The following chapter is from Rabbi (Prof.) Yehuda (Leo) Levi's forthcoming expansion of his book: Torah and Science. It is posted here with his kind permission.
The evidence of God's wisdom and strength as displayed in the marvels of nature and their harmonious complexity is potentially among the most powerful sources of inspiration guiding us to love and revere Him. To demonstrate this wisdom, I present at the end of this chapter an illustration from my own professional field, describing one part of a small organ in man, which is minuscule in size, yet awe-inspiring in its performance.
The evolutionist argument of natural selection attempts to account for all biological marvels by means of well-known laws of nature. Although this argument collapses under closer scrutiny (see sec. 7.3), it tends to dampen the emotional impact of such demonstrations of God's wisdom. Natural selection may be argued to be relevant to the origin of species, but is, of course, irrelevant to the origin of basic laws of nature. Therefore, illustrations of God's wisdom from the laws of physics may have a special appeal. One such illustration is given later on (sec. 7.4), another, the so-called anthropic principle, we discuss here. See also our earlier discussion of the origin of laws of nature (sec. 1.2) as a possible source of inspiration in this sense.
Sir Fred Hoyle, the well-known astronomer, also well-known for his agnosticism, calculated the probability that the creation of life on earth was due to chance. His conclusion: it equals one in 1040,000. See sec. 7.3 for further discussion of this point.
5.2 The Forces of Nature and the Anthropic Principle1
According to our present world picture, there are four basic forces that control all physical processes and are responsible for the structure of our universe. They are:
(1) Gravity, a relatively weak force, responsible for the macroscopic structure of the universe, holding e.g. our solar system together .
(2) Electrical force, which, among other things, accounts for the structure of the atom.
(3-4) The weak and strong (nuclear) forces, which control the structure and stability of the atomic nucleus.
The magnitudes of these forces span a range of about 40 decades (a factor written as a one followed by 40 zeros), a number so large that it truly defies our imagination. And yet, their relative magnitudes are closely prescribed by the anthropic principle, which states that universe must have been designed to make intelligent life possible. The constants governing them seem to be limited to a very small range, if life is to be possible in this world.
Detailed analysis shows that, were the gravitational constant only slightly greater, all stars would be "blue giants", radiating only ultra-violet light, incompatible with life as we know it. On the other hand, if this constant were only slightly smaller, all stars would be "red dwarfs", again incompatible with plant life.
Similarly, if the strong force, which holds the nucleus together, were only a few percent weaker, only hydrogen could exist; if it were just 5% stronger, a nucleus consisting of two protons would be stable and no hydrogen would survive, so there could be no water.
The weak force controls the proton-neutron interaction in the nucleus. If it were only slightly weaker, all hydrogen would turn into helium and, again, water would be impossible.
It also appears that if the universe were somewhat more massive2 than it is in fact, its expansion would be short-lived - it would rapidly recollapse. Were it significantly less massive, galaxies would not condense, stars would not form and, again, life as we know it would be impossible.
If they are to be observable, laws of nature require the existence of an observer - they must be such as to make intelligent life possible. This conclusion is called the anthropic principle. It is used to "explain" many "coincidences" in nature like the ones listed above and many more. These coincidences are too unlikely and too many to be accepted without an explanation.
The anthropic principle by itself is of course not an explanation - it simply helps us to group the coincidences. Possible explanations include the assumption that under different circumstances intelligent life would also be possible - we simply can not imagine what form it would take. Life takes the form it does only because that form is compatible with the forces of nature the way they happen to be constituted. But this explanation remains unconvincing as long as the postulated alternative life forms are unimaginable.
Others have suggested that there exist, in fact, an infinity of universes, each with its own set of natural laws and most of them "stillborn", i.e. without the potential of intelligent life. Since no one has yet found the slightest evidence for the existence of such worlds, this very much looks like a desperate attempt to graft "natural selection"-type thinking onto a physical situation with which it is simply incompatible.
It would appear, then, that we have here evidence, albeit far from conclusive, pointing to a careful design, where the most fundamental components of our world picture are concerned.
Incidentally, today many scientists believe that the spontaneous evolution of life is extremely unlikely - even with the given optimum constellation of forces of nature (see chap.7, note 6).
