DOUGLAS KLEVEN
The Uncaused Cheeseburger And Other Hurdles For A Godless Universe
Douglas K.
Aug 28, 2019 · 18 min readFräulein Maria and her boyfriend — decades ago — taught me that “nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.” I’d always been inclined to believe her teachings about the early cosmos because she was such an ingenious seamstress, but my faith in her credentials evaporated the day I learned that the documentary I watched about her life was actually not a documentary, but a movie that was only
Not a documentary“based upon a true story,” which means that she probably had little to no training in cosmology and might not even know how to sew. That realization led me down disillusion’s wormhole until it dumped me at the feet of Richard Dawkins, a.k.a. the World’s Most Famous Atheist and the source for two quotes that have since guided my investigation into the origins of the cosmos: “Measuring the statistical improbability of a suggestion is the right way to go about assessing its believability” and “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” In other words, if Mr. Dawkins is correct, as the improbability of an event increases our belief in its occurrence ought to decrease; because believing in the highly improbable is evil.
Gotcha Richard. Thanks for the tip.
Although I grew up with the Big Bang as the dominant scientific explanation for the universe’s origin, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I realized how frustrating it might have been for certain non-believing cosmologists and physicists and lots of other types of -ists, to climb backwards in time over roughly 14 billion years of cosmic data only to confront — not an infinite, steady-state universe — but an infinitely tiny point. A beginning, like the one described in the opening line of Genesis. There they all converged on that singular point, sometime between 1930 and the early 90’s, and to their chagrin (in some cases at least) what they encountered was a 5,000 year old Hebrew scholar, perched atop that point, wondering what had taken them so long.
Lawrence KraussMaybe that annoying Hebrew is why some yearn to find a solution to the problem of a beginning. Anti-theist and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss titled his own solution to the Genesis 1:1 dilemma A Universe From Nothing and hoped that its pages would deliver what Dawkins described in the afterward as “a knockout blow” to “the last remaining trump card of the theologian.” I read Lawrence’s book, and unfortunately for Mr. Dawkins that “knockout blow” is never delivered. In fact, by his own admission, his title is misleading. In the Q&A at the book’s close you’ll find this question, “What do you really mean by nothing”? Which Lawrence answers honestly, “Now that state of no-stuff may not be ‘nothing’ in a classical sense, but it is a remarkable transformation nonetheless.” He’s forced to the not empty but remarkable line because he never completely “empties” space. He leaves very, very little in his vacuum for sure, but still juuuuust enough stuff remains to generate the quantum fluctuations that he needs to spark a Bang. But even if he could empty space, in that same answer he admits that “one can nevertheless question whether that is nothing, because the transition is mediated by some physical laws. Where did they come from? That is a good question.” Actually, that is a great question, because even if Lawrence could perform a miracle and empty space of all of its contents but birth something anyway, the laws of physics would have still midwifed that birth. How and in what medium did those laws arise? As you can see, problem not solved.
But Lawrence doesn’t despair, because fortunately for him there’s always the possibility of a multiverse: a theoretical landscape populated by an infinite number of universes, each slightly different from the next where conveniently “the laws themselves may be random, coming into existence along with universes that may arise.” In other words, if instead of the odds of existence being forced onto our universe alone, we’re actually bobbing along in a never-ending sea of alternate universes, then the hope is that one of those many alternates will have sprouted up from just the type of vacuum that Mr. Krauss’ yearns to find in his test tubes. If our options are infinite, then it’s not at all remarkable that we would find ourselves in an inevitable universe.
So problem solved, right?
Actually, problem still not solved; because all we’ve done with the multiverse is propose a non-falsifiable theory that helps us feel good about our rounding errors. But if we’re scientists and not theologians, then don’t we have to test our theory? If so, how do we exit our universe to find out if another exists? But even if we could locate the exit and even if we stumbled across a neighbor, we don’t need just one, or two or eight hundred distinct universes, we need an infinite number of universes! That’s a lot of door knocking. But even if we could poll our neighbors and the data allowed us to extrapolate an infinite number of universes, why would that infinite scenario annul the problem both Lawrence and Richard have with Genesis 1:1? Couldn’t a creator of one universe have created a second universe and a third, and so on and so on on into infinity? I’m confused as to how even a multiverse delivers “a knockout blow” to “the last remaining trump card of the theologian.”
But I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Because before we spend the money building the space ship that escapes us from this universe so that we can test the theory of the multiverse and prove Fräulein Maria wrong, shouldn’t we contemplate this one question…
Where are all the uncaused cheeseburgers?
