There must be a reason that 2i + 2i = 4i, an unobservable number, as all numbers are, but as is most obvious in numbers like i = sqrt(-1).
There must be a reason why there are not just an infinity, but infinities, of numbers between 0 and 1.
There must be a reason logic tells us we cannot conclude with certainty “Jane loves foreign wars” if we accept “Most professors love foreign wars and Jane is a professor”. There must be a reason we can know truth and know falsity.
There must be a reason the fine-structure constant α equals e^2/(2*ε_0ch), and that e the elementary charge equals 1.602176634 x 10-19, just as there must be a reason c, the speed of light, and h, the Planck constant take the values they do.
There must be a reason that something exists rather than nothing. Where nothing includes the absence of all things, including numbers, logic, thought.
The Way Things Are must have a reason why they are the way they are, and are not some other way. Things have to have a creation, which requires a Creator. This is God.
The Things I mean are the foundations of the world. And the world is all that there is.
Some say not world but universe, a fine word, but nervous physicists have corrupted its meaning while attempting to bypass the requirement of a Creator. It’s never clear whether they mean all that there is or this one tiny “universe” in an infinite sea of “universes.”
I was reminded of all this in a review of Stephen Meyer’s new book Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe.
The review states that the fine-structure constant’s
value is close to 1/137. If it were slightly different—closer to, say, 1/138—elemental carbon could not form in our universe. Life as we know it could not exist. But no theory predicts the value of the fine-structure constant. It doesn’t have to be what it is: it just happens to be precisely situated in the narrow sliver of values amenable to life. And the fine-structure constant is only one of many constants which appear minutely tuned to support life.
It continues:
The materialist’s usual explanation for our universe’s 12 perfectly tuned constants is that there exists an infinite or nearly-infinite number of universes, each one exhibiting a different combination of values for these constants. We happen to find ourselves in a universe where the constants just happen to allow the existence of our sort of life—not because of any Grand Designer, but merely because life as we know it could evolve only in a universe where the values of the constants just happen to be so aligned. We cannot observe other universes. So no experiment—even in principle—can provide evidence to refute or confirm the multiple-universe hypothesis.
Meyer, the review states, “finds such appeals to imagined and unobservable worlds unscientific”, mentioning Ockham’s razor.
Yet whether or no these other “universes” are scientific, which is to say measurable, they do not obviate God. There still has to be a reason why our “universe” is how it is; how it was picked. And there still has to be a reason for the picking; and reasons why picking exists, and how picking works.
There has to be a reason why the multiverse, if it really exists, is the way it is. If fine-structure constants are in some available set and some cause picks one for each new universe, there has to be a reason this is so.
Cosmologist “Alexander Vilenkin,” the review continues,
has proposed that a process called “quantum tunneling” from superspace into a real universe can produce space and time, matter and energy. But such tunneling must be governed by laws that are in existence “even prior to the universe itself,” Vilenkin has written. He continues: “The laws are expressed in the form of mathematical equations. If the medium of mathematics is the mind, does this mean that mind should predate the universe?” Vilenkin never answers his own question. As his silence implies, scientists are hesitant to embrace, or even to mention, what Meyer considers the best explanation for our current observations: the God hypothesis.
We can answer it: yes, the mind must come before the equations. Something has to think the equations, they cannot think themselves into existence. And then, if these are the true equations that describe the causes operating in the world, something has to breathe life into them. There must be an act of creation.
This must be God, and, as the quotation goes, there can be only one. For if there were more than one, each responsible for separate domains, there must then exist a reason above them that accounts for separation of duties, why this god does thought and this one quantum tunneling.
You can keep going, adding higher organizational levels, manager gods in charge of worker gods, and director gods in charge of manager gods, but you can’t go on forever. There must be One Final Source. And this must be God.
Science only speaks about causes of things it can measure. It cannot say how the things that can be measured, or their causes, came into being.
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