update : Feb.27,2014

Science and Design in the Universe

James Mackey 3/16/2012

What does science have to say about origins and about the possibility of some intelligence behind the existence and structure of the universe as well as the physical laws that govern its operation. In the latter part of the 19th century and the first part of the 20th, unbelievers could argue that scientific discoveries were antagonistic to religion

In the last 30 or so years, newer discoveries have changed this perception. We will look at a number of these discoveries and see that they are more consistent with a creation event, than with a random mechanistic origin from atomic interactions

Remember ! There are only 2 options:

Purely random interactions of non living matter producing all that we see in the universe Or A universe designed by some intelligence (God) who constructed its natural laws in such a way as to make human life and human development possible

Before I present evidence from different areas of science, let me introduce a very simple, but powerful argument, called the Kalaam Argument.

KALAAM Argument

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause We have never observed an exception to this point

2. The Universe has a beginning Vast majority of scientists would accept this

3. Therefore the Universe has a cause The argument cannot be more specific than this

What’s the evidence?

1. Cosmology The Universe is not eternal, matter has not always existed. The Universe had a beginning.

Before 1920’s everyone KNEW the universe was eternal

Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the expanding Universe, coupled with the correct solutions of Einstein’s general relativity equations pointed directly to an finite universe that had a beginning and could have an end. A universe with a beginning could have a Beginner!

This idea was not easily accepted and was resisted on philosophical grounds by many who did not want a non-eternal universe. Hoyle and others developed a Steady State Universe model to allow for expansion and still keep the universe eternal.

There was NO experimental evidence for this model, and it required violating one of the fundamental laws of the universe – conservation of energy

It was argued that this violation was too small to see – even if it occurred. Penzias & Wilson’s discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation in 1965 was the death blow to all such models. Today, the fact that the universe had a beginning is generally accepted as so!

Physics

While there have been numerous discoveries in physics that are consistent with a designer, I will mention only one! Anthropic Principle : The fundamental parameters of the Universe are finely tuned to permit the existence of intelligent life (US?)

The Anthropic Principle

The Universe possesses narrowly defined characteristics that permit the possibility of a suitable habitat for humanity

This principle has been recognized by numerous scientists in recent years, and has been increasingly publicly stated. Physicist Paul Davies

“[There] is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all…It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the Universe…The impression of design is overwhelming.” The Cosmic Blueprint (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1988) p203

Astronomer George Greenstein “As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency – or, rather, Agency – must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly without intending to, we have stumbled upon the scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit?” The Symbiotic Universe (New York,William Morrow, 1988) p27

Cosmologist Bernard Carr A student of Stephen Hawking, Carr is Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy at Queen Mary

“One would have to conclude either that the features of the universe invoked in support of the Anthropic Principle are only coincidences or that the universe was indeed tailor made for life. I will leave it to the theologians to ascertain the identity of the tailor!” "The Anthropic Principle and the Structure of the Physical World," Nature 278 (1979) p53

Arno Penzias, Nobel laureate

“Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life, and one which has an underlying (one might say “supernatural”) plan.” Cosmos, Bios, and Theos p83

As Far as I know, none of these men would be classified as a believer in the Biblical God we worship.

Specific example of physical parameter - Gravity Range of force strengths in universe Strong nuclear

weakest - gravity

Consider a ruler with 1 inch markings, stretched the width of the universe ~ 4.6 x 1024 inches That is :

4.6 million, million, million, million inches 4,600,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 inches

Red arrow is the present value of gravity, then a one inch adjustment in the arrow produces a billion fold change in gravity (change of 1 part in 4.6 x 1024)

Consequences of this relatively small change … Animals the size of humans would be crushed – no critters larger than insects (and they would have very large legs, like elephants) The Earth would be about 40 feet in diameter, with a surface area of about 20,000 sq.ft. smaller than Searcy Habitat on Mars illustration …..

In an article, “Exploring Our Universe and Others”, in Scientific American’s The Once and Future Cosmos, Martin Rees observed..

