Saturday Morning @ The Story-of- Everything Place

Reason? Or the Whole Life Experience?

2008-05-23T08:00:00.000-04:00

How many of are making journeys of the spirit? In February the Pew Forum reported that 28 percent of American adults had left the faith of their childhood--44 percent, if you included migration among Protestant denominations. Many ended up in other faiths, but 16 percent ended up in none. The amount of movement was staggering.

To hear the neo-atheists tell the tale--Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others--the only journey worth making is the one from religion to science. You "break the spell" of religion by embracing reason and evidence. If it sounds like a head trip, it is; and nothing could be farther from the truth.

People travel, not heads. Research I published decades ago, as scientific as you can get, showed that "pre-intellectual" or "a-rational" factors were the keys to transitions involving religion. The whole person made the journey, not just the faculty of reason. The whole life experience shaped the outcome.

The book containing this research will be re-issued this fall by Transaction/Aldine. The subjects were 100 young adults raised Catholic, 50 of whom remained in the church and 50 of whom did not. The two groups had received identical exposure to the church. The two acknowledged the same "evidence" about it. But now they construed that evidence in opposite ways. It wasn't a question of reason. Something came before reason. Something lay outside of it.

You can read a summary here, but the biographies of two famous scientists make the same point. When Charles Darwin boarded the Beagle at the age of 22, he was a firm believer in Genesis and had in fact completed studies for the ministry. Later in life he became an agnostic. He abandoned religion not because of any evidence he found on the Galapagos nor because religion was incompatible with his theory of evolution. Though he had given up a belief in creationism, Darwin left religion only when he beloved daugher Annie fell ill and died. He could not reconcile the loss with Christianity's claim that a good and loving God cares about every hair on our head.

As director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins led a scientific journey comparable to Darwin's. Yet his religious journey was nearly the opposite. At age of 22 Collins was an atheist, the son of freethinkers. He entered medical school and a few years later began having bedside conversations with sick and dying patients. Many were deeply religious and, despite their terrible suffering, they were at peace "Suddenly all my arguments [for atheism] seemed very thin," Collins wrote in The Language of God. "I had the sensation that the ice under my feet was cracking.'' He began an intellectual search that led to C.S. Lewis and ultimately to Christianity, where his faith survived a trauma, though not a death, involving his daughter. This was a journey of reason, science, evidence and . . . bedside conversations. Not a head trip, but a whole life experience.

The Metanexus Institute likes to talk about "the whole story of the whole cosmos for the whole person." If you tell such a story, it will come from everything that's happened in your life.

Note: You can read the tales of science-spirit journeys by clicking here. They've been submitted by readers, and most (but not all) are about traveling from Old to New. You're more than welcome to add to the collection.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 JOHN N. KOTRE

The Journey

2008-05-16T13:45:00.011-04:00

He was fifty years old, and he still didn't know how his own mind worked, what its deepest desire was. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 19)

I came to the science-religion dialogue as a scholar in neither science nor religion. My professional work was in psychology, and there I wrote books about the course of life, about memory for life events, and about the impact of lives on future generations. Somewhere along the line I left "scientific" psychology to record the tales of life's journey. They called it "narrative" psychology.

As I was finishing the last of those books, a story came to me. It came in several pieces over the course of several weeks. A title came, a character, a personification, a plot. The Story of Everything. When I told it to my wife, I wept.

I had no idea why the story moved me as it did, but I knew I had to write it. It took five years. I had a lot of science to learn and a genre to figure out, and besides, other things were going on in my life. At first I thought I was writing a children's story but then I realized it was a parable.

Only now do I realize why I was so moved. This was the tale of my journey. The events weren't autobiographical, but the energy surely was:

Story. Adam had no idea how often the word entered his mind and how seldom it escaped. He didn’t know how many beginnings and middles and endings were trapped inside of him, or how they kept lining up, now this way, now that. He didn't realize that, at his core, Matter was a story, not a science. Life was a story, too, not "biology." It was narrative, all of it, but Adam didn't know it. He was fifty years old, and he still didn't know how his own mind worked, what its deepest desire was.

Later, Adam was enlightened:

One morning at dawn, a low shaft of sunlight streaked through the valley where Adam was staying and outlined every flower, rock, and pebble. It was a solitary ray, and it lasted no more than a minute. But in that minute there awoke in Adam a solitary longing. Why that? he asked. Why now? It made no difference: he might as well have told the sun to go back down. For in that minute Adam learned which way from here. He learned what he had yet to do in life, perhaps what he was born to do. I am to speak a Story, he said, and he knew which story it was.

And yet he could not speak that story. Something had to happen first, and it finally did in a dream:

. . . When the sky began to panic, clouds came in and covered it, clouds so thick and low that he could hardly breathe. It began to rain.

Adam stood in the rain. As it came over him, he felt a cleansing. Something said, I forgive. And something else, I am forgiven.

Adam could not speak his story because it was new and he loved the old, even though it was deeply flawed. He had to forgive the old its sins. He needed forgiveness for abandoning it. Then he could speak "cleanly."

No matter how compelling the New Story, no matter how much the evidence behind it, there is still an Old to leave behind. You may say good-bye to it. You may say good riddance. You may feel regret. You may never look back. You may deny there was a leaving. The kind of departure depends upon the point of departure, on the ties that bound you to the place of origin. They can be complex, and they're all part of the journey, or at least they were of mine. Forgive and be forgiven.

Note: You can read the tales of science-spirit journeys by clicking here. They've been submitted by readers, and most (but not all) are about traveling from Old to New. You're more than welcome to add to the collection.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 JOHN N. KOTRE

The Ornament of the World

2008-04-18T13:18:00.009-04:00

In 955 a Benedictine nun named Hroswitha wrote of the marvels of a city far from her convent in Saxony. The city was Cordoba in present-day Spain, and Hroswitha called it "the ornament of the world." I'm struck by her metaphor.

