The Big Bang and the Big Question: A Universe without God?

The history of scientific search for the origins of the Universe gives us permission to believe in God.

Until the early twentieth century, astronomers entertained three possible models of the universe:

According to this theory, though the mutual gravitational attractions of stars and planets might hold them together in the form of solar systems and galaxies, each of these stellar-terrestrial groups slide through space along its own random trajectory, unrelated to the courses tracked by other groups of stars and planets.

The static model works for atheists and believers: Such a universe could have been created by God at some point in history, but it also could have existed forever without God.

It might be a cosmic balloon alternately expanding and contracting. For a few billion years it would inflate, expanding into absolute nothingness. But the gravitational attraction of every star and planet pulling on every other would eventually slow this expansion until the whole process would reverse and the balloon would come crashing back in upon itself. All that existed would eventually smash together at the universe's center, releasing huge amounts of heat and light, spewing everything back out in all directions and beginning the expansion phase all over again.

Such a universe could also have been created by God or could have existed forever without God.

It might be a cosmic balloon that never implodes. If the total gravitational attraction of all stars and planets could not halt the initial expansion, as in the oscillating model, the universe would spill out into nothingness forever. Eventually the stars would burn out and a curtain of frozen darkness would enshroud all existence. Such a universe could never bring itself back to life. It would come into existence at a moment in history, blaze gloriously, and then pass into irrevocable night.

Crucially, the latter model proposes that before the one-time explosion, all the universe's matter and energy was contained in a singularity, a tiny dot that sat stable in space for eternity before it detonated.

This model proposes a paradox: Objects at rest -- like the initial singularity -- remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force; and yet, since the initial dot contained all matter and energy, nothing (at least, nothing natural) existed outside of this singularity that could have caused it to explode.

The simplest resolution of the paradox is to posit that something supernatural kicked the universe into being. The open model of the universe thus implies a supernatural Creator -- a God.

In 1916 Albert Einstein released the first drafts of his general theory of relativity, and the scientific world went wild. It appeared that Einstein had revealed the deepest secrets of the universe. His equations also caused a few problems -- technical dilemmas, mathematical snags -- but not the sort of thing to interest newspapers or even popular science journals.

Two scientists noticed the glitches. Late in 1917 the Danish astronomer Willem de Sitter reviewed general relativity and returned a detailed response to Einstein, outlining the problem and proposing a radical solution: general relativity could work only if the entire universe was exploding, erupting out in all directions from a central point.

Einstein never responded to de Sitter's critique. Then, in 1922, Soviet mathematician Alexander Friedmann independently derived de Sitter's solution. If Einstein was right, Friedmann predicted, the universe must be expanding in all directions at high speed.

Meanwhile, across the sea, American astronomer Vesto Slipher actually witnessed the universe's explosive outward movement. Using the powerful telescope at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, Slipher discovered that dozens of galaxies were indeed rocketing away from a central point.

Between 1918 and 1922, de Sitter, Friedmann, and Slipher independently shared their findings with Einstein, but he strangely resisted their solution -- as if, in his brilliance, he realized the theological implications of an exploding universe.

Einstein even wrote a letter to Zeitschrift fur Physik, a prestigious technical journal, calling Friedmann's suggestions "suspicious," and to de Sitter Einstein jotted a note, "This circumstance [of an expanding universe] irritates me." In another note, Einstein reassured one of his colleagues, "I have not yet fallen in the hands of priests," a veiled reference to de Sitter, Friedmann, and Slipher.

In 1925, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble dealt the static model of the universe a fatal blow. Using what was then the largest telescope in the world, Hubble revealed that every galaxy within 6 x 10¹⁷ miles of the Earth was receding.

Einstein tenaciously refused to acknowledge Hubble's work. He continued teaching the static model for five more years, until, at Hubble's request, he traveled from Berlin to Pasadena to personally examine the evidence. At the trip's conclusion, Einstein reluctantly admitted, "New observations by Hubble ... make it appear likely that the general structure of the universe is not static."