If our universe is built upon principles that allow for things to begin to exist without causes, shouldn’t we expect to see that principle manifest itself in other areas of the universe. Shouldn’t it surface at least one other time in history? Even at the quantum level where things are uncertain and mysterious, particles still do not begin to exist absent a cause. The same holds true for the macro universe where every cheeseburger I’ve ever eaten has had a proximate cause, an antecedent, an explanation for how it arrived in my belly. Rewind my cheeseburger tapes back as far as you want and you’ll never come across a blip; all you’ll do all day long is watch the antecedents pile up. Last Friday the paddy I ate’s great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandma was probably an early 19th century cow that chewed her cud in the outskirts of Chicago. For a dude who loves cheeseburgers, the predominance of caused cheeseburgers always grates. Just once I’d like to have my craving for lunch satisfied by an uncaused cheeseburger. Why doesn’t it ever happen? If things that begin to exist can do so without a cause, then where’s the uncaused beef? You’d think someone somewhere would have seen it happen at least once. Why can’t that person be me?
But for the sake of continuing our investigation into the universe’s origins, let’s pretend that Hurdle #1 doesn’t exist. Let’s assume a multi-verse or quantum fluctuations in a true vacuum or even magic strings… who cares? Let’s just assume that we can clear Hurdle #1. Unfortunately though, once we do the problems presented by the biblical phrase “In the beginning” don’t disappear, they multiply; because even if you can get something from nothing, the odds of that something being life are .00000… with the zeros stretching on for as far as the world’s most powerful telescope can see. If there were a creation from nothing, probability theory suggests that the thing created should have never developed the capacity to either type or read this article. We should have remained lifeless forever as collections of cosmic dust or language-less electromagnetic waves or… anything other than us. The odds against you existing are so great that they’ve been given a name that even non-believers use: The Fine Tuning Problem.
But fine tuning is actually only a “problem” if like Lawrence Krauss you assume that the universe came from nothing: no designer, no intelligence, no motive, no purpose. Nothing. If we live in a universe that burst out of a vacuum, then we have a fine tuning problem on our hands; because at the instant of creation the constants and quantities in nature — which arose simultaneously and independent of one another — appear to have been set at ridiculously precise values. Alter any one of those astronomical numbers by the tiniest fraction and matter and energy carom off into non-life permitting ranges.
To illustrate the scale of the fine tuning problem let me first describe the number of seconds that have ticked away since the universe began, approximately 10¹⁷ (that’s a 10 followed by 17 zeros.) Contrast that with the number of known subatomic particles in the entire universe: 10⁸⁰. But if the weak force (one of the four fundamental forces in nature) were to have its value modified by one part in 10¹⁰⁰ life as we know it would have never emerged. If the cosmological constant, which governs the acceleration of the universe’s expansion, were altered by one part in 10¹²⁰ a life-permitting universe would have been impossible. If the low-entropy state of the early universe, which allowed for an even distribution of mass and energy, were altered by one part in 10¹⁰^¹²³ (that’s 10 raised to the 10th raised to the 123rd) the stuff that would have emerged from that poorly tuned universe would have instantly obliterated every single one of life’s building blocks. Never mind that three other founding forces exist in nature: the strong force, the electromagnetic force and gravity, each with their own massive constants. But do remember that in the beginning these constants appeared independently, which means that to determine the odds of their simultaneous appearance you have to multiply them together (that’s 10¹⁰⁰ X 10¹²⁰ X 10¹⁰^¹²³ and so on and so on and so on.) To call the product of that multiplication “astronomical” is to not understand how few stars our universe has at its disposal. But however deep into the eternities all of those zeros stretch, it is crucial to note that the first non-zero digit you hit (light years down the line) represents the odds of anything like you ever being able to read English. In a universe started on accident by a purposeless, unaware, blind force, you should have never been born. At this point I think it behooves us to re-read some advice given earlier by the world’s most famous atheist:
Richard Dawkins“Measuring the statistical improbability of a suggestion is the right way to go about assessing its believability.”
Although life is obviously improbable, for the sake of investigation let’s disregard Mr. Dawkins’ suggestion regarding the believability of the improbable, and assume that despite Hurdle #2 we hit the jackpot of all jackpots and a life-permitting universe emerged. But just because life can emerge, doesn’t mean it will emerge. Just because I can win the lottery, doesn’t mean I will. Even in a non-hostile environment we still have to clear Hurdle #3: the emergence of the organic from material that was inorganic, or life from that which was not living. So insurmountable is this prospect that Mr. Dawkins himself once offered a rather surprising explanation during an interview with Ben Stein:
DAWKINS: Nobody knows how it got started. We know the kind of event that it must have been. We know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.
BEN STEIN: And what was that?
DAWKINS: It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.
BEN STEIN: Right, and how did that happen?
DAWKINS: I told you, we don’t know.
BEN STEIN: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in evolution.
DAWKINS: Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Now, um, now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.
