Is There Design in the Universe?
If by design one means a blueprint or pattern, then scientists and those with a religious or spiritual outlook can all agree that yes, the universe does have a design. We all see it with our eyes, and scientists seek to represent it through their equations, for we believe that the laws of physics are the blueprint for the universe. To create or simply understand a mathematical theory, and then observe as even the most minuscule atoms or the largest and most distant stars act according to the physical laws embodied in those equations, is one of the greatest wonders and joys of being a physicist.
Why nature follows laws is a mystery. Why the specific laws we’ve observed exist is also a mystery. But what is clear is that the laws of nature are sufficient to enable us to show how life arose without the necessity of there being any immortal hand or eye executing the design. Those laws dictated that from the primordial cosmic soup, stars would condense and create carbon and the other elements living things require. They dictated that some of those stars would then explode, and from the debris new solar systems would form. And they dictated that from the primordial chemical soup on at least one planet, ours, naturally occurring processes led to objects of beautiful design, from geodes to tigers to people.
The issue that separates Deepak and me is not whether the universe has design, but whether something designed it, and whether it was designed for a purpose. Creationists and adherents of “intelligent design” believe, as Deepak does, that the intricacies of living creatures could not be the result of natural law. That view has a long tradition. The British philosopher David Hume published a book in 1779 called Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, in which three fictional characters debate the issue. One of them, Philo, puts the argument this way: “Throw several pieces of steel together, without shape or form; they will never arrange themselves so as to compose a watch.”
In 1802 theologian William Paley famously elaborated on that theme:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there: I might possibly answer, that for any thing I know to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there.… the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker; that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.
The crux of all these gee-whiz arguments is that things as incredible as a watch or your grandmother are really complicated and hence could not have arisen except as the product of some being’s exceptional expertise. They are sincere and compelling arguments based on the best science of their day, which was not up to the task of explaining how life came to be. But to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced consequence of a scientific law that we do not yet understand is indistinguishable from the work of a “higher power.”
Again and again through history people have assigned to any aspect of nature they could not explain an origin in the supernatural. Hume’s character Philo was correct that pieces of steel thrown together will not form a watch, but that analogy seemed convincing only because people in Hume’s day, nearly a century before Darwin published his great work, were not yet aware of the principle of natural selection, which makes it clear how unguided nature can indeed design amazingly complex objects (such as DNA; such as, ultimately, ourselves). Had a scientist from the future shown an eighteenth-century philosopher an airplane, an X-ray machine, or a cell phone, that philosopher would have been equally dumbfounded, and could just as well have attributed those devices to a divine origin. Perhaps then, some philosopher might have argued,
“Fix several wings together onto a steel hull; they can never be arranged so as to allow that hull to fly.”
“Shine whatever light you wish onto a person’s head; it will never allow you to peer at the brain inside.”
or
“Scream as loudly as you wish into a tiny box; you will never be heard across the ocean.”
Today science does explain how such devices can be constructed—just as it explains how natural processes lead to the development of intelligent life.
There is one difference between science’s explanation of life and its explanation of those apparatuses. The science behind the airplane, the X-ray machine, and the cell phone doesn’t threaten anyone’s preferred beliefs. Hence, there is no public outcry against the science behind them. No one claims that scientists are closed-minded because they believe in aeronautics. No one proposes that X-ray images of broken bones don’t really come from photons. No one says electromagnetism is “just a theory,” or suggests that courses in telecommunications give equal time to carrier pigeons, just in case. But evolution concerns how we all got here, which makes it harder for some people to accept. The William Paleys of today willingly make use of the miraculous scientific feat that enables text messages offering two-for-one quesadillas to be coded into an invisible type of energy, transmitted through the air, and reconstituted on their handheld devices, but they question the integrity of the scientific method when it comes to the biological miracle of life. They are happy to employ inventions and products created through science they don’t understand, but they balk at accepting the scientific “theories” that explain the very origins of life.
Biologists tell us that the designer of life was not a being, but the environment. The assumption implicit in the argument that complex things must have been designed by a higher intelligence is that it would have been simpler to accomplish the creation of life that way than through evolution. That is an understandable belief, especially for those who ignore the role of natural selection in evolution and view it merely as some sort of random hocus-pocus. But actually, because of the astonishing power of natural selection, the opposite may be true. That’s why natural selection (technically, “artificial selection”) has become the basis of a revolutionary new method of designing molecules called “directed evolution,” in which chemists and chemical engineers set up environments that encourage starter molecules to evolve into commercially useful products. Directed evolution has proved successful in allowing the synthesis of many proteins that no one knew how to “design” in the traditional sense. So when admiring the amazing capabilities of life, perhaps it is more natural to say, not that they could only be the work of a creator, but rather that “this could only be the product of evolution.”
