Touring Orion: Astronomy and the Depth of Wonder

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

- Walt Whitman, When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer

People look at you funny when you talk about outer space. The artists and poets think you're too cold and analytical, and others think you're a nerdy space cadet who should come down to earth. People think pondering the depths of space just isn't cool. But, then, people can be pretty silly. And as much as I love Walt Whitman, he was being a little silly, too. His mistake in the poem above was thinking we have to choose between science and the experience of gazing in awe at the night sky. It's a false dichotomy. You can have both at the same time, if you just decide your mind is big enough to hold them both. Besides, science can make the experience of looking up at a night sky all the more awe-inspiring, by telling you just how ancient and far away those stars really are.

So, if you're one of those people who think space is either too square or too dorky, I'd like to try to convince you otherwise.

First, let's just walk out and take a look at the night sky, like Mr. Whitman did. Imagine that we're walking out in the early spring, to see something like the image below. There's the Milky Way arched across the sky, and Orion the hunter with his bow outstretched. The little cluster of stars on the right is the Pleiades, and the bright star on the left is Sirius, the Dog Star.  Between Orion and the Pleiades is Jupiter, which is not a star at all, but the biggest planet in the solar system. If you had a pair of binoculars, you could look up and see four of it's moons. It's the first warm night of the year, and the frogs are singing off in the distance. Altogether, it's a glorious, overwhelming experience.

But what if we could look deeper? What if we could take a closer look at those distant worlds, and see them as more than just points of light? Well, we can, at least in our imaginations. And the reason we can is all those learn'd astronomers with their charts and figures, which helped them figure out so much about what's really going on out there.

So let's take an imaginary trip, straight into Orion and beyond, to see how much deeper the sky is than we can see with our naked eyes. First, let's consult a map to see where we're going. Here's our itinerary:

The trip seems to jump around so much because we're starting with the closest objects, and making our way toward the most distant ones. We're going to start with Jupiter, and then go deeper and deeper into space, in the general direction of Orion. I'm not going to dwell on the planets much, because most people learned those in school pretty well. What most people don't know is how things are arranged out beyond the solar system. That's where we're headed, but we'll stop at Jupiter, since it's on the way.

Jupiter is the first and largest of the gas giant planets out beyond Mars and the asteroid belt. It's not a solid object, except at its rocky core. Its famous bands are formed by rising and falling clouds of ammonia ice and ammonium hydrosulfide. Jupiter is the big boy of the solar system--over 1400 Earths would fit inside it, and it's twice as massive as all the other planets combined.

But Jupiter is a pipsqueak compared to the sun, which is over 1000 times as massive. Really, the planets are just bits of detritus around the sun, and even the sun isn't that impressive by astronomical standards. This becomes obvious if we look backward and remove the constellation lines, to see the inner solar system as it would really look from Jupiter. The sun just looks like an unusually bright yellow star from here, and we wouldn't even recognize the inner planets--including our own--if they weren't labeled. But then, we've come a long way, by our normal standards. To put the distance to Jupiter in perspective, if you could point your car there and start driving at a steady 75 miles per hour, it would take several hundred years to get there. You would need to bring a lot of music.

But we've barely gotten started. Our next stop is Sirius, which is 8.6 light years away--a whole different level of far away. A beam of light, which can goes fast enough to circle the world over 7 times a second, would take 8.6 years to get to Sirius. And Sirius is one of the closest stars to Earth. If the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has just reached the edge our solar system after 35 years, were heading for Sirius, it would take about 180,000 years to arrive. Travel to the stars is still pure science fiction.

Luckily, we're taking an imaginary trip, so we can get to Sirius in no time at all. As we approach, we see the single point of blue-white light resolve into two stars. It turns out Sirius is a binary star system, with two stars orbiting a common center of mass. The bigger one, Sirius A, is about twice as massive as our sun, but it's much hotter, and thus 25 times as bright. Sirius B is an entirely different story. It's a white dwarf star, slightly smaller than the earth, but more massive than the sun. In other words, it's astoundingly dense--a piece of it the size of a sugar cube would weigh about a ton. Try dropping that in your coffee.

White dwarfs like Sirius B are the shrunken cores of larger, deceased stars. Around 120 million years ago, Sirius B resembled Sirius A, but it became unstable as it used up all its fuel. This caused it to swell up into a huge red giant star, and eventually puff its outer layers of gas into space, creating a luminous nebula which has long since dispersed. All that remained was the hot, tiny core, which will burn with stored heat for billions of years to come, until it finally cools down into cold, dark object called a black dwarf.

The next leg of the trip is a big one. We're going to the Pleiades, or Seven Sisters, a group of stars at least 390 light years from Earth. That means the light we now see on earth when we look at them has been traveling through space since around the time the Mayflower landed. Unlike most constellations, the Pleiades are an actual group of stars, called an open cluster. But I like to think of them as a litter, because they are siblings--born together in a giant cloud of collapsing gas. The bright blue stars we see are blue giants, which are bigger, hotter, and far brighter than most of the other 1000 or so stars in the cluster. Blue giants are like rock stars, living hard and dying young, burning through their fuel at a furious pace. Some of the ones in the Pleiades are already showing their age, and they're a mere 100 million years old. The smaller yellow and red stars take the slow and steady approach. They will live on for billions of years, some of them for many times the current age of the universe.

