Probable Impossibilities, page 11
A spiritual universe may or may not include God. However, it is usually associated with religion. In his landmark book The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), the Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James characterized religion, in its broadest terms, as “the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.” The “order” in James’s conception of religion helps provide meaning. The order must be unseen, since much of what we see in the world of human affairs is chaotic and hard to understand with rational thought. The hypothesized order provides comfort and security. The hypothesized order suggests that there is some purpose in the cosmos. The order comes from outside the physical universe. It comes from the spiritual universe. Paradoxically, for believers, that same unseen order sometimes chooses to violate the orderly laws of nature and produce a miracle.
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I confess that I myself do not believe in miracles. I have sometimes wondered why this disbelief has always been strong, even from a young age. I suppose my views have been shaped in part by demonstrating to my own satisfaction that the physical world is a lawful place. I remember that as a boy of twelve or thirteen, among my many scientific projects, I began making pendulums by tying a fishing weight to the end of a string. I built pendulums of different lengths and timed their swings with a stopwatch. I had read in Popular Science or some book that the period of the pendulum—the time it takes to make one complete swing—was proportional to the square root of the length of the string. I personally verified that formula and then used it to predict the periods of new pendulums even before I had made them. How amazing, I thought, that this simple formula worked over and over again—at my house, at my friends’ houses, anywhere at all. By contrast to the erratic ups and downs and unpredictable behavior of my brothers and mother and father, nature was reliable.
As I got older, I learned more and more about the laws of nature, about what scientists did, and I didn’t see any evidence of a supernatural world. It seemed to me, and still seems to me, that everything we experience in the physical world can be explained in terms of repeatable and universal laws of nature. We certainly don’t have a complete set of the laws of nature, but I join most scientists in believing that a complete set of laws exists. The history of science has been a history of constant progress in discovering the laws of nature.
At the same time, it seems extremely unlikely to me that there is another kind of reality that exists outside the physical universe but that can enter our time and space at will. I simply have seen no evidence for such a thing. We all have to come to our own view of the world, based on the experiences of our own and the people we trust. In this regard, I have always put stock in Occam’s razor. Among competing hypotheses to explain events, I go with the simplest, the one that requires the least number of assumptions, until that hypothesis is proven wrong. If events in the physical universe can be explained by laws of nature, then why invoke anything beyond nature? To my mind, the parting of the Red Sea and other reported miracles are not documented and confirmed. Furthermore, they contradict the reality that I have come to embrace through countless personal experiences with nature, big and small, from my childhood experiments to my research in physics to my everyday life in the world.
All of that said, I still consider myself a spiritual person. By spirituality, I mean belief in things that are larger than myself, appreciation of beauty, commitment to certain rules of moral behavior, such as the Golden Rule. Spirituality does not require belief in miracles.
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My wife and I spend summers on a small island in Maine, far from any town. At night, the skies are quite dark. Sometimes, when there is no wind blowing and the tidal flow is small and the ocean is very still, I can see the reflection of the stars in the water. At such moments, the water looks like a dark carpet with a million tiny sparkles of light, which gently bob and ripple with each passing wave. Even though I know all the science, I am totally mesmerized and awed. For me, that is miracle enough.
Our Lonely Home in Nature
The tornadoes that devastated Arkansas and several other states in 2014, turning homes into matchsticks and killing dozens of people, and the deadly mudslide in Washington State that same year, demonstrate once again the unimaginable power of nature. Of course, we have seen this before. The 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean, killing over 250,000 people in Indonesia and other countries. Hurricane Katrina in 2005, ending the lives of at least 1,800 people and wreaking nearly $100 billion in property damage. The 2011 tsunami in Japan, drowning over 18,000 souls. And, of course, the coronavirus gripping the world at this moment in May 2020, as I now revise this essay.
After each of these disasters, we grieve over the human lives lost, the innocent people drowned or crushed or infected without warning as they slept in their beds or worked in their fields or sat at their office desks. We feel angry at the scientists and policy makers who didn’t foresee the impending calamity or, if forewarned, failed to protect us. Beyond the grieving and anger is a more subtle emotion. We feel betrayed. We feel betrayed by nature. Aren’t we a part of nature, born in nature, sustained by the food brought forth by nature, warmed by the natural Sun? Don’t we take pleasure in walking through grassy fields and sitting barefoot on the edge of the sea? Don’t we have a deep spiritual connection with the wind and the water and the land that Emerson and Wordsworth so lovingly described, that Turner and Constable painted in scenes of serenity and grandeur? How could Mother Nature do this to us, her children?
Yet despite our strongly felt kinship and oneness with nature, all the evidence suggests that nature doesn’t care one whit about us. Tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, pandemics happen at moments and places without the slightest consideration of human inhabitants.