Einstein died in 1955, swayed but still not fully convinced that the universe was expanding.

Ten years later, in 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were calibrating a supersensitive microwave detector at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey. No matter where the two scientists aimed the instrument, it picked up the same unidentified background noise -- a steady, three-degree Kelvin (3K) hum. On a hunch, the two Bell Labs employees looked over an essay on general relativity by a student of Alexander Friedmann. The essay predicted that the remnants of the universe's most recent explosion should be detectable in the form of weak microwave radiation, "around 5K or thereabouts."

The two scientists realized they had discovered the echo of the biggest explosion in history: "the Big Bang." For this discovery, Penzias and Wilson received the Nobel Prize.

The discovery of the "3K hum" undermined the static model of the universe. There were only two models left: one that worked without God and one that did not.

The last issue to be settled was: Had the primordial universe exploded an infinite number of times (the oscillating model) or only once (the open model)?

Researchers knew the issue could be settled by determining the average density of the universe. If the universe contained the equivalent of about one hydrogen atom per ten cubic feet of space, then the gravitational attraction among all the universe's particles would be strong enough to stop and reverse the expansion. Eventually there would be a "big crunch," which would lead to another big bang (and then to another big crunch, etc.). If, on the other hand, the universe contained less than this density, then the big bang's explosive force would overcome all the gravitational pulls, and everything would sail out into nothingness forever.

Curiously, the death of the static model inspired panic in many quarters of the scientific world. Mathematicians, physicists, and astronomers joined forces to prove the eternity of the universe.

Dr. Robert Jastrow, arguably the greatest astrophysicist of the time and director of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Center for Space Studies, was named head of the research project. For fifteen years Jastrow and his team tried to demonstrate the validity of the oscillating model, but the data told a different story.

In 1978 Jastrow released NASA's definitive report, shocking the public with his announcement that the open model was probably correct. On June 25 of that year, Jastrow wrote about his findings to the New York Times Magazine:

Dr. James Trefil, a physicist at the University of Virginia, independently confirmed Jastrow's discovery in 1983. Drs. John Barrow, an astronomer at the University of Sussex, and Frank Tipler, a mathematician and physicist at Tulane University, published similar results in 1986.

At the 1990 meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Professor John Mather of Columbia University, an astrophysicist who also serves on the staff of NASA's Goddard Center, presented "the most dramatic support ever" for an open universe.

According to the Boston Globe reporter covering the conference, Mather's keynote address was greeted with thunderous applause, which led the meeting's chairman, Dr. Geoffrey Burbridge, to comment: "It seems clear that the audience is in favor of the book of Genesis - at least, the first verse or so, which seems to have been confirmed."

In 1998, Drs. Ruth Daly, Erick Guerra, and Lin Wan of Princeton University announced to the American Astronomical Society, "We can state with 97.5 percent confidence that the universe will continue to expand forever."

Later that year, Dr. Allan Sandage, a world-renowned astrophysicist on the staff of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, was quoted in The New Republic saying, "The big bang is best understood as a miracle triggered by some kind of transcendent power."

Newsweek columnist George Will began his November 9, 1998, column with this quip: "Soon the American Civil Liberties Union or People for the American Way, or some similar faction of litigious secularism, will file suit against NASA, charging that the Hubble Space Telescope unconstitutionally gives comfort to the religiously inclined."

The same year, Newsweek reported a recent and unexpected swing of opinion among the once passionately agnostic: "Forty percent of American scientists now believe in a personal God - not merely an ineffable power and presence in the world, but a deity to whom they can pray."

There are, of course, mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists who choose not to believe in God today. For a variety of reasons, they choose instead to have faith that new natural laws will be discovered or that new evidence will appear and overturn the current model of an open, created universe.

But for many in the scientific community, the evidence is persuasive. For many, modern cosmology offers permission to believe.

