How the #$*! Did We Get Here?
Comments By The Rev. Susan Manker-Seale and Jeff Chamberlain
March 20, 2005
I. Beginnings of the Universe
Susan:
It has already been almost two years since The Da Vinci Code came out. I heard on the radio that the Vatican has appointed someone to deal full-time with the fall-out from that book. They accused Dan Brown of writing it to make money rather than teach good theology, or something like that. Well, he was writing fiction, wasn’t he?
A lot of people apparently think there is something to his theology, since his book has spawned an interest in a lot of other books on alternative Christian histories. One of those is Bloodline of the Holy Grail, written by Laurence Gardiner in 1996. I picked up a later book of his, written in 2001, called Genesis of the Grail Kings, which tries to interpret pre-Biblical stories from Mesopotamia and Sumer as giving clues to the origin of the universe. Our familiar genesis account says “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light.” (Genesis 1:1-3)
The earlier version, called the Enuma Elish, was written 3500 years ago and says,
When on high the heaven had not yet been named,
Firm ground below had not been called by a name,
Nought but primordial Apsu, their begetter,
And Mummu, and Tiamat – she who bore them all,
Their waters mingled as a single body…
No pasture had yet been formed; no marsh had yet appeared.
None of the gods had yet been brought into being.
Not one bore a name; their destinies were undetermined.
Then it was that gods were formed in their midst.
(Genesis of the Grail Kings, p. 40, 43)
Using such texts, Gardiner tries to posit a theory that those “gods” were aliens who visited the earth in ancient history, mingling with early humans to create the intelligent beings we are today. His aim is to repaint a picture of the origin of life and the universe into one that seemingly will not contradict ancient religious texts.
That is one of the continuing struggles humanity has had throughout religious history (and is there such a thing as history without religion?): Religion tries to make sense of our universe, but because sacred stories were written down and presented as revealed truths, advancements in understanding are barely tolerated if they contradict such “truths.” Science and religion have traveled hand in hand through millennia, but more often than not, religion has had great difficulty absorbing new scientific understanding. Like Laurence Gardiner, some people are desperately trying to fit modern science into ancient story, and not succeeding very well, or, like the Vatican, working hard to defend the old ways. I think it is sad that everyone can’t appreciate the amazing new theories of the origin of the universe, our own modern genesis.
Jeff:
We’re tantalizingly close to figuring it all out; the way it all started, that is. We’ll call the beginning of the universe “t sub zero”. That’s “t” for time and “zero” for the beginning. One possibility is that it’s a quantum singularity – such a nice phrase “quantum singularity”. It just rolls off the tongue. A mangled mass of matter and gravity where space and time and energy as we know it makes absolutely no sense. And at t sub ten to the minus 43 seconds that’s point zero, zero, zero etc. for 42 zeroes – that’s pretty small – at ten to the minus 43 seconds, it, for want of a better word, explodes. It explodes so quickly that by ten to the minus four seconds – that’s ten to the minus 4, one ten-thousandth of a second - this quantum singularity has gone from a chaotic, swirling unknown to the forces of energy and matter that we know today: gravity, electromagnetic forces, nuclear forces – and basic quantum physics can take it all from there. All in one ten-thousandth of a second. Now THAT’S a big bang.
Alright, but I have to keep moving. So, not even a second has passed and quarks and anti-quarks are colliding and destroying each other, and protons and anti-protons are colliding and destroying each other, and mesons and anti-mesons are colliding and destroying each other and everything that’s being created is creating the “anti” of itself and everything’s just destroying itself and it doesn’t look good for the good guys.
But look, over there, there’s one strange little reaction. X-bosons. X-bosons? Yes, X-bosons. They’re creating anti-X’s too and they’re just breaking down into pairs of anti-quarks and quarks and they’re destroying themselves too – except:
When an anti-X decays it produces a billion anti-quarks.
When an X decays, it produces a billion and one quarks.
OK, this is an approximation but, in this massive explosion, one in a billion quarks survives without being annihilated and this is what, when everything cools down a little more, form the protons and neutrons of the matter that we so know and love.
And not even a second has passed. So much universe, so little time…
Susan:
When faced with the wonder of creation, so beyond our ability to comprehend, we turn to composers and poets, to the metaphor that gives at least some hint of what it means to be a human being contemplating the universe. We write from the heart and soul, whatever that is, whatever that means…
Special Music: “Something Out of Nothing,” by Jeff Chamberlain
II. Beginnings of the Earth
Susan:
Jelaluddin Rumi is one of my favorite poets. He wrote in the thirteenth century of the mysteries of existence on this beautiful earth in ways that speak to my heart and touch my understanding:
I am
dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.To the bits of dust I say, Stay.
To the sun, Keep moving.I am morning mist,
and the breathing of evening.I am wind in the top of a grove,
and surf on the cliff.Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.The musical air coming through a flute,
a spark off a stone, a flickering in metal.Both candle and the moth
crazy around it.Rose and the nightingale
lost in the fragrance.I am all orders of being,
The circling galaxy,The evolutionary intelligence,
the lift and the falling away.What is and what isn’t. You
who know Jelaluddin, you
the One in all, say Who I am.
Say I am you.
