Universe no accident

Neither a miracle

Voltaire’s 1759 satire Candide skewered numerous targets, not least the proposition by the German philosopher Leibniz that the existing world was the best of all possible worlds. In the story, Candide’s mentor is Professor Pangloss, a devoted follower of Leibniz. “It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are,” Pangloss declares, “for all being created for an end, all is necessarily for the best end. Observe, that the nose has been formed to bear spectacles—thus we have spectacles. Legs are visibly designed for stockings—and we have stockings. Stones were made to be hewn, and to construct castles—therefore my lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Pigs were made to be eaten—therefore we eat pork all the year round. Consequently they who assert that all is well have said a foolish thing; they should have said all is for the best."

Leibniz couldn’t hit back at Voltaire, being dead. But others defended him and took his philosophy in new directions. William Paley, an English clergyman, gave the perfect-fit argument a religious twist. “In crossing a heath,” Payley wrote in 1802, “suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there. I might possibly answer that, for anything I knew 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 I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there.”

No, a watch implied a watchmaker. “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 world and its intricate wonders, Paley said, were proof of a Grand Watchmaker. “Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.”

As science grew more sophisticated, so did the argument that the universe was tailor-made for humans. Twentieth-century physicists observed that the cosmological constant—a number connecting key forces in the universe—had to be just what it was. Larger and the universe just after the Big Bang would have expanded too rapidly for stars and planets to have coalesced. Smaller and the universe would have collapsed back on itself. Either way, we humans would never have come into being.

Similarly with the strong nuclear force, which holds together the nuclei of atoms. Very slightly stronger and all the hydrogen would have turned into helium, making water impossible. Weaker and hydrogen would have been the only element in the universe. Either way, no humans.

William Paley would have said this was additional evidence of a divine Creator. God threaded the needle for the cosmological constant and the strong force so we humans could thrive in the universe.

Not so fast, said skeptics. They pointed out that if the universe were such that it didn’t support human life, we wouldn’t be here to notice. Maybe there are a million universes, and only ours is inhabitable. But we don’t know about the others, and so we think that somebody or something is watching out for us.

In 1973 an Australian physicist named Brandon Carter coined the term “anthropic principle” to describe this situation. He counterposed his concept to the “Copernican principle,” which asserts that Earth isn’t the center of the universe: there’s nothing special about humanity’s home. Carter agreed that there’s nothing special about Earth or its solar system, but he said that the mere existence of humans anywhere in the universe is evidence that the universe has certain properties, such as a cosmological constant and a strong force with the values we observe.

To summarize: It’s not surprising that a universe that contains humans is fit for human life.

This might sound abstruse, but something like it pops up everywhere in life. A person wins the lottery and tells a reporter he must have been destined to win. No, he wasn't destined to win. Somebody was going to win, and once the reporter learned the winner's name, that person was the one interviewed.

People often take their life circumstances for granted and from this baseline lament their lack of additional benefits. Free speech advocates on American college campuses in the 1960s protested the restraints on what they could say and where they could say it, failing to acknowledge that their speech was already freer than that of 99 percent of all the people who ever lived. It was this very freedom that permitted the protests. Chinese dissenters had no such license.

American conservatives fund think tanks that complain that the heavy hand of government is stifling American capitalism, ignoring that the United States has the most capitalism-friendly government in the world, and that this friendliness allows the profits that fund the think tanks.

The circumstances in which we humans find ourselves are usually neither miracles nor accidents. It's fine to be pleased when the circumstances suit us. But often we shouldn't be surprised.