LAWRENCE KELEMEN is the author of Permission to Believe: Four Rational Approaches to God's Existence (Targum/Feldheim, 1990) and Permission to Receive: Four Rational Approaches to the Torah's Divine Origin (Targum Press, 1996). He studied at U.C.L.A., Yeshiva University of Los Angeles, and Harvard University. He was also a downhill skiing instructor on the staff of the Mammoth Mountain Ski School in California and served as news director and anchorman for KMMT-FM radio station. Currently he teaches medieval and modern Jewish philosophy at Neve Yerushalayim College of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem.

This essay is excerpted from "Jewish Matters: A pocketbook of knowledge and inspiration." "Jewish Matters" includes short essays on topics from relationships, prayer, happiness, and Shabbat, written by top male and female educators from around the world. Deep, funny, and fascinating, "JM" is available in Jewish bookstores, and on Amazon.com , and Chapters.ca. More information and excerpts can be seen at www.jewishmatters.com.

Author Biography:
Lawrence Kelemen is Professor of Education at Neve Yerushalayim College of Jewish Studies for Women in Jerusalem. He is the author of Permission to Believe and Permission to Receive; and his most recent book, To Kindle a Soul: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Parents and Teachers, was recently ranked the 48th best-selling book in the United States. His website is www.lawrencekelemen.com

The God Hypothesis:
Discovering Design in our "Just Right" Goldilocks Universe
by Michael A. Corey

