They Said They Left Their Bodies

 In general professors are extremely poor about studying reports of paranormal phenomena, reports of extraordinary human abilities and reports of extraordinary human experiences. In the rare cases when a professor attempts to research such matters, he or she will typically use some incompetent search strategy.  A professor will typically search for some topic using only a search of published scientific papers. That is not a very good strategy when searching for reports of the three types of things mentioned above, because most reports of such things do not end up in scientific papers, but appear in publications such as newspapers, books and periodicals. 

It is not true that reports published in scientific papers are in general more reliable than reports published in newspapers, books and periodicals. I can think of endless reports I have read in newspapers and periodicals that met very good standards of evidence, by giving first-person accounts of experiences that occurred a short time ago, with named witnesses, named dates of observations and named places of observations. Conversely, scientific papers typically fail to follow good standards for reporting observations, because they tend to use a passive voice without mentioning specific observers, and they usually fail to specify exactly where and when an observation occurred. When reading some scientific paper, you may ask: who was the person who made some crucial hard-to-get-right observation that an entire paper hinges upon -- some professor who has used some fancy piece of equipment many times, or merely some newly admitted graduate student who may have been fumbling around when using the equipment the first time? We can't tell, because scientific papers are always using the passive voice, in a way that no specific observer is mentioned. For example, in scientific papers we do not read sentences such as,  "On July 18, 2024 in Room 203 of the Cornell Neuroscience Lab, John Jacobsen tested the mice using a Morris water maze."  Instead we read passive voice sentence such as "The mice were tested using the Morris water maze."

Let us look at some periodical accounts of out-of-body experiences, reports that were obtained using the search phrase "out-of-the-body experience." Before about 1975, this phrase was more popular than the term "out-of-body experience," which has become the more common phrase in the past several decades. 

In the 1965 newspaper account here, TV personality Hughie Green says this about his experience in a car crash:

In the 1963 account here, a baron (Lord Ogmore) recalls an out-of-body experience:

The 1971 newspaper account below (which you can read here) discusses research by a South African researcher named J. C. Poynton. The terms "astral travel" and "astral projection" are terms for out-of-body experiences. Click on the image to read it better. 

On page 62 of the January 26, 1934 edition of the periodical Light, which you can read here, we have the account below of an out-of-body experience:

"A correspondent, Mrs. F. Shepherd, sends us an account of the following out-of-the-body experience. ' I had had a severe shock,' she writes, ' when I suddenly noticed that I was breathing in a strange way, and with the last conscious breath I found myself slipping out of the top of my head. I was an exact counterpart of the body that lay upon the bed. I could see that it had its eyes and mouth closed, and that I was connected with it by some kind of cord. I tried in vain to make myself known to the people in the room, who took no notice of me whatever. My mind was very active; I wished to recover the use of my body, and knew that in order to enter it again I must get round to the foot end of the figure. Movement was difficult in what appeared to be a very heavy atmosphere, but eventually I reached the right position ; whereupon I seemed to dissolve into a quick-silver-like fluid and slipped into my body by the toes. I advanced until I reached the centre of the body where the cord was fixed, after which I was my corporeal self once more.' "

In the 1977 article here, Joan Kron reports on research into out-of-body experiences. She states that she had several herself, stating this:

In the 1968 article here, we read of a large study of many people who had out-of-body experiences. 

At the link here, we have a speaker claiming that when she asks her audience how many have had an out-of-body experience, she gets about one third of the audience raising their hands. 

In 1968 there appeared the book Out-of-the-Body Experiences by Celia Green, the Director of the Institute of Psychophysical Research at Oxford University. Registered users at www.archive.org can read the book here. In 1966 an appeal had been made by radio for accounts of people who had such experiences. About 400 responses were received. Two questionnaires were sent to these people, and 326 replied to the first, with 251 to the second. 

On page 22 we have these statistics: about 70% reported only one out-of-body experience, about 9 percent reported 2 such experiences, about 5%  reported three such experiences, about 2% reported four such experiences, and about 21% reporting six or more such experiences. On page 24 we have a striking account by someone put in a glass cubicle in a hospital while suffering from a high fever. She reports being out of her body for 8 or 9 days, feeling no pain. She says, "I was no longer in my body but up in the corner of the cubicle watching the nurses flitting about." 

On page 39 Green says, "Many subjects comment on their feelings of well-being and reality in their new position apart from their physical body, and there are no counter-instances, that is to say, no subjects remark on having felt incomplete, unsubstantial or unreal in their new position."

The Mistakes and Myths of Milner's Manifesto

Yuri Milner is a super-rich scientist, entrepreneur and investor who has donated millions to various projects such as the Breakthrough Prize and the Breakthrough Listen project, one of many SETI projects searching for radio signals for extraterrestrial civilizations. Milner has published a philosophical manifesto he calls the Eureka Manifesto. You can access it by reaching the page here. 

You would think that someone with so many millions would be able to put up a bug-free web site that made it real easy for people to read his manifesto. But when I go to the site using a PC, I experience some difficulties. The manifesto is introduced on a short page with a Read button at the bottom. Clicking on that button takes me to a blank page with nothing to read. 

There is a Download button that takes me to a page that offers four download choices. Clicking on PDF, I do not get sent to a web page of his site displaying a PDF file I can read. All that has gone on is that a PDF file has been downloaded to my Documents folder. If I remember to look at some list I can get in the top right corner of my Chrome browser, I can read that download. But how many potential readers, we may wonder, simply give up in frustration?  

Let's look at some of the mistakes and myths in Milner's Eureka Manifesto.

Page 20: "The journey from the little sphere to the mind that imagines it – and beyond – is the story of everything. The Universal Story. The beats of this story are a series of 'phase transitions': critical changes of state, as when water freezes to ice. These transitions shaped order out of chaos."  