Rogelio Bernal Andreo (Creative Commons Att. Share Alike)

Now it's time to head for Orion itself. First, let's take another, closer look at Orion as it appears from earth.  The amazing photo to the right is a long-exposure mosaic showing the clouds of gas and dust that fill the constellation. The red clouds, called emission nebula, glow because they're heated up by the stars forming in and around them. If you look closely, you can see darker clouds too, which show themselves by blocking the stars behind them. The Orion region is one of the most active regions of star formation known. In fact, some of the stars visible around Orion's belt and sword were born together out of those clouds. It's unusual for the stars in a constellation to be related, but many of the stars in Orion are, possibly including the next two we're going to meet.

Our next stop is Betelgeuse, the enormous red supergiant that defines Orion's left shoulder. When I say Betelgeuse is enormous, I mean it's really just stupendously huge. If the center of Betelgeuse were where our sun is, it would swallow all the planets up through Mars, and come nearly to the orbit of Jupiter. But Betelgeuse is nearing the end of its life, and it's really starting to fall apart. It roils and pulsates, belching plumes of gas as large as our solar system. In about a million years, it will collapse and then explode as a supernova. Anyone still around on earth will see it shine as bright as the moon for a few weeks, even though it's 640 light years away.

The brilliant blue star that forms Orion's right foot is called Rigel. It's a young blue supergiant star, around 8 million years old. It's no small fry itself. If the sun were the size of a BB, Rigel would be about the width of a beach ball. It's not nearly as big as Betelgeuse, but it's big. It's also tremendously bright--at least 117,000 times as bright as the sun. Its brilliance caused partly by its size, but mostly by its intense heat (with stars, size is not nearly as important as heat). Rigel's brilliance is the reason we see it so clearly, even though it's about 860 light years away, and the light we see left it around the time Genghis Khan was born.

If you walk out on a clear night and look up at Orion, the middle of his sword is actually not a star at all, but a glowing red cloud called the Orion Nebula. It's one of the most spectacular star formation sites known, so let's go take a closer look. As we approach the nebula, about 1,344 light years from earth, we see that it's really a bright cavity in a more extensive cloud. It's like an amphitheater full of thousands of stars. The brightest, as usual, are blue giants and supergiants, but there are stars of all other sizes and temperatures being born too. Some are still wrapped in discs of dusty debris which will one day aggregate into planets. Others are in the so-called bipolar outflow stage, with great jets of gas shooting out from each pole. Astronomers have even seen brown dwarfs, balls of gas too small for fusion reactions to ignite, so they never quite turn into stars. If we could look into the cloud with infrared vision (and astronomers can do just that) we would see even younger stars forming from the dense gas. After they form, stellar winds of radiation will push back and illuminate the gas, deepening the cavity of the Orion Nebula. This, in turn, will cause gas further back in the cloud to collapse toward stardom. Starbirth propagates itself like spreading wildfire, so that as we move deeper and deeper into Orion, we find younger stars. Looking back toward Earth, stars like Rigel and Betelgeuse may be older progeny of the same great cloud across Orion, born in clusters like the stars of the Orion Nebula, but drifting away from their siblings over millions of years.

We've gone straight through the heart of Orion, and now we're on the other side. Let's keep going, to see what we can see. Our next stop, the Crab Nebula, is many times farther away than anything we've seen so far--6,500 light years. That means we see it as it was about a thousand years before the Sumerians built the world's first cities. The Crab Nebula is a completely different animal than the Orion Nebula. It's what's left over from a supernova explosions in 1054 AD. Chinese astronomers at the time recorded a "guest star", which appeared all the sudden, bright enough to be seen in the daytime. What we see today is a cloud of glowing gas 11 light years across, and still expanding at about 1,500 kilometers per second. Yes, per second. At the center of the cloud is the leftover core of the old star. When the core collapsed and then rebounded, the pressure was so great that it collapsed protons and electrons into neutrons, forming a ball of neutrons as dense as an atomic nucleus, but as large as a city. It's still spinning about 30 times a second, pouring radiation out from each magnetic pole. We see this radiation as rapid-fire pulses, so this kind of neutron star is also known as a pulsar. It's hard to believe anything this extreme really exist out there, but nature is full of surprises.

In the long history of the Milky Way galaxy, there have been countless supernova explosions like the one that created the Crab Nebula. In fact, we owe our existence to them. When the universe was born in the Big Bang, the only elements that existed were hydrogen, helium, and traces of lithium. Then, when the first stars lit up, they burned by fusing hydrogen and helium into heavier elements, creating the rest of the periodic table--the atomic alphabet that makes life possible. All stars create a few heavier elements, but some of the most crucial elements for life, including sulfur, sodium, and potassium, are created in supernova explosions. We are, quite literally, made of stardust--stardust blasted into space in some of the most violent explosions in the universe. It's a pretty amazing heritage, and we share it with everything in the solar system.