GOD'S EXISTENCE is not required by the premises of quantum mechanics or general relativity, the great theories of twentieth-century physics --but then again, it is not contravened by their conclusions either. What else can we do but watch and wait?
The agnostic straddle. It is hardly a posture calculated to set the blood racing. In the early 1970s Jacques Monod and Steven Weinberg thus declared themselves in favor of atheism, each man eager to communicate his discovery that the universe is without plan or purpose. Any number of philosophers have embraced their platform, often clambering onto it by brute force. Were God to exist, Thomas Nagel remarked, he would not only be surprised, but disappointed.
A great many ordinary men and women have found both atheism and agnosticism dispiriting--evidence, perhaps, of their remarkable capacity for intellectual ingratitude. The fact remains that the intellectual's pendulum has swung along rather a tight little arc for much of the twentieth century: atheism, the agnostic straddle, atheism, the agnostic straddle.
The revival of natural theology in the past twenty-five years has enabled that pendulum to achieve an unexpected amplitude, its tip moving beyond atheism and the agnostic straddle to something like religious awe, if not religious faith.
It has been largely the consolidation of theoretical cosmology that has powered the upward swing. Edwin Hubble's discovery that the universe seemed to be expanding in every direction electrified the community of cosmologists in the late 1920s, and cosmologists were again electrified when it became clear that these facts followed from Einstein's general theory of relativity. Thereafter, their excitement diminished, if only because the idea that the universe was expanding suggested inexorably that it was expanding from an origin of some sort, a big bang, as the astronomer Fred Hoyle sniffed contemptuously.
In 1963 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson inadvertently noticed the background microwave radiation predicted by Big Bang cosmology; when Robert Dicke confirmed the significance of their observation, competing steady-state theories of creation descended at once into desuetude. And thereafter a speculative story became a credible secular myth.
But if credible, the myth was also incomplete. The universe, cosmologists affirmed, erupted into existence fifteen billion years ago. Details were available, some going back to the first three minutes of creation. Well and good. But the metaphoric assimilation of the Big Bang to the general run of eruptions conveyed an entirely misleading sense of similarity. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius took place in space and time; the Big Bang marks the spot at which time and space taper to a singularity and then vanish altogether.
It follows that the universe came into existence from nothing whatsoever, and for no good reason that anyone could discern, least of all cosmologists. Even the most ardent village atheist became uneasily aware that Big Bang cosmology and the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis shared a family resemblance too obvious profitably to be denied.
Thereafter, natural theology, long thought dead of inanition, began appearing at any number of colloquia in mathematical physics, often welcomed by the same physicists who had recently been heard reading its funeral obsequies aloud. In "The God Hypothesis: Discovering Design in our "Just Right" Goldilocks Universe," Michael A. Corey is concerned to convey their news without worrying overmuch about the details. His message is simple. There is a God, a figure at once omnipotent, omniscient, eternal, and necessary. Science has established his existence.
How very embarrassing that this should have been overlooked.
AT THE very heart of revived natural theology are what the physicist Brandon Carter called "anthropic coincidences." Certain structural features of the universe, Carter argued, seemed finally tuned to permit the emergence of life. This is a declaration, to be sure, that suggests far more than it asserts. Structural features? Finely tuned? Permit? When the metaphors are squeezed dry, what more is at issue beyond the observation that life is a contingent affair? This is not a thesis in dispute.
Still, it often happens that commonplace observations, when sharpened, prompt questions that they had long concealed. The laws of physics draw a connection between the nature of certain material objects and their behavior. Falling from a great height, an astrophysicist no less than an airplane accelerates toward the center of the earth. Newton's law of gravitational attraction provides an account of this tendency in terms of mass and distance (or heft and separation). In order to gain traction on the real world, the law requires a fixed constant, a number that remains unchanged as mass and distance vary. Such is Newton's universal gravitational constant.
There are many comparable constants throughout mathematical physics, and they appear to have no very obvious mathematical properties. They are what they are. But if arbitrary, they are also crucial. Were they to vary from the values that they have, this happy universe--such is the claim--would be too small or too large or too gaseous or otherwise too flaccid to sustain life. And these are circumstances that, if true, plainly require an explanation.
Carter was a capable physicist; instead of being chuckled over and dismissed by a handful of specialists, the paper that he wrote in 1974 was widely read, Fred Hoyle, Freeman Dyson, Martin Rees, Stephen Hawking, Paul Davies, Steven Weinberg, Robert Jastrow, and John Gribbin all contributing to the general chatter. Very few physicists took the inferential trail to its conclusion in faith; what is notable is that any of them took the trail at all.
THE ASTRONOMER Fred Hoyle is a case in point, his atheism in the end corrected by his pleased astonishment at his own existence. Living systems are based on carbon, he observed, and carbon is formed within stars by a process of nucleosynthesis. (The theory of nucleosynthesis is, indeed, partly his creation.) Two helium atoms fuse to form a beryllium intermediate, which then fuses again with another helium atom to form carbon. The process is unstable because beryllium intermediates are short-lived.
In 1953 Edwin Salpeter discovered that the resonance between helium and intermediate beryllium atoms, like the relation between an opera singer and the glass she shatters, is precisely tuned to facilitate beryllium production. Hoyle then discovered a second nuclear resonance, this one acting between beryllium and helium, and finely tuned as well.
Without carbon, no life. And without specific nuclear resonance levels, no carbon. And yet there he was, Hoyle affirmed, carbon based to the core. Nature, he said in a remark widely quoted, seems to be "a put-up job."
INFERENCES now have a tendency to go off like a string of firecrackers, some of them wet. Hoyle had himself discovered the scenario that made carbon synthesis possible. He thus assigned to what he called a "Supercalculating Intellect" powers that resembled his own. Mindful, perhaps, of the ancient wisdom that God alone knows who God is, he did not go further. Corey is, on the other hand, quite certain that Hoyle's Supercalculating Intellect is, in fact, a transcendental deity--the Deity, to afford Him a promotion in punctuation.
And Corey is certain, moreover, that he quite knows His motives. The Deity, in setting nuclear resonance levels, undertook his affairs "in order to create carbon based life forms."
