Is the Cosmos All There Is?
As with modern astrophysical ideas, ancient Christian ideas of a new heaven and a new earth are a rational revisioning of a new and different physics.
By Owen Gingerich
About the Author: Owen Gingerich is a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Research Professor of Astronomy and of the History of Science at Harvard University. He has been chair of Harvard's History of Science Department, vice president of the American Philosophical Society, and chairman of the U.S. National Committee of the International Astronomical Union. His research interests have included the interpretation of stellar spectra, and the writings of Nicholas Copernicus, the 16th century cosmologist. In addition to more than 500 technical articles and reviews, his essays have been anthologized in two volumes, The Great Copernicus Chase and Other Adventures in Astronomical History (Cambridge University Press) and The Eye of Heaven: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler (the American Institute of Physics).
WHAT I WANT ARE THE FACTS, MAM, JUST THE FACTS. . . ." That's the famous line from Joe Friday, star of the 1950's TV series Dragnet. But our fascination with facts isn't just a 20th-century conceit. Charles Dickens lampooned our obsessions in the opening scene in his novel, Hard Times:
"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life."
School superintendent Thomas Gradgrind is "a man of realities, a man of facts and calculations." In the classroom he turns to an intimidated new pupil, Sissy Jupe, daughter of a circus performer:
"Your father breaks horses, don't he?"
"If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring, sir."
"You mustn't tell us about the ring here. Very well then. Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?"
"Oh yes, sir."
"Very well then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse."
At this Sissy Jupe is thrown into the greatest alarm, and she stands speechless.
"Girl number twenty unable to define a horse. Girl number twenty possessed of no facts in reference to one of the commonest of animals!
"Bitzer, your definition of a horse."
"Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty-eight teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twenty incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries sheds hoofs too. Hoofs hard but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth."
"Now girl number twenty, you know what a horse is."
Empiricists and Joe Fridays notwithstanding, facts in themselves can be rather sterile. I am reminded of the logician and philosopher who were riding in a railway carriage across Scotland. Through the window they observed a flock of sheep.
"They have been freshly shorn," remarked the philosopher.
To that the logician rejoined, "On this side at least!"
Empirical observations—facts—versus philosophical understanding—that is a central theme in my discourse this evening. Tonight I want to take the role of philosopher, exploring some ideas beyond the role of empirical facts, but I remind you that I am only an amateur philosopher and an amateur theologian, so I will not only not lead you to any answers, but I probably won't even get to any well framed questions. Nevertheless I have provocatively entitled my remarks, "Is the cosmos all there is?"
My title echos the opening line of the late Carl Sagan's widely watched Cosmos television series. At the beginning Carl intoned, "The Cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever will be." That is surely the logician speaking. To some critics, it was an atheist manifesto. "Really?" his producer asked rather incredulously when I reported this. "We just put it in because it seemed poetic!"
What follows are some observations about the cosmos and about our human place within it, and they are necessarily something of an autobiography. While I was an undergraduate in college, I learned of a notable property of water, how it expands as it freezes, an unusual phenomenon that means that ice floats on water. Without this lowered density ice would sink, oceans would freeze from the bottom up and not thaw out in summer, making complex life on earth difficult if not impossible. Score one for the Creator-Designer!
As a graduate student I learned more about water: how the two hydrogen atoms join the single central oxygen atom. Surrounding the positive nucleus of the oxygen is an outer arrangement of six negative electrons. These electrons situate themselves at the four vertices of a tetrahedron, and as the rules of quantum mechanics describe it, two electrons can share and fill any vertex. Thus four of the six outer electrons form pairs filling two of the vertices, while the other two partially fill the remaining two vertices. Hydrogen atoms, each with a single electron, can now bond into the two partially filled vertices. This means that the two bonding hydrogen atoms do not lie at opposite sides of the oxygen atom, but at the angle created by the two vertices of the tetrahedron. This asymmetry gives the oxygen atom a relatively exposed negative flank whereas the outer sides of the hydrogen atoms, relatively electrically unbalanced because their negative electrons have been pulled into the vertices of the oxygen atom, are slightly positive. As a consequence, individual water molecules in the liquid state have mutual attractions, the positive hydrogen sides tending to couple against the negative oxygen flanks. This electrostatic feature makes water a powerful solvent as well as a stable substance with a high heat capacity, and therefore water is a magnificent thermostatic regulator—both properties essential to biochemical processes.
