Page 69 - The Origin of Life and the Universe - International Conference 2016

The Origin of Life and the Universe

Consider what it takes for humanity to live. I can count at least three
things. First you got to have diamonds. No, I'm joking. You don't need di-
amonds but you need carbon, this was just the best picture of carbon that
I could find. You need to have carbon. Second, you need to have water,
since water is the liquid that allows all the biochemistry that life requires
to take place. And third you need to have a planet where liquid water
could exist in its liquid form with an abundance of carbon. Now as
scientists try to understand how the universe is supportive of life, many
come to the conclusion that the universe looks designed to support life.
Let me share a couple of quotes by people who are self-professed atheists
and agnostics. These are not people, religious people who are looking for
God but this is what they have to say.
Fred Hoyle stated,
“A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super
intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and bio-
logy… the numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overw-
helming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.” (Fred Hoyle,
"The Universe: Past and Present Reflections", Engineering and Science,
November, 1981. pp. 8–12)
Roger Penrose, colleague of Stephen Hawking, goes on to say, “I
would say the universe has a purpose. It’s not there just somehow by chance.”
(See A Brief History of Time (1991) film script - springfieldspringfield.co.uk) It
is uncontroversial to say that the best scientific evidence indicates that the
universe appears designed for life, and we see evidence for that design
across the scientific disciplines.
Let's take a look at some of those areas where the universe looks
designed to support life. We live in a universe with three large spatial di-
mensions of one time dimension. But we can analyze what would happen
if the universe were different if it had two or one spatial dimensions.
Three, four, five spatial dimensions. Multiple time dimensions. We can
ask that question: So what happens if there were only two spatial
dimensions? As it turns out if there were two or less spatial dimensions
the universe is not complicated enough for life. Imagine an animal in two
dimensions. If the animal has a passage for food intake, and a different

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