So difficult is the puzzle surrounding the emergence of the first self-replicating molecule that Dawkins actually posits a designer who leveraged a “very high level of technology” to seed our planet with life. An odd postulation from a man who wrote an entire book on why people who believe in life-seeding designers are delusional. Of course he did offer another explanation for creation’s miracle in his book The Blind Watchmaker, wherein he proposes that crystals could have mutated into self-replicating genes. In other words, either a God-like creature planted life on earth or that which was dead, came alive. If you ask me, either proposition is drenched in theology. Ironically the more I take Mr. Dawkins precisely at his word on these key issues the more difficult it is for me to ignore the universe’s theological underpinnings. I half-wonder, is he an atheist or an evangelist? Either way, if I’m to operate on the premise that we live in a meaningless universe that is destined to send us all into oblivion, I still have to come to terms with Hurdle #4: the existence of morality.
Right now somewhere deep in the jungle a troop of gorillas is about to get a new leader. The new alpha will earn his place at the head of the troop by bashing in the head of the previous leader. If that leader had any children he will grab them by the ankles, brain them and then mate with their mothers. Despite his brutal behavior, New Alpha will not face prosecution in any court of law. We will not ask the members of his newly acquired harem if the ensuing sex was consensual. We will make no attempt to reform the killer. We will not so much as bury the baby gorillas, carrion they will become.
We remain indifferent to the plight of Alpha Gorilla’s victims because we recognize that they are merely animals, and we place no expectation for moral behavior on animals. Likewise when a lion digs her incisors into a zebra we don’t say that she “murdered” the zebra, we say that she ate the zebra. No one witnessing that scene would think to explain to the lion that “zebras are lions too!” In spite of Finding Nemo, fish are food.
But humans on the other hand are obsessed with morality, bedeviled with the concept of right and wrong. We constantly tell each other what we can and cannot do and our injunctions are inevitably based in some supposed objective standard that we feel others ought to respect. Not only do we live out our lives as if an absolute morality existed, whenever we find people who disregard our community’s generally accepted moral norms we criticize, fine, imprison or execute them. Morality is now and has always been humanity’s international pastime. We are constantly about the work of building and then revising our moral frameworks while eternally lamenting or being enraged by the fact that others disregard our frameworks (to see this play out in real time just log onto Twitter.) And yet if we are the product of a standardless cosmic accident, then what distinguishes us morally from every other member of the animal kingdom? If the universe is without a lawgiver, what non-arbitrary pretext exists for anyone to either criticize or prosecute supposed law breakers? To what authority does the atheist ecologists appeal when he or she asks me to “save the earth.” Save the earth from what? Its destruction is certain. Our planet is scheduled to meet its end in roughly four billion years as either the sun explodes, evaporates and then blasts our watery globe to dust or the Andromeda galaxy smashes into the Milky Way, sending whoever or whatever is still here into oblivion. So no need to worry too much about encouraging people to treat their animals ethically. The animals are all doomed. But even if they weren’t, what lawgiver decided that people ought to care for puppies rather than eat them? And if such a lawgiver could be plucked out of the type of primordial vacuum that Mr. Krauss postulates, why did it turn a blind eye to tuber genocide? Let’s face it, if polar bears are people too then…
Artwork courtesy of Douglas KlevenOf course we can invent legal fictions that help us pass through this meaningless existence in a more orderly fashion, but as we do that we should at least have the intellectual honesty to admit that when we call a thing “right” or “wrong” we are simply grown-ups playing make believe. It comforts us to establish order and so we establish order; but in a pointless universe there’s nothing transcendental about our orders. So when Dawkins, in a moment of clarity, asks “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question.” He’s actually wrong. That question’s answer is simple. In a universe governed by a law-giving, moral God, Hitler was an abomination. While in a universe that erupted mindlessly from a vacuum, there’s no way to pass any meaningful judgement on Der Führer. Every insult we might hurl at him involves a silly two step wherein, in Step 1, we make believe that an objective standard exists against which we can judge his behavior. But if our existence is vapid then the validity of our judgments extend only so far as our own persons. So no matter how much you chide Hitler for his cruelty, your railings will never have any substantive, universal meaning. If the title of Krauss’ book is accurate then Hitler was just a ball of meat, pre-programmed to do exactly what he did. If that’s the case then what are we getting so worked up about?
