Hosted by Jeff Hunt and Joan McCracken
Broadcast 11am Sunday January 18 2004
(This script was first broadcast as a Humanist Outlook programme on Wellington Access Radio in 1994. It was re-recorded and rebroadcast January 2004)
TODAY'S HUMANIST OUTLOOK is about the most important thing we know of. Or perhaps it's the least important. It depends on you. It is the largest subject there is and it's the oldest.
Today I'll talk about the origins of the universe and from there our own origins. I'm not a cosmologist, but Richard Dawkins is a professional evolutionist and his book "The Blind Watchmaker" has taught me things I want to share. Recently I read a biography of the similarly named and badly physically handicapped Oxford Professor, Stephen Hawking, who is a cosmologist. I'll use his ideas as well today.
It's impossible to imagine the unimaginable, but we need to try because today's Humanist Outlook has to do with the unimaginably large, the unimaginably old, and the processes of time and space which are not only beyond our everyday experience but probably outside anything we can ever contemplate.
The colossal size and antiquity of the universe are the reasons that make it so hard for lay people to think clearly about their place in the scheme of things, yet Dawkins insists that it is the very size and antiquity that make things as they are, and make Humans the refined and caring creatures that they are.
When Humans lived in caves and the control of fire was a distant dream for the more advanced technocrats, the answers were easy. An obviously flat earth with celestial bodies moving around it a long way away. say 100 kilometres or so clearly needed some very clever thing to have designed it. Since the only clever things are humans, the designing creature was a superhuman who must have had a motive for designing the universe which is presumably to have humans for company. Ah and since she has designed humans she must be treated with respect and her laws which she would tell to clever people for interpretation must be obeyed.
That remained the best and really the only plausible scientific explanation of the origins of both the cosmos and humans. and apparently served from the dawn of consciousness until quite recently. The fact that the model collapses hopelessly over the need to postulate a superhuman to account for the appearance of ordinary humans is an ignorable disadvantage. Karl Popper, eminent physicist and philosopher, has explained that any theory can be inoculated as he puts it against shortcomings and so sub-theories about timelessness came into being.
But anyway, the theory of divine design and intervention solved a multitude of problems of design and reason and so became the accepted model as any reasonable scientific model does. Problems began to appear as humans learned to examine the physical universe and discovered vast and apparently useless size and age. Other difficulties come from the dubious behaviour of divinely inspired humans- Closer observation suggests the difference between ourselves and the rest of the animals is less than we feel comfortable with.
In the 1991 census in New Zealand a majority of people expressed some sort of religious belief. The cave theories of past millennia still hold good for a majority of modern educated New Zealanders. Is it possible that this ancient philosophy has stood the test of time and is still current and acceptable science.?
Astonishing as it seems the universe still works apparently guided by a benign god. Humans still function and breed and often show loving altruistic support apparently imposed by a loving designer. The system works and has a certain rationale about it that suggests a grand designer.
But there are cracks. What's it all for? Why would a superhuman want us'!
Why so big? Why so cruel'? Why doesn't the designer reveal itself?
If I were an omnipotent, omnipresent god in the sky would I make the world so
big, so old so cruel? I couldn't bear to do it, could you? Yet it's the only
plausible explanation; or is it?
Charles Darwin in the mid 19th century had a chip at it and offered some alternatives. Mid 20th century cosmology has offered some other ideas about the beginning of the universe, and modern social ethics have made a contribution.
Yet the god theory lives on. When our politicians invoke the help of a divine being at the beginning of a political session, are they performing according to the best scientific theory of human origins and science and ethics or are they making fools of themselves?
Let's try an alternative. Imagine the unimaginably large. No, not that large, much, much larger. The universe is big. It's ginormous. Is it possible that in this mass of swirling cooling gases that something may emerge that has the nature of planet Earth? Think of the expanse. Of a universe made up of mass and energy. The mass degenerates to a mess of different subatomic particles. Might some of them coalesce into atoms and into molecules and from there into a warm moist body close to a warming centre of nuclear energy such as our sun? Try hard and think that given enough space and time such an event may occur. In fact here it is under our feet. Perhaps it would be extraordinary, if in the vastness of space something like this had not cropped up.
Yet the earth is lifeless, just a. mess of space, time and matter. Can we conjure up life. We need at a minimum a self-replicating chemical. After all that's what life is. A chemical or chemical system with enough activity to gather together another chemical like itself to reproduce.
