Fred Hoyle: Astronomical Pain in the Ass
Fred Hoyle has been maligned many times over the years by the scientific establishment. He was against the Big Bang theory and Darwinism, but he was also an outspoken atheist. His arguments against the Big Bang theory were also arguments against God: since he was against a “universal beginning,” Hoyle slammed the Big Bang and Creation in one stroke.
Hoyle personally knew the creator of the Big Bang theory, Georges LeMaitre, who was both a scientist and a Catholic priest. Hoyle was convinced that LeMaitre’s idea of the universe being born was an artifact of LeMaitre’s Catholic belief in the Creation. Most science historians disagree with this idea. Nonetheless, LeMaitre the Catholic scientist is responsible for putting the scientific sheen on the idea that the universe had a beginning. This put science in the position of constantly disentangling its “scientific” idea of the birth of the universe from the religious Creation. Since LeMaitre’s Big Bang theory, essentially the only disagreement between science and religion has been the age of the universe. That it was “created” - either by God or by cosmic accident - is not in doubt.
Hoyle would have rather had a universe with no beginning at all, and no end either. It would have infinite duration into the past and future, no creation required (and no Armageddon either). The idea was no less ludicrous than the idea of everything being created from nothing. If science ever accepted that the universe had no beginning or end, it would drive an even bigger wedge between science and religion. This is where Hoyle positioned himself. Creation and the Big Bang were both mistakes in his view, and consequently, he was reviled in all quarters.
Dissing Darwin
Hoyle took his cranky approach into other fields, becoming just as controversial in biology. Hoyle disagreed with most Darwinists that life had evolved on earth in the time allotted. Hoyle developed arguments about how there wasn’t enough time for earth to develop life on its own as a closed system. In Hoyle’s view, the building blocks of life were so complex that they needed all of time and space to arise by chance, and even then it was a long shot. Hoyle felt sure that life had evolved over cosmic timescales throughout the reaches of deep space. He became a champion of the Panspermia theory, or the idea that viruses and microbes - which can survive in space - were already seeded through the universe by the time the earth formed. Once Earth found itself colonized by microbial life, a constant influx of viruses and microbes from space would add new genetic material and shuffle genes around (a specialty of viruses).
His ideas rejected by mainstream biology and astronomy, Hoyle persisted and wrote several books, including one called, “The Intelligent Universe: A New View of Creation and Evolution.” In this book, Hoyle imagined there were two different levels of higher intelligence - essentially incredibly advanced aliens - that might qualify as God. Hoyle speculated that the universe is so old that it has gone through many evolutionary periods, or times when the laws of physics changed dramatically. Our universe, whose physical constants support carbon-based life, could undergo a kind of “phase change” in a few billion years and become inhospitable. Like let’s say something obscure like the “fine structure constant” blows a gasket, and carbon bonds will no longer hold. The universe would reorganize itself into a new stable phase, where, say, silicon is king. Hoyle imagines that at such a time, an advanced carbon-based life form would engineer new building blocks for silicon-based life, in order to inject life and consciousness into the next phase of the universe. Such advanced beings would be able to predict the physical laws of the next phase of the universe, and then engineer a self-replicating genetic code perfectly in tune with those laws. Hoyle believes such a distant alien species set up the panspermia system from the deep past.
Hoyle also supposes a second tier of supreme alien intelligence: one operating from the deep future. This superintelligence reaches backwards in time, manipulating quantum events, to maintain itself by creating and evolving life. This is still not God, but a being or beings from so far in the future that it is beyond our comprehension.
Co-opted By The I.D.iots
The horrible irony is that since Fred Hoyle died, some of his attacks on Darwinism have been adopted by the Intelligent Design community of religious whackos who want to get the God of the Bible into the school system any way they can. Hoyle would have been mortified. And as it turns out, Hoyle’s attacks on Darwinism have been shown to be wrong anyway - it’s technical but basically he got the math wrong, and he also failed to appreciate (along with many biologists) the depth of what might be called biology’s self-organizing principle.
At least Hoyle bothered to speculate as to the nature of the intelligent designer, unlike any of the Intelligent Design folks. In adopting some of Hoyle’s ideas, the Intelligent Design crowd leaves itself open to the question: are either of Hoyle’s aliens the God of the Bible? And if it was aliens that created life, do they still need to be worshipped?
[Originally published in Duluth’s “Zenith City Weekly” Nov. 07. Byline: By Jim and Allen Richardson.]
