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Years ago, at Los Angeles’ Getty Museum, I was given the rare privilege of a personal, after-hours tour of Leonardo da Vinci’s artwork. Standing alone in the quiet, dimly lit gallery, mere inches from a sepia-colored sketch of a human face composed of several dozen perfectly placed wavy lines, I knew without a doubt I was in the presence of pure genius.
After years of being an atheist for whom science was god and the cosmos was a miraculous accident, I now know with equal certainty our universe, too, is a work of pure genius.
Why is that?
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In 1973, scientists from around the world gathered in Kraków, Poland, to celebrate the 500th birthday of Nicolaus Copernicus. Part of the conference concerned a fifty-year-old unsolved mystery called the “large-number coincidences.” The numerical values of natural phenomena large and small – the radius of the observable universe, the charge of an electron, the strength of gravity, and so forth – follow a pattern hard to dismiss as mere coincidence.
What could possibly explain this?
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Australian physicist Brandon Carter stood before the August gathering and offered a provocative observation that came to be called the Anthropic Principle. The special numerical “coincidences,” he said, are inexorably linked to the one thing that makes our universe special: we and our fellow lifeforms. Without life, the universe would be an unremarkable ghost town.
Carter’s presentation ignited the explosive birth of a brand-new science dedicated to fully answering the fifty-year-old mystery: Is it mere coincidence our universe has just the right numerical composition for life to be possible — especially life as complex as humans — or is there more to it than that?
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Think of when you get your annual physical. The nurse measures your four core vital signs — body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rate — which yield a pattern of numbers that reveals important information about your insides.
The universe’s numerical profile serves the same purpose: it tells us something essential about the inner being of the cosmos. And what it tells us, after decades of careful examination involving increasingly precise astronomical observations, laboratory experiments, and theoretical calculations, is that our universe is not merely a coincidence. Far from it.
“I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos,” stated the late American cosmologist and former atheist Allan Sandage. “There has to be some organizing principle.”
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British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, whom I had the honor of getting to know as a grad student at Cornell, concurred: “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics … and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
This startling revelation does not set well with atheists, who twist themselves into knots trying to defend the belief that everything — life and all — is but a happy accident, courtesy of purposeless laws of nature. The problem they have is explaining where those supposedly blind natural agents came from.
Another valiant attempt to rescue the naturalistic worldview is the multiverse hypothesis. If there are an infinite number of universes, then it is no surprise at least one of them — ours — is tailor-made for life.
But many decades of seeking ways to test this fantastic idea have failed. That’s because parallel universes are in principle isolated from one another and therefore beyond the reach of our observations.
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“The idea that we live in a multiverse is a fringe idea in a small part of a subfield of the physics community,” says German theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder. “Nobody who does serious science works with the multiverse because it’s utterly useless.”
So, then, we all now face this burning question screaming for an answer: If our universe is not a coincidence, how do we explain it?
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For me, the answer goes back to that unforgettable day at the Getty. As I stood there, seized by the ineffable beauty of Leonardo da Vinci’s exquisite sketch, it never would have occurred to me to entertain the notion that it was an accident.
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Today, likewise, when I contemplate life, the night sky, and the precision and improbability of the vital signs that define the essence of our cosmos, my reaction is crystal-clear and supported by the latest scientific evidence. In both the outer and inner being of the universe, I perceive not the throw of dice, but the hand of a Master Artist.