Bertrand Russell's Questions Without Answers.

Howard Taylor.

Bertrand Russell posed a series of questions which he deemed to be the most interesting and important for humanity[1].  If he is right about their importance, the questions must be about reality, for it would be hard to argue that questions about anything that doesn’t exist could be of supreme importance. He also says that they cannot be answered in the 'laboratory' nor by 'philosophy' (which can only discuss them), but can only be answered by 'theology' if it exists (Bertrand Russell believed it didn't). This leads to his paradoxical view that the most interesting and important questions facing humanity have no answers.

He writes:

… all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, .. this No Man's Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem convincing.  These are:

¨                  Is the world divided into mind and matter, and, if so what is mind and what is matter? Is mind subject to matter, or is it possessed of independent powers?

¨                  Has the universe any unity or purpose? Is it evolving towards some goal?

¨                  Are there really laws of nature, or do we believe in them only because of our innate love of order?

¨                  Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on a small unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both at once?

¨                  Is there a way of living that is noble and another that is base, or are all ways of living merely futile?

¨                  If there is a way of living that is noble. In what does it consist, and how shall we achieve it?

¨                  Must the good be eternal in order to deserve to be valued, or is it worth seeking even if the universe is inexorably moving towards death? …

To such questions no answer can be found in the laboratory.  …. The studying of these questions, if not the answering of them, is the business of philosophy.

We begin with his first question and divide it into two – the nature of mind and the nature of matter – and we turn to Leibniz, whom Russell regarded as one of the greatest minds of all time.[2]

What is mind?

Leibniz, in what Professor Anthony O'Hear (President of the Royal Institute of Philosophy) refers to as his ‘telling image’[3], reasoned that the mind couldn't be identical to the physics of the brain. His argument went something like this. If your brain was as big as a windmill, I could walk inside it. I would meet much physical activity but one thing I would not meet would be an idea or a thought. So although I might see much movement in the neurons and could possibly, using a science of the distant future, deduce what you are thinking about, I could not actually 'see' or 'hear' or 'read' directly what you are thinking about - say a snow-covered and cloud-covered Matterhorne with the wind whistling about its peak and notices warning the climbers of the dangers ahead.[4]

Physical systems behave in certain ways – and not other ways. What they do is neither true nor false; it is just the way things are, the whole story of purely physical phenomena. Our human descriptions of physical activity may be true or false but the activity itself is neither. For something to be true or false it must be the product of a conscious mind. We who are conscious can have thoughts about physical phenomena. These thoughts of our conscious mind may be either true or false.

When water boils at 100˚C at sea level, it is not correct or incorrect behaviour for water ­– it is just the way things are. That is true for all physical phenomena. Just as water does not consciously know anything –(such as its own boiling state), no combination of physical phenomena is conscious. Advances in the study of the brain may be impressive but they only show how physical effects have other physical effects. They may show where, in the brain, reasoning (or morality or religion) have their affect, but they don't show what the reasoning actually is about!

However, my thoughts can be correct or incorrect. I plausibly may think that the square root of 1000 is 35. However, that thought is incorrect. The square root of 1000 is actually approximately 31.62. By doing the calculation I can consciously correct my thought.

Now if the mind is just a complex combination of physical causes and effects[5] it would be inappropriate to describe any of its operations (in producing thoughts) as true or false, just as it would be inappropriate to describe the boiling of water as true or false.[6] Only conscious thoughts can be true or false.

Bertrand Russell again:

If we imagine a world of mere matter, there would be no room for falsehood in such a world, and although it would contain what may be called ‘facts’, it would not contain any truths, in the sense in which truths are things of the same kind as falsehoods. In fact, truth and falsehood are properties of beliefs and statements: hence a world of mere matter, since it would contain no beliefs or statements, would also contain no truth or falsehood.[7]

O'Hear comments

How is it that some bits of matter can both react in physical ways and experience, from the inside as it were, what is going on? It cannot just be a matter of one bit of the brain monitoring or controlling other bits, like a thermostat in a heating system, for the thermostat, though certainly part of the system and reacting to other parts, is not itself consciously aware of anything.[8]

You know directly what you are imagining even if you know nothing about neurons and the workings of your brain. So your access to your thoughts must be different from that of a scientist who is looking at the workings of your brain. Thus your mind, which can think about your thoughts, cannot be identical to your physical brain. This relates to what we have said about the 'self' above.

