It is just a few days until Christmas and I’m driving with great Prudence, yet still able to observe the full moon in its apparently circular beauty, yellow-orange and huge. Flying across its face are dark gray clouds. There still being some waning daylight, the clouds seem darker than they really are, making the moon’s reflected light seem friendlier than ever, and it made us think about it all.
Some astronomers are faithful to some view of God or an Intelligence behind the design of the “Universe” of which we are aware. Some are faithful only to mathematics and physical laws… of which we are aware. All, however, are evidently in agreement about matters of life on earth, and our so-far unique circumstances that allow for the benign environment life has enjoyed for millions of years. And, it has a lot to do with the Moon.
Along with earth’s distance from the right sort of star, it is blessed with a “satellite” moon that is large enough (about ¼ of earth’s diameter) and massive enough (about 2% of earth’s, gigantic among known “moons”) to not only generate significant tides but to form, in effect, a binary planet system. By some manner, the formation of the Moon caused a tilt to earth’s axis resulting in seasons as we whirl about the Sun each year. Our friendly moon also has protected us from objects too numerous to count that hit her instead of earth.
Earth also was formed from the right kind of rocky, metal-laden bits and pieces – the remains of stars that died billions of years ago – such that our core is a molten mix of iron and several radioactive elements that both maintain heat and convection and which happily generate a strong magnetic field that, fortunately, protects us from the worst of our right-sort-of-star’s radiation, allowing mutation to occur not so frequently that already living things could not take advantage of them over generations of evolution. All in all, cool.
Amidst all of this rare good fortune – so rare in conjunction that its calculation of probability needs more zeroes to the right of its decimal point than this page could hold – somehow evolution produced humans who became abruptly smarter a couple hundred thousand years ago, including the ability to worship, the only truly exclusive ability amongst all the higher orders of fauna.
True agnostics, among whom all honest scientists should reside, are able to consider the possibility that there is Intelligent Design given the quantity of evidence for it; atheists, on the other hand, are committed to denial in the face of evidence, mainly out of fear that there might be a “God,” so-called, and they seriously don’t want that to be true. Skeptics, though, want to argue every tiny point about “Intelligent Design” or any other name for God, since they can’t see it, touch it, taste it or hear it, and lacking tangible proof prefer to remain on the sidelines, watching the game. Besides, if there were such an all-powerful Being, wouldn’t He make Himself known?
The answer to that question is, of course, yes, He would… and here we are.
Humans tend to assume that if there is something to be learned that we can learn it – something to be known, we can know it. On Earth we know a great deal but very little beyond. Without experience to fill out our observations, we remain quite ignorant and reduced to speculation, which we are very good at. Currently the hot speculation is about “life” on other planets in other solar systems in “our” galaxy and, naturally, in others. Telescopes of various kinds reveal that most stars have planets and we can observe basic parameters of some of them. Automatically we can speculate, estimate by orders of magnitude, that there are billions and billions of planets… surely some are enough like Earth to have sentient life, both more advanced and less advanced than we are.
Is it reasonable that “God” or the “Intelligent Designer” of the universe has devoted some care and attention to them, also? Do they have souls? Can they go to “Heaven” when they die? In the 1950’s Prudence’ close, close friend read a science-fiction story about humans – probably Americans – who had abandoned their original starship mission in an attempt to arrive at an inhabited planet while “Jesus” was still there, just missing him more than once. The title and author escape us but it may have been Heinlein, Poul Anderson or some other science fiction artist of the period. The concept is a natural extension of our speculations, though, is it not?
The facts and phenomenal good fortune of our existence on Earth have granted us the ability – perhaps the right – to believe and to worship, to discover mathematics and to learn to speculate outside of our individual spheres of subsistence and procreation. At the center of the “Are we alone?” question, lies “Are you there God, it’s us, humans?”
Still, it is interesting that humans are wired to worship, and that “religious” traditions around the world share many concepts and traditional accounts of the origins of everything and of the sources of knowledge of all sorts: from outside of Earth, always “up.”
Unfortunately, learned humans tend to create comfortable pathways along which to speculate – form theories. Many of these same consider religious beliefs – religious explanations for the origin and operation of “things” – to be mythical and therefore unreal. After all, those ancient peoples had no science, no rational means of discovery, so the speculation goes, and therefore everything they believed was baseless. Maybe.
Now and then something is dug up that belies a lot of speculations and the learned humans file it away in the basement of a university school of misunderstandings so as to not threaten their speculations. Speculators like to be in control. Consequently, they prefer the most complicated explanations they can conceive of – explanations that require incalculably tiny probabilities of sequences of “natural” events – to explain everything.
One could speculate that these rationalist humans are simply worshiping the wrong truth.