By luck or by love?
BILL TONER SJ :: The German philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz, was the first to pose the greatest mystery of life with the question, Why is there something rather than nothing? The first question in the catechism put this in a different way: “Who made the world?”
Many of us run away from the question, perhaps for fear of what it would mean to our humdrum lives if there is a strange, unpredictable Being loose in the universe. The world “just happened”, many people say, – mountains, seas, stars, fish, birds, animals, people, human culture, they all “just happened”.
Darwin’s discovery of the process of natural selection in nature, seeming to lead to the evolution of all living things, brought great relief to many people who found the concept of a Creator God terrifying, sketched even in some verses of the Bible: “It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews).
Also, the faith of many Christians was heavily underpinned by wonder at the marvels of the natural world, which seemed to reflect God’s might and beauty: “I see his blood upon the rose, and in the stars the glory of his eyes”. Darwin’s discoveries seemed to replace the wonder of God’s creation by the lottery of natural selection.
But Darwin’s discovery of the process of evolution distracted people from considering the extraordinary number of conditions that had to exist in the universe and in our own solar system so that the evolution of life could begin.
In Darwin’s time few of these conditions had been discovered, or their importance realized. Although there is constant speculation that life of the same complexity as that of our own planet must exist somewhere among the billions of galaxies in the universe, there are an extraordinary number of features of the planet Earth that are necessary to support life as we know it, and so far no planet (or even solar system) has been found with all the same features.
One simple example is the speed at which the Earth spins. This determines the length of day and night. If our planet turned more slowly, parts of the Earth would heat up so much during the longer day, or become so cold during the longer night, that many of the living things (including perhaps ourselves!) would not survive.
The Earth is also at a distance from its sun that makes life as we know it possible. Many of the living things we are familiar with can only survive within a narrow temperature band; we can see the alarm that is being caused among scientists by the current warming of the earth brought on by human activity. The margins within which life as we know it can survive appear to be very narrow.
Even our moon plays an essential role in the Earth’s stability. As satellites go, it is very large compared with other known satellites, being 27% of the earth’s size. Without it being the size it is, and its consequent influence on Earth through its force of gravity, the earth would tilt in chaotic fashion. This would create climate variation that would make complex life impossible. There are in fact dozens of other unusual features of the planet Earth that make complex life possible.
In recent times many scientists have endorsed what is called the ‘Rare Earth Hypothesis’, which suggests that the emergence of complex life forms on any planet is an improbable phenomenon and is likely to be rare throughout the universe as a whole.
None of the examples above can be said to ‘prove’ that our planet is unique, or that it has been created and specially designed by a divine being. Nevertheless, the Rare Earth Hypothesis may reawaken our sense of wonder, and lead us to speculate that we may even be alone in a universe of 200 billion galaxies. Apart perhaps from a God who loves us.
Perhaps what is most needed now is to take more seriously the opinion of all the great theologians that God is unknowable. Sadly, the apparent certainty with which churchmen throughout history have attributed terrifying qualities to God has probably been sparked by a desire for social control rather than any great insight or revelation.