Natural selection explains how organisms change from generation to generation until what started as the type of simple organism that causes stomachaches can evolve, after billions of years, into the type of complex organism that gets them. Darwin wrote about elephants. Suppose Noah had saved a single pair of elephants on his great ark, sometime around 3000 BCE, which was the time of the Flood. Though elephants are the slowest of breeders, in just five centuries they would have produced fifteen million descendants. By 2000 BCE, there’d have been trillions, many thousands of elephants for every person now alive. By now we should all have been crushed under a mountain of pachyderms. What saved us? Injury, sickness, starvation, and death. They ensured that only a fraction of elephants survived to produce offspring. It was not an unbiased pruning. On the contrary, in determining which should live and which should die, the environment acted as the intelligent designer. Animals that weren’t tough or big or tall or smart enough to find sufficient food, fend off predators, and survive disease tended to die before they could pass on their ineffective traits. Those more suited to their environment survived and created progeny fit to compete in the next, new and improved, generation. And so on. In chapter 4, I mentioned that when a process like natural selection was included, in just forty-three generations evolution could create the Shakespearean phrase “Methinks it is like a weasel,” which would take a random letter generator longer than the life of the solar system to produce. That is the power of evolution.
Evolution predicts that the design of living beings comes from both random mutation and selection due to the competition to survive. As a result, when studying living organisms in detail, one can’t help but be struck by the fact that often their “design” is neither optimal nor elegant. It is, instead, “just good enough.” Living organisms might be wondrous from the point of view of function, but they are not beautiful from the standpoint of design. That is very different from what you would expect if the design were created by an “intelligent designer,” at least one that possessed superhuman intelligence. Evolution creates inelegant design because, as species evolve, nature doesn’t tear down the house and rebuild from scratch, but takes the more expedient route of altering what’s already there. Sometimes we’re left with wisdom teeth or an appendix, or, as I’ll talk about in the next chapter, a gene for a tail, traits that once served a function, but are no longer necessary. A purposeful designer would probably have made other choices, but since living organisms need not exhibit perfect design, evolution makes organisms that are just good enough to survive.
Evolution explains the origin of intelligent life on one level, but there is more to explain. Though biologists have made great strides in understanding the mechanism of evolution, right down to the molecular scale, biology is only the outer layer of the onion of scientific explanation. It describes organisms, their organs, cells, and, as of the last few decades, even the DNA, proteins, and other molecules living things are made of. But the descriptions and laws of biology take as their elementary elements objects which themselves can be broken down into more elementary components. At the deepest level—the core of the onion—lies physics. Physics is concerned with the forces and elementary particles that, by the trillions upon trillions, act to create the structures of the biologists’ concern. So one ought to also ask, Does the development of life without the aid of a designer make sense on the level of physics? It is on that level that the answer to Deepak’s challenge really lies: from the fundamental equations governing matter and energy, without any guidance or purpose, can life be spontaneously created? If we are to believe that no designer was needed, we must provide an answer that works not only at the level where biological processes are at work, but also at the level where the laws of physics operate.
To address whether, from the point of view of physics, the obvious design in nature required a designer, we must translate the issue into the language of physics. The early Earth was a rough mix of rocks and sand and air and water with various compounds dissolved or suspended within it. Living things, on the other hand, are made from very particular complex molecules and structures. The crux of the issue for physicists is: can such order arise without guidance? The tool physicists use to analyze that kind of question is a concept called entropy. Loosely speaking, entropy is a measure of the disorder in a system. The more disordered, usually, the higher the entropy. Entropy is the enemy of life, and of any concept of “design.”
Physicists in the nineteenth century noticed that, with time, things tend to become more disordered—that is, the entropy increases. In a way this is a reflection of the lack of purpose or guidance in physical law. To understand why entropy, or disorder, increases, let’s consider a simple (and classic) example, a box of gas molecules that has a partition down the middle with a hole in it. Suppose we start with a thousand molecules on the left side and none on the right. As the molecules bounce around, some of those on the left will pass through the hole in the partition and end up on the other side. With time, more will pass from left to right, but some on the right will occasionally pass to the left. That won’t happen often as long as the right side is underpopulated, but eventually there will be many molecules on the right side, and so the net exodus will slow down. After more time there will be roughly the same number of molecules on both sides, and the number per unit time passing from right to left will be nearly the same as the number passing from left to right. That is an example of a state of equilibrium, as explained in the last chapter.