Sam HarrisOf course many non-believers disagree with my take on morality in a Godless universe; writer, philosopher and noted anti-theist Sam Harris is just such a person. According to Sam, in the absence of God, humanity can arrive at a universal morality by simply supposing a state of existence that maximizes human suffering simultaneously for every human on the planet, and from there all you need to do to behave in accordance with universal morality is take a step in any direction away from that arrangement of universal misery. But his thought experiment fails on two points: first it assumes that — even theoretically — everyone can be made universally and maximally miserable, and second it assumes that agreement by a certain percentage of humans on a point of doctrine establishes truth. Regarding the issue of universal human suffering, from a sample size of 8 billion you are bound to stumble across a handful of degenerates who would be sent into ecstasy at the thought of writhing in pain alongside neighbors they despise. But even if you could eliminate masochists and sadomasochists from the gene pool, the establishment of his absolute moral standard is still contingent upon the rest of humanity agreeing with him about what constitutes optimal misery. What kind of absolute moral standard rest upon such a fickle contingency? If all you need to do to establish a truth is to make sure that 100% of a given population coalesces around an idea you like, then you haven’t established anything that remotely resembles an absolute standard. In fact, you’re right back where you started from, with nothing meaningful to say about absolute standards at all (but at least you have a lot of company with whom you can have impotent conversations.)
Now before too much more entropy sets in on our discussion of the cosmos, I should address the second of Mr. Dawkins’ quotes, because it also guided my investigation into our improbable origins: “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” Even though I don’t agree with him, I can’t dismiss Mr. Dawkins’ position out of hand. The man is no fool. I respect his intellect. In fact, my guess is that if pitted against him in a match of wits, I would arrive at that gunfight dramatically outgunned. And for all I know he may be my superior in many other areas as well:
Better father?
Kinder neighbor?
Eats more cheeseburgers?
Who knows?
But if the great evil he wishes to eradicate is “a firm belief in something for which there is no proof” then despite his credentials and my lack thereof, I can’t concede him the point. On at least a couple of levels the eradication he’s advocating sets up a circular firing squad, wherein the wiser members of his own team might feel outgunned if they seriously contemplate just one of the cosmological constants (10¹⁰^¹²³.) Not the product of all six of the constants mind you, just one will do the trick. But maybe his definition is more specifically targeted at religious institutions, maybe his definition of faith is “a belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion.”
At first glance he might be justified in wanting to eradicate mankind’s habit of seeking out a divinity to worship. From ISIS’ depredations in the Middle East to the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria; from the tinder box that is the Indian/Pakistani border to bygone eras when Catholics butchered Protestants, Protestants returned the favor and both brutalized Native Americans, religious people and their institutions have a long history of abominable behavior. On the cover of his book god is not Great the late Christopher Hitchens included this tagline “How Religion Poisons Everything.” But if Hitchens’ tagline is correct it suggest that had religion never arose, mankind’s behavior would have dramatically improved. Supposedly if we went back in time, removed our religious inclinations and then let the story play out again, we’d see a vast reduction in the quantity of misery that drapes itself all over human history. If all we had done is sing that one Beattles song five thousand years ago, imagine all the people who wouldn’t have died in gulags in the 20th century. Now those who pointed out to Hitchens that the 20th century gulags were almost exclusively operated by atheistic regimes, met the rebuttal that Stalin, Mao and the rest simply leveraged their people’s religious inclinations to convert themselves into state-sponsored deities. A clever debate tactic I must admit, wherein the presence of religion proves him right, but so does its absence! I wouldn’t want to play blackjack in a Hitchens casino.
So is faith “the world’s great evil,” and a venom that “poisons everything,” making otherwise benevolent and wise men both cruel and ignorant, or is mankind often cruel and ignorant, and has faith — at times — simply supplied the malevolent with a useful tool? Come on comrades, do you really think that if the beatitudes were never published, if the Qu’ran never called for anyone’s submission and if the Torah had been lost somewhere in the sands of ancient Egypt that mankind would have never found something to fight about?
Three thousand years ago the Psalmist wrote “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.” When that ancient believer looked skyward — notably (considering his contemporaries) — he didn’t feel inspired to write a tale of corrupt and accidental superheroes. What he saw was knowledge, and he noted the evidence. That knowledge has echoed down through the ages and is what moved Kant to write that “two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe… the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
I hold Kant’s same position, as do admittedly countless agnostics and atheists; because awe isn’t the purview alone of the believer. But I carry my awe one step further, into a region disbelievers won’t enter because they say there’s not enough evidence to support the step. And that’s cool. Go ahead and don’t step. But note that as I pass you by I’m not walking on because I fear death or I miss my deceased mother or I need something to comfort me in a lonely and cruel world. My faith is not driven by my needs, it’s driven by my discoveries. So don’t mind me, I’ll just shuffle on past you and maybe pause to apologize for the conduct of any of my miscreant colleagues as I do. I know you think I’m naive, but try not to worry about me. Yes sitting in a pew is somewhat of a gamble, but I’m having a good time, and besides…
I like my odds.
Douglas K.