Maybe we've come far enough for now. We're over 6,500 light years from home, farther than light could have traveled in all of written history. But just how far is that, in the grand scheme of things? Not very. In the picture below, the yellow line shows roughly where we have been so far. Except for the Crab Nebula, which is in the Perseus Arm of the Milky Way, everything we saw on our tour was in the little sub-arm of the galaxy known as the Orion Spur.

The galaxy as a whole is over 100 thousand light years across, and it contains at least 200 billion stars--more than you could count in several lifetimes. We've only seen a tiny section of it, and then only in our imaginations. A real trip like this is still completely beyond our grasp, and will be for the foreseeable future. And the Milky Way is just one galaxy; part of a small group of galaxies on the edge of a giant cluster that contains thousands of others, in a universe that contains untold numbers of such clusters. We could keep on traveling outward, to see where our galaxy fits in with others, but we've surely gone far enough for now. 

Now, here's the question. If you walk out one night and look up at Orion, does the tour we just took make  looking up at a night sky somehow less amazing? I don't see how it could. For me, it just makes a great thing that much greater, showing us wonders we never could have imagined if learn'd astronomers hadn't made all those charts and figures.

Of God and other Mysteries

Ancient of Days, William Blake, 1794

It's dangerous for someone like me to work in a library.  Sometimes I feel like a compulsive gambler working in a casino.  I get sucked in, taking home way too many books, and thinking about the big questions of existence more than, you know, doing laundry and going to the grocery store.  The other day I was arranging the books in the religion section, and noticed all the books about God. There were biographies of God, histories of God, books by scientists about how the idea of God is compatible with science, and books by other scientists about how it isn't.  I think about religion quite a bit, but that's mostly because religious extremism scares the crap out of me.  I haven't thought much in recent years about religion as it relates to me, because I'm one of those people who thinks you can be a happy, decent person without it.  But--and I guess this is another reason I think about religion a lot--it bothers me when I interact with religious people, often people I like, and then think about how they have a fundamentally different view of....well...fundamental reality than I do.  Someone who literally believes in the prophecies of Revelation, and someone like me who doesn't really believe in a supernatural at all; we're really living in two different worlds. Anyway, I started looking at those books about God, and decided to read some of them, to try to figure out what people actually mean when they talk about God.

Because I really didn't know.  When many people talk about God, they seem to envision some kind of heavenly father up in the sky, looking down on them and taking an active role in their lives.  Others see God as a more distant, ineffable entity; as the "ground of being", or the "first cause", or "ultimate reality".  I know people with both these views of God, and all kinds of variations in between.  So, when I hear people talking about God, I have this big, foggy question mark in my head.  "What do you mean when you say that?" I think.

Anyway, for the last 3 weeks or so I've been pondering two questions more than usual: 1. What are the most common conceptions of God? 2. Is there any concept of God that I, with my basically scientific, naturalistic view of the universe, could actually imagine existing? At the risk of killing the heart-pounding suspense of this post, I didn't satisfactorily answer either question.  I'm still confused by what people mean when they talk about God, and thinking about what kind of God I could see as plausible has left me with a terrible existential headache.  It didn't take me long to run into puzzles that leave the world's great intellects scratching their heads, and therefore leave me entirely slackjawed.  So, I'm not going to try to do some in-depth analysis of the issues in this post.  There are things I feel like I can discuss with some degree of confidence, and this is not one of them.  So I'm going to ramble, and just mention some ideas I've come across. If this post seems a little half-baked, that's because my ideas on this stuff ARE half-baked. I doubt anyone will, but please don't change what you think based on this amateurish screed.  If you follow up on some of these ideas and read people who really know what they're talking about, and then change your mind, that's different.

First, any concept of God I could believe in, or at least entertain seriously, would NOT be much like the God you find in Bible, who prefers one ethnic group over another, changes his mind, is jealous of other Gods, and so on.  The God in most of the Old Testament, and parts of the New Testament (and I have read them, though it's been a while,) seems closer to the kind of god most people these days see as pure mythology, like Zeus, Aries, or Odin.  Of course, the Old Testament was written when people really tended to believe in those kinds of gods, so this isn't surprising.  I also can't accept the concept of God, or many of the other beliefs, common to most branches of Christianity. If you look at the early statements of belief still accepted by most of them, like the Apostle's Creed or the Nicene Creed, they are full of things that are, for me and many of my peers, hard to swallow.  They affirm that Jesus was born of a virgin, died to atone for our sins (atonement being required so that God wouldn't send us all to hell for eternity), was resurrected from the dead, descended into heaven, rules at the right hand of God, and will come back someday to judge the living and the dead.  The Apostle's Creed says Jesus descended into hell.  Both talk about the resurrection of the dead, and the Apostle's Creed actually talks about the resurrection of the body--for most Christian denominations (though their members may not realize it) the standard historical belief, as set forth in the Apostle's Creed and other places, is that the dead will literally rise from their graves when Jesus returns.  Look it up.

