Wednesday 31 October 2001

Pic of the day: Why is Chaos-san so sure there is a benevolent Creator? Read the surprising conclusion in this article!

Sun and moon

No matter how the weather may be around the time of the full moon, it seems there is usually some clear hours in the night so the moon get to show off. It is almost funny. I'm sure it has some rational explanation. Perhaps there are such streaks of clear skies when the moon is dark too, but I just don't notice. Oh well. At least the full moon does not seem to influence my mood now.

It does make me think, though. About creation and creationism and creation myths old and new. And something else ...

***

I can sort of accept the theory that the universe just suddenly tunneled out of nowhere on its own. No help from supernatural beings needed, just random fluctuations in the improbability field or whatever. True, things don't usually pop up like that. Then again, if we accept that there was nothing before the universe - no time, no space, no laws of nature - then presumably there was no law saying "there shall not turn up universes at random" either. And really, you have to give the intellectual atheists this point: If it is improbable that a universe would just start to exist out of nothing, how improbable is it that a omnipotent God capable of making such a thing should just start to exist out of nothing? Presumably a Creator is more advanced than the creation, so would be even more improbable. Heh.

(Of course, this bypasses the most obvious explanation for both of the two: That this universe is not the first, but that it and/or God comes from somewhere else, somewhere we as of yet have no way to comprehend. This just pushes the whole thing further back in time, but the sad fact is that we don't know enough of the Superverse to say for sure. Yet.)

You can say that a universe is one thing, but a universe fit for life is another. The laws of nature are fitting together just so, such that life is possible. Take water, for instance. Water is absolutely instrumental in life as we know it. It has very special properties. For instance, it absorbs a lot of heat, dissolves a lot of stuff, and it even differs from other liquids in that it freezes to a solid that is lighter than the fluid, conveniently keeping the oceans from freezing from the bottom up. All this from two of the most common atoms in the universe, and which for good measure has an affinity for each other. Then there is the versatile carbon atom, which deserves a book all to itself. Each of these, and many more, deserve a Nobel Prize for sheer ingenuity. And the various parameters of the universe seem tweaked just so, to allow life. And even complex life, at least some places.

(It seems now that there may not be so many habitable planets out there after all. Modern cosmology shows that certain parts of the galaxy are much safer than others. Too near the center, and the stars are too close together for planets to stay in one orbit, and there's too much hard radiation. Too far out, and there are not enough heavy elements from the previous generation of stars to form terrestrial planets. Unsurprisingly, our solar system is near the middle of the habitable zone.)

Yes, you can say that life seems improbable, and especially that it would arrive on Earth almost immediately after we got oceans here. Given how complex life is - a living cell is pretty much a whole society of nanomachines - it seems amazing that it turns up almost immediately and then uses a few billion years before multicellular life eventually turns up. True enough, in there is the invention of the eukaryotic cell, which has a specialized nucleus and several organelles which seem to be derived from smaller cells. But even that was a long time in coming. Much longer than the time from liquid water to first cells. This just seems so wrong.

But whether life just happens easily, or rained down from space, or just happened by some incredibly good luck which will never repeat in the history of the universe ... one thing remains. If not for life, we would not be here to discuss it. This is again a reasonable argument for the thinking atheist: It is no great miracle that there is life, because without it we would not be here. Most of the time, there has probably not been anyone here to discuss it. And there may be heaps of universes not so lucky, but no one there is complaining.

(This does not really explain anything, you know. It is more an obvious truism, like "wherever you go, there you are". But it is a kind of shield that counters the claim that there must be something special since we are here. Indeed, the fact that we are here makes it unavoidable, even without knowing any explanation.)

***

But then I look up at the moon, and I remember that it is exactly the same size as the sun, seen from Earth. Enough to cover the sun, but not its corona. An exact fit, even though they are far apart and there is no connection of cause and effect between them. It hasn't even always been so. The moon varies in its distance from the sun. When life arose, the two were quite different. Even in the age of dinosaurs, the two heavenly bodies were not quite as evenly matched in size as now they are. And in the future, the moon will move away for quite a while. But right now when we are here to look at them, they are matched so evenly in size that anyone can see it. And this time, we WOULD be here even if they weren't. Perhaps life would not evolve the way it did without a moon, but they need not be evenly matched. In fact, two moons might make for a faster evolving intelligence, since it would give a more complex environment.

Late in his life, Carl Sagan wrote a novel where towards the end a main character found a message in the decimals of the constant pi. I think that's going over the stream to fetch water. We already have a message from our Creator up there, for all to see, writ large in the sky.

And if we lower our eyes, and look at the front of a young woman, what do we see? The very same symbol! Two round objects of nearly equal size. You think that's a coincidence? Look at the udder of a cow or a goat, or even the great apes who we declare as our close relatives. Do any of them bear that heavenly mark? No, they are all purely functional; and fittingly, the adults of those species pay them no heed. Only mankind is given the mental capacity to see and understand that the One who created the sun and the moon, also created the woman's body. What more signs do we need?

(None, since it is midnight and I need to finish this. But I'll be back, the Creator willing, with new startling revelations or something, each day. Yeah, it was kind of an unexpected twist; indeed, had I not written it myself, the word "cheesy" would spring to mind. But hey, if I got some of my male readers to think of the Creator each time they see a pair of female endowments, I'll be happy to call it a day.)