Aug 28, 2019 · 18 min readFräulein Maria and her boyfriend — decades ago — taught me that “nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.” I’d always been inclined to believe her teachings about the early cosmos because she was such an ingenious seamstress, but my faith in her credentials evaporated the day I learned that the documentary I watched about her life was actually not a documentary, but a movie that was only
Not a documentary“based upon a true story,” which means that she probably had little to no training in cosmology and might not even know how to sew. That realization led me down disillusion’s wormhole until it dumped me at the feet of Richard Dawkins, a.k.a. the World’s Most Famous Atheist and the source for two quotes that have since guided my investigation into the origins of the cosmos: “Measuring the statistical improbability of a suggestion is the right way to go about assessing its believability” and “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” In other words, if Mr. Dawkins is correct, as the improbability of an event increases our belief in its occurrence ought to decrease; because believing in the highly improbable is evil.
Gotcha Richard. Thanks for the tip.
Although I grew up with the Big Bang as the dominant scientific explanation for the universe’s origin, it wasn’t until fairly recently that I realized how frustrating it might have been for certain non-believing cosmologists and physicists and lots of other types of -ists, to climb backwards in time over roughly 14 billion years of cosmic data only to confront — not an infinite, steady-state universe — but an infinitely tiny point. A beginning, like the one described in the opening line of Genesis. There they all converged on that singular point, sometime between 1930 and the early 90’s, and to their chagrin (in some cases at least) what they encountered was a 5,000 year old Hebrew scholar, perched atop that point, wondering what had taken them so long.
Lawrence KraussMaybe that annoying Hebrew is why some yearn to find a solution to the problem of a beginning. Anti-theist and theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss titled his own solution to the Genesis 1:1 dilemma A Universe From Nothing and hoped that its pages would deliver what Dawkins described in the afterward as “a knockout blow” to “the last remaining trump card of the theologian.” I read Lawrence’s book, and unfortunately for Mr. Dawkins that “knockout blow” is never delivered. In fact, by his own admission, his title is misleading. In the Q&A at the book’s close you’ll find this question, “What do you really mean by nothing”? Which Lawrence answers honestly, “Now that state of no-stuff may not be ‘nothing’ in a classical sense, but it is a remarkable transformation nonetheless.” He’s forced to the not empty but remarkable line because he never completely “empties” space. He leaves very, very little in his vacuum for sure, but still juuuuust enough stuff remains to generate the quantum fluctuations that he needs to spark a Bang. But even if he could empty space, in that same answer he admits that “one can nevertheless question whether that is nothing, because the transition is mediated by some physical laws. Where did they come from? That is a good question.” Actually, that is a great question, because even if Lawrence could perform a miracle and empty space of all of its contents but birth something anyway, the laws of physics would have still midwifed that birth. How and in what medium did those laws arise? As you can see, problem not solved.
But Lawrence doesn’t despair, because fortunately for him there’s always the possibility of a multiverse: a theoretical landscape populated by an infinite number of universes, each slightly different from the next where conveniently “the laws themselves may be random, coming into existence along with universes that may arise.” In other words, if instead of the odds of existence being forced onto our universe alone, we’re actually bobbing along in a never-ending sea of alternate universes, then the hope is that one of those many alternates will have sprouted up from just the type of vacuum that Mr. Krauss’ yearns to find in his test tubes. If our options are infinite, then it’s not at all remarkable that we would find ourselves in an inevitable universe.
So problem solved, right?
Actually, problem still not solved; because all we’ve done with the multiverse is propose a non-falsifiable theory that helps us feel good about our rounding errors. But if we’re scientists and not theologians, then don’t we have to test our theory? If so, how do we exit our universe to find out if another exists? But even if we could locate the exit and even if we stumbled across a neighbor, we don’t need just one, or two or eight hundred distinct universes, we need an infinite number of universes! That’s a lot of door knocking. But even if we could poll our neighbors and the data allowed us to extrapolate an infinite number of universes, why would that infinite scenario annul the problem both Lawrence and Richard have with Genesis 1:1? Couldn’t a creator of one universe have created a second universe and a third, and so on and so on on into infinity? I’m confused as to how even a multiverse delivers “a knockout blow” to “the last remaining trump card of the theologian.”
But I think we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Because before we spend the money building the space ship that escapes us from this universe so that we can test the theory of the multiverse and prove Fräulein Maria wrong, shouldn’t we contemplate this one question…
Where are all the uncaused cheeseburgers?
If our universe is built upon principles that allow for things to begin to exist without causes, shouldn’t we expect to see that principle manifest itself in other areas of the universe. Shouldn’t it surface at least one other time in history? Even at the quantum level where things are uncertain and mysterious, particles still do not begin to exist absent a cause. The same holds true for the macro universe where every cheeseburger I’ve ever eaten has had a proximate cause, an antecedent, an explanation for how it arrived in my belly. Rewind my cheeseburger tapes back as far as you want and you’ll never come across a blip; all you’ll do all day long is watch the antecedents pile up. Last Friday the paddy I ate’s great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandma was probably an early 19th century cow that chewed her cud in the outskirts of Chicago. For a dude who loves cheeseburgers, the predominance of caused cheeseburgers always grates. Just once I’d like to have my craving for lunch satisfied by an uncaused cheeseburger. Why doesn’t it ever happen? If things that begin to exist can do so without a cause, then where’s the uncaused beef? You’d think someone somewhere would have seen it happen at least once. Why can’t that person be me?