Here is a another comment from O'Hear about the theory that mind and brain are the same thing.

No progress whatever has been made on this problem, (of trying to understand mental activity as physical activity) despite thirty or more years of intensive effort, probably because the very notion of the mind being the brain is at root unintelligible.[9] (His emphasis.)

Your thoughts affect the physical world – they may encourage you to go to the Travel Agency and book a holiday tp see the Matterhorne – and therefore they are certainly real. So we have something that is real but not physical. Once again, therefore, naturalism fails.

What is matter?

Leibniz reasoned that if matter is made of particles of finite size then each one could be broken in two and thus not be fundamental. So if matter is made of particles they must be infinitely small. However since a definition of matter is that it occupies space then matter cannot be made of matter! It must be made of other non-material things. Leibniz called them ‘monads’ or 'souls'. This kind of argument leads to a result that goes against common sense. But nevertheless the world of the very small, as discovered by quantum physics, does behave in counter intuitive ways. Some people who understand a little of Einstein’s theories might say that matter comes from energy. However, that does not solve the problem since energy is matter in motion or potential motion. Perhaps quantum theory is proving Leibniz's argument correct as it discovers a rather ghostly world of atomic phenomena. So theoretical physicist Paul Davies can edit a book on Quantum Theory and call it The Ghost in the Atom.

So what is everything made of? The Biblical worldview is that God created in stages. Those who believe this worldview should expect detectable discontinuities in the created world, which is examined and discussed by scientists and philosophers.

What might these detectable discontinuities be, if the Biblical worldview is correct?

First, the nature of matter which we have discussed above. The current theory is that it all emerged from the Big Bang which itself came from nothing. Some theories of so-called empty space postulate that such ‘space’ is actually a hive of quantum activity. But what is the nature and origin of such activity? Whatever the case surely it will never be possible to reduce matter to absolutely nothing but instead its existence suggests a creative input.

Second, the nature and origin of life, which involves information not reducible to the physics and chemistry of the matter from which it is composed – but rather needs a mental input (as does all information and language.) If we discover ancient writing in a cave we will not surmise that it may have come from the properties of the rock or the accidental affects of weathering, but that someone with a mind wrote it. Drusilla Scott tells us of Michael Polanyi's reaction to the claim that the discovery of the DNA double helix is the final proof that living things are physically and chemically determined.

No said Polanyi it proves the opposite. No arrangement of physical units can be a code and convey information unless the order of its units is not fixed by its physical chemical make-up. His example is a railway station on the Welsh border where an arrangement of pebbles on a bank spelled the message - "Welcome to Wales by British Rail". This information content of pebbles clearly showed that their arrangement was not due to their physical chemical interaction but to a purpose on the part of the stationmaster ...   The arrangement of the DNA could have come about chance, just as the pebbles on that station could have rolled down a hillside and arranged themselves in the worlds of the message, but it would be bizarre to maintain that this was so ... [10]

So an important part of the argument is that the complexity of the simplest form of life contains information in the form of 'code' or 'words' or 'language' (DNA and RNA, for example). 

The atheist Richard Dawkins writes:

What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, warm breath, nor a 'spark of life'.   It is information, words, instructions . . .   Think of a billion discrete digital characters . . .   If you want to understand life, think about information technology.[11]

Third, the nature of mind and consciousness, which relates to 'mind' and, as we have already seen, cannot be reduced to matter or vegetable life.

Fourth, the nature of reason, by which we think abstractly and universally.

This is probably limited to human and Divine thought. Humans can think of things with which they have had no physical relationship: the future, things that we have never interacted with materially and things that don't even exist, such as 'golden mountains' or unicorns. This is abstract thought.

Humans too can think of things in general such as the nature of dogs, democracies, and buildings. Such universal concepts do not exist as concrete things.

