The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God

by Lynn Picknett

  However, as we saw in Part One, this is not the way the scientific revolution happened. All of its great figures – Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Leibniz – based their work on the understanding that the universe was intelligently created and that human intelligence plays a key part in its design and purpose. Bruno even anticipated the existence of other, more advanced extraterrestrial intelligences, which fits the strong anthropic principle even more neatly. None of them would have had any problems with the implications of the anthropic principle; they would have taken it for granted. And they certainly wouldn’t have tied themselves in theoretical knots to evade the evidence staring them in the face.

  Opponents of design point out that the hypothesis is just as untestable as the multiverse theory. That is not the case. The hypothesis of creation by deity or deities unknown does allow for the formulation of testable predictions. What predictions? Simply, if the universe is designed for intelligent life then the more our understanding of physics advances, the more we will uncover evidence of such design. Which is, of course, exactly what has happened. The design hypothesis passes that test.

  A few scientists have at least been open to the notion of some form of design. Fred Hoyle proposed that the ‘intelligent universe’ (the title of his 1983 book) is a purposeful, creative entity evolving towards some specific end. Hoyle also scathingly dismissed the usual scientific response to the anthropic principle, calling it ‘a modern attempt to evade all implications of purpose in the Universe, no matter how remarkable our environment turns out to be’.36

  The most high-profile scientific advocate of the design idea now is Paul Davies, who summed his position up in The Mind of God (1992):

  Through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact. There must, it seems tome, be a deeper level of explanation. Whether one wishes to call that deeper level ‘God’ is a matter of taste and definition. Furthermore, I have come to the point of view that mind – i.e. conscious awareness of the world – is not a meaningless and accidental quirk of nature, but an absolutely fundamental facet of reality. That is not to say that we are the purpose for which the universe exists. Far from it. I do, however, believe that we human beings are built into the scheme of things in a very basic way.37

  However, perhaps oddly, the theory that suffers the most from the design interpretation of the anthropic principle is the traditional idea of God as creator, because it exposes the limitations of his divine power.

  The God of the Judeo-Christian religion, for example, created worlds from his will and word alone, and fashioned Adam out of clay and Eve from a rib bone. This was not metaphorical, but literal. After that particular tour de force tweaking the resonance of the helium nuclei or making a minor adjustment to the strength of the weak nuclear force in order to produce a man and woman millions of years later is something of an anticlimax.

  This is not properly understood (or perhaps it is, but evaded) by those representatives of organized religions who use the evidence for design in support of their own doctrines. We find ourselves in the unusual position of agreeing with a pope, John Paul II, in his 1985 statement that to dismiss the scientific evidence for design in the universe as being a simple coincidence ‘would be to abdicate human intelligence’.38 But we profoundly disagree that such evidence supports the existence of the God of the Bible, and therefore of the Catholic Church.

  The Cardinal Archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Schönborn, supremely missed the point when he declared in ‘Finding Design in Nature’, published in the New York Times in 2005, that by refusing to accept chance explanations for the way the universe works, the Catholic Church is ‘standing in firm defence of reason’ and that it will again defend human nature by proclaiming that the immanent design evident in nature is real’.39 He is quite wrong: the evidence of design disproves the Catholic teachings about God, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

  However, the ‘designer universe’ concept does support the cosmology of the Hermetic tradition, as well as the Neoplatonists’ and the Heliopolitan theology that we argue lay behind them. Paul Davies notes that the kind of designer suggested by the strong anthropic principle fits the model of the Demiurge – the lesser or, in the words of the Hermetica, ‘second god’, whose creative power is constrained by matter – rather than the omnipotent God of Judeo-Christian tradition.40 So in this respect at least, science supports the Hermetic tradition.

  At this point the exact nature of the designer isn’t the most important consideration. If we have to use a term that doesn’t commit us to any specific image, we suggest Grand Universal Designer – or the good GUD almighty.

  In this chapter we have only explored the conditions that made the universe ripe for life. If GUD exists, we should be able to see evidence of his or her hand elsewhere in nature, particularly in the emergence and development of intelligent life. On the other hand, other branches of science may utterly demolish poor old GUD by demonstrating conclusively that certain phenomena could only happen through the workings of pure chance and blind forces. But which way does it go?

  Chapter Nine

  1 In the radio programme ‘The Multiverse’, part of the In Our Time series, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 21 February 2008.

  2 Barrow and Tipler, p. 5.

  3 Susskind, ‘A Universe Like No Other’, p. 38.

  4 Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, p. 154.

  5 Carr and Rees, p. 612.

  6 Dyson, p. 44.

  7 Quoted in Davies, The Mind of God, p. 199.

  8 Stockwood (ed.), p. 64.

  9 Davies, The Mind of God, Chapter 8.

  10 Feynman, p. 12.

  11 Davies, The Mind of God, p. 197.

  12 In the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The Multiverse’ (see note 1 above).

  13 Hawking and Mlodinow, p. 161.

  14 Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma, pp. 166–70.

