#63 – Fine Tuning of the Universe (re-release)

Are certain cosmological constants “too good to be random or coincidental”?

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We’re repeating this episode in anticipation of a couple new ones that will be released in two weeks, after the holiday season has passed (we didn’t want those to be eclipsed by the distractions of the holidays). Those two new episodes in January are part of our “Origin and evolution of …” series, and will focus on the universe and life, respectively. To that end, we thought we’d re-release previous episodes on the Fine Tuning of the Universe (this week) and Emergent Creationism (next week).

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Apologies to my high school geography teacher. The only thing I seem to remember learning in that class was how to balance pencils on the end of their erasers!? I’d seen street performers turn the art of balancing odd things into an impressive revenue generator … maybe I could make something of it too? I might have taken an entirely different career path if I’d learned how to take that to the next level by turning the pencil around and balancing it on its point, but no one on earth has ever been able to do that. It’s as if earth’s gravity amplifies an imbalance of even a few molecules to instantly topple even the most carefully poised pencil (air currents are not the problem, because astronauts can do it in the space station). Chaos theory and the butterfly effect come into play here: the very smallest initial event gets magnified into a catastrophic system failure.

Scientists have learned that many physical constants that dictate the structure and function of our universe seem to be so precisely tuned it’s as if they were like pencils standing on their points.

If the ratio of the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force were off by a decimal with thirty two zeroes in front of it, the sun would burn a million times faster … and any life that ever appeared on earth would be immediately vaporized in that intense heat.

If the balance between the nuclear and electromagnetic forces holding atomic nuclei together was off by a decimal with dozens of zeroes in front of it, the universe would have ended up either as one super-gigantic ball of mass like a mega-supersized proton, or as a vastly dispersed cloud of particles that could never form planets or life forms.

Those are some pretty finely balanced pencils! And there’s a daunting list of other examples.

But is that an argument for design? For a Designer?

In this episode, we explore some of the reasons why some answer “yes,” and reasons why some do not.

We also look at how some Fine Tuning proponents stretch this idea to absurdity, adding in all kinds of “examples” which … if you think carefully about them … are not examples of the universe being finely-tuned for life, but instead are examples of how life-as-we-know-it is so finely-tuned for this universe.

As always, tell us what you think …

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