“Our universe could not have become structured if it were not expanding at a special rate. If the big bang had produced fewer density fluctuations, the universe would have remained dark, with no galaxies or stars… ..If our universe had more than three spatial dimensions, planets could not stay in orbits around stars.”

continuing “If gravity were much stronger, it would crush living organisms of human size and stars would be small and short-lived. If nuclear forces were a few percent weaker, only hydrogen would be stable: there would be no periodic table, no chemistry and no life. Some would argue that this fine-tuning of the universe, which seems so providential, is nothing to be surprised about, because we could not exist otherwise.”{since we’re here, it looks special, but isn’t – this is the Weak Anthropic Principal or WAP}

There are more than 20 and may be as many as 30 physical or cosmological parameters that require very precise calibration in order to produce a life sustaining universe. Probably the most precise of all is the cosmological constant (energy density of empty space) has to be set to 1 part in 1053 or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000 Another is the initial mass density of the Universe

The Standard Big Bang requires a density during initial stages of big bang with a value within 25 decimal places of the critical density »

This is highly unlikely!!

The figure above shows scale factor a(t) for three models with three different densities at a time 1 nS after the Big Bang. The black curve shows a critical density case that matches the WMAP-based concordance model, which has density = 447,225,917,218,507,401,284,016 gm/cc at 1 ns after the Big Bang. Adding only 0.2 gm/cc to this 447 sextillion gm/cc causes the Big Crunch to be right now! Taking away 0.2 gm/cc makes the universe too diffuse.

If one rejects the evidence for design, what remains? “The more the universe is comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.” Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes

“The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” Stephen W Hawking

ASSUMPTIONS In all of the following discussion, it is assumed that life is carbon based. While silicon based life has been discussed by a few individuals, the length of amino acid chains based on silicon are no more than a few hundred at the most - insufficient for the complexity required for life as we know it.

Additionally, boron has been advocated as an alternate basis for life; however, boron is relatively rare in the universe compared to carbon or silicon, which would make life even less probable than it is. Hydrogen 705,700 nuclei per million Silicon 653 nuclei per million Boron 0.1 nuclei per billion

It is also assumed that physical laws, as best as we understand them, operate the same at all places and times in the evolution of the universe. No unknown physical laws can be postulated to explain currently unexplainable phenomena.

It is possible for something to be so improbable that even in the possible time span of the universe, 13.6 Billion years or about 4.3x 1017 seconds, it will never happen. Any argument from design will be, in most cases, faith strengthening not faith producing!

Biochemistry: DNA and the information problem ..

Biologist Dean Kenyon who wrote a book on the chemical origin of life, later repudiated his own book based on the evidence from genetics.

“This new realm of molecular genetics is where we see the most compelling evidence of design on the Earth.”

DNA provides the genetic information needed to create all the proteins out of which our bodies are built. Each of the 30,000 genes embedded in our 23 pairs of chromosomes can yield as many as 20,000 different kinds of protein “The problem of the origin of

life is clearly basically equivalent to the problem of the origin of biological information.”Bernd-Olaf Kuppers

If you unraveled all your chromosomes from all of your cells and laid out the DNA end to end, the strands would stretch from the Earth to the Moon about 6,000 times.

If you could pull apart the double helix, you would see the exposed ends of four different chemicals waving in the air. Those four chemicals, called bases carry the information used to make a body and to keep it running.

adenine

taurine

cytosine

guanine

G A

C

T

Scientists named each of the four bases with a letter, G, A, T or C. All of the letters in one cell make up the human genome, a complete set of instructions for making a person.

In a complete helix, the A's always line up with the T's and the G's with the C's. In the picture, the white and red bases always hook up together and blue and green are always together.

When you make new cells, your body is putting together different letters of the DNA alphabet.

Even with just four letters, the DNA alphabet spells out all of the information you need to create new cells and to stay healthy. The order of the DNA bases is called the sequence

Just like the order of the letters in a sentence, the sequence of the bases in DNA can spell all the instructions for your body -- even with only four letters.

If you wrote down all of the bases in one cell, you would fill a stack of 1,000 Chicago phone books with A's, T's, G's and C's. Scientists trying to locate small sections of DNA out of the whole genome have to flip through billions of bases to find what they want! Sometimes this takes years. We all have 6 feet of DNA crammed into the nucleus of every cell. This is somewhere between 5 and 10 billion miles of the stuff in every one of us.

Now that the entire Human Genome has been unraveled, we know that there are large sections of DNA that seem to have no function (“junk” DNA), while the vast majority of the remainder, has functions we do not yet understand, yet this strand of material contains all the information to recreate a copy of the individual from whom it is extracted, through millions of replications with an amazingly few errors produced. It is an extraordinarily well designed system to produce the variety of organisms observed on Earth today.