  15 Susskind, ‘A Universe Like No Other’, p. 37.

  16 Ibid., p. 39.

  17 In the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The Multiverse’ (see note 1 above).

  18 Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, pp. 166–7.

  19 Jeans, p. 96.

  20 Davies, The Mind of God, p. 173.

  21 In the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The Multiverse’ (see note 1 above).

  22 Carr, p. 14.

  23 Ibid.

  24 Quoted in Smolin, The Trouble With Physics, p. 125.

  25 Ibid., pp. 158–9.

  26 Al-Khalili, p. 23.

  27 Smolin, The Trouble with Physics, p. 163.

  28 Quoted in Malone, p. 191.

  29 See Nick Bostrom, ‘Are We Living in The Matrix? The Simulation Argument’, in Yeffeth (ed.).

  30 Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma, pp. 213–4.

  31 Hawking, ‘The Grand Designer’, p. 25.

  32 Al-Khalili, p. 23.

  33 Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p. 182.

  34 Susskind, ‘A Universe Like No Other’, p. 36.

  35 Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory, p 182.

  36 Hoyle, pp. 217–8.

  37 Davies, The Mind of God, p. 16.

  38 Quoted in Schönborn.

  39 Ibid.

  40 Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma, pp. 228–30.

  CHAPTER TEN

  STARDUST IS EVERYTHING

  In the last chapter we saw that advances in cosmological understanding point firmly in the direction of the design interpretation of the anthropic principle, suggesting that the universe was intentionally fine-tuned – by whom or what we have no way of knowing – specifically to make it suitable for intelligent life. But this only concerns the physics, the manufacture of the elements necessary for life and the planets where it can dig in and thrive. What about the next step? How are living things actually made? And do the processes that create life support the designer universe hypothesis?

  After all, if life itself turns out
to be an incredible fluke, the whole idea of a designer universe would be undermined. On the other hand, if the laws of physics have been rigged to produce a universe agog for life, we would expect the rules of biochemistry to be similarly primed to ensure life develops wherever and whenever it can.

  Frustratingly, however, matters are not as cut and dried as they are with the physics, since there are enormous gaps in the available data. Charles Darwin wrote to his great friend, the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, in 1863, four years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, saying: ‘It is mere rubbish, thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.’1 Although 150 years later we know considerably more about the origin of matter itself, our information on the origin of life is still largely ‘rubbish’. Darwin’s foremost modern apostle, Richard Dawkins, writes in The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (2009) that ‘we have no evidence bearing upon the momentous event that was the start of evolution on this planet’.2 ‘No evidence …’ None whatsoever.

  Since Darwin took the discussion of the evolution of life to a new level in the mid-nineteenth century, biologists’ growing understanding of the conditions necessary for complex life forms could be extrapolated in two diametrically opposite directions. Some still consider that the chain of events that led to life on Earth was so dependent on chance that organic life must be an extremely rare phenomenon, cosmically speaking. Some even argue that the odds are so stacked against the development of life that Earth may be unique in the universe. Yes, they claim, we are alone – get used to it. On the other hand, some believe the processes that produce life unfold according to rigid laws. What happened here will happen anywhere given approximately the same conditions. And given the vastness of the universe, even if those conditions were rarer than multiverses with life, there will still be millions of suitable locations for it to exist.

  Once upon a time most biologists believed that life was an exceedingly rare phenomenon at best. But new discoveries in the last two or three decades prompted specialists to see it as a common, even inevitable, feature of the universe. A phrase that is often bandied around is that life is a ‘cosmic imperative’: the ordering of the universe means that wherever conditions are such that life can evolve, it will, just as weeds will seize on the tiniest nooks and crannies to grow and thrive. Life just can’t stop itself.

  One of the foremost exponents of this school is Christian de Duve, the Belgian biochemist and cytologist who won a Nobel Prize in 1974 for his work on cells. In 1995 he published Vital Dust: Life as a Cosmic Imperative, a detailed survey of the origin and development of life on Earth, from the first organic molecules to human beings. He writes:

  … life is the product of deterministic forces. Life was bound to arise under the prevailing conditions, and it will arise similarly wherever and whenever the same conditions obtain. There is hardly any room for ‘lucky accidents’ in the gradual, multistep process whereby life originated.3

  It may be early days yet, and the evidence may be nowhere near as conclusive as that for the fine-tuning that led to the formulation of the anthropic principle, but the very fact that the study of the origins of life, or abiogenesis, is moving in this direction is implicitly designer-universe friendly. This also fits in with the Hermetic principle that the universe is teeming with life – or at least the potential for life. Giordano Bruno took this line of thinking to its logical conclusion, arguing for the existence of other inhabited worlds.

  The modern trend towards seeing life as a cosmic inevitability arose largely from the growing recognition that the universe is brimming with the building blocks of life – not just on planets but even in deepest space.

