For a mini-primer on the force G and other "balancings" in the universe, see The Fine-Tuning of G.
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Dr. Francis Collins is hardly the "obscure creation scientist" that we think of when we think of Creationist spokesmen. Collins was the head of -- not a member of, but the head of -- the Human Genome Project and is one of the world's greatest geneticists.
Collins, a former atheist, was not persuaded by arguments of the origin of life, by arguments against origin of species or other fundamental arguments used by theistic scientists.
Why? Because, according to Collins, even if we cannot imagine how inorganic materials coalesced into the first reproducing, organic life form with 5,000 codons -- and we cannot -- it is fundamentally a "God of the gaps" argument, and therefore unconvincing.
Someday, somehow, there might be a mechanism discovered that explains the leap from 0 codons to 5,000 codons in one generation. (I - jemanji - do not concur with this reasoning, but the spirit is clear. Collins is not an easy nut to crack for the theistic world.)
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This objection does not apply in any way to the argument over the fine-tuning of G, the gravitational constant.
At a recent gathering of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. George Coyne rebuked biological arguments for intelligent design. (Coyne himself is actually an astrophysicist.)
Dr. Collins stepped up directly afterward, took the microphone, and pointed asked Coyne -- in front of a room full of eminent scientists -- why gravity is so “finely-tuned.”
That is, if the force of gravity were an astronomically-tiny fraction smaller than it is, then the universe would have kept expanding without forming galaxies (and we would not be here) ...
While, at the same time, if gravity were the same fraction stronger than it is, matter in our universe would have imploded together and not expanded outward to form galaxies, stars, and planets (and thus we would not be here).
How small is this fraction?
1 part in 10 to the minus 14th power!In either direction. For a bit of perspective, a human hair's width is about 1 in 10 to the minus 11th power relative to the circumference of the earth. You'd have an easier time throwing a dart at a random spot on the entire equator, and bisecting a human hair hidden on it, than you would have in setting Newton's Constant to the correct strength needed to enable the Big Bang. To put it another way, if a 200-lb. man actually weighed 200.000 000 000 0001 pounds, or if he weighed 199.999 999 999 9999 pounds, the Big Bang would not have been possible in either direction. This observation, relative to G and the Big Bang, is not creationist speculation. It's a demonstrated phenomenon of the observable universe. Collins pointed asked whether Coyne thought this evidence suggested luck, or "monkeying" with the laws of physics by a Being somehow more powerful than the universe itself. Coyne's reply: well, that isn't a scientific question ... .............. Stephen Hawking, certainly no friend of theism, responded to this (and only this) puzzle with the remark, "I think there are clearly religious implications." It is this type of observation that led Albert Einstein to suspect that a Transcendent Being had imposed rationality on what should be an irrational universe. Astronomer Fred Hoyle opined, "a super-intellect has monkeyed with the laws of physics." The alarming thing about G-and-the-Big-Bang is that it is not answered with a "God of the Gaps" rebuttal. There will never come a time when some physicist discovers any natural mechanism that "tunes" G to the correct strength "desired" by a future Earth and the life on it. No natural force exists above and transcendent to Gravity, much less one that intelligently "tunes" it to a particular parameter. ................. Skeptics generally reply with a supposition that an infinite number of universes exist, of which this happens to be the lucky one (also known as the Giant Bubble Machine theory). For the purposes of this website, religion is not the point here; neither are debates or escape clauses from the implications of such incredible fine-tunings. For our purposes, it's enough to simply notice that if a 200-lb. man actually weighed 200.000 000 000 0001 pounds, the universe wouldn't work. If you ask me, that fits into the category of freaky. Cheers, jemanji .................. image: http://www.grandunificationtheory.com/history.bigbang.jpg