What is the source for all of the information marvelously encoded in DNA and other biochemical constituents? The source of information in every other system that we know of is always the same …

Intelligence

It takes far more faith to believe that somehow all of the information stored in DNA came from purely random, unguided, mechanistic processes, than to admit the possibility of an intelligent designer

Those who summarily dismiss the possibility of intelligent design are usually making a statement about their antagonism to religion and their faith in mechanistic materialism and their presupposition that everything must be explained solely and exclusively mechanistically.

Astronomy & Geology Historically many textbook writers have presented what is called the Principle of Mediocrity* usually in the context of Copernicus “dethroning Earth” as the Center of the Universe. *or Copernican Principal The Earth is an ordinary planet circling an ordinary star located in an inconsequential solar system located in a backwater place in one common galaxy among billions. There is absolutely nothing special about the Earth, and by implication also its inhabitants.

Fortunately, modern discoveries have shown this principle to be completely false.

In contrast we know today that the Earth is a privileged planet, and perhaps the only place in the Universe to hold intelligent life Contrary to Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. we may very well be alone in the universe.

In order for the Earth to harbor high level intelligent life (us?), we must have : The right size planet The right distance from our home star not too far (too cold) not too close (too hot)

Right kind of home star not too big (too short a lifetime) not too small (too little energy for life)

Right kind of atmosphere need O2 but not too much need N2 but not too much

Need a single large moon to stabilize axis of rotation to provide tidal forces in earth to help plate tectonics and volcanism to occur

Need to be in the right kind of solar system with a Jupiter size planet at the right distance to remove much of debris from system to reduce impacts on earth not close enough to significantly affect Earth’s orbit

Need to have all planets far enough apart in nearly circular orbits not to have too much influence on one another (otherwise the system is unstable)

Planet hunters Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler (Mar.2000) In discussing the 33 (at that time) [ there are now ~ 1077] known planets discovered orbiting other star systems, the authors observe that most such systems are dominated by highly elliptically orbit giant planets. • "The predominance of elliptical orbits implies that planetary systems with circular orbits may be the exception rather than the norm.

• Apparently our nine planets were just far enough apart and low enough in mass to avoid this chaos [referring to the tendency of giant planets to slingshot neighbors out of their systems]. •The nine planets do perturb one another, but not enough to cause close passages. •The planetary house of cards that we call our solar system may be one of the rare systems that remains just barely stable.

• If our solar system is unusual in its circular

orbits, we humans would seem to be extraordinarily lucky to be here. • After all, the circular orbit of earth keeps solar heating nearly constant, minimizing temperature fluctuations. •Perhaps biological evolution would not have proceeded to intelligence if Earth's temperature were fluctuating widely.

Astronomy, March 2000, "Planets Beyond" by Geoff Marcy and Paul Butler, page 45

Located in the right kind of galaxy (not elliptical or irregular)

Need to be in a safe region of our galaxy not to close to center or where disastrous events (supernovae, colliding magnetars, etc.) occur too often. I.e. in between spiral arms Not too far out where heavy metals necessary for life are too sparse

Need to be a planet where not too many extinction events have occurred example of dinosaur killer impact 65 Myr ago

Increasingly we are finding out that we live in a very dangerous universe, and had we been located in many of the myriad galaxies in the universe all life on earth would have been annihilated many times. One example of this recently discovered is the Magnetar event shown next.

1998 event 20,000 yrs ago while Mammoths, Mastodons, etc. roamed North America - a distant neutron star in constellation Aquila (SGR 1900+14) underwent an unknown type of cataclysm..

A violent explosion propelled a sphere of hard radiation out at the speed of light. For 20,000 years this sphere expanded until on Aug. 27, 1998 it hit the Earth over the Pacific Ocean and then passed on through space.

For about 5 minutes Earth was bombarded by a high level of gamma rays & X-rays.

Even after 20,000 lyrs the energy level sent radiation sensors on 7 satellites to max. or off scale. Two of these satellites shut down to avoid burnout. The radiation penetrated to within 30 miles from the Earth’s surface. The first time ever such an event from outside our solar system had a measurable effect on the atmosphere of Earth.

