A. Regarding how humans perceive reality
B. Regarding the anthropic principle, both weak and strong. (A refutation.)
C. Some thoughts on God, human insignificance, and human dignity.
How It Looks to Us: the Human Frame of Reference
I.
It has been fairly well established that humans do not perceive what has been called the “actual, free-standing reality.” It would appear that all non-deductive human knowledge of the world is mediated through the senses, which present to the brain a version of that reality, something perhaps linked to it, but not the essence of it. Humans literally cannot directly experience this “real” reality, what Immanuel Kant called “The World in Itself”. If a human were to be plunged into this “real” reality, we must suppose he or she would have no way of comprehending it or describing it to anyone else, since the human would have no basis whatsoever from which to do so. Such a basis could only be grounded in what philosophers call absolute perspective, which can only be possessed by a fully transcendent being. This means that humans face a paradox from which they cannot escape. It is logically impossible for them to view reality from a non-human, transcendent vantage point. They cannot perceive as a human and a non-human simultaneously.
Humans can only perceive and describe reality within certain carefully bounded limits. There are, obviously, many physical limitations humans have, but here I am referring chiefly to how human consciousness processes the stimuli provided by the senses. The human nervous system seems to have evolved in such a way so as to sort out sensory input and arrange it in a form which facilitates our survival. The senses convert different kinds of energies coming into (or from within) the body into electro-chemical signals that the brain uses to interpret these energies, converting them from raw sensation into the objects of conscious awareness, thus giving us a picture of reality that is comprehensible. The brain which processes and reacts to these signals appears to have evolved in a jerry-rigged, haphazard fashion, with many ancient functions conserved across both time and species. Within its processes, there is plenty of room for error or breakdown, and the deep nature of its functioning is not yet fully understood.
The brain’s higher functions—ratiocination, language processing, abstraction, imagination, memory—appear to be vulnerable to physical limitations inherent in the brain’s anatomy and physiology and subject to errors caused by physical deterioration due to illness, injury, or age. Further, the brain’s intellectual functions seem to be inextricably bound to its emotional functions and expressions, which can manifest themselves in a very great number of ways. Therefore, the brain cannot be thought of as an infallible recorder of the external world.
The human attempt to understand all of this takes place, of course, within the confines of the physical brain itself. There is no empirical support for the proposition that mind can exist outside of the brain, although it is not logically impossible that it might. The brain must use its own resources to understand its own functioning. A deep paradox exists here: the very complexity that gives rise to intelligence makes the analysis of that intelligence an almost insuperably difficult task. As one neurologist put it, if the brain were simple to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.
There are many epistemological issues as well. How do we know what we know? How do we verify what we know? What is knowledge itself? Can humans have sufficient confirmatory evidence to support our contentions of validity? Perhaps we will have to settle for consistency as the chief test of our link to reality and surrender the quest for a certitude that may be unattainable.
So we must question the ability of humans to even engage in the kind of examination that I am proposing. In a sense, all such examinations of the human condition and the context in which human history has emerged are inherently, perhaps even fatally, limited and flawed. How can we put human history into the context of a reality that we cannot truly perceive? And in regard to what we believe we can perceive, we face other barriers, as well. Advanced types of communication (that is, those which rise above the level of mere gestures or simple signals) are dependent on language, which in turn is an imprecise tool (as I will stress repeatedly). So one can readily see the dilemma we face. Is language sufficient to discuss the limitations of language? If we perceive only a version of reality, how can we, with any coherence, discuss reality itself? We are trapped in the prison of human consciousness. We cannot imagine any other way of seeing the world because even the terms in which we try to imagine another viewpoint are grounded completely in our own frame of reference. It could be argued that even I don’t completely understand what I mean by what I am saying, and that you don’t either. It’s as if we are in an intellectual hall of mirrors, a world of psychological self-recursion, where we find ourselves looking at ourselves looking at ourselves. Even at the very moment that you are reading this you might realize that you are reading about reading about reading…
We read that our understanding is imperfect, and because of our imperfect understanding we cannot fully realize it, thus illustrating the very principle we fail to grasp. It’s as if the best we can do when trying to convey our thoughts and impressions is to achieve an approximation of communication, with the hope that there is enough of a coincidence between our views, our experiences, and our understanding of language that some sort of communication might be effected. (And as a matter of principle, it would appear that the more abstract our words, the more imprecision of communication there will be.)