I remember the first time I encountered the insensible power of nature. My wife and I had chartered a small sailboat for a two-week holiday in the Greek isles. After setting out from Piraeus, we headed south and hugged the coast, which we held three or four miles to port. With binoculars, we could just make out the glinting of houses on the land, fragments of buildings. Then we passed the tip of Cape Sounion and turned west toward Hydra. Within a couple of hours, both the land and all other boats disappeared. Looking around in a full circle, all we could see was water, extending out and out in all directions until it joined with the sky. At first, I felt elation. Then I felt fear. Because during the summer season, the Aegean Sea is plagued by a fierce, dry wind called the meltemi, which can appear without warning in clear air and be upon you in minutes with great waves and gales. At any moment, a wall of water and wind could lunge from the horizon, wash over the boat, and drown my wife and me. I realized that there was no compassionate overseer or oceanic consciousness to prevent that from happening. To the great expanse of water, my wife and I were just additional pieces of flotsam and jetsam. And I remembered someone I knew who had been walking along the shore in Alaska one day and was suddenly swept away by a crashing wave.
I believe that our comfort with nature is an illusion. Certainly, we are part of nature, but does nature care about us? Here on Earth, even with our earthquakes and storms, we have no conception of the range and the power of nature. In many other parts of the cosmos, conditions of temperature and atmosphere and gravity are far more extreme than on Earth and quite inhospitable to life. On planet Mercury, for example, the temperature is 800 degrees. On Neptune, it is −328. On Uranus, the winds exceed 500 miles per hour. There are dead stars so compact that a penny on their surface would weigh over a hundred thousand tons. In the last decade, we have discovered over a thousand planets outside our solar system, many with environments far different from Earth’s. One world is apparently covered entirely with water and has an atmosphere of thick steam. Another world orbits its central star in a mere nine hours. (Its year is less than one Earth day.)
For all of recoded history, humankind has had a conflicted view of nature. In ancient times, we made awesome and frightening gods of the natural elements. The Babylonian-Assyrian god of storms, Adad, brought rain to the crops but also caused havoc and death on land and on sea. Vulcan, the god of fire, both created and destroyed and was sometimes invoked to annihilate one’s enemies. In Chinese thought, especially in Taoism, we are advised to follow the flow of nature’s rhythms for moral and physical health. So close to nature are we in some mythologies that human beings are regularly transformed into other animals and even inanimate matter. In Aztec mythology, the twin volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl were once human lovers, later turned into mountains by the gods. In the other direction, nature is constantly given human qualities. Wordsworth wrote that “nature never did betray the heart that loved her.” Mother Nature suckles and comforts us in every culture on Earth. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, some environmentalists have claimed that the entire Earth is a single ecosystem, a “superorganism” called Gaia.
I would argue that we have been fooling ourselves. Nature, in fact, is mindless. Nature is neither friend nor foe, neither malevolent nor benevolent.
Nature is purposeless. Nature simply is. We may find nature beautiful or terrible, but those feelings are human constructions. Such utter and complete mindlessness is hard for us to accept, as creatures with minds. We feel such a strong connection to nature. But the relationship between nature and us is one-sided. There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall. That absence of mind, coupled with so much power, is what so frightened me on the sailboat in Greece.
The 2014 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change documents the damage now being done by human-created greenhouse gases and global warming, the changes in weather patterns, the rise of sea levels, the droughts and the storms and the dangers to human habitation and agriculture. In reacting to the report, we should not be concerned about protecting our planet. Nature can survive far more than what we can do to it and is totally oblivious to whether Homo sapiens lives or dies in the next hundred years. Our concern should be about protecting ourselves. Because we have only ourselves to protect us.
Is Life Special?
A rocket powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen and carrying a scientific observatory blasted off into space at 10:49 p.m., March 6, 2009 (by local calendars and clocks). The launch came from the third planet out from a G-type star, 25,000 light-years from the center of a galaxy called the Milky Way, itself located on the outskirts of the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. On the night of the launch, the sky was clear, with no precipitation or wind, and a temperature of 292 degrees by the absolute temperature scale. Local intelligent life-forms cheered the launch. Shortly after the blastoff, the government agency responsible for spacecraft, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, wrote in the global network of computers: “Our team is thrilled to be a part of something so meaningful to the human race—Kepler will help us understand if our Earth is unique or if others like it are out there.”
The above account might have been written by an intelligent life-form located on exactly the kind of distant planet that Kepler would search for. Named after the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, the observatory was specifically designed to search for planets outside our solar system that would be “habitable”—that is, neither so near their central star that water would be boiled off, nor so far away that water would freeze. Most biologists consider that liquid water is a precondition for life, even life very different from that on Earth. Kepler surveyed about 150,000 Sun-like stellar systems in our galaxy and discovered over a thousand alien planets. Although the satellite stopped functioning in 2013, its enormous stockpile of data is still being analyzed. For centuries, we human beings have speculated on the possible existence and prevalence of life elsewhere in the universe. For the first time in history, we can begin to answer that profound question.
