The Expectations
What is the place of man in the cosmos? This is one of the central issues that divides the materialist and the religious believer. To the Jew or Christian, the universe was created, at least in part, for the sake of the human race. The Epistle to Diognetus, a Christian work of the early second century, says, “God loved the race of men. It was for their sakes that he made the world.”1 In the Book of Genesis, the six days of Creation culminate in the creation of man, who alone among all the creatures of Earth is said to be made “in the image of God.” This does not necessarily imply that other intelligent beings do not exist elsewhere in the universe. Traditionally, theologians have explained that human beings are made in God’s image primarily because, like God, we have reason and free will. If there are other beings in the universe endowed with rationality and freedom, then they too are made in the image of God and presumably are no less important in the divine plan. In any case, from the religious perspective, it can be said that it was partly for the sake of the existence of rational, free creatures such as ourselves that God created the universe.
In the view of the materialist, however, it makes no sense to talk about the universe existing for anybody’s sake, or for any purpose whatsoever. The universe just is. It is a brute fact, without cause and without purpose. In the words of Victor Stenger, author of Not By Design, “The simplest hypothesis that so far seems to explain the data is that the universe is an accident.”2 In his best-selling book The First Three Minutes, Steven Weinberg, the leading particle physicist of our time, wrote,
It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a farcical outcome of a chain of accidents, … but that we were somehow built in from the beginning.… It is very hard for us to realize that [the entire Earth] is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe.… The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.3
Not only to Weinberg, but to many scientists, the progress of scientific understanding has more and more made the universe appear “pointless,” and the human race seem to be merely a by-product of blind material forces. Indeed, it is believed by many that this is the key lesson that science has to teach us. A particularly forthright champion of this view is the biologist Richard Dawkins, who writes, “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”4
The pointlessness of the cosmos and its indifference to human beings is also a main theme in the writings of the zoologist Stephen Jay Gould, as in this passage of his book Full House:
I have often had occasion to quote Freud’s incisive … observation that all major revolutions in the history of science have as their common theme … the successive dethronement of human arrogance.… Freud mentions three such incidents: We once thought that we lived on the central body of a limited universe until Copernicus, Galileo and Newton identified the earth as a tiny satellite to a marginal star. We then comforted ourselves by imagining that God had nevertheless chosen this peripheral location for creating a unique organism in His image—until Darwin came along and “relegated us to descent from an animal world.” We then sought solace in our rational minds until, as Freud noted, … psychology discovered the unconscious.5
Gould goes on to observe that Freud left out “several important revolutions in the pedestal-smashing mode.” One is the discovery of “deep time”:
The earth is billions of years old.… The Freudian dethronement occurred when paleontology revealed that human existence only fills the last micromoment of planetary time—an inch or two of the cosmic mile, a minute or two of the cosmic year.6
The human race is, according to Gould, a freak accident of evolutionary history, merely “a tiny twig on an ancient tree of life.”7
This idea of the progressive “dethronement” or marginalization of man by scientific discovery is perhaps the central claim of scientific materialists. It lies at the core of their view of reality. The question is whether it is justified by a dispassionate examination of the scientific data, or is based on their own philosophical preconceptions.
It cannot be denied that there is much in the history of scientific discovery that lends itself to this marginalization-of-man interpretation. And yet, discussions about the size or the age of the universe do not come to grips with the real question: Is the human race an “accident” or is it a central part of the cosmic plan? Or, to put it in Weinberg’s terms, are we “somehow built in from the beginning”?
As it happens, some new light has been shed on these old questions by ideas that have come out of physics and astronomy in the last few decades. In particular, starting with the work of the astrophysicist Brandon Carter8 in the 1970s, it has been noticed that there are quite a few features of the laws of physics that seem to suggest precisely that we were built in from the beginning. Some scientists call these features “anthropic coincidences.” (“Anthropic” comes from the Greek word anthropos, meaning “human being.”) What is “coincidental” is that certain characteristics of the laws of physics seem to coincide exactly with what is required for the universe to be able to produce life, including intelligent beings like ourselves.
Many, including former agnostics and atheists, have seen in these anthropic coincidences a powerful argument for the existence of God. Others have argued that these coincidences can be explained scientifically without invoking God. Their discovery has not, in short, succeeded in ending the old debate between religion and materialism. That is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, it has dramatically changed the terms of that debate. It is no longer a question of whether one can find any evidence in nature that we were built in. Such evidence abounds. It is now a question of whether that evidence should be taken at face value, whether it really means what it seems to mean.
In the next chapter I will present and explain some examples of anthropic coincidences. In subsequent chapters I will discuss their implications.