I'm sorry, but all these things seems like ancient, pre-scientific mythology to me.  I don't say that to insult people who believe them; it's just what I think.  What also seems completely unbelievable is the idea of a three-part God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are of the same being but somehow distinct. This just seems made up to me, and no more believable than any of hundreds of other ideas of God that people around the world have had. Why should I believe this particular one...because I was raised in a predominantly Christian country? I don't find that convincing. The argument that, "I grew up thinking X, therefore X is true" just doesn't seem like good reasoning to me.  For one thing, anyone could make that argument, no matter what their beliefs (and they do).  Unless you believe truth is nothing but a social construction (and I don't) then if these beliefs contradict each other, they can't all be right.

But even the more subtle ideas about God run into problems.  Many people describe God as all-powerful, all-knowing, and all good.  But those things can lead to contradictory conclusions. For example, is God so all-powerful that he can sidestep logic? School kids ask if God can make a rock so big he can't lift it.  Well, they've got a point. And then there's the problem of evil.  If God is all good, why is there so much awfulness in the world? If God is both all-powerful and all-good, why didn't he, for example, stop the Holocaust, or the tsunamis in Japan and the Indian Ocean? As for human evil, people argue that God gave us free will, and that some people took that freedom and used it for evil purposes.  Well maybe, but free will is another one of those great unsolved mysteries, so I'm not sure. Besides, if God is all-knowing, can we really be free? If he already knows what we are going to do, is that really freedom? And why did he give us so much freedom to be evil anyway? I can see a benevolent God making a cosmic rule that an individual should have the freedom to hang himself with his own rope, but what is served by allowing a Hitler or a Pol Pot? (For that matter, if God can and does intervene in human affairs, why doesn't he just unambiguously show himself, in a way that convinces all reasonable people? That would solve a lot of confusion.)

Also, if God is all-good and all-powerful, why did he create, or allow to be created, a hell where people are tortured for all eternity? (I'm speaking rhetorically; I don't believe in hell).  As Robert Wright points out in The Evolution of God, you can't even argue that hell is for correction, because there's no escape--it's for eternity.  You're never going to think, "I'll be good now, I don't want to go back there!"  The ideas of a good God and of hell are simply mutually exclusive as far as I'm concerned. I can't imagine a (good) God saying that if I ask for evidence for his existence (or his Son's) instead of taking it on faith, I will go to hell.  Surely, if there is a God worth venerating, he wants us to use our reasoning powers? And surely no good God would decide that, ever since Adam ate the fruit, humans have been so tainted by this original sin that only the death--by torture--of his son would keep us from spending all eternity being tortured by demons? I've said it before, but I think that idea--that we are all born deserving to be tortured forever--is surely the worst idea anyone ever had. And once again, why should I believe it any more than I should believe in Hinduism, or Buddhism, or Islam...or atheism, for that matter? Because I'd better if I don't want to go to hell? That's just existential blackmail, and I can't imagine a decent God blackmailing us like that.

As for other arguments for the existence of God, we all know William Paley's argument from design: that surely all the intricate complexity of life on Earth proves that it was designed by an unimaginable intelligence?  Paley had an excellent point...at the time.  There was no other reasonable explanation, until Darwin came along.  Evolution by natural selection, combined with enormous stretches of time, really can account for the complexity of life on Earth.  Even the things people have pointed to and said, "That couldn't have just evolved, it's too complex" have been shown to be easily create-able by evolution.  The eye, for example, has evolved many times, and different creatures have eyes that display the whole range of eye-complexity, from light-detecting eyespots to the amazing camera-like eyes of humans, eagles, or octopuses.  The flagellar motor, beloved of intelligent design theorists, is also quite easily explained by evolution, and does have known precursors.

Besides, if God really designed life as-is, we could reasonably ask about some of his design choices.  Why, for example, does the male urethra pass directly through the prostate gland, which is prone to swelling and blocking things up? Why are the majority of non-photosynthetic species on earth parasites? Is that really how God would have wanted it? Why don't all those animals without hands have some way to remove ticks, fleas, and mites, which can sometimes get bad enough to kill them? Life on earth is astoundingly complex, and often beautiful, but can be horrible often enough to make me question the idea that an all-good God designed it, even if I had never heard of Darwin.