It was this abstract and universal thinking ability that made Pythagoras and later Plato realise that there must be a transcendent world that enabled universal reason to exist. Although most of us think that Plato's solution of a transcendent world of 'ideas' unsatisfactory, Plato did at least recognise a problem that troubles philosophers to this day.[12]

A human being can also ponder his/her own life, death, and possible life after death, and be aware of good and evil. We can know that we are responsible (partly) for our behaviour. Even those holding to the worldview of naturalism know that, even though their official beliefs deny it.

Information

Underpinning the first two (at least) of these detectable discontinuities is information.

When we consider matter/energy as a wave or field we find that it is a wave understandable by mathematics.

Galileo is reputed to have said, ‘Mathematics is the language with which God wrote the universe’.

In one of his non-religious books on quantum theory (Quantum Theory – A Very Short Introduction) John Polkinghorne says it is intelligibility rather than objectivity from which all physical existence emerges.

So information lies in and behind all physical reality.

The theoretical physicist Paul Davies in New Scientist recently wrote:

Normally we think of the world as composed of simple, clod-like, material particles, and information as a derived phenomenon attached to special, organised states of matter. But maybe it is the other way around: perhaps the Universe is really a frolic of primal information, and material objects a complex secondary manifestation.[13]

(Rather than the other way round: information emerging from mindless particles and energy.)

This resonates with the Bible’s teaching that ‘Word’ is the foundation of all things.

Bertrand Russell wrote, in Study of Mathematics:

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, …  is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry.

Paul Dirac, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on quantum theory, wrote:

… fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power … One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.

Dirac's brother-in-law Eugene Wigner, winner of the equivalent of a Nobel Prize for Mathematics, spoke of the ‘unreasonable effectiveness of Mathematics’. It is, he said, ‘a gift, which we neither understand nor deserve.’

In the Spring 2005 edition of Science and Christian Belief there is a marvellous article by physicist Peter Bussey (‘Beyond Materialism – Aquinus, Duns Scotus and Quantum Physics’) making a similar point about matter. He likens the old mind-brain problem to mind-matter. It is mind that gives matter its form in terms of 'laws of nature'. Without form there would not be formless matter: there would be no matter. It is a brilliant article linking consciousness, quantum theory, a realist view of mathematics, the mind, and the laws of nature, with the nature of matter itself.

He comments that while biologists are looking for more physical explanations for biological complexity, physicists are looking to non-physical mind to explain matter itself!

When we press the question far enough, do we really think that we understand any physical processes in terms of other physical processes – say one pebble hitting another? The electrons, which supposedly surround the nucleus in the atoms of the pebbles, are not tiny hard or soft things. So what are they? They seem to emerge from non-material information.

Information in the form of mathematical code or something equivalent to languages must have its origin in Mind. If you receive a letter written in a language or mathematical code, you cannot discern the origin of the language or code from the chemistry of the ink or paper. Its message is explained not by the chemistry of the ink and paper but the mind who wrote it.

Einstein said:

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library, whose walls are covered to the ceiling with books in many different languages. The child knows that someone must have written those books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books, a mysterious order, which it does not comprehend but only dimly suspects.[14].

Again this resonates with the Biblical teaching that God creates by His Word and upholds all things by the Word of His power. 

This does not mean that God is part of His creation. We have to be careful to distinguish between Creating Word and created information.

Now we jump to Bertrand Russell's last question. (We shall return to the others later.)

Must the good be eternal in order to deserve to be valued, or is it worth seeking even if the universe is inexorably moving towards death?

This raises the question of meaning or purpose. It is common for people (not just the religious) to wonder about the purpose or meaning of life. Something has meaning in this sense if and only if a purposive personal agent or group of such agents endows it with meaning and significance. To have meaning or purpose of any kind, a thing must be brought under the governance of some kind of purposive intention, whether an intention to refer, to express, to convey, or to operate in the production of some acknowledged value. This is true of all meaning. Meaning in the sense of purpose is never intrinsic; it is always derivative.

Objective or Subjective Meaning?

