(This article by Terry Scambray originally appeared in the December 2022 edition of New Oxford Review.)
The 20th century’s most prominent atheist, Bertrand Russell once said that when he dies if confronted by God and asked why he remained an atheist, he would simply say, “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.”
Michael Denton is one of several 20th century scientists who have come forward with evidence that the cosmos by all scientific accounts looks to be a profoundly crafted place for life and specifically for human life to exist and then to thrive and flourish.
Even an agnostic like Freeman Dyson, the Anglo-American physicist, has said, “The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.” Voltaire famously wrote: if God did not exist, he would have to be invented; though he less famously followed that by writing, God does exist because of the order in the natural world. America’s Voltaire, H.L Mencken, wrote, “I can recall no concrete atheist who did not appear to me to be a donkey. For if there is anything plain about the universe, it is that it is governed by law, and law is always a manifestation of Will.”
Other cosmologists like Brandon Carter, Fred Hoyle, and Guillermo Gonzalez have made similar claims for what has become known as the anthropic principle meaning that this world offers an irresistible invitation for life to come in and stay awhile.
Certainly these findings do not “prove God,” but when one considers the sublime fine tuning of the universe that Denton describes, the conclusion of a Designer is hard to resist. Indeed, as Denton has recently said, “This just right, Goldilocks universe rings up the curtain on the great scriptural drama of Redemption which requires man’s centrality in some sense and that’s what fitness is bringing back.”
So science and theology, science and Christianity are inextricably connected as they were when science was invented in the medieval universities and, by contrast, they are not the entrenched enemies as they have been portrayed for the last 200 years. Physicist Paul Davies goes further when he says, “Science offers a surer path to God than religion.”
Denton’s first book, Evolution: A Theory in Crisis, is regarded as the opening salvo of the intelligent design movement, a view which attempts to demonstrate that just as man made things are designed by a mind for a purpose, so the same applies to the even more wonderous features of nature.
In addition to his medical degree and his doctorate in genetics, Denton knows history and philosophy. All of this makes him aware that by pointing out the shortcomings of Darwin, he sends an entire worldview into a tailspin. As Denton puts it, Darwin thought that “the eerie purposefulness of living systems resulted from a blind process – natural selection; that is, time and chance. God’s will was replaced by the capriciousness of a roulette wheel. The break with the past was complete.”
Others had certainly deconstructed Darwin almost immediately after his 1859 publication of The Origin of the Species. However, Denton’s critique relied mainly on the science of the last 50 years and especially the latest findings in molecular biology to reestablish teleology as the only possible explanation for the complexity of life and the cosmos.
The findings of molecular biology show that the inner workings of the cell alone are too complex, far too interdependent to have been built in a piece-by-piece manner without a purpose, or to use Aristotle’s words, without a “final cause.”
Denton wrote that the claim that time and chance are responsible for such sublime complexity “is one of the most daring claims in all of science. But it is also one of the least substantiated. No one has ever produced any proof that the designs in nature are within the reach of chance.”
Denton, in his 1998 book, Nature’s Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe, proceeded to dive deeper into the complexity of life by showing that it exists on a razor’s edge of finely calibrated variables. As he wrote, “There is insufficient evidence to argue that the laws of nature are uniquely fit for every detail of human biology. However, I believe the current evidence points strongly in this direction and that future scientific advances will confirm the absolute centrality of mankind in the cosmic scheme.”
The current evidence that Denton’s book relies on is encyclopedic, including the nature of many variables including carbon, water, fire, sunlight and even the cosmos itself. His explanations of how all these features are synchronized is finely grained and demanding, but a few examples may suffice to suggest the depth of his investigation.
Carbon is the only element that bonds easily with other elements in long chains without a great loss of energy. Besides making life possible when it bonds with hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, which make amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, it also makes life bearable when it combines with other elements to make natural gas, gasoline, lubricating oils, gases, waxes, plastics, anesthetics, solvents, Freon, ethanol, coffee, tea and many other items.
