It’s not too hot, it’s
not too cold and its forces act together in a way that’s just right; why does
the universe seem so perfectly tailor-made for life to exist?
by Laura Knight-Jadczyk
In his book aptly
titled “The Goldilocks Enigma”, physicist and science writer, Paul Davies,
says that some scientists claim to be on the verge of providing answers to the
great questions of existence such as Why are we here? How did the universe
begin? How will it end? How is the world put together? Why is it the way it is? And so on. We recognize these questions from Philip Goff’s
rather feeble attempt to philosophize about them in the previous series of posts:
“Why? The Meaning of the Universe”. Here
I’ll just suggest that the reader will be better served reading Davies over
Goff even if I don’t think Davies has the whole banana either.
Davies explains that the
reason some scientist are so confident about the possibility of being able to
explain the order of the universe is due to developments in both cosmology and
high energy particle physics. However,
elsewhere, Davies has warned us against ‘Taking Science on Faith’ because the faith scientists have in the immutability of physical laws has
origins in Christian theology. (He was roundly criticized for saying this).
Davies thinks that the
fact that consciousness exists is one of the most significant facts of the
universe, (he also notes that many scientists and philosophers do not agree with
this assessment), and that for life to emerge and then to evolve into conscious
beings like ourselves, certain conditions have to be met.
Davies worked with
astronomer, Fred Hoyle, and tells us that Hoyle thought that it appears as if
some super-intelligence was behind the laws of physics. Davies agrees that it does look that way and
no scientific explanation for the universe can be acceptable unless it accounts
for this fact. “On the face of it, the universe does look as if it has been
designed by an intelligent creator expressly for the purpose of spawning
sentient beings.
Like the porridge in
the tale of Goldilocks and the three bears, the universe seems to be ‘just
right’ for life, in many intriguing ways.”
Figuring out why this is so requires us to probe the nature of physical
laws. Davies writes:
“Throughout history, prominent thinkers have been convinced that the
everyday world observed through our senses represents only the surface
manifestation of a deeper hidden reality, where the answers to the great
questions of existence should be sought.
So compelling has been this belief that entire societies have been
shaped by it. Truth-seekers have practiced
complex rituals and rites, used drugs and medication to enter trance-like
states, and consulted shamans, mystics, and priests in an attempt to lift the
veil on a shadowy world that lies beneath the one we perceive. The world ‘occult' originally meant ‘knowledge
of concealed truth’, and seeking a gateway to the occult domain has been a major
preoccupation of all cultures, ranging from the Dreaming of Aboriginal
Australians to the myth of Adam and Eve tasting the forbidden fruit of the tree
of knowledge. …
“The ancient Greek philosopher Plato compared the world of appearance to
a shadow playing on the wall of a cave.
Followers of Pythagoras were convinced that numbers possess mystical
significance. The Bible is also replete
with numerology… The power of numbers led to a belief that certain integers, geometrical
shapes and formulas could invoke contact with a supernatural plane, and that
obscure codes known only to initiates might unlock momentous cosmic secrets. …
“Isaac Newton – mystic, theologian and alchemist – … did more than
anyone to change the age of magic into the age of science. …
“The ancients were right: beneath the surface complexity of nature lies
a hidden subtext, written in a subtle mathematical code. This cosmic code contains the secret rules on
which the universe runs. Newton, Galileo
and other early scientists treated their investigations as a religious quest. They thought that by exposing the patterns
woven into the processes of nature they truly were glimpsing the mind of God. Modern scientists are mostly not religious, yet they still accept that an intelligible script underlies the workings of nature, for to believe otherwise would undermine the very motivation for doing research, which is to uncover something meaningful about the world that we don't already know.”