II.
There are, naturally, perceptual similarities between humans and other animals, and these similarities are more pronounced in species which are evolutionarily closer to us. We may assume, for example, that other higher primates (such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans) have very similar sensory apparatuses. We share with them visual traits such as color perception, depth perception, and highly developed maculae. We share with them weak senses of smell. We tend to have highly sensitive hands. (This is why an understanding of the phylogenetic tree of life is so crucial—it is the basis for our assessment of our own capabilities, similarities, and dissimilarities relative to every other living thing.) Extending this, we may argue that we share many experiential similarities with all mammals. (At some point, of course, we may ask if the members of other classes have a sense of their own existence, and it seems likely to me that the simpler a thing’s brain is, the less that thing would be “aware” of its own existence, however the term aware might be defined.) Human consciousness, of course, provides us with a unique vantage point. Many other animals certainly have the capacity to learn and imitate complex behavioral patterns, use tools, teach their offspring vital skills, and even perhaps communicate in symbols (such as cetacean sounds). But it is not the uniqueness of our mental capacities, but rather the degree to which they have been developed that sets us apart. Natural selection operated with its typical ruthlessness to give our immediate ancestors brains more capable of assessing a situation and acting appropriately in it, and storing useful information in our working memory, than any other species we know of.
But we shouldn’t be fooled by our comparatively immense gifts. The human brain is both liberating and confining. Our experiences are the sum total of our sensory input and the way those inputs are interpreted, and the particular evolution of the human brain facilitates our survival and reproductive success; it does not give us infallible powers of assessment and comprehension. Evolution has produced different capabilities in different animals, ones that we cannot truly imagine. Moreover, the different neural structures of other animals (even though many specific brain structures are conserved across species) probably create distinctive frames of reference.
For instance, no human can, by definition, know what it would be like to hear the high audio tones perceptible to dogs. Humans do not really understand the mental world created by the echolocation of bats, which may be as “real” as the visual world created by our eyes. (Some blind humans may have a version of this ability, however.) Humans cannot imagine what it would be like to experience the perception of infrared, as certain insect species can. Our perceptions and the neural structures that underlie them produce a frame of reference that is both unique and strictly limited. Humans can guess what it would be like to perceive the world as a dog, an ant, or a bat, but all of their guesses and suppositions could only be understood in human terms, an endless loop. (And if we have difficulty imagining the experience of being a dog, how much more difficult would it be for us to imagine the perspective of an omniscient being!)
III.
We are therefore confined to a limited, mediated, human-centered version of reality. We are linked to the “real” reality, but we do not apprehend that reality directly. Knowledge of the reality in which we find ourselves can be obtained in only two verifiable ways. The first is through the senses, the basis of empiricism. Even in the empirical realm, however, we can not be certain that we perceive what others perceive. The knowledge our senses gather does not appear to be infallible in all cases, nor does it seem that the senses of all humans are identical. It would appear that there are differences in degree in all sense perceptions. Additionally, as I have noted, there seem to be energies that humans are not capable of perceiving directly, such as the ends of the light spectrum or the lowest or highest megacycles of sound. Since there appear to be realities humans cannot perceive or experience, it would therefore seem that human perception is subjective (that is to say, not absolute).
The second way we can obtain knowledge of our reality in a verifiable way is through inductive reasoning, the basis of mathematics. Mathematics may be something that is discovered by human reason, or it may be a construct and creation of human reason. By its very processes, it may the closest we come to a direct connection with that which is ultimately real, but we will examine that question in more detail elsewhere.