Here we have an introduction to the utterly lame explanation attempts that Milner will give. He will be attempting to explain great leaps of biological organization and mental capabilities by appealing to the physics concept of "phase transitions."  A phase transition is a change of state like what goes on when water freezes or ice melts. It makes no sense to try to explain great leaps of biological organization by describing them as phase transitions. Frozen water is not very more impressively organized than liquid water; and neither liquid water nor frozen water have any functional information.  So you don't do anything to credibly explain some great biological transition requiring a huge amount of new functional information (such as the transition from non-life to life) and a huge leap in organization by saying that it was a phase transition.  

Phase transitions

Page 22: "And now, on the third planet out, a new phase transition begins. Deep in an ocean or on some ancient shore, spiral-shaped ribbons of molecules, sealed inside bubbles, have found a way to copy themselves. As the bubbles – the first cells – move through their environment, they do something that’s never been done before, possibly anywhere in the Universe. Reacting to the conditions around them, absorbing nutrients and avoiding hazards, they develop an ability to model the outside world."

 We have here neither an accurate description of the first living cell nor a credible description of how it could have originated.  The language is very misleading language making a self-reproducing cell sound billions of times simpler than it is. And a cell does not have an ability to model the outside world. A self-reproducing cell is something exponentially more complex than a mere bubble with DNA. Even the simplest self-reproducing cell requires hundreds of types of protein molecules, each its own separate complex invention. The origin of something that complex would be something hugely too complicated to be described as anything like any of the "phase transitions" known to physicists. 

Milner is a physicist. I could make a joke here along the lines of: "To a carpenter, everything is a hammer or a nail; and to a physicist everything is a phase transition."  

 Page 23: "The cell, tiny and simple as it is, holds a sliver of knowledge."

Even the simplest self-reproducing cell is something of very great functional complexity, not something "simple." The amount of genetic information required to have the simplest self-reproducing cell is equal to the functional information in about 100 pages of text, each having hundreds of words. That is much more than "a sliver of knowledge."

Page 23: "For over a billion years, there are only single cells. Then comes a leap in complexity – another phase transition: one cell gets inside another and joins forces with it."

This passage refers to the origin of eukaryotic cells, vastly more complex than the simplest type of cells, called prokaryotic cells. Darwinists and materialists have no credible story to explain such a huge leap in complexity, which has been compared in the leap in complexity of making an upgrade from a tiny shack to the mansion of a multi-millionaire such as Milner. Such a huge leap forward in organization and information cannot be credibly explained by the idea that "one cell gets inside another." 

Page 23: "Colonies of cells begin to cohere, acting as single organisms."

Referring to the origin of multicellular life, this is the most vacuous hand-waving. The origin of visible multicellular organisms is something trillions of times too hard to explain by such "the cells started to stick together" explanation. Currently biologists have no credible explanation for how there could have occurred a transition from microscopic life to large visible organisms with complex anatomy. 

Page 23: "Organisms comprising trillions of cells develop sensory organs and nervous systems, then eventually brains – organs that can build and update more sophisticated models and select the ones with the best predictions."  

We have here here no explanation as to how such wonders of biological innovation could have occurred. There is no evidence that brains "can build and update more sophisticated models and select the ones with the best predictions." We merely know that humans can create models that predict things.  No neuroscientist has a credible explanation of how a brain could create such models or make predictions. 

Page 23: "The next phase transition occurs when intelligent animals find ways to communicate, spreading models beyond the individual brain."  

The reference is to the origin of language, something that Darwinists have no credible explanation for. Describing it as a "phase transition" does nothing to explain it. 

Page 30: "The simplest cell already had part of the Story to tell, written in its genes. A tiny part, true – a fragment of a sentence, describing a droplet of ocean on a primeval planet. But as genes built brains and brains built cultures and cultures built a shared store of knowledge, more and more fragments became legible."

The description of the information content in the simplest cell is wrong by a factor of about 10,000 times. The amount of functional information in the simplest cell is equivalent to about the information content in a book of 100 pages -- vastly more than "a fragment of a sentence." The claim that "genes built brains" is false. As discussed here, DNA and its genes do not specify how to make any human organ,  do not specify how to make up  any of the tissues that make up organs, do not specify how to make up  any of the cells that make up tissues,  do not specify how to make up  any of the organelles that make up such cells, and do not specify how to make up any of the protein complexes that are crucial to the construction and maintenance of cells. 

Page 31: "In the dance of chance and time, we found ourselves in a form that can explore and understand. This is our gift. Our precious birthright. To be awake. To have minds formed from matter. To look out at the world and understand." 

Chance and time are not credible explanations for human bodies, and nothing Milner has said bears any resemblance to a credible  explanation for human bodies or any type of simpler life. A mind is an immaterial thing, and is not "formed from matter."  

Page 32: "We have the opportunity to embody that extraordinary transformation, to embrace it and carry it forward into the future. To stay awake. To explore and understand our Universe. That means all of us."

Because of all of the many ocean-sized shortfalls in our current understanding of matter, life and mind, it is  overconfidence to claim that we currently can "understand our universe." 

Page 32: "Without our commitment to the Mission, the Universe could close its eyes and drift back into sleep."

This statement makes no sense at all. 

Page 36: "It seems inevitable that evolution will, over time, create life, minds, and civilizations that will keep expanding the scope of their discoveries."

