MOSTLY HARMLESS

In “My God is Bigger Than Your God”, I introduced a number of difficult concepts.  The potentially infinite nature of the Universe, the unity of space and time, and my explanation that the Creator must, of necessity, not be of this Universe.   

But here is the most mind-boggling idea of all.  We are surrounded by millions of humans who firmly believe that this unimaginably vast and wondrous Universe was created solely for the benefit of the inhabitants of this one tiny planet.  And more than that, they believe that we have to behave in certain ways because the Creator told us we must, that the Creator will from time to time bend the rules by which the Universe operates if we ask and have abided by the rules, and that the Creator will reward or punish us in some sort of continued existence once we have died based on how well we have behaved.  I haven’t the word skills to describe just how preposterous this appears to me.  It’s as if a colony of bacteria, living by chance in the gut of a performing dolphin at Sea World, had decided that the dolphin had created Sea World for their benefit.

This notion is, of course, the last and most insidious manifestation of our belief that the world is the center of the Universe.  Early man had no understanding of the reasons for phenomena he observed around him, and so assumed that there was some person or persons with powers greater than his own arranging the events of his life.  He had no understanding of the lights in the night sky and formed the theory that these were lamps placed in a bowl over his head.  When he came to a large body of water he could not see anything over the horizon and so assumed that there was nothing there.  Once he had observed the movement of the sun and moon over time he saw that they seemed to be the items in motion while the earth beneath his feet was obviously fixed, and so they must be orbiting him.  In addition, he saw that things did not move unless pushed, and so postulated the motions in the heavens must also be the handiwork of those invisible beings with greater power.  He originally believed they lived on high mountains, but moved them to a place in the sky once his explorations failed to find them on the physical planet.  Now of course, we nod sagely to ourselves, we know better these days.  The Earth orbits the Sun and the lights in the sky are other planets and other suns.  Things move in accordance with Einstein’s refinement of Newton’s laws, and we humans no longer believe in those invisible powerful beings. 

Except we do.  We’re nowhere nearly as evolved as we like to imagine.  Nearly all humans believe in a creator that can be experienced, who continues to order and affect our lives on a daily basis, who requires our adulation and in return will grant special favors and some sort of extension of life beyond death.  Beyond an insistence that the deity looks something like us (since we were ‘created in his image’) there is no agreement among humans regarding the name and form of this deity nor the specifics of the rules by which we are to live in order to be pleasing to him.  Even between adherents of a specific deity there are disagreements regarding proper procedures.  Do you baptize infants or adults?  Do you make images of the deity or is this forbidden?  Do you give praise five times a day or once a week, and is that on Saturday or Sunday?  The list of ways we are divided by our religions would (and has) filled many a book.  The adherents of each religion display, moreover, a considerable range in commitment regarding their religion’s beliefs and practices.  The most dangerous level of commitment among the adherents of any religion may be referred to as the fundamentalists.  Each of these groups believes that theirs is the only true belief; that they possess the only accurate text(s) as dictated by their deity in some manner, and that these texts are true, complete, and unassailable, admitting to no interpretation and completely sacred.  Anything that contradicts these sacred texts, whether any other religion’s sacred texts or the knowledge gained though centuries of scientific thought, is wrong, blasphemous, and dangerous.  More on these people later.  Suffice it to say that there are large sections of the population of this planet who are mentally the same as the Catholic Church elders made war on Muslims in the Middle East and who prosecuted Galileo nearly four centuries ago when he had the temerity to announce that the earth moved.

In any event, I made it clear that the Creator I referred to in my earlier article is not the same as Jehovah, Allah, Shiva, Jove, or any other of these anthropomorphic creations.  All of these deities, whether ancient or current, exist within the Universe and therefore cannot have created it.  In my view, ancient humans created their gods to give rational form to the world they observed, and have morphed them from time to time but never let them go.  Thus most no longer believe in Zeus or Odin, but a direct line can be drawn from them to the current officeholders.  I further believe that once formed, all religions contain an invested bureaucracy (the priesthood), which is self-perpetuating as are all bureaucracies.  So, for example, as pagan druids converted to Christianity, the uniforms changed but the underlying structure of the keepers of belief changed not at all.  The priesthood has, after all, a vested interest in maintaining their position and so continues the fiction that belief must be continued in whatever deity currently occupies the top spot.

It is another truth of the human race that religion has spawned more wars and death than any other reason.  Christians, Jews, and Muslims have been at each other’s throats in ancient and modern times, as well as internecine conflicts between different factions within each of these groups.  Hindus and Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, Hutus and Tutsis, the list of conflicts spawned by ignorance and intolerance is limited only by the number of religions humans have created.  At the heart of all of these conflicts are each faith’s fundamentalists, the ones who insist that any belief other than their own is blasphemy, curable only by the death of the blasphemer. 

Sadly, the millennia-long toll of death is not the only evil perpetuated at the behest of faith.  Ignorance is another of faith’s evil benefits, as one faith after another has fought tooth-and-nail against any scientific advance seen as contradictory to faith’s tenets.  Remember, our religions arose from mankind’s desire to understand his world, but science is how, as thinking individuals, we work out the details of the truth of the world as it really is.  Science does not rely on belief, only facts.  Scientists do speculate, of course, in order to postulate a theory.  But any theory does not stand unless it survives rigorous experimental examination.  Is the Earth flat and fixed in place?  Let us gather observations in support or refutation of this premise, and if the observations do not agree with the premise, the premise must therefore be wrong, and if wrong, discarded.  It does no good to go on believing in some premise that has not stood up to observation.  This is the opposite of rational thought.  The list of concepts denied by various religions is long, but modern examples include evolution and the warming of the planet.  Both of these trains of thought are the result of observations, and are not beliefs as such, but provable statements.  Every breeder practices evolution in an effort to create an animal that meets his specifications, and planetary warming is measurable by readings on simple thermometers, gathered over decades.

The only thing I can be thankful for is that our level of technological advancement has not led to any understanding of how to leave the planet in any significant way.  We are bound to this solar system by our current understanding of physics.  As a matter of fact, this month we have had an example of how limited our cosmic reach is.  The Voyager spacecraft, first launched in 1977, has finally reached what we feel is the edge of our solar system, as defined by the reach of the Sun’s gravity.  More than one human generation has passed since this spacecraft ventured into interplanetary space.  But the most telling point is the message this craft bears for the use of any civilization which may encounter it in the future.  The message contains images and sounds of the planet, not only of humans but of other species, like whales.  And how are these images and sounds recorded?  On a phonograph record!  Can you imagine the confusion of any species encountering this craft?  An analog recording?  Have these primitives never heard of digital?  Another point is that substantially none of our science fiction even postulated leaving our home galaxy.  Star Trek – Voyager, portrays a spacecraft marooned by a magic spell on the far side of our galaxy, and the marvelous technology imagined by the series can only get them back in a voyage of over seventy-five years!  Seventy years ago the writer Doc Smith imagined a voyage outside our galaxy, to a satellite galaxy known as the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.  In his story line that proposed technology such that our galaxy could be crossed in weeks, this journey was described as taking months.  Even in our fiction the distances facing us are completely beyond our ability to cope.

In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the Guide describes Earth as ‘Mostly Harmless’.  I am glad that physics confines our peculiar brand of ignorance to our planet because I’m confirmed in Adams’ estimate of humans.