These and other remarkable life-enhancing properties of water had long since been extolled by Harvard professor L. J. Henderson in a book entitled The Fitness of the Environment and first published in 1913. Henderson also pointed to the unique properties of the carbon atom. Like oxygen, carbon arranges its outer electrons in a tetrahedral arrangement, but it has only four outer electrons, one for each corner, so it is a more symmetrical atom, one that can bond with itself in a vastly larger number of combinations than any other atom. It is this wonderful property that makes complex organic chemistry possible.
Of course, these unique properties would have been of little avail if it were not for the substantial abundance of oxygen and carbon. But since hydrogen and oxygen rank number one and three respectively in cosmic abundances, water is guaranteed to be ubiquitous throughout the universe, and carbon comes in as number four in cosmic abundance. Curiously enough, neither oxygen nor carbon emerged in the first three minutes of the Big Bang. At first glance, this might be labeled "God's Goof." That's how the physicist George Gamow felt when he discovered the flaw in the nature of the light elements that prevented the heavier elements from forming. In the first minute of the Big Bang, energetic photons transformed into protons, and these fused into deuterium (nuclear particles of mass 2), tritium (nuclear particles of mass 3), and alpha particles (which would serve as mass 4 nuclei of helium atoms). But there was no stable mass five, so at that point the fusion process stopped, well short of the 12 needed for carbon or the 16 for oxygen. Gamow, who had an impish wit, then wrote his own version of Genesis 1:1
In the beginning God created Radiation and Ylem (a mixture of protons and neutrons). And the Ylem was without shape or number, and the nucleons were rushing madly upon the face of the deep.
And God said: "Let there be mass two." And there was mass two. And God saw deuterium, and it was good.
And God said: "Let there be mass three." And there was mass three. And God saw tritium, and it was good.
And God continued to call numbers until He came to the transuranium elements. But when He looked back on his work, He saw that it was not good. In the excitement of counting, He had missed calling for mass five, and so, naturally, no heavier elements could have been formed.
God was very disappointed by that slip and wanted to contract the universe again and start everything from the beginning. But that would be much too simple. Instead, being Almighty, God decided to make heavy elements in the most impossible way.
And so God said: "Let there be Hoyle." And there was Hoyle. And God saw Hoyle and told him to make heavy elements in any way he pleased.
And so Hoyle decided to make heavy elements in stars, and to spread them around by means of supernova explosions. But in doing so, Hoyle had to follow the blueprint of abundances which God prepared earlier when He had planned to make the elements from Ylem.
Thus, with the help of God, Hoyle made all heavy elements in stars, but it was so complicated that neither Hoyle, nor God, nor anybody else can now figure out exactly how it was done.
But far from being a design flaw in our universe, the missing mass five might have been essential to our existence. The fact that there is no stable mass five means that the element building in the stars takes place initially in a two-step process, first when the hydrogen is converted into helium, and then with an abundance of helium, a second process whereby helium is built up into atoms whose nuclei consist of integer numbers of helium nuclei. This includes oxygen and carbon, which, as I have indicated, are the cosmically most abundant atoms after hydrogen and helium. Without the missing mass five (as well as several other curious details in the structures of these lighter elements), we probably wouldn't have the life-giving abundance of carbon and oxygen. What at first glance appeared to be God's mistake turns out to be one of God's most ingenious triumphs. Certainly the way our universe works, the fact that it takes a very long time to generate the heavier elements, depends critically on the lack of a stable mass five. How the many other heavier elements came to be is a complicated matter, and Fred Hoyle was a leading player in figuring out these processes, as alluded to in Gamow's parody.
In any event these empirical facts about carbon, oxygen, and the other atoms might just be mind-boggling to the logician, whereas the philosopher would surely reflect still further as to whether there is any deeper meaning here. When I drove to the airport this morning, the license plate number of the car was 297-LKW. How remarkable! One chance in ten million that I would have got that number! But you may not think that was worth a notice. Had the number been, say, 999-AAA, it would seem odd, and if en route I had spotted in immediate succession 999-BBB and 999-CCC, you could well have suspected that there was some underlying reason beyond accidental coincidence that caused these paths to cross. So it is with nature. Are the remarkably tuned properties of atoms simply as random as license plates? Or should we seek deeper explanations?
