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² It was in an address to the International Astronomical Union in 1974 that Brandon Carter, then a physicist at Cambridge and now at the Meudon Observatory in Paris, coined the term “anthropic principle” to explain scientifically the surprisingly ordered structure of the physical world. In doing so he was relying on the work in the late 1950s by Princeton's Robert Dicke, who in turn had utilized the research some thirty years earlier of Cambridge mathematician, Paul Dirac. Carter's principle was based, as were Dicke's conclusions, not on fundamental physics but on biology, and it offered for the first time a means of relating mind and observation directly to physical phenomena. The principle was subsequently examined in some detail by other physicists like Bernard Carr and Martin Rees and by philosophers of science like Ernan McMullin and John Leslie. A massive study of the principle was coauthored by astronomer John Barrow and mathematician Frank Tipler. Numerous popular discussions also began to appear in the writings of physicists Freeman Dyson, Paul Davies, and George Greenstein, biologists Arthur Peacocke and George Gale, and mathematicians Stephen Hawking and John Casti. For historical perspective on the principle, see Barrow, John D. and Tipler, Frank J., The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), chaps. 2-3;Google ScholarCarter, Brandon, “Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle in Cosmology” in Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, ed. Longair, M. S. (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974), 291–98;CrossRefGoogle ScholarCarr, B. J. and Rees, M. J., “The Anthropic Principle and the Structure of the Physical World,” Nature 278 (1979): 605–12;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMcMullin, Ernan, “How Should Cosmology Relate to Theology?” in The Sciences and Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. Peacocke, Arthur (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 40–46;Google ScholarLeslie, John, “Anthropic Principle, World Ensemble, Design,” American Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1982): 144–51;Google Scholar and Casti, John L., Paradigms Lost (New York: Morrow, 1989), 479–91.Google Scholar

³ This faint microwave radiation was found to be exactly the same whichever direction the detector pointed, which meant that it was coming from outside the earth's atmosphere. Also it was the same day or night and throughout the year, which indicated that it was coming from beyond the solar system, perhaps beyond the galaxy; otherwise it would vary with the movement of the earth. We know now that this noise comes across most of the observable universe, and that the universe must therefore be the same in every direction. See Hawking, Stephen W., A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), 41.Google Scholar

⁴ For a more detailed history of this development, see Pagels, Heinz R., Perfect Symmetry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 136–56.Google Scholar This relatively new field of science is surveyed in its entirety by Harrison, Edward R., Cosmology: The Science of the Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

⁵ Hawking, , Brief History, 122.Google Scholar

⁶ Davies, Paul, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), 167–68.Google Scholar

⁷ Hawking, , Brief History, 121–22.Google Scholar

⁸ See the analysis by Davies, , God and the New Physics, 176–82.Google Scholar Note that the negative exponential numbers are abbreviated in the same way as the positive numbers: 10⁻³ would mean 0.001 or one thousandth, 10⁻⁶ would be one millionth, 10⁻¹² one trillionth. In other words, a 10 with a negative number as exponent means that the decimal point should be moved this many places to the left.

⁹ Unseen matter is a disconcerting discovery. At best, astronomers now tell us, we can see only about 10 percent of what exists. At least 90 percent of mass in the universe, perhaps as much as 97 percent, gives off no visible light and no radiation at any wave-length. What this “dark matter” is made of is still a mystery, but its existence has been deduced from the gravitational dynamics of galaxies: the pull of their gravity on light from visible stars is much too strong to be explained by their luminous matter. See Kraus, Lawrence M., The Fifth Essence (New York: Basic Books, 1989);Google Scholar and Trefil, James, The Dark Side of the Universe (New York: Scribners, 1988).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Astronomer Bernard Lovell gives the density of matter at 10⁻⁴³ second after the Big Bang as 5 × 10⁹³ grams per cubic centimeter of space, and, after one second of expansion, as one gram per cubic centimeter. Today, after some fifteen billion years of expansion and with the almost bottomless emptiness of space between galaxies, he estimates the critical mean density to be 2 × 10⁻²⁹ grams per cubic centimeter, or approximately one proton per cubic meter. See Lovell, Bernard, In the Center of Immensities (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 104–107.Google Scholar

¹¹ See Guth, Alan and Steinhardt, Paul, “The Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American 250 (1984): 120.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹² Davies, , God and the New Physics, 179.Google Scholar A light year is the distance that light travels in a year at the rate of 186,272 miles per second, or just under six trillion miles.