There is actually a
bit more to the search for the underlying nature of reality than just ‘figuring
stuff out’. Theologian Gerd Theissen
writes:
“Religion is a
cultural sign language which promises a gain in life by corresponding to an
ultimate reality. The definition leaves
open whether and in what sense there is an ultimate reality. In religion, a gain in life is often to be
understood in a very tangible way, above all as health and help … But often
religions promise something more sublime in addition: a life in truth and love,
a gain of identity in the crises and changes of life – even the promise of
eternal life. … Cognitively, religions
have always offered a comprehensive interpretation of the world: they assign
human beings their place in the universe of things … Religion maintains belief
in a hidden order of things – and it functions where our knowledge fails in
cognitive crises (for example in the question of what lies beyond this world in
which we live and what removes us from ourselves at death).” (Gerd Theissen, A Theory of Primitive Christian Religion (London: SCM Press, 1999).(Emphases, mine.)
What is of interest here is that it is
implied that knowing or inferring something about ultimate reality can help an
individual to live a better life in some sense and Christianity most certainly
promised this ‘gain in life’ at its inception.
But somehow, today, what was once seen to
be a path to a better life has changed into a way of life that, to outsiders,
seems delusional. The problem lies, I
think, in how Christians began very early on to misunderstand the message and
then to distort it. The main reason for
the distortion of that message was the very thing that the message was intended
to defeat: a totally materialist view of reality versus one that includes
consciousness as something that can be non-material. And in our day, scientific materialism reigns
supreme.
In many ways, scientific materialism is the
modern incarnation of one side of the old conflict between the flesh and the
Spirit, to use the apostle Paul’s terms, only taken to new extremes. Often not explicitly
formulated or even acknowledged, this belief system is based on the idea that
the material world is all there is, and everything else – consciousness in
particular – is derived from it, a mere side effect. What’s more, it is often
assumed that the physical world is causally closed, which implies that our free
will is just an illusion. But for this belief system to make any sense, if only
superficially, its proponents need their own creation myth to explain the
complexity of human life, experience and consciousness: enter Darwinism. A
random material universe, so the story goes, is somehow capable to produce life
by chance; the complexity of our experience, including our so-called illusion
of having free will, so the story continues, is just a product of selecting ‘advantageous’
traits over long time spans. Never mind that if the physical universe is causally
closed and we have no free will, then our consciousness is entirely useless and
certainly not advantageous for survival. But
if we have free will, that is, if our minds can somehow break the causal chains
of the strictly physical world, then there must be something seriously wrong
with materialist doctrine.
But the materialists are determined to hold
the line against any single acknowledgment of any process that is not totally
random, accidental, and material. Evolution is their gospel, Darwin their
savior. Their story is that the Big Bang
was the explosion of a primal atom, and all matter in the Universe was in this
incredibly dense atom. Everything that
has happened since is just the result of random jostling of particles that,
over billions of years, may form affinities by accident, and different forms of
matter arise. Eventually, some of this
matter jostles against some other bit of matter, some sort of electrical (or
other) interaction takes place, and that is 'life.’
But make no mistake about it! The Big Bang theory is Creationism.
Materialists believe that matter sprang suddenly into existence with nothing
prior. That primal atom was there, and they make no attempt to explain it. That's exactly the same as saying 'God was
just there' and decided to create the universe.
Archeologist Steven Mithen writes:
Creationists believe that the mind sprang
suddenly into existence fully formed. In their view it is a product of divine
creation. They are wrong: the mind has a long evolutionary history and can be
explained without recourse to supernatural powers.
As you can see, Mithen is arguing from as
false a premise as the 'God-did-it-in-six-days' gang. He has already made a big
leap of assumption that when anyone speaks about 'mind' they are speaking
exclusively about a mind that is tied to a physical body. It apparently never occurs to him that pure
consciousness is what is meant by ‘mind’ and not masses of neurons talking to
each other with chemical and electrical signal systems. The very idea that
consciousness might exist prior to matter is anathema to the materialists, yet
that very idea in its most basic form is being discussed in recent years as the
foundation of all existence in the form of pure information. At the same time,
a close study of the matter reveals that many scientists involved in
biochemical research have actually gutted classical Darwinism and some of them
are coming forward and saying so plainly.