Knowledge claimed to exist through revelation, the basis of much of religious belief, cannot be independently verified, but it still may be veridical. By its very nature, revelation is not testable—it cannot be repeated and observed in the manner of a replicable experiment, nor can it be expressed as an equation. And as we move from the testable realm of physical objects and their interrelationships, or the realm of mathematical proofs, the degree of certainty we can have declines correspondingly. And it is the lack of certainty that governs the human world in many ways, however humans may wish to believe otherwise.
The human frame of reference is therefore a deeply confining one, filled with self-contradictions. Humans must use language to show that language is insufficient to the description of reality. They must imagine the existence and nature of an absolute perspective they cannot imagine. They must describe their own subjective perceptions using subjective perceptions. They must use their brains to figure out their brains. They must discuss their lack of certainty using uncertain means.
So in our examination of the world, we are confronted with an inescapable reality: everything that we look at can be explained only by such phrases as, “the way we see it” or, “according to human perception” or, “as it looks to us” or, “as it seems to us.”
There is no other way for us to proceed.
A Species Lost in Both Space and Time
I.
It’s difficult to find the exact boundary between the Australopithecines, the genus of upright animals thought to be ancestral to the genus Homo, and the first true humans. But if we assume something like Homo habilis is the first truly distinct member of our genus, we must try to picture the life of these earliest humans on the African savanna some 2 million to 2.5 million years ago. How dauntingly huge the world must have seemed to them! Probably moving in nomadic groups, the earliest of our kind gathered food from an environment over which protracted walking was required. Who knows the true range of their wanderings? They trudged across the surface of their apparently huge home at ordinary walking speed, perhaps 3-4 miles per hour. (Even running as fast as they could, were they able to reach anything like sapiens running speeds, perhaps 27-28 miles per hour in short bursts?) Their world must have appeared to be endless, if the exertion required to traverse its surface was any indication. (Of course, if they possessed any concept of the totality of the world, they probably saw the area of their own migration as its full extent.) A more advanced type of human (either a descendant of habilis, or an entirely independent offshoot from a common ancestor, depending on the hypothesis accepted) known as erectus, began the human diaspora out of Africa, perhaps as early as 1.5 million years ago. (It is now thought that erectus did not survive as a going concern in Asia, and that a later African sapiens group became the progenitors of modern humanity.) Their migration may simply have been a matter of moving base camp a few hundred or a few thousand feet a year, depending on the circumstances, or it may have been a migration punctuated by long journeys stimulated by desperation or unusual conditions.
But whatever the actual timetable of a particular group’s journey, the expansion ultimately took on a truly epic nature. Think of what physical barriers these travelers must have encountered. We have no written record of their experiences, but their travels must have been characterized by long periods of dull, seemingly endless plodding punctuated by huge challenges and harrowing dangers. And these dangers were not being met by humans of great size and tremendous strength. The height of the average member of the genus Homo, as we will examine in greater detail elsewhere, has averaged somewhere around five feet (about 1.5 meters), with males generally taller than females. A small mountain of 300-400 meters in height would be formidable to such a being; a mountain in the Alps would be huge; and a mountain in the Himalayas would seem unspeakably gigantic. Our ancestors roaming the eastern hemisphere encountered such giants, and surely must have felt dwarfed by them.
In these encounters with the world, undoubtedly many travelers lost their lives along the way. And among the survivors, an idea was deeply impressed upon their consciousnesses: the world is enormous.
As Homo sapiens evolved, spread, and founded a wide variety of new cultures, each group undoubtedly had its own conception of the world’s extent, again, a conception generally limited to the area in which their tribal hunter-gatherer group roamed. Once larger numbers of permanent settlements than had existed in the pre-agricultural world had been founded, and literacy became commonplace, humans (or at least that minority which was educated) began to gain some understanding of the actual geography of the region where their group lived. Until recent centuries, such knowledge was sketchy and speculative at best.
When humans began venturing out on epic sea journeys, from the Phoenicians in the early 12th century BCE to the Chinese and Western Europeans beginning in the fifteenth century CE, the sense of the Earth’s hugeness was reinforced, as was the impression of the difficulty in crossing the Earth’s surface. (It was not unusual, for example, for a pilgrimage from the German states to Jerusalem to take the better part of a year, owing to a variety of difficulties.)