Some philosophers advocate a ‘do-it-yourself’ approach to questions of meaning and purpose. According to this view there is no ‘objective’ meaning of life waiting to be discovered. If we order our lives around things we desire, value and enjoy, within the structure of goals we take for ourselves, we render them meaningful and thereby give meaning to the life they compose. A person’s life can therefore have ‘subjective’ meaning or purpose – or so they say.

Problems for Subjective Meaning

How do you distinguish between one kind of ‘meaningful’ goal and another? Someone may focus his whole life on collecting matchbox covers and another on finding cures for terrible diseases.  (How does one distinguish the trivial from meaningful goals? There is nothing to appeal to.)

Someone may be very good at torturing people and enjoy it very much so that he focuses his life on that pursuit. How does one distinguish between worthy goals and unworthy goals? There is nothing to appeal to. How can a purely subjective approach to life’s meaning account for these objective differences? [15]

If one holds with the naturalists that we have come from nothing, are here by chance, and are going to nothing, there can be no rational basis for believing that our lives have meaning or value.

Life everlasting by itself does not bestow meaning. A few thousand years watching television would not give our lives purpose.

One of the alternative views about life everlasting also renders the meaning of life on earth null and void. For example if we hold that the next life (in heaven or hell) is infinitely long then this finite life loses all value except as a test for the next life.

If however we hold the Christian view that the Eternal Mind who created us for Himself actually meets our physical lives on earth (in Christ) then our earthly life which He values, takes on enormous value and meaning. This 'intersection' of the Eternal Divine life with our earthly lives is vitally important for purpose and value for our lives on earth.

We move on to another of Russell’s questions.

Has the universe any unity or purpose? Is it evolving towards some goal?

Naturalism is clear. There is ‘no ultimate purpose’[16] or, as TVs favourite atheists Dawkins and Atkins often tell us, we must not ask the 'Why?' question because it assumes there is a purpose.

However those who deny the validity of the `Why?' question have to say that the universe is in being and that is all there is to say. For them the only appropriate question to ask of nature is the `How' question. How do natural phenomena occur?

But is the `Why?' question so silly?

Surely there must be other questions that follow the `how?' question. The first one is surely the `what?' question. What brought the Big Bang into being? (Assuming, for the sake of argument, that that is how the universe got started.[17]) What lies behind (if not before) it? Even granted that the Big Bang is the beginning of time, this is still a very real, obvious and legitimate question to ask. However when we begin to think about it, the `what?' changes to `who?' It seems reasonable to believe that since personal beings exist, that which brought the universe into being cannot be less than personal. `What?' has to change to `who?’. Once we have begun to ask `who?' then the `why?' question of purpose naturally follows. Professor T F Torrance tells us that in 1929 Einstein said that science has now reached the stage where it cannot be satisfied simply with describing how nature is what it is in its ongoing processes, but must press on to ask "why nature is what it is and not something else". [18]

At these very fundamental levels of enquiry when we have reached the boundary of the natural world, the questions `how do things behave as they do?' and `why do things behave as they do?' converge into the one question. Once we have accepted the validity of the `Why?' question we have admitted that there may be purpose to the existence of the universe. If nature and our lives might have purpose then it is beholden upon us to seek that purpose so that we can discover how we should behave in this world. The universe forces us not only to consider what is the case but what ought to be the case and what ought to be our part in it.

Torrance has further made the point that science has operated with a false dualism between these two questions which has led to a false separation between the natural and moral sciences. It is this false distinction between the `public world of facts' and `the private world of values' about which Lesslie Newbigin so ably challenged us in his book `Foolishness To The Greeks'.

At the time of writing, the scientific establishment is complaining about the declining interest in science shown by school and university students. It is hard for such departments as Physics to recruit the students they need. This is certainly a sad and serious problem. But if it is the case that there is no purpose to the universe, then can we wonder that young people don't see the point or purpose in exploring the wonders the natural world contains, and instead simply turn to the utilitarian subjects which will make them more money?

Although natural science by itself cannot answer the `Why?' question it is the irrational denial of the legitimacy of the `Why?' question of purpose that is, in the long term, the greatest enemy of science.

