Tag Archives: Universe

The Paradox of Intelligent Design

Philosophy, Physics, Spiritual, , , , , ,

What have led me to believe in intelligent design? As a person, personal experiences, as a scientist, the unsolved mysteries of science gave me the evidences.

In recent years, the most interesting topic and field of science that has strengthened my faith the most, is the one that deals with the fine-tuning of the Universe. The most briefly I could summarize this is that there are laws in the Universe that seem to have been created and are just like that to support the emergence and survival of intelligent life. The properties of space and time, the size of the Universe, interactions and their special and strange manifestations, but most of all the constants of physics are the ones that have become the focus of increasing interest in recent years. Precisely because it has been discovered that the slightest change in any of the components makes the existence of intelligent life impossible, and in fact, some changes would not allow even the simplest life, but there are also such small differences that simply would not allow the existence of the Universe.

For example, see three-dimensional space. It’s incredible, but in any other space, there can be no stable planetary systems, that is, a world with a number of dimensions other than three would have to be redesigned in every detail, and I can’t even say now whether it could support life even if it were redesigned.

And I could list countless signs of fine-tuning, about which, fortunately, exhaustive knowledge is now available in more and more books. So I don’t want to list them now, they provided just enough evidence for me to believe that the world is tuned to intelligent life, to an amazingly improbable degree.

Just a few examples of the most important finely tuned properties: the ratio between expansion and gravity, the proton-neutron mass ratio, the nuclear efficiency, the weak interaction, the tunneling effect, the Pauli exclusion principle, the special properties of water, the ratio of gravitational and electromagnetic forces, the zero value of entropy at the birth of the Universe, quantumness, and I could list more.

I must mention the most astonishing and convincing feature, which cannot be attributed to anything other than fine-tuning, to intelligent design: this feature is the stability of the Solar System. And if that were not enough, this stability can be observed throughout the Universe. A stable arrangement is an extremely unlikely configuration for systems operating under the influence of gravity, under the influence of each other’s attraction. Chaotic behavior is much, much more likely. In the case of the Solar System, a very small modification of the orbit of Mercury would lead to chaotic behavior of the entire system. And yet the Solar System is stable, which cannot even be proven by mathematical means; the best proof is experience itself.

science

And if we accept that such luck cannot exist solely due to chance, then the other possibility remains: design. This requires an intelligent designer, whether he is the God of believers or a powerful intelligence that is hidden somewhere unknowable to us, this is undecidable. For a believer, the natural choice is God, who also plays the role of the Intelligent Designer and who created the conditions necessary for intelligent life during Creation. He also created intelligent life in the image of man, but for this to survive in the long term, that fine-tuning is also needed. Agnostics do not call the creator and implementer of fine-tuning God, but an Intelligent Designer, thereby leaving open some philosophical and religious questions.

For me, there is no doubt that our world is well designed by God, the Creator. However, there are still some problematic issues that I have called the paradox of intelligent design.

One is the question of evolution and its justification. In the beginning, there was only hydrogen and helium. Then stars and galaxies were born, in these the chemical elements were created, from which planets were born, and one of the planets became the birthplace of intelligent life. My question is: why didn’t the Creator create the world in its present form? Is evolution necessary for survival? Of course, the world may have actually been created in its present state, but then why does it contain so many traces and memories of evolution? For a person who believes in the Bible’s creation story, this is of course not a problem. However, I believe that the Bible speaks to the soul, while the mind adheres to the facts of science, and if science also points in the direction of an Intelligent Designer, we must examine this path as well.

The other part of the paradox is moral, philosophical, and I feel this is much more important now, because the events of my individual life and history, as well as the current increasingly hopeless situation in the world, make this problem glaring.

We have accepted that the world is incredibly finely tuned, attributing it to the existence and work of an Intelligent Designer. And what do we see? In contrast to the perfection of the Universe, life on earth is full of suffering, disease, and all sorts of evil.

We can say that Adam and Eve are to blame, or the free will we were given, or selfishness, greed, envy.

In a perfectly fine-tuned Universe, are suffering, pain, and unhappiness necessary?

The most difficult book in the Bible for me to accept, the book of Job, is about this very thing. And I accept that I have no basis whatsoever for asking questions about whether the world could be better. But God created me in His own image, and I ask Him to forgive me and to forgive me for having Job’s doubts. And I know that “my Redeemer lives, and at the last day I will stand upon the earth,” but now I am here in a finely tuned world, among suffering people, and because of their suffering I suffer too. And this is incomprehensible to me; the paradox of Intelligent Design is insoluble to me.

A Universe entirely designed to support intelligent life, and the wildlife and human civilization that currently exist on Earth, which is a world of suffering, pain, unhappiness, and unanswered questions.

Is this really what this world is about, and can we only be happy in that other world that the Savior prepared for us with his sacrifice?

Is there another answer that we are here in this world to discover, we intelligent beings?