Regarding the size of the Universe, the height of the heavens themselves, our ancestors had no real conception. In early Mesopotamia, those who stood at the top of ziggurats were thought to be appreciably closer to the stars. Archimedes, perhaps the most brilliant mind of the Greco-Roman Classical era, calculated that the Universe was, in our terms, about 12 trillion miles in diameter—what we would call 2 light years. And with the notable exception of Aristarchus of Samos, most educated people believed that the cosmos rotated around us. Aristotle built his cosmology on this assumption. The great astronomer Ptolemy deeply influenced both the Hellenistic Greek world and later the educated Arabic-speaking world through his epic work, and both official Christianity and Islam assumed its absolute accuracy.
But there were observations that troubled many adherents of geocentrism. The orbits of planets, particularly Mars, seemed “eccentric”. A weird, elaborate system of “epicycles” was invented to try to clear up the growing numbers of observations that could not be made to fit into an Earth-centered Universe.
Beginning with the work of Copernicus in the 16th century CE, the picture of a geocentric cosmos began to be superseded by a new conception of the heavens. As astronomers began to broaden the scope of their investigations in the centuries that followed, facilitated by new and more powerful technologies, the size of the physical Universe seemed to “grow”.
In the last century or so a revolution has taken place in the human understanding of our planet’s physical relationship to the Universe. Between 1917 and 1932 the most massive expansion of our conception of the Universe’s size that has yet taken place occurred. With the discovery during this period that the Universe was expanding, that it contained enormous numbers of other galaxies, and was very, very old (from the human perspective), all of our previous conceptions of the cosmic order were systematically overthrown. And with the overthrow of our conceptions of the Universe came another, unexpected result, one which many people have yet to confront: the overthrow of the centrality of the human race in physical reality. This development is momentous, perhaps as momentous as anything humans have ever discovered about the world, and yet its full impact has yet to be felt.
II.
Our small size in relation to the Earth turned out to be deceptive; it didn’t give us a picture of our world’s true place. In the larger context of the physical universe, the Earth is almost unimaginably miniscule.
We can begin by considering the Earth in relation to objects in our own solar system. The Earth, large as it is to us, is tiny compared to Jupiter, which has a volume more than 1,300 times that of our planet. (The perpetual storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere, the Great Red Spot, is in itself three times the surface area of the Earth.) The size of our neighborhood star, the Sun, is even more overwhelming. The Sun, some 864,000 miles in diameter could hold our entire planet over 1,300,000 times. A single arc of gas erupting from the Sun’s surface would utterly engulf our planet were it within range of us. The diameter of the Solar System our Sun rules over is more than 7.5 billion miles as compared to around 7,900 miles for our little world—a ratio of more than 949,000:1. But that’s just the start of the measure of our cosmic insignificance.
The Sun is merely a star of average size. There are, not terribly far from us in the Galaxy (relatively speaking), many stars of such immensity that they dwarf our Sun. Alnilam is 27,000,000 miles in diameter, capable of holding our Sun 30,500 times and the Earth almost 39.7 billion times. Menkar, a red giant, is 48,000,000 miles in diameter, more than 170,000 times the volume of our Sun and 221 billion times the volume of the Earth. Betelgeuse, a dying supergiant, is 433,000,000 miles in diameter, some 125 million times the volume of our Sun and more than 1.6 trillion times the volume of the Earth. And VY Canis Majoris, the largest star in the Milky Way, has a diameter that on the low end is estimated at 1,600,000,000 miles, making it more than 6.3 billion times more voluminous than the Sun and 8.3 quadrillion (8.3 x 10^15) times the volume of the Earth.
