Rev. Kendyl Gibbons
First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis
October 1, 2006
Intelligent Designers
Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.
To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, co-operative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally under-appreciated state known as existence.
Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don’t actually care about you – indeed, don’t even know that you are there. They don’t even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single rigid impulse: to keep you you.
The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting – fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes into view, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will close you down, then silently disassemble and go off to be other things. And that’s it for you.
Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe it doesn’t, so far as we can tell. This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is fantastically mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulphur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements – nothing you wouldn’t find in any ordinary pharmacy – and that’s all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is, of course, the miracle of life.
Whether or not atoms make life in other corners of the universe, they make plenty else: indeed, they make everything else. Without them there would be no water or air or rocks, no stars and planets, no distant gassy clouds or swirling nebulae or any of the other things that make the universe to agreeably material. Atoms are so numerous and necessary that we easily overlook that they needn’t actually exist at all. There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and the other properties on which our existence hinges. There needn’t actually be a universe at all. For a very long time there wasn’t. There were no atoms and no universe for them to float about in. There was nothing – nothing at all anywhere.
So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty-first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most – 99.99 per cent, it has been suggested – are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.
The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself – shape, size, color, species affiliation, everything – and to do so repeatedly. That’s much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from "protoplasmal primordial atomic globule" (as Gilbert and Sullivan put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls, or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore, or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.
Not only have you been luck enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely – make that miraculously – fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forbears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result – eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly – in you.
So writes Bill Bryson in the Introduction of his enchanting volume A Short History of Nearly Everything. As I hope you know by now, I am not a fan of sermons as book reports, but in this instance I want to suggest that there is some urgency at stake. We heirs of the Enlightenment project, we of the scientific inclination, we who stake our view of reality on knowledge that is accumulated by human endeavor rather than revealed by supernatural inspiration, need this book – or something like it. Because we are engaged in a cultural contest for the popular mind – a struggle that we thought decisively won almost a century ago – and I fear that we are not as well equipped as we might be for this fray. Over the past generation or two, we have relaxed into the supposed victory of reason and science, interpreting any remaining questions about the origins of life and the universe to be a kind of mop-up operation, assigned to specialists in obscure academic disciplines. Complex and costly technical adventures, like the Hubble Telescope, or the superconducting supercollider, we thought might reveal some hitherto unsuspected bizarre and amazing facts about inconceivably large, or small, or long ago aspect of the world as we know it, and we were prepared to be suitably impressed. But we didn’t expect – I certainly didn’t – to have to defend the basic scientific premises of knowledge, or the consensus of modern educated understanding about how matter and life come to exist. Nevertheless, here we are, in a renewed struggle against 2,500 year old fables of faith, like those of the Bible, whose adherents wish to suppress all that human knowledge has gained in the intervening millennia. We cannot expect to come out of this encounter unscathed, if we go into it empty-handed.
Earlier this week, Ray Schreurs handed me a small, elegant volume – as tiny as Bryson’s is large – a little jewel of a book, from the estate of Edith Thompson, a long time member of this Society who died last spring, over a hundred years old. This little book, published in 1883, indicates that it was once the property of Maud Stockwell, a name that our congregational historians will also recognize. Its author is Henry Simmons, the first minister of the First Unitarian Society, from its founding in 1881 until 1905. He would have completed barely two years of his ministry here when this work saw print. It is entitled The Unending Genesis, and it is Simmons’s attempt to describe what was then known of the scientific origins of the world in a way that showed the biblical account of creation to be poetic metaphors, and still in the process of unfolding. Let me share with you this passage, in which, after summarizing the scriptural tradition, he explains his own purpose. Simmons writes:
This story [from the Bible], so beautiful in its style, so poetic in its fancies, has yet fared hard from the hands of science. Geology proves that Creation was a longer work; nor is there the least ground for the assumption that the "days" were ages, for the writer speaks naturally, and his repeated mention of evening and morning shows that he meant the literal day. Nor were day and night divided before the sun was created, as in the story. There is no ocean of waters above a solid firmament, nor any such firmament. Botany declares that plants could not live before the sun, as in the story, and astronomy proves that they did not. Sun and stars were not made so late to light the earth, but are far older than the earth itself. Nor were animals created so long after plants, but came with them. So many mistakes does science find here, as was to be expected.
But science, if ruining the old story, is reading us a grander one from writing old as the rocks, yet fresh as the rain-drops, vast as star-systems, yet delicate as snowflakes. Rather, to the poetic thought, science is not so much ruining the old story as enlarging it; -- replacing its fancies by more wondrous facts, and showing that its "days" did not end, and its week has never closed. All the work of the old legend is still done before our eyes; not once alone, as there, but continually repeated, and often not merely done, but outdone. We are learning to see all around us this more wonderful Genesis, the Creation infinite and eternal.
