The Inbuilt Potentiality of Creation

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The Inbuilt Potentiality of Creation
John Polkinghorne
Our understanding of the very early universe tells us that we live in a world
that seems to have originated some fourteen billion years ago from a very
simple state. The small, hot, almost uniform expanding ball of energy that
is the cosmologist’s picture of the universe a fraction of a second after the
Big Bang has turned into a world of rich and diversified complexity – the
home of saints and scientists. Although, as far as we know, carbon-based
life appeared only after about ten billion years of cosmic history, and self-
conscious life after fourteen billion years, there is a real sense in which the
universe was pregnant with life from the earliest epoch.
anthropic fine-tuning
One can say this because, although the actual realisation of life has pro-
ceeded through an evolutionary process with many contingent features (the
role of “chance”), it has also unfolded in an environment of lawful regularity
of a very particular kind (the role of “necessity”). The so-called Anthropic
Principle (Barrow and Tipler 1986; Leslie 1989) refers to a collection of
scientific insights that indicate that necessity had to take a very specific form
if carbon-based life were ever to be a cosmic possibility. In other words, it
would not have been enough to have rolled the evolutionary dice a suffi-
cient number of times for life to have developed somewhere in the universe.
The physical rules of the cosmic game being played also had to take a very
precise form if biology were to be a realisable possibility. The given physi-
cal fabric of the world had to be endowed with anthropic potentiality from
the start.
It is worth recalling some of the many considerations that have led to this
conclusion. A good place to begin is by asking where carbon itself, along with
the nearly thirty other elements also necessary for life, comes from. Because

the very early universe was so simple, it only made very simple things. Three
minutes after the hectic events of the immediate post–Big Bang era, the
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universe settled down into a state in which its matter was three-quarters
hydrogen and one-quarter helium. These are the simplest of the chemical
elements; on their own, they have too boring a chemistry to be the basis
for complex and interesting developments. It was only when the nuclear
furnaces of the first generation of stars started up, a billion years or so after
the Big Bang, that richer possibilities began to be realised. Every atom of
carbon in our bodies was once inside a star – we are people of stardust. One
of the great successes of twentieth-century astrophysics was to unravel the
chain of processes by which the chemical elements were made, within stars
and in the death throes of supernova explosions.
As an example, consider how carbon was formed. The first stars con-
tained α-particles, the nuclei of helium. To make carbon, three α-particles
must combine to yield carbon 12. One might suppose that the natural way to
achieve this would be via the intermediate state of a berylium nucleus (made
of two αs), to which a third α might subsequently become attached; but this
possibility is made problematic by the extreme instability of berylium 8. The
only way in which carbon could be made would be if the attachment of that
third α was a process that went anomalously fast. At first, the astrophysicists
were completely baffled. Then Fred Hoyle realised that this route to car-
bon would be possible only if there were a resonance (a greatly enhanced
effect) in carbon 12 at exactly the right energy to facilitate the process.
Such a resonance was not then known, but so precise was the pinpointing
of what its energy would need to be that Hoyle could tell the experimen-

talists exactly where to look to see if it were in fact there. They did so, and
they found it. Any change in the strengths of the basic nuclear forces would
have displaced the resonance and so frustrated any possibility of carbon
production by stars. When Hoyle saw the remarkable degree of fine-tuning
that was necessary if the process of nucleogenesis was to get off the ground,
he is reported to have said that the universe is a “put-up job.” Hoyle could
not believe that the fulfilment of so precise a condition was just a happy
accident.
Further investigation revealed that not only the first link but the whole
chain of processes by which the elements are made in viable abundance is
beautifully and delicately balanced. After carbon, the next element to be
formed is oxygen, requiring the addition of yet another α to carbon. Here it
is important that there is not a resonance in the oxygen nucleus, enhancing
the effect, for if the process were too efficient, all the carbon would be lost
as it was transmuted rapidly into oxygen. And so on. If the basic nuclear
forces that control the processes of stellar nucleogenesis had been in the
slightest degree different, this would have broken links in this chain and so
frustrated the possibility of life’s developing anywhere in the universe.
Many more examples could be given of necessary anthropic “fine-
tunings” in the laws of nature. For instance, if complex life is to develop
on their encircling planets, stars must burn reasonably steadily and for the
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John Polkinghorne
several billion years that such a process requires. The behaviour of stars in
our universe is well understood, and it is found to depend upon a delicate
balance between the intrinsic strengths of two basic forces of nature, gravity
and electromagnetism. If that balance were out of kilter, stars would either
burn so furiously that they would quickly burn themselves out, lasting only