But for the sake of continuing our investigation into the universe’s origins, let’s pretend that Hurdle #1 doesn’t exist. Let’s assume a multi-verse or quantum fluctuations in a true vacuum or even magic strings… who cares? Let’s just assume that we can clear Hurdle #1. Unfortunately though, once we do the problems presented by the biblical phrase “In the beginning” don’t disappear, they multiply; because even if you can get something from nothing, the odds of that something being life are .00000… with the zeros stretching on for as far as the world’s most powerful telescope can see. If there were a creation from nothing, probability theory suggests that the thing created should have never developed the capacity to either type or read this article. We should have remained lifeless forever as collections of cosmic dust or language-less electromagnetic waves or… anything other than us. The odds against you existing are so great that they’ve been given a name that even non-believers use: The Fine Tuning Problem.
But fine tuning is actually only a “problem” if like Lawrence Krauss you assume that the universe came from nothing: no designer, no intelligence, no motive, no purpose. Nothing. If we live in a universe that burst out of a vacuum, then we have a fine tuning problem on our hands; because at the instant of creation the constants and quantities in nature — which arose simultaneously and independent of one another — appear to have been set at ridiculously precise values. Alter any one of those astronomical numbers by the tiniest fraction and matter and energy carom off into non-life permitting ranges.
To illustrate the scale of the fine tuning problem let me first describe the number of seconds that have ticked away since the universe began, approximately 10¹⁷ (that’s a 10 followed by 17 zeros.) Contrast that with the number of known subatomic particles in the entire universe: 10⁸⁰. But if the weak force (one of the four fundamental forces in nature) were to have its value modified by one part in 10¹⁰⁰ life as we know it would have never emerged. If the cosmological constant, which governs the acceleration of the universe’s expansion, were altered by one part in 10¹²⁰ a life-permitting universe would have been impossible. If the low-entropy state of the early universe, which allowed for an even distribution of mass and energy, were altered by one part in 10¹⁰^¹²³ (that’s 10 raised to the 10th raised to the 123rd) the stuff that would have emerged from that poorly tuned universe would have instantly obliterated every single one of life’s building blocks. Never mind that three other founding forces exist in nature: the strong force, the electromagnetic force and gravity, each with their own massive constants. But do remember that in the beginning these constants appeared independently, which means that to determine the odds of their simultaneous appearance you have to multiply them together (that’s 10¹⁰⁰ X 10¹²⁰ X 10¹⁰^¹²³ and so on and so on and so on.) To call the product of that multiplication “astronomical” is to not understand how few stars our universe has at its disposal. But however deep into the eternities all of those zeros stretch, it is crucial to note that the first non-zero digit you hit (light years down the line) represents the odds of anything like you ever being able to read English. In a universe started on accident by a purposeless, unaware, blind force, you should have never been born. At this point I think it behooves us to re-read some advice given earlier by the world’s most famous atheist:
Richard Dawkins“Measuring the statistical improbability of a suggestion is the right way to go about assessing its believability.”
Although life is obviously improbable, for the sake of investigation let’s disregard Mr. Dawkins’ suggestion regarding the believability of the improbable, and assume that despite Hurdle #2 we hit the jackpot of all jackpots and a life-permitting universe emerged. But just because life can emerge, doesn’t mean it will emerge. Just because I can win the lottery, doesn’t mean I will. Even in a non-hostile environment we still have to clear Hurdle #3: the emergence of the organic from material that was inorganic, or life from that which was not living. So insurmountable is this prospect that Mr. Dawkins himself once offered a rather surprising explanation during an interview with Ben Stein:
DAWKINS: Nobody knows how it got started. We know the kind of event that it must have been. We know the sort of event that must have happened for the origin of life.
BEN STEIN: And what was that?
DAWKINS: It was the origin of the first self-replicating molecule.
BEN STEIN: Right, and how did that happen?
DAWKINS: I told you, we don’t know.
BEN STEIN: What do you think is the possibility that Intelligent Design might turn out to be the answer to some issues in genetics or in evolution.
DAWKINS: Well, it could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, probably by some kind of Darwinian means, probably to a very high level of technology, and designed a form of life that they seeded onto perhaps this planet. Now, um, now that is a possibility, and an intriguing possibility. And I suppose it’s possible that you might find evidence for that if you look at the details of biochemistry, molecular biology, you might find a signature of some sort of designer.
