THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS?

 Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), the British astronomer who gave the Big Bang its name, was a maverick among his contemporaries. He denied that the Universe started with a Big Bang, and he said that the likelihood of life arising on Earth through the accidental combination of amino acids (the theory of abiogenesis) was similar to the likelihood of a tornado roaring through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747. Hoyle was aware that he had many detractors, but he said, “I don’t care what they think. It is better to be interesting and wrong than boring and right.”

Something else that Hoyle said was, “I have always thought it curious that, while most scientists claim to eschew religion, it actually dominates their thoughts more than it does the clergy.” One scientist who fits Hoyle’s aphorism is Paul Davies (b. 1946), who has written many books discussing God and physics (e.g. God and the New Physics, The Mind of God, and The Goldilocks Enigma). In his books Davies wrestles with the questions of how the Universe came to be and why it is so conducive to the spawning of living things, including sentient living things such as ourselves.

He examines and rejects many explanations, including the explanation that God made the Universe.  In The Mind of God Davies asks the question, “In what sense might God be said to be responsible for the laws of physics?” He then summarizes the thoughts of Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) on the subject. Leibniz first posited that God must be rational. Otherwise, how could we live in a rational Universe? The next attribute of God must be that He is omnipotent. He made everything. How could He not be omnipotent? A rational, omnipotent God must also be perfect. This concept is probably beholden to St. Anselm’s (1033-1109) Proslogion, where he argues that God is someone “than whom there is nothing greater.” What else can we say about a rational, omnipotent, perfect God? He must be omniscient. Leibniz held that God must have these characteristics. Then Leibniz asked the question, what kind of a Universe would be made by a rational, omnipotent, omniscient, perfect God? The best of all possible Universes.

Leibniz’s theory that we live in the best of all possible worlds was savagely ridiculed by Voltaire (1694-1778) in his work Candide, where he made a learned nitwit by the name of Professor Pangloss the butt of his jokes. Of course, Voltaire made the problem of evil his argument against this being the best of all possible worlds.

Of course, we, with our limited knowledge, doubt that this is the best of all possible worlds. But what’s best for us may not be best for the Universe as a whole. To those who would criticize God for making a less-than-perfect Universe, Rev. J. Vernon McGee (1904-1968) said, “This is God’s Universe, and God does things His way. You may have a better way, but you don’t have a Universe.”

Davies, of course, doesn’t believe God created the Universe, but he seems to think that our Universe is the best of all possible Universes. He bases this opinion on the twin facts that mathematics so perfectly describes everything in the Universe and that the Universe is perfect for the spawning of sentient life. In his book The Goldilocks Enigma, he considers several explanations for this, including the theory that God made the Universe. I forget which explanation he said that he  preferred, but I do recall that when I read all the possibilities he put forward, I decided that God is the simplest, best explanation for the Universe being the way it is.