There are also problems with God as the creator of the universe: the "prime mover" or "un-caused cause".  People say that if everything has a cause, then if we trace things back far enough, we must surely find a first cause.  That cause, they say, is God. Well, why does it have to be God? Why should a first cause resemble the Judeo-Christian God?  And besides, what caused God? Did he cause himself? Maybe he did, but I would really like to know how that works.  Really, as Richard Dawkins and others have pointed out, it's more parsimonious to suggest that the universe evolved from a simple state than to say it was created by God, because surely a God capable of creating a universe is more complex than the universe itself, at least initially? If we want to keep invoking Occam's Razor--preferring the simplest explanation possible--then the idea of a God creating the universe doesn't really get us there.  And it still leaves the question of where God came from, and why the ultimate cause should be something we would recognize as a God.  Still, I recently saw it pointed out that not all true explanations of the world conform to Occam's Razor.  The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum points out that Thales said that all matter is made of water. That's a nice, simple theory that conforms nicely to Occam's Razor, but reality is more complex: matter is made of over 100 different chemical elements. Of course, those are made of a smaller number of elementary particles, but the point is still a good one.

So, could it be that our universe, at least originally, was designed by some hyper-intelligent, complex being who set it all in motion at the time of the Big Bang?  Right now, we're at a point with that question somewhat similar to someone pondering life before Darwin came along.  Because there is something weird about the universe.  Respectable physicists talk about the Anthropic Principle, the idea that any explanation of how the cosmos works must be compatible with the fact that we exist.  At first, that sounds pretty trivial: if someone proposes a theory of, for example, how oxygen atoms form inside stars, that theory can't be true if it means that the universe would have turned out different than it actually is.  Another way of saying it is that we could only exist in a universe in which our existence is possible.  These statements are ways of describing what's known as the Weak Anthropic Principle (I hate the word "anthropic"--"Complex Life Principle" would be much better, and less...Ptolemaic).  The weak anthropic principle is more or less a tautology. Of course we exist in a universe in which it's possible to exist! But what keeps the idea from being trivial is that scientists actually have used it to constrain their theories: the theory has to predict results compatible with a universe in which complex life could exist, because, well...here we are.

But there's also a more arresting and controversial version of the anthropic principle, called the Strong Anthropic Principle, which states that the the universe seems to be in some sense fine-tuned for complex life to emerge in it.  And in fact, if you changed the numbers of some physical constants just a little bit, life would be impossible.  Not only that, but the universe as we know it would be impossible. If the four fundamental forces of nature--gravity, the weak nuclear force, the strong nuclear force, and the electromagnetic forces--had slightly different values, we wouldn't be here. For example, the electromagnetic force is enormously stronger than gravity--many, many zeros stronger.  If gravity were a little stronger, the universe would have all collapsed back together again after the Big Bang. And we wouldn't be here. I'm not going to go into all the ways in which the universe had to be just so in order for complex life to emerge. You can google "Anthropic Principle" and find much better explanations than mine. Suffice it to say there are many examples.

Now, this might also seem trivial if you compare this idea to another one: that Earth seems so well-designed for life.  Earth is just the right distance from the sun, and has the right amount of carbon, oxygen, etc., to support life.  Well, sure it does, because we evolved on it.  It's not so much that the earth fits life as life fits the earth.  Of course there are many imaginable worlds (and many actually-discovered planets) where life remotely resembling Earth's would be impossible.  But it's not a big coincidence that there are planets in the universe hospitable to life, since there are apparently countless planets in the universe.  Of course we live on one of the ones hospitable to life, and of course it seems perfectly suited for life, since life evolved to fit it. There's absolutely no reason to think the earth was specially created for life.  Thinking otherwise would be to think like the puddle in Douglas Adams' wonderful quote: "Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, "This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!"

Now, why isn't the apparent fine-tuning of the universe just another example of this "puddle thinking"? Maybe it is, but it's not as simple as the case of the earth. The reason is that we're talking about things that describe the entire observable universe, not just one of many planets.  Why do we find ourselves in this particular universe, which really does seem to be far more hospitable to life than it has any reason to be? There really does seem to be something that needs explained here, though some people obviously disagree.  Several answers have been proposed.  One idea is that the universe was designed this way, perhaps by some sort of inconceivably superior being, and that life was basically part of the recipe, if not the initial ingredients. If there is only one universe, then that idea seems about as plausible to me as any other. Another idea is that it's just an enormous coincidence that the universe has the characteristics it does: yes, it's incredibly unlikely, but some coincidences happen, right?  Yes, they do, but I honestly don't see how that's much more plausible than the designer scenario.  We're talking about a gigantic coincidence here.  It would be like if only one person were allowed to pick from millions of lottery tickets, and she picked the winning ticket.

Another idea is that there are actually multiple universes, all with different characteristics.  If there are countless universes, then it's not surprising that one of them will happen to be hospitable to life, and obviously, that is the one we will find ourselves in. This is the same as the logic of why the Earth is so hospitable for life, but on a much larger scale.  But here we're back to Occam's Razer: isn't positing an enormous number of universes incredibly unparsimonious? Just as much as positing a designer, even if "he" would have to be more complex than the universe he designed? I don't know, since I don't know what a designer would be like. But I do know that there are scientific grounds for speculating about multiple universes.  According to some theories, the visible universe may be a miniscule part of a larger, possibly infinite universe, which may have different characteristics in different places.  Also, since space and time seem to pinch off into unreachable regions inside black holes, it may be that each black hole creates another universe.  Some interpretations of quantum mechanics suggest that every time  a quantum particle does one thing instead of another, the universe divides. Seriously, they say that. This sounds crazy, but other interpretations of quantum mechanics are also crazy (though maybe not AS crazy).