Though the term “disorder” is vague and subjective, it is probably safe to say that the initial configuration, with all the molecules congregating on the left, seems more ordered than the final one, in which the molecules are spread through the entire box. We think of the initial arrangement as ordered because it has a regularity—there are no molecules anywhere on the right side of the box. The final state of the box has no restrictions on its arrangement—the molecules are everywhere, so it is disordered. Our bodies, when we are alive, are like the initial arrangement. For example, our blood cells must maintain a certain internal biochemical balance, and not mix with their surroundings, and our blood must stay inside its vessels, and remain pure, not mixing randomly with other bodily fluids.
In the box scenario the initial configuration, with all the molecules on the left, was a low-entropy setup, and the final configuration, with the molecules all over the place, was a high-entropy situation. With time, and no higher consciousness or power at work to influence the distribution of molecules, the system moved toward a roughly equal split of the molecules, which is the most disordered, or maximum entropy state (that being the technical meaning of the term “equilibrium”). That is the tendency of all nature—the drive toward ever higher levels of entropy. As I explained earlier, life resists that drive. And when it ends, the drive toward entropy continues.
The law that explains why living things have to work at staying alive—i.e., at maintaining their order—is called the second law of thermodynamics. It dictates that the entropy of a closed system never decreases. That’s a scientist’s way of saying what Hume had his character say: “Throw several pieces of steel together, without shape or form; they will never arrange themselves so as to compose a watch.” But the second law also says: “Leave a watch uncared for in nature and with time it will tend to become just several pieces of steel, without shape or form.” The second law is why, if we shove a splattered egg off the counter, it will never hit the floor and coalesce into that nicely structured object we call an intact egg, but if we shove an intact egg off the counter, it will splatter into a random-looking mess. Similarly, if we find a box containing molecules equally distributed within it, we will never see the molecules all gather on one side, but if we find such a box with all its molecules on one side, with time they will eventually distribute themselves uniformly throughout the box. In view of this law, the challenge a physicist must address is, how can we start with atoms distributed willy-nilly throughout the universe, and find that at some later time they have coalesced into the ordered state we call living beings? In other words, if the natural tendency of the universe is disorder, then where does the order of life come from?
The phrase “closed system” here is the key. Entropy can’t fall if there is no outside interference, but the entropy of one system can decrease if the entropy of another increases by an equal or greater amount. The hand of God may reach in and keep all the molecules on one side of the box, but that hand must suffer an increased disorder of its own. We keep the disorder in our bodies from increasing by consuming order in the guise of things like broccoli and chicken (until they’ve decomposed, they maintain a good bit of order) and expelling disorder as excrement and heat. So, too, must our planet respect the entropy balance. In order for life in our biosphere to have evolved from inorganic materials, the Earth needs to export entropy—that is, to import order. How? Where does the order come from?
Each day the Earth receives a sizable gift of energy from the sun, and also bequeaths a roughly equal amount of radiation back into space—that radiation balance keeps the planet’s temperature from continuously rising. But the quality of the energy the Earth radiates is not the same as the quality of that which it receives. The surface of the sun is about twenty times the average temperature of the surface of the Earth, which means that the Earth must radiate twenty times as many photons—the particles of light—as the sun in order to radiate the same amount of energy. Physics tells us that this corresponds to twenty times the entropy, and so, day after day, the Earth radiates twenty times as much entropy as it receives. As Caltech physicist Sean Carroll has calculated, the net entropy generated by the Earth over the years is far more than enough to account for the entropy decrease the Earth has experienced by generating life.
The gift of life is not, then, the gift of a god, or of a “universal consciousness”; it is a gift from the sun.
It’s a shame that “design” became a buzzword for Christian fundamentalists, a pivot for their belief in the creation story of the book of Genesis. The word suddenly became radioactive in other circles. Scientists grew worried that reason itself was under attack. Skeptics and atheists threw their dogs into the fight, ever ready to beat back superstition. It thus became impossible to separate charged emotions from the issues that were at stake. Offering “intelligent design” as an alternative to Darwin’s theory of evolution never did have any validity. What it did have was political clout. Elected officials who wanted to woo religious voters tried to sidestep overwhelming protest from the scientific community.
With this in mind, it’s a welcome development when a respected scientist like Leonard agrees that the universe does, indeed, display traces of design. But his way of getting there is completely materialistic, meaning he relies on randomness and the dictates of the laws of Nature. There is a huge gap between “dictate” and “allow”: without question the laws of Nature allow human beings to be here and to invent things like airplanes and watches, but did Bernoulli’s principle, which allowed the Wright brothers to shape a wing in such a way that it got lift, dictate to them? The setup of the early universe cannot dictate my actions billions of years hence.
