One argument occasionally raised in opposition to the proposition that ours is a created
Universe (and, especially, a Universe created with the aim of bringing about intelligent life) is the general hostility of our Universe to life as we know it. The vast majority of our Universe, it is noted, is the empty vacuum of space, dotted by the blazing furnaces of the stars wrapped in deadly
radiation. This may deal a blow to theories of Creation which suggest a Universe made with
Man as its center of importance, the sort originating with notions of an
Earth orbited by the
Sun with
stars small enough to fall on the Earth like so many
snowflakes. But not all theories have such elements inhering in them.
The Tree and the Fruit:
But to suggest the inhospitability of some parts of the Universe as proof against it being fortuitous for life is little different from suggesting the inedibility of the bark and leaves and roots of an
apple tree as proof that the
seed can not have been planted to yield fruit. Who would do such a thing? Clear a large plot of land and plant a seed and wait
years and years for it to grow to be big enough, and all the while the only thing to be harvested from this massive
organism, this living assembly of several tons of mass, is a fractional fragment, a few dozen pounds of
apples. And they don't even come forth all year round, just for a short period of the year, while the tree must be cared for all the time.
Well so it is -- we live in a Universe that is largely inhospitable in the ways that ours is because it is precisely such a Universe that will generate life in those rare hospitable parts. Indeed, a few billion years ago, our Earth itself would have been a totally hostile place for most any kind of life found here today!! Had it had our current atmospheric composition, comfortable to us, perhaps that original life would never have been able to arise at all. It had to go through a series of epochs in the development of life, in each one having life itself set the conditions that brought about the next. So it may be that if the entire Universe was "hospitable" to life as we know it -- kept at what we would testify to be a comfortable warmth, atmosphered and oxygenated -- then the conditions would never exist for life to arise!! Some modern models propose that life on Earth originated at all because of the energy provided by events which would be absolutely catastrophic today. And so the knife's edge upon which we balance, a Universe which contains the raw ingredients to generate life must have a largely toxic brew, in which occasional bubbles will manifest the right combination of stuff to lock out the surrounding
toxicity and let those normally caustic materials combine in their beneficial
manifestation.
That Which Does Not Kill Us:
Another example -- naked space is full of radiation, harmful outside of an
atmosphere, but on the ground just enough to spur some of the mutations which drive evolution (and as any who have had skin cancer or even a bad sunburn can testify, sometimes even our own life-sustaining sun can be "inhospitable"). No less a
luminary than
Neil deGrasse Tyson has contended that
The Universe is Trying to Kill You -- but let us take this as true, despite all this trying it is in the aggregate failing. For life has evaded these efforts on this planet for 3.5 billion years, a quarter of the calculated age of it. And as
Friedrich Nietzsche taught in
Twilight of the Idols, "that which does not kill us makes us stronger." And that perfectly translates to the invaluable process of
evolution by natural selection -- for absent quite deadly obstacles to overcome, there is no selection pressure, no force compelling all varieties of adaptation, no need for the sort of evolution which brings about
us.
Such a sorting out of affairs is not part of the typical
Creation story, but it is elemental to
Pandeism, which proposes that our Creator became our Universe-- perhaps had no choice but to become our Universe-- and an evolutionary Universe at that, this being the most efficient means to set forth a Universe able to bring about life without further intervention.
Philosopher William C. Lane has described Pandeism as an out from the
problem of evil because the Creator in Pandeism is neither the cause of
suffering, nor an idle
observer of it, but
bears all suffering -- suffering borne for the purpose of obtaining the knowledge of existence itself. But, to drive a last nail into the
coffin of the "inhospitable Universe" argument, despite all these dangers and threats and inhospitabilities, we have for decades now been creeping into that supposedly baneful realm,
outer space. We have built permanent fixtures there, and amplifying our ability to continue doing the same. So that, if we manage not to destroy ourselves, inevitably we will come to have the power to conquer and colonize that vast stretch of the Universe which we now call "inhospitable"-- and perhaps in so doing, will stretch out so much that we find the outstretched hands (or whatever limbs might be) of other beings with intelligence like our own, other civilizations which have evolved and learned to cooperate well enough to turn their own stretch of emptiness into a populated domain.