Anyway, there are plenty of respectable, if speculative, scientific reasons that our universe could be one of many.  There are also other, even weirder proposals, about how life and consciousness might retroactively cause the universe to come into existence and evolve life (I urge you to read The Goldilocks Enigma, by Paul Davies, which brilliantly, and mind-bogglingly, explains all these ideas).  Personally, I do think the weird fine-tuning of the universe needs an explanation, but I think the multiple-universes one is more plausible than the designer one, since it does have precedent on a smaller scale.

But who knows? Maybe there is some sort of cosmic designer who created our universe.  Maybe life is somehow necessary.  Maybe consciousness is even necessary, or preordained? If the kind of God we're talking about is the God depicted in the Bible, who is often violent and petty, then yes, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in him any more than I believe in Marduk or Isis.  But if we're talking about some kind of inconceivably grand cosmic designer, then I think it would be rash to be an atheist. Who am I to say what's out there in other dimensions, or beyond the farthest galaxies? There are still plenty of profound mysteries that we are nowhere near solving: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does mathematics work, and where does it come from? Could it be that information, or logic, is what's really fundamental? I can imagine a universe without matter, but I can't imagine a universe where 2 + 2 = 5. Could some of these unsolved mysteries contain the key to whether there's a God or not?

One of the truly great mysteries, for me, is how consciousness works.  How is it that a certain arrangement of matter--my brain, for example--can feel like something? I can understand (at least in principle) how it can process information, but I can't even begin to imagine how this processing is sometimes accompanied by awe, or pain, or the color red.  I read recently where someone said we're about 5 Einsteins away from explaining why the universe exists at all.  Maybe so, and I think that's about how far we are from explaining consciousness--not self-consciousness, or thinking, but the actual feeling of being awake and alive.  Some people say that this amazement at consciousness is just a kind of mystery-mongering, like a sort of vitalism of the mind. Maybe it is.  But vitalism--the idea that some extra "spark of life" is necessary for life, above and beyond the physical processes of life--seems silly to me.  We may not know everything about life, but it seems perfectly explainable in terms of biochemistry and evolution and other scientific ideas.  We know the basic mechanisms of life, though there are details to be worked out. Consciousness is, I would think, perfectly explainable in terms of some mechanism, too, but we don't know that mechanism yet.  At least I don't think we do.

Some people suggest that consciousness could be a fundamental property of the universe, like gravity: that any time information is processed in a certain way, consciousness arises.  I don't know.  If that's true, could there be something "divine" about consciousness? Could it be a sort of "divine spark" in every conscious thing, as Hasidic Jews and others might suggest? Maybe, maybe not.  Karen Armstrong, the historian of religion, is always saying in her books that God could never be something easily defined in language or other symbols, and that you can only begin to know God (whatever he or she is) through practicing awareness and compassion.  In fact, she says that most of the Bible, and other sacred texts, were never meant to be interpreted literally, and that such fundamentalist literalism is a product of the modern world.  I find that last part pretty hard to believe. True, there have been people interpreting scripture allegorically and mythically ever since it was written down, but many others--probably the majority--have also thought it was literally true all that time.  The Nicene Creed and the Apostle's Creed talk about what Christians believe, and I think they mean that literally, not metaphorically.  But still, maybe she has a point about the practice thing, and that you can attain something that at least feels like "the divine" by widening your awareness, especially if that includes cultivating a sense of compassion for other conscious beings.  I'm not the most compassionate person, but I've certainly experienced awe, and it truly does have a sacred feeling about it.  Maybe if an experience feels truly divine or sacred, it really is "divine" in some sense, whether there's a God in the literal sense of a cosmic supreme being or not. But...but...what if someone gets that feeling from murdering people who don't believe in his God? That's plausible, and definitely argues against the "if it feels sacred, it is" theory.

In any case, consciousness is one of the big mysteries, and those mysteries are the reason I'm an agnostic and not an atheist.  I think we always have to stay humble about what we know, but not so humble we can't rule out clearly outmoded ideas. Yes, the old, anthropomorphic God seems totally implausible to me.  But, to paraphrase Shakespeare, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in my philosophy, so maybe some far grander idea of God is plausible.  I think about it this way: In 1900, many physicists thought the basics of physics would soon be a solved problem.  At that time, for all they knew, the universe was pervaded by an invisible ether which light moved through, the Milky Way was the entire universe, and the atom was the smallest unit of matter (if it even existed, which some physicists denied).  In just a few years, they had learned that there is no ether, that space and time are malleable and matter and energy interconvertable, that the atom is made of smaller particles, and that the Milky Way is just one of countless galaxies in a gigantic, expanding universe.  The universe turned out to be far more subtle and astounding than they had ever imagined.  I suspect it will turn out to be far more subtle and astounding than we are imagining today.

