Looking In the Distance. Richard Holloway
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was the $64,000 question no one could answer, though it did not stop people from trying. The fact of the universe, of why there is something and not just nothing, is puzzling enough; what is even more baffling is that through us the universe is now asking questions about itself. One wit inverted that way of putting it, by saying that a physicist is the atom’s way of thinking about atoms. We have not yet encountered other conscious agents in the universe capable of generating questions about their own meaning and the nature of the reality in which they find themselves, but given the vast scale of the universe it is likely that they are out there somewhere. Astronomers tell us that there may be as many as 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe. Bill Bryson offers an analogy to help us get our minds round that unimaginable number. He suggests that if galaxies were frozen peas there would be enough of them to fill the Royal Albert Hall.11
Apart from its impossible vastness, the more we think about it, the more weird our knowledge of the universe and our place within it becomes. Our mathematicians, those prodigies who inhabit a sphere of pure reason, do their calculations and, years later, we discover that the discernible processes of the universe correspond exactly to their mental equations. That the human mind can put us in touch with the intricate structure of the universe is intriguing enough; the emergence of humanity itself is an even more tantalising story. The fact that after 15 billion years our planet became a home for self-conscious beings is worth meditating on, though I am not sure where it gets us. Scientists tell us that our emergence into conscious life is the consequence of certain finely tuned elements called anthropic balances. If the earth were a little closer to the sun it would be too hot for life and if it were a little further away it would be too cold. If the orbit of the earth were slightly different then life on earth would never have emerged. It is the precise balance of two great forces that creates the right conditions for life to exist. The expansive force of the Big Bang spreads the universe out, while the contractive force of gravity pulls it back together. If the gravitational force were too high, the universe would appear, but in a microsecond gravity would pull everything back into a Big Crunch. If the expansion rate were too high, then the universe would stretch at such a rate that gravity would be unable to form the stars and galaxies from whose dust carbon-based life evolved. The chances of these conditions being precisely satisfied are as likely as those of shooting at a target an inch square on the other side of the universe and hitting it. These delicate adjustments do not only refer to the earliest instance, but to the continuing history of the world and its detailed processes.
This extraordinary fine tuning appears to be necessary at every stage of world development. So it is no surprise that religious thinkers point to these anthropic balances as new and compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design. We have already seen that one of the traditional arguments for God was the argument from the appearance of design in nature to the existence of a transcendent designer. We have also been cautioned by the way science has consistently overtaken these hypotheses that posited the existence of an external creation agency and shown us how the life process explains itself from within. That will almost certainly happen with the fine tuning of the universe and the anthropic balances, as well. Scientists already offer a number of ways of explaining them without reference to an external engineer, including the possibility of multiple universes in time/space. Martin Rees believes that there may be an infinite number of universes and that we simply exist in one that combines things in a way that enables us to exist. He offers the analogy of a clothing store: ‘If there is a large stock of clothing, you’re not surprised to find a suit that fits. If there are many universes, each governed by a differing set of numbers, there will be one where there is a particular set of numbers suitable to life. We are in that one.’12
But what about the fact of the existence of the life process itself? If we take it simply as it is in itself without reference to any supernatural originating agency, what kind of reality is the huge, many-sided fact of Being? If what we already know about the universe is anything to go by, the answer may not be to our liking. That’s certainly what the poet Robinson Jeffers suggests in his poem ‘The Great Explosion’:
The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and
galaxies, dust-clouds and nebulae
Are recalled home, they crush against each other
in one harbor, they stick in one lump
And then explode it, nothing can hold them
down; there is no way to express that explosion; all that exists
Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away
from each other into all the sky, new universes
Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the
outer nebulae like charging spearmen again
Invade emptiness.
No wonder we are so fascinated with fire-works
And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness
perhaps for the howling fire-blast that we were born from.
But the whole sum of the energies
That made and contained the giant atom survives. It
will gather again and pile up, the power and the glory –
And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole:
the whole universe beats like a heart.
Peace in our time was never one of God’s promises;
but back and forth, die and live, burn and be damned,
The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries
His terrible life.
He is beautiful beyond belief.
And we, God’s apes – or tragic children – share in the beauty.
We see it above our torment, that’s what life’s for.
He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like
Dante’s Florence, no anthropoid God
Making commandments: this is the God who does
not care and will never cease. Look at the seas there
Flashing against this rock in the darkness – look at the
tide-stream stars – and the fall of nations – and dawn.
Wandering with wet white feet down the Carmel
Valley to meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.
The great explosion is probably only a metaphor – I
know not – of faceless violence, the root of all things.13
Anger at the cruelty of it all
The spectacle is certainly magnificent and draws forth awe from us, as we contemplate the implacable momentum of the life-power that surges indifferently through the universe. This was certainly why Nietzsche admired the raw honesty of the warrior aristocrat before the Church weakened his tough ethic with Christian pity. ‘The essential characteristic of a good and healthy aristocracy is . . . that it accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments.’14 There is a terrible honesty in that. It is the raw unconscious honesty of the lion who trails the herd of antelope and picks off the wounded straggler with beautiful ferocity. It is possible to admire the fierce symmetry of the balance between species in nature and to understand why, for example, the orphaned baby elephant has to be ignored by the rest of the herd and left to die. The species cannot afford to care for the individual, only for its own survival. But one’s heart winces at the sight, and feels that it should not be this way among humans. There is something in us that seems to be emotionally reluctant to abandon the stragglers who limp behind the human herd. That is why we respect and occasionally support those who work to help the wretched humans of the earth and to succour the wounded who cannot