Astronomical distances and dimensions are so gigantic that they are usually measured in light years (or parsecs, which are about 3.26 light years). A light year is the distance light, the fastest known thing, travels in a vacuum in one Earth year—a distance of 5,878,499,810,000 miles. The Milky Way Galaxy, in which our Sun is so ordinary, measures anywhere from 100,000 to 120,000 light years in diameter. Therefore, the Milky Way is (to be on the low end of the estimate) 100,000 x 5.878499 trillion miles across—about 588 quadrillion miles. This is more than 74 trillion times the diameter of the Earth. The galaxy contains anywhere from 100 billion to 400 billion stars, depending on the thoroughness of the estimates being made. (Incidentally, astronomers locate our solar system in a partial spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy known as the Orion Spur. We are 30,000 light years from the galaxy’s center). On such a scale, our planet’s size is already negligible. But the picture gets worse.
It was not understood until the 1920s, through the brilliant work of Edwin Hubble, that the Milky Way Galaxy was far from being the only one in existence. Since Hubble’s time, we have vastly improved our observational tools, including the orbiting of space telescopes (the first one named in Hubble’s honor, fittingly enough). And the story they tell humbles us even more. There are whole clusters and walls of galaxies, all held together by gravity. NASA recently estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies, and emphasized that infrared cameras, radio telescopes, and x-ray cameras might greatly increase the estimate.
The distances between us and the closest full-fledged galaxies are staggering. The nearest galaxy, the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, is 75,000 light years away. This means a beam of light that started traveling from our galaxy at a speed of 676,000,000 miles per hour 75,000 years ago, before any humans were in the Americas, is just arriving at Sagittarius now. The Small Magellanic Cloud, another “close” neighbor, is 210,000 light-years away. A beam of light that started from our galaxy to the SMC at about the time that modern Homo sapiens were first evolving is just arriving there now. And the nearest spiral galaxy to us, Andromeda, is so far away that a beam of light that left our galaxy when humans were no more than a handful of Homo habilis types living in eastern Africa 2,000,000 years ago, is just arriving there now.
Other galaxies are not just tremendously distant. Some of the galaxies in our Universe are mind-bogglingly huge as well. In 1990, Science News announced the following:
By carefully recording the faint light surrounding a bright galaxy at the center of a dense cluster, a team of astronomers has uncovered evidence for perhaps the largest and most luminous galaxy known. This gigantic agglomeration of stars, which sits at the center of a rich galaxy cluster called Abell 2029, extends 6 million light-years in diameter (more than 60 times the width of the Milky Way) and emits more than a quarter of all the light produced by the entire cluster.
Such an object has a diameter 4.7 billion times the diameter of our Solar System. This would be as if our solar system were eight one-hundredths of an inch across and the giant galaxy in question were roughly the diameter of North America from the Arctic Circle to Colombia. By my calculations, this enormous galaxy in Abell 2029, if seen as a circle, would be more than 22 quintillion (2.2 x 10^19) times the area of a circle represented by our solar system.
And when the Earth is finally compared to the entire physical Universe, the human species all but vanishes completely. The Earth’s diameter of about 7,900 miles must be compared to the estimated 156 billion light years diameter of the Universe. (We should recall that space can expand faster than the speed of light.) The number of miles represented by a light year, multiplied by 156,000,000,000 yields a staggering result: the estimated Universe is, compared to the Earth’s diameter of 7,900 miles, more than 116 quintillion, or to be precise, 116,071,898,734,177,215,190 (1.16071898734177215190 x 10^20) times larger in diameter.
Atoms range in size from 1 x 10^-10 to 5 x 10^-10 of a meter in diameter. The Earth is 1.2742 x 10^7 meters in diameter. Therefore, the Earth is about 127.42 quadrillion times (1.2742 x 10^17) the diameter of the smallest atom. In other words, the Earth is smaller in relationship to the Universe than the smallest atom is in relation to the Earth by a factor of about 1,000.
III.
The creation myth believed until recently by most humans in the Western world seemed to posit a Universe no more than a few thousand years old. Interpreters of the Book of Genesis, for example, have often come up with a figure of 6,000 years for the age of the cosmos, with humans appearing within the first week of the Universe’s existence. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalists generally agree with this assessment.