As a historian of Renaissance astronomy, I keep coming back to Copernicus and his achievement. In his day, which was the time of Leonardo and Columbus and Martin Luther, everyone except Copernicus himself accepted that the earth was the fixed center of the cosmos, and that the observed motions in the heavens could be well accounted for by a series of transparent, frictionless, crystalline spheres that carried the sun, stars, and planets around the globe every twenty-four hours. Clearly this basic motion could also be easily explained by supposing that the stars were fixed and that the earth spun on an axis every twenty-four hours, but that would have been silly because the earth was very heavy and unfit for motion, and just think what would happen if you threw a stone into the air—the earth would spin right out from under it and the stone would land in another county!
But there were in addition some other, more subtle motions of the planets against the background of stars. Take Mars, for example. It moved slowly around the sky against the starry background, completing its circuit about once every two years. However, approximately every two years it would break its stately eastward march, would become much brighter, and for several weeks Mars would move backward, through approximately one zodiacal sign. Ptolemy modeled these observed effects by supposing that Mars rode on a secondary circle, or epicycle, that was in turn carried around the earth in a larger sphere. Now here there was a peculiar, unaccounted for coincidence: every time Mars came to the near side of its epicycle, when the combined motions would give the planet its backward motion, the sun was always directly on the opposite side of the sky. It was all very nice that Mars shone brightly in the midnight sky whenever it did its rhythmic do-si-do, but why it happened this way was as unexplained as a random license plate number.
And then came Copernicus, with no new observations, no fresh empirical evidence, but simply a new way of looking, a "theory pleasing to the mind" as he put it. If Mars and the earth both moved, and around a fixed sun, whenever the faster-moving earth bypassed the slower Mars, Mars would appear for a short while to move backwards, just as the slower car on the Interstate appears to move backward with respect to the distant scenery as it is overtaken by the faster car in the passing lane. But notice that the earth can overtake Mars only when it lies directly between the sun and Mars. In the Copernican arrangement Mars must necessarily be in the midnight sky when its retrogression takes place.
Our logician-geometer could now say, "Aha! Your scheme is very clever, but it actually says nothing about whether the earth is moving or fixed at the center of the universe, because if you let the sun carry Mars around with it, you will get the same effect. You have simply interchanged the epicycle and its carrying circle, and put the new epicycle around the sun." So why did Copernicus opt for a heliocentric cosmology? He didn't have any proof of the earth's motion, but it just made more sense to him despite the lack of a clear physics. It was more unified, more aesthetic, more coherent. This, I will argue, is the way science moves and progresses, not by the foolproof empiricism of the logician, but by the mental leaps of the philosophers.
Yet nature can be both mind-boggling and murky. Let me show you an example that has fascinated me, an intriguing digression. My wife and I are shell collectors, and of the 200 species of cowries in our collection, only a handful, including Cypraea mappa, fluoresce brightly in ultraviolet light. I was long curious about what chemical caused the fluorescence, and found the answer in the literature only a few months ago: coproporphryn. I built a model linking its four pyridine rings—four carbons and a nitrogen in each of these five membered rings—in order to show the characteristic structure that characterizes the porphryns. Any biochemist among you would instantly recognize it as the basic central structure of hemoglobin, except that the hemoglobin in our blood contains an iron atom in the center of the four rings. Furthermore, if you switch the iron for a magnesium atom, you get the central part of chlorophyl, the compound that gives the green color to plants. These porphryns obviously play fundamental roles in living organisms, though as far as I know, no one has the foggiest idea why the Map Cowry has the porphryn and why almost no other cowries have it. But the mystery is still murkier. The central heme part of hemoglobin is not a protein, and therefore cannot be coded directly by DNA. How does it know to incorporate an iron atom? Why don't we get green blood part of the time? What strange, truly complex designs there are in nature! And how much there is that we don't understand!