There's a lot of mystery still out there.  Is some of that mystery where we might find a God? Many theologians wouldn't like that question.  They call this the "God of the gaps", and they are right to worry.  If we only see the possibility of God in the places where there are mysteries--in the parts of the map labeled "Here Be Dragons"--what happens when we solve more and more mysteries? Does God shrink? Will we find that he doesn't exist, any more than those dragons do? Maybe. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep solving mysteries, and see if we find out, one way or another.  As any decent philosopher will tell you, the fact that an idea has consequences you don't like does not make that idea false.  If the possibility of God shrinks with the gaps in our knowledge, that will be true whether the theologians like it or not.  And, whether they like it or not, there are still mysteries, and I'm not ready to take the leap of faith that would be required to say there isn't some sort of God out there in them. 

But I'm not ready to take the opposite leap of faith either. I figure that if I don't know, what I should believe is: I don't know.  But that doesn't necessarily mean I want to talk you out of your religion.  Some of the more aggressive atheists and humanists argue that all religions are bad, and inevitably lead to violence and debilitating superstition. While I think they commonly lead to those things, I don't think they always do, and they also lead to good things like homeless shelters and hospitals.  Also, I've had people tell me that if they lost their faith in God, they would see no reason to have any sense of morality at all (!).  If they really think that, I hope for all our sakes that they keep right on believing. If people don't have some basic sense of morality to replace religion with, then we're all better off if they stay religious.  But not fundamentalist.  If you believe that the Earth was created in six actual days a few thousand years ago, or that your non-Christian friends are going to burn in hell forever, or that non-Christian lives are less valuable than Christian ones, then yes, I would like to convince you not to believe those things, because they can be very, very harmful.  I won't try to force you not to believe those things, but I will try to convince you.

But if you're a moderate of any religion, I may not agree with you, but I see no reason to hound you about your religious beliefs, as long as you don't try to get them written into law, or make me conform to them some other way.  That doesn't mean I think nothing should be illegal, of course.  Law and morality don't require religion, and laws can and should forbid murder, theft, and so on without appealing to religion.  If you want to impose additional rules on yourself, based on your religion, that's your business.  Basically, if you're not hurting anyone, and you're tolerating me, then I'll tolerate you. We might even be friends.

Richard Dawkins has claimed that moderate religion leaves the door open for religious extremism, because if you think it's OK to belief "moderate" things based on faith instead of evidence (e.g. Jesus was divine), then you could just as well believe extreme things without evidence (e.g. it's OK to burn suspected heretics). It's an interesting point, and while I prefer not to believe things without evidence, I don't think the slope from "moderate" to "extremist" is quite that slippery.  Most decent people are far more skeptical about ideas telling them to hurt people than ideas that don't.  But even if Dawkins is right, moderate religion isn't going away any time soon, and certainly not because some outspoken atheist denounces it. As for me, I'm not going to convert most religious moderates to my way of thinking, and I'm not sure it's a good idea anyway.  If I antagonize them, then they are more likely to see me as the enemy.  I would rather have them as allies, pushing with me against fundamentalism and extremism. Besides, many of them are truly great people, whose selflessness I would do well to emulate.  Some of them may even read this blog, and if you're one of them, and you've made it this far, then hats off to you. I hope I didn't offend.

And I'm still curious about what people mean when they talk about God.  What's your idea of God, if you have one? Tell me in the comments. I'd really like to know.

The Thankful Agnostic

Every Thanksgiving season the last few years, I go through a predictable sequence of thoughts. First, I start thinking what a good idea it is to have a holiday devoted, at least in theory, to being thankful. Surely one of the keys to a happy life is appreciating what you already have? I've believed this for years, and it seems to work pretty well. Besides, I really do have an enormous list of things to be thankful for. But then I start to think, “Is 'thankful' really the right word?” For religious people, being thankful implies that they are actually giving thanks to God. But I'm not a religious person in any traditional sense, and I'm agnostic about the existence of God. So what does it mean for me to be thankful? Does the idea even make sense? I think it does.

I've believed for years that one of the most important things to achieve in life is to appreciate being alive. In fact, I think my science-centered, agnostic outlook makes me appreciate some things even more. When I think about the enormity of the universe, and how vanishingly, infinitesimally small the earth is (not to mention all of its inhabitants, however big their egos may be) it makes earth and life seem all the more fragile, rare, and precious. Then I think about how this tiny little speck we live on is thousands of millions of years old—one third the age of the universe, and hundreds of thousands of times as old as recorded history. This little speck is ancient. Venerable. Precious beyond imagining. Sure, it's a tough old world, and it's got its problems, but it truly is all we've got. Some things are cliches because they're true.

