4. Not-so-fine-tuning

One of the many arguments against intelligent design in biology is the fact that there are so many examples of sub-optimal design.  The same counterargument can be given to some examples of fine-tuning.  Take the vacuum energy as an example: someone who wanted to design a universe where the probability of life arising somewhere is maximal should make sure to tune the vacuum energy to exactly zero, since this would make structure formation easier.  The fact that we seem to live in a universe where the vacuum energy allows for structure formation, but does not have the “best” value it could have makes it look rather like our universe is a result of blind naturalistic processes. 

Some of the arguments for fine tuning are decidedly strange.  They self-destruct.  One such argument is that the universe is so finely tuned for life that it just manages to arise.  In this universe, life is so rare, and requires an environment so fragile that if physics were just a little different, it would be impossible.  And yet, this fragility is supposed to reveal careful design. 

Consider someone struggling across a desert, barely able to walk, but managing to keep going.  She has a flask of water which contains just enough to keep her able to struggle on, through careful but painful rationing. She finally reaches a village, and the inhabitants welcome her in.  A few days later, sitting in a cafe, she tells the waiter her story. The waiter is not sympathetic: "How could you complain?", he says, "the desert was clearly fine-tuned for your existence.  You are here now, you had water enough to survive.  You did not succumb to heat stroke".

So much for fine tuning. But is life so fragile, so improbable? Is the universe really a desert, in which life struggles to exist?  In a recent New Scientist article the theist biologist Simon Conway Morris talks about life being "a spectacular tightrope walk on a gossamer thread between vast regions of crystalline immobility and chaotic flux".

Life can appear fragile to us. It seems like a fire, fuelled by the directed flows of entropy that are inevitable in a universe like ours, and it re-lights again and again from the embers remaining after each mass extinction. But that is the parochial view of an ape that numbers merely in the billions.  The bacteria, the archaea, the insects, the fungi hardly noticed the extinction.  The taller flames were put out for a while, but the soil and even the rocks beneath have been burning with life like a furnace.

Between order and chaos there is a boundary, but it isn't a tightrope, it's a solid bridge with the strong foundations of thermodynamics. The point is that there has to be a border, somewhere, and that is going to to be interesting - how could the interaction between static order and dynamic chaos be anything but?

That interaction may not occur often in our universe, but because gravity concentrates gas into fusing spheres that shine low entropy radiation onto orbiting balls of rock, it has happened at least once, and perhaps many, many other times as well.

Each organism may be improbable, one out of countless possibilities. Each may be transient and vulnerable, yet life may be inevitable, and not just in a universe like ours.  Wherever order and chaos interact, there is the possibility of replicating structures feeding off that interaction, leading to life.