We simply don't know enough about the porphryns in general to contend that their existence is truly unusual and fine tuned to make life uniquely possible. But Michael Denton, in his book Nature's Destiny, has argued that for the viability of any large, active organism, an efficient transport of the oxygen fuel is essential, and a molecule such as hemoglobin is required. He asks whether a respiratory molecule designed on radically different principles might be possible, and concludes,
It would seem that designing an oxygen-transporting molecule from first principles we are led inevitably to a molecule very like hemoglobin and to the choice of iron or at least one of the transitional metals to carry out the key oxygen-binding role. Water would also most certainly have to be excluded from the binding site, and this would lead inevitably to something like the hydrophobic heme cleft in hemoglobin. The evidence is consistent with the possibility that hemoglobin is the ideal and unique respiratory pigment for metabolically active air-breathing organisms such as ourselves, and that its unique abilities depend in turn not only on the unique properties of the transitional metal atoms but on the specific properties of one of these atoms—iron.2
In looking more generally at the physical constants that characterize our universe, Sir Martin Rees, the brilliant English cosmologist who also happens to be the Astronomer Royal, considers six particularly interesting physical parameters in his recent book Just Six Numbers. Each of them is a ratio or dimensionless constant. If any one of these numbers were altered, the universe would be quite uncongenial for the formation or existence of complex life. His list includes the ratio of the electrostatic to gravitational force, a staggeringly huge number, 1036, one followed by 36 zeroes. In other words, gravity is an extraordinarily weak force compared to electricity. Suppose gravity were a million times stronger, a ratio of 1030. Ants would need thick legs, and gravity would crush anything as large as ourselves. A typical star would last only 10,000 years, leaving precious little time for evolutionary development.3
Another of the six numbers is the ratio of actual density of the universe to the so-called critical density; it is also the ratio of the expansion energy of the universe to the gravitational potential energy drawing the universe back together. The ratio seems rather close to unity, that is, the expansion and contraction forces are virtually balanced. Had the initial expansion been too fast, the universe would have thinned too rapidly and stars and galaxies would not have formed. Had it been too slow, the universe would have long since collapsed back in on itself. Like the little bear's porridge, the expansion seems just right.
That the particular values of certain physical constants have a strong bearing on whether we would be here or not was originally pointed out by two of the Princeton physicists, John Wheeler and the late Robert Dicke. Later this idea was given the name the anthropic principle.4 In their original formulation, the strong anthropic principle drew attention to the fact that the universe was particularly fit for life. It was not just the fitness of the environment as Henderson had noticed, but the entire cosmic stage seemed designed for the emergence of life. Could there be design without a Designer? Were there not philosophical hints that there was more than just the Cosmos?
Indeed, there are so many evidences of design that skeptics have been obliged to come to terms with them, and they have captured the anthropic principle. The universe must be this way for life to exist, they declare, and had it been otherwise, we simply wouldn't be here to contemplate this situation, and that is that. In this form, the notion is known as the weak anthropic principle. Frankly, it's a cop-out. As the cosmologist Fred Hoyle once wrote,
A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.5
But even if there were a bullet-proof deductive argument for the existence of a transcendence beyond the cosmos from the evidences of physics, one that would satisfy our logician, would it be more than a god of large numbers? It's not at all clear that physics could describe a god that would engender both awe and worship.
In considering his six anthropic numbers, Martin Rees has come up with an alternative way of looking at them. It is imaginable that the process that brought forth our universe—a fluctuation in a quantum vacuum, to use the jargon that simply cloaks a mystery beneath a name—that process could have brought forth uncountable additional universes, each with its own assortment of physical constants, even some with other than three dimensions. Andre Linde, one of the architects of the inflationary universe cosmology, has been an enthusiastic advocate of just such a cosmos, with one universe after another budding off from existing universes, and Martin Rees has suggested the name multiverse for this collection of universes. Given a myriad universes, with a variety of properties, then naturally the intelligent, self-contemplating beings we call Homo sapiens would be found in precisely the one where the roulette brought up the numbers congenial to complex life forms!