Nothing in the manifesto justifies such a statement, nor does anything in the explanation of Darwinists or materialists. Darwinian evolution cannot occur until life exists, so evolution does not "create life" from nonlife. Nor does evolution create minds or civilizations. Human minds are not credibly explained by human brains, for reasons very abundantly discussed at my site here.  Human minds are not credibly explained by the theory of evolution by so-called natural selection.  This shortfall was explained at length by the co-founder of that theory (Alfred Russel Wallace) in his essay "The Limits of Natural Selection as Applied to Man," which you can read here and here.  Milner donated  many millions to the Breakthrough Listen project, which spent quite a few years searching thousands of stars looking for signs of extraterrestrial life. No such signs were found. This is the opposite of what we would expect to happen if "it seems inevitable that evolution will, over time, create life, minds, and civilizations."

Page 37: "Let’s step back to that moment on primeval Earth when two cells merged together. That union, which was the genesis of all complex life, came most likely over a billion years after the appearance of the first cells." 

This is a reference to the origin of eukaryotic cells, things a million times too complex and organized to be explained by some mere story that "two cells merged together." The claim that the origin of eukaryotic cells was "the genesis of all complex life" is hugely mistaken. Even the simplest type of cell (a prokaryotic cell) is an enormously complex system. 

Page 46: "Jill Tarter, a pioneer in the search for intelligent life, famously compared the searches undertaken in the decades since the Green Bank conference to dipping a single glass into the ocean and wondering why you don’t catch a fish." 

The history of SETI searches is by now very extensive, with very many thousands of observation hours. The entire sky has been searched multiple times by large expensive projects. So it is very misleading when SETI enthusiasts try to make us think that the search for radio signals has only just begun. To the contrary, it has been well-funded for more than 50 years. You can read my post here for a list of many of the main searches that have occurred. 

Page 53: "We now have a glimpse of the bounty of worlds the Universe has to offer. Even beyond the Earth-like planets identified so far, we know there are super-Earths, water worlds, probably planets made of diamond."

Here the manifesto incorrectly claims that there have been Earth-like planets discovered. No such discovery ever occurred. A planet should never be called Earth-like unless life has been discovered on it, and life has not been discovered on any other planet. 

Page 68:

On this page we have a Plan of Action which consists of these items:

• "invest resources into fundamental science and space exploration
•  enable artificial intelligence to drive scientific progress 
•  celebrate scientists as heroes 
•  focus education on the universal story and use the power of art to tell it 
•  spark a new enlightenment in which everyone can contribute to a shared culture of knowledge"

The "universal story" that Milner has told is one that makes no sense. Nowhere does it provide any credible explanations for any of the main wonders of biology or mind. So it would be a huge mistake to "focus education" on so bad and unbelievable an origins story. Huge problems with so-called artificial intelligence systems is that they do not really understand anything, and that such systems worsen echo-chamber effects, by making frequentist judgments of truth, in which the most common answers are treated as true. The use of such "the most common claim is true" assumptions by AI systems make them unsuitable for the job of driving scientific progress in an intelligent way. "Follies of the herd" mistakes in dogma-clinging scientist belief communities tend to be worsened by so-called artificial intelligence systems.

As for the bullet list item that we should "celebrate scientists as heroes," and the similar claim on page 69 that we should "raise their profiles and prestige," it sounds like more of what we have already too much of: the placing of scientists atop pedestals, and the crowning of scientists as Grand Lords of Explanation. Such hero worship is an obstruction to scientific progress, and a stumbling block. The placing of Charles Darwin on some high pedestal has been a gigantic mistake, blinding people to critically examining all the flaws and fables of his error-ridden effort to explain the origin of species. Instead of putting scientists on pedestals and making them the objects of idol worship, we should be subjecting the utterances of every scientist to the same critical scrutiny we apply to politicians. 

In the culture of Darwinist materialism there has been too much deceit and conceit. The deceit occurred through the nearly 100 types of deception I list in my post here. The conceit occurred when people went ego-tripping by wrongly crowning themselves as Grand Lords of Explanation, without ever deserving such a crown. 

Page 68 -- 69: "There is ultimately only one field of inquiry: the Universal Story, which contains the history of our Universe, our planet, and our civilization, including the realm of the social sciences and humanities."

This is very bad nonsense. There are very many fields of inquiry. If Milner had studied more of these fields of inquiry, he might understand some of the mistakes he has made in his manifesto. 

Based on what I read about him on wikipedia.org, Milner seems like a fine fellow who is very well-meaning and generous. It's a shame that his manifesto seems lacking in original and noteworthy thought. He sounds like someone who is much better at technological innovation and making money and philanthropy than at philosophical innovation or philosophical insight. A second effort by him might well yield much better results. Good original work in philosophy related to origins or grand questions tends to require diligent effort over long periods of time, along with a willingness to make a deep study of many fields of inquiry. 

Artemis: A Program With No Compelling Rationale

NASA has a Big New Task it is eagerly working on: an Artemis program to have  astronauts go back to the moon. This is something that was already accomplished quite a few times more than 50 years ago, when US astronauts not only orbited the moon, but walked on the moon, and drove around the moon in a little vehicle rather like a golf cart. In a 2022 post I pointed out that NASA's web page promoting the Artemis program miserably failed to articulate a convincing rationale for the mission. The moon is a lifeless rock of no real scientific interest, and its surface is a very lethal environment for reasons discussed in the infographic below. 

A recent article on the LiveScience.com site is entitled "Artemis II: NASA is preparing for a return to the moon, but why is it going back?" The article writer named Pester tries to conjure up a case for the Artemis program, but fails to make any compelling case. 

Here are some of the statements made in the article, and why they do not hold up well to scrutiny. 

