Einstein’s Self-Professed Greatest Blunder and the Existence of God
Part II The Existence of God
Ironically it turns out that there really is a Cosmological Constant! Its value determines the expansion of the universe and it has to be very precisely set to allow for complex biological life. If the universe expands too quickly, stars won’t form and there is no life. But if it expands too slowly, the universe collapses back on itself with the same result: no life. I don’t know about you, but I take this kind of personally!
In fact, science has learned that many of the constants in nature are not arbitrary, but have to be fine-tuned in order to make life possible. The mass of the proton, the strength of the electromagnetic force, and many others all must be set to tight tolerances to support life.
But the Cosmological Constant is the most precise of all. Scientists are divided as to whether it is positive or negative, but they agree it is very close to zero. So close in fact that it will have a decimal place followed by 120 zeros and only then a number!
Consider for a moment that the most precise piece of human engineering to date is the gravity wave telescope (pictured above) that detects movements one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. This instrument has tolerances down to a decimal followed by 24 zeros. That means the cosmological constant has 96 more zeros! For those of you keeping count, that’s a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion times more precise! Not eight trillion, but a trillion multiplied by itself eight times!
How could that happen? Could this value arise by chance as some kind of cosmic accident? Mathematicians tell us that when a probability gets to one in 1050 (that’s 50 trailing zeros) it can comfortably be considered impossible. And the Cosmological Constant is 70 zeros beyond that.
Was there something about the material world that required it to be that way? Well, since the material world only came into existence with the Big Bang and the constant had to be set from the beginning, it’s hard to imagine how anything material could necessitate one particular value.
That leaves us with immaterial causes. The Bible claims from its first pages that an immaterial, eternal God is the designer and creator of the universe.
So the question arises, are we seeing in the fine-tuning of the Cosmological Constant for life yet more evidence of His existence? I leave that up to you.
NOTE: LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravity-Wave Observatory detects movements one one-thousandth the diameter of a proton