There seems to be a lot of debate on this forum recently about the matter of God vs. Science. There hasn't been much talk about scientific support for the existence of God, so here is some scientific information that at least IMPLIES the existence of a creator (I've taken the facts about physical/chemical constants from a science website). Hard headed scientific formalists, get your flaming skills ready for a workout.
The universe seems curiously designed to have one single ultimate purpose: to give rise to life. It's something that is geared into the fundamental nature of the universe's "settings", so even though life randomly emerged on this planet, it would have eventually done so just because of the way things eventually develop according to the properties of physical things. Chaos inevitibly gives rise to order, atoms that arrange randomly in the most useful form develop into organic molecules, organic molecules develop into amino acids, amino acids develop into... etc etc etc, until you reach the incredibly sophisticated development of genetic structures. Our genes exist for one single purpose, to keep copying themselves. This has nothing to do with conscious design, it's a result of the properties of the universe, and it's a little odd when you think about it. Why is there this fierce inbuilt drive towards things surviving? It's almost as if the universe is trying to become conscious of itself.
But when you look at the way in which the physical and chemical "constants" of the universe are so precisely tuned to allow life and the universe itself to exist, it's just plain bizarre. If you want a universe to exist and be capable of supporting life, then each of these constants needs to be exactly the way they are in our universe, or it just wouldn't work. Here are some of those constants (this was first put forward by the astrophysicist and cosmologist Brandon Carter from Cambridge University, not some religious nut):
- Gravity is roughly 1039 times weaker than electromagnetism. If gravity had been 1033 times weaker than electromagnetism, "stars would be a billion times less massive and would burn a million times faster."
- The weak nuclear force is 1028 times the strength of gravity. Had the weak force been slightly weaker, and not been in the exact balance it is to the masses of the electron, proton, and neutron, the universe would have started out as either all hydrogen or all helium, instead of the 75/25 ratio that we had. If this had happened, without hydrogen there would have been no organic chemistry, no life (making water would have been impossible for example).
- The strong nuclear force is decided by the ratio between quark masses and the mass of the proton. A more powerful strong nuclear strong (by as little as 2 percent) would have prevented the formation of protons--yielding a universe without atoms. Decreasing it by 5 percent would have given us a universe without stars, since deuterium could never have formed.
- If the difference in mass between a proton and a neutron were not exactly as it is--roughly twice the mass of an electron--then all neutrons would have become protons or vice versa. Say good-bye to chemistry as we know it--and to life.
- The very nature of water--so vital to life--is something of a mystery (a point noticed by one of the forerunners of anthropic reasoning in the nineteenth century, Harvard biologist Lawrence Henderson). Unique amongst the molecules, water is lighter in its solid than liquid form: Ice floats. If it did not, the oceans would freeze from the bottom up and earth would now be covered with solid ice. This property in turn is traceable to the unique properties of the hydrogen atom.
- The synthesis of carbon--the vital core of all organic molecules--on a significant scale involves what scientists view as an astonishing coincidence in the ratio of the strong force to electromagnetism. This ratio makes it possible for carbon-12 to reach an excited state of exactly 7.65 MeV at the temperature typical of the centre of stars, which creates a resonance involving helium-4, beryllium-8, and carbon-12--allowing the necessary binding to take place during a tiny window of opportunity 10^17 seconds long. If the fine structure constant had been any different, carbon would not have formed in significant amounts, and if that happened, we wouldn't have carbon based structure (pretty much all life as we know it).
The more you look at how precisely fine tuned the universe is so that stars don't burn out too fast, that nuclei and complex atoms can form and be stable, and so on, it's just fucking bizarre (and astronomically improbably) that things worked out so perfectly. Any skeptics want to take a pop at this?
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