5.3. Some Marvels of Water and Air3
Marvelous design can also be seen in the substances most central to life: water and air.
Water makes up the major bulk of the living cell. In our bodies it also serves as the transportation medium, carrying nourishment to the cells and waste products from them. In plants it carries dissolved inorganic nutrients to the roots. It is eminently suited for this because of its ready adhesion capabilities and its being an intermediately active solvent. Its extensive presence on earth is not inherent in the nature of a planet - none of the other known planets have significant amounts of water.
On earth, most of the water is stored in reservoirs "miraculously" available for it. Why "miraculous"? The earth's surface is essentially divided into two distinct regions: the continental level, above sea level, and the deep oceanic level, at a depth of about 4 km. Only 4% of the earth's surface is in the transition region between sea level and 4 km below it. This fortuitous structure is based on an underlying distortion of the shape of the earth's mantle and cannot be explained on the basis of random development.
The marvel of the water cycle, in which the oceans supply the clouds, and these bring the water to the land, whence, via rivers, it returns to the ocean, is well known. Less well known is another function of the oceans. Our life on earth depends crucially on about 0.04% of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere. Together with water and nitrogen, this is the main constituent of the carbohydrates manufactured by plants and hence sustaining animals and man. CO2 is generated during combustion and oxidation of dead organic material; it is consumed by plants during photo-synthesis; too much CO2 or too little, both are detrimental to life. How is the delicate balance maintained? This is a major function of the oceans. About 96% of all available CO2 is dissolved there. The oceans absorb any excess of CO2 present in the atmosphere and release it as needed to maintain the balance.
The liquidity of the oceans is the result of another fortuitous anomaly. Most substances contract when they cool and this is true of water as well - except when it comes to within 4°C of its freezing point. As it is cooled below this temperature, it begins to expand; in a natural body of water it therefore rises as it cools further. This accounts for the fact that bodies of water freeze from the top down and hence readily thaw when the atmosphere warms up again later. Were it not for this anomaly, oceans and rivers would freeze from the bottom up and thaw only partly when warm weather comes. Year by year the ice level would rise and soon most of the water on the earth's surface would be frozen - a deadly "ice age" would quickly set in.
The earth's rotation, too, is fortuitous. By means of the resulting lateral force (Coriolis effect) it diverts winds from their "natural" north-south direction, brings them down to a manageable speed (most of the time), turning them into an important factor maintaining life on earth as, for instance, in plant pollination. Incidentally, it has been calculated that if the earth's axis of rotation were not inclined to the plane of its orbit around the sun, the resulting lack of seasonal temperature fluctuations would give rise to the formation of glaciers that would soon cover all of the earth.
Similar marvels have been pointed out concerning the atmosphere, which, in addition to the CO2 balance discussed above, also maintains a balance of ozone (a mere 3 mm out of 8 km of sea-level-equivalent atmosphere). This balance provides a carefully monitored level of ultra-violet radiation at the earth's surface.
The intricate atmospheric processes have been studied extensively.4
5.4 The Smart Television Camera in Our Head5
Job exclaimed "from my flesh I perceive God" (Job 19:26). As an illustration of how we can use modern science to perceive God from our own flesh, let us consider the eye - our window to the world. Our eye is built somewhat like a tiny camera with lens, shutter, automatic iris control and automatic focusing, the last a feature only recently introduced into the amateur camera field. In particular let us look at a tiny part of the eye, the element analogous to the film in the camera: the retina, which covers the inside of the back of the eyeball.
The retina receives the image formed by the cornea and lens of the eye and converts it into nerve impulses. It operates usefully over a range of brightness of about a trillion to one, greater than that of any man-made device. Due to the automatic iris control, the resulting illumination range on the retina is less than that by a factor of about fifteen; but that still leaves a factor of about a hundred billion for the retina itself to handle.
To understand how the retina does this, we must take a closer look at the individual light detecting organs it contains. There are about seven million cone-shaped detectors, capable of the highest resolution of detail and of color discrimination. In addition, there are 120 million ultra-sensitive rod-shaped detectors. These are effective primarily at low illumination levels. Each of these "rods" contains hundreds of thousands of molecules of visual purple, each of which changes its structure when struck by light.
