“All successful men have agreed in one thing — they were causationists. They believed that things went not by luck, but by law.”– Ralph Waldo Emerson
At a news conference at the United Nations a few years ago, the 2006 Templeton Prize was awarded to John Barrow, a distinguished cosmologist and professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge in England. The $1.4 million prize is given each year to a living person to honor the advancement of knowledge in spiritual matters.
In the course of his career, Barrow has tapped mathematics, physics and astronomy to raise interesting questions about time, space and matter to challenge both scientists and theologians to understand the universe.
In 1986, Barrow co-authored “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle”, a ground breaking book that investigated anthropic principles across physics, chemistry, cosmology, astronomy, history and theology.
What is the “anthropic principle”, you might ask? Well, it’s the principle, first proposed by theoretical physicist Robert Dicke and later named by astrophysicist Brandon Carter, that the universe seems specifically designed to support carbon based life. If even small changes were introduced in any of the various constants of science – like the force of an electric charge, the attraction of gravity – the universe as we know it would not exist. And neither would we.
This original version is now know as the “Weak Anthropic Principle” since it really doesn’t make much of a statement by saying that the universe has to be the way it is or we wouldn’t be here to notice. However it has since been joined by three other versions that are much more interesting.
Carter also proposed the Strong Anthropic Principle, which states that the universe must have those properties that allow intelligent life to develop within it at some stage of its history. This was later joined by the Final Anthropic Principle that asserts that once intelligent life has developed it will never die out. These two, although science based, are considered more speculative.
The fourth one, though, is the one I consider the most interesting. It’s called the Participatory Anthropic Principle and it states that the universe had to develop intelligent life of some form because consciousness is required to bring the universe into physical existence.
It’s the observer effect on a grand scale, and advocated by some very prominent scientists. The late John Wheeler of Princeton, who said that we live in a “participatory universe” and his friend Andre Linde of Stanford who says “you cannot have the universe without an observer” are two of them.
So we, or beings like us, are necessary to have a universe made manifest. Wheeler believed that there might be sections of the cosmos that were still just probability clouds because no conscious observer had ever looked at them. So what does that mean for us?
In his acceptance speech, Barrow said, “Many of the deepest and most engaging questions that we grapple with about the nature of the universe have their origins in our purely spiritual quest for meaning. The concept of a lawful universe – with order that can be understood and relied upon – emerged largely out of belief about the nature of God. Out of these beliefs came confidence that there was an unchanging order behind the appearances that was worth studying.”
Do you see the importance of that? It’s not just that the universe is friendly to conscious life forms like us. The universe is also logical and understandable by us, so we can learn how it works and make our lives better. The more we know, the more we thrive.
Some people still want to believe in chance and luck. If that was how it worked, we’d be powerless, wouldn’t we? How could we improve our lives in a world of random chance? No, like Emerson said, to be successful, we have to be causationists. The universe works by law, and it works by law because it’s founded at a deep level upon consciousness.