In a multiverse, to ask the question "Is the universe all there is?" clearly gets the answer, "By no means!" That is, there would be all the other strange universes besides our own. Now some of you are no doubt already thinking, "What a dangerous situation! What if two universes would bump into each other?" Such a question is based on a false concept, namely, that there is some sort of superspace in which the universes are placed and which they share. In reality, each universe has its own independent space, creating more as it expands, just as each universe creates its own time. So there is no possibility that the universes would collide, because they are not sharing space. In fact there is no physical way to get in touch with another universe, to observe it, or to detect its presence. Are these forever unobservable universes as real as the other sides of those shorn Scottish sheep? Or are they simply a figment of the Astronomer Royal's imagination? Some cosmologists are deeply offended that anyone would even seriously entertain the notion of universes that we could never hope to detect. These cosmologists are the logicians, the strict empiricists, but not the philosophers who often find that understanding the universe requires leaps of insight that go beyond "Just the facts, mam, just the facts." Actually all of us astronomers believe in the existence of unobservable parts of our own universe: the past and the future, which we deduce from the existence of the present. That is, as we look out into space, we are looking backward in time, and we do not see the undefinable present at a distance. Rather, we are seeing the past. Consider a star a hundred light-years away. In a century from now our successors will observe today's present on that star—but it is an assumption that the star we now see as it was a century ago is still there and will be seen at the beginning of the twenty-second century.
But this is not exactly the direction I want to go. Rather, I want to remind you that Christians have long envisioned a world with which they have no physical contact, not the heavens, but Heaven, the empyrean. It is a totally other place, without evil and suffering, and where the inhabitants never grow old. It thus cannot be our present world remodeled, for the remodeling would strike at the very heart of all our physical understanding. To suspend the rules of our cosmos would be tantamount to being in another universe. Yet to deny the existence of such a universe, of anything other than our observed physical cosmos, would be to deny a traditional Christian doctrine.
So, I would like to explore how modern astrophysical ideas can intersect with the ancient Christian ideas of a new heavens and a new earth, that is to say, a rational envisioning of a new and different physics, something that can no more be dismissed out of hand than the notion of a multiverse. And I say this knowing full well that there are many who in fact dismiss the multiverse concept as "mere metaphysics."
Traditionally the cosmos was seen on a comparatively human scale of both space and time. The Biblical account described a universe created a very long time ago in terms of human generations, but trivially short by any modern cosmological standards. Similarly, the starry sphere was seen as not all that far above the earth. The levels of paradise described so vividly by Dante came immediately beyond the firmament of stars. But note the difference in the sources for the short time scale and the short distance scale. The short time scale appears at first glance to be anchored in the scriptures, whereas the place of heaven, that is, the short distance scale, is a traditional interpretation, one that finds its depiction in literature and art rather than in the Bible. Nevertheless, the New Testament account of how Jesus came into the world and how he ascended from it is deeply rooted in an antique biology and an antique distance scale that stands in stark contrast to our modern scientific understanding.
Unlike the ancient cosmos, the scale of today's theater for God's action is mind-numbing in its sweep. There is no way to grasp the enormity of scale of time and space except by making stepwise comparisons or some kind of analogies. When Christiaan Huygens gauged the distance to a nearby star Sirius, as nearly 28,000 times farther away than the sun, he recorded the enormity of that distance as follows:
For if 25 years are required for a bullet out of a Cannon, with its utmost Swiftness, to travel from the Sun to us; then by multiplying the number 27664 into 25, we shall find that such a Bullet would spend almost seven hundred thousand years in its Journey between us and the nearest of the fix'd Stars. And yet when in a clear night we look upon them, we cannot think them above some few miles over our heads. What I have here enquir'd into, is concerning the nearest of them. And what a prodigious number must there be besides of those which are placed so deep in the vast spaces of Heaven, as to be as remote from these as these are from the Sun! For if with our bare Eye we can observe above a thousand, and with a Telescope can discover ten or twenty times as many; what bounds of number must we set to those which are out of reach even of these Assistances! especially if we consider the infinite Power of God. Really, when I have bin reflecting thus with my self, methoughts all our Arithmetick was nothing, and we are vers'd but in the very Rudiments of Numbers, in comparison of this great Sum.
Huygens' feeling is easily shared today, but he was probing only the fringe of the vastness. He was one of the first to assign a reasonably correct velocity to light itself, but it didn't occur to him to measure the distance to Sirius in the flight time of light rather than the cannon ball. Today we put Sirius' distance at eight light-years, and eight years is easily within human grasp. But the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy—100,000 light-years—exceeds ordinary human comprehension, a time interval vastly greater than all of human history. To go a thousand times farther takes us to distant clusters of galaxies, but that would delineate a sphere whose volume is still less than one ten-thousandth of a percent of the volume of the observable universe.6
Indeed, we are mere specks in an abyss of space and time. God may see the little sparrow fall, but can we take seriously the concept of a caring Creator whose universe has somehow allowed us to emerge in this tiny backwater of the cosmos, overwhelmed by a sea of space and time? We have eaten of the tree of knowledge and see that we are naked.