• "It's also no secret that China threatens to overtake the U.S. as the leader in space exploration, and the U.S. doesn't want to fall behind." This is the old "space race" rationale used to try to justify the unnecessary Apollo program. We were told that we must spend many billions landing men on the moon, because we cannot ever let the Russians beat us in a space race.  Such a rationale was never a convincing reason for funding the Apollo program, and it is not a convincing reason for funding the Artemis mission. 
• "From a scientific perspective, humanity still has much to learn about the moon. Earth's natural satellite has a long history preserved in its rocks, and it could help researchers better understand our own planet, the solar system and the universe at large." Rock samples from the moon have already been retrieved, and such samples did not advance human knowledge in any notable way. Retrieving additional rocks from the moon will not help us better understand our planet, our solar system, or our  universe at large. And if you want to retrieve such samples, they can be retrieved at a far lower cost by unmanned robotic missions. 
• "The moon and Earth are like twins that have been dancing around each other since the beginning of the solar system around 4.5 billion years ago, said Sara Russell, a planetary scientist at the Natural History Museum in London. This means they have a shared history of impacts from asteroids, comets and other objects, 'It just has this 4-and-a-half-billion-year record of what has happened on its surface' Russell told Live Science. 'We can see how affected it has been by impacts, which have also happened to the Earth, but we don't see evidence for that on the Earth so easily.' "  Oops, what a huge failure this is to explain any compelling rationale for further studying the moon. It is ridiculous to claim that Earth and the moon are like twins. Earth is a lovely planet teeming with life, and the moon is a lifeless rock. No, Earth and the moon do not "have a shared history of impacts from asteroids, comets and other objects." A comet or asteroid hitting the moon was not a comet or asteroid hitting Earth. Craters on the moon provide evidence of asteroid or meteor impacts in its past, but the topic of exactly what bombardments the moon received long ago is not an important scientific topic. Not 1% of the population has any interest in what type of bombardments the moon received ages ago. There are endless thousands of scientific research topics very much more important and more worthy of funding than the bombardment history of the moon, which is pretty much the topic least worthy of scientific funding. 
• "Traveling to the moon with a crew will also enable mission scientists to pursue another, perhaps more disturbing, goal of the Artemis program — investigating the effects of space travel on human physiology. The Artemis II flight is an opportunity for new studies of astronaut health, including how space travel influences the body, mind and behavior, and how those impacts could affect future missions, according to NASA." There is no need to travel to the moon to research the effect of space travel on human physiology. You can do the same type of study with astronauts orbiting Earth.  What we have learned about effects such as cosmic rays is information very discouraging to any idea of colonizing the moon (information summarized in the infographic above). Having no atmosphere, the moon is subject to constant bombardment by radiation from deep space, with the worst being cancer-causing particles called cosmic rays. So anyone living for years on the moon would be forced to live underground. 
• "Space exploration is difficult, dangerous and expensive, so NASA needs to test its systems and its astronauts on the moon before sending them to farther destinations. Establishing a lunar base could be key to traveling to Mars."  Nonsense. Establishing a base on the moon will not be a dry run for sending men to Mars. And there is no reason why humans need to go to Mars. We sometimes hear "don't put all of your eggs in one basket" rationales for colonizing Mars. If you want to have people protected against the hazards of global warming or nuclear war or an asteroid strike, it is ten times easier to build underground colonies or undersea colonies than to build bases on the moon or Mars. 
• "NASA has claimed that if it can harvest the moon's water, the space agency can use it to help make drinking water, oxygen and rocket fuel — although this remains unproven."  There is virtually no water on the moon, making any "exploit lunar water resources" claims laughable.  
• "NASA has said that its moon strategy stimulates the commercial space industry and creates business opportunities in ways that could foster a lunar economy. The lunar economy currently stems from NASA working with private companies that provide commercial deliveries to support the space agency's mission. Essentially, NASA pays companies to take stuff to the moon."  This sounds like welfare for corporations, another case of the government acting to enrich giant corporations rather than doing something to help the common man keep his head above water. 
• "Moon mining has the potential to become a billion-dollar industry. The moon harbors resources like rare earth elements, which are mined for electronics on Earth, as well as a potential gold mine in its stocks of helium-3, which could eventually be used in nuclear fusion reactors to make near-limitless clean energy." There is no practical prospect of profitably mining the moon in the next two decades.  If such a thing is ever done, it would require some distant technology not available for many years, and such a possibility does not justify expenditures for Artemis in the next few years. In a European Space Agency article about the concept of extracting helium from the moon, we read, "In 2007, the theoretical physicist Frank Close famously described the concept as 'moonshine' ".  Maybe he used that word for nonsense because the helium on the moon is at very low abundances such as about 1 part per billion. 
• "If the U.S. is to win this second race for the moon, then the upcoming Artemis missions will need to remain on schedule. China wants to land its own astronauts on the moon before 2030, which is at most two years after the first Artemis lunar surface missions, assuming they are a success." More "space race" nonsense. We did not need to beat the Russians in the first "space race" to the moon, and we do not need to beat the Chinese in a second "space race" to the moon. 

After the successful launch of the Artemis II mission, which merely went into orbit around the moon, the Ars Technica site published an article entitled "Why is NASA bothering to go back to the Moon if we’ve already been there?" The author struggles to explain some convincing rationale, but all he gives is the emptiest of "handful of moonbeams" reasons. Along the way, he makes some interesting confessions such as these:

" In the end, success with Artemis II may provide a short blip of public bonhomie, but I don’t expect it to last. And with the turbulent news cycle of 2026, I expect Artemis II to be largely forgotten by most Americans before the end of April...Most polls show that as many as 90 percent of Americans don’t care about returning to the Moon or establishing a presence there."

The Forgotten Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Argument From Cosmic Fine-Tuning

Discussions of arguments for the existence of God have traditionally mentioned three different arguments:

1. An argument called the cosmological argument, which is metaphysical.  
2. An argument called the argument from design, based on aspects of the universe that seem designed or organisms in nature that seem designed. 
3. A metaphysical argument called the ontological argument. 