Proponents of Darwinism or neo-Darwinism
insist that there are clear distinctions between science and religion. Indeed, there are obvious differences in the
style and content of a laboratory experiment and a claim to divinely revealed
knowledge. Materialists say that science
is concerned with knowledge of the proven and visible, while religion is
concerned with mindless faith in the
unprovable and invisible. And yet, when
the facts are known, one must ask: is natural selection really a proven system
based on demonstrated knowledge, or is it an unproven hypothesis in which there
are so many contraindications that belief in it is also, in the final analysis,
only a matter of faith? Natural
selection is no more visible than a Deity and, frankly, less likely to do what
is claimed than supernatural intervention!
Evolutionists are often found taunting
those who think that something higher is involved in our existence – that their
miracles of special creation can, by definition, be neither proved nor
disproved. Yet the evolutionists arrive
at similar propositions, especially when they exclude any possibility of
something that guides and propels evolutionary processes. The main difference between the believers in
miracles of special creation and believers in accidental variations is that the
former has God Almighty pulling the strings and the latter has only impossible probabilities
of jostling atoms and molecules as its ultimate reality. Not much difference, eh?
The late Weston La Barre, professor of
anthropology at Duke University, was consumed with ideological fervor against
the 'enemy' and wrote that all religions other than evolution are maladaptive
retreats from reality. When considering
the Platonic philosophy which holds that ideas, forms, patterns, types and
archetypes have an existence and reality of their own and would, therefore,
seem to have an obvious relevance to evolution and the origins of species, he
regularly compared Plato to Adolf Hitler.
He neglected to mention that Hitler was a confirmed – even extreme –
Darwinist, believing that man evolved from monkeys, a proposition that Plato
would have considered absurd.
The writings of many great researchers,
including physicists and mathematicians, suggest that Plato was correct and
that there are immaterial realities independent of physical brains, and
more. The evidence for this is actually
more considerable than the rags and tatters of evidence glued together to
attempt to validate macroevolution. And,
of course, this means that the advocates of materialistic Darwinism are the
ones who are laboring under one of history's greatest delusions.
Quantum physics indicates that not only
does 'matter' seem to dissolve into patterned vibrations at the most
fundamental levels, it has become apparent that there is a structuring role
played by consciousness, by information.
There is now much accumulated evidence that
mind does exist separate from the physical brain and that phenomena such as
telepathy, psychokinesis, and other so-called paranormal effects are not only
demonstrable, they conform to models of the universe with non-local causes. In the fields of mathematics and physics, the
world has changed under the material evolutionist's feet and there is much more
to our reality than the naive realism upon which neo-Darwinism is based. The fact that most contemporary evolutionists
still cling to the old-fashioned, crude and mechanical theories in spite of the
well-known developments in other scientific fields is more proof of the
religious character of their beliefs.
And here we come to an interesting idea:
the difficulty for both believers in purely mechanistic evolution and the
creationists is that any cosmology that
is sufficiently explanatory of the phenomena we observe in our universe has
deeper dynamics and implications.
The evolutionists and creationists both seem incapable of the truly
abstract, subtle thinking required to parse these implications. It is as though
both types are confined within a set of cognitive restrictions that drive their
perceptions, experiences and priorities.
Science took a serious wrong turn in the
middle of the nineteenth century, about the time Darwin published his Origin of Species and that is why we do,
indeed, live in a spiritual Dark Age as a consequence. It wasn't that natural selection was wrong,
per se, but the way the principles have been applied has been disastrous. Natural selection was seized upon as the one
and only underlying law of our reality – and this seizing was done by
individuals with a very particular psychological make-up. The same kinds of people that become
fanatically religious and kill others in the name of their god can – and often
do – become adherents of the religion of science. Psychologist Robert Altemeyer calls them ‘rightwing
authoritarians’ and ‘authoritarian followers,’ but
there are leftwing authoritarians too – labeled ‘political-correctness
authoritarians’ in the contemporary literature.
