Professor Explanations for Nature's Fine-Tuning Are Way Too Thin or Way Too Fat

"Science appears no longer to be characterised by accurate observation, carefully conducted experiment, and precision of thought, but to run riot in the wildest of all wild speculations, and, leaving knowledge far behind, to soar away into flights of imagination that may well vie with ancient mythology....The unbearable dogmatism and arrogant presumption of some of the men who, in modern times, pride themselves on being the champions of science, would be amusing, were the results not so mischievous to society at large." 

The Spiritual Magazine, 1875

The biggest problem for the person wishing to believe in a purposeless universe is that nature seems to have a vast abundance of fine-tuning all over the place, so much that the person denying purposeful teleology in nature seems like a person in a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean who denies the existence of water. A large part of that abundance is to be found in biology. Biological organisms very strongly resemble the products of design. In fact, in biological organisms we see a degree of organization and functional complexity beyond anything humans have ever been able to achieve through technology or manufacturing activity.

Consider, for example, the simple case of a speck-sized fertilized human ovum that progresses to become a full-grown human being. Humans have never built anything that accomplishes that type of progression. The equivalent in a technological product would be if you could buy a tiny little “car pill,” plant it in your back yard, and then watch it grow into a full-sized car. Similarly, all of human technological ingenuity is unable to produce something with even one tenth the functional intelligence of a human being. While the human genome does not contain all that much data, if you were to fully specify all the information needed to create from chemical raw materials a human body or an elephant, that would require more detailed instructions than you would need to specify how to make a modern car. The incredibly intricate complexity of a human organism is shown in the fact that modern biochemistry textbooks may run to 1000 pages in length, and do not at all fully specify the complexity of human biochemistry.

Fine-tuning in biological organisms is only half of the fine-tuning we see in nature. There is also a vast amount of fine-tuning to be seen in the physics and laws of the universe. Against all odds, the fundamental constants have values that allow the existence of long-lived stars, planets and living beings. Make minor changes in any of a dozen places in the universe's fundamental constants and laws, and observers such as us would be impossible.

An example (one of many discussed here) is the exact numerical equality of the absolute value of the proton charge and the electron charge. Given that each proton has a mass 1836 times greater than the mass of each electron, we would not at all expect these two fundamental particles to have electric charges that are exactly equal or exactly opposite. But according to modern science the electric charge of each electron in the universe is the exact opposite of the electric charge of each proton in the universe. The equality has been proven to be an exact match to at least 18 decimal places. We would not expect a coincidence like this to occur in 1 in a trillion random universes.  On pages 64-65 of his book "The Symbiotic Universe," astronomer George Greenstein (a professor emeritus at Amherst College) said this about the equality of the proton and electron charges (which have precisely the same absolute value): 

"Relatively small things like stones, people, and the like would fly apart if the two charges differed by as little as one part in 100 billion. Large structures like the Earth and the Sun require for their existence a yet more perfect balance of one part in a billion billion."

There are countless other examples of fine-tuning to be found by studying cosmology and physics. One involves the strong nuclear force. If it were about five percent larger or smaller, we would not be living in a habitable universe. If the physics of the universe had not been just right, very precisely fine-tuned, the Big Bang would have resulted in a universe that either would have collapsed in on itself before galaxies or formed, or a universe that would have expanded too fast for galaxies to form.

People wishing to explain away such natural fine-tuning have offered two theories that try to sweep nature's fine tuning under the rug. The first of these theories is pretty much the thinnest and flimsiest explanation ever offered by scientists. The second of these theories is the fattest and bulkiest theory ever offered by scientists. One of the theories is way too thin, and the other is way too fat.

The theory that is way too thin is Darwinism, the theory of macroevolution by random mutations. This theory is offered by scientists to explain away all the fine-tuning in biological organisms. The explanatory part of Darwinism is one of the flimsiest explanations ever advanced by scientists. It's so lightweight and simple you can state it in a single sentence like this: random variations occur in organisms, causing some to be fitter, and fitter organisms reproduce more, tending to cause lucky variations to spread around and be preserved in a population. That's an idea so simple you could easily explain it to someone while riding up in an elevator to the top floor of a ten-story building. 