There are different versions of the argument from design. Prior to 1950 most versions of the argument seemed to be based almost entirely on appearances of design in biology. The classic exposition of such an argument was William Paley's book Natural Theology. 

But after 1980 there began to arise a different version of the argument from design, one based on physics and cosmology. We can use the name "the argument from cosmic fine-tuning" to refer to this version of the argument from design. The argument was based on seemingly fine-tuned aspects of two different things: (1) the Big Bang event that apparently began the universe, and (2) the universe's laws and fundamental constants. 

What is a fundamental constant? It is a number that is the same everywhere in the universe, a number that crucially affects the behavior and appearance of matter and systems in the universe. The table below lists some of these fundamental constants. 

Speed of light	299,792,458 meters per second
Planck's constant	6.62607004 × 10-34 m2 kg / s
Gravitational constant	6.67408 × 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2
Proton rest mass	1.6726231 × 10-27 kg
Electron rest mass	9.1093897 × 10-31 kg
Proton charge	1.60217733 × 10-19 coulomb
Electron charge	-1.60217733 × 10-19 coulomb

These numbers are called constants because they appear to be unvarying throughout the universe. Apparently everywhere in the universe all resting protons have a mass exactly equal to the proton mass stated above. Apparently everywhere in the universe all resting electrons have a mass exactly equal to the electron mass stated above. Apparently everywhere in the universe all protons have an electric charge exactly equal to the proton charge stated above. Apparently everywhere in the universe all electrons have an electric charge exactly equal to the electric charge stated above. The electric charge of all protons (a positive charge) is the very precise opposite of the electric charge of all electrons (a negative charge), something which physical science fails to explain.  

The argument from cosmic fine-tuning argues that some or most of these fundamental constants are fine-tuned, in the sense that they have values within a very narrow range compatible with the existence of intelligent life in the universe. The same argument appeals to fine-tuning in the laws of nature, and fine-tuning in natural quantities that could have been vastly different, such as the universe's initial expansion rate and the universe's initial entropy. An interesting question is: who first advanced something like this argument from cosmic fine-tuning?

To answer this question, we must go all the way back to the year 1834. In this year there was published the work "Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology" by William Whewell, which can be read here and here.

The Google Gemini infographic below summarizes Whewell's accomplishments in science, mathematics and education. 

Wikipedia gives a biographical sketch of William Whewell here. It is an article describing someone who seemed to be a figure of very high brilliance. We read that Whewell was a "polymath" who was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. We read this:

"The breadth of Whewell's endeavours is his most remarkable feature. In a time of increasing specialisation, Whewell belonged in an earlier era when natural philosophers investigated widely. He published work in mechanics, physics, geology, astronomy, and economics, while also composing poetry, writing a Bridgewater Treatise, translating the works of Goethe, and writing sermons and theological tracts. In mathematics, Whewell introduced what is now called the Whewell equation, defining the shape of a curve without reference to an arbitrarily chosen coordinate system. He also organized thousands of volunteers internationally to study ocean tides, in what is now considered one of the first citizen science projects. He received the Royal Medal for this work in 1837.

One of Whewell's greatest gifts to science was his wordsmithing. He corresponded with many in his field and helped them come up with neologisms for their discoveries. Whewell coined, among other terms, scientist, physicist, linguistics, consilience, catastrophism, uniformitarianism, and astigmatism; he suggested to Michael Faraday the terms electrode, ion, dielectric, anode, and cathode."

We read in the Wikipedia article of the most astonishing output by Whewell, mainly in the fields of science and mathematics. 

On page 9  of his  work "Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology" William Whewell stated this:

"It will be our business to show that the laws which really prevail in nature are, by their form, that is, by the nature of the connexion which they establish among the quantities and properties which they regulate, remarkably adapted to the office which is assigned them ; and thus other evidence of selection, design, and goodness, in the power by which they were established." 

Whewell attempted to discover numbers in nature that seemed fine-tuned. He discussed examples such as the length of the year, the length of the day, and the mass of the earth. These are examples pertaining only to our planet, and cannot be called part of a cosmic fine-tuning argument. But some of Whewell's statements foreshadowed the argument from cosmic fine-tuning we see today. For example, on page 43 he said this:

"Now, it will be very obvious that if the intensity of gravity were to be much increased, or much diminished, if every object were to become twice as heavy or only half as heavy as it now is, all the forces, both of involuntary and voluntary motion which produce the present orderly and suitable results by being properly proportioned to the resistance which they experience, would be thrown off their balance ; they would produce motions too quick or too slow, wrong positions, jerks and stops, instead of steady, well conducted movements. The universe would be like a machine ill regulated ; every thing- would go wrong ; repeated collisions and a rapid disorganization must be the consequence."

He follows on page 50 with similar comments, discussing the disastrous effects  "if the force of gravity were much lessened." After discussing how much earthly life depends on the force of gravity having the right quantity, Whewell states this on page 51:

"The arbitrary quantity, therefore, of which we have been treating, the intensity of the force of gravity, appears to have been taken account of, in establishing the laws of those forces by which the processes of vegetable and animal life are carried on. And this leads us inevitably, we conceive, to the belief of a supreme contriving mind, by which these laws were thus devised and thus established."

On page 110 Whewell begins to discuss "the laws of electricity," but he failed to grasp the supreme importance of electromagnetism to the habitability of the universe. You can read about that importance in my posts here and here and here. 