The aim of these pages is to trace this unceasing Creation; -- to show how much more marvelous are the real facts than that writer’s fancies; how that wondrous week is still here in this week, and those six divine "days" are repeated in every day; and how the new story, even better than the old one, begins a Bible and furnishes a foundation for reverence and religion.
It is still charming, the way Simmons weaves his scientific awareness into the lovely metaphors of the ancient Hebrew scriptures, never losing the sense of timeless majesty, but easily discarding the literal, outdated information for better science, along with a confident expectation that even better knowledge would come from future exploration. This confidence, of course, was justified; more than a century of explosive scientific development later, there is much that we could correct in the information he had to work with, but his purpose is one that we ought still to ponder.
Because here’s the thing, my humanist friends: the evolutionary niche that we human beings have exploited so well is that of story-tellers and pattern-finders. We are not as big or as fierce, or as hard or as fast, or as fertile or as toxic as our competitors for space on this planet, but we do see the ways that things connect, and we use cause and effect far better than any other gene pool. For the blink of a cosmic eye that is human history, this cleverness has served us well, but it has its downside, which is that we are formed by the pressures of nature instinctively to prefer the better story. Given a choice between a satisfying, coherent narrative, and a random collection of data, we are drawn to the drama, regardless of its accuracy, as much as we are drawn to water by thirst. If those of us who trust the gifts of science abandon the effort to tell the story of the unfolding universe, and of human evolution, in a compelling way, it is not surprising that the old mythologies arise renewed in human consciousness.
Our story about humanity’s place and purpose in the cosmic scheme of things is not flattering to our vanity, nor does it have an especially happy ending. To live in it asks of us a certain nobility of mind, and the willingness ultimately to subsume our own aspirations into the workings of a blind, unfinished process whose darlings we are not. It is, as Annie Dillard observes, a hell of a way to run a universe. And yet, I believe that humankind has the capacity to rise to this challenge, if it is presented rightly; we can make our meaning out of tragic truth as well as comforting fiction, we just can’t make it out of seemingly random facts. Hence, it seems to me, we need to be doing what Simmons was doing; we need what authors like Bryson are doing; connecting the dots of what we know about the world and ourselves into framework of meaning, into a story that can help us understand what we are, and what we might be doing here. Bill Bryson offers this narrative with both appreciative wonder and humble humor, which is why I commend his work to you. Open it to any page, and you will find some engaging story about how we come to know what we now think is true about the world, ourselves, and nearly everything.
(The FUS bookstore has one copy of the illustrated hard cover edition; I understand it runs $35.00, and they’re reluctant to stock multiples of something that pricey. The text is also available in paperback, without all the color plates, and we have several of those. Personally, I think the illustrated edition is a great investment, and they will be happy to take orders for more, if you let them know that you want one.)
Reflecting on the paradoxical fragility and tenacity of life, Bryson puts it this way:
Like most things that thrive in harsh environments, lichens are slow-growing. It may take a lichen more than half a century to attain the dimensions of a shirt button. Those the size of dinner plates, writes David Attenborough, are therefore "likely to be hundreds if not thousands of years old." Attenborough adds, "testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake."
It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we’ve been endowed with. But what’s life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours – arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don’t. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment’s additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But – and here’s an interesting point – for the most part it doesn’t want to be much.
This is perhaps a little odd, because life has had plenty of time to develop ambitions. If you imagine the 4,500 million years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 a.m., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost eight-thirty in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has the Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first seas plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 p.m. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 p.m. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.
Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 p.m. and hold sway for about three quarters of an hour. At twenty one minutes to midnight they vanish, and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history on this scale would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day, continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flashbulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.
Perhaps an even more effective way of grasping our extreme recentness as a part of this 4.5 billion year old picture is to stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire history of the Earth. On this scale, according to John McPhee in Basin and Range, the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the other is Precambrian. All of complex life is in one hand, "and in a single stroke with a medium-grained nail file you could eradicate human history."
Fortunately, that moment hasn’t happened, but the chances are good that it will. I don’t wish to interject a note of gloom just at this point, but the fact is that there is one other extremely pertinent quality about life on Earth: it goes extinct. Quite regularly. For all the trouble they take to assemble and preserve themselves, species crumple and dies remarkably routinely. And the more complex they get, the more quickly they appear to go extinct. Which is perhaps one reason why so much of life isn’t terribly ambitious.
Ah, well, but we are. We indeed have our plans and aspirations and desires, do we not? And unlike the lichen, clinging steadfastly to its rock, we must have a tale to tell about ourselves, or we do lose the will to go on. There is a story, about the gratuitous grandeur of the universe, of all that need not have been but is, constrained by our own finitude, by our limited vision and our brief days, that we need to know by heart, and tell with passion; first to feed our own souls, and then to offer a wholesome alternative to the poisonous candy of literalized myth throughout our wider culture. As carriers of the heritage of free minds and expanding truth, this is our task, our opportunity, our role in the unfolding of that evolution whose products we are. Its design lies in our insistent human capacity to create meaning for our lives; its intelligence is our own.