Wall Street Journal prints op-ed promoting intelligent design
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8089
In this venue, a recent media report about the op-ed “The perils of romanticizing physics” began, “The Wall Street Journal‘s opinion editors have a complicated relationship with physics and physicists.” The latest such complication: a WSJ op-ed claiming to invoke new astrophysical understanding to justify recycling old intelligent-design arguments.
The 26 December WSJ piece by Eric Metaxas carries the overview headline “Houses of worship,” the main headline “Science increasingly makes the case for God,” and the subhead “The odds of life existing on another planet grow ever longer. Intelligent design, anyone?”
Metaxas offers a purportedly science-invoking analysis establishing the statistical improbability of life on this planet in this universe, then offers the core of his argument:
Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what point is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?
There’s more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exist on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the values of the four fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces—were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction—by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000—then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.
Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?
Metaxas joins intelligent-design advocates from the Discovery Institute in promoting quotations from astronomer Fred Hoyle (“a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics”) and theoretical physicist Paul Davies (“the appearance of design is overwhelming”).
Addendum:
On the morning of 29 December, more than three days after this op-ed first appeared online, the Wall Street Journal‘s home page was listing it first among articles cited as “Popular Now.” The WSJ explains that this means "[c]ontent engaging our readers now, with additional prominence accorded if the story is rapidly gaining attention. Our WSJ algorithm comprises 30% page views, 20% Facebook, 20% Twitter, 20% email shares and 10% comments.” (It’s probably worth mentioning as well that the 29 December WSJ contains a letter that, in response to an entirely unrelated book review, says that science sees creationism as having “far too little scientific basis to be called a scientific theory.”)
---
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.