Things Seen and Unseen: Faith and the Fine-Tuning of the Universe

The book begins in the expanse of silent space. With each turn of the page, a portion of the previous image is magnified tenfold. Successive pages find innumerable galaxies, and among them, nestled between spiral arms, lies an ordinary star. As the journey proceeds, the solar system becomes visible. Swirling in past sweeping paths of giant spheres, suspended along the third orbit lies a speck. Soon the brilliant blue topography of planet Earth bursts into view.2 Successive pages disclose coastal outlines, wisping clouds and city skyscrapers, beneath which a grassy park appears. Zooming in further, on a sunlit picnic blanket lies a dozing couple. Progressively tapered fields of view focus in on the man’s hand. On the surface of his skin is unexpected detail. The next pages plunge into the microscopic world and, within a white blood cell, a sea of molecules. Inside its nucleus, the DNA double helix unwinds to spell out the man’s entire genetic identity. Looking still further inward, vibrant electron orbitals whiz around the carbon atom’s compact nucleus. Still deeper within unfurls the quirky realm of quarks and quantum uncertainty.

At every level of scientific investigation, images supply understanding. Images convey details about the particular characteristics of things: their relative size, shape, orientation, color, texture and information content. In the quarter century since the book was written, research has delivered many new images that continue to fill in the details of the scientific portrait of nature. For example, in recent years infrared detectors have mapped the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang.3 The Hubble telescope probes the deepest reaches of space to capture images of galaxies and distant nebulae in explosive hues.4 Closer to home, functional neuroimaging methods are tracing out pathways of thought in the human brain.5 Electron microscopy can probe (postmortem) any of the 160 trillion synapses in the human cerebral cortex.6 The three-billion base pair human genome has been sequenced.7 Nanotechnology affords unprecedented levels of resolution capable of imaging the shape of a snowflake the size of just six water molecules.8 The list goes on.

Each of these discoveries adds detail to a visually enriched narrative of nature. The story of science consists of chapters arranged by proportion. Because each discipline observes things that interact with one another, scientific descriptions tend to cluster by scale. The methodology of science, accordingly, is incremental and reductionist. The value of reductionism lies in its exact detail, yielding pictorial clarity.

Note, however, that each level of precise explanation leaves out something. Images have edges, beyond which lies unprinted territory. In science, every discipline is incomplete and none has the final word. Cosmology, climatology, psychology, neurology, biology, chemistry and physics are concerned with progressively smaller scales of phenomena within phenomena. To better understand nature, knowledge from each field of science is necessary, but no field alone possesses sufficient knowledge to provide a complete account of all the others. Each field contributes knowledge which, although exact, is limited to its area of competence, and although often generalizable, is also dependent on contributions from other disciplines.

Images provide not only fine details but also larger perspectives that look beyond reductionism. The zooming lens of science reveals worlds within worlds in a universe that is at once enormous and intricate. Nature’s architecture displays an ordered continuity between phenomena that differ in scale. Relationships between the small and the large emerge in surprising ways, as tiny things can have huge implications. For example, helium, the second lightest element in the periodic table, powers the Sun. A difference of two or four neutrons in the iodine nucleus distinguishes a harmful radioactive substance from an essential nutrient. A single gene can determine eye color. The difference of one chromosome decides gender. From one unique single-cell embryo develops a Dartmouth student or professor. An idea can launch a career. One Jewish carpenter changed the course of history.

In the other direction, enormous things are sometimes known by slight clues. Consider the night sky’s stars in relation to the human eye. Light from the most distant object visible to the unaided eye — the Andromeda galaxy — has traveled 2.5 million years to reach Earth. The retina is able to detect just a few hundred photons (subatomic parcels of light) emanating from this galaxy. Passing through the pupil and lens to fall on the retina, the photons stimulate retinal [electrons] to an excited energy state, which leads to a cascade of molecular changes that culminate in a signal passing down the optic nerve and to the visual cortex. In this way a faint splash of light originating from distant space corresponds to the idea of a galaxy in the brain of an onlooker.

Surveying the images of nature leads to an astonishing realization. Though its parts may be separated by many orders of magnitude, the composite image represents a coherent whole. Galaxies and quarks and everything in between compose one reality. Confidence that the different levels of reality fit together into a comprehensible arrangement, in which the laws of nature everywhere apply, allows the scientist to construct models, test hypotheses and make predictions. For example, collisions of particles in laboratory accelerators predict the behavior of atoms in stars. Mathematical models of turbulent fluid flow apply both to the study of arterial circulation supplying the brain and of massive storms on the surface of Jupiter. Models also assist the amateur. Books, photographs, web pages, planetaria, video presentations and computer simulations bridge the gap in scale between the human body and the universe and usher the mind into exhilarating worlds of the immense and the minuscule.

