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The
future appears to be a grim place. Scientists tell
us that someday the sun will balloon and consume
the Earth before dwindling away to a cosmic
cinder. Someday the universe will undergo "heat
death," as all energy dissipates in a cold and
dark miasma. But why worry about that when there's
every likelihood that asteroids will obliterate
the planet's life forms?
Makes you wonder, what's the point? Are humans
only bit players on the universal stage? Is the
universe hostile to the human presence, or merely
indifferent? Are we, as some contend, mere bundles
of cells at the service of selfish genes? Is human
existence all sound and fury signifying nothing,
as Shakespeare asked?
Once upon a time, religion told us that humans
were indeed valued and valuable participants in
the cosmic order. This belief was once the
predominant influence in the West, informing our
laws, politics and social orders, for good and
evil.
Today, science shapes our self-understanding. We
have in the past century largely ceded authority
over our lives to the scientific worldview. The
old certitudes about God, nature and morality no
longer claim our unqualified attachment. Science's
monopoly on how we "know" the natural world
determines whether we look upon the world with
hope or despair, stoicism or nihilism. Indeed,
with its notions of "heat death" and "selfish
genes," science has worked like acid on religious
and philosophic ideas that provided the bedrock of
the West's hard-won moral and political
achievements. But many, it seems, have decided
that science's break with these long-held ideas,
particularly notions of human purpose and "final
causes," warrant the claim that health, wealth and
entertainment are the singular purpose of our
social and political arrangements.
No rational person would deny the material
benefits of the scientific method -- more food and
less starvation, medicines that ease the ancient
scourge of disease, a world of light and heat
instead of cold and dark. Yet, science also has
its dark side.
"Science may have alleviated the miseries of
disease and drudgery and provided an array of
gadgetry for our entertainment and convenience,"
says physicist Paul Davies. "But it has also
spawned horrific weapons of mass destruction and
seriously degraded the quality of life."
At the extreme, scientism -- that "quasi-religious
faith in the sufficiency of modern science to give
a complete account of the world," as bioethicist
Leon Kass puts it -- reduces thousands of years of
thought, feeling, hope and aspiration to nothing
more than electrochemical impulses in the brain,
with no meaning or purpose beyond the organism's
capacity to survive and reproduce.
Consider, for example, the views of biologist
Jacques Monod. "Man must at last finally awake
from his millenary dream; and in doing so, awake
to his total solitude, his fundamental isolation.
He lives on the boundary of an alien world." Or
those of physicist Steven Weinberg: "The more the
universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems
pointless."
The theory of evolution leads to the conclusion
that humans are little more than "survival
machines -- robot vehicles blindly programmed to
preserve the selfish molecules known as genes,"
says zoologist Richard Dawkins. Such a world is
amoral, devoid of the benevolent God imagined by
the monotheistic religions of Judaism,
Christianity and Islam, he contends. "The universe
that we observe has precisely the properties we
should expect if there is, at bottom, no design,
no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but
blind, pitiless indifference."
If the neo-Darwinian view doesn't get you down,
there's the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which
postulates that everything -- stars, mountains,
motors and minds -- will eventually run out of
energy. Entropy is the fate of the universe, and
someday, a dozen billion years hence, the universe
will reach maximum entropy and be reduced to
lifeless chaos.
◙
Admittedly,
the fate of the universe is a ways off, and a lot
could happen between now and then. So thinking
about our place in the universe may seem
irrelevant to our daily lives. Who cares about
cosmic fate when you've been laid off, the bills
are piling up and the car needs snow tires? But
many do. Despite the secularity of modern society
-- or, perhaps, because of it -- large numbers of
people are reengaging the life of the spirit. Some
of this "return to religion" is not necessarily
good, particularly when, as in the case of
Islamist terrorism, it is motivated by an
irrational desire to turn back the clock on
modernity. Still, many who rediscover a religious
sensibility, whether of the New Age variety or the
more traditional forms of Judeo-Christianity, are
responding to their dissatisfaction with the moral
relativism and spiritual nihilism of the
postmodern scientistic age.
