In Lawrence M. Krauss’s piece in the New Yorker, No, Astrobiology Has Not Made the Case for God, he responds to an article entitled Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God published in the Wall Street Journal by Eric Metaxas. In Metaxas’ piece, he writes about how miraculous and statistically infinitesimal the likelihood that life would have arose on Earth. Metaxas then cites God or some other supernatural, eternal, and intelligent being as the reason for our creation. In other words, the perfect conditions that allow us to live are so perfect in design, and so unfathomable, that all of this must be the result of some greater plan. For Metaxas, the recent findings in astrobiology, that there are more than “200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life,” make it evident that the more that we know, the more likely we will begin to understand that life was created by design.
Krauss, a theoretical physicist and cosmologist finds issue with many of the premises of Metaxas’ argument. Namely that “many routes could have led to the same result.” This is true when we think about the possibility of life on Europa or the Moons of “hot Jupiters” orbiting distant planets. Moreover, there is an abundance of types of life, in drastically different environments, and there is a propensity for the universe to create the right conditions for life to thrive. Therefore, one cannot assert that all of these specific “parameters” must be met perfectly, but rather one must look into how versatile, dynamic, and abundant life is on our planet and maybe even the universe as a whole. Krauss responds to many assertions that are posed by Metaxas, namely how astrobiology seems to pose more questions than it answers. Krauss believes that these arguments are specious on the grounds of causation, citing how life is a reaction to the conditions that the universe has set forth, not that the universe must have all of these conditions in order for life to have existed. In many ways, Krauss uses a lot of the material we have covered in the last few weeks to argue that life must exist elsewhere, and the natural laws of physics promote life, rather than life on earth being completely anomalous. One interesting addition that Krauss asserts is that “when driven by an external source of energy, matter will rearrange itself to dissipate this energy most efficiently. Living systems allow greater dissipation, which means that the laws of physics might suggest that life is, in some sense, inevitable.” This may answer the question I was left with at the end of our course, which is why life exists in the first place.
The dialogue between the TV host Metaxas and the cosmologist Krauss speaks to where we exist presently in our debate of how the universe was created. After studying the drake equation, it seems that it poses paradoxical arguments for how obvious it is that life must exist elsewhere in the universe, but also how unlikely it is based on how small the fractions of each variable can become. Our textbook began with the assertion that we should focus on how specific the constant of gravity is, if it were any smaller things would not be able to come together and if larger, things would not be able to come apart. There are an infinite amount of variables that have led to the creation of our universe, and this leads me to both agree and disagree with both writers. While I am an optimist that life certainly exists elsewhere and that we are probably not too special in the realm of our universe, the question for me is still why? Yes, maybe life as a whole might adhere to properties of energy efficiency, and maybe we can explain how we were created in the near future, but we are still nowhere near understanding the complexity of the brain. What purpose could our feelings of freedom, power, wonder, hope, and sense of self serve for the physical laws of the universe? Why was the universe created in the first place and what came before? Is our universe all that there exists or is it just one reality amidst many? Indeed Socrates would approve of cosmology as an incredible platform to promote dialogue!