Hroswitha learned about Cordoba from a man who came from there--a Christian bishop named Racemundo who was also called Rabi ibn Zayd. Racemundo was both a leader in his church and a diplomat in the corps of Cordoba's Muslim ruler. In 955 he was sent to the German court of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, and there he met Hroswitha. Racemundo spoke Latin and Arabic and knew the literature of the long-forgotten Greeks. He was a reflection of the ornament-city.

Exactly two hundred years before Racemundo's trip, in 755, a young Muslim of the ruling Umayyad family escaped the slaughter of his relatives by rival Abbasids. That was back east in Damascus. Abd al-Rahman fled west and wound up in Spain, in a frontier of the Islamic Empire known as al-Andalus, or Andalusia. A year later he became its emir. The House of Umayya had a new home.

Author Maria Rosa Menocal describes what happened next:

Abd al-Rahman . . . vigorously and uncompromisingly administered al-Andalus while refusing to play the games of tribal loyalties. In the long run his strategy succeeded brilliantly, and the result was (among other things) a thriving, powerful, and well-organized state, which he passed on to his heirs, and they to theirs, for a quarter of a millenium." (The Ornament of the World, p. 57)

At the heart of al-Andalus was Cordoba, known for its wealth, its military prowess, its palaces, its running water, its paved and well lit streets--but especially, wrote Hroswitha, "for its seven streams of wisdom." By one count, the caliph's library held four hundred thousand volumes, at a time when the largest in Christian Europe held a scant four hundred. Here Andalusians translated and eventually brought to the Latin West the lost works of the Greeks. The "Dark Ages" never cast a shadow on the ornament.

Cordoba was a city of tolerance. Despite intractable differences and enduring hostilities, Jews, Christians, and Muslims managed to live together in peace. And more: they blended cultures, as in the person of Racemundo. You could see it in their food, clothing, and language, in their philosophy, art, poetry, and song. Today it's visible in their architecture. (Take a virtual tour.) Cultures fused in Cordoba not because of interfaith dialogue but because beauty was allowed to cast its spell. The triumph wasn't doctrinal; it was aesthetic. Hence Hroswitha's methaphor.

Cordoba continued to shine even when bitter civil wars among Muslim factions destroyed the caliphate and fragmented al-Andalus. Christian power grew (the first Crusade was announced in 1095) but not at the expense of symbiosis in Andalusia. Even Ferdinand III took part. A Christian saint-to-be, he used a Muslim alliance to take over Cordoba in 1236. When he died, his son had his tomb inscribed not only in Latin, Hebrew, and Castilian, but also in Arabic.

Two weeks ago I wondered if science and religion could meet along the "Beauty Way." In Cordoba it appears they did. It wasn't the science of our day, but still it mingled freely with three different monotheisms. There was beauty in that mingling. Hroswitha chose her metaphor well.

P.S. You can learn more about the Andalusian story from the book (and upcoming PBS special) by Maria Rosa Menocal. The Metanexus Institute will celebrate this story at its forthcoming conference this July in Madrid. Menocal will be there.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 JOHN N. KOTRE

Lilies

2008-04-11T13:51:00.033-04:00

Last week, in the expanse of a desert, we were reminded of the beauty of Matter. This week, thanks to another reader, we can contemplate the beauty of living things. Dick Bayerl has had a long fascination with lilies and sent us these photos.

It's easy to get lost in the simple elegance of Lilium canadense, a wild variety found in eastern Canada. Design unfolds, but so does spontaneity. Is the combination a metaphor for all creation, for the cosmos itself?

According to the fossil record, flowers appeared out of nowhere about 125 million years ago. Chemical evidence in the record hints at an earlier date: 250 million years.

Flowers appeared as a way of attracting insects that would spread a plant's genes. It was a feat of co-evolution. This is Lilium henryi from China, and it "remembers" how to attract, over and over again.

Long after flowers emerged, humans came on the scene. They created hybrids--a feat of conscious design. This one is derived from Lilium henryi above. Now beauty exists not for the sake of genes, but for its own sake.

Be silent now and drink the beauty in. This flower lasts but a day.

How did the cosmos get around to growing lilies? Natural selection explains why these flowers look the way they do. It explains why I have the eyes to see them. But things are going on here that natural selection cannot reach.

Beauty is going on. The idea of it. The experience of it. The spirit of it. Not the kind of Idea that Plato had in mind, but close to it. In the New Story, beauty is an emergent. It depends on what came before--on genes and eyes and natural selection. But it cannot be reduced to them. When beauty becomes an Idea, something new starts to happen, something more, something "higher." Something causal. A reality is born.

Moments ago, in cosmic time, beauty emerged and began to circle an ordinary star in a remote region of the universe. Producing flowers was strange, but producing an idea was the oddest thing a universe could do. You just had one.

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Impossibly Beautiful II

2008-04-04T13:00:00.038-04:00

On my way to a writing a series about journeys, I stopped to reread comments about the Goldilocks Enigma. What was on the mind of readers? For several it was beauty, as it had been once before.

Reader Mark Thomas told me about a stunning collection of photos entitled Navajoland. (The photographer, Alain Briot, was good enough to let me post these samples.) "Who perceives what is beautiful?" Mark asked. "What is the code for beauty? Is it inherent in our DNA?"

Beauty lies in design, but what is the source of design? Above, one stone monument casts a shadow on another. The placement of the shadow is perfect, the design pleasing. Yet no intelligence planned it.

Here, a shaft of light enters an enclosed space. The required precision comes from "blind" nature. At Newgrange, another shaft of light enters an enclosure (take a look), but now the precision comes from human planning. Whether the source is blind or intelligent, I see little difference in the result.

Something about these photos were "eerily reminiscent" to Mark of Hubble space photos. Was it the expanse? The emptiness? The call from "out there"? In The Story of Everything the desert actually calls to Adam, telling him what to do in life.