"More and more of us are looking for spiritual
direction," says Leon Kass. "It seems like only
yesterday that the Enlightenment overthrew the
rule of religious orthodoxy, promising an earthly
paradise of human fulfillment based solely on
scientific reason. Yet today, the enlightened
children of skeptics are discovering for
themselves that man does not live -- or live well
-- by bread alone, not even by bread and circuses,
and that science's account of human life and the
world is neither adequate to the subject nor
satisfying to the longings of the soul."
The problem, in a nutshell, is that the world of
human interest, the world of values, seems to have
little connection to the world of facts as
revealed by the natural sciences. As a result we
live bifurcated lives. We accept the world
described by science -- purposeless matter in
mindless motion -- as the "real" world, while
confining the world of meaning and purpose to the
subjective psychological realm. The result is a
debilitating tension between the subjective and
the objective, between the inner world and the
outer world. We are aware that how we think of the
world, our knowledge of it, shapes our actions,
and, hence, influences our social and political
orders. But we also sense that we can only be at
home in a world when the "facts" reflect and
reinforce our "values" -- when, in other words, we
no longer feel like aliens on Earth.
Surprisingly, perhaps, many scientists feel this
way, too. The cosmic pessimists -- Dawkins,
Weinberg, Monod, etc. -- who insist the universe
is "indifferent" or even "hostile" to the human
presence seem to hold sway of late, but there are
others, past and present, who aren't afraid to
open science to spiritual questions.
These cosmic optimists include Stephen Hawking,
perhaps the most famous scientist of our time. In
a 1985 letter in the American Scientist, he
described the theological implications of his
theories this way: "I thought I had left the
question of the existence of a Supreme Being
completely open ... It would be perfectly
consistent with all we know to say that there was
a Being who was responsible for the laws of
physics."
Physicist Freeman Dyson finds the most amazing
thing in the universe to be the presence and power
of the mind. "Somehow, by natural processes still
totally mysterious, a million butterfly brains
working together in a human skull have the power
to dream, to calculate, to see and to hear, to
speak and to listen, to translate feelings into
marks on paper which other brains can interpret."
Astronomer Carl Sagan used the word "numinous" to
describe the awe he felt him contemplating the
universe. He once said that "science is not only
compatible with spirituality; it is a profound
source of spirituality."
Such examples, says scholar Nancy Frankenberry,
suggest that we should not regard scientists "as
cold, hard soulless individuals who try to reduce
the splendor of nature to sterile mathematical
formulas or the mystery of life to laboratory
manipulations."
◙
Certainly,
the most famous scientist of the 20th century was
convinced of the meaningfulness of the universe.
Albert Einstein did not believe in a personal God
that intervened in the world, but the physicist
thought the universe was pervaded by an underlying
intelligence. "My comprehension of God comes from
the deeply felt conviction of a superior
intelligence that reveals itself in the knowable
world ... I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals
Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in
a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and
doings of mankind."
Einstein was also convinced the universe was
intelligible. As he famously put it: "God does not
play at dice." For Einstein, nature was rational
and man, as a rational creature, possessed the
capacity to comprehend this reality. And as far as
Einstein was concerned, the religious sensibility,
properly understood, expressed this relationship
better than any other human endeavour. "I have not
found a better expression than 'religious' for the
trust in the rational nature of reality that is,
at least to a certain extent, accessible to human
reason."
Einstein held to this "faith" despite the arrival
of other theories -- Max Planck's quantum theory
and Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, for
example -- that undermined his idea of a unified
and deterministic universe in favour of a universe
of chance and probabilities. Nancy Frankenberry
sums up Einstein's predicament this way: "Having
glimpsed so much of the very face of God revealed
in the workings of a majestically rational and
deterministic universe, Einstein could not bring
himself to abandon the sublime vision of a certain
God for one of probability and uncertainty."
Einstein is not alone in seeing a rational and
knowable order to the universe. Physicist John
Polkinghorne, for instance, argues that biological
life, from the simplest to the most complex, is
the purpose of the universe. "Those trillions of
stars have to be around if we are to be around
also to think about them ... Only a universe as
large as ours could have been around for the 15
billion years it takes to evolve life."
Our world, says Polkinghorne, is one "shot through
with 'signs of mind.' I believe that it is an
attractive, coherent and intellectually satisfying
explanation of this fact that there is indeed a
divine Mind behind the scientifically discerned
rational order of the world." Indeed, Polkinghorne
seems to believe the universe exists to produce a
species that allows the universe to comprehend
itself. "Human powers of rational comprehension
vastly exceed anything that could be simply an
evolutionary necessity for survival, or plausibly
construed as some sort of collateral spin-off from
such a necessity ..."