-- p. 108, The Illuminated Rumi
Jeff:
So all that universal creation happens 9 or so billion years ago and now we fast forward to four and a half billion years ago. Our protosun is dark and it’s collapsing under the force of its own gravity and finally it’s just too much and it explodes – a true fusion explosion this time – and dust goes flying every which way only to be pulled back in and, over the next hundred million years or so, our little planet is formed.
But it’s not a pretty place. It’s hot and covered with noxious gases and things keep falling on it like meteorites and comets. One is so big that it knocks a massive chunk off of our eventual home and that becomes the moon. Poor little planet. But we’re not alone – the big chunks of ice and rock are falling on all the planets and breaking off bits of them and flinging them around the galaxy so that, on a galactic time scale, we’re really not even separated. Rocks on Mars land here and vice versa. And while all of this is happening, we’re flying around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at 500,000 miles per hour and we’re flying through all kinds of other space debris landing on this swirling ball we will eventually call home.
So now we come to the problem of life. Life is about self-replication. I mean, there are a lot of things that have to happen before we can call something “alive”, but the ability for something to somehow propagate something like itself is pretty critical. Now, a popular biogenesis theory is that life on earth began in a primordial soup with random chemicals bouncing around until a critical amino acid was formed. But, according to Paul Davies in The Fifth Miracle, a small protein may typically contain a hundred amino acids of twenty varieties. In this simple protein then, there are 10130 different arrangements of the amino acids in a molecule of this length. This is much more than the number of atoms in the observable universe. That makes the odds of life occurring on earth an incredibly unlikely prospect.
But not impossible. We are now discovering critters deep in the surface of the earth and around volcanic vents deep in the ocean. One bizarre class of these critters is called “hyperthermophiles” who appear to thrive at temperatures between 100 and 150 degrees Celsius. And they are able to go into extended states of suspended animation at super-cool temperatures only to come back to life in the right conditions. So, this 10130 odds problem may not be so insurmountable because critters like this could have formed anywhere in universal, galactic or solar system space and fallen to earth with the comets and the meteorites and the space debris. Davies’ pet theory is that life actually developed first on Mars and was brought here by a meteorite. Mars was too small to maintain an atmosphere and so died off, but our Earth took in the orphans and flourished into our big blue ball.
I like to think that protolife was born as soon as the big bang universe had cooled enough and these self-replicating molecules are spread throughout all the stars we see in the sky and beyond.
III. Beginnings of Awareness
Susan:
Rumi again:
All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and
What am I supposed to be doing?
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.
This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place, I’ll be completely sober.
Meanwhile, I’m like a bird from another continent,
sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear, who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?
Who looks out with my eyes?
What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord,
and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.
-- p. 14
Jeff:
So, after this basic self-replicating molecule is created here or finds its way here, random selection takes over and Darwinian evolution creates a broad variety of plants, animals and, eventually the self-aware creatures that we like to think of as “us”. Granted, I skipped a lot of steps along the way, but cut a guy some slack. I’ve got 15 minutes here to create the universe and all the life therein. God had six days.
But doesn’t it seem rather odd that the reaction of the X-bosons, remember the X-bosons, was just so that the universe didn’t destroy itself in its infancy? And somehow, the 10130 odds problem was overcome and self replicating molecules were formed. But maybe it’s not a problem of statistics. We glibly talk about random molecules bouncing around, but the reality is, random is just a human construct. It doesn’t exist anymore than Euclid’s perfect triangle or an infinite number of monkeys randomly typing Shakespeare’s sonnets. Random just means that there are too many calculations for us to deal with but everything, everything, is in relationship. And when the calculations begin to feed back into themselves, it appears to become even more “random” – way too many calculations.
But we’re cutting through this too. I created these pictures behind me and they are fractal, I like to call it, “art”. Fractals are formed by taking fairly simple mathematical formula and feeding the answer back into the same formula over and over again and then plotting what they do on a computer screen. They are truly “self-replicating” formulas. And it’s amazing what we can see in them. Fractals come out of a branch of mathematics known as “chaos theory”, and it’s incredible how these things appear to be random and yet not random.
So, how the bleep did we get here? Maybe better to acknowledge first that we are here. We are here because of an almost seeming anomaly in the way X-bosons break down. If they didn’t break down that way, there would be no matter and we wouldn’t be here to talk about it, now would we. We are here because of the formation of self-replicating molecules, despite overwhelming odds. But then again, if self-replicating molecules hadn’t formed, we wouldn’t be here.
And self-awareness? Don’t get me started again. How all of this stuff came together and allowed us to know about ourselves is, for want of a better term, miraculous. And yet, here again, if self-awareness hadn’t happened we wouldn’t be able to talk about it.
Most physicists believe that there are a lot of universes out there that we will never be able to know about – ours is just one universe in what they call the “multi-verse”. Some of them may flash in and out of existence in less than a second. Some of them may be very much like our own, and some may exist in ways that humans could never be able to comprehend.
But our universe exists and it almost seems to exist in a “just so” way that allows us to marvel, every ten to the minus 43 seconds, just how miraculous it is.
Meditation:
Please join in the spirit of meditation and prayer and once again listen to the words of Rumi:
Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?
We are the mirror as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity.
We are pain and what cures pain.
We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.Soul of the world,
no life, nor world remain,
no beautiful women and men longing,
only this ancient love
circling the holy black stone of nothing
where the lover is the loved,
the horizon and everything in it.
-- p. 110-113
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson