Once upon a time, some of the smartest people in the world thought the universe might have always existed in its current state, hence the name steady state theory was given to the idea of an eternal universe that has always existed in more or less its current form. Aristotle. Bertrand Russell. Sir Fred Hoyle. These men were certainly not stupid. In fact, they were among the most brilliant intellectuals of their respective eras. Coincidentally, all three of these men were atheists. They believed our allegedly "fine-tuned" universe was eternal in part because there was insufficient scientific evidence, at least in their minds, for them to believe otherwise. But they also believed the universe had always existed as it currently is because of the implications created by the alternative, a fine-tuned universe that once had a beginning. Hoyle famously said, Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom; otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. Clearly, the idea of an eternal universe has more appeal than the idea of a fine-tuned universe produced from absolute nothingness, possibly because it is less complex. Fred Hoyle … [Read more...]