Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Victor J. Stenger (1935 - 2014) was an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii. He was the author of the New York Times bestseller God: The Failed Hypothesis, God and the Atom, God and the Folly of Faith, The Comprehensible Cosmos, and many other books.

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THE FALLACY OF FINE-TUNING

Prometheus Books

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......................................13PREFACE..............................................151. SCIENCE AND GOD...................................272. THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLES..........................373. THE FOUR DIMENSIONS...............................474. POINT-OF-VIEW INVARIANCE..........................735. COSMOS............................................956. THE ETERNAL UNIVERSE..............................1157. GRAVITY IS FICTION................................1498. CHEMISTRY.........................................1579. THE HOYLE RESONANCE...............................16710. PHYSICS PARAMETERS...............................17511. COSMIC PARAMETERS................................19912. THE COSMOLOGICAL CONSTANT........................21313. MONKEYGOD........................................23314. PROBABILITY......................................24515. QUANTUM AND CONSCIOUSNESS........................25716. SUMMARY AND REVIEW...............................277NOTES................................................297BIBLIOGRAPHY.........................................319INDEX................................................333ABOUT THE AUTHOR.....................................343OTHER BOOKS BY VICTOR J. STENGER.....................345

Chapter One

1.1. NOMA

Awidespread belief exists that science has nothing to say about God—one way or another. I must have heard it said a thousand times that "science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God."

However, in the past two decades believers and nonbelievers alike have convinced themselves in significant numbers, and their opponents in negligible numbers, that the scientific basis for each position is virtually unassailable.

Atheists look at the world around them, with their naked eyes and with the instruments of science, and see no sign of God. Even the most devout theist must admit that the existence of God is not an accepted scientific fact in the same way as, for example, the existence of quarks or black holes. As is the case with God, no one has directly observed these objects. But the indirect empirical evidence is ample for them to be considered to have some relation to reality with a high degree of probability, always with the caveat that future developments could still find a better explanation for this evidence.

Now, the theist will retort that this does not prove that God does not exist. If she is a Christian, she will of course be thinking of the Christian God. But the argument also does not prove that Zeus and Vishnu do not exist, nor Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Still, one can easily imagine scientific experiments to test for the existence of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Just post lookouts on rooftops around the world on Christmas Eve, and at the bedsides of children who just lost baby teeth.

As I pointed out in my 2007 book, God: The Failed Hypothesis—How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist, it is possible to scientifically test the hypothesis of the existence of a god who plays such an active role in the universe as the traditional God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Zeus and Vishnu might be a little tougher to rule out scientifically, but the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God is surprisingly easy to test for by virtue of his assumed participation in every event in the universe, from atomic transitions in distant galaxies to keeping watch that evolution on Earth does not stray from his divine plan.

While the majority of scientists in Western and non-Islamic nations do not believe in God, many prefer to adopt the stance advocated by famed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life. Gould proposed that we redefine science and religion so that they are "two nonoverlapping magisteria" (NOMA), leaving science to deal with studying nature and religion to deal with morality. Or, to paraphrase Galileo, science tells us the way the heavens go and religion tells us the way to go to heaven.

Gould's NOMA especially appeals to believing scientists. The many I have known in fifty years of academic life place their religion and science in separate compartments that never interact with one another. Most nonbelieving scientists go along with NOMA as well, since they would prefer, as a social and political strategy, to avoid getting into battles over religion. However, philosophers, theologians, and many atheist scientists have not found NOMA practical. Notice I referred to Gould's proposal as a "redefinition." Gould, an avowed atheist, now deceased, was good-intentionally trying to carve out distinct, "nonoverlapping" areas for both religion and science. He strived to eliminate conflicts, which had increased in recent times, by basically redefining religion as moral philosophy. However, existing religions, while claiming to tell us how to go to heaven, also try to tell us how the heavens go. Moreover, science is not proscribed fromobserving human behavior and providing observational data on matters of morality.

NOMA simply does not accurately describe either the history or the current status of the relationship between religion and science. Neither is likely to agree to any limitations on its zone of activity. So they overlap and are going to continue to do so, and they will continue to battle over their common ground where differences are, in many cases, irreconcilable.

1.2. NATURAL THEOLOGY

During the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, when the rise of science increasingly influenced thinking, religion was deeply questioned in Europe and America. For the first time perhaps in history, it became possible to be openly atheistic or at least critical of established religion. But it was not a one-way street. Western Christian theology, which by then already had a proud history of logical thinking on the problem of God, found a place for science in what was called natural theology.

Natural theology provided several excellent scientific arguments for the existence of God that, when first introduced, were irrefutable with existing scientific knowledge. They only became refutable with further scientific developments.

The premier figure in natural theology was William Paley (d. 1805), archdeacon of Carlisle, whose 1802 book, Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, was the first serious attempt to use scientific arguments to prove that the world was designed and sustained by God. While design arguments for God had been proposed since antiquity, and argued against—notably by the great Scottish philosopher David Hume (d. 1776) in his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion and An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding—Paley went beyond the typical theological emphasis on logical deduction to a direct appeal to empirical observation and its interpretation.

This was important because every one of the endless series of "proofs" of the existence of God that has been proposed, from antiquity to the present day, is automatically a failure because, as I have mentioned, a logical deduction tells you nothing that is not already embedded in its premises. All logic can do for you is test the self-consistency of those premises. There is only one reliable way...