Editor’s note: Writing at The American Spectator, mathematician Granville Sewell considers the “problem of gratuitous beauty,” a noteworthy element in the argument of The Story of Everything. The following is an excerpt.
The “problem of pain” is a problem for those of us who believe in God; in fact, for many people it is the strongest objection to design. The “problem of gratuitous beauty,” on the other hand, is a problem for atheists. Nearly every nature documentary, after demonstrating the astonishing cleverness of living species, ends with the obligatory “hard to believe, but all of this is the result of the survival of the fittest.” Most laymen agree that it is hard to believe.
The Long-Necked Giraffe
But it is not just the layman who sees that there is so much cleverness and beauty in the living world that seems to go far beyond any survival value, that seems to have only artistic value. German geneticist Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig, in his book The Evolution of the Long-Necked Giraffe, analyzes many Darwinian attempts to explain biological features (such as its long neck!) and behavior of giraffes in terms of the advantages they might convey for survival. He shows that all are false or unsupported by the evidence. Then he concludes: “If, on the other hand, one views nature as ingenious artwork that cannot be reduced to the question of utility alone, these problems disappear.”
Local and Global Fine-Tuning
But gratuitous beauty is not just a problem for the Darwinists. It is also a problem for the atheists’ explanations for the “local” fine-tuning of conditions on Earth, and the “global” fine-tuning of the laws and constants of in our universe… . They argue that there are many planets in the universe, and our planet is so well-suited for the development of life because otherwise we would not be here.
Well, there are a lot of planets in the universe, so this seems to make some sense. But for the global fine-tuning, they have to make a similar argument and say, there must be many other universes with random laws of physics and/or random values for the constants of physics, and our universe is finely tuned for life because otherwise we would not be here to wonder about it. This “anthropic” explanation for the global fine-tuning is much weaker, since there is no evidence — there can never be any evidence — that there are other unobservable universes, or that they would have random laws and physical constants if they did exist.
But the problem of gratuitous beauty challenges attempts to explain both local and global fine-tuning without design. As Michael Behe reminds us in The Edge of Evolution, these explanations only attempt to explain why we live in a universe, and on a planet, where intelligent beings can survive, not why we live in such a “lush” world, where the fundamental laws and conditions not only make life possible, but also make it interesting and beautiful. As Behe writes, “It is difficult to make a rigorous argument on such a question. Yet it seems that our world is quite lush and contains much more than what’s absolutely needed for intelligence.” Indeed.
Our Privileged Planet
For example, the books The Privileged Planet: How our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery, by astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards, and Fire-Maker: How Humans were Designed to Harness Fire and Transform our Planet, by biologist Michael Denton, detail many ways in which the conditions on our planet and its location, and the laws of our universe, are fine-tuned not only for our survival but also for scientific discovery and technological progress. These fine tunings cannot be explained by “the conditions were just right for life because otherwise we would not be here to wonder about it” arguments.
We would still be here to wonder if the conditions on Earth had not been so finely tuned as to make possible the development of technology and scientific discovery. The only explanation for these remarkable fine-tunings, it seems to me, is that they are gratuitous gifts from our Designer, given to challenge and entertain us. That is why I find the fine-tuning for discovery especially satisfying: not only does it defeat the “anthropic” arguments, but it also provides a humbling lesson to those scientists who insist that nothing can lie beyond the reach of science. They have been able to reach as far as they have only because, in the first place, they were set up to succeed.