Is the Universe Fine-Tuned for Us

Decoding the Cosmos since 1905

The universe is a pretty big place seems like an awful waste of space.

• Nearest star: 4.22 light years.
• Nearest galaxy: 2.44 million light years.
• Galaxies within our horizon are now 40 billion light years away.
• Universe beyond horizon: 10 to the 10 to the 100 times bigger.

The Goldilocks Planet is not all that well suited for human life.

• 2/3 salt water unfit for drinking.
• Humans are restricted only to surface.
• Atmosphere does not block harmful ultraviolet radiation which causes skin cancer and other genetic disorders.
• Natural calamities like floods, earthquakes, famine and droughts, diseases like cancer, AIDS, kill millions millions of people yearly.

Only two photons of every billion emitted by sun are used to warm the Earth surface, the rest radiating uselessly into space. And lack of oxygen and cosmic microwave background radiation (which is well characterized by a (2.728 ± 0.002) Kelvin black body spectrum over more than three decades in frequency) prevents humans from spending years in outer space.

The fine tuning coincidences are updated and refurbished and have been somewhat misleadingly categorized under the designation anthropic principle, a term coined by astronomer Brandon Carter in 1974 – which states that the physical properties of the universe are as they are because they permit the emergence of life. This teleological principle tries to explain why some physical properties of matter seem so fine-tuned as to permit the existence of life — and are widely claimed to provide prima facie evidence for purposeful design — a design with life and perhaps humanity in mind.

However, the fine-tuning argument is the unwarranted assumption that the universe is exquisitely designed with the goal of generating and sustaining observers. Of course, fine tuning coincidences are only needed to fill in the details of evidence for the existence of insulated interpositions of Divine power. If the universe were congenial to human life, then we would expect it to be easy for humanlike life to develop and survive throughout the vast stretches of the universe (an intricately complex place). We must admit that much of what we believe, including our fundamental coincidences about the universe — is a blind leap of faith. We, after all, carbon-based biological systems operating a billion times slower than computer chips made of silicon, can carry the implications of the illusion of intelligent design about as far as we can imagine we could go — classifying as an argument from design is the contemporary claim that the laws and constants of physics are "fine-tuned" so that the universe is able to contain life – which is commonly — have been publicized in the popular print media, featured in television specials on PBS and BBC, and disseminated through a wide variety of popular and scholarly books, including entries from prestigious academic publishing houses such as Oxford and Cambridge University Presses — but misleading. Furthermore, blind faith can justify anything and we have no reason to conclude that earthlike planets and sunlike stars and life itself are far too complex to have arisen by coincidence or could not have had a purely accidental origin because astrobiologists have now demonstrated that captured material from a comet — analyzed immediately after striking Earth so that effects of contamination by earthly matter are minimal — possessed lysine, an amino acid, in the sample, suggesting that the evolution of life on Earth had only begun after accidental jump-start from space i.e., the first ingredients of life accidently came from space after Earth formed.

On the other hand, we — survival machines evolved by the principle of natural selection — robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes— who need Newtonian mechanics operating in a three-dimensional universe to have planets circling the sun, multiple stable elements of the periodic table to provide a sufficient variety of atomic "building blocks" for life, need atomic structure to be constrained by the laws of quantum mechanics, further need the orderliness in chemical reactions that is the consequence of Boltzmann's equation for the second law of thermodynamics and for an energy source like the sun transfer its life-giving energy to a habitat like Earth we who require the laws of electromagnetic radiation that Maxwell described— ask a multitude of certain questions contemplating the immense complexity of the cosmos and seek answers on a grand scale which points firmly to the fact that is daunting, but still short of proof that every design, every adaptation, and every act fits comfortably inside a survival sceptical viewpoint. However, it is tempting to believe, but, the apparent survival-tuning is something bordering on the mysterious........ there is no rational explanation for the cause of the appropriateness of the language of survival. Is it a product of cosmic coincidence or merely an exceedingly ingenious design product of an intelligent designer or an act of a superior will (people of faith believe it as God's signature or a pinnacle of God's divine handiwork)? In the millennia of Homo sapiens evolution, we have found it something quite . . . puzzling. Even that great Jewish scientist Albert Einstein (who freed us from the superstition of the past and interpreted the constancy of the speed of light as a universal principle of nature that contradicted Newtonian theory) sustained a mystical outlook on the universe that was, he said, constantly renewed from the wonder and humility that filled him when he gazed at the universe. I wonder, can our finite minds ever truly understand such things as mysticism and infinity? The scientific community is prepared to consider the idea that God is the cause of the appropriateness of the language of survival a more respectable hypothesis today than at any time in the last 100 years.