A single quantum of light (it takes about 2.5 trillion of these to make a watt-second!) is capable of activating such a molecule, causing it to release a sizeable flow of electric charge. Thus each such molecule acts, in a way, like a Geiger counter, amplifying the effect of a single quantum. A few "rods", with just one molecule of each activated, give rise to a sensation of light.
This much for the lower end of the brightness range. As the illumination rises, more and more molecules are activated and our visual nerves would soon be flooded with signals beyond their capacity to handle - if it were not for an amplification control mechanism, which reduces the sensitivity as less is needed. When the illumination has risen to about 3000 times its barely detectable level, the "cones" become active and start taking over the detection function. They work in a manner similar to the rods, except that their sensitivity is lower and they remain effective to much higher illumination levels.
This is but the beginning of our story. Each of the retinal detectors exits in a small nerve thread - close to 130 million nerves; in all. So many signal channels entering the brain would overload its data handling capacity. We are, therefore, fortunate that the optic nerve, the cable that carries information from the retina to the brain, consists of only a few hundred thousand nerve fibers. How does the transition take place? The optic nerve fibers end in a layer facing the layer of detectors, with a veritable thicket of nerves connecting the two sets of nerve endings. Some nerves connect to many detectors; others connect to many optic nerve fibers. The significance of these interconnections has only recently been discovered. This network of nerve interconnections performs the function of image enhancement. Perforce, the image formed on the retina is blurred; but, by means of carefully arranged interconnections, much of the blur is eliminated by the nerve interactions, in a manner similar to the way images received from space ships are processed.
This image enhancement uses up some of the signal energy so that, at very low levels of illumination, the retina might fail to detect the image altogether due to this processing. To overcome this limitation, the eye automatically adapts the amount of processing to the illumination level.
But the eye does ordinary image processing one better! It processes signals in time as well. The reader may have wondered at his ability to detect a moving object "out of the corner of his eye." He may be viewing a very complex static scene, with a great amount of detail structure with, say, a million picture elements each the size of a fly; and yet, if there is one small moving object, he notes it instantly. If he had to check out each one of the million elements, it would take him close to 3 hours, even if he could check them at the rate of a hundred per second! But the eye has certain detectors which are especially sensitive to change, "sounding an alarm" every time there is a significantly rapid change. Simultaneously, the retina "tunes out" the strictly static elements, which are, after a while, no longer very interesting. (The eye actually performs small rapid scanning motions, of which we are not conscious. Without these, the visual image would fade after a few seconds and actually does so, when the motion is artificially eliminated.)
Here, too, there are some refinements. At low illumination levels, the photons come in slowly and there would be too few of them if the total were added up too soon. But at these levels the eye responds to change more slowly, again sacrificing discrimination for detection.
And the retina does all this - in full color, except at the lowest levels of illumination.
And so the little retina in our eye performs the function of a super-television camera together with a sophisticated image processor – with one big difference: the pictures from space are processed by a computer that takes up the equivalent of a large box, whereas the retina does it in the volume of the head of a pin!
Anyone sensitive to divine wisdom cannot but stand in awe before this feat, which reproduces itself and is so commonplace that we take it simply for granted.
1 This section is based on the following: a. B.J. Carr and M.J. Reeves, "The Anthropic Principle and the Structure the Physical World," Nature 278:605-612 (1979). b. G. Gale, "The Anthropic Principle," Scientific American 245:114-122 (Dec.1981). For a very thorough treatment, see John B. Barrow & Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, Oxford, 1986.
2 The proper term here is the "scalar curvature of the universe." To make the presentation more readable, I use the term "mass" instead.
3 This section is largely based on H. Mandelbaum, "Ma'aseh Bereshith and Geology" Proc. Assoc. Orthodox Jew. Sci. 5:75-94 (1979)
4 Relevant material has been briefly reviewed in E.G. Freudenstein, "The Fourth Day of Creation," Intercom 122:5-8 & 23, A.O.J.S., New York (1979)
5 This section is based on L. Levi, Applied Optics, Vol. 2, Wiley, New York (1980); Chapt.15. Cf. also RaMBaM, Guide of the Perplexed 3:19.