Philosophically it hardly matters whether the universe is 100 million light-years in diameter or 14 billion—once we have left a human scale behind, it leaves us just as lost and insignificant whether we are talking millions or billions. But scientifically it matters a great deal whether we are in a universe 100 million years old or one 10 to 20 billion years old. A hundred million years puts us back to the age of the dinosaurs, but if the universe were only 100 million years old, neither the dinosaurs nor humankind would be here. Modern science shows us a universe in which the atoms required for life did not emerge in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang. Rather, they simmered very slowly in the fiery furnaces of stellar interiors, gradually building up the abundances of oxygen and carbon, and in occasional catastrophic bursts fusing the relatively lighter atoms together into the essential heavier elements such as iron, at the same time spewing them back into the interstellar medium from which new, enriched generations of stars and planets could form. The physics of our universe simply requires a vastly old universe—dare I say a venerable universe?—before the path to complex life can begin. And an old universe requires a huge universe—weak as the gravitational forces are, a small universe would collapse gravitationally long before the cosmic cooking had produced a nutritious stew.
I like to think that John Wheeler had it right when he likened our tiny existence in the vast universe to an immense plant whose central purpose was to produce one small, ephemeral flower. And what an extraordinary efflorescence this is! The human brain is by far the most complex physical object known to us in the entire cosmos. (Only God, "the Old One," the "ground of being" can claim to surpass this complexity.) Of the roughly 30,000 genes coded by the DNA in the human genome, approximately half are expressed in the brain. There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain, nerve cells many with long dendritic extensions intricately interconnected with each other. Each neuron connects with about 10,000 other neurons. While the number of estimated stars in all the galaxies in the universe vastly exceeds the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, the number of synaptic interconnections in a single human brain greatly exceeds the number of stars in our Milky Way: 1015 synapses versus 2 x 1011 stars.
For a human at rest, roughly half the body's energy supply fuels the brain. Oxygen (required for slowly "burning" the organic fuel) is carried to the brain by the red blood cells. In these cells the oxygen is loosely bonded to the iron atoms in the middle of the heme complex in the blood's hemoglobin. The oxygen is transferred into the blood through the intricately branched and foliate lung system, where the solubility of oxygen in water and the diameter of the capillaries are finely tuned for an efficient rate of transfer of the oxygen to the heme. Of all the possible metallic complexes, iron has just the right bonding strength to allow the capture and subsequent easy release of the oxygen.
Fortunately for us, our atmosphere contains a reasonable supply of oxygen—about 20% by number of atoms. This percentage is high enough to sustain fire, but not so high as to allow cataclysmic combustion. In fact, the acceptable oxygen limits for life more complex than single cells are fairly narrow, and the earth's atmosphere, it seems, is just right.
As the human brain develops from infancy, a substantial part is devoted to the control of the organs of speech. No other aspect of human powers differs so significantly from the other animals as our ability to communicate by spoken language. It can well be argued that the ability to speak was the first essential step toward becoming human, as Ian Tattersal has done quite eloquently in his book of the same name, Becoming Human. The Harvard anthropologist David Pilbeam has remarked that if we could have observed Neanderthal for the 200,000 years beginning that long ago, we could hardly have extrapolated to the complex human civilization that eventually arose on the earth. The Neanderthals made the same kinds of tools at the beginning until the end of their existence, with no dramatic advance in technology. Perhaps, as Tattersal has argued, this was owing to their lack of language. Watching the Neanderthals' lack of progress gives us some pause about the inevitability of the evolution of intelligence.
The evidence at hand is hardly conducive to modesty. Homo sapiens clearly represents the pinnacle of life on earth, far outdistancing any rivals, and to say otherwise is to engage in a sort of scholastic fantasy. "What is man that thou are mindful of him?" asks the Psalmist. "For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him with glory and honor." Yet part of the glory of human creativity and self-consciousness is the ability to ask questions beyond ourselves, about whether the human brain really is the most complex object in the universe or about whether we are alone in the universe—alone in either sense, whether God exists and/or whether extraterrestrial intelligence exists.
