Publisher's Note: All Credit for this article goes to Dr. Jeff Zweerink. This article was published by admin, but written by Dr. Zweerink for Rock Solid Apologia

Darwin, Atheism and Fine-Tuning

Consider the difference between a palm frond and a race car. You can use both for transportation, but everyone would choose the race car. It’s clearly in a different class because it was designed for that purpose. Similarly, we can ask: is the universe like a palm frond or a race car? To answer that question, let’s look at a concept called fine-tuning and see if there is any evidence for it in our universe.

For something to be fine-tuned, it must have a purpose. A race car exists for one purpose—to drive really fast. Consequently, its construction exhibits strong evidence of fine-tuning. The engine is designed to generate enormous power. The transmission is tuned to ensure that power makes it to the wheels—which are designed to put that power into the ground and propel the car forward. The body of the car is fine-tuned to both minimize air resistance and maximize durability. Changing any of these key components in small way dramatically reduces the race car’s ability to fulfill its purpose. So, is the universe fine-tuned to support life? Let’s look at the evidence.

Life’s Building Blocks

Carbon provides the chemical complexity (unique among all the elements) necessary for life, and oxygen is a key component of water—the only liquid capable of hosting life’s chemistry. As scientists investigate how the universe generates these two elements, they find powerful evidence of fine-tuning.

When astrophysicist Fred Hoyle studied how stars produced carbon, he found the reactions required exacting conditions on three different parameters of the universe. If any one of those three parameters were changed by miniscule amounts, our universe would contain too little carbon for life to exist. These same three parameters also ensure a sufficient supply of oxygen. In other words, the three parameters were fine-tuned for life to exist. The discovery of this fine-tuning lead Hoyle to state that “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology…. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

More recent studies show that changing the quark masses or the fine structure constant by a few percent results in a universe with insufficient carbon and oxygen for life. And for good measure, it turns out that scientists find similar fine-tuning for another element important for life—hydrogen.

The Genetic Code

Perhaps most remarkable evidence of fine-tuning comes from our understanding of DNA. The DNA that forms the basis for all life exists in the form of a code that is ideally suited for life. Analogous to computer codes, DNA is optimized to minimize errors due to mutations, optimized to carry multiple layers of code, and optimized to conserve resources. In fact, Francis Crick, who received the Nobel prize for discovering the double-helical nature of DNA stated that “Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.”

Creating Life in the Lab

Scientists accomplished the impressive feat of making a novel organism with human-engineered DNA. If scientists had taken some chemicals, shaken them in a bottle and made a new organism, that might undermine the evidence of fine-tuning. Instead, they had to discover which chemicals were vital for this process to succeed, eliminate anything that would cause damage, come up with exact measurements, create the correct processes, and carefully control the environment surrounding the experiments. To complete this process required a team of quantum chemists, computational chemists, protein engineers, biochemists, and molecular biologists. The calculations to engineer the new DNA consumed hundreds of hours on a supercomputer. The reactions worked because of incredibly sophisticated instrumentation. And to top it all off, the team spent a mere $40 million over a period of 15 years!

The Bottom Line

As scientists better understand the universe, Earth and life, the evidence for fine-tuning continues to mount.  One wonders if Darwin had known about all this evidence, would he still have proposed the theory of evolution?

Dr. Jeff Zweerink is the Senior research scholar for Reasons to Believe. We here at the world’s one and only apologetics satire site would encourage everyone to go check out Dr. Zweerink’s work over at Reasons to Believe. https://reasons.org/team/jeff-zweerink