In Tales from the Kojiki, the Japanese creation story, the age of the Universe is said to be at least “millions and millions” of years, although the ancient Japanese had nothing but supposition on which to rest this estimate. In Chinese mythology, one source puts the age of the Universe at 18,000 years. Hindu cosmologists speak in terms of enormous time periods. One Hindu belief asserts that the Universe is more than 314 trillion years old, for example. But all of the enormous time periods postulated in Hinduism are specifically linked to the age of the various manifestations of God, and in all Hindu hypotheses about the creation of the Universe, humans are present right from the start. We must assume, additionally, that the Hindu estimates, like those of the Japanese, are based on supposition and imagination, and not on any empirically-based observations.
All cultures have creation myths, but they seem to share one common theme: humans are of greater or lesser importance in them, but the act of creation by the gods or God or the infinite has as one of its central purposes, if not the central purpose, the creation of humans, and humans appear either immediately at the beginning of the Universe or not terribly long after it comes into being. All creation myths share another commonality, as well: they have all been shredded to pieces and superseded by the discoveries of modern science.
Recent findings from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) space project indicate a universe 13,700,000,000 years old. The earliest member of the genus Homo, Homo habilis, is thought to have emerged no earlier than 2,500,000 years ago. Even with the discovery of a find called Toumaï' (not a member of Homo) in Chad, we can say that the hominid line emerged no earlier than 7,000,000 years ago. Therefore, the genus Homo has occupied approximately less than two one-hundredths of one per cent of the total existence of the Universe (more precisely about .01825% of the Universe’s age). To use a slight variation on how Carl Sagan once put it, if the entire age of the Universe could be reduced to one year, the genus Homo did not emerge until around 10:30 pm on 31 December. In this scale, the oldest member of sapiens, perhaps 200,000 years old, emerged at about 11:52 pm on that fateful last day. The earliest agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, about 11,000 years before the present, began about 25 seconds ago, the earliest written records, about 5,000 years old, emerged about 11 seconds ago, and all of human history since the year 1500 has, in this Universe shrunken temporally to one year, has taken place over the last 1.15 seconds. The life span of a centenarian on this scale is reduced, therefore, to about one-fifth of a second. The life span of a person of typical life expectancy in the advanced countries would be about one-seventh of a second.
Some people might prefer to think of these issues by picturing an enormous timeline. So let’s consider this. Let’s say you have a timeline that stretches out 1,000,000 kilometers in length. Each year since the Big Bang would be about 7.299 centimeters on such a scale. On such a scale, we would have to travel 664,293 kilometers—-almost two-thirds of the total length of the line—-to reach the beginning of the Earth. We would have to travel almost 999,818 kilometers on that timeline to reach the first member of the genus Homo. We would have to travel 999,985 kilometers to reach the first sapiens, 999,999.2 kilometers to reach the earliest civilization, and 999,999.6 kilometers to reach the earliest writing. The last 500 years of human history would take up about the last 36.497 meters of the timeline, more than 999,999.96 kilometers from the start, the lifetime of a centenarian would be 7.299 meters from the end of our one million kilometer line, and the lifespan of a typical human in the advanced nations (about 75 years) would take us less than 5.5 meters from the end of a line 1,000,000,000 meters in length.
We are an amazingly recent occurrence in this iteration of the Universe. Even in comparison to the Earth, a mere 4.6 billion years in age, we are insignificant. Imagine if the Earth were a sentient, conscious being. Further imagine that it had the powers of observation and evaluation. Can you imagine how fleeting the life of a seventy year old person would be to such a being, a being almost 66,000,000 times older? It would be as if our 70 year-old simply evanesced out of nowhere and disappeared almost instantaneously. The rhythms of the Earth are unimaginably slow in comparison to the frantic pace of our lives. The Earth’s memory would include geologic eras measured in tens or hundreds of millions of years. It would contain the earliest glimmerings of life, the upheavals and splitting apart of whole continents, the births, lives, and deaths of countless entire species. The recession of the last ice age, some 14,000 years ago, would be a recent memory, comparatively speaking, to such a being. It would be the equivalent of a memory our 70 year-old would have of something that happened 45 minutes ago!
