ABC Radio National show about the Anthropic Universe on The Science Show

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Definition (from Wikipedia):

Anthropomorphism, a form of personification (applying human or animal qualities to inanimate objects) and similar to prosopopoeia (adopting the persona of another person), is the attribution of human characteristics and qualities to non-human beings, objects, or natural phenomena. Animals , forces of nature , and unseen or unknown authors of chance are frequent subjects of anthropomorphosis. There are considerable religious overtone later in the article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism. +++ Quotes from The Science Show transcript include: “…in the wake of Charles Darwin’s birthday on the 12th it may be a good time to ask how come we’re here, why is the world apparently so exquisitely organised for our convenience?” Martin Redfern: A good example of this fine-tuning is the ease with which three helium nuclei combine to produce a stable carbon atom. If it were just slightly harder there’d be no carbon and no life. If, once made, carbon was just slightly less stable, it would all turn to oxygen – again no life.

That parameter that defines the ease of making carbon was identified by Fred Hoyle and it changed his perception of the universe. As he wrote:- A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggest s that a superintendent has monkeyed with the physics, as well as chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. I do not believe that any physicist who examined the evidence could fail to draw the inference that the laws of nuclear physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside stars.

So what are we to make of this apparent coincidence? Is it evidence of providential design in the universe, as the advocates of Intelligent Design would have us believe? Or is there another explanation, one that avoids invoking God simply to explain the gaps in our knowledge? Keith Ward: Most theologians I know now are calling themselves panentheists and a panentheist, (because they don’t like the word pantheist) is someone who thinks that the world exists within God: there’s even a quotation from Acts, the book of Acts, ‘All things live and move and have their being in God’. And that’s a view I find attractive but what you have to say is of course God is beyond this universe, I mean this universe might be in God but perhaps there are other universes which are also in God and perhaps there are bits of God which aren’t in any universe. So God is certainly greater than and that’s the view I would like and is very widely held amongst Christian theologians now, is that God is greater than but includes the universe. Of course, that’s also been an Indian, Hindu belief for a long time.

In theology we’re all agreed that you have to get rid of an anthropromorphic God, one who is like a human person but outside the universe. You certainly have to get rid of that but you can still talk about a cosmic mind, or the intelligence of the universe, and in the Indian tradition that would be called Sat Chit Ananda, quite widely, Being, Consciousness and Bliss, a consciousness of intelligence and bliss. That’s exactly, you know, what I think the sort of God that science would suggest. I think a combination of those two strands of thought is the future of religion in my view.

The sort of religious view which is very compatible with modern science is a vast cosmic evolution of the finite towards the infinite: the growth of consciousness from the unconscious; the growth of intelligence from that which has no intelligence. So that indeed it seems to make sense if you’re looking at it in the most broad terms, to see the universe as a finite reflection of the intelligence of ultimate mind, a reflection which becomes one with its source.

Transcript: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1572643.htm

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