As for agnosticism, when I think that there could be no heaven or hell (and I doubt very much that they exist) then this short life we get becomes a tiny, priceless interlude between two enormous, painless nothings (funny how we spend so much more time thinking about the future nothing than the one we've already had). Just as the earth is like a jewel in the enormity of space and time, life is a jewel in the enormity of whatever comes before and after. Of course, you may think I'm wrong about heaven and hell, and you may be right. But I hope you'll agree with me that life—this life—is precious. If you believe this life is more or less expendable, because it's just a prelude to something greater, then I'd like to convince you to rethink that. Not necessarily the afterlife part, but certainly the this-life part. Still, I want to give credit where it's due. Religious people may actually be a little better at appreciating their blessings than secular types. They have rituals that remind them to stop and be thankful, and secular types would do well to follow their example.

But what does it mean to be thankful, if you're secular? I suppose it just means appreciating what you already have. It's true that I don't actually say “Thank you” to a supreme being, but I'm still appreciative and grateful for the things I have. “Thankful” may not be quite as precise as “appreciative”, but I figure it's close enough, and I'm going to keep using it. For me, being thankful relates to something I've always believed in: it's a lot better to be happy by learning to appreciate what you have than by pinning your happiness to what you can might gain in the future. Someone who can be thunderstruck with happiness when they see a gorgeous cloud formation, or hear a great song, is much richer than someone who thinks they won't really be happy until they trade their Porsche for a Ferrari. Not richer in a monetary sense, of course, just richer in the way that actually matters.

But appreciating what we already have is hard. Evolution wired us to strive and survive, not to be happy. It's hard to ever be satisfied. We let ourselves think, “If I just get that 4G phone, then...THEN I'll really be happy”. But we probably won't. We'll be thrilled with it for a few days, maybe, and then having it will just become the new daily routine. Psychologists call this the “hedonic treadmill.” What this means is that happiness has a tendency to stay constant. Most people have a sort of set-point for happiness, like a thermostat. We live through windfalls and disasters, and it turns out that after a while, we're close to the same level we were before. That's why most of us keep getting on that treadmill and running after bigger and more expensive things to try to keep getting happier. When you have that Porsche, it will start to seem mundane, so you start thinking that Ferrari will really make you happy. But then you get it, and the thrill fades. Your thermostat returns to its set point, and you start thinking about what other acquisition might really do it this time.

The hedonic treadmill may help explain how there can be so many depressed people in a modern country, where things really are a whole lot better than they used to be in all kinds of ways. Compared to most people throughout human history, we're fabulously wealthy: we have indoor plumbing, clean drinking water, enough to eat, and the reasonable expectation of living into our 80's or 90's. Life has also progressed in morality and justice in lots of ways. While there's still far too much racial hatred, the days of “White” and “Colored” drinking fountains are gone. While women still need to gain equal representation in congress, and equal pay in the workplace, a hundred years ago they couldn't even vote. We have a long way to go, yes, but that doesn't mean we haven't come a long way. Some people seem to think that if you stop to appreciate how much you've gained, you'll lose the drive to achieve more. I think that's crazy. Why make the world a better place, if you're never going to stop and appreciate how nice you've already made it? It's not an either/or situation. We can appreciate what we have while working to make things even better. 

When it comes to material things, though, it's worth stopping to ask whether getting them will really make things better, or if they'll just make us work harder for something that will seem mundane anyway after a few weeks. Maybe what makes more sense is to cultivate a habit of appreciation, to try to raise the happiness set-point our minds tend to return to. Thinking we can raise that point by endlessly chasing after stuff won't work. In fact, it'll backfire, and the dial will drop because you can't figure out why it's not higher. It's not about getting the things you want so much as wanting the things you already have.

That's how I see things, anyway. I may not be thanking “the man upstairs”, but I'm still thankful. I'm thankful for my amazing family and wonderful friends. I'm thankful I can get up out of my nice, warm bed, turn up my heater if it's chilly, walk into the kitchen and turn a dial and get fresh water. I'm thankful for my refrigerator, and that I don't have to eat turnips, potatoes, and salt pork all winter long. I'm thankful for the four-wheeled machine in my garage, which will rocket me at breakneck speeds to places that would have taken days to get to in past ages. I'm thankful I can write a scathing letter to the editor about the government, and not only will they print it, but no secret police will come for me in the wee hours. Because I was sick at my stomach a few days ago, today I'm thankful that I can eat and enjoy it. I'm thankful for my dog, who makes me smile several times a day. I'm thankful for the medicine that keeps him from getting heartworms or rabies; and for the medicine that keeps me from getting smallpox or polio. I'm thankful for all the amazing ideas people have had over the centuries, and how I can turn on my computer and instantly learn about them. I'm thankful I can post this blog, and that millions of people could (could I said) read it. I'm thankful there are more wonders in this world than I will ever be able to learn about, no matter how much I try. 

It's not that there aren't some bad thinks in the world. There are plenty, and they need to be faced with open eyes. But there are so many great things about it, too. As far as I'm concerned, whether there's any intrinsic meaning in life or not, there's plenty of meaning to be found in trying to make it better, while appreciating what's great about it already.

Happy Thanksgiving.