Hoyle on the origin of species, the origin of life, and the origin of carbon

I read one of Fred Hoyle’s books when I was a kid and for a long time favored his continuous creation theory, which was the only scientific theory other than the Big Bang (a phrase Hoyle himself coined in 1949), that could explain the expansion of the universe. Hoyle, one of the most prominent astronomers and cosmologists of the 20th century, was an atheist, and he rejected the Big Bang partly because he thought it meant that there had to be a Creator—an obvious inference that the atheist believers in the Big Bang blandly deny.

Hoyle also became a strong opponent of Darwinian theory of evolution. A reader has put together a summary of Hoyle’s views on the subject based on Wikipedia’s article on Hoyle. The reader writes:

Sir Fred Hoyle reached the conclusion that the universe is governed by a greater intelligence. In 1978, Hoyle described Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution as wrong and claimed that the belief that the first living cell was created spontaneously out of the primordial ocean was just as erroneous.

In his book “Evolution from Space” (1982), he distanced himself completely from Darwinism. He stated that natural selection could not explain evolution.

In his book “The Intelligent Universe” (1983) he wrote: “Life as we know it is, among other things, dependent on at least 2000 different enzymes. How could the blind forces of the primal sea manage to put together the correct chemical elements to build enzymes?”

According to his calculations, the likelihood of this happening is only one in 10 to the 40,000th power (1 followed by 40 000 zeros). That is about the same chance as throwing 50,000 sixes in a row with a die. Or as Hoyle describes it: “The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk-yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein… I am at a loss to understand biologists’ widespread compulsion to deny what seems to me to be obvious.” (“Hoyle on Evolution,” Nature, Vol. 294, 12 November 1981, p. 105.)

In a 1982 lecture, after considering the very remote probability of Darwinian evolution, he concluded:

If one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion, one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design. No other possibility I have been able to think of…

Hoyle did not stop at saying that that the evolution of new life forms required intelligence, and that the appearance of the enzymes that are necessary for living cells required intelligence. He said that the existence of matter itself, or at least of carbon atoms, required intelligence. This is from the Wikipedia article:

An early paper of Hoyle’s made an interesting use of the anthropic principle. In trying to work out the routes of stellar nucleosynthesis, he observed that one particular nuclear reaction, the triple-alpha process, which generated carbon, would require the carbon nucleus to have a very specific energy for it to work. The large amount of carbon in the universe, which makes it possible for carbon-based lifeforms (e.g. humans) to exist, demonstrated that this nuclear reaction must work. Based on this notion, he made a prediction of the energy levels in the carbon nucleus that was later borne out by experiment.

However, those energy levels, while needed in order to produce carbon in large quantities, were statistically very unlikely. Hoyle later wrote:

Would you not say to yourself, “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.” Of course you would … A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect 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.

Hoyle, an atheist until that time, said that this suggestion of guiding hand led him to be “greatly shaken,” and he then converted to being a Christian. Those who advocate the intelligent design hypothesis sometimes cite Hoyle’s work in this area to support the claim that the universe was fine tuned in order to allow intelligent life to be possible.

Wikipedia lists Hoyle’s religion as “Atheist then Christian.”

- end of initial entry - Kristor writes:

Sir Antony Flew is one of the more important of 20th Century philosophers, and by far the most important philosophical atheist in history. His careful and systematic critiques of theistic arguments have sharpened and clarified the polemic of theistic philosophers (such as Alvin Plantinga and Charles Hartshorne), leading to a renascence among academic philosophers of theism as a respectable belief and subject of discourse. Flew recently converted to theism for many of the same reasons that swayed Hoyle, and that have been discussed at VFR in numerous recent threads: to wit, what is the source of the existence and orderliness of the world? For absent such a source, that is itself sui generis, and rational and orderly by nature, there can in the final analysis be no such thing as order, or therefore as causal order, but rather only pure happenstance, one raw contingency happening after another, none related to any other, and with no rhyme or reason—and thus no possibility of reasoning.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 05, 2008 11:03 AM | Send