‎‎Nyíregyháza, June 7, 2025 – September 4, 2025

The Final Questions

Science, , , , , ,

If someone, like me, sets out to face the currently unsolved questions of physics, it is good to prepare in advance that the struggle will not be easy. The greatest scientists have wrestled with these problems for many centuries, mostly with little success. Still, the thing is, we can’t help but keep trying, more and more persistently and more and more creatively.

Many people may say that without an experimental basis, we have little chance to reach any conclusions about the most important problems, and nowadays, when billions (in dollars and euros) are spent on the LHC and other similar projects without achieving any serious success, it may seem foolish the cultivation of domestic physics.

The truth is, however, that the philosophical approach can work very well in the case of fundamental questions without any experiment, and the Greek philosophers have provided the most surprising and best examples of this. Zeno’s paradoxes are alive and well to this day, although there are proposals for solutions on the stage, but we cannot rest completely on this front. The Greek philosophers used their common sense alone to create a picture of the world consisting of atoms, realized that the Earth is spherical, and made incredible statements about, for example, infinite time. They constructed the beautiful science of geometry and also achieved fundamental results about numbers. All this without having built anything for it. And although Greek science obviously could not be successful in everything, they formulated the basic problems, the ones we still struggle with today.

In order to ask questions and outline problems, mere reason is sufficient, and of course the perceptions that can be called everyday. The best ideas come from observations that are so simple that you’re surprised no one else thought of it much earlier. The best example of this is the case of Olbers, who looked up at the stars as a doctor and realized that the assumption of a static universe infinite in time and space conflicts with our everyday experience that the night sky is dark.

In order to formulate the final questions, we do not need anything other than observation and thinking. The situation is different with drawing conclusions and theorizing. Since these are not simple problems – that’s why we called them final questions – so that the research work for answers does not feel unnecessary, even if we do not get anywhere in the world, we are forced to outline a pessimistic scenario as a first step. This is not an escape, but rather a kind of protection against failure. Perhaps the problem with today’s physics is that it is not prepared for failure. If the theory does not find experimental confirmation, then the theory is modified in such a way that the ability to prove or disprove it exceeds the technical possibilities. Thus, there is always the excuse that the theory was not verified only because of the limited experimental possibilities. For this, it is usually sufficient to set a few freely selectable constants, or even to use some mathematical trick in order to save the faulty theory.

It would be very, very important that the creators of unsuccessful theories do not have to fear the collapse of their professional careers, because in order to protect their jobs, they are thus forced to endlessly divulge even otherwise indefensible ideas. If physics is full of physicists who consider their university position and professional prestige more important than honesty, not many breakthroughs can be expected in the future either.

We have to face the possibility that we have limitations. The limit can be mathematics itself, it can be the human thinking itself, and it can also be a complexity limit to our understanding. Experiments can also have absolute physical limits, for example we cannot conduct experiments at the absolute zero degree temperature, because it is impossible to reach it. We cannot perform experiments outside the Universe either, so for example we cannot measure from the outside whether the Universe is rotating or not. Of course, these are obvious limitations, but there are also less obvious ones. For example, we cannot have knowledge of the “true” reality, we have to accept that reality is what we believe it to be. We cannot know about the subjective experiences of other people, only indirectly, never directly. In addition to these, there can be many limitations, the formulation of which can be a limitation, for example, it is very difficult to understand and explain self-referencing systems, and the final questions are actually about self-referencing systems.

So, without thinking about anything for now, let’s formulate the pessimistic principle: the ultimate questions can never be answered, due to our physical, mathematical, logical and thinking limitations. No matter how much we try, no matter how long and no matter what, the final theory will never be complete and without contradictions (as Gödel already proved about mathematics). There will always be an inexplicable and incomprehensible phenomenon, a perception that will escape even the most cunning theory.

So our first step should be this, let’s accept that we are doomed from the start. This is not so difficult, although at first it may seem extremely strange to many, I would prefer to say that it is just an honest acceptance of the fact that we are human. Omnipotence and perfect wisdom are not in our possession, nor will it be. So we must stand on this ground, and looking the world from here, we must construct it in our own consciousness.

Could even the dear Reader say this, “Why don’t we stop here and be satisfied with this much?”. The suggestion is completely justified. The truth is that human life can actually be lived risk-free, relaxed, and even completely happy without dealing with any of these problems, even for a minute. A musician, a painter, a farmer, even a writer, but even a soldier or a steel caster can live a full, balanced, perfectly happy life without even the tangential proximity of philosophy or physics. This is very important, and I would like my statement to be really emphasized, that only those who feel that this is an indispensable part of their life should deal with this type of problems. For example, when I was in the seventh grade of primary school, I had thoughts like that maybe evolution could also work during the struggle of the Universes, or that time actually originates from the fact that we all move at the speed of light in a spatial dimension, and even then I felt incredible excitement thinking about such things during. Today I know that for me scientific thinking and philosophy cause more pleasure than alcohol or the use of mind-altering drugs for others. Maybe that’s why I don’t drink alcohol, and I’m not addicted to any other passion either, for me, chewing on the things of the world ensures a perfect full life.