How many similar calls have come in deserts? In desert caves? How many lie at the heart of religion? In this scene, is it the perspective that beckons? Or perhaps the focus on a single spire, a single shadow. Monotheism began in deserts.

Such calls are heard no matter what the season. What does beauty have to do with them? What does it have to do with religion? For that matter, what does it have to do with science?

Beauty lies at the core of neither. The universal religious commandment is not "Be beautiful" but rather "Be compassionate." Yet beauty is never far from religion. It permeates its art, its music, its architecture. It is seen in arches and pillars and spirals and domes, in stone that looks like lace.

Nor is beauty that far from science. Copernicus embraced heliocentrism not because it predicted planetary motion better than geocentrism (it didn't), not because he had proof of the earth's motion (he didn't), but because a sun-centered system was aesthetically pleasing. Similarly, Mark Thomas finds Planck units appealing because they're "beautifully simple."

This is from the Navajo Beauty Way ceremony:

On the trail marked with pollen may I walk
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk
With dew about my feet may I walk
With beauty may I walk

Walk with beauty and you may find a place where science and religion meet.

P.S. Be sure to see the work of Alain Briot at www.beautiful-landscape.com.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2008 JOHN N. KOTRE
PHOTOS COPYRIGHT (C) ALAIN BRIOT

The Pearl of Great Price

2008-03-14T13:44:00.013-04:00

All I know is where the cosmos is right now. Not at the beginning. Not at the end. But somewhere in the middle, two minutes after a most remarkable turn of events. (The Story of Everything, Chap. 25)

I'm dead-drop certain of one thing. Everyone agrees on it. Theists and atheists do. So do those who believe the universe has an outside, and those who don't. Also on board: those who endorse a strong version of the anthropic principle, those who endorse a weak version, and those who refer to it as the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (CRAP). Even Goldilocks would say okay.

Here's that one thing: the universe did produce an observer. It produced its own scientists, philosophers, theologians, poets, and storytellers. And, in cosmic time, it did it moments ago.

Right now we treat this indisputable fact like an old slipper. We're comfortable with it. We're used to it. We take it for granted. The wow factor disappeared millennia ago. We're not astonished by what is truly astonishing:

The man pointed down the coastline. "Look at all the sand on this beach. Suppose we came across a grain of sand, a single grain, that talked. How improbable would that be? How improbable that it existed? How improbable that we found it? One grain of sand is not the center of anything. But when one starts to talk, you've got to listen."

No slipper there. This character from The Story of Everything is not wowed by 400 billion galaxies (and counting), not by the trillions of stars they contain, not by God-knows-how-many planets. The universe is a veritable Sahara of sand, but he's astonished by just one grain. And with good reason.

It's almost impossible for us to get into this man's shoes and see the way he does. We carry too much history. For thousands of years, all we have known is the talking. We cannot, in fact, remember not talking. But only recently have we glimpsed all the sand. Of course we're astonished by the wrong thing.

So how can we put the sand in its place? How can we flip figure and ground? Here's a way of starting:

(1) Appreciate how out of place our talking is. I remember the first time I found sea shells embedded in sandstone in the middle of a southern Indiana field. I chipped a few out just to remember the eerie strangeness of it all. How in the world did they get there? Talkers circling a nondescript star are equally out of place. How did they get there?

(2) Appreciate how recent the talking is. On a scale where the age of the universe becomes one year, it began two minutes ago. All the stars and planets and galaxies aren't new. This bit of talking is. And it began--literally--right under our noses.

(3) Sell everything in your Story for this little grain. It's the pearl of great price. It's the rock-hard evidence. Forget about beginnings you weren't there for. Forget about endings you have no way of knowing. What was it like, this dawn of observing, of narrating?

"What's it like for a planet to wake up? And to do it for the first time?" That was the hard part, the impossible part, the man said--to picture the first time. "I can't imagine a first awakening. I've tried to do it, but I cannot. It's not like getting up in the morning. When you get up in the morning, you put on history, like clothes. Every day. But the first time . . . ."

I welcome the cloud that covers the beginning and the end of Everything. I'm happy, at the end of my life, to be in the middle. But I'm left in a quandary. What do I tell my grandchildren? It has to be something they will love, as I loved what I was taught as a child, but I don't yet know what it is. I honestly don't.

P.S. This is the last article in the Goldilocks-enigma series. I will be taking time off to prepare another series on journeys. In the meantime, I will post some thoughts on your latest set of comments.

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N=1

2008-03-07T12:01:00.005-05:00

I'm not a know-it-all, the Story realized that night on the cliff. I'm just a Story of Everything. (The Story of Everything, Chap. 21)

It's been fun guessing, but now it's time to nail the story down. We have here a universe that produced its own observer. It produced its own speaker, of that we can be sure, and it did so using hydrogen and a few other elements. Strange to our ear--why would hydrogen lead to a story?--but that's what happened.

The anthropic principle in cosmology, a.k.a. the Goldilocks enigma, gets you thinking about all that could or would have been. If X had been a little slower or Y a little stronger or just one number different, the universe would have ____ (FILL IN THE BLANK) ____. It reminds me of the years I spent listening to people tell the story of their lives. They would finish those "ifs" with everything from "I could have been a millionaire today" to "I wouldn't be talking to you today."

Coulda. Woulda. We're all Monday morning quarterbacks, but let's face it: we've got the life we've got and we've got the universe we've got--the one with the observer. That universe arose from what cosmologists call a singularity. N=1. There is no evidence for any other universes and it is proving impossible to test for their existence. There are regions in our own that we will never know about. They're retreating from us with ever increasing speed.1 So whether you talk about "other universes" or "unobservable regions" in our own, you're saying the same thing. You're saying "beyond our knowledge." N=1.

A life needs limits, and so does a story, and so, I suspect, does a cosmological theory. If N=infinity, there are no limits, no constraints. In a life, that means dissipation, and I think it does in a story as well. If everything is possible, then nothing is possible. Science has always felt constrained by evidence. Let's wait for the evidence to tell us that N=2 or 3 or more.