In the nineteenth century, certain
discoveries that enhanced technology led to economic and political
considerations, and that is when science took the wrong turn because the authoritarian
type of individual also has other character traits that include a need to
dominate others, as well as a strong tendency to greed. The pursuit of science thus was taken over by
politics, and an army of scientific workers was sought to serve the agendas of
what has become known as the military-industrial complex.
Altemeyer points out that the authoritarian
follower is quite capable of holding entirely contradictory beliefs, and this
is how they are easily controlled by those in positions of power who desire
that science serve only their interests.
Over and over again it is seen – in retrospect, of course – that
irrational beliefs which are promulgated by authorities who desire to maintain
control, and which are believed by the followers who want to be 'good,’ trump true
science; and here I mean the mode of scientific cognition, not just 'science'
since the so-called Enlightenment.
Over and over again, throughout history,
going back even to ancient times, you can note that there were a number of
really intelligent free thinkers who made observations, drew useful inferences
from those observations, and suggested solutions that were ignored, ridiculed,
reviled, buried; and often, the thinker who dared to voice his ideas was
destroyed by one means or another because authoritarian followers are also
aggressive against anything that is not pronounced to be 'okay' by their
leaders. Most often this destruction was
– and is even today – due to power considerations: the individual has an idea
that, in some way, threatens the political/social power structure.
The fact is, if you read enough history,
you will discover that in war, killing or otherwise neutralizing the
intelligentsia first is the aim of all invaders and conquerors because it is
through the elimination or suppression of competent thinkers that any
oppressive regime takes hold. This has
been done so regularly and extensively throughout history that it staggers the
mind to consider it. What it means,
essentially, is that over and over and over again, pathological authoritarians
have systematically eliminated from the human population the best and brightest
minds, removing their DNA from the human gene pool, and it is ALL of humanity
that is suffering the consequences of this loss. It could very well be that this single
strategy is the reason that humanity may indeed be on the verge of extinction
right now, as is proposed by a number of eminent thinkers.
The Malthusian Darwinists, of course, will
say that it is just 'survival of the fittest.’ I guess that depends on what you
understand the 'fittest' to be. In the
animal kingdom, where fitness is measured by strength and power, the ability to
wallop the heck out of all rivals to your possession of food and sexual
partners, selection of this type might be useful. But in the human species, where fitness and
progress and even survival depend on brain power,
killing off all the brainiest people in any given culture can only lead to
degradation and devolution of the species as a whole. And when that species holds in its hands the
ability to destroy all life on the planet, well, I think you can see where that
kind of selection will lead: a lot of power and not enough brains to know that
it ought never to be used.
I would like to invite you to stop and try
to imagine what life on Earth might be like if science had actually fulfilled
its mandate of explaining our reality, solving the problems of humanity, and
teaching us how to best interact with our world and each other. If science was – today – actually a free
exploration of nature and drawing accurate conclusions, creating theories,
testing those theories with no hidden agendas, what might it have accomplished
up to now? Can you do it? Can you think of any area of life that could
not be improved by having a truly scientific understanding and clearly
described response that was supported and implemented by the social/power
structure to the benefit of all of humanity, not just the enrichment of a few?
Oh, you think it has been done? Think again.
Read the history of science and human social development. When you see how repeatedly the few
individuals who had the right idea were marginalized and/or destroyed, if you
have any firing neurons after being born into a humanity which has been
genetically manipulated to lower intelligence, you will immediately realize
that the same conditions – only worse – prevail today: what the mainstream follows
is almost always what is politically expedient to those in power, with only
enough truth involved to patch over the obvious tears in the now disintegrating
fabric of the mask of science.
If a true, free, intelligent science,
supported and encouraged by all of society, had actually been the norm since
its inception, not the exception, we would live in a world where our very
existence was not a shame to the planet that gave us birth. We would have free, clean energy. We would not have vast numbers of human
beings living in poverty or starving. We
would have no over-population problems.