Might it be possible in the swirling sea of energy and matter that such a chemical - perhaps a double helix with the capacity to break in two and reform - might occur? It sounds a bit unlikely, but what if in the vastness of space a hundred earths have formed, perhaps a thousand, perhaps a million? Allow a few millions of years, perhaps almost a billion amongst each of these millions of potential earths is it likely that a self-replicating chemical might form? Thinking about it in these terms it might be a little unusual if it didn't.
If it happened then the seeds were sown and life appeared in the universe. The evidence suggests it did. On an insignificant piece of cooling cosmic gas at the edge of an insignificant galaxy lost in the immensity here we are. A piece of chance living chemical in space and time. Once the living chemical came into being the rest was easy. Charles Darwin showed us how.
Replicating chemicals rely on the environment and chance to replicate. When the new generation is not exact then the progeny will normally not survive, but sometimes the change will aid the process of replicating and those are the chemicals that will survive possibly at the expense of the true copies. Evolution has occurred. Size and complexity may be an advantage. A chance piece of light-sensitive chemical is the origin of an eye 10 million years later. We know what changes can be wrought with existing animals in a few generations. In a billion years of steady change, death and adjustment what might be brought about? Look about and see the product of billions of years since the Earth's origins.
But humans have something extra, they have spirit, soul, they are the image of god. Next time you accidentally pull out in front of someone in your car, check to see if it?s the image of god that reacts to you or whether it's a creature molded by 4 billion years of subtle chemical change to survive that you see.
Ah, but humans are caring social animals. They create. They are altruistic and compassionate. But bees are social animals, birds make nests, many species care about their offspring and their tribe. They, like humans, had no choice. The ones who didn't are in the dustbin of evolution. The spirit and love of life that is so precious, is a simple necessity of survival. Quite simply the individuals that weren't determined to live each day and get through it got their reward. We are the survivors who rode the evolutionary ladder on the deaths of the unfit. A harsh realisation, but a truism. We live because we are for the time being adequate to survive. All else is dead.
Evolved life is almost impossible to comprehend. It relies on a scale of time and space that has no reality to everyday human life, but given that scale it can happen and apparently did. Had it been another time and another place then some other creature might be speaking to you on the far side of the universe, but it was here on earth and we are now.
I personally have my doubts that the universe is full of other life forms, with many earths and many similar creatures, I think, but with no scientific basis at all, that Earth life may have stretched the probabilities to the limit and we are it. I hope I'm wrong.
Another thing that makes evolved life difficult to understand is that it produced humans with a capital "H". After all humans are everything, they are godly, they are the ultimate. And yet an earthworm is very nearly as miraculous. A bat may very well be superior by some standards, it can fly and echo sound. It doesn't need to be intellectual, it's too superior.
Nancy Sibain has this to say about climbing the evolutionary tree.
Said dinosaurus to his brother
Let us congratulate each other.
The world has seen a final birth.
The dinosaurs now rule the earth.
The former things were made to pass.
To shrink to shrivel as the grass.
Gone is the age of bleak confusion.
We've reached the peak of evolution.
This is our right, our destiny.
The world was made for you and me.
Think of that the next time you hear a fundamentalist speaking. Humans are not an end in themselves, they just happen to be you and me and that makes them special to us. But this need not suggest a grand plan designed to finish with you and me. After all if you were a grand designer is this the end you would aim for?
Evolution is scary. We become animals, and not very good ones at that. Our sole credentials are that we have survived - and not nearly as well as insects or sharks. In fact even the maligned dinosaurs had a run of nearly 200 million years and we are taught to think of them as failures.
We have very little. We are unsupported and unloved in the greater scheme of things. And yet, I personally take great strength from our position. I was told by people who were supposed to be educating me that I was the image of a good god gone wrong and I could be punished for having failed to live up to a celestial law that I didn't understand. I was a godlike creature expected to behave accordingly and couldn?t. All that has been lifted from me and what is left is that I am a member of a highly successful species that far from falling from grace is evolving and learning and starting to take control its own destiny.
Far from being divine failures we are earth creatures that have achieved a great deal, and by studying and learning the ways of the world we can make ourselves happy.
Perhaps the most exciting and reassuring aspect of understanding our evolution is the concept of the global village. Our evolution made us fight invaders or fail, it also made us love our families and friends for the support that that offered, As our communities spread we have the opportunity to declare the whole earth our friend and family. There need be no more invaders if we can plan and organise on a global basis.
This to me is Humanism and I think we can cope with the new order of things if we accept our primitive origins for what they are and not as what we'd like them to be.