If we accept that N=1, certain things follow. There is no point in talking about "observer selection" effects in universes. There is nothing to select from. There is no point in calculating the odds behind our unlikely emergence. As the philosopher C. S. Peirce stated, "in reference to a single case considered in itself, probability can have no meaning." Indeed, if N=1, the anthropic principle (and the Goldilocks enigma) may have to be shown the door. They may be saying nothing more than, "If the universe were different, it would be different."

What becomes of God if N=1? What becomes of the one who presumably "designed" or "tuned" this cosmos? If you read the fine print in the fine-tuning argument, you'll discover a few key words. The values of the physical constants that shape our universe are arbitrary. They were free to be set. Someone had to dial up a number--to choose 186,282.397 for the speed of light, for example. There's also an assumption that the values are independent of each other, so that setting one doesn't automatically set the others.

But, according to cosmologist Paul Davies, a deeper understanding of the laws of the cosmos may show that these values aren't arbitrary at all. They may not be free and independent. In that case, the God who assigned the numbers will turn out to be, not a God-of-the-gaps, but a God-of-just-one-gap, the very first. He will be a symbol of our ignorance, and we will wonder, with Einstein, if an actual God had any choice when he created this universe. Another limit to our knowing.

Limits give a story a border of darkness, a blessed constraint without which we could not speak. Let's embrace that border. The other guys in the other universes can spin their own tales. Let's stick to the one we've got. N=1.

1. See "The End of Cosmology?" in the current issue of Scientific American for a discussion of the impact of an accelerating expansion on our ability to know the universe.

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The Three Bears Return

2008-02-29T12:01:00.008-05:00

Then how can all things be for man's sake? How can we be the masters of God's handiwork? (Johannes Kepler)

It's not a pretty picture. While Goldilocks is sound asleep, the three bears return to their house. "Someone's been eating my porridge," growls Papa Bear. "Someone's been eating mine," says Mama Bear. "Someone ate all of mine!" cries the baby. They find the broken chair and the messy beds. Just as they spot Goldilocks, she wakes up and screams. Then she runs out of the house and into the woods, never to return.

That's the tame version. In the older, R-rated edition, Goldilocks jumps out of a second story window when she sees the bears. "Whether she broke her neck in the fall; or ran into the wood and was lost there; or found her way out of the wood, and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her."

The story after which a cosmological enigma is named is actually a cautionary tale. In case you missed the warning, here it is: "Goldilocks, don't assume the porridge is for you. Or the chairs, or the beds, or anything in the house. They're not yours."

Should we take similar warning? Are we "the masters of God's handiwork," as Kepler asked? Is the universe for us?

You know how we came about. The very first stars baked up carbon in their furnaces, then died and sent it into space. A second generation of stars gathered it up and generated heavier elements, only to die and repeat the process. The spatial debris coalesced into a third set of stars--but also into planets, our own included. From there our kind of life (carbon-based) could emerge, and finally us, the surveyors of it all. On a scale where 13.7 billion years is reduced to 1 year, it took until December 31 and roughly 11:57 PM to get to us. That's a whole lot of time.

And it's a lot of space. All throughout that cosmic year the universe never stopped expanding, and it's doing so now at ever increasing speeds. In this game old equals big, so if the universe were any smaller (i.e., any younger), we would not be around. To get its observer, to get its story, the cosmos had to be immense.

It took a long time, a convoluted route, and gobs of space. If the point was to get to us, wouldn't there be a simpler way? Why bother with all the rest? Why not just . . . make us?

There are many answers to that question, and they could be placed on a continuum from "weak" to "strong" anthropic principles. But I can't say if we were "an accident waiting to happen," as a character in The Story of Everything does; or if the universe "must have known we were coming," as physicist Freeman Dyson does; or if "our conscious self-reflective existence is part of God's intention," as astronomer Owen Gingerich believes.

But I am not above heeding a warning from three storybook bears (especially the big growly one). Don't assume it's all for you. The universe may be for God, it may be for living creatures, it may be for itself, but it's not for us alone. There's just too much of it. Maybe the bears are saying that other creatures count too. What matters is the good of the whole.

And yet no other creature has the consciousness and freedom that we do. If creation isn't for us, maybe at this point it's up to us. At least the planet earth is. Our decisions have affected its present condition and will matter even more in the future. Listen to nature growling and you'll end up with the Biblical notion of stewardship.

Note: You can lend your signature to a movement of those who believe the earth is up to us at TheEarthAct.org.

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You Call This Friendly?

2008-02-22T12:01:00.009-05:00

listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go
(e.e. cummings)

Let's do the math. Two bowls of porridge were wrong for Goldilocks. Two chairs were wrong, and so were two of the beds. I forgot . . . when Goldilocks sat in Baby Bear's chair, it broke. Put that chair in the "wrong" column too, making Goldilocks two for nine. Only 22% of the house she found in the woods was right for her.

How much of the cosmos is right for us? How much is wrong? You can do the math or just take a walk in space, no equipment allowed. The math would go like this. Calculate the amount of space in the universe. Calculate how much is occupied by creatures like us, or observers of any kind (SETI is having a hard time finding them). Divide the latter by the former. You'd get one of those astronomical numbers. A decimal point followed by lines of zeroes, then a 1, then the % sign. An unprotected walk in space would make the same point. It's not a "bio-friendly" universe.

Yet that's the term cosmologists use, whether they think there's a Who outside or many whats. Midway through the Goldilocks enigma--I'm still flying by the seat of my pants--I want to think about that. I want to think about words like "just right" and "benevolent." Theoretical cosmology is mathematical, and its practitioners are really smart guys, but at some point they use language--my language--and that's where I'm entitled to a say. Here are some reflections.

1. The initial conditions of the universe were just right for lots of things. They were just right for toothpaste and barges and YouTube and lower interest rates. If you're going to talk about an "anthropic" principle, said Carl Sagan, you should talk about a "lithic" principle as well, since the initial conditions of the universe were perfectly right for stones. Take any outcome of any kind, dig into its history, and of course its origins will be just right.