“The most spectacular event came on Aug. 27

when RXTE (Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer) was not even pointed at SGR 1900+14. The burst was so strong and clear that RXTE's Proportional Counting Array detected it through the shielding intended to keep stray radiation out. Then the array locked up because of the overload.

"It is amazing that such a burst could produce

ionization levels similar to those produced by all the radiation coming from the sun," Inan* says. "When we put this information into our mathematical models it may provide us with important new insights about how the ionosphere behaves in response to sudden ionization changes.“*Umran Inan, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, head of the research group that observed the atmospheric disturbance.

"All this goes to show that the Earth does not exist in splendid isolation," says Inan.

"We now know that the Earth's physical environment is affected not only by our own sun but by energy originating from distant parts of our universe."

http://science.msfc.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast29sep98_2.htm

Had the event been at 10,000 lyrs, it would have been 4 times as intense - perhaps strong enough to damage the ozone layer. Had we been a civilization at 100 lyrs the radiation 160,000 X as intense would have probably have sterilized the side of Earth encountering the pulse.

How probable are such event? We do not know! We’ve only been able to detect such events for ~ 30 years

event described

These are only a few of the many ways in which our planet is special and perhaps unique We do know today that there are planets around other stars, called extrasolar planets. As of Feb. 23, 2014 1074 planets in 812 systems.* Let’s see how many of these are even remotely earthlike. *http://exoplanet.eu/catalog.php

All Candidates detected 1074 Planets Candidates detected by radial velocity or astrometry update : Feb.27,2014 550 Planets 413 planetary systems 96 multiple planet systems Transiting planets 435 planets 331 planetary systems update : Feb.27,2014 70 multiple planet systems Candidates detected by microlensing 24 planetary systems update : Feb.27,2014 26 planets 2 multiple planet systems Candidates detected by imaging 43 planetary systems update : Feb.27,2014 47 planets 2 multiple planet systems Candidates detected by timing 13 planetary systems update : Feb.27,2014 16 planets 2 multiple planet systems

List of one representative data page of the known 1074 extrasolar planets to date. Data complete as of Feb. 23, 2024

Sample data printout ~28 pages of data like this

List of all the 1072 planets with orbits within 20% of 1 AU (Earth’s orbit)

0.8 – 1.2 AU 90 Planets

List of all the 1072 planets with orbits within 20% of 1 AU (Earth’s orbit) and with masses within 100 % of Earth’s mass. In this listing we would have 0.00314 for the mass of Earth. i.e from 0.00157 to 0.00628 Jupiter masses. 3 The smallest in this list is MOA-2010-BKG-328lb at 0.029 MJ or more than 9 times as massive as the Earth.

The smallest mass planets known to date(ME =.00314)

About 200 of the known Exoplanets

In addition, the sun is not an average star, it ranks in the top 10% of all stars in size. The average star is a small, very cool M class star. The sun has a high in metal content. Stars with low metal content will not have rocky planets. Consider the long list given earlier, almost 86% have Fe/H ratios > -.20 where the Sun is 0.

125 out of 870 have Fe/H > -0.2 on scale where 0 = sun’s metallicity

The sun is also unusually stable for a main sequence star, whose luminosity (brightness) has increased only a few % over the last 2 billion years, providing a very long term stable environment for life to flourish and develop Whatever luminosity increases the Sun has experienced have been mostly offset by the long term decrease in CO2 in the atmosphere, produced primarily by plate tectonic activity.

Typical Extrasolar system compared with our solar system

Solar system masses in terms of Jupiter mass Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter

a = .00017 b = .00256 c = .00315 d = .00034 e = 1.0

Our solar system

6 x ME

I would weigh more than 900 pounds

conclusion Based on the multiple lines of evidence from a variety of scientific areas ( and I have only presented a very small sample of a large body of evidence) what is one to conclude ?

Based on almost any reasonable criteria that one could devise, the existence of intelligent life on Earth and perhaps in the Universe as well is an ENIGMA....

without GOD

Exam review is NOT on my website. Also there will be the bonus option for quoting Isa. 55:9 and/or Col. 1:16-17 NIV/NASV only.

For a much more detailed presentation of these ideas see the “Constraints on a Chance Universe” presentation on the website including as large segment on the occurrence of extinction events in Earth’s geologic history. Not on exam Case For a Creator DVD Thursday 2 PM Rm 123