We are newborns; we are very, very young children of space-time and energy-matter. We were not created at the start; we were not created near the start; we weren’t even created near the middle. We are the latecomers. It took eons of time to produce us, and our reign on this tiny world has been vanishingly brief. We have only just begun our journey, and there is no guarantee that it will last much longer than it already has.
IV.
So what does this all mean? It means that all human-centered views of the Universe are nonsense, utterly indefensible on every level. It means that our myths were simply quaint efforts to explain reality, based on the superstitions and limited observations of the ancient world. These myths perhaps possess some literary or historical value, but they possess no scientific value whatsoever. Our utter physical and temporal insignificance call into question all anthropocentric views of the Universe’s origin and various physical features. To contend that the Universe was created for the benefit of a set of beings who occupy a world as ludicrously small as ours, is to stretch credulity to the breaking point. We thought we were the center of creation. We’re not. We thought the object of the Universe’s existence was to produce us. In all probability, it wasn’t. Perhaps, in an unspoken way, we thought if our world disappeared it would matter to the Universe, or at least be noticed. It wouldn’t. Most humans, even though they know that the Earth is very small and that humanity is very young, still tend to embrace some variation of the view that everything was made for us. It is time, in my humble opinion, for us to disabuse ourselves of this notion. The individual human life is virtually nothing in the scale and age of the Universe in which it evolved. This is a hard truth from which we can no longer turn, and it carries implications that must be confronted if any kind of human dignity and worth are to be salvaged from the wreckage of our broken dreams and shattered mythologies.
On God, Human Insignificance, and Human Dignity
There are three major arguments that can be made for our significance in the vastness of the Universe:
•We are the only species anywhere to have evolved consciousness. This is possible. But even if this were the case, would our tiny little island of intelligence have any impact whatsoever on an entity as vast as our home galaxy, let alone the Universe as a whole? We might be only a brief candle, the flickering out of which would be noticed by absolutely no one.
Naturally, you may tend to reject this argument out of hand, pointing to the extraordinary nature of the human brain and the products of the culture its features, and those of the rest of the human body, made possible. And we are unique, you may argue. We are, in all likelihood, absolutely unique in form and expression, the only beings of our kind in all of the Universe, even among the other advanced intelligences which may have evolved. There is nothing in any evolutionary system anywhere that is like us, you could contend (ignoring for the moment the multiple worlds hypothesis). You may indeed be right. In fact, nothing like us probably has evolved anywhere else. Our cultures are in all probability not like those of any other intelligent beings which may exist elsewhere. And yet, I would ask, how likely is it that our uniqueness will ever be known to anyone outside of our world?
You might also argue that, discovered or not, known or not, our intelligence is still a wondrous phenomenon, a beacon however tiny its light might be, a possession both exalted and exalting. Here again I must object. It seems to me that our intelligence is far more limited than we believe it to be. It is the product of a body constructed out of the simplest and most convenient elements available. It has fooled us into thinking that it is equipped to probe the deepest mysteries of existence, when in fact its principal reason for being was to facilitate reproductive success—nothing more.
Of course, we might someday reach out into small parts of the Universe and colonize them. But our “empire” would be tiny at best. There is also the possibility that humans will someday send self-replicating devices into space, but the utility of doing so would be diminished by the fact that such devices would face the insuperable barrier of distance as they tried to communicate with us.
• The Universe is as it is for our benefit. This is the so-called anthropic argument. The “strong” version of it argues that the Universe was created specifically to bring about the existence of the human race. The absurdity of this belief echoes the absurdities of an earlier age’s geocentrism. To believe that a universe bigger in relation to us than the Earth is to a single atom exists chiefly to facilitate our existence borders on delusion. Would anyone argue that the Earth was created for the benefit of a single atom within it?