Did He indeed? It is by no means obvious. For all we know, the Deity's concern may have lain with the pleasurable intricacies of nucleosynthesis, the emergence of life proving, like so many other things, an inadvertent consequence of his tinkering. For that matter, what sense does it make to invoke the Deity's long term goals, when it is His existence that is at issue? If nothing else, natural theology would seem to be a trickier business than physicists may have imagined.
AS IT HAPPENS, the gravamen of Corey's argument lies less with what the Deity may have had in mind and more with the obstacles He presumably needed to overcome. "The cumulative effect of this fine tuning," Corey argues, "is that, against all the odds, carbon was able to be manufactured in sufficient quantities inside stellar interiors to make our lives possible." That is the heart of the matter: against all the odds. And the obvious question that follows: Just how do we know this?
Corey does not address the question specifically, but he offers an answer nonetheless. It is, in fact, the answer Hoyle provides as well. They both suppose that something like an imaginary lottery (or roulette wheel) governs the distribution of values to the nuclear resonance levels of beryllium or helium. The wheel is spun. And thereafter the right resonance levels appear. The odds now reflect the pattern familiar in any probabilistic process--one specified outcome weighed against all the rest. If nuclear resonance levels are, in fact, unique, their emergence on the scene would have the satisfying aspect of a miracle.
It is a miracle, of course, whose luster is apt to dim considerably if other nuclear resonance levels might have done the job and thus won the lottery. And this is precisely what we do not know. The nuclear resonance levels specified by Hoyle are sufficient for the production of carbon. The evidence is all around us. It is entirely less clear that they are necessary as well. Corey and Hoyle make the argument that they are necessary because, if changed slightly, nucleosynthesis would stop. "Overall, it is safe to say"--Corey is speaking, Hoyle nodding--"that given the utter precision displayed by these nuclear resonances with respect to the synthesis of carbon, not even one of them could have been slightly different without destroying their precious carbon yield." This is true, but inconclusive. Mountain peaks are isolated but not unique. Corey and Hoyle may well be right in their conclusions. It is their argument that does not inspire confidence.
THE TROUBLE is not merely a matter of the logical niceties. Revived natural theology has staked its claims on probability. There is nothing amiss in this. Like the rest of us, physicists calculate the odds when they cannot calculate anything better. The model to which they appeal may be an imaginary lottery, roulette wheel, or even a flipped coin, but imaginary is the governing word. Whatever the model, it corresponds to no plausible physical mechanism. The situation is very different in molecular biology, which is one reason criticism of neo-Darwinism very often has biting power. When biologists speculate on the origins of life, they have in mind a scenario in which various chemicals slosh around randomly in some clearly defined physical medium. What does the sloshing with respect to nuclear resonance?
Or with respect to anything else? Current dogma suggests that many of the constants of mathematical physics were fixed from the first, and so constitute a part of the initial conditions of the Big Bang. Corey does not demur; it is a conclusion that he endorses. What then is left of the anthropic claim that the fundamental constants have the value that they do despite "all odds"? In the beginning there was no time, no place, no lottery at all.
MATHEMATICAL physics currently trades in four fundamental forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak forces governing the nucleus and radioactive decay. In general relativity and quantum mechanics, it contains two great but incompatible theories. This is clearly an embarrassment of riches. If possible, unification of these forces and theories is desirable. And not only unification, but unification in the form of a complete and consistent theoretical structure.
Such a theory, thoughtful physicists imagine, might serve to show that the anthropic coincidences are an illusion in that they are not coincidences at all. The point is familiar. Egyptian engineers working under the pharaohs knew that the angles of a triangle sum to more or less one hundred and eighty degrees. The number appears as a free parameter in their theories, something given by experience and experiment. The Greeks, on the other hand, could prove what the Egyptians could only calculate. No one would today think to ask why the interior angles of a Euclidean triangle sum to precisely one hundred and eighty degrees. The question is closed because the answer is necessary.
THE GRAND HOPE of modern mathematical physicists is that something similar will happen in modern mathematical physics. The Standard Model of particle physics contains a great many numerical slots that must be filled in by hand. This is never counted as a satisfaction, but a more powerful physical theory might show how those numerical slots are naturally filled, their particular values determined ultimately by the theory's fundamental principles. If this proves so, the anthropic coincidences will lose their power to vex and confound.
Nonetheless, the creation of a complete and consistent physical theory will not put an end to revived natural theology. Questions once asked about the fundamental constants of mathematical physics are bound to reappear as questions about the nature of its laws. The constants of mathematical physics may make possible the existence of life, but the laws of mathematical physics make possible the existence of matter. They have, those laws, an overwhelmingly specific character. Other laws, under which not much exists, are at least imaginable. What explanation can mathematical physics itself provide for the fact that the laws of nature are arranged as they are and that they have the form that they do? It is hardly an unreasonable question.
Steven Weinberg has suggested that a final theory must be logically isolated in the sense that any perturbation of its essential features would destroy the theory's coherence. Logical isolation is by no means a clear concept, and it is one of the ironies of modern mathematical physics that the logical properties of the great physical theories are no less mysterious than the physical properties of the universe they are meant to explain. Let us leave the details to those who cherish them.
The tactic is clear enough. The laws of a final theory determine its parameters; its logical structure determines its laws. No further transcendental inference is required, if only because that final theory explains itself.
This is very elegant. It is also entirely unpersuasive. A theory that is logically isolated is not necessarily a theory that is logically unique. Other theories may be possible, some governing imaginary worlds in which light alone exists, others worlds in which there is nothing whatsoever. The world in which we find ourselves is one in which galaxies wink and matter fills the cup of creation. What brings about the happy circumstance that the laws making this possible are precisely the laws making it real? The old familiar circle.
ALL THIS leaves us where we so often find ourselves. We are confronted with certain open questions. We do not know the answers, but what is worse, we have no clear idea--no idea whatsoever--of how they might be answered. But perhaps that is where we should be left: in the dark, tortured by confusing hints, intimations of immortality, and a sense that, dear God, we really do not yet understand.