2.The odds will always be astronomical. In 1969 I went to a convention, walked up to a desk, and started talking to the person standing next to me. If I had arrived at that precise place a minute sooner or a minute later, the conversation would not have taken place and my life today would be very different. As far as odds go, that's just the tip of the iceberg. What had to be right, years before, for the person I met to be born? For me to be born? For his parents? For my parents? And so on. Don't be impressed by all the zeroes: any outcome of any kind has overcome incredible odds.

3. If the initial conditions were just right for good, they were just right for evil. They were just right for terror and torture, for tsunamis and Katrinas. This is a universe with mixed outcomes. If you call it benevolent, you have to call it malevolent as well. This is a problem for believers in the Who outside, a problem that goes by the name of theodicy.

Maybe it's the earth that's bio-friendly, and not the entire universe. The dinosaurs might think so, their demise having come from outer space. But what about all the other species--over 99% of the total--that have gone extinct? It seems that life on our planet proceeds by eliminating other life. There ought to be a friendlier way. And while the earth is habitable now, it won't always be, even if we take good care of it. When the sun begins to die billions of years from now, it will become a red giant, and its outer edge will reach the earth's present orbit.

I'm not in a gray wintry mood, just in a mood for perspective. I want to get the story straight. It isn't lush out there in space. It isn't a rain forest. It's a near vacuum and it can get down to three degrees Kelvin and that's really cold. To say that the universe as a whole is "bio-friendly," much less observer-friendly, is myopic. How about "bio-tolerant"? Barely bio-tolerant? Just barely? The universe had the stuff to make us, but if it's friendly, it has a funny way of showing it.

Note: Paul Davies addresses degrees of bio-friendliness on p. 174 of Cosmic Jackpot. From the multiverse point of view, he says, it is likely that our universe is "marginally," rather than "optimally," bio-friendly.

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The WHAT Outside

2008-02-15T12:01:00.007-05:00

If there is a large stock of clothing, you're not surprised to find a suit that fits. If there are many universes, each governed by a differing set of numbers, there will be one where there is a particular set of numbers suitable to life. We are in that one. (Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, in Just Six Numbers)

Every now and then a universe happens. What's the big deal? A lot have happened, a lot are happening, and a lot more are going happen. All have different initial conditions and different laws. All are governed by different numbers. Only one set of numbers produces a universe with an observer.

Welcome to the second solution to the Goldilocks enigma. It addresses the statistical improbability of our universe without turning to divine providence. If the odds of a universe like ours are one in a gazillion, well, there are zillions of other universes out there. To use last week's analogy, there are zillions of other firing squads we know nothing about. In the vast majority of them, all the marksmen hit the target. In a few, a couple of marksmen miss. In a handful, the majority of marksmen miss. In one, they all miss. Simply the laws of probability.

What will the one man who survived the firing squad tell his grandchildren? What will be his story? "Somebody gave me a break" or "God had other plans" but not "It was an accident." He may fish for the reasons but he'll believe they're there. He will discount accident because he doesn't know about the other firing squads and cannot grasp the odds. Perhaps he just feels grateful and needs someone to thank.

Now think about the Cosmic Jackpot, which it seems we have hit. Solution #2 says it looks like someone made a conscious decision. It looks like there were reasons. It appears that someone wanted to give the universe an observer. But appearances are deceiving because we don't know about all the other universes. There may be an infinity of them, making up a multiverse. Most are sterile, but once in a great while one of them produces life and mind. Simply the laws of probability.

Solution #1 posited a Who outside the universe. Solution #2 posits many whats. It says there were houses in the woods that the story of Goldilocks forgot to mention. Nearly all were wrong for her. She chanced on the one that was right.

The multiverse theory wasn't developed to solve the Goldilocks enigma. In fact, the idea of many worlds goes back a long way. It was one of the reasons Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600. He embraced theological heresies as well, and he believed with Copernicus that the earth traveled around the sun.

Fifty years ago physicist Hugh Everett proposed a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which the universe sprouts countless branches with different events occurring in each. Most physicists dismissed the idea, and Everett left physics," though his thesis advisor, John Wheeler, tried to keep his idea alive.

Today, string theory and inflationary theory have gotten physicists thinking multiverse again, proposing ways that universes happen. For some, those universes remain possibilities. (Leibniz had this idea in the 17th century, saying that God chose among the possibilities.) But others say the universes actually exist, right alongside ours. Some are pictured as bubbles popping out of an eternally inflating space. I see Goldilocks' house standing in a row of condos.

On the Goldilocks map, the multiverse position lies close to the designer position. There is no evidence for those condos, or those bubbles, or any of those other universes. If no one has seen a Who outside the universe, no one has seen a what either. The Goldilocks Enigma is about an observer who is not in a position to observe the outside.

What, then, is left for this observer? What kind of knowing? Speculation? Conjecture? Inference? If you believe the equations in the bubble universe are real, the best descriptor is faith. Faith was part of solution #1. Faith is part of #2. If the cosmos has an outside, it's seems the only way to get there.

P.S. Billy Grassie, founder of Metanexus, offers another layman's take on the multiverse here. A "cosmotheological" view can be found here.

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The WHO Outside the Universe

2008-02-08T10:38:00.002-05:00

To my mind, there must be at the bottom of it all, not an utterly simple equation, but an utterly simple idea. And to me that idea, when we finally discover it, will be so compelling, and so inevitable, so beautiful, we will all say to each other, "How could it have ever been otherwise?" (Physicist John Archibald Wheeler)

Philosopher John Leslie approaches the puzzle of our just-right universe with a parable. A firing squad of 50 aims at one condemned man. The commander yells "Fire!" and everyone shoots. They all miss! The condemned man walks away.