It would be a great sadness for our human condition if we lost interest in discovering the wonders of nature. One of the mysteries of the human mind is that it possesses an intelligence and way of thinking that seem just right to be able to grapple with nature so as to uncover its inner logic – and this doesn't look to be the sort of thing that could have an evolutionary explanation. That is to say, the ability to understand abstract concepts such as quantum theory and the structure of the atom (say) seems irrelevant to evolution as simply `the survival of the fittest'.

Paul Davies says:

... we find that nature's order is hidden from us, it is written in code. To make progress in science we need to crack the cosmic code ... What is remarkable is that human beings are actually able to carry out this code-breaking operation, that the human mind has the necessary intellectual equipment for us to ‘unlock the secrets of nature’ ... It would be easy to imagine a world in which the regularities of nature were transparent and obvious to all at a glance. We can also imagine another world in which .... the regularities were so hidden, so subtle, that the cosmic code would require vastly more brain power than humans process. But instead we find a situation in which the difficulty of the cosmic code seems almost to be attuned to human capabilities. .... The challenge is just hard enough to attract some of the best brains available, but not so hard as to defeat their combined efforts and deflect them onto easier tasks. The mystery of all this is that human intellectual powers are presumably determined by biological evolution and have absolutely no connection with doing science."

The following convictions (consciously or unconsciously held) would surely promote and help the flourishing of science:

1. The natural world is orderly and therefore open to rational investigation.

2. Its rational order is open to understanding by the human mind.

3. Nature's order is a contingent order. That is to say, its rational structure did not have to be as it is but was chosen to be as it is. If the orderliness of nature were simply the orderliness of mathematics (where such truths as 3 times 4 = 12 are not dependent upon anything but are necessarily true), then the rational structure of the universe could be simply discovered by mathematics alone. Further observation and experiment would be unnecessary. However if we believe that its order was `chosen' to be as it is then observation and experimentation are necessary to delve deeper into its own rationality.

4. The natural world is good. Belief that it is evil, might make us try to understand it as we might try to understand the tactics of an enemy but there would be no joy in, or love, for the subject. Belief that it is neither good or evil would rob its study of real purpose.

5. There is hope for the natural world. Even though it contains much suffering, the conviction that it will finally be redeemed by the love of its Creator, strengthens our desire to love and know its secrets. The Incarnation and Atonement are the great seals of God's affirmation of His redeeming love for the physical world which He will not finally forsake.

Now Bertrand Russell's next question:

Are there really laws of nature, or do we believe in them only because of our innate love of order?

Although the German philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that our minds impose their own order on the nature that we observe, science assumes that there are discoverable laws of nature, intrinsic to nature itself, that govern the behaviour of physical objects. Their existence, though, poses a mystery that cannot be answered by nature itself.

The self-confessed materialist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Edward Wilson in his book Consilience skirts the related question: Why is the universe ordered?’ with the words, ‘fortunate comprehensibility of the universe’, and with a description of the world as ‘surprisingly well ordered’.[19]

Einstein, speaking of the `miracle' that the universe is ordered and therefore comprehensible says:

And here is the weak point of positivists and professional atheists, who feel happy because they think they have pre-empted not only the world of the divine but also of the miraculous. Curiously we have to be resigned to the miracle without any legitimate way of getting any further.[20]

This expresses his amazement that the laws of physics, which our minds are somehow attuned to understand, apply not just here on Earth but also in the remotest galaxy. Newton taught us that the same force that makes apples fall holds the Moon and planets in their courses. We now know that this same force binds the galaxies, makes some stars collapse into black holes, and may eventually cause the Andromeda galaxy to collapse on top of us. Atoms in the most distant galaxies are identical to those we can study in our laboratories. All parts of the universe seem to be evolving in a similar way, as though they shared a common origin. Without this uniformity, cosmology would have got nowhere.[21]

Now the next question of Bertrand Russell.

Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on a small unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both at once?