¹³ Barbour, Ian G., Religion in an Age of Science (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), 135.Google Scholar This knife-edge may turn out to be exceedingly sharp. Cosmologists refer to the phenomenon we have been discussing as the “flatness” of the universe: there is barely enough space for the expansion to continue against the pull of gravity. But such “flatness” may in fact be necessary in order to stabilize the expansion. Recent calculations by Harvard physicist Sidney Coleman indicate that the universe could well be ex-actly flat, i.e., its present density may be exactly 1 or exactly equal to critical density, and that consequently it must always have been such. This should not be so surprising, cosmologists say, because it would be very peculiar for a universe so very close to critical density at its start, and at most of its evolutionary stages, to be in our epoch departing from this delicate equilibrium. If Coleman's calculations are correct, then eventually enough dark matter must be found to increase the critical mass from the present guess of 30 percent to exactly (or very nearly) 100 percent. See Waldrop, M. Mitchell, “The Quantum Wave Function of the Universe,” Science 242 (1988): 1248–50.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

¹⁴ This point is well made by Polkinghorne, John, One World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 55–57;Google Scholar and by Barrow, John D. and Silk, Joseph, The Left Hand of Creation (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 204–205.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Dyson, Freeman, Distributing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 151.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Quoted in Greenstein, George, The Symbiotic Universe (New York: Morrow, 1988), 188, 190.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Davies, Paul, The Accidental Universe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 110.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Ibid., 115.

¹⁹ Barrow, and Tipler, , The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, 4.Google Scholar

²⁰ Ibid, 3

²¹ Pagels, , Perfect Symmetry, 359.Google Scholar

²² See, for example, Gould, Stephen Jay, “Mind and Supermind” in Physical Cosmology and Philosophy, ed. Leslie, John (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 181–88;Google Scholar and Drees, Willem B., Beyond the Big Bang: Quantum Cosmologies and God (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1990).Google Scholar

²³ Pagels, Heinz, “A Cozy Cosmology” in Physical Cosmology and Philosophy, ed. Leslie, John (New York: Macmillan, 1990), 180.Google Scholar

²⁴ Guth's theory is explained at lengthy by Hawking, , Brief History, 127–32Google Scholar, and by Guth himself in Guth, and Steinhardt, , “The Inflationary Universe,” 116–28.Google Scholar

²⁵ See Everett, Hugh, Review of Modern Physics 29 (1957): 454.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ On the many-worlds hypothesis see Davies, , Accidental Universe, 122–27;Google ScholarDavies, , God and the New Physics, 171–74;Google Scholar and Leslie, , “Anthropic Principle,” 145–46.Google Scholar The many-worlds hypothesis has been incorporated also into the strong anthropic principle as part of the requirement for a teleologically ordered cosmos.

²⁷ McMullin, , “How Should Cosmology Relate to Theology?” 43–44.Google Scholar

²⁸ Leslie, , “Anthropic Principle,” 150.Google Scholar

²⁹ Dyson, Freeman, Infinite in All Directions (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 296.Google Scholar

³⁰ Pagels, Heinz R., “A Cozy Cosmology,” The Science 25 (1985): 38.Google Scholar

³¹ Morowitz, Harold J., “Rediscovering the Mind” in The Mind's I, ed. Hofstadter, Douglas R. and Dennett, Daniel C. (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 34.Google Scholar

³² Monod, Jacques, Chance and Necessity (New York: Knopf, 1971), 172–73.Google Scholar

³³ Ibid., 21.

³⁴ Dyson, , Distributing the Universe, 249.Google Scholar

³⁵ See the critique offered by Midgley, Mary in her Science as Salvation: A Modern Myth and Its Meaning (London: Routledge, 1992).Google Scholar

³⁶ The analogy is that of de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, Toward the Future (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 165.Google Scholar

³⁷ Jastrow, Robert, God and the Astronomers (New York: Norton, 1978), 116.Google Scholar

³⁸ Gustafson, James M., Ethics from a Theocentric Perspective, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 82.Google Scholar

³⁹ de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 224.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Kolakowski, Leszek, The Presence of Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).Google Scholar

⁴¹ Ibid., 118.