The “weak” version of this argument claims that the physical principles that govern the Universe exist to facilitate at least some form of intelligent life somewhere, at some time. But this argument transforms coincidence and randomness into necessity and design, and it still leaves a host of issues unaddressed, such as the possibility of multiple or parallel Universes containing different physical forces and constants. Humans are a byproduct of fortuitous conditions in an extremely localized environment, and little else can reasonably be said.
• We are the favored offspring of God or a divine intelligence or universal spirit. Again, the influence of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic view of the Universe is manifesting itself here. The major religions all came to postulate their views of God at a time when the human conception of the Universe was severely limited in scope, to say the least. It may have been credible to believe that a universal mind was interacting with us when the whole of creation was thought to have a roof only a few miles high and the whole sky seemed to rotate around us. Our theologies and philosophies were largely formed at a time when humans believed themselves to be overwhelmingly significant in the scheme of things. In my view, to the degree that they argue for the centrality of the human species in the Universe or of our centrality in the consciousness of some divine figure, these systems of thought are no longer tenable. You might, ultimately, rest your argument on the poetry of the Bible or some other revered text—“Not a sparrow falls” without His knowledge of it. But this seems to me to be a sentiment humans use to comfort themselves. Most of us want to be important in some way in the scheme of things. But what is comforting and what is real are two different things. To believe now that a universal God sees us as the pinnacle of its creation is either an amazingly hopeful view of our place in reality, or an amazingly hubristic one.
Therefore it is quite reasonable, I think, to argue that the human experience means nothing in the context of the Universe—nothing at all. We thought our earthly drama was of universal significance because we used to think we were the Universe and the children of a father-like creator spirit (in societies that imagined godlike figures to exist) or else imbued with the spirit of the world itself. I have arrived at the point in my life where it is impossible for me to believe that if there were indeed a Universal Intelligence of some sort that existed, that it would even notice our presence. It would be exactly as if a being the size of the solar system were expected to notice a group of microbes clinging to a dust speck. The proposition collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.
Because of our extremely limited understanding, it seems to me that we cannot lean on belief in this Universal Intelligence, or God, with true intellectual certainty (however deeply God’s presence might be felt emotionally). Some might find this conclusion to be cause for despair. They might say that without the certainty of God, how can life have any meaning? How can a human hold up his or her head with any dignity, secure in the knowledge that humanity occupies a special place in creation, and that each person’s life has a deeper purpose than mere survival? In all honesty, it seems to me that there is a great deal to marvel at and celebrate in our existence, no matter what is ultimately real. And we can rest our claim to dignity on grounds other than metaphysical ones. We have only to open our eyes to do so.
Imagine an individual standing shoulder to shoulder in a tremendously long line of humans. On one side, stretching into the mists of an obscure past, are those who came before him or her. On the other, even more indistinct and hazy in form, are those living in a future the outlines of which cannot be discerned. Our individual is part of an unbroken line of humans stretching back perhaps 25,000 centuries and some 125,000 biological generations (if we arbitrarily count a generation as being 20 years in length). He or she is part of a gigantic family the first members of which felt the east African wind in their faces 2,500,000 years ago, and the last members of which, changed beyond recognition and living inconceivably far from their ancestral home, might bear witness to the death of the Universe itself. Not a bad group of which to be a member.
The family of humans of which our individual is a part has made every mistake and committed every sin, and yet they have also counted among their numbers a multitude of individuals of courage, tenacity, inner strength, determination in the face of all obstacles, love, compassion, decency, cleverness, great work ethic, good humor, or blazing talent. No human has ever combined all virtues in himself or herself. No human has ever been without flaws, and no human has ever lived a “perfect” life, however that meaningless term might be defined. And yet, the humans have spread out over the face of this tiny world, keeping this blind expedition going on sheer faith and inertia, fighting with each other incessantly for the control of small pieces of the planet’s crust, and yet retaining within themselves the capacity to be something more, and something better, than just survivors. They may never achieve Utopia, paradise-on-Earth, or the Kingdom of God. But in their aspirations to do so, they may yet cause a positive verdict about the value of the human enterprise to be rendered by our ultimate descendants.