“I was breaking the fallen strips of bark as I made my path randomly among the spider webs that caught the filtered sun when something occurred to me. If I had not been an eyewitness on that distant day when I saw the workers in the sun, would I not believe I was standing here in virgin bushland? You would think this forest had been here forever in a wild and natural balance unless you happened to have the ‘privileged’ knowledge of an eyewitness like myself.” from May 16th 2025 ‘Made The Forest’
Fred Hoyle was a towering figure of 20th century physics. He discovered that the heavier elements, such as life giving carbon, were not created at the big bang as previously thought, instead two hundred million years later were fused against all likelihood in the cauldrons of red giant stars.
Atoms inside the core of the red giant stars have what can be called an ‘excitement’ level. Electrons swarm like bees around a nucleus and it this ‘excitement’ or ‘resonance’ level that predisposes them to fuse into other elements such as carbon.
The unlikely resonance level of the carbon-12 atom caused that element to be produced in such quantities that would make possible or even likely the accident of life.
Life long atheist Hoyle said:
“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. 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.’”