LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 2016, Page 205

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IV. THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS­­—COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS

how unlikely such stars are given the range of possible values for the forces
of gravitation and electromagnetism: “mid-range stars are near the dividing
line between convective and radiative energy transport ... a teetering balance
between gravity and electromagnetism. If it were shifted one way or the other,
main sequence stars would be either all blue or all red.”76 Similarly, a “change
in the (strong) nuclear force strength (the force that binds particles in an
atomic nucleus) by more than about half a percent ... would yield a universe
with either too much carbon compared with oxygen or vice versa, and thus
little if any chance for life.”77 If the force were significantly weaker or stronger, “no atoms could exist other than hydrogen,”78 making life impossible.
These and many other extraordinary cases of fine-tuning have led soberminded physicists to say some extraordinary things. For example, George
Ellis, a British astrophysicist, said:
Amazing fine tuning occurs in the laws that make this [complexity] possible. Realization of the complexity of what is
accomplished makes it very difficult not to use the word ‘miraculous’ without taking a stand as to the ontological status of the
word.79
Likewise, Arno Penzias, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, said:
Astronomy leads us to a unique event, a universe which was
created out of nothing, one with the very delicate balance
needed to provide exactly the conditions required to permit life,
and one which has an underlying (one might say ‘supernatural’) plan.80
Gonzalez and Richards extend this fairly standard fine-tuning argument
by noting that our solar system, and particularly the Earth, are also locally
fine-tuned to permit life. The Earth is shielded from comets by Jupiter and
from the asteroid belt by Mars, and has an unusually large moon, which
“stabilizes the rotation axis of its host planet, yielding a more stable, lifefriendly climate. Our moon keeps Earth’s axial tilt ... from varying over a
large range.”81 This prevents climate fluctuations and temperature extremes
that life cannot tolerate. In addition, the moon raises the ocean tides “creating
the fecund intertidal zone” and is thought to contribute to ocean currents that

“regulate the climate by circulating enormous amounts of heat.”82 According
to Gonzalez and Richards, both a larger sun and a smaller one would be less
favorable to life. Large suns have rapid changes in luminosity “more likely
to lead to drastic climate changes” and generate asteroids; a small sun would
brake the rotation of Earth giving it a cold, frozen side and an arid desert side,
neither of which are life-friendly.83 Finally, “the host planet ... needs to be about
Earth’s size to maintain plate tectonics, to keep some land above the oceans,
and to retain an atmosphere.”84 From this it seems that the size, shape and relative location of the earth, sun and moon are fine-tuned for complex life.
Still more amazingly, it appears that the very same conditions that make
the earth congenial to life also make it a good place for scientific investigation of the cosmos. The fact that the moon has the same visual size as the
sun means that scientists on earth can observe “perfect” eclipses of the sun.
In a “super-eclipse,” the face of the sun (the photosphere) is covered by an
object with a larger visual size. By contrast, a perfect eclipse is a total eclipse
where the photosphere is covered by an object of exactly the same visual size
and shape, making it possible to investigate the chromosphere and corona.
“Of the more than sixty-four moons in our solar system, ours yields the best
match to the sun as viewed from the planet’s surface ... . The sun is some four
hundred times farther than the moon, but it is also four hundred times larger.
As a result, both bodies appear the same size in our sky.”85
Beyond that, it turns out that our universe is not a chaotic, confused mass
of whirling debris in a state of flux, but is organized into discrete, stable clusters which can be studied independently of one another. As a result, scientists
have been able to make progress in discovering simple laws, where newer
laws build on the previous ones. Our universe exhibits “linearity and locality,” meaning that we can reliably extrapolate from observing a small area to
a law which holds throughout the universe.
Linearity and locality are closely related to nature’s long-term
stability—another prerequisite for life and discovery. Our very
ability to establish the laws of nature depends on their stability.86
This miracle, that the universe and the human mind are so ordered that
scientists can discover beautiful laws was not lost on Einstein, despite the fact
that he was neither an orthodox Jew nor a Christian. He wrote that
a priori one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be
grasped by the mind in any way ... [T]he kind of order created
by Newton’s theory of gravitation ... is wholly different. Even

76
Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards, The Privileged Planet (Washington, DC: Regnery
Books, 2004), 204.
77

Ibid., 199.

78

Robin Collins, “The Fine-Tuning Design Argument,” 7.

79

George Ellis, “The Anthropic Principle: Laws and Environments.” The Anthropic Principle, F.
Bertola and U.Curi, ed., (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993), 30.
80

Margenau, H and R.A. Varghese, ed., Cosmos, Bios, and Theos. (La Salle, IL, Open Court,
1992), 83.
81

The Privileged Planet, 4.

82

Ibid., 6.

83

Ibid., 132–133.

84

Ibid., 7.

85

Ibid., 9.

