I just finished watching a thoroughly absorbing and delightful debate between Stephen Meyer and Phil Halper over the evidence for God in cosmology. The YouTube conversation, hosted by Justin Brierley, was collegial while remaining energetic and occasionally feisty. Meyer, a leading proponent of the theory of intelligent design, is a first-rate thinker and debater, but you cannot tell just how thoughtful and well-prepared he is until he faces a worthy opponent. Phil Halper, co-author of Battle of the Big Bang (University of Chicago Press), was just such an opponent, a fact that Meyer acknowledged in the closing minutes of the three-hour conversation.
More Predictions Please
The discussion, occasioned by the theatrical release of The Story of Everything, focused on the evidence for a cosmic designer from the evidence of a cosmic beginning and the fine-tuning of nature for life. One point I would like to elaborate on: Halper faulted the God hypothesis for not predicting such things as (I’m going from memory here) the precise value of the carbon-12 resonance, essential for the synthesis of stable carbon in stars. Meyer noted that no hypothesis is expected to predict everything, and the design hypothesis offers the best explanation for all the fine-tuning being uncovered in physics and cosmology; moreover, the hypothesis anticipates the discovery of more fine-tuning, a prediction that has been repeatedly confirmed by the discovery of new instances of fine-tuning.
Halper countered that Meyer’s design hypothesis doesn’t predict the exact amount of fine-tuning that’s out there, to which I refer readers back to Meyer’s point that no theory is expected to predict (or even retrodict) every phenomenon in view.
Bullseyes … After the Fact?
Halper argued that Meyer’s examples of fine-tuning often amounted to drawing a bullseye around the target after the arrow has struck. That counterargument is thin ice indeed, given the many powerful instances of fine-tuning for life in physics and cosmology, instances that even many top atheistic physicists and cosmologists agree on.
Imagine an explorer trudging through the jungle. He comes across a boar pinned to a tree by an arrow through its gut. The explorer promptly infers design — an archer intentionally shot the boar. It won’t do for the explorer’s companion to complain that if the arrow had been found run through any of a thousand other things there in the jungle — a panther, a bear, an ape, a tiger, a python, a boy, a knot in the dead center of a tree trunk, etc.— the explorer would have reflexively inferred design in any of those cases as well. Such an objection doesn’t wash. The design, the intention, is abundantly evident in the scene of the slain boar, even if many other possible outcomes might have obtained, including numerous outcomes that also would have provided evidence of fine-tuning to achieve the result, meaning the explorer could not have predicted the arrow through the boar.
Nor would it do for the companion to complain that the amount of fine-tuning in the case of the arrow is rather loosey-goosey. After all, why not an arrow through the heart or brain? Surely such a shot would be more fine-tuned than this messy gut shot. No, the intention is still evident in the boar kill even if one is left to ponder why the arrow is in the gut rather than in the head or heart.
A Feature, Not a Bug
There is another point to be made here. One feature of the Judeo-Christian outlook crucial to the igniting of the scientific revolution was that while this outlook regarded nature as the deeply rational work of a rational Creator, the Creator was also understood as free to create in a variety of possible ways, meaning that physical theories couldn’t simply be worked out deductively from first principles but must be tested and refined by careful observation — as for instance, with Kepler’s discovery of elliptical orbits over against the perfect circular orbits held to by the Greeks, with their over-reliance on deductive reasoning when doing natural philosophy.
This understanding of God as rational but free to create in different ways was crucial to the scientific revolution, a point that many leading theistic and non-theistic historians of science agree on; and yet Halper faulted the God hypothesis for not predicting the various fine-tuned settings that have turned up in physics and cosmology. But to attempt such a thing would require it to operate more like the deduction-intensive framework that impeded the progress of science until the scientific revolution in Christian Europe. No thanks.
An Illustration from Salisbury Plain
Let me attempt to weave together various threads with an example from archeology. One can properly infer that Stonehenge was intelligently designed, and can infer this without also being able to have predicted, before studying it, exactly how the Stone Age builders had selected, cut, and arranged the stones.
In the same way, one can reasonably infer design from the exquisite fine-tuning of the laws, constants, and initial conditions of nature without one’s theory specifying the particulars of those settings.
A Babel of Models
Halper also never seemed to acknowledge Meyer’s point that the dizzying multiplication of cosmological models that are intent on explaining away fine-tuning and a cosmic beginning are evidence not of a robust scientific program but, following Thomas Kuhn, of a degenerate one, particularly when the models tend to be littered with the equivalent of the many ad hoc epicycles tacked onto the geocentric model of the solar system before it finally gave way to the heliocentric model. No, Occam’s razor is not the only test of a good hypothesis, but it is one.
I could say more on the subject, but much of it is in this fantastic conversation — “the toughest debate I’ve ever had,” as Halper graciously says at the end — and if not there, in Meyer’s work Return of the God Hypothesis. Check them out!