Who Fine-Tuned the Universe?

Reprinted with permission of Crisis Magazine.

It may well be the most important intellectual movement to occur in the last 200 years, if not the last half-millennium. Its roots are in the sciences, but when it reaches full flower, it may branch into nearly every discipline, from theology, philosophy, and the social sciences to history and literature, and redefine almost every aspect of culture, from morality and law to the arts.

It's the Intelligent Design (ID) movement, and it's reshaping the face of science.

The revolution began in the latter half of the 20th century as a result of discoveries in the various sciences that seemed to point to an intelligent being as the cause of nature's amazing intricacies. The aim of ID is included in its origin: the investigation of nature to uncover every aspect of its stunning complexity. Such complexity is the sure sign of intentional design, and the discovery and contemplation of it is also the natural delight of our intellect.

The ID movement directly contradicts the modern secularist intellectual trend that has so thoroughly dominated Western culture for the last two centuries. In the "secularist" branch of philosophy, one denies the existence of any truth beyond what is humanly contrived. The secularization of science manifests itself in the belief that nature has no need for an intelligent designer, but is self-caused and self-contained. Secularized science tries to reduce apparent design (whether cosmological or biological) to the unintelligent interplay of chance and brute necessity. If nature itself has no intrinsic order, then (by default) the human intellect is the only source of intellectual order.

The ID movement investigates the possibility that nature, rather than being the result of unintelligent, purposeless forces, can only be understood as the effect of an Intelligent Designer. This contradicts secularized science. The contradiction arises from the evidence of nature itself. In science, the ID movement points to the growing evidence of intelligent fine tuning (both cosmological and biological) and it opposed the idea that the order of nature can be completely reduced to unintelligent causes. As more and more evidence is gathered, secularized philosophy will be forced to confront the scientific evidence that truth is not a mere human artifact. Soon enough, secularized culture will be compelled to realign.

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