What are the odds of that? No different, we are told, than the odds behind a universe that produces its own observer, as ours produced us. How do you explain either? Accident, colossal randomness? Or did agents act on purpose, with intelligent missing on the one hand, intelligent design on the other?

In The Language of God geneticist Francis Collins says it was no accident. If you conclude the soldiers missed on purpose, you have to conclude a designer designed on purpose. Collins rejects the Intelligent Design movement and its God-of-the-gaps, but he accepts the basic design argument that goes back to Aquinas and Aristotle and squares with Genesis 1. This argument leads to a Who "outside of space and time." It leads to God.

In God's Universe, astronomer Owen Gingerich travels much the same road, seeing the hand of intelligent design (but again, not Intelligent Design) in the cosmos. Both "efficient" and "final" causes are at work, he says. Why does water boil in a kettle? Is it (A) because heat causes water molecules to move around faster and then escape as gas? Or is it (B) because somebody wants some tea? Both, says Gingerich, after John Polkinghorne. (A) is the efficient cause, which science can probe. (B) is the final cause, which science cannot. When it comes to the universe, both point to a Who outside.

Where does this Who fall on the map of the Goldilocks story, the one for whom the puzzle of incredible odds is named?

Let's start with "causes." When Goldilocks discovers the just-right porridge, she doesn't ask, "How did it get here?" The question of efficient cause never crosses her mind. She is, you should excuse the expression, naively teleological. She goes right to final cause. What is the porridge for? Her actions reveal her answer.

It's the story itself that addresses efficient cause. The porridge was cooked (and the chairs and the beds made) by two adult bears. The house was their idea. They designed it. They built it from scratch. They furnished it. They created Baby Bear.

Baby Bear represents biological complexity, the kind that's most compelling to design adherents. Gingerich points out that the human brain is the most complex object in the cosmos, with far more connections than stars in the Milky Way. To Collins, the DNA that built that brain is "the language by which God spoke life into being."

All this is compatible with the tale of Goldilocks, but she's got something that we do not. She's been outside her just-right house. We have not. We can't get to the edge of the universe any more than we can get to its center. There isn't a wall to poke our heads through. But in the argument from design, and in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there is indeed an edge. There is an outside.

How can we know it? Take a leap of faith, say Collins and Gingerich. Make it reasonable, but take it. Both men are Christians.

Keep their answer in mind when you read next week's solution to the Goldilocks enigma. It doesn't involve a Who but a what--many whats, in fact. They're not deities but still they're out there. The same question will loom: How can we know the outside?

P.S. Another scientist who gives the answer Who to the Goldilocks enigma is Gerald Schroeder. You can learn about his work, and the opening quote from John Archibald Wheeler, here.

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Goldilocks Comes to Cosmology

2008-02-01T12:01:00.001-05:00

"Listen to this. Space and time shoot out from a point. In a matter of seconds, a universe is formed. It expands and expands. And then, in some remote corner, it drops a speck of consciousness. It spills a little subjectivity. A touch of soul. Weird, eh?" (from The Story of Everything, Ch. 25)

You know the tale. A little girl is walking in the woods and comes upon a house. She knocks on the door but gets no answer, so she walks in and looks around. On the kitchen table she finds three bowls of porridge. One is too hot for her taste, one is too cold, but the third is just right. In another room she tries out the chairs. A couple are too big, but again, one is just right. Then it's the beds--one too hard, one too soft, one just right. In fact, the third bed is so right that the little girl falls asleep in it, her tummy full of porridge.

You may know the story of Goldilocks, but you may not know that it's found a home in cosmology. That's because theoreticians are struck by a weird coincidence: the initial state of the universe, nearly 14 billion years ago, was also just right--just right for us, that is. It was just right to produce observers of the universe long after its beginning. Just right to "drop a speck of consciousness." Had the value of any physical constants been off by a hair, we would not be around.

For the record, this coincidence is usually called the anthropic principle, although the man who coined the term, theoretical physicist Brandon Carter, later regretted it. Early treatments of the subject include Carter's own, which suggested that the basic laws of the universe were fine tuned for life, Martin Rees's Just Six Numbers, and The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John Barrow and Frank Tipler. Recent treatments include Paul Davies' Cosmic Jackpot and God's Universe by Owen Gingerich. It's Davies who likes to talk about the "Goldilocks enigma."

What was so finely tuned in the beginning? Energy from the Big Bang, to start with. Had it been greater, matter would have rushed apart too fast for stars and galaxies to form. Had it been less, gravity would have pulled the matter back and the universe would have collapsed. "If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size," wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. The rate had to be that precise . . . and it was.

The list of coincidences can get pretty long. The speed of light was precisely right. So were the strengths of the "fundamental" forces--gravity, electromagnetism, and two confined to the nuclei of atoms. Had any been off by 1 or 2%, we would not be here. According to Davies, the "biggest fix" of all involves dark energy, the name given to whatever drives galaxies apart at an accelerating rate. The odds of its value being just right? Four hundred flips of a coin. If you want a universe that produces us, he says, they all have to come up heads.

And they did. Why? That's the Goldilocks enigma.

I wonder what was in Goldilocks' mind when she first looked around the house she had found. Did she think that someone had cooked the porridge just for her? And what about us? Should we think that someone has cooked the books on our behalf?

The internet is full of travelers discussing this question. But no one has made the trip with Goldilocks, as I will do in the weeks ahead. Her story, the whole of it, has something to offer. Goldilocks has been outside her just-right house. She was, in fact, born there. Not us. We were born inside the universe, we grew up inside, and we remain there. There are no windows in this house of ours. There are no doors. We don't even know if our universe has an outside.

Point of view matters in this enigma. It helps to think "outside the box," but in this case we're in the box and can't get out. Standing where we are--and with no windows--we ask, why are we at home in this cosmos of ours? Why do we find those settings on the dials? And what about the porridge?

P.S. For a short version of the Goldilocks story, click here. For a longer version, with history, annotations and variants, click here. For a theologian's view of the anthropic principle, try this by Nancey Murphy; it's from The Global Spiral, an e-publication of Metanexus Institute.

