Apparently, a recent survey of some 1,700 physicists (who knew there were so many?) asked them their preferred explanation for cosmological fine-tuning. I’m sure all my readers are well aware of the absurdly tight limits of various cosmological constants and boundary conditions of the early universe that seem, to so many ordinary people, to point to a divine Creator.
Well, it seems that Intelligent Design is the least popular view among these physicists, at least when responding to surveys by their professional peers. I’m not sure they were given the Flying Spaghetti Monster as an option. But more surprisingly, the most popular explanation was not a multiverse, nor vacuum-fluctuations, nor not-yet-revealed necessity from the laws of physics, nor any other natural explanation.
In fact, the leading opinion – and even more so in a smaller survey of leading physicists – seems to be that fine tuning is a brute fact that doesn’t warrant even an attempt to explain it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be too surprised, as I remember “brute factism” being pushed by working atheist scientists in a discussion either on BioLogos or Peaceful Science several years ago.
But it’s a little odd for a number of reasons. Not least among them is the massive investment in wholly theoretical string theory in theoretical physics in recent decades. This, by providing a potential mechanism for infinite universe replication, would have allowed our extraordinarily special universe to be explicable by chance. And so it was pursued relentlessly, though it has lost much ground recently. Indeed, the focus of much theoretical cosmology, since the Big Bang theory was widely accepted, has been on finding ways of bypassing the space-time singularity so that the universe would not have had a unique beginning, and so would not be unique, and so would be in some way potentially explicable in material terms.
But even before the Big Bang, recall that since the secularisation of science in the nineteenth century, essentially to further naturalistic materialism, the universe had been assumed to be eternal and unchanging. This was based on no scientific evidence whatsoever, and of course was in direct contradiction of the previously near-universal theistic view. Being self existent under that scheme, the universe would become, in place of God, the First Cause and therefore beyond explanation. This belief was adopted despite the philosophical problem that the universe consists of disparate parts, a complexity problem to which Aquinas had drawn attention 700 years earlier.
The lack of an empirical or rational foundation for this eternal, infinite universe, and yet its fierce defence in the face of evidence of cosmic expansion and hence a temporal and spatial origin, reveals that avoidance of the Creator was the probable motive. It was a gut-reaction below the level of consciousness, let alone science, a question of moral evasion rather than rational objection.
And so I am suspicious of the sudden and complete loss of human curiosity about origins displayed in this survey, given that (since the physicists are not sold on multiverses, etc) they presumably accept the “standard model” of the universe just popping into existence at the singularity. Yes, its four fundamental forces, its initial conditions, its chemistry, its (assumed) inflaton field, and so on are absurdly fine-tuned for interesting stuff, intelligent life, and intelligent observation. Yes, earth’s situation in space and time, and its physical character, and the unexplained origin of life, and the unexplained origin of consciousness, are most peculiar. But they are just brute facts, and there is nothing scientific to see here, so move along, please.
My suspicion is the greater for this lack of interest being set in the context of a world in which the vast majority of its billions believes in a divine Creator. A majority of the majority views that God as a Person who also chooses to reveal himself to mankind. It is also a world in which research suggests that children quickly develop an innate sense of God, even in atheist households, until it is educated out of them.
Furthermore, science itself in its ancient mediaeval form was a philosophical enterprise intended to discern the mind of God. In its modern reformation after Francis Bacon it became an empirical discipline to discern God’s laws operating in the world he had created. I can identify with a sense of wonder at the ways of nature leading to a sense of greater wonder at its Maker. I suppose I can almost sympathise with becoming so addicted to efficient material causal chains that one hopes to find them before the world was. But there’s something very artificial about chasing the marvels of the universe back to a marvellous source and then shrugging that source off as brute fact.
William Paley’s approach to natural theology is out of fashion, but he is surely right to discount the possibility that the man finding a self-replicating watch on the heath, having investigated its workings, would show no interest whatsoever in the origin of the watch. A fool might regard it as “natural.” But what kind of scientist would shrug it off as simply a brute fact unworthy of even speculation?
In the linked video Stephen Meyer accounts for this poll result by the all-pervading influence of methodological naturalism, surreptitiously tied to metaphysical naturalism, in the sciences since the late nineteenth century. He’s surely not far off the mark. For although a commitment to materialistic science itself can lead to the refusal to countenance a non-material cause like God, that does not explain the truncation of curiosity altogether in “brute factism.”
If you admit that science can take you no further (as “brute factism” must), the total denial of other causation indicates either that scientism has fried most of your brain, or more probably, that you have given yourself over to a reprobate mind “suppressing the truth by your wickedness.” It’s a tragedy when whole disciplines are seduced into that.