But the imagined flower on John Wheeler's plant was not only small but ephemeral. The first of the genus Homo appeared on earth about four million years ago, and already half a dozen species of the genus are extinct. Homo sapiens has been around only a few hundred thousand years. I asked my friend Philip Morrison, an Institute Professor Emeritus at MIT and an astute observer of the scientific scene, about the prospects for Homo sapiens. "I would give it about 10 million years," he opined, and when I pressed him about the basis of his estimate, he replied that this was a typical lifetime for a complex species. I agreed that certainly the fossil record shows us that extinction is the name of the game, and there is no reasonable expectation that humankind would be exempt.
While ten million years is a fleeting instant compared to the sun's projected future lifetime of five billion years, it does seem to me unreasonably long. Given an incredible transition to a sustainable future with a greatly diminished population for our planet, plus a thriving scientific environment needed to harness the vast and generously distributed sunlight, would we not also expect an exponential increase in biological knowledge? Fifty years ago the exact number of chromosomes in human cells was still in doubt, while today we are making a complete map of their genetic patterns. In evolution we have crossed the Lamarkian divide. The human brain now stores more information than the DNA of our chromosomes. What we learn can become inheritable. Correction of crippling genetic defects is close upon us. In another fifty years, barring major nuclear catastrophe, geneticists will surely be able to manipulate the genes to create a stronger, healthier, smarter superman.
There is a rather spooky scenario in Lee Silver's provocative book, Remaking Eden.7 He describes a time three and a half centuries hence, when genetic engineering has allowed the wealthier parents to invest in improved genes for their children. Naturally they did not want their GenRich children wasting all this expensive improvement by finding unimproved mates, although inevitably love sometimes crossed those social boundaries between the GenRich and the Naturals. But then a curious thing happened: increasingly those mixed marriages proved infertile. I think most of you know the scientific definition of a species, which is the boundary within which individual creatures can interbreed. What Prof. Silver has described is the genetic origin of a new species.
In 2,000 years our species will be indeed be smarter—if it even exists as the same species! So to me it is unimaginable that Homo sapiens will still exist on earth ten million years from now, except perhaps by some remote chance in zoos or special preserves, a throwback much like Przewalski's horse. It is not astronomy that gives me this reading, nor even evolutionary biology and anthropology, but my reflections as a historian and philosopher of science. I believe it is neither pessimistic nor optimistic, but simply realistic. Our universe is going to go on for billions of years without us. Our temporal span is as fleeting as our spatial position is minuscule.
It was early in these ruminations that I offered to explore how modern astrophysical ideas can intersect with the ancient Christian ideas of a new heavens and a new earth, and it may seem that I have wandered rather far from that goal. Yet these digressions have helped to fill out some of the requirements for a contemporary understanding of heaven.
When I asked, "Is the Cosmos all there is?" I had in mind first of all the question of whether there is a transcendence out of which the universe arose, a creator-designer which accounts for the observed fact that the universe is remarkably well tuned and congenial for the formation of intelligent, self-contemplative consciousness, which in turn may well represent the ultimate purpose of the universe, the bottom line to that most profound of questions, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Amateur philosopher though I am, I do recognize the anthropomorphic bearings of my question and its answer. "Purpose" is a very human notion that may have no meaning whatsoever to the transcendence that gave birth to the universe. But we are human and I suspect that we will always have to frame our questions and answers in personal, human terms. And I have no trouble imagining that a superintelligence could take on a human mask to interact with our sensibilities, and could communicate to us through prophets of many cultures and many ages.
But when I asked, "Is the Cosmos all there is?" I also had in mind the question of immortality. Does our self-contemplative consciousness have any being beyond this mortal coil? Is our existence just a macabre joke that a meaningless universe has inflicted on us? Is it just sound and fury, signifying nothing? Is it reasonable to hope for a continued existence beyond death, a central doctrine of the Christian faith?
I personally rather like the notion of a personal existence in paradise. I think most of us would enjoy the opportunity to speak again with long-lost friends, to interview our great grandfathers or Galileo or Augustine. It would be satisfying, at least fleetingly, to be able to figure out where lost socks went. And I would like the time to learn Greek, and on a longer scale, I would love to look back at the earth to see how the continents will drift.