On page 141 Whewell summarizes some of his arguments thus far:

"It has been shown in the preceding chapters that a great number of quantities and laws appear to have been selected in the construction of the universe ; and that by the adjustment to each other of the magnitudes and laws thus selected, the constitution of the world is what we find it, and is fitted for the support of vegetables and animals, in a manner in which it could not have been, if the properties and quantities of the elements had been different from what they are."

On page 144 Whewell states this:

"Now, in the list of the mathematical elements of the universe which has just been given, why have we such laws and such quantities as there occur, and no other? For the most part, the data there enumerated are independent of each other, and might be altered separately, so far as the mechanical conditions of the case are concerned....All natural philosophers will, probably, agree, that there must be, in this list, a great number of things entirely without any mutual dependence....There are, therefore, it appears, a number of things which, in the structure of the world, might have been otherwise, and which are what they are in consequence of choice or of chance. We have already seen, in many of the cases separately, how unlike chance every thing looks: — that substances, which might have existed any how, so far as they themselves are concerned, exist exactly in such a manner and measure as they should, to secure the welfare of other things : — that the laws are tempered and fitted together in the only way in which the world could have gone on, according to all that we can conceive of it. This must, therefore, be the work of choice ; and if so, it cannot be doubted, of a most wise and benevolent Chooser."

Whewell then proceeds to discuss at great length favorable features of our solar system that we would not expect chance to have produced, many of which are needed for humans to exist. On page 216 Whewell returns to a discussion of gravitation, pointing out that the law of gravitation has features (such as its inverse square rule)  it easily could not have had, features needed for our existence. He states this: "The answer to this is, that no reason, at all satisfactory, can be given why such a law must, of necessity, be what it is ; but that very strong reasons can be pointed out why, for the beauty and advantage of the system, the present one is better than others." 

Around pages 233-234 Whewell discusses Newton's laws of motion, discussing how life would be a long shot if they did behave as they do (for example, Earth would stop spinning if there did not exist Newton's first law of motion stating that objects maintain their state of motion unless something acts to change such a state). Whewell points out that there's no known why such laws have to behave as they do, and that for most of recorded history people thought matter did not behave as Newton's first law states. He states this:

"Such is the necessary consequence of the first law of motion ; but the law itself has no necessary existence, so far as we can see. It was discovered only after various perplexities and false conjectures of speculators on mechanics. We have learnt that it is so, but we have not learnt, nor can any one undertake to teach us, that it must have been so. For aught we can tell, it is one among a thousand equally possible laws, which might have regulated the motions of bodies."

A bit later Whewell concludes this:  "And as, along with this, it has appeared that we have no sort of right to attribute the establishment of this law to anything but selection, we have here a striking evidence of design, suited to lead us to a perception of that Divine mind, by which means so simple are made to answer purposes so extensive and so beneficial."

There seems to be validity in his comments about how critical laws of nature could just as easily have been vastly different. The three laws of nature most crucial to life are discussed in the table below.

PHENOMENON	OPERATING PRINCIPLE
Gravitation	Inverse square law (diminishes gradually as distance increases)
Electromagnetism	Inverse square law (diminishes gradually as distance increases)
Strong nuclear force	Glue-like operation (extremely strong at very short distances, disappearing at slightly greater distance)

Whewell's arguments about how providential are the features of our planet and solar system now seem prescient, given that astronomers have discovered thousands of planets revolving around other stars, but still have not discovered an extrasolar planet with either intelligent life or life of any type. Such arguments about our planet and solar system were only part of Whewell's arguments, which dealt considerably with things such as the strength of gravitation and the universal laws of nature, which are the same throughout the observable universe (gravity varying from planet to planet always depends on the same fundamental constant symbolized by G in Newton's famous equation expressing the law of gravitation). Whewell's arguments about how providential are the features of our planet and solar system have been restated and improved on by writers in recent decades. For example, the long paper here discusses multiple solar system habitability zones and multiple galactic habitability zones, giving a discussion of  quite a few "bullseyes that must be hit" that reinforces many of Whewell's claims. 

Whewell's 1834 book "Astronomy and General Physics Considered with Reference to Natural Theology" did not get very many readers. A few decades later, a person less intelligent than the very brilliant Whewell (Charles Darwin) wrote a book with the racist-sounding title "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life."  Atheists got busy constructing the untrue triumphal legend that a genius had explained the design in nature, and that the need to postulate a cosmic designer had been eliminated. The legend was untrue not merely because of the weakness of Darwinian explanations of biological phenomena, but also because of the complete failure of Darwinism to explain the evidence for fine-tuning in the laws and parameters of nature, the very evidence Whewell had discussed. Very strangely, the science professors of academia fervently embraced the mathematics-blind reasoning of the mathematics-ignorant Darwin rather than the opposing reasoning of the science genius and mathematics genius Whewell. 

That the academic world made Darwin its darling rather than Whewell was not merely an intellectual tragedy but a moral tragedy. Whewell's book was a book of both intellectual and moral brilliance. Whewell spent much of the book teaching an elevated ethics. Conversely, Darwin's "Origin of Species" was a book devoid of moral teachings, one that suggested an immoral code of conduct based on the idea of a ruthless "struggle for existence" in which "survival of the fittest" was the main rule. The disastrous moral effects of Darwinism are described in my post "The Poisonous Effects of the 'Struggle for Life' Ideology," which you can read here. 

But in the 20th century there occurred what we might call "Whewell's Revenge," as scientists made arguments like Whewell's, and with greater force. Part of this came in the writings of Harvard biological chemistry professor Lawrence J. Henderson, author of the 1913 book "The Fitness of the Environment," pointing out many cases of how nature seemed to be "pre-adapted" to allow the possibility of life's appearance In a later 1917 book Henderson stated this:

"The process of evolution consists in increase of diversity of systems and their activities, in the multiplication of physical occurrences, or, briefly, in the production of much from little. Other things being equal there is a maximum 'freedom' for such evolution on account of a certain unique arrangement of unique properties of matter. The chance that this unique ensemble of properties should occur by 'accident' is almost infinitely small (i. e., less than any probability which can be practically considered)."

On the next page Henderson stated this: 

"Therefore the properties of the elements must for the present be regarded as possessing a teleological character....This complex connection is almost infinitely improbable as a chance occurrence."

On page 205 Henderson flatly stated this: "For biological organization is teleological and non-mechanical."

In the 1974 paper "Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology," Brandon Carter discusses several examples of cosmic fine-tuning. He stated on page 298 that if the strong nuclear force were "rather weaker hydrogen would be the only element." Referring to "the main sequence" that basically refers to the set of all regular stars, he stated this on page 297:

"If the gravitational coupling constant were weakened significantly..(or if the fine structure constant were increased 

by only a very small amount, the other parameters being fixed) then the main sequence would consist entirely of convective red stars. Conversely if the gravitational constant were rather stronger than it is (or if the fine structure constant were very slightly reduced) then the main sequence would consist entirely of radiative blue stars."

The fine-structure constant referred to is computed by using three of the fundamental constants listed above: the speed of light, the electron mass and Planck's constant. Blue stars are short-lived stars, and red stars (called red dwarfs) are thought to be "long shots" in regard to supporting planets on which intelligent life can evolve. 

In 1979 there was published in the journal Nature the important paper "The Anthropic Principle and the Structure of the Physical World" by physicists B. J. Carr and M. J. Rees. which you can read here. This was a very influential paper that accelerated discussion of the topic of whether the universe was fine-tuned. The physicist authors noted that "several aspects of our Universe—some of which seem to be prerequisites for the evolution of any form of life—depend rather delicately on apparent ‘coincidences’ among the physical constants." Many examples were given. For example, the authors stated this about the gravitational constant G: "Were G...slightly larger, all stars would be blue giants; if it were slightly smaller, all stars would be red dwarfs."  Neither of the star types mentioned are stars like the sun. Blue giant stars have short lifetimes of only a few million years, too short to allow the evolution of life.  While some think that life could exist on a planet revolving around the type of star called a red dwarf, it is usually maintained that planets revolving around such red dwarf stars would be much less likely to be habitable than planets revolving around yellow stars like our sun. 

Carr and Rees discussed many cases of fine-tuned fundamental constants. A book-length discussion of such cosmic fine-tuning occurred in the long 1984 work "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle" by John Barrow and Frank Tipler. 

In later years, more and more scientists began to state that the universe is astonishingly fine-tuned to allow life to exist in it. Below are some quotes, all from scientists. 

• "The universe appears designed." -- Stephen Hawking, in a statement to physicist Thomas Hertog (link). 
• "The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned, and very little in physical law can be altered without destroying the possibility of the development of life as we know it.” -- Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow,  The Grand Design (page 161),
• "The simple FLRW-based ΛCDM lambda cold cark matter] model has been so successful in fitting data. However one of its ‘simple’ parameters is the Cosmological Constant Λ which, interpreted as the energy density of the quantum vacuum, would require fine-tuning of two unrelated terms to at least 60 decimal places to enable the Universe to exist in its present form. It is clear that simplicity is in the eye of the beholder." -- Four scientists, "Colloquium: The Cosmic Dipole Anomaly" (link). 
• "Of all the universes that could exist, ours is spectacularly well configured to bring forth life....The universe’s biofriendliness, it turns out, concerns the laws of physics themselves. There are numerous features in these laws that render the universe just right for living things...But the density of vacuum energy seems to be 10¹²⁰ times lower than physicists expect based on theory. If the vacuum energy density of the universe were just a tad larger, however, its repulsive effect would be stronger and acceleration would have kicked in much earlier. This would have meant that matter was so sparsely distributed that it couldn’t clump together to form stars and galaxies, once again precluding the formation of life. The laws of physics and cosmology have many more such life-engendering properties. It almost feels as if the universe is a fix – a big one." -- Physicist Thomas Hertog (link).
• "We conclude that a change of more than 0.5 % in the strength of the strong interaction or more than 4 % change in the strength of the Coulomb force would destroy either nearly all C [carbon] or all O [oxygen] in every star. This implies that irrespective of stellar evolution the contribution of each star to the abundance of C or O in the ISM would be negligible. Therefore, for the above cases the creation of carbon-based life in our universe would be strongly disfavoured." -- Oberhummer, Csot, and Schlattl, "Stellar Production Rates of Carbon and Its Abundance in the Universe."
• "From 1953 onward, Willy Fowler and I have always been intrigued by the remarkable relation of the 7.65 Mev energy level in the nucleus of ¹²C [Carbon 12 isotope] to the 7.12 Mev level in ¹⁶O [Oxygen 16 isotope]. If you wanted to produce carbon and oxygen in roughly equal quantities by stellar nucleosynthesis, these are the two levels you have to fix, and your fixing would have to be just where these levels are actually found to be. Another put-up job? Following the above argument, I am inclined to think so.  A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."  -- Astronomer Fred Hoyle, "The Universe -- Past and Present Reflections" (link). 
• "The cosmological constant must be tuned to 120 decimal places and there are also many mysterious ‘coincidences’ involving the physical constants that appear to be necessary for life, or any form of information processing, to exist....Fred Hoyle first pointed out, the beryllium would decay before interacting with another alpha particle were it not for the existence of a remarkably finely-tuned resonance in this interaction. Heinz Oberhummer has studied this resonance in detail and showed how the amount of oxygen and carbon produced in red giant stars varies with the strength and range of the nucleon interactions. His work indicates that these must be tuned to at least 0.5% if one is to produce both these elements to the extent required for life."  -- Physicists B.J. Carr and M.J. Rees, "Fine-Tuning in Living Systems." 
• "The Standard Model [of physics] is regarded as a highly 'unnatural' theory. Aside from having a large number of different particles and forces, many of which seem surplus to requirement, it is also very precariously balanced. If you change any of the 20+ numbers that have to be put into the theory even a little, you rapidly find yourself living in a universe without atoms. This spooky fine-tuning worries many physicists, leaving the universe looking as though it has been set up in just the right way for life to exist." -- Harry Cliff, particle physicist, in a Scientific American article.
• "If the parameters defining the physics of our universe departed from their present values, the observed rich structure and complexity would not be supported....Thirty-one such dimensionless parameters were identified that specify our universe. Fine-tuning refers to the observation that if any of these numbers took a slightly different value, the qualitative features of our universe would change dramatically. Our large, long-lived universe with a hierarchy of complexity from the sub-atomic to the galactic is the result of particular values of these parameters." -- Jeffrey M. Shainline, physicist (link). 
• "The overall result is that, because multiverse hypotheses do not predict the fine-tuning for this universe any better than a single universe hypothesis, the multiverse hypotheses fail as explanations for cosmic fine-tuning. Conversely, the fine-tuning data does not support the multiverse hypotheses." -- physicist V. Palonen, "Bayesian considerations on the multiverse explanation of cosmic fine-tuning."
• "A mere 1 percent offset between the charge of the electron and that of the proton would lead to a catastrophic repulsion....My entire body would dissolve in a massive explosion...The very Earth itself, the planet as a whole, would crack open and fly apart in an annihilating explosion...This is what would happen were the electron's charge to exceed the proton's by 1 percent. The opposite case, in which the proton's charge exceeded the electron's, would lead to the identical situation...How precise must the balance be?...Relatively small things like atoms, people and the like would fly apart if the charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Larger structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion." -- Astronomy professor emeritus George Greenstein, "The Symbiotic Universe: Life and Mind in the Cosmos," pages 63-64. 
• "What is particularly striking is how sensitive the possibility of life in our universe is to a small change in these constants. For example, if the constant that controls the way the electromagnetic field behaves in a vacuum is changed by four percent, then fusion in stars could not produce carbon....Change the cosmological constant in the 123rd decimal place and suddenly it's impossible to have a habitable galaxy." --  Marcus Du Sautoy, Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, "The Great Unknown," page 221. 
• "The evolution of the cosmos is determined by initial conditions (such as the initial rate of expansion and the initial mass of matter), as well as by fifteen or so numbers called physical constants (such as the speed of the light and the mass of the electron). We have by now measured these physical constants with extremely high precision, but we have failed to come up with any theory explaining why they have their particular values. One of the most surprising discoveries of modern cosmology is the realization that the initial conditions and physical constants of the universe had to be adjusted with exquisite precision if they are to allow the emergence of conscious observers. This realization is referred to as the 'anthropic principle'...Change the initial conditions and physical constants ever so slightly, and the universe would be empty and sterile; we would not be around to discuss it. The precision of this fine-tuning is nothing short of stunning. The initial rate of expansion of the universe, to take just one example, had to have been tweaked to a precision comparable to that of an archer trying to land an arrow in a 1-square-centimeter target located on the fringes of the universe, 15 billion light years away!" -- Trinh Xuan Thuan, Professor of Astronomy, University of Virginia, “Chaos and Harmony”  p. 235.
• "If we are indeed simply requiring suitable conditions for the evolution of intelligent life just here, then the figure of ~ [1 in 10 to the 10 to the 124th power] that  we appear to find for the improbability of the universe conditions that we actually seem to find ourselves in is ridiculously smaller than the much more modest figure needed just for ourselves."  -- Cosmologist Roger Penrose,  "Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe," page 313 (link).
• "The values of some fundamental physical constants are considered to be finely tuned and balanced to give our observable world. Examples include finely tuned balance between quark masses needed to produce protons and neutrons ...and production of heavy nuclei in stars, which depends on the finely tuned balance between the fine structure constant ...and the ratio of the proton mass ..and electron mass...These and other examples suggest a narrow 'habitable zone' in parameter space...where essential biochemical elements can form... For this reason, fundamental constants are referred to as 'biofriendly' or 'biophilic' ....We need to tune the same fundamental constants setting α and β (ℏ, e, c, me, mp) that, importantly, involves tuning, which is additional and different to tuning involved in fixing α and β....We can conjecture that multiple independent tunings were involved. This includes tuning fundamental constants to produce heavy nuclei and additional tunings needed for other observed sustainable structures to emerge." -- Kostya Trachenko, "Constraints on fundamental physical constants from bio-friendly viscosity and diffusion" (link).

During the past 70 years scientists have learned more and more about how enormously fine-tuned the universe is. During the same period, scientists have learned more and more about how enormously organized and fine-tuned biological organisms are, how enormously rich creatures such as humans are in gigantically complex components that are enormously interdependent on each other to be functional. The more we learn about such things, the less credible Darwinist explanations are.  The more we learn about things such as an abundance of many types of accidentally unachievable fine-tuned molecular machines in our bodies, the less credible gradualist explanations are. Gradualist explanations of biological wonders fail enormously, for reasons discussed here. 

Consequently a very powerful case can now be made that the 19th century scientific figure who did a better job of pointing us in the right direction about the type of universe we live in was not Darwin but Whewell.  And as I will clarify in a later post, of the often-mentioned pair of Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, it is becoming increasingly more clear that the one who characterized humans more accurately was Wallace, not Darwin.