Episode Details

It takes an incredibly finer level of fine-tuning to produce a universe that has carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, potassium, calcium, iron, copper, zinc, selenium, molybdenum and many other trace elements needed for life.

Last week, we explored the first of three meanings of the term “fine-tuning of the universe”: the delicate precision and balance of the fundamental constants and laws needed just to produce a universe full of simple atoms (like hydrogen and helium), planets and stars. 

This week, we look at the second meaning of that term: how that delicate and precise balance has to be even more finely tuned so that a wide variety of different kinds of atoms are produced … including those that are absolutely essential for life.  Not just the lighter ones that are necessary for making the basic structural components of cells (hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur) and the slightly heavier ones necessary for basic cell physiology like generating electrical signals and causing contraction (sodium, potassium, calcium), but also the much heavier and more complicated atoms that give many enzymes their core functionality that is so necessary for life (the iron in your blood cells, or the copper, zinc, selenium, and molybdenum in your liver enzymes).

We talked to Dr. Luke Barnes (PhD in astronomy from Cambridge University), who continued the conversation that Elie and Aaron started with us last week. He explained how those fundamental constants and laws of physics needed to be so very precisely tuned in order to produce the bewildering array of atomic elements (we have 118 of them here on earth) that are so necessary for intelligent life.  He also told us how that precise tuning is so provocatively disturbing that even the staunchly atheistic astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle said more than once to his equally atheistic peers: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.” 

Dr. Barnes also talked at length about how the common atheistic response to this fine tuning is to appeal to the multiverse, and how those that do so don’t properly understand