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A Solitary Ray

2007-12-21T12:01:00.002-05:00

One morning at dawn, a low shaft of sunlight streaked through the valley where Adam was staying and outlined every flower, rock, and pebble. It was a solitary ray, and it lasted no more than a minute. But in that minute there awoke in Adam a solitary longing. Why that? he asked. Why now? (from The Story of Everything, Ch. 19)

Tomorrow at precisely 1:08 A.M. EST the winter solstice will come. I'll be asleep on the earth's northern hemisphere, halfway up from the equator, taking advantage of the year's longest night. I won't be feeling the 23.5 degree tilt of the earth that creates all this friendly darkness. Tomorrow, if the sky is clear, I'll follow the sun through its lowest trajectory of the year. This is the point at which the sun "stands still," sol-stice coming from the Latin for sun-standing-still.

What actually stands still is not the sun but the arc that it follows from dawn to dusk. That arc has been falling for six months now and the standing-still is the pause before it reverses direction and begins again to rise. The complementary pause comes six months later, at the summer solstice, when the arc stops climbing and begins another descent.

From the beginning of recorded history, festivals of light have celebrated the winter solstice. Other celebrations--
Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa and, this year at least, Eid-ul-Adha--appear in the calendar around the time of such festivals. Perhaps the original idea was to beg the gods to remove the threat of perpetual night. Today the meaning is more symbolic: we need the Light that wipes out fear, despair, ignorance and evil.

While festivals exist to celebrate the summer solstice, they do not say, "Enough of the light!" None implores for winter's reverse. None asks for more darkness. None begs the sun to fall. Who would want symbolic night--fear, despair, ignorance, evil?

It goes against the spirit of both solstices, then, to express a longing for the dark, as I have done here and here. The darkness I love, of course, is not moral darkness but the darkness in our knowing. All I ask is that we see it. All I ask is to be rid of false illumination--to resist the temptation to take theories, mathematical models, hypotheses, the words "could have" and "may have" as evidence. Let us continue to speculate, but until the evidence is in, why deny the dark?

In Ireland there's a circular mound, 5,000 years old and about the size of an acre, called Newgrange. (Be sure to see it.) Newgrange is less well known than its English cousin, Stonehenge, but it's a bit older--older even than the Egyptian pyramids--and it's just as great a mystery. At dawn on the winter solstice Newgrange receives a ray of sunlight deep into its central chamber and reveals intricate carvings of spirals and discs. That solitary ray lasts for 17 minutes a day, from the 19th to the 23rd of December.

Seventeen minutes a day, five days a year. That's it. The rest is darkness. Is light that reaches so deep worth that long a wait? It's not more light that I celebrate at the winter solstice, but the coming of light like that.

I wish you Light during this holiday season, and I thank you for your support in 2007.

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It Slumbers

2007-11-23T09:58:00.002-05:00

In the quiet that followed, Adam could almost see his granddaughter's mind at work, turning the Story over and over. Suddenly, she bolted upright. "I think I know," she said. "When the dust was ready, Spirit . . . like . . . breathed into it."

"But how did Spirit get there?"

"It didn't get there, it was always there," said Dawn. "It had to wait, that's all." (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 30)

What makes up Everything? For Bill Bryson, it's Matter, Life and a touch of Spirit. For Harold Morowitz, it's Matter and Life, with Spirit coming on strong. Ken Wilber strikes a different proportion. Ninety percent of his A Brief History of Everything--the last in this series of "Everything" books-- is about Spirit.

Wilber is a philosopher who dropped out of a biochemistry major in college to write his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, at the age of 23. Consciousness and integral thinking have been his abiding interest since, over the course of two dozen books. Much of his work is summarized in A Brief History of Everything, which was published in 1996. I read the revised edition, published in 2000.

The history that Wilber covers--moreso, interprets--is indeed that of consciousness, traced through philosophy, mainly from the West, and spirituality, mainly from the East. But playing in the background, and sometimes coming to the fore, are the sciences of Matter and Life, which complete his cosmology.

That cosmology begins with the Big Bang and Matter. Then comes Life, an emergent or holon that is "higher." Then comes (depending on which page you are reading) "mind and Spirit" or "mind, soul, and Spirit." No surprises so far: this is New Story all the way, with gradations once you get past Life.

But wait: there's a stunning sentence on page 179, six words that turn the story upside down. "Pure consciousness is not an emergent." Not an emergent, says Wilber. Nor is Spirit, the equivalent of pure consciousness. If Spirit is not an emergent, it's more than just the end of the story. It is also, in some way, the beginning.

What is Spirit? Wilber is liberal in his referents. It is Self, Subjectivity, the Ultimate I, the I-I, Emptiness. It is pure Witness, pure Seer, pure Presence. It is Buddha, Christ, God and Goddess, Tao and Brahman. It is the support, the cause, the creative ground.

For being so much, Spirit does very little . . . for a while. "Spirit slumbers in nature, begins to awaken in mind, and finally recognizes itself as Spirit." The metaphor of slumber comes from the German idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854):

Schelling's key insight was that the Spirit that is realized in a conscious fashion in the supreme identity is in fact the Spirit that was present all along. . . . At each stage Spirit unfolds more of itself, realizes more of itself, and thus moves from slumber in nature to awakening in mind to final realization as Spirit itself.

Interestingly, Alfred Russel Wallace, who hit upon the idea of natural selection independently of Darwin, "always maintained that natural selection itself was not the cause but the result of 'Spirit's manner and mode of creation.'"

Spirit at the beginning of the story. Spirit at the end. Spirit all along the way. The template is neither "old" nor "new," but this may be the story our children tell when their time comes. They ought to love the metaphor of sleep because they are part of the awakening.

