Probability and the Demiurge

The universe has an age: it is about 12 or 13 billion earth years old. Maybe. In that sense, we know that this universe is temporally finite, which seems to supports the typical cosmological argument that at some point in time there was nothing there, save the Creator.

There are some fairly obvious problems with that formulation: there was no point in time before time, there was no there before there was a place for there to be. To talk about creation as something unfolding over time cannot be right if time was created. And so it seems silly to say then there was a time before which there was no before. In that ontological sense, we can say that the universe has always existed for all time.

But of course, that tells us nothing if all time has only been 12 or 13 billion years. We really are forced to say that something must have caused the universe. And of course we cannot imagine anything capable of that other than a Creator. Leaving aside the fact that the limits of our imagination hardly constitute hard science, we need to understand what we mean by time and by universe.

When we say that the universe has existed for perhaps 12 or 13 billion years, we really only mean the amount of time between now and the ‘big bang’. The problem is that knowing anything about the singularity is impossible (at the moment). We cannot know if there was a universe before it and time breaks down as we approach it, so it is impossible to say that the singularity lasted for such and such length of time. Even conventional rules of logic and causality break down. What that means is basically that we cannot speak intelligently about it, and so to claim that it required a Creator goes beyond what we can actually know. In that sense, the only logical answer to the cosmological argument is agnosticism.

This is where the teleological argument comes in. There is an argument that says that the universe is too perfectly suited to life, the gravity is just right, we have exactly the right number of dimensions, etc. Of course we have only seen this one universe, and we do not really know that much about it. I doubt that we can say with certainty just how improbably a life-capable universe is—especially since we do not know if there are or have been universes other than this one.

But taking a look at this one observable universe: does it really seem that there is a god behind it?

Consider that planets could not even begin to exist until after the first generation of stars had fused hydrogen and helium into the heavier elements—such as carbon. That being the case, life could not even begin to emerge until billions of years after the big bang; intelligent life would have to wait millions of years more. So if a life supporting universe really is as unlikely as some people think it is, and this universe was created specifically to be capable of supporting life—why was it created to be incapable of supporting life for so long.

Let’s put that another way. This universe is obeying precisely the rules of probability that one would expect from it, given its starting conditions. In that sense there is no reason to suspect a guiding intelligence. The fact that this universe obeys the rules of probability set by its starting conditions suggests that its starting conditions were also determined by probability rather than by design. In that sense the universe itself makes god look unnecessary.