86

Ibid., 211.

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if the axioms of the theory are proposed by man, the success
of such a project presupposes a high degree of ordering of the
objective world ... . That is the “miracle” which is being constantly reinforced as our knowledge expands.87

beyond necessity), since a single, rational God is surely a simpler hypothesis
that will explain the available data. In fact, as Robin Collins has pointed out,
the idea of a multiverse does not even succeed in explaining away design,
because it requires the mechanism of a “universe generator,” and

So confident has modern science become that its best answers must be
rational and beautiful, that even the atheist Nobel prizewinning physicist
Steven Weinberg admits that scientists expect to find “beautiful answers”
when they study fundamental problems, that the beauty in present theories
points to the greater beauty of the final theory and indeed that a final theory
would not be accepted “unless it were beautiful.”88

in all current worked-out proposals for what the “universegenerator” could be—such as the oscillating big bang and
the vacuum fluctuation models ...—the “generator” itself is governed by a complex set of physical laws that allow it to produce
the universes ... . [I]f these laws were slightly different the generator probably would not be able to produce any universes that
could sustain life.91

Of course, none of this is proof, and it is always possible for a skeptic
to suggest an alternative explanation. Some argue that fine-tuning is just an
“anthropic coincidence,” and we should not be surprised that the universe
is calibrated to produce intelligent life like us, for only if this were the case
would we be here to observe it. This argument misses the point, however,
as John Leslie points out. 89 Suppose I am sentenced to execution by fifty
sharpshooters, but to my surprise, they all miss. We would not consider it
an adequate explanation of this surprising event to say, “Well, if they hadn’t
missed, you wouldn’t be here to be surprised!” Yes, one must be conscious
to be surprised, but that does not explain away the improbability of all those
sharpshooters missing. We would look for some act of sabotage, an executive order, or a secret agreement among the sharpshooters (in other words,
to intelligent design) to explain this highly improbable event. Likewise, the
fact that we would not be here unless the universe were fine-tuned does not
make it any less improbable that it is, and offers no explanation of why the
fundamental forces of nature take the specific values that they do.
The realization of this fact has led other skeptics to propose the idea of a
multiverse, according to which our universe is only one of a large (possibly
infinite) number of universes. Given enough universes, almost anything
might happen in one of them, and it is no longer so improbable that there
is one supporting intelligent life. However, as different, causally isolated
regions of space and time, these other universes are necessarily unobservable,
and so the idea of a multiverse is untestable and speculative. And, arguably, it
also violates Occam’s razor90 (which says that we should not multiply entities

87

Albert Einstein, Letters to Solovine (New York: Philosophical Library, 1987), 131.

88

Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 165.

89
John Leslie, “How to Draw Conclusions From a Fine-Tuned Cosmos,” in Robert Russell, et
al, eds., Physics, Philosophy and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding (Vatican City State:
Vatican Observatory Press, 1988), 304.
90

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It is noteworthy that there is no hard evidence for the existence of such
a universe-generator. It appears to be postulated not because any data
require it, but because it would allow a naturalistic account of cosmology
that excludes God. We should remember that resistance to God is not merely
a matter of reason, but also a matter of will, a will which in natural man is
turned in enmity away from God, and which seeks to efface all evidence of
His involvement in the world. As Paul tells us, God has made His attributes
plain within nature, but fallen man suppresses that truth (Romans 1:18–20).

Biological information
Origin of life researchers have concluded that life is far different in its
complexity than Charles Darwin had thought.92 In the 19th century, it was
commonly supposed that living cells were undifferentiated blobs of protoplasm, and it did not seem so unlikely that these building blocks could have
arisen spontaneously from inorganic chemicals. Since the discovery of DNA,
however, it has become clear that every living cell contains elaborate instructions for the construction and regulation of proteins and protein machines.
Just as the finely tuned constants of physics contain information that
structures a life-friendly universe, so DNA contains information necessary
to build and maintain living systems. In the natural world, a key difference
between living and non-living systems is that the former exhibit specified
complexity: not only are they highly complex, but that complexity is specified
by the independent functional requirements of life. The British chemist and
origin of life researcher Leslie Orgel explains:
Living organisms are distinguished by their specified complexity. Crystals … fail to qualify as living because they lack
should not “multiply entities beyond necessity,” postulating more entities than are required to
explain the phenomena.
91

Collins, “The Fine-Tuning Design Argument,” 10.

This principle is named for William of Occam (1285–1349), though similar principles of simplicity, such as the idea that nature takes the simplest course, are found in the work of Aristotle,
Ptolemy, and Aquinas. Occam’s razor is the methodological principle according to which, other
things being equal, scientists should prefer the simpler hypothesis. What this means is that we

92
For an excellent history of origin of life studies and a rigorous argument in favor of design,
see Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (New
York: HarperCollins, 2009).

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