Page 177 - Confessions of the Evolutionists

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CHAPTER 27.
CHAPTER 27.

EVOLUTIONISTS' CONFESSIONS
STATING THAT THE ORDER IN THE
UNIVERSE CANNOT HAVE COME ABOUT

BY CHANCE

P aul Davies is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist at
P

Arizona State University:
Everywhere we look in the Universe, from the far flung galaxies to
the deepest recesses of the atom, we encounter order... Central to
the idea of a very special, orderly Universe is the concept of information.
A highly structured system, displaying a great deal of organized activity,
needs a lot of information to describe it. Alternatively, we may say that it
contains much information.
We are therefore presented with a curious question. If information and or-
der always has a natural tendency to disappear, where did all the infor-
mation that makes the world such a special place come from originally?
The Universe is like a clock slowly running down. How did it get wound
up in the first place? 452
Careful measurements put the rate of expansion very close to a critical
value at which the universe will just escape its own gravity and expand
forever. A little slower and the cosmos would collapse, a little faster and
the cosmic material would have long ago completely dispersed. It is in-
teresting to ask precisely how delicately the rate of expansion has been
"fine tuned" to fall on this narrow dividing line between two catastrophes.

If at time I S (by which the time pattern of expansion was already firmly
established) the expansion rate had differed from its actual value by more
than 10-18, it would have been sufficient to throw the delicate balance out.
The explosive vigour of the universe is thus matched with almost unbe-
lievable accuracy to its gravitating power. The Big Bang was not evident-
ly any old bang, but an explosion of exquisitely arranged magnitude. 453