So let's review this idiot thread:
There is not a shred of evidence for design. Not a shred.
And that about sums it up.
The structure of matter says otherwise.
These are the primary conditions for the existence of life in the universe and evidence that our universe is unnaturally finely tuned to exist and produce life and intelligence.
- The universe being created from unequal amounts of matter and anti-matter.
- Proton being exactly as plus-charged as electrons are minus-charged. If the proton and electron did not possess exactly the same electric charge, no matter would aggregate and no life would exist.
- The mass difference between electrons and the nucleus and the distance between the nucleus and electrons. If the proton and neutron did not have enormously greater mass than the electron and the electron were closer to the nucleus, all matter would be fluid and no life would exist.
- Of the 92 natural elements, ninety-nine percent of the living matter we know is composed of just four: hydrogen (H), oxygen (O), nitrogen (N), and carbon (C). These same elements interact to generate the light of its star.
- Between four and zero degrees centigrade, where water freezes, water expands, so rapidly that the ice that forms is less dense than liquid water. The complete hydrogen bonding among the water molecules in ice holds them more widely spaced than in liquid water, so ice floats. If water behaved like virtually everything else, and continued to contract on cooling, then the increasingly dense water would constantly be sinking to the bottom, and freezing would begin at the bottom, not as now at the top, and would end by freezing the water solidly. A really large mass of ice takes forever to melt, even at higher temperatures. If ice did not float, it is hard to see how any life could survive a cold spell. On any planet in the universe, if a freeze occured even once in many millions of years, that would probably be enough to block the rise of life, and to kill any life that had arisen.
- Finally, we have a cosmic principle: To have such a universe as this requires an extraordinary balance between two great cosmic forces: that of dispersion (expansion), powered by the Big Bang, and that of aggregation, powered by gravitation. If the forces of expansion were dominant, that would yield an isotropically dispersed universe lacking local clusters, galaxies or planetary systems; all the matter would be flying apart, and there would be no large solid bodies, hence no place for life. If, on the contrary, gravitation were dominant, the initial expansion produced by the Big Bang would have slowed up and come to an end, followed by a universal collapse, perhaps in preparation for the next Big Bang. There would be no time for life to arise, or it would be quickly destroyed.
We live in a universe in which it has just lately been realized that those two forces are in exact balance, so that the universe as a whole is expanding wherever one looks, everything very distant is going away from us, but locally there are so-called local groups and clusters, where whole clusters of galaxies are held together by gravitation. Our own relatively small cluster contains, in addition to the Milky Way, the Andromeda galaxy (M31). It is very much like our galaxy, but a little smaller, and there is also a still smaller galaxy, all part of our local group. Most of you have probably heard that we measure the expansion of the universe by the so-called
red shift. The further one looks out into space, the redder the light is, compared to the same sources on earth. That is interpeted as an expression of the Doppler Effect, and taken to mean that the more distant an astronomical body, the faster it is receding from us. But the first such color shift ever to be discovered, by the astronomer Slipher back in 1912, was not a red shift by a
blue shift. He was looking at our sister galaxy, Andromeda, and observed a blue shift because, far from receding, the Andromeda galaxy is coming toward us at about 125 miles per second. It is just this exact balance between the steady expansion of the universe as a whole and its stability locally that affords both enormous reaches of time and countless sites for the development of life.
I have here only sampled briefly an argument that extends much further. The nub of that argument is that our universe possesses a remarkably detailed constellation of properties, and as it happens, it is just that constellation that breeds life. It takes no great intelligence or imagination to conceive of other universes, indeed any number of them, each of which might be perfectly good, stable universes, but lifeless.
How did it happen that, with what seem to be so many other options, our universe came out just as it did? From our own self‑centered point of view, that is the best way to make a universe: But what I want to know is, how did the universe find that out?
It may be objected that the question would not arise if we were not here to ask it. Yet here we are, and strangely insistent on asking that kind of question. Perhaps that indeed is the answer: That this is a life‑breeding universe precisely in order eventually to bring forth creatures that ask and attempt to answer such questions, so that through them the universe can come not only to be, but to be known; indeed can come to know itself.
George Wald: Life and Mind in the Universe