In a similar fashion, physicist Paul Davies
rejects the nihilism implicit in the theories of
the cosmic pessimists. Science, he says, points to
deeper meanings to material existence. The
universe is indubitably about something, it has
meaning and purpose and humans are somehow
connected to that purpose. "If the universe did
not have to be as it is, of necessity -- if, to
paraphrase Einstein, God did have a choice -- then
the fact that nature is so fruitful, that the
universe is so full of richness, diversity and
novelty, is profoundly significant."
Davies is convinced that the universe is governed
by natural laws that encourage matter to evolve
into life forms that can become conscious. "Life"
is so etched into the basic structure of the
universe that its appearance is almost inevitable
when Earth-like conditions are available. "To me,
the true miracle of nature is to be found in the
ingenious and unswerving lawfulness of the cosmos,
a lawfulness that permits complex order to emerge
from chaos, life to emerge from inanimate matter,
and consciousness to emerge from life ..." For
Davies, then, "God" -- understood as the rational
ground of the universe -- imbues the universe with
purpose and meaning.
Stuart Kauffman, a biochemist and theoretical
biologist, conceives of a "fully natural God that
is the creativity in the cosmos." Such a concept
of divinity is offensive to many because it
implies that God, the sacred, is a human
invention, Kauffman admits. "For billions of
believers this is Godless heresy," he says. On the
other hand, "words like 'God' and 'sacred' are
scary to many of us who live in modern, secular
society because they have been used to start wars
and kill millions of people, and we just don't
need any more of that."
What we need, says Kauffman, is to "reinvent the
sacred" because our current notions of God are
obsolete. "Humans have been worshipping gods for
thousands of years. Our sense of God in the
Western world has evolved from Abraham's jealous
God Yahweh to the God of love of the New
Testament. Science and faith have split modern
societies just as some form of global civilization
is emerging. One result is a retreat into
religious fundamentalisms, often bitterly
hostile."
We need to find a middle ground between the
destructive inclination of religious extremism and
spiritually denigrating notions of fundamentalist
atheism and cosmic pessimism, says Kauffman. "The
schism between science and religion can be healed,
but it will require a slow evolution from a
supernatural, theistic God to a new sense of a
fully natural God as our chosen symbol for the
ceaseless creativity in the natural universe."
◙
Cosmic
optimists by and large derive their concepts of
the "sacred" from the idea that the universe is a
self-organizing order that was bound to produce
life. From the moment of the Big Bang some 13
billion years ago the universe contained the
potential for life, not because it was necessarily
designed that way by an external creator (the Abrahamic God, for instance) or some
First Cause (as the ancient Greek philosophers
taught), but because the universe was creating
itself in such a way that the creative process
itself is the process of emergent life.
Kauffman, for instance, theorizes that the sheer
abundance of "being" in the universe eventually
reached a tipping point that allowed the metabolic
sources of life to emerge. To borrow his
scientific language: "As the molecular diversity
of a reaction system increases, a critical
threshold is reached at which collectively
autocatalytic, self-reproducing chemical reaction
networks emerge spontaneously."
This is no small thing, because it suggests that
the emergence of self-reproducing molecular
systems was highly probable. If so, then life is
not the freakish accident the cosmic pessimists
claim it to be. Rather, life emerged because of an
inherent purposiveness in the fabric of the
universe. And that implies, perhaps, that human
existence on a small planet on the rim of a galaxy
that is one of billions of galaxies is not without
some meaning and significance.
Such a thought brings up the so-called anthropic
principle: the idea that the universe is finely
tuned for life to emerge. Not every scientist is
enamored of this notion. They object that the
anthropic principle is a sneaky way to reintroduce
a designer God, a Great Creator. Yet, a number of
physicists have approached this conclusion in one
fashion or another. Physicists such as Stephen
Hawking have pointed out that the earliest seconds
of the universe after the Big Bang reveal some
strange constants: the exact rate of the
universe's expansion (the Hubble constant); the
precise numerical values of the various force
fields -- nuclear, electromagnetic, gravity --
that hold the universe together; and the equally
precise ratio of particles and anti-particles.