for a few million years, or burn so feebly as not to be able to function as
effective energy sources to fuel the development of life.
Turning to a terrestrial example, one might consider the many remark-
able properties of water that have made it indispensable to living beings
(Denton 1998, Chapter 2). For instance, the density of water behaves anoma-
lously near freezing point, decreasing rather than showing the normal liquid
behaviour of increasing as the temperature falls. This property has been of
vital significance for the development of life, for it means that lakes and
pond freeze from the top down, rather than from the bottom up. This
prevents such life-breeding locations from freezing solid, with the lethal
consequences that would follow. Ultimately, aqueous properties of this kind
must stem from the exact form of electromagnetism (the force that holds
matter together); if this force were different, presumably water would not
behave in these ways that are so hospitable to life.
It would be possible extensively to multiply examples of anthropic co-
incidences, but it will be enough for the present finally to focus on three
cosmological considerations that are of anthropic significance. One is sim-
ply the vast size of the observable universe, with its 10
22
stars. Rather than
being daunted by such cosmic immensity, we should be thankful for it. Only
a universe at least as big as ours could have lasted the fourteen billion years
that must elapse between the initial Big Bang and the possibility of evolved
self-conscious life. It is not a process that can be hurried – for example, it
takes about ten billion years to get enough carbon, as the first step.
A second point relates to the fact that the very early universe was smooth
and homogeneous and also that there was a very precise balance (of the
order of one part in 10
60
) between the explosive effects of expansion and

the contractive effects of gravity. Both of these conditions must be satisfied
in a life-evolving universe. Large inhomogeneities would have produced de-
structive turbulence, and a greater degree of inbalance between expansion
and contraction would have either induced rapid cosmic collapse or blown
matter apart too quickly for it to condense into galaxies and stars. However,
there is a scientific explanation for these particular fine-tunings. A specula-
tive, but very plausible, process called “inflation” is thought to have operated
when the universe was about 10
−35
seconds old, in which, for a short period,
space expanded with extreme rapidity. This process would have resulted in
a smoothing and balancing effect, even if still-earlier cosmic circumstances
had been different. Yet the possibility of inflation itself requires that the
laws of nature take a particular form, so this insight deepens, but does not
dispose of, the question of anthropic specificity.
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The third point relates to what is called the “cosmological constant.”
Essentially, this is a kind of energy associated with space itself, for which
the phrase “dark energy” has been coined. Until recently, cosmologists be-
lieved that this constant was in fact zero. They now tend to think that it is
nonvanishing but extremely small, amounting to about 10
−120
of what one
would have expected to be its natural value. If this constant had been in
any degree larger, life would again have been impossible, for the universe
would have either been blown apart very quickly or collapsed extremely
rapidly, depending on the sign of the constant. The minute value of the cos-

mological constant is the most exacting of all the conditions of anthropic
fine-tuning.
Let us return to the general question of the strengths of the basic forces
that we observe today to be controlling physical processes. We have noted
that they are tightly constrained by anthropic considerations: nuclear forces
capable of producing the elements, gravity and electromagnetism capable
of suitably regulating the burning of the stars, and so on. Often the same
force is subject to multiple conditions of this kind (electromagnetism in re-
lation to both stars and water, for example), which nevertheless clearly, and
remarkably, turn out to be mutually compatible. Many physicists believe that
these observable force strengths are a consequence of processes taking place
in the very early universe, by which, as the cosmos cooled, a highly symmetric
ur-force (described by a Grand Unified Theory) was broken down into the
less symmetrical set of forces that we observe today. This reduction would
have been triggered by a process that is called spontaneous symmetry break-
ing. It is induced by contingent circumstances, and it need not have hap-
pened in a literally universal way. It is possible that symmetry breaking took
different forms in different cosmic domains. (The process is rather like the
way in which a vertical pencil, balanced on its point, may fall asymmetrically
in a particular horizontal direction, as the result of a very small disturbance.
These disturbances may vary from place to place – a set of such pencils would
not all fall in the same direction.) Thus there could be different parts of
the universe in which the resulting balance of observable forces takes dif-
ferent forms. The whole of our observable universe must lie within one of
these domains, for we see no sign of the variation of natural force strengths
within our field of observation. Yet, there might also be other domains,
blown away from our view by inflation. Of course, human observers must
find themselves located within an appropriately fine-tuned cosmic domain,
because we could not have evolved anywhere else. As with the discussion of
inflation itself, this consideration does not remove anthropic particularity