Here I am going to turn to the old familiar argument from Design. Before this is dismissed let me quote Bertrand Russell again, as he comments on this argument:

This argument [the argument from design] contends that, on a survey of the known world, we find things which cannot plausibly be explained as the product of blind natural forces, but are much more reasonably to be regarded as evidences of a beneficent purpose.

He regards this familiar argument as having no ‘formal logical defect’. He rightly points out that it does not prove the infinite or good God of normal religious belief but nevertheless says that, if true, (and he does not give any argument against it) it demonstrates that God is ‘vastly wiser and more powerful than we are’.[22]

For the next few paragraphs let us assume that the Big Bang theory for the origin of the universe is correct.[23] Why are there stars? (Our sun upon which our planet earth depends for all its life is a star.)

If the big bang is a mystery then so is the fine tuning necessary to guarantee that the universe actually produced stars and galaxies so that there could be a planet like earth for us to live on. In the 1960s Sir Bernard Lovell the famous Manchester astronomer calculated that:

·        If the rate of expansion had been less by only one part in a thousand billion, then the initial fire ball would have collapsed in on itself before its constituent parts would have been able to form any of the constituents of the stars. There would have been then a universe with no stars (and therefore no sun), no planets - nothing solid or liquid for animals to stand on or fishes to swim in.

·        If the expansion rate had been a very tiny bit greater, gravitation would not have been able to hold the gases so that stars could not then have formed. Again there would have been nothing solid - everything would just have been gas!

Since Sir Bernard Lovell made that calculation the fine-tuning seems even more remarkable. If any of the fundamental forces of nature (such as gravity, electo-magnetism and others) had been a tiny bit stronger or weaker then stars and planets like our could not have existed.

How was our planet earth made?

But even the stars too had to be just of the right kind. Think about our planet, Earth. Where did the chemical elements that make up our water, rocks and soils come from? The big bang only made hydrogen and helium atoms. There wasn't any iron, oxygen, carbon or anything that is in our planet earth then. So how were these heavier elements formed? Most astro-physicists believe they were formed by nuclear reactions in the inside of these first stars.

It is generally believed that these elements are the products of huge supernova explosions of the larger of these stars. Stars don't burn for ever. The bigger ones end their lives in huge explosions that scatter the debris throughout space. From this debris, it is believed, planets like our earth were formed. John Polkinghorne puts it very well:

......stars also have a very important thing to do. The nuclear furnaces that burn inside the stars are the source of the chemical elements which are the raw materials of life ... For life you need a much more complicated chemistry than hydrogen and helium ... In particular you need the chemistry of carbon, which … [is the basic constituent] … of those macro molecules which are the basis of life. To make the carbon you have to make three helium nuclei stick together (a very delicate operation). Then you've got to make lots more elements (oxygen for example). That means another helium atom to stick to the carbon. But be careful, you mustn't overdo it. You mustn't turn all the carbon into oxygen else the carbon will be lost. All these balances must be exactly right until you get up to iron. (The centre of stars cannot make anything beyond iron). Two problems remain: You've got to make heavier elements than iron and you've got to get them all out of the centre of the star so they can become part of the environment of the universe so that planets like earth which contain these elements can be formed. So you must arrange that these stars explode and scatter their elements AND that the explosion itself is of just the right type as to blow off neutrinos to cause the formation of heavier elements such as lead.[24]

These examples give a brief summary of the Fine Tuning of the Universe that make it so exquisite.

One of the world's most distinguished astro-physicists is Paul Davies. He makes no claim to religious belief. In chapter 13 of his book ‘God and the New Physics’ he says that the fine tuning is like firing a gun and hitting a target the size of a postage stamp positioned on the other side of the universe.[25]

Some who want to reject the conclusion that the Universe must have had a Designer will respond that any universe might appear finely tuned. To this I further respond that the fine tuning referred to here is that which is necessary to produce any solid existence at all. All the other alternatives would produce gas or black holes only.

Peter Atkins is a well-known militant atheist scientist (chemistry is his subject). His response[26] to the fine-tuning mystery is to say that there may be many other universes and ours just happens to be the one among many billions of universes where initial conditions were just right. If our universe's existence had only depended on one incredible example of fine-tuning then it would be possible to argue that case. However the universe's existence requires many exquisitely finely tuned initial conditions all to occur at the same moment. The Oxford Mathematician Roger Penrose (who makes no religious profession) has said that expecting to find a universe so finely tuned as ours would be like finding a pencil balanced on its point after an earthquake! In other words, our universe is very improbable indeed.

New evidence for the nature of the fine-tuning keeps accumulating. We now know that, in order for a planet to sustain complex life, it needs to be in a very special place in a very special star system in a very special part in a very special galaxy. In addition, it needs to have a right-sized moon (unusually large for our size of planet) and right-positioned gas planets (such as Jupiter), and tectonic plates of the right thickness, to sustain any complex life. Further the universe needs to be as dense at it is (i.e. the size and mass that it is) for a planet like earth to exist at all.

Hence we can answer Russell's question: Is man what he seems to the astronomer, a tiny lump of impure carbon and water impotently crawling on a small unimportant planet? Or is he what he appears to Hamlet? Is he perhaps both at once?

Perhaps Hamlet is exaggerating but he says:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, How infinite in faculties, in form and moving how Express and admirable, in action how like an angel, In apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the World, the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what Is this quintessence of dust?

Even granting for a moment that the incredible fine tuning found in our universe could be explained by saying that our universe may be just one amongst a trillion trillion universes there is much more to the reality of our universe than just an amazing and intricate arrangement of its atoms and forces.

Although the amazing fine-tuning of the universe is a recent discovery, philosophers have always been aware that the world seems, at least, to show evidence of design. Their question has been: ‘Does that show that there must have been a designer?’

What have the sceptical philosophers said about the apparent design of the universe?

One of the greatest of sceptical philosophers was David Hume who lived in eighteenth-century Scotland. The sceptical philosophers since him have added little to his basic arguments – they have just rehashed them and attempted to update them. David Hume's most readable (and indeed entertaining) arguments are found in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

Here is a summary of his points that are relevant to this section:

1.    He says the universe is bound to have the appearance of design.

Any universe would need to have its parts adapted to one another. That is to say; any universe would have to have some order. Since we know any universe would appear to be designed, how do we know that the universe actually is designed?

Here is a quote from the modern philosopher John Hick’s book Philosophy of Religion – page 29, in which he summarises David Hume’s argument:

The fact that there is only one universe precludes our making probable judgements about it. If - impossibly - we knew that there were a number of universes (e.g. 10) and if in addition we knew that (say) half of these were God-produced and half not, then we would deduce that the probability of our own universe being God-produced would be one in two. However, since by the universe we mean the totality of all that is (other than the creator of the universe), clearly no reasoning based on frequency theory of probability is possible concerning its character.

My response is this:

The false assumption behind Hume’s reasoning is the belief that it is possible to have a non designed universe. In fact, it is not possible. Any universe would appear to be designed because there can be no natural existence without design, whatever form it takes.

I expand a little on that point: the existence of anything in nature means its parts must hold together and relate to one another and they cannot do this unless there are fundamental laws of existence which presuppose order. Another hypothetical universe might have completely different laws of nature than ours but it would still have to have some laws of nature, and therefore would have been designed by a Designer.

2.    David Hume says that if the order of nature were created by a Supreme Being, then He must have order in Himself. He then asks, 'If a Supreme Being is capable of non-created order, why should not the world have a non-created order?'

This is similar (but not the same as) the question: 'Who made God?'

This question is based on what some philosophers call a category mistake. It applies a principle of the finite universe of nature - namely, that effects have causes - to the realm of the eternal supernatural.

The question as to who made something, is a question only applicable to the something if it is part of the natural order. We cannot know from nature what questions are applicable to that which is beyond nature.

Hume’s question is slightly different. It assumes that the Supreme Being has constituent parts which need to be held together in relationship. But we know nothing of the structure of such a supernatural being to postulate constituent parts, so we have to confess that we are faced with mystery, rather than another question – a question which follows on from a question and answer applicable to the natural world.

Howard Taylor: (HowardTaylor1944@yahoo.co.uk)

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