.
You know that moment (around 2:50) in Kanye’s “New Slaves” when it suddenly switches from dark noisy techno to something completely opposite and sublime?
Turns out he STOLE the sample for the last part from this Hungarian pop song:
A funny and timely excerpt from Lauren Oyler’s forthcoming novel Fake Accounts. Oyler is primarily a critic, notorious for panning books everybody else seems to love. Now she’s on the other side, and already getting a taste of her own medicine.
All of the Gamestop content
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Until next month,
Micah