But there are problems here. I would like to meet again my mother, who died two weeks ago at age 98, but I would certainly take little pleasure in seeing her at age 98. We are all continuously changing, generally becoming wiser and more dilapidated. Time is a property of our universe, and a fundamental part of human experience. We live in a world of time, are molded by time, and we cannot envision living in a world without time any more than we can imagine what it would be like to live in a world with time but without growing older.
Last fall I had the opportunity to attend a Vatican conference on cosmology, specifically on cosmological eschatology, the science of the far future universe, and it was pointed out that none of us have any gut feeling of what "forever" means if indeed we intend an infinity of time, which would allow everything to happen an infinite number of times. Essentially it is impossible to have a universe that is unending and also interesting.
I have already suggested that any traditional view of heaven, to the extent it is reasonably well described, is so far from our earthly norms of time and aging that it is tantamount to one of those other universes imagined in the multiverse cosmology. These days string theorists have no problem thinking of universes with more than three spatial dimensions—maybe even our own universe can be understood in terms of additional unperceived dimensions. But I think it is rather hard for the theorists to conceive of universes with two dimensions of time, or none of time.
What modern cosmology is telling us is that it's not automatically absurd to imagine other places with other, unfamiliar physical laws. I suspect our traditional views of heaven are as dated as the tightly nested medieval cosmos. However, it must be as difficult to envision a consistent view of eternity as it is to think of a totally different universe within a multiverse complex, among other reasons because it is hard to grasp the fact that time itself is created with our universe and is no more outside of our universe than is some kind of superspace. Yet, I am told, Plato conceived of a timeless eternity, and I think that is something for philosophers to re-explore. For only in this way, I suspect, will we begin to reconcile our fleeting human existence in this particular universe with the larger cosmological structures that the incredible self-conscious brain of Homo sapiens can conceive. Of course, if you ask me what a timeless eternity is, I cannot answer. Timelessness is as impossible for us to grasp as a beginning of time or an end of time. In a sense it is only word play. Nevertheless, word games are not necessarily trivial.
Is the cosmos all there is? The logician will undoubtedly say yes. The philosopher can only say "not necessarily!" He knows he is like the blind man trying to describe an elephant. Is his search for coherence in vain? Or is it a fundamental part of being a reflective, self-conscious creature—maybe even a designed and created creature? Perhaps the quest itself is the purpose of the universe and somehow the answer to the question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" And ultimately, for the Christian, it is a matter of trust.
My canvas tonight has been vast, digressive, and all too inconclusive. But I hope these fragments may perhaps help enlarge the vision of theological inquiry in the twenty-first century. In closing, let me turn back to a prayer that I have often prayed, the one with which Johannes Kepler closed his extraordinary cosmological voyage, his Harmonice mundi:
If I have been allured into brashness by the wonderful beauty of thy works, or if I have loved my own glory among men, while advancing in work destined for thy glory, gently and mercifully pardon me: and finally, deign graciously to cause that these demonstrations may lead to thy glory and to the salvation of souls, and nowhere be an obstacle to that. Amen."8
Notes
1. G. Gamow, My World Line: An Informal Biography (New York, 1970), p. 127. Gamow speculated that this parody might account for his not having received an invitation to the 1958 Solvay Congress on cosmology.
2. Michael Denton, Nature's Destiny (New York, 1998), p. 202.
3. Martin Rees, Just Six Numbers (New York, 1999), p. 30.
4. John D. Barrow & Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford, 1986), Introduction.
5. Fred Hoyle, "The Universe: Past and Present Reflections," pp. 8-12 in Engineering and Science, November, 1981, esp. p. 12.
6. Christiaan Huygens, The Celestial Worlds Discover'd (London, 1698), pp. 154-55.
7. Lee Silver, Remaking Eden (New York, 1997), p. 6.
8. End of Book V, chapter 9 of Harmonice mundi, Johannes Kepler Gesammelte Werke, 6, 362; my translation is based on the ones by Charles Glenn Wallis in Great Books of the Western World, 16, and by Eric J. Aiton, A. M. Duncan and J. V. Field, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society, 209, (Philadelphia, 1997).