No, but they are subject to the same laws of probability you outlined. Life or not, why doesn't the same analysis work?

Why is this so difficult for you to comprehend? Life is different from nonlife. Organic is different from non-organic. The conditions that create coal or salt dome are not even CLOSE to the conditions that create life. Coal was here millions of years before we were. And this doesn't even take into consideration COMPLEX life--which coal or salt dome isn't even CLOSE to achieving last I checked, COAL hasn't come up with a way to communicate or travel on it's own.

Your equations say that.

No, actually my equations say life is far more unlikely to happen. Coal or salt-dome might have had a slight chance in coming to be, but it's not life, save for a few people on this board. Maybe it's me, but why can't you comprehend that a lump of coal is infinitely simpler--and therefore more likely, then a wiggling bacteria?? The difference is amazingly obvious.

Randomness plays a role in evolution, but it's biased selection that does the work.

No, actually it's randomness that begins life, and that's what I'm talking about. The calculations I gave you was for one of the simplest creatures on Earth. The chances of the simplest and first signs of life evolving to someone like yourself are almost infinitely greater, if you take into account all the probabilities at any point that something could go wrong-Asteroid, Super Volcano's, meteors, etc. etc. Please, pay attention.

You can't talk about the probability that life happened in this way, and pretend that that's the probability that life happened at all. Until you can provably enumerate all the myriad ways, you have no basis for making that calculation.

ROFL!! You people are too funny. If life COULD evolve any other way, as you have supposed, why don't we see evidence anywhere else? Asteroids, Meteors, other planets, etc. Heck, why don't we see it anywhere here on Earth. Biologically speaking life happen only ONCE, here on Earth. Genetically speaking, we can trace life back to one single source, some 3.8 billion years ago. If, as you suppose, there is a basis for OTHER life forms, made of entirely different processes, why don't we see it here.

No, YOU do the calculations, and YOU figure out if it's YOUR theory. If you have knowledge on how other life forms could come about, then by means share it with the Noble Prize committee.

ROFL!! I guess what's so funny about you, is that you're so ARROGANT to think this is an original idea. That somehow, in between slouching off to flip burgers at the nearby Denny's, you've come up with the secret on how life might have formed elsewhere.

Again, I know of only ONE possible way for life to exist in the universe. If you know or think you know of another way, don't waste your time convincing me of it, ROFL!!, run it over to Cambridge University, Harvard or Stanford. I guarantee you a Noble Prize will be awarded to you!!!

No, the possibilities are YOUR problem, not mine. ROFL!!

Put that into your calculations, or they're wrong.