We take it for granted that there are ways to get around physical laws, usually by using one against the other. When I lift my arm I defy gravity by invoking electromagnetism, the force that controls muscles. I can pull two magnets apart, using the same law against itself. As it exists today, the universe allows us enormous scope to play with the laws of Nature. Of course there are limits. I couldn’t lift my arm on Jupiter, because my muscles would be too weak to counter that planet’s stronger gravitational field. But materialism can’t account for how a person chooses which laws to obey, counter, or play around with.
Latitude is built into Nature. When carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen meet up, their free electrons dictate that they will bond; all of life is based on such bonding, and as we observe, there are billions of possible combinations. Nature left lots of wiggle room for variation; therefore, the simple example Leonard provides of gas molecules drifting from the left side of a box to the right is not only reductionist, it doesn’t apply. The same holds for the entire argument based on entropy. No one denies that entropy rules states of heat exchange. No one denies that living forms are islands of negative entropy. But the real mystery is how they got that way. The entire cosmos is heading toward heat death, as Leonard explains. But heat death is just a blown-up version of the molecules drifting in a box. Drift doesn’t explain how islands of negative entropy, like the sun, the Earth, and life on Earth, can last for billions of years and keep growing more self-sustained.
Reductionism will always fail the test of how mindless natural laws can create anything as intricate as a watch. Leonard tries to escape the flaws in reductionism by verbal sleight of hand. He calls a watch complex, which it is. But it is more than that. It is designed. On the slopes of the Swiss Alps, one skier leaves a trail in the snow that is a simple line. A hundred skiers going down the same slope leave many more trails that form a tangled weave. The lines are more complex, but they are far from being a design. A Swiss watch doesn’t just pile a bunch of simple processes on top of one another; it has purpose and meaning. It was designed to perform a specific task. It can be beautiful, but without a doubt it is precise. And when it drifts into inaccuracy, its imprecision can be corrected. All these aspects of design must have come from somewhere. Spirituality argues that they are aspects of consciousness, the invisible designer behind the scenes of the visible world.
I am not bothered when Leonard lumps my argument in with those of creationists and believers in “intelligent design.” He isn’t claiming that I am either of those things. Yet the lumping together does imply a kinship, which I must counter. Creationism and intelligent design are just as far from the world’s wisdom traditions as materialism. When choosing sides in the ongoing debate between religious faith and scientific rationality, spirituality actually comes closer to science, since wisdom is the blossoming of reason, not its enemy.
I found it deplorable when a conservative White House announced that there was nothing wrong with teaching schoolchildren an alternative to evolution, and that children would benefit from an open debate. The public seemed to agree. In the end, it took the federal courts to affirm the obvious truth: intelligent design is a religious concept, not a scientific one, and therefore it cannot be considered an “alternative” in science classrooms. There is nothing to debate.
In an age of faith, the abundance of patterns in Nature was used to defend the existence of God. Leonard gives us the analogy of the watchmaker, which he associates with a kind of primitive, early scientific mind. That’s not entirely right. The so-called argument from design was respectable on intellectual grounds in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. But it disappeared along with every other argument that tried to uphold the notion of purpose in the universe (known in philosophy as teleology). Scientists today offer the opposite, the argument against design, although they graciously allow that design can temporarily appear in the swirling randomness that rules all things.
The beautiful design found in Nature—as opposed to mere complexity and islands of heat—cannot simply be brushed aside. Science is forced to explain how design appeared in an accidental universe. For its part, spirituality is forced to explain the opposite, how randomness appeared in a purposeful universe. But if creation is imbued with consciousness, there is no war between chance and purpose, randomness and design. You can have both at the same time.
Look at your own life. You are a conscious being. Sometimes you stroll aimlessly looking at the scenery; sometimes you know where you are going. Sometimes you doodle and sometimes you draw. Aimless wandering doesn’t negate destinations any more than a squiggle on a scratch pad negates studies in an art class. The same holds true on a cosmic scale. At a deeper level, random chance can benefit purpose. In the human sphere, letting go of a problem, releasing it to new possibilities, is often the best way to arrive at a solution. Nature seems to agree. The universe combines matter and energy, apparently by chance, only to arrive at sudden leaps of pattern and form. Before DNA there was a primordial soup of amino acids. The soup churned around without visible “design,” but out of it emerged an incredibly complex design. This was creativity at work, not war.
Randomness can easily live in the same neighborhood as purpose, design, and meaning. All exist simultaneously in Nature. Red corpuscles bounce along randomly in my bloodstream, but I am not writing these words randomly. Being forced into an either/or choice—which is what happens when science says “choose materialism” and religion says “choose God”—puts a roadblock on the path to the truth. There is no use even arguing until everyone is willing to consider the deeper issues with an open mind.