Pondering the revelations of science proceeds, therefore, from images to imagination. Informed by empirical data and guided by reason, creative visualization transports the mind to worlds both grand and small, ancient and swift. This capacity to imagine – to contemplate in the mind’s eye what cannot be directly seen – makes all the universe home to human creatures too small to grasp Saturn’s rings and too large to walk along the DNA strand. The imagination may mentally inhabit such worlds, watch the tectonic drift of continents or follow a flash of light.

The mind prepared to recognize what is missing at any particular level of assessment finds connections to other levels and to complementary disciplines. This endeavor is refreshingly open-ended. For each question answered, science finds more interesting questions. Along the way, one discovers that the true nature of things is always more intriguing than previously thought. As more is seen, still more must be discerned.

The reader of Powers of Ten may turn to the page preceding the sequence of images and find the name of the author. Likewise, the mind open to asking what is beyond nature may perceive its transcendent implications. To illustrate, one might ask whether it would matter if the universe had been arranged in a slightly different way. As it happens, the specific conditions of the universe matter a great deal. Astrophysicists have found that, in order for the universe to have produced sufficient quantities of the elements necessary for there to be any possibility of any form of life at any time in its history, the rate of expansion of the universe must be precisely what it is. If the universe had expanded more rapidly, matter would have dispersed so readily that none would have coalesced to form galaxies and stars. If the universe had expanded more slowly, matter would have clumped into a superdense slab before any stars like the Sun could have formed. In technical terms, for the rate of expansion of the universe to satisfy the conditions required to produce stars and the elements necessary for the possibility of life, the value of the cosmic mass density must be fine-tuned to within one part in 10⁶⁰ and the space energy density to within one part in 10¹²⁰.9 Such orders of magnitude are staggeringly unimaginable.

At the other end of the scale, the physical conditions of the subatomic milieu also must be precisely as they are for life to be possible. Among numerous parameters that must be met for life to exist is the number of electrons, which must equal the number of protons in the universe to within one part in 10³⁷. Otherwise electromagnetic forces would have overcome gravitational forces in the early stages of the universe, preventing the formation of galaxies, stars and planets.9

The conditions necessary to support the origin of life and of minds are so extraordinarily improbable that explanations appealing to accidental forces and blind chance prove deeply disappointing. Naturalism, or the view that everything arises from physical causes to the exclusion of any intelligence beyond material nature, guides a serious inquiry into such questions only so far. The mathematician Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem provides helpful insight on this subject. Gödel showed that no nontrivial formal system can have in itself its proof of consistency.10 Thus, it is logically necessary to look beyond nature for a satisfactory explanation of nature.

Unseen in the survey of images of nature is the mind of the beholder who, in some sense, stands apart from nature in order to connect and synthesize the images. The essayist C. S. Lewis considered naturalism to be self-refuting because it undermines the validity of reasoning, on which all possible knowledge depends. If human thought were solely the product of necessary or deterministic biophysical causes in the brain, argued Lewis, then the scientist would have no reason to believe that scientific insights into nature are true and trustworthy rather than just a reflection of the way the brain happens to work.11

Supremely unseen is the sovereign Mind that conceived and guides nature. Commenting on the exquisitely precise initial conditions of the universe, cosmologist Stephen Hawking, an agnostic, commented that, It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.12 Assuming that Hawking is on to something, it is reasonable to conclude that an Intelligence acting from beyond space and time who is powerful enough to bring the universe into existence would be able to reveal himself to humankind howsoever he chooses. A Creator who endows humankind with a creative mind with which to imagine visiting faraway places seen through telescopes and microscopes could well be the sort of God who humbly walked onto the stage of human history and dwelt in person among us.

Science alone cannot prove the existence of God. With each discovery of nature’s beauty and elegance, however, its awe-inspiring images render the alternative increasingly implausible. Furthermore, nature’s coherence and contingent implications are too profound to dismiss. As attractive as visible proof of God’s existence might be, perhaps he prefers not to compel belief but rather to invite people to seek and trust him. The wondrous catalogue of nature stimulates curiosity and motivates investigation. Instead of definitive proof of God that could discourage further inquiry, science finds delightful clues that enliven contemplation of meaning within and beyond the physical world.

Not all that is true is visible. The authors of Powers of Ten recognized in nature a dependency on meaning that transcends images when they wrote, Behind every representation stands much more than can be imaged, including concepts of a subtle and often perplexing kind.1 In deciding how things truly are, each person must draw his or her own conclusion based on a reasoned examination of the evidence, testing the possibilities in the trials and joys of life. The worldview that offers the greatest explanatory power and hope will speak most clearly to the mind and heart.13

Ultimately, one must rely also on faith, whether placed in the sufficiency of natural materialistic processes or in supernatural explanations to the questions science cannot answer. Faith, a wise writer once wrote, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.14 The gallery of scientific images, far from precluding transcendent reality, points to it.