Thus, I declare that those who find joy in it, should boldly open the book of Nature and research it, even if, as we know, we may be doomed from the start. Just as a mole cannot deal with the colorful world above the surface (I also wrote a short story about this), our fate may be the same, and time, for example, will forever remain indecipherable and incomprehensible to us. But the fact that we are thinking people – and may even be the only conscious species in the Universe – obligates us to try the impossible and face the difficult questions. In case we have a helper (another short story was written about this: during the destruction of a planet, chance writes the much-sought-after secret of existence, which of course no one reads). After this, I think we are ready to formulate the four biggest questions of humanity:

1. What is time? This question is different from the next three, which have in common that all three are examples of a consequence without antecedent. Time, on the other hand, is the framework of all things, and at the same time, it is the most cunning, most elusive concept that only humans can encounter.

2. How did the Universe originate?

3. How did life originate?

4. How did we gain consciousness?

So the program was put together. What can we do with it? Well, according to the pessimistic principle, maybe nothing. But during the search, we can still feel good about it, and we can even find treasures…

October 22, 2012.

English translation: August 23, 2023.

COBE – Our Place in the Universe

Physics, , , ,

NASA launched the COBE satellite on 18th of November, 1989. The main purpose of the mission was the examination of the thermal spectrum and the flatness of the cosmic microwave background radiation.

Flatness is important in terms of the emergence of cosmic structures. If the background did not show any “grain”, then we could not know the origin of those material centers, which later the galaxies and galaxy clusters would develop from. COBE found those “ripples” of the cosmic background, which could start the build of these cosmic structures. This is therefore a clear success, confirming the currently most popular theory of birth of the Universe, the theory of Bing Bang.

Another confirming of the theory is also the result of the COBE mission. It turned out that the spectrum of the cosmic background radiation nearly perfectly matches the spectrum of the absolute black body radiation. That means that the Universe was in a thermal balance in that time. This of course raises more questions, in particular, in relation to the second law of thermodynamics: if the total energy was in the radiation field in thermal equilibrium with maximum entropy, than the heat death of Universe, – which was so often cited by the physicists of the 19th century, as the threat of future – will not come in the future, but already has occurred in the past.

There is a more interesting result of the COBE mission. A Doppler-effect is detectable in the frequency of cosmic background radiation. The radiation frequency shifts towards blue in one direction of space, and shifts towards red in the opposite direction. It is calculated from the amount of shifting, that the detector, which is Earth itself, moves in space with a velocity of 600 km/s.

And it raises very interesting questions. For we know – since Galilei and Einstein -, that absolute velocity has no meaning, if we speak about the speed of something, we should always point to the reference body, we mean the speed to. Now, however, here is a speed, which we measured without telling the reference point we used.

So is this an absolute velocity? In contrast with all we learned about the principle of relativity of Galilei and Einstein in the school?

The majority of the scientists reply to this, that it is compared to the speed of the background radiation, so there is no any absolute in it.

But the truth is not that simple. For what is that background radiation? This is an electromagnetic space of radiation, which fills the whole Universe. So this is not a reference point, or body, or any rigid object in the classical sense. This radiation space is absolute in the sense that it is accessible to all the observers of the Universe. All of them can measure their velocity referenced to the background, they can count the velocity referenced to each other from this, so an absolute frame of reference could be built with the help of this. In addition to, the temperature of the background decreases by the age of the Universe, so an absolute time scale is also can be constructed.

Though, there is a little problem with this absolute scale. Namely, that the local velocity of expanding could not be detected, but this could be expected from an absolute frame of reference. Now let’s take an object, which is – according to its distance and the Hubble constant – moving away from us with half speed of light because of the expansion of the Universe. If there is a true absolute frame of reference, then he can measure it referenced to the background radiation. This would result so drastic blue-, and red shift, that the cosmic background would seem radically different to him, than to us. But the background should be nearly the same for every explorer in the Universe, for if it were not, there would be a respected explorer in the Universe, and this would be a harder return of the geocentric view of world.

Let’s note that the absolute frame of reference is not the same as the respected explorer. The former is an electromagnetic background, the latter a material explorer, who would be selected as some kind of center of the expanding Universe.

The key question is that: when we can measure our velocity to the background radiation, so why are we unable to measure our speed which comes from the expansion of the Universe?

Michelson and Morley at the end of the 19th century did their famous experiment precisely because they wanted to show the movement of the Earth in relation to the hypothetical ether. The null effect led to the special theory of relativity. The COBE showed the movement of the Earth a century later, though not relatively to the ether, but to something very similar to it. If Michelson and Morley had executed the COBE measurements, would there be a theory of special relativity?

I think, not…

March 1, 2014.