  ALIEN SEEDS

  The spring of 1953 was a big time for abiogenesis: two seminal scientific papers appeared within just three weeks, fuelling great excitement in the subject. The first was published in the 23 April edition of the British scientific journal Nature, by James D. Watson (a somewhat maverick American biologist) and Francis Crick (British physicist-turned-biologist), announcing their discovery of DNA’s double helix. Then on 15 May the American Science carried a paper by Stanley L. Miller on his and Harold Urey’s re-creation at the University of Chicago of some of the fundamental chemical building blocks of life – most significantly certain amino acids – under simulated ‘primitive Earth’ conditions.

  At the time, it was Miller who made the bigger splash. Watson and Crick’s paper was about what was then considered a very uninteresting nucleic acid, only hinting cautiously, in its very last sentence, that it might actually be the long-sought medium of genetic inheritance: ‘It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a copying mechanism for the genetic material.’4 But despite their laid-back comment, the discovery of DNA made the scientific landscape richer, more colourful and intoxicatingly alive with promise.

  Miller’s paper, on the other hand, offered much more hope for unlocking the origins of life. It seemed to confirm the prevailing theory that it began in the Earth’s ‘primordial soup’ of biochemicals. The implication was that further research would reveal how the more complicated parts of the system came into being through similar processes – all of them essentially blind.

  As we now know, by unravelling the genetic mystery, Watson and Crick’s discovery has had by far the greater impact, not just on science, but on our daily lives – witness, for example, the DNA ‘fingerprinting’ used to catch criminals. Urey and Miller haven’t fared nearly so well, partly because although their experiments showed amino acids and certain other biogenic chemicals could be produced easily in the lab, taking it further and putting the building blocks together in any more complex way remained out of reach. Since 1953 it has also been discovered that creating, for example, amino acids doesn’t require terrestrial conditions at all. Many of the building blocks of life have been found literally floating around in space.

  For a long time it was assumed that however life on Earth originated it happened on Earth. Even over a century ago this was not without its challengers, however. Great names of the Victorian age such as German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz and British physicist and engineer Lord Kelvin advocated that the seeds of life could be carried between planets by meteors and comets, a theory that was termed ‘panspermia’ in 1907 by the Nobel-prizewinning Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius. He actually took the term from Athanasius Kircher who wrote of panspermia rerum, ‘the universal seed of things’. In turn, he had developed the concept from Bruno’s spermia rerum, meaning the basic unit of which everything is made – essentially atoms.5

  Panspermia’s most (in)famous recent champions were Sir Fred Hoyle and his long-time collaborator Chandra Wickramasinghe. With a typically robust side-swipe at his peers, Hoyle likened their view that life originated exclusively on Earth to the geocentric ideas that prevailed before Copernicus.6 In a way he was right, their ideas effectively make our planet the biological centre of the universe.

  And the increasingly exciting discoveries of the comparatively new field of astrobiology – developed in the late 1950s – reveal that there is no doubt whatsoever that many of the building blocks of life do have an extraterrestrial origin. The only real controversy is how far they were assembled before they arrived on Earth.

  Certainly the chemical ingredients for life exist in space. Even the most remote regions of interstellar space are pervaded with gas and a much, much smaller amount of solid material in the form of extremely fine-grained ‘dust’. These cosmic grains are enormously significant. Until the beginning of the 1960s the consensus was that they were simply frozen clumps of gas molecules, but improved technology has revealed that some were too close to stars to be frozen. So what could they be?

  Enter the ever-energetic Hoyle and his newly arrived research student from Sri Lanka, Chandra Wickramasinghe. Their time working at Newton’s alma mater Trinity College, Cambridge marked the beginning of one of the most enduring scient
ific collaborations, one that continued after Wickramasinghe’s own glittering scientific career took off and only ended with Hoyle’s death in 2001.

  It was Wickramasinghe who developed the idea that organic carbon-based chemicals form the major components of cosmic dust. When he and Hoyle first proposed this in 1962 it was, unsurprisingly, highly controversial. But research in the 1960s and 1970s vindicated it, and these days it is simply a given.

  Formaldehyde, one of the simplest organic compounds, was detected in interstellar clouds in 1969, and since then a whole host of organic chemicals has been added to the list. By the end of the next decade over thirty complex molecules had been found in interstellar dust, including water vapour, carbon monoxide and ammonia. Organic molecules including methane, acids, alcohols and sugars have now been found. Even molecules of vinegar have been detected in a gas cloud in Sagittarius. Around 20 per cent of interstellar dust is now thought to be made up of organic chemicals. The discovery of so many prompted Hoyle and Wickramasinghe to propose, in the mid-1970s, that even more complex organic molecules could be lurking in the interstellar clouds, and that this was a better candidate for the origin of life than the terrestrial ‘primordial soup’.

  One of the most significant discoveries in this field came in 2005 from a NASA team from the Ames Research Center in California, using data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The team was studying a type of complex organic molecule with the uncatchy name of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a very common family of chemicals which, in the words of the team’s leader Douglas Hudgins, are found ‘in every nook and cranny’ of the universe. The fact that PAHs are abundant in space had been known for a long time, and few thought they were worth much of a second look. But the NASA team discovered to their great astonishment that the PAHs they were looking at – in a distant galaxy designated M81, 12 million light years away – were rich in nitrogen. This is considerably more significant than it might appear.