At this point, the results of the Kepler mission can be extrapolated to suggest that something like 10 percent of all stars have a habitable planet in orbit. That fraction is large. With a hundred billion stars just in our galaxy alone, and so many other galaxies, it is highly probable that there are many many other solar systems with life. From this perspective, life in the cosmos is common.
However, there’s another, grander perspective from which life in the cosmos is rare. That perspective considers all forms of matter, both animate and inanimate. Even if all “habitable” planets (as determined by Kepler) do indeed harbor life, the fraction of all material in the universe in living form is fantastically small. Assuming that the fraction of planet Earth in living form, called the biosphere, is typical of other life-sustaining planets, I estimate that the fraction of all matter in the universe in living form is roughly one-billionth of one-billionth. Here’s a way to visualize such a tiny fraction. If the Gobi Desert represents all of the matter flung across the cosmos, living matter is only a few grains of sand in that desert. How should we think about this extreme rarity of life?
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As I have commented in previous chapters, throughout history most of us have considered ourselves and other life-forms to contain some special, nonmaterial essence that is absent in nonliving matter and that obeys different principles. The eighth-century BC Egyptian royal official Kuttamuwa built an eight-hundred-pound monument to house his immortal soul and asked that his friends feast there after his physical demise to commemorate him in his afterlife. The eleventh-century Persian polymath Avicenna argued that since we would be able to think and to be self-aware even if we were totally disconnected from all external sensory input, there must be some nonmaterial soul inside of us. These are all “vitalist” ideas.
Modern biology has challenged the theory of vitalism. In 1828, the German chemist Friedrich Wöhler synthesized the organic substance urea from nonorganic chemicals. Urea is a byproduct of metabolism in many living organisms and, before Wöhler’s work, was believed to be uniquely associated with living beings. Later in the century, the German physiologist Max Rubner showed that the energy used by human beings in movement, respiration, and other forms of activity is precisely equal to the energy content of food consumed. That is, there are no hidden and nonmaterial sources of energy that power human beings. In more recent years, the composition of proteins, hormones, brain cells, and genes has been reduced to individual atoms, without the need to invoke nonmaterial substances.
Yet, polls of the American public show that three-quarters of people believe in some form of life after death. Surely, this belief too is a version of vitalism. If our bodies and brains are nothing more than material atoms, then, as Lucretius wrote two millennia ago, when those atoms disperse as they do after death, there can be no further existence of the living being that once was.
Paradoxically, if we can give up the belief that our bodies and brains contain some transcendent, nonmaterial essence, if we can embrace the idea that we are completely material, then we arrive at a new kind of specialness—an alternative to the specialness of vitalism. We are special material. Not special because our atoms are different from atoms in rocks and water, and not special because we have a nonmaterial essence inside us, but special because our atoms are arranged in a special way as to create life, and consciousness. We humans living on our one planet wring our hands about the brevity of our lives and our mortal restraints, but we do not often think about how improbable it is to be alive at all. Of all the zillions of atoms and molecules in the universe, we have the privilege of being composed of those very, very few atoms that have joined together in the special arrangement to make living matter. We exist in that one-billionth of one-billionth. We are that one grain of sand in the desert.
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The two tramps in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, placed on a minimalist stage without time or without space, waiting interminably for the mysterious Godot, capture our bafflement with the meaning of existence. Estragon: “What did we do yesterday?” Vladimir: “What did we do yesterday?” Estragon: “Yes.” Vladimir: “Why…(Angrily) Nothing is certain when you’re about.” Of course, there are questions that do not have answers.
But if we can manage to get outside of our usual thinking, if we can rise to a truly mind-bending view of the cosmos, there’s another way to think of existence. In our extraordinarily entitled position of being not only living matter but conscious matter, we are the cosmic “observers.” We are uniquely aware of ourselves and the cosmos around us. We can watch and record. We are the only mechanism by which the universe can comment on itself. All the rest, all those other grains of sand in the desert, are dumb, lifeless matter.
Of course, the universe does not need to comment on itself. A universe with no living matter at all could function without any trouble—mindlessly following the conservation of energy and the principle of cause and effect and the other laws of physics and biology. A universe does not need minds, or any living matter at all. (Indeed, in the recent “multiverse” hypothesis endorsed by many physicists, the vast majority of universes are totally lifeless.) But in this writer’s opinion, a universe without comment is a universe without meaning. What does it mean to say that a waterfall, or a mountain, is beautiful? The concept of beauty, and indeed all concepts of value and meaning, require observers. Without a mind to observe it, a waterfall is only a waterfall, a mountain is only a mountain. It is we conscious matter, the rarest of all forms of matter, that can take stock and record and announce this cosmic panorama of existence before us.