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The Other "E" Word

2007-11-16T12:01:00.002-05:00

There's everything. There's evolution. But the key to the New Story may be an e word lurking in the shadows. It's emergence, the subject of a book by Harold Morowitz entitled The Emergence of Everything, the second in our series of "Everything" books. Emergence is evolution on steroids.

The concept of emergence addresses how you put elements together and wind up with something more. Take two hydrogen atoms, add one of oxygen, and you get something cool to drink on a hot summer day. That's more than dihydrogen oxide. Run hydrogen atoms through a series of emergences, do it over 13 billion years, and you get a whole lot more. You get us.

It works something like this. To my right is a dot. It's an element, the simplest of beginnings.

Now here's the dot combined with others. If I asked what you were looking at, you'd probably say "an x." That's more than dots; it's a letter of the alphabet. The letter is an emergent-- like water, or like a living cell that arises from a collection of chemicals.

Take it to the next level. Arrange the x's a certain way and you get a second emergent, this time a triangle. The dots are still there (very small now), the x's are still there, but now there's something new--a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Next week's author, Ken Wilber, calls it a holon. A holon isn't reducible to dots.

In a Story of Everything--the New version--you substitute Matter, Life, and Spirit for dot, x, and triangle. Life emerges from Matter. Spirit emerges from Life. Each is more complex than what preceded it. As the narrative of the cosmos moves along, the emergents become richer, more interior, more subjective, deeper--until you have something called Mind or even Spirit.

Harold Morowitz is a biophysicist involved in the study of life's origins. But in The Emergence of Everything he writes as more than a biophysicist. Every now and then you hear the voice of a philosopher, even a theologian. This is a whole person speaking, one who wants to "go beyond the obvious" and align himself with those who seek nothing less than to "know the mind of God." Morowitz regards his "speculative scholarship" as a calling.

How many emergents have arisen in the history of the cosmos? It all depends on how closely you look. Somewhat arbitrarily, Morowitz picks 28, from the formation of particles, stars, and solar systems to the formation of hominids, tools, language, and philosophy.

Emergence number 28, underway now, is Spirit, and here Morowitz acknowledges a debt to the vision of Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist. Spirit is not defined, except to say that it goes beyond Mind, or Teilhard's "noosphere." Call me a heretic, says Morowitz, but as we emerge so does God. In a phrase whose meaning escapes me, he repeats, "We are the transcendence of the immanent God." He simplifies once: "We are God."

To be sure, the God that comes at the end of the story isn't the God of our traditional faiths. But Morowitz contends that science has forced us to rethink God. God cannot be a one-time creator nor can he ever rest, as on the seventh day in the Genesis narrative. He cannot rest because creation continues to occur. Each new emergent is in fact a new creation.

The subtitle of Morowitz's book--in places dense, in places accessible--is How the World Became Complex. What I'd like to know is why the world became complex, why evolution proceeds in the direction it does. I imagine that Morowitz would like to know this too. That, after all, is the nature of his calling. He wants to know the mind of God.

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Pluto and the Pea

2007-11-09T14:10:00.002-05:00

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is popular science writing at its best. In a series of short stories he visits the players and events behind the great discoveries that go into a Story of Everything. There are unsung heroes and liars (Edwin Hubble, no less!), Nobel laureates and janitors, and someone (Linnaeus) so obsessed with sex that he names a genus of plant Clitoria. The book is not, as the title suggests, a history of everything, but rather a history of how we got to know everything. In Bryson's hands, that history is fascinating.

It's fascinating not merely because of the drama but because Bryson has a way of communicating scale. Take the solar system. In depictions like this one, where Earth is the size of a pea, the giant Jupiter is located a few inches away and Pluto a few inches beyond that. But if the solar system were drawn to scale, Jupiter would be a thousand feet from a pea-sized Earth and Pluto would be a mile and a half. You wouldn't be able to see Pluto because it would be about the size of a bacterium. Scale matters.

It matters more in our knowledge. How much of that dinosaur skeleton you see in a museum is actual fossil and how much is plaster? Answer: in practically every case, it's all plaster. Closer to home, how much of the story of human lineage is fossil and how much (theoretical) plaster? Answer: the total world archive of hominid and early human bones--coming from roughly 5000 separate individuals--could fit in the back of a pickup truck. Even the heralded Lucy skeleton, a 3.2 million year old Australopithecus, is only 20% complete, 28% if you strip out bones that are redundant. Here's a look at her reconstructed skull. A BBC series called the skeleton "complete."

Scale in our knowledge is the ratio of light to dark, of evidence to the lack of it. The hard part is seeing the lack. I'm thrilled by the story of human evolution, but I have to recognize the enormous gaps in the fossil record. Some equate to the distance between Pluto and the pea. I don't want God to fill in the gaps but I don't want plaster either. If there is darkness, let it be.

Bryson is guided in his book by the New Story template--first Matter, then Life, then Spirit. How did life come out of matter? Quite naturally, say Bryson's sources, maybe inevitably. The age of the earth is 4.6 billion years; the first record of life appears at 3.85 billion. Once conditions were right, it didn't take long for life to get going.

And so evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould can say that bacterial life "was chemically destined to be." And biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve that life is "an obligatory manifestation of matter, bound to arise whenever conditions are appropriate." Curiously, when it comes to intelligent life, Gould does a flip-flop (I don't know about de Duve). Life was destined to come out of matter, but the next emergence, homo sapiens, was a random fluke.

Curious indeed, at least to this outsider. Why should one transition be a matter of destiny and the other an accident? But let's put both in scale. If the cosmos is like the Sahara, matter is its sand. We know so far of only one grain that's given rise to Life and Spirit. If we're in the dark about all the others, who's to say what's inevitable? Who's to say what isn't?

Inevitable or not, Spirit is beyond the scope of Bryson's book. As a science writer, he ends his engrossing tale at Life. That's "nearly" Everything, he says in his title, but by my calculus it's far from it. So let's change the title. How We Got to Know Two-Thirds of Everything would be more accurate. It's what Bryson covers--in scale, like Pluto and the pea.

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