So difficult is the puzzle surrounding the emergence of the first self-replicating molecule that Dawkins actually posits a designer who leveraged a “very high level of technology” to seed our planet with life. An odd postulation from a man who wrote an entire book on why people who believe in life-seeding designers are delusional. Of course he did offer another explanation for creation’s miracle in his book The Blind Watchmaker, wherein he proposes that crystals could have mutated into self-replicating genes. In other words, either a God-like creature planted life on earth or that which was dead, came alive. If you ask me, either proposition is drenched in theology. Ironically the more I take Mr. Dawkins precisely at his word on these key issues the more difficult it is for me to ignore the universe’s theological underpinnings. I half-wonder, is he an atheist or an evangelist? Either way, if I’m to operate on the premise that we live in a meaningless universe that is destined to send us all into oblivion, I still have to come to terms with Hurdle #4: the existence of morality.
Right now somewhere deep in the jungle a troop of gorillas is about to get a new leader. The new alpha will earn his place at the head of the troop by bashing in the head of the previous leader. If that leader had any children he will grab them by the ankles, brain them and then mate with their mothers. Despite his brutal behavior, New Alpha will not face prosecution in any court of law. We will not ask the members of his newly acquired harem if the ensuing sex was consensual. We will make no attempt to reform the killer. We will not so much as bury the baby gorillas, carrion they will become.
We remain indifferent to the plight of Alpha Gorilla’s victims because we recognize that they are merely animals, and we place no expectation for moral behavior on animals. Likewise when a lion digs her incisors into a zebra we don’t say that she “murdered” the zebra, we say that she ate the zebra. No one witnessing that scene would think to explain to the lion that “zebras are lions too!” In spite of Finding Nemo, fish are food.
But humans on the other hand are obsessed with morality, bedeviled with the concept of right and wrong. We constantly tell each other what we can and cannot do and our injunctions are inevitably based in some supposed objective standard that we feel others ought to respect. Not only do we live out our lives as if an absolute morality existed, whenever we find people who disregard our community’s generally accepted moral norms we criticize, fine, imprison or execute them. Morality is now and has always been humanity’s international pastime. We are constantly about the work of building and then revising our moral frameworks while eternally lamenting or being enraged by the fact that others disregard our frameworks (to see this play out in real time just log onto Twitter.) And yet if we are the product of a standardless cosmic accident, then what distinguishes us morally from every other member of the animal kingdom? If the universe is without a lawgiver, what non-arbitrary pretext exists for anyone to either criticize or prosecute supposed law breakers? To what authority does the atheist ecologists appeal when he or she asks me to “save the earth.” Save the earth from what? Its destruction is certain. Our planet is scheduled to meet its end in roughly four billion years as either the sun explodes, evaporates and then blasts our watery globe to dust or the Andromeda galaxy smashes into the Milky Way, sending whoever or whatever is still here into oblivion. So no need to worry too much about encouraging people to treat their animals ethically. The animals are all doomed. But even if they weren’t, what lawgiver decided that people ought to care for puppies rather than eat them? And if such a lawgiver could be plucked out of the type of primordial vacuum that Mr. Krauss postulates, why did it turn a blind eye to tuber genocide? Let’s face it, if polar bears are people too then…
Artwork courtesy of Douglas KlevenOf course we can invent legal fictions that help us pass through this meaningless existence in a more orderly fashion, but as we do that we should at least have the intellectual honesty to admit that when we call a thing “right” or “wrong” we are simply grown-ups playing make believe. It comforts us to establish order and so we establish order; but in a pointless universe there’s nothing transcendental about our orders. So when Dawkins, in a moment of clarity, asks “What’s to prevent us from saying Hitler wasn’t right? I mean, that is a genuinely difficult question.” He’s actually wrong. That question’s answer is simple. In a universe governed by a law-giving, moral God, Hitler was an abomination. While in a universe that erupted mindlessly from a vacuum, there’s no way to pass any meaningful judgement on Der Führer. Every insult we might hurl at him involves a silly two step wherein, in Step 1, we make believe that an objective standard exists against which we can judge his behavior. But if our existence is vapid then the validity of our judgments extend only so far as our own persons. So no matter how much you chide Hitler for his cruelty, your railings will never have any substantive, universal meaning. If the title of Krauss’ book is accurate then Hitler was just a ball of meat, pre-programmed to do exactly what he did. If that’s the case then what are we getting so worked up about?
