SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER US:

Design and the Anthropic Principle (Dr. Hugh Ross, Ph.D., Origins)

Now that the limits and parameters of the universe can be calculated, and some even directly measured, astronomers and physicists have begun to recognize a connection between these limits and parameters and the existence of life. It is impossible to imagine a universe containing life in which any one of the fundamental constants of physics or any one of the fundamental parameters of the universe is different, even slightly so, in one way or another.

From this recognition arises the anthropic principle—everything about the universe tends toward man, toward making life possible and sustaining it. The first popularizer of the principle American physicist John Wheeler, describes it in this way, "A life-giving factor lies at the centre of the whole machinery and design of the world."

Of course, design in the natural world has been acknowledged since the beginning of recorded history. Divine design is the message of each of the several hundred creation accounts that form the basis of the world's religions. The idea that the natural world was designed especially for mankind is the very bedrock of the Greek, as well as of the Judeo-Christian world view. Western philosophers of the post-Roman era went so far as to formalize a discipline called teleology—the study of the evidence for overall design and purpose in nature. Teleology attracted such luminaries as Augustine, Maimonides, Aquinas, Newton and Paley, all of whom gave it much of their life's work.

Dirac and Dicke's Coincidences

One of the first to recognize that design may also apply to the gross features of the universe was American physicist Robert Dicke. In 1961 he noted that life is possible in the universe only because of the special relationships among certain cosmological parameters (relationships researched by British physicist Paul Dirac twenty-four years earlier).

Dirac noted that the number of baryons (protons plus neutrons) in the universe is the square of the gravitational constant as well as the square of the age of the universe (both expressed as dimensionless numbers). Dicke discerned that with a slight change in either of these relationships life could not exist. Stars of the right type for sustaining life supportable planets only can occur during a certain range of ages for the universe. Similarly, stars of the right type only can form for a narrow range of values of the gravitational constant.

The Universe as a Fit Habitat

In recent years these and other parameters for the universe have been more sharply defined and analyzed. Now, nearly two dozen coincidences evincing design have been acknowledged: [...]

The growing evidence of design would seem to provide further convincing support for the belief that the Creator-God of the Bible formed the universe and the earth. Even Paul Davies concedes that "the impression of design is overwhelming." There must exist a designer. Yet, for whatever reasons, a few astrophysicists still battle the conclusion. Perhaps the designer is not God. But, if the designer is not God, who is? The alternative, some suggest, is man himself.

The evidence proffered for man as the creator comes from an analogy to delayed choice experiments in quantum mechanics. In such experiments it appears that the observer can influence the outcome of quantum mechanical events. With every quantum particle there is an associated wave. This wave represents the probability of finding the particle at a particular point in space. Before the particle is detected there is no specific knowledge of its location—only a probability of where it might be. But, once the particle has been detected, its exact location is known. in this sense, the act of observation is said by some to give reality to the particle. What is true for a quantum particle, they continue, may be true for the universe at large.

American physicist John Wheeler sees the universe as a gigantic feed-back loop.

The Universe [capitalized in the original] starts small at the big bang, grows in size, gives rise to life and observers and observing equipment. The observing equipment, in turn, through the elementary quantum processes that terminate on it, takes part in giving tangible "reality" to events that occurred long before there was any life anywhere.

In other words, the universe creates man, but man through his observations of the universe brings the universe into real existence. George Greenstein is more direct in positing that "the universe brought forth life in order to exist ... that the very cosmos does not exist unless observed." Here we find a reflection of the question debated in freshmen philosophy classes across the land:

If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to see it or hear it, does it really fall?

Quantum mechanics merely shows us that in the micro world of particle physics man is limited in his ability to measure quantum effects. Since quantum entities at any moment have the potential or possibility of behaving either as particles or waves, it is impossible, for example, to accurately measure both the position and the momentum of a quantum entity (the Heisenberg uncertainty principle). By choosing to determine the position of the entity the human observer has thereby lost information about its momentum.

It is not that the observer gives "reality" to the entity, but rather the observer chooses what aspect of the reality of the entity he wishes to discern. It is not that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle disproves the principle of causality, but simply that the causality is hidden from human investigation. The cause of the quantum effect is not lacking, nor is it mysteriously linked to the human observation of the effect after the fact.

This misapplication of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is but one defect in but one version of the new "observer-as-creator" propositions derived from quantum physics. Some other flaws are summarized here:

,i>Quantum mechanical limitations apply only to micro, not macro, systems. The relative uncertainty approaches zero as the number of quantum particles in the system increases. Therefore, what is true for a quantum particle would not be true for the universe at large.

The time separation between a quantum event and its observed result is always a relatively short one (at least for the analogies under discussion). A multi-billion year time separation far from fits the picture.

The arrow of time has never been observed to reverse, nor do we see any traces of a reversal beyond the scope of our observations. Time and causality move inexorably forward. Therefore, to suggest that human activity now somehow can affect events billions of years in the past is nothing short of absurd.

Intelligence, or personality, is not a factor in the observation of quantum mechanical events. Photographic plates, for example, are perfectly capable of performing observations.

Both relativity and the gauge theory of quantum mechanics, now established beyond reasonable question by experimental evidence, state that the correct description of nature is that in which the human observer is irrelevant.

Science has yet to produce a shred of evidence to support the notion that man created his universe.