This is a repost from a thread of mine in the Hindu DIR thread. It has taken me a long time to accept that God exists, as I am an ex-atheist and still have strong atheistic tendencies. I have looked at all the main arguments for why God exists cosmological, design and ontological, but it is this argument that convinces me the most.
Argument: The laws of cause and effect require a maintainer that enforces it.
If a law exists, it does not necessarily mean that everybody will follow the law. If there is no maintainer/enforcer/supervisor to enforce that law, then some will deliberately not follow that law, some will forget to follow that law and if the laws are very complex, then may partly follow that law while breaking another law.
Objection: This is an invalid argument, because it makes the mistake of applying how humans laws work to natural laws
Reply: The above is only an analogy to illustrate that laws require a supervising intelligence. Consider how complex natural laws are, the laws of gravity, electricity, magnetism, light, sound, nuclear laws, mechanical laws and all these laws operate in tandem perfectly to maintain this universe. If the laws were just blind, why would they do that? Why would they continue to persist, why doesn't gravity just stop working the next moment and all planets fall out of their orbit? Why doesn't some random reaction take place in the sun and the sun explode? Why don't the spin of atoms change by a minuscule amount and all matter just collapses? Why are the physical laws so precisely fine tuned that the universe can exist and humans are around to see it(anthropic principle)
We know that at the quantum level of the uncertainty, how atoms just appear and disappear seemingly randomly every moment, and despite this material flux, still at the non-quantum or manifest level of reality everything coheres. This fact when discovered by Max Plank even compelled him to say in his Nobel prize speech that it can only be explained by a supervising cosmic intelligence
Scientists have now started to acknowledge that the universe is indeed a perfectly fined tuned system for life to exist:
"For more than 400 years, physicists treated the universe like a machine, taking it apart to see how it ticks. The surprise is it turns out to have remarkably few parts: just leptons and quarks and four fundamental forces to glue them together.
But those few parts are exquisitely machined. If we tinker with their settings, even slightly, the universe as we know it would cease to exist. Science now faces the question of why the universe appears to have been “fine-tuned” to allow the appearance of complex life, a question that has some potentially uncomfortable answers.
So now, I invite you to join me in imagining a universe, a universe slightly different to our own. Let’s just play with one number and see what happens: the mass of the down-quark. Currently, it is set to be slightly heavier than the up-quark.
(snip)
This situation is devastating for the possibility of complex life, as in a heavy down-quark universe, the simplest atoms will not join and form molecules. Such a universe is destined to be inert and sterile over its entire history. And how much would we need to increase the down-quark mass to realise such a catastrophe? More than 70 times heavier and there would be no life. While this may not seem too finely tuned, physics suggests that the down-quark could have been many trillions of times heavier. So we are actually left with the question: why does the down-quark appear so light?
Examining the huge number of potential universes, each with their own unique laws of physics, leads to a startling conclusion: most of the universes that result from fiddling with the fundamental constants would lack physical properties needed to support complex life.
Things get worse when we fiddle with forces. Make the strength of gravity stronger or weaker by a factor of 100 or so, and you get universes where stars refuse to shine, or they burn so fast they exhaust their nuclear fuel in a moment. Messing with the strong or weak forces delivers elements that fall apart in the blink of an eye, or are too robust to transmute through radioactive decay into other elements,
Then there’s the finely tuned level of dark energy. We know very little about this mysterious substance that fills the universe. It may be related to the weird behaviour of the vacuum. Quantum mechanics predicts that the vacuum is not really empty. Particles continually pop in and out of existence producing a background energy that seems to influence cosmic expansion.
And there is another structural issue to consider – our universe is flying apart. Two things affect the rate of expansion: the amount of matter which acts as a brake, and dark energy which acts as an accelerator. Dark energy is winning so our universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.
What this means is that in the early days of the universe, the rate of expansion was slower, slow enough to allow matter to condense into stars, planets and people. But if the universe had been born with only a touch less matter, it would have rapidly expanded, thinning out to less than one hydrogen atom per universe.
On the other hand, if the universe had been born with only a touch more matter, that would have caused it to re-collapse before the first stars could form. In short, the early universe was on a knife-edge, poised between these possible outcomes. What emerged was the Goldilocks expansion rate: not too fast, not too slow.
Then there’s the finely tuned level of dark energy. We know very little about this mysterious substance that fills the universe. It may be related to the weird behaviour of the vacuum. Quantum mechanics predicts that the vacuum is not really empty. Particles continually pop in and out of existence producing a background energy that seems to influence cosmic expansion.
Symmetry
Next, we come to a consideration of the symmetry displayed in our universe. In everyday life the word symmetry describes how something stays the same when you change your viewpoint; think of the appearance of a perfect vase as you circumnavigate the table it’s sitting on. It demonstrates rotational symmetry.
In physics, we find other types of symmetries hidden in mathematics. For instance, there is a symmetry that ensures the conservation of electric charge: in every experiment we perform, equal amounts of positive and negative charges are produced. Other symmetries dictate the conservation of momentum, and there are others for a whole host of quantum properties. Some symmetries are perfect, others contain slight imperfections. And we would not be here without them.
In a perfectly symmetric universe, the hot fires of the Big Bang would have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. This means protons and antiprotons would have completely annihilated each other as the universe cooled leaving a universe empty of its atomic hydrogen building block.
Somewhere hidden in the physics of protons there must be a slight asymmetry that resulted in protons outnumbering antiprotons by one in a billion.
But why does our universe possess a perfect symmetry with respect to charge but a slight asymmetry with respect to matter and antimatter? Nobody knows! If the situation was reversed and our universe was born with zero protons, but with a net excess of charge, the immense repulsive action of the electromagnetic force would prevent matter present from collapsing into anything resembling stars and galaxies.
No matter which way we turn, the properties of our universe have finely tuned values that allow us to be here. Deviate ever so slightly from them and the universe would be sterile – or it may never have existed at all. What explanation can there be for this fine-tuning?
What is now known to science in the latest research from empirical facts we declared purely using reasoning more than a thousand years ago. We argue similarly, the laws of nature function because there is a supervising intelligence. In fact we can also provide you empirical proof of this. Take the body for example. As long as the intelligence that is regulating the body exists, the body functions and remains coherent, but as soon as that intelligence leaves, the body stop functioning and falls apart. Thus, extending this argument to the body of the universe, its functioning and coherence can only be possible if there is a supervising intelligence.