Sam HarrisOf course many non-believers disagree with my take on morality in a Godless universe; writer, philosopher and noted anti-theist Sam Harris is just such a person. According to Sam, in the absence of God, humanity can arrive at a universal morality by simply supposing a state of existence that maximizes human suffering simultaneously for every human on the planet, and from there all you need to do to behave in accordance with universal morality is take a step in any direction away from that arrangement of universal misery. But his thought experiment fails on two points: first it assumes that — even theoretically — everyone can be made universally and maximally miserable, and second it assumes that agreement by a certain percentage of humans on a point of doctrine establishes truth. Regarding the issue of universal human suffering, from a sample size of 8 billion you are bound to stumble across a handful of degenerates who would be sent into ecstasy at the thought of writhing in pain alongside neighbors they despise. But even if you could eliminate masochists and sadomasochists from the gene pool, the establishment of his absolute moral standard is still contingent upon the rest of humanity agreeing with him about what constitutes optimal misery. What kind of absolute moral standard rest upon such a fickle contingency? If all you need to do to establish a truth is to make sure that 100% of a given population coalesces around an idea you like, then you haven’t established anything that remotely resembles an absolute standard. In fact, you’re right back where you started from, with nothing meaningful to say about absolute standards at all (but at least you have a lot of company with whom you can have impotent conversations.)
Now before too much more entropy sets in on our discussion of the cosmos, I should address the second of Mr. Dawkins’ quotes, because it also guided my investigation into our improbable origins: “Faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” Even though I don’t agree with him, I can’t dismiss Mr. Dawkins’ position out of hand. The man is no fool. I respect his intellect. In fact, my guess is that if pitted against him in a match of wits, I would arrive at that gunfight dramatically outgunned. And for all I know he may be my superior in many other areas as well:
Better father?
Kinder neighbor?
Eats more cheeseburgers?
Who knows?
But if the great evil he wishes to eradicate is “a firm belief in something for which there is no proof” then despite his credentials and my lack thereof, I can’t concede him the point. On at least a couple of levels the eradication he’s advocating sets up a circular firing squad, wherein the wiser members of his own team might feel outgunned if they seriously contemplate just one of the cosmological constants (10¹⁰^¹²³.) Not the product of all six of the constants mind you, just one will do the trick. But maybe his definition is more specifically targeted at religious institutions, maybe his definition of faith is “a belief in the traditional doctrines of a religion.”
At first glance he might be justified in wanting to eradicate mankind’s habit of seeking out a divinity to worship. From ISIS’ depredations in the Middle East to the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria; from the tinder box that is the Indian/Pakistani border to bygone eras when Catholics butchered Protestants, Protestants returned the favor and both brutalized Native Americans, religious people and their institutions have a long history of abominable behavior. On the cover of his book god is not Great the late Christopher Hitchens included this tagline “How Religion Poisons Everything.” But if Hitchens’ tagline is correct it suggest that had religion never arose, mankind’s behavior would have dramatically improved. Supposedly if we went back in time, removed our religious inclinations and then let the story play out again, we’d see a vast reduction in the quantity of misery that drapes itself all over human history. If all we had done is sing that one Beattles song five thousand years ago, imagine all the people who wouldn’t have died in gulags in the 20th century. Now those who pointed out to Hitchens that the 20th century gulags were almost exclusively operated by atheistic regimes, met the rebuttal that Stalin, Mao and the rest simply leveraged their people’s religious inclinations to convert themselves into state-sponsored deities. A clever debate tactic I must admit, wherein the presence of religion proves him right, but so does its absence! I wouldn’t want to play blackjack in a Hitchens casino.
So is faith “the world’s great evil,” and a venom that “poisons everything,” making otherwise benevolent and wise men both cruel and ignorant, or is mankind often cruel and ignorant, and has faith — at times — simply supplied the malevolent with a useful tool? Come on comrades, do you really think that if the beatitudes were never published, if the Qu’ran never called for anyone’s submission and if the Torah had been lost somewhere in the sands of ancient Egypt that mankind would have never found something to fight about?
Three thousand years ago the Psalmist wrote “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.” When that ancient believer looked skyward — notably (considering his contemporaries) — he didn’t feel inspired to write a tale of corrupt and accidental superheroes. What he saw was knowledge, and he noted the evidence. That knowledge has echoed down through the ages and is what moved Kant to write that “two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe… the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.”
I hold Kant’s same position, as do admittedly countless agnostics and atheists; because awe isn’t the purview alone of the believer. But I carry my awe one step further, into a region disbelievers won’t enter because they say there’s not enough evidence to support the step. And that’s cool. Go ahead and don’t step. But note that as I pass you by I’m not walking on because I fear death or I miss my deceased mother or I need something to comfort me in a lonely and cruel world. My faith is not driven by my needs, it’s driven by my discoveries. So don’t mind me, I’ll just shuffle on past you and maybe pause to apologize for the conduct of any of my miscreant colleagues as I do. I know you think I’m naive, but try not to worry about me. Yes sitting in a pew is somewhat of a gamble, but I’m having a good time, and besides…
I like my odds.