As it happened, Hoyle, early on as an atheist, figured that there was a relatively easy pathway to form carbon. What he found, though, was that combining other elements like helium, hydrogen and beryllium could not form carbon. Additionally the physical and chemical dynamics within stars play a role in making carbon. That is, a star, acting as a furnace, must get sufficiently hot in order to blend various elements but not so hot that the star would burn up. Hoyle concluded that such finely calibrated events cannot be explained by chance, making this one example of many which drove him to say that “a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.”
Another indispensable feature of life that is difficult to explain within a purely materialistic framework is water; for it is the ideal substance for filling the body’s billions of capillaries while also serving as a universal solvent which produces the hygienic conditions conducive to health.
In explaining water’s versatility, Denton writes that when water freezes into ice “it has a viscosity of 1016 times that of water. The rocks which make up the crust of the earth have viscosities ranging between 1025 to 1028 times that of water. So if the viscosity of ice had been several times lower than it is, then glacial activity would have been much less effective in grinding down the mountains” to form rich valleys and to expose the vital minerals which make modern industrial society possible. (1016 means 1 with 16 zeros after it which is a quadrillion; and so on for the others mentioned.)
Fire literally ignited the industrial revolution and the earth’s boundless forests offered the fuel to make fire while the upright, bipedal features of humans and the manipulative abilities of human hands perfectly fit the demands of fire making. From burning wood, charcoal was made which burns at the high temperatures necessary to blend raw metals and then to shape them into the materials and machines without which civilization could not exist.
Sunlight is another essential for life because it manufactures energy by the still unexplained process of photosynthesis which grows plants which produce food for humans and animals.
Some ask how the almost immeasurable size of the universe fits into what might appear to be this rather tidy teleological view. As it turns out, however, even the most distant galaxies influence the inertia of earthly bodies! As Denton writes, “The existence of beings of our size and mass with the ability to stand, to move, and to light a fire is only possible because of the influence of the most distant galaxies, whose collective mass determines the precise strength of the inertial forces on earth.”
Denton sees this feature of the universe “as a distant echo of the medieval doctrine of man which held that the dimensions of the human body reflect in some profound sense the dimensions of the macrocosm.”
In his most recent work, Denton continues his quest to demonstrate the perfect fit between man and the cosmos. Thus, beginning in 2016 he published a series of four short books on each of the properties of fire, water, light and the cell. In each of these books, ranging in length from 68 to 168 pages, he delves into even greater detail the elegant features of life. While specialists will better appreciate the finely grained details from chemistry, physics, optics and so on that Denton discusses, the wizardry of nature described in these monographs will also impress the non-specialist.
For example, in his 2020 book, The Miracle Of The Cell, he writes that a cell “consists of trillions of atoms, representing the complexity of a jumbo jet and more, packed into a space less than a millionth of the volume of a typical grain of sand. But unlike anything else this entity can replicate itself. Here is an infinity machine with seemingly magical powers.”
Denton concludes his “Privileged Species Series” with The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence. And, in this case, he admits that his claim that the cosmos is uniquely fit for man may strike many as extraordinary. As Carl Sagan wrote, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” But unlike the unsupported Darwinian claim that time and accident produced all of nature including man, Denton responds that, regardless of how extraordinary his claim appears, the facts speak for themselves.
And once again, Denton presents an amazing array of facts, from the cardiac muscle cells which have “trillions of tightly packed molecular arrays of contractile filaments” which generate the cardiac cycle as it pumps blood which adds a fourth of a liter of oxygen per minute as it moves one hundred trillion oxygen molecules per minute through the surface of the lungs.
The human brain, for its part, performs 1015 synaptic operations per second and may be “the most complex functional assemblage of matter possible in our universe,” according to Denton.
These are stunning ensembles in themselves, but they become even more so when one considers that they must be synchronized with features like the size of the Earth, its atmosphere, its hydrological cycle, and its soils, along with a staggering number of other variables.
Denton concludes with a Biblical like paean to man: “Our destiny was inscribed in the light of the stars and the property of atoms since the beginning. All of nature sings the song of man. We now know what medieval scholars only believed, that the underlying rationality of nature is indeed ‘manifest in human flesh.’”