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Skriven 2014-12-29 15:46:42 av Daniel Torrey (1:132/505)
Ärende: Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God
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Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God

The odds of life existing on another planet grow ever longer. Intelligent
design, anyone?

By ERIC METAXAS - Wall Street Journal, Dec. 25, 2014

In 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? Many have accepted
the cultural narrative that he's obsolete - that as science progresses, there
is less need for a "God" to explain the universe. Yet it turns out that the
rumors of God's death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively
recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place - science itself.

Here's the story: The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the
astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a
planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance
from that star. Given the roughly octillion - 1 followed by 24 zeros - planets
in the universe, there should have been about septillion - 1 followed by 21
zeros - planets capable of supporting life.

With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a
large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in
the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon. Scientists listened with a vast
radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were
not merely random. But as years passed, the silence from the rest of the
universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search
continues with private funds. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely
bubkis - 0 followed by nothing.

What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that
there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two
parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially
life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few
thousand planets and kept on plummeting.

Even SETI proponents acknowledged the problem. Peter Schenkel wrote in a 2006
piece for Skeptical Inquirer magazine: "In light of new findings and insights,
it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest.... We should quietly
admit that the early estimates... may no longer be tenable."

As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero,
and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the
universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we
shouldn't be here.

Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to
support life - every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole
thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity
will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth's surface.

The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can
account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by
accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we
cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn't assuming that an intelligence
created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a
life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into
being?

There's more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is
nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at
all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four
fundamental forces - gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the "strong" and
"weak" nuclear forces - were determined less than one millionth of a second
after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For
instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic
force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction - by even
one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000 - then no stars could have ever formed at
all.

Feel free to gulp.

Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the
odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that
the notion that it all "just happened" defies common sense. It would be like
tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row.
Really?

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term "big bang", said that his
atheism was "greatly shaken" at these developments. He later wrote that "a
common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has
monkeyed with the 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."

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said that "the appearance of design is
overwhelming" and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said "the more we get to
know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a
Creator...gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here."

The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe.
It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the
combined brightness of every star to something - or Someone - beyond itself.

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 * Origin: Almost At The Top Of The Hill - Newfane, Vermont USA (1:132/505)