But all the MATTER in the Universe, ISN'T Infinite. Keep saying it is, and you'll look ignorant.

Besides of all the matter IN the universe, very, very few of them can make life. and the chances of them all coming together, in such a fantastically complex way.

If you would like to know how scientists calculate the mass of the Universe, go here: http://science.howstuffworks.com/framed.htm?parent=question221.htm&url=http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980114d.html

Nowhere did I make that argument.

ROFL!! You are hilarious!! You're NOT making the assumption that life "Just wants To Be", by implying, without scientific reason of course, that life could have begun differently then it did here on Earth? You're not implying that fighting huge amounts of almost impossible odds, life just popped up one day some 3.8 billion years ago?

IF, as you have proposed, life is possible without the impossible odds I've proposed here, then we should see it in different forms everywhere else. On different planets, in meteors, asteroids, etc. Heck, if life is so viable in the universe, it should be overflowing with aliens.

You are the results of decades of science fiction movies, books and TV shows pelting you everyday that life must exist elsewhere, but your logic is flawed. You forget--or never learned--that life is fragile, so nearly impossible to come together, and in a universe so hostile to it--it can't possibly exist anywhere else.

If you're so convinced life COULD exist, from anything else, YOU do the calculations and prove me wrong. Don't be so lazy.

If life COULD evolve any other way, as you have supposed, why don't we see evidence anywhere else? Asteroids, Meteors, other planets, etc. Heck, why don't we see it anywhere here on Earth. Biologically speaking life happen only ONCE, here on Earth. Genetically speaking, we can trace life back to one single source, some 3.8 billion years ago. If, as you suppose, there is a basis for OTHER life forms, made of entirely different processes, why don't we see it here.

Maybe RadioAstronomer can give us some measured limits on the probability of life on other worlds, and tell us just how thoroughly we've checked our solar system.

Let's suppose that the calculation you borrowed is correct. Surely, then, we won't expect to find our kind of life anywhere but here. But if there were some other kind of life, would we see it? Only if its probability is extremely high. For example, if the probability of some hypothetical type of life (different from our own) were one in 100 million per solar system (a much higher probability than any you discussed), there'd be essentially no chance of finding such life forms in our solar system or on Earth. Even so, there'd be thousands of living worlds of that type in every galaxy.

Again, I know of only ONE possible way for life to exist in the universe.

That's the problem. You are assuming that that's the ONLY possible way for life to exist in the universe. You have to prove that assumption. I am not saying that I know there is any other way; I am saying that I don't know all the ways. No more do you. Until you do (and can prove it), you can make no calculation about the overall probability of life.

But all the MATTER in the Universe, ISN'T Infinite. Keep saying it is, and you'll look ignorant.

Four months ago, it was discovered that the geometry of space is flat on the largest scales. This means that space goes on forever, and is uniformly filled with matter. Does that mean that the universe is infinite? That's a matter of semantics; what do you mean by "universe"? Everything that exists, or everything that you can in principle communicate with and travel to? If by universe you mean "everything that exists", then the universe is infinite. If you mean "everything you can ever see or travel to", then the universe (our "Hubble volume" within the infinite space) is finite.

Given that space goes on forever and is filled with galaxies, then the probability of our being somewhere is identically 1, however unlikely life might actually be. It becomes the "lottery winner" effect: most Hubble volumes may be devoid of life, but all life forms will see themselves as living in an inhabited Hubble volume. Wheeler's "anthropic principle" wins after all.

You're not implying that fighting huge amounts of almost impossible odds, life just popped up one day some 3.8 billion years ago?

My argument is that is precisely what it did NOT do. Your borrowed calculation scheme is as bad a failure for life molecules as it is for salt domes.

Heck, if life is so viable in the universe, it should be overflowing with aliens.

So, let me get this straight. The only possible likelihoods are "impossible" and "ubiquitous"?

I vote for "rare, but likely enough over a sufficiently large volume". If we find life anywhere other than Earth in my lifetime, I'll change my vote to "ubiquitous".

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