The laws of nature seem to be calibrated in order
that galaxies, stars, planets and life itself can
appear, says science writer David Toolan in
summarizing this picture of constancy. If gravity
was just a bit stronger, the universe would have
collapsed before stars -- the factories for the
chemicals of life -- could appear. If gravity had
been any weaker, the universe would have ballooned
too fast for stars to form. If there had been a
slight variation in the strong nuclear force, the
universe would be a vast, starless desert. If
every proton created in the early universe had
been matched by an anti-proton, they would have
eliminated each other. That would have ended the
story of life right there.
No one yet understands why these constants are the
way they are, says David Toolan. But what is clear
is that "the initial conditions of the universe
are so very finely tuned for the development of
life -- in some region of the galaxies at some
time, and perhaps in more locales than planet
Earth."
Pondering this balancing act, Freeman Dyson
wonders whether the universe was arranged for the
arrival of humans. "I don't feel like an alien in
this universe. The more I examine the universe and
study the details of its architecture, the more
evidence I find that the universe in some sense
must have known we were coming."
Paul Davies refers to this apparent cosmic
equilibrium as the "Goldilocks Enigma." The
universe, he says, "looks not just beautiful, but
in some sense deeply ingenious. It looks like it's
been put together in a way that makes it work
exceptionally well ... If it were even slightly
different, it's quite likely there would be no
life."
Such thinking raises questions about the
scientistic view of the world that has prevailed
over the past few centuries. The mechanistic
science that has come to dominate the West in the
400 years since Galileo, Bacon, Descartes and
Newton holds that nature is mindless and
indifferent to the existence of creatures that
feel, think, reason and understand. Self-conscious
beings such as ourselves are "cosmic anomalies,"
to borrow Toolan's phrase. We are, say the cosmic
pessimists, alien intruders huddling around our
religions like frightened men crouching beside a
fire in the middle of dark forest.
But what if the cosmic optimists are right? What
if we really do belong here, part of a still
unknown -- and perhaps humanly unknowable --
cosmic purpose? As Toolan says, "What if the
evolution of mind is what this universe has been
about since the first three seconds?" What if, to
borrow Kauffman's poetic phrase, "life spattered
across megaparsecs, galaxies, galactic clusters"
to make us "members of a creative, mysteriously
unfolding universe?"
Such ideas cannot help but lead to the notion that
maybe we are the means by which the universe seeks
to know itself, self-conscious star stuff that for
some mysterious reason has a role in a long
running cosmic drama. What that role entails and
how long we have to play on the cosmic stage is
unknown. But perhaps if we strut our stuff with
courage in the face of this mystery the future
won't be entirely grim.
Robert Sibley is a senior writer for the Citizen
Selected Sources
Francis Collins,
On God: A New Theology of Celebration, Search
Magazine, Sept.-Oct., 2007.
www.searchmagazine.org/On%20God/collins-on-god
Paul Davies, We
are meant to be here, Salon.com, July 3, 2007;
Physics and the Mind of God: The Templeton Prize
Address, First Things, August-September, 1995; and
God and the New Physics, 1983.
Richard Dawkins,
The Selfish Gene, 1976; The Blind Watchmaker,
1986; and River Out of Eden, 1995.
Freeman Dyson,
Disturbing the Universe, 1979.
Nancy Frankenberry,
The Faith of Scientists in Their Own Words, 2008.
Stephen Hawking, A
Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black
Holes, 1988.
Stuart Kauffman,
Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science,
Reason, and Religion, 2008; Does Science Make
Belief in God Obsolete? John Templeton Foundation
-- Essay, 2008.
www.templeton.org/belief/; Breaking the
Galilean Spell, Edge, 2008,
www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kauffman08/kauffman08_index.html;
Investigations, 2000; and At Home in the Universe:
The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and
Complexity, 1995.
Leon Kass,
Science, Religion and the Human Future,
Commentary, April, 2007; The Beginning of Wisdom:
Reading Genesis, 2003.
Jacques Monad,
Chance and Necessity, 1972.
John Polkinghorne,
Understanding the Universe,Cosmic Questions:
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2001;
and Beyond Science: The Wider Human Context, 1996.
David Toolan, At
Home in the Cosmos, 2001.
Steven Weinberg, A
Designer Universe, New York Review of Books, Oct.
21, 1999.
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