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Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God

Excerpt from wsj.com
By Eric Metaxas

The odds of life existing on another planet grow ever longer. Intelligent design, anyone?

In 1966 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? Many have accepted the cultural narrative that he’s obsolete—that as science progresses, there is less need for a “God” to explain the universe. Yet it turns out that the rumors of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place—science itself.
Here’s the story: The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion—1 followed by 27 zeros—planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion—1 followed by 24 zeros—planets capable of supporting life.
With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launched in the 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon. Scientists listened with a vast radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were not merely random. But as years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely bubkis—0 followed by nothing.
What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life than Sagan supposed. His two parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.
Even SETI proponents acknowledged the problem. Peter Schenkel wrote in a 2006 piece for Skeptical Inquirer magazine: “In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest . . . . We should quietly admit that the early estimates . . . may no longer be tenable.”
As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we shouldn’t be here.
Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life—every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.
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?
Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology . . . . The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor Dr. John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator . . . gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”
The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something—or Someone—beyond itself.

Mr. Metaxas is the author, most recently, of “Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life” ( Dutton Adult, 2014).

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NASA Brings Scientists & Theologians Together To Prepare World For Extraterrestrial Contact

September 27, 2014 / Steven Lanier's Journey - Main Article Directory / 0 Comments

Arjun Walia, Collective-EvolutionA couple of months ago top U.S. astronomers gathered in front of congress to let them know that extraterrestrial life exists without question. Their main argument was the size of the universe, emphasizing that there are trillions of stars out there, with one in every five most likely harboring an Earth-like planet. It’s also important to keep in mind that planets do not have to be “Earth-like” in order to harbor life. You can read mor [...]

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The Unstoppable Awakening of Humanity

September 25, 2014 / Steven Lanier's Journey - Main Article Directory / 0 Comments

by Zen GardnerWe’re undergoing an amazing transformation. Absolutely diametrically opposed to the constant, gradual attempt by elitists to shut down humanity via eons of engineered subjugation, we’re being consciously and vibrationally liberated by the very nature of the Universe in spite of all their efforts.It’s not readily apparent to most, but it’s very clearly there.It’s subtle and yet obvious at the same time. Knowledge of this change or shift in conscio [...]

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What is Enlightenment?

September 20, 2014 / Steven Lanier's Journey - Main Article Directory / 0 Comments

Thomas Razzeto, GrahamHancock.comMy most passionate plea is for you to wake up to your true self as pure awareness. We have all heard it said that you are not a human being having a spiritual experience, but instead, you are a spiritual being having a human experience. Yet you are not a being of any kind, spiritual or physical. You are pure awareness! And most importantly, your awareness is the One Awareness – the Divine Awareness – and as such, it is the only reality tha [...]

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Space station detector reports more hints of dark matter—or not

September 19, 2014 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

Adrian Cho

New reports of further evidence for dark matter have been greatly exaggerated. Yesterday, researchers working with the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a $2 billion cosmic ray detector attached to the International Space Station, reported their latest data on a supposed excess of high-energy positrons from space. They contended—at least in a press release—that the new results could offer new hints that they’ve detected particles of dark matter, the mysterious stuff whose gravity binds the galaxies. But several cosmic ray physicists say that the AMS data are still perfectly consistent with much more mundane explanations of the excess. And they doubt AMS alone will resolve the issue.
The leader of the AMS team, Nobel laureate Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, takes care to say that the new results do not prove that AMS has detected dark matter. But he also says the data lend more support to that interpretation than to some others. "The key statement is that we have not found a contradiction with the dark matter explanation," he says.
The controversy centers on AMS's measurement of a key ratio, the number of antimatter positrons to the sum of positrons and electrons. In April 2013, AMS confirmed early reports that as the energy of the particles increased above about 8 gigaelectron Volts (GeV), that ratio, or "positron fraction," increased, even as the individual fluxes of electrons and positrons were falling. That increase in the relative abundance of positrons could signal the presence of dark matter particles. According to many theories, if those particles collide, they would annihilate each other to produce electron-positron pairs. That would alter the balance of electrons and positrons among cosmic rays, as the usual source such as the cloudlike remnants of supernova explosions produce far more electrons than positrons.
However, that interpretation was hardly certain. Even before AMS released its measurement of the ratio, astrophysicists had argued that the excess positrons could potentially emanate from an undetected nearby pulsar. In November 2013, Eli Waxman, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and colleagues went even further. They argued that the excess positrons could come simply from the interactions of "primary" cosmic rays from supernova remnants with the interstellar medium. If so, then the positrons were just "secondary" rays and nothing to write home about.
However, AMS team researchers see two new features that are consistent with the dark matter interpretation, they reported online yesterday in Physical Review Letters. First, the AMS team now sees that after rising with energy, the positron fraction seems to level off and may begin to fall at an energy of 275 GeV, as would be expected if the excess were produced by colliding dark matter particles, as the original particles' mass would put an upper limit on the energy of the positron they spawned. AMS researchers say the leveling off would be consistent with a dark matter particle with a mass of 1 teraelectron volt (TeV). (Thanks to Albert Einstein’s famous equivalence of mass and energy, the two can be measured in the same units.)
Second, the AMS team measured the spectra of electrons and positrons individually. They found that the spectra have different shapes as energy increases. "It's really surprising that the electrons and positrons are so different," Ting says. And, he argues, the difference suggests that the positrons cannot be secondary cosmic rays produced by primary cosmic ray electrons, as such production should lead to similar spectra.
But some cosmic ray physicists aren't convinced. For example, in AMS's graph of the electron fraction, the error bars at the highest energies are large because the high-energy particles are so rare. And those uncertainties make it unclear whether the positron fraction really starts to drop, says Stéphane Coutu, a cosmic ray physicist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. And even if the positron fraction does fall at energies higher than AMS reported, that wouldn't prove the positrons come from dark matter annihilations, Coutu says. Such a "cutoff" could easily arise in positrons from a pulsar, he says, if the spatial region in which the pulsar accelerates particles is of limited size. All told, the new results are "probably consistent with anything," Coutu says.
Similarly, Waxman questions Ting's claim that the new data suggest the positrons aren't simply secondary cosmic rays. If that were the case, then the electrons and positrons would be coming from different places and there would be no reason to expect their spectra to be similar, Waxman says. Moreover, he notes, AMS's measurement of the positron fraction seems to level out just at the limit that he and colleagues predicted would be the maximum achievable through secondary cosmic rays. So, in fact, the new data support the interpretation that the positrons are simply secondary cosmic rays, he says. "To me this is a very strong indication that we are seeing cosmic ray interactions.”
Will the argument ever end? AMS is scheduled to take data for 10 more years, which should enable scientists to whittle down the uncertainties and extend their reach toward higher energies, Ting says. "I think we should be able to reach 1 TeV with good statistics," he says, and that should be enough to eventually settle the dispute. But Gregory Tarlé, an astrophysicist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, says, "I don't think that's a legitimate claim." Higher energy cosmic rays arrive at such a low rate that even quadrupling the data set would leave large statistical uncertainties, he says. So, Tarlé suspects, years from now the AMS results will likely look about as ambiguous they do now.

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Mysterious Lights Captured in Game Camera Photographs

August 8, 2014 / Greg Giles / 0 Comments

ufocasebook.com Haslett, Michigan - 07-31-14 We have a game camera that we put up to observe the deer across the street from our house. My husband brought the disk in on Sunday which contained approximately 120 pictures over a 4 day period....

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