altogether, but it serves to deepen its discussion. It still remains necessary to
assume that the ur-force of the original Grand Unified Theory takes some
constrained form, if its broken symmetry consequences are to be capable
anywhere of generating forces of the kind that would yield a domain able
to evolve carbon-based life
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John Polkinghorne
Although the exploration of possibility through evolving process is cer-
tainly part of the story of the universe’s fruitful history, by itself evolution
would have been powerless to bring about carbon-based life if the physical
fabric of the world had not taken a very specific form. Realisation of this
fact came not only as a surprise to almost all scientists, but also as an un-
welcome shock to many. The scientific inclination is to prefer the general
to the unique, and so it had seemed natural to assume that our world was
just a fairly typical specimen of what a world might be like. The Anthropic
Principle makes it clear that this is not the case at all.
This realisation has evoked a number of different responses. Since sci-
ence (physics) takes the laws of nature as its given and unexplained starting
point, on which it grounds all of its explanations of cosmic process, its own
discourse cannot take it behind those laws to explain their ultimate charac-
ter. Thus all responses to the Anthropic Principle are essentially metaphys-
ical in their character, whether this is acknowledged by their proponents
or not.
One way of responding simply says that if the universe were not the way
it is, then we humans would not be here to worry about it. Any world of
which we are aware just has to be consistent with our being its inhabitants.
(This is sometimes called the Weak Anthropic Principle.) Of course, this is
true, but simply resting on this truism misses the real point. What is truly

surprising, and what surely must in some way be significant and call for
further understanding, is that satisfying this harmless-looking criterion turns
out to impose such stringent conditions on the physical character of the
universe. One might have supposed that any “reasonable” sort of cosmos
might be expected to have had the possibility of its own kind of fruitful
history. Consider, for instance, a world whose physical fabric is exactly the
same as ours but with the sole difference that its gravity is somewhat stronger
(say, for the sake of definiteness, three times stronger) than ours. One might
well have thought that so similar a universe would in due course evolve its
own form of life – obviously not Homo sapiens, but little green men, maybe.
(And they would be little, for the stronger gravity of that world would make
it more difficult to grow tall, so that its inhabitants would be expected to be
rather squat.) In fact, there would be no living beings of any kind in that
world, for its stars would burn themselves out in just a few million years,
before life would have time to develop.
Simply to shrug off this remarkable specificity seems an intellectually
lazy response. I have proposed the Moderate Anthropic Principle, “which
notes the contingent fruitfulness of the universe as being a fact of interest
calling for an explanation” (Polkinghorne 1991, 78). John Leslie makes the
same point in a more picturesque fashion (Leslie 1989, 13–15). He tells
the story of a person facing a firing squad composed of fifty highly trained
marksmen. After the shots ring out, the prisoner finds that he has survived.
Will he not ask himself why he has been so fortunate? Of course, he could
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not do so if he were not still alive, but simply to shrug one’s shoulders
and say “That was a close one” would be to carry incuriosity to ridiculous
extremes. Equally, we should not be indifferent to the questions that relate

to anthropic fine-tuning. Leslie suggests that there are two rational kinds of
explanation possible for the prisoner’s escape from death. One is that the
marksmen were on his side and missed by design. The other is that even
trained marksmen occasionally miss, and there were so many executions
taking place that day that this was one instance in which they all missed.
Clearly, theism can provide a coherent response to the anthropic ques-
tion, corresponding to the first of the explanations that Leslie suggested
for his parabolic story. Those who believe in God do not regard the universe
as being just “any old world,” but they understand it to be a creation whose
Creator may be expected to have endowed it with just those finely tuned laws
and circumstances that will enable it to have the fruitful history that would
be a fulfilment of the divine will. Two important aspects of this theological
response need to be noted. One is that its metaphysical character does
not put it in conflict with what an honest science has to say, but rather
complements the story that the latter can tell. One should welcome the
possibility of extended understanding that theism offers, since the laws of
nature, in their anthropic specificity, are not so intellectually self-contained
that they can fittingly be treated as requiring no further explanation, in
the way that David Hume recommended that they be considered. Rather,
these laws may be held to point beyond themselves in what may credibly
be conceived to be a theistic direction. A kind of natural theology of this
kind must be sharply distinguished from one, say, that tries to argue that
some form of direct divine “intervention” is needed to bring about life.
The latter is in contention with science in accounting for the unfolding
process of the world; the former is concerned with matters that lie beyond
the grasp of science, as theology seeks to make intelligible the form of those
laws of nature that are the assumed ground of all scientific discussion of
physical/biological processes. Putting the matter in Hebraic terms, science is
concerned with ‘asah (ordinary making, of the kind that Paley’s watchmaker
might also have been supposed to be engaged in), but theology’s proper

concern is bara (the word reserved in the Hebrew scriptures uniquely for
divine creative activity, which can be understood as being the sustaining of
created reality).
The second aspect of the theistic response that needs to be noted also
follows from the last remark. Hume had criticised the natural theology of his
day as being too anthropomorphic, as if the Creator were to be compared
to a carpenter making a ship. We are presenting a picture of creation made
fruitful through inbuilt potentiality, an activity that is intrinsically divine,
having no corresponding human analogue. (The point at issue relates pre-
cisely to the distinction between creation “out of nothing” and the human
artist’s creative manipulation of an already existing medium.)