Health issues that dominate Western society and are bringing it to its
knees would not be a problem because there would be plenty of nourishing food
for all. There would be no wars because
scientific anthropology and social psychology would have figured out what is
the best of all possible forms of social structure that allows for the widest
expression of human types to flourish in harmony. Children would not be medicated at ever
younger ages because cognitive science would have established the best way to
rear and educate them, and couples would be able to attend classes on infant
care and parenting that were actually effective. The best forms of education would be known so
that the widest variety of options would be available to the varied human types
and levels of intelligence and skill so that each individual would progress
into a life of satisfaction doing what they really enjoy and are best at doing,
and society would benefit by not wasting its most precious resource: human
beings. Consciousness – and non-material
spirit – would be understood and the proper reverence for Nature and the Cosmos
would be a natural part of the lives of all, and the well-known religious
feelings in human beings would be directed toward compassion and empathy, not
used by manipulative leaders to incite anger, aggression and death. Free will, rather than being outright denied
in science and philosophy as well as in very real terms politically, would be
respected as the sacred principle that it is. In short, humankind would know
how to live in harmony not only with each other, but with the world in which
they are born.
All of these COULD be the conditions of a
world where true science is a valued part of society. It could have been our
world.
But that isn't what we have today. What we have today is the chaos produced by
pathological individuals that induces consent from the authoritarian followers. As I noted above, science took a wrong turn
when it was co-opted by power and diverted to the purposes of imperialism and
materialistic greed.
The really sad thing is that the
authoritarian followers who 'believe in authority' could as easily follow an
authority that actually does have their best interests at heart, were such an
authority to exist. I don't think it
does anymore: the psychopaths have
seen to that, co-opting and corrupting even science, to the core. As it is, the authoritarian sheep follow and
support the very worst of humanity: pathological individuals who gain power by
deception and manipulation. And in the
end, as psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski wrote: “Germs are not aware that they
will be burned alive or buried deep in the ground along with the human body
whose death they are causing.”
The moment that Darwin published his Origin of Species in the nineteenth
century, an event that marked the culmination of a gradual shift in society
from being dominated by religion to what was called 'rational thinking' and
science, the authoritarians knew they had their theory of everything: random
processes of matter, no consciousness needed.
So, it has been the steady application of
materialistic evolutionary thinking that is behind the explanation of the order
of the universe that prevails today, which underpins the chaos and disorder we
see in a world devoid of information and organization. There are, undoubtedly, psychopaths in the
woodpile here acting as the éminence
grise behind science – the thing that controls most of our social
constructs and institutions – because we certainly can't say that all
scientists, or even most of them, are psychopathic. The profession itself excludes most
psychopaths by virtue of the requirement for superior intellect. However, it can certainly include a great
many members that are authoritarian in personality type and who are under the control of pathological types. We have seen living examples of this as a result of the COVID scam.
Looking back at the history – more
particularly, the archaeology – we notice how much like the Roman Empire our
present civilization actually is. The
Romans were certainly rational and scientific in many respects. They had factories which produced tableware
that has been found at the farthest reaches of the Empire, even in peasant
homes. They had factories that
manufactured roof tiles that covered the heads of even the poorest workers and
their livestock. A cache of letters was
found in northern Britain where soldiers wrote home to have socks sent to them,
which were, apparently, mass produced.
The Roman army was superior because it had standardized equipment,
produced in mass quantities at factories located in hubs of the Empire. Grain, olives, oil, foodstuffs of all kinds,
luxury goods, were mass-produced and distributed throughout the Roman
world. Literacy was obviously very
widespread, even to the working classes.
There were roads, sanitation systems, haute cuisine; in short, everything that we take for granted as
essential to civilization. The only
difference seems to be that we have harnessed sources of power that the Romans
did not have, which enables our civilization to aspire to globalization. But in
almost every other way, we are exactly like them. It is only science that has made us bigger
and badder, so to say. And, as the
saying goes, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. That fall may be the extinction of the human
race.
The end of the Roman Empire witnessed
horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live
through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of
the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Romans
before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue
forever, substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to
repeat their complacency.
Now that I've gotten that off my chest, in the next post, we'll come back to Davies and proceed with examining 'The Goldilocks Enigma'.