As an explanation, Darwinism is incredibly thin because it doesn't postulate anything that wasn't already known long before Darwin lived. It has been known for most of human history that minor variations occur in organisms. It was also known by many long before Darwin that fit organisms reproduce more. For example, it must have occurred to quite a few of the spectators at the Colosseum that the more fit a gladiator is, the more likely he is to survive long enough to father children.

Darwinism doesn't work as a credible explanation for complex biological innovations resembling design products. There are several different ways of explaining why random mutations and so-called "natural selection" do not work to effectively explain complex biological innovations. One way to explain it is to simply point out that the type of random mutations that occur in organisms are merely tiny fragments of complex biological innovations. If a random mutation were to produce a sizable fraction of a complex biological innovation such as a vision system, there might be some hope of explaining complex biological innovations in the Darwinian manner. But sadly when random mutations occur, they are much less than a thousandth of what is needed for a complex biological innovation. Similarly, if a monkey makes a random strike on a keyboard, that is less than a thousandth of what is needed for a complex new computer program. A random mutation will typically change or add a single nucleotide base pair in a gene  that specifies a protein, and such a gene typically requires more than a thousand such nucleotide base pairs, all arranged in the right way to produce a functional purpose. Moreover a complex biological innovation almost always requires much more than just a single new gene or a single new protein corresponding to such a gene. 

Strip away all the jargon and digressions someone may use when arguing for Darwinism, and all the thick multi-syllabic verbiage designed to impress us, and you have at the core of Darwinism an explanation with the intellectual depth of a fortune cookie slogan. The explanation offered by Darwinism is basically "great luck occurs, and luck spreads around and piles up," which would work fine as a fortune cookie slogan. Every time someone tries to explain mountainous amounts of complex organization and functional fine-tuning in biological organisms by using Darwin's tissue-thin explanation of "random variations occur, and fitter things reproduce more,"  the question we should always ask such a person is: "Is that all you got?"

An opposite extreme can be found in the attempt scientists make to explain the fine-tuning we see in physics and cosmology. The explanation offered is that of the multiverse. This is the fattest explanation in intellectual history, and the person who advances it is like someone swimming in the middle of an ocean filled with whale blubber. The multiverse idea is that there is some vast collection of universes, perhaps an infinite number of them. This does nothing to explain the fine-tuning of fundamental constants and natural laws in our universe.  You do not increase the likelihood of our universe being habitable by imagining some infinity or near infinity of other universes, just as you do not increase the chance of you winning the Powerball lottery if you postulate an infinity of lotteries and an infinity of lottery players. 

There is only one good thing that can be said about the explanation of Darwinism, that it is economical. If we give scientific theories separate grades on economy and explanatory power, rating thin theories well for their economy and fat theories poorly, then we can give Darwinism an economy grade of A, but an explanatory power grade of F+ or D-. Contrary to the groundless boasts of its overly enthused disciples, who often resemble eager apostles of a religion, Darwinism can only explain a few very minor effects in nature, almost all merely superficial effects such as the darkening of moths. The grades that we must give to the multiverse theory are an economy grade of F and an explanatory power grade of F. Nothing whatsoever in our universe is actually explained by imagining some great multitude of other universes, and no explanation has ever been less economical.

Even when I was a teenage boy of only about fifteen, I was extremely interested in philosophical problems, and would spend endless hours trying to figure out some of them. When I was about fifteen, way before the term "multiverse" had been coined, I created in my mind  some theory of something like the idea of some infinity of universes, having a vast variety of properties. I was very pleased with myself, foolishly imagining I had come up with some brilliant solution to some long-standing philosophical problems.  By about the time I was in my twenties, I had realized that this youthful idea was of no explanatory value, and was just a bit of teenage silliness that had gone on in my mind.