The Cosmic Perspective Part 3

Here is the third (and last) part of an essay I wrote in 2000 AD....

Matter is beautiful  and unreal, but there's loads of it out there.

The actual nature of matter is profoundly mysterious, but it is, nevertheless, very common and our bodies and minds are composed of the same mysterious medium that the Great Artist has used in enormous quantities elsewhere in the universe (*1). But as we look out across the cosmos it is clear that the endless cubic miles of sparingly filled volume tell us one thing: That living things, such as our selves, are highly unrepresentative arrangements of matter and what distinguishes us from the relatively prosaic formations scattered across the depths of space is that we are an extremely rare form of matter. This rarity is not just a physical fact but is also true in an abstracted mathematical sense, because of all the myriad upon myriads of the things which can be contrived using the medium the Creator has chosen, living things clearly represent a very, very, tiny fraction amidst the relative banality of all that is mathematically possible. To secure the existence of living entities taken from such a small fraction requires something of unprecedented power to make an extremely precise selection from the enormous but abstract realm of mathematical possibility. Think of it like this; prior to their existence those highly atypical permutations of material particles we call life can be thought of as lost combinations of matter, lost as might be the key to a highly complicated combination lock. Humanly speaking the activity of seeking a lost combination amounts to a kind of computation and computations of all types necessarily involve the knowledge and thought embodied in a context of calculations within which the sought for result is to be found (*2). Likewise, retrieving the extremely rare configurations of life must surely involve the application of Divine knowledge and thought because I don't think for one moment that living things sprung from nowhere, as if by magic, into the Divine mind; if they did one might question if something bigger and better than God himself created that complex idea out of nothing. Therefore, it is likely that God actually did some kind of mental work in the act of conceiving the creation, mental work that amounted to an assembling of the idea in the mind of God. Now here is a crucial question: Just as there exists the question of whether the knowledge and workings encapsulated in a calculation should be packaged together with the product of that calculation, so a similar question arises in regard to Divine creativity: That is, has God chosen to give us some kind of revelation as to the magnitude of the knowledge and thought He invoked in the act of creating life? My guess is that he has done so and in the absence of better guesses I have been able to draw only one conclusion about the meaning of the scale of the universe; that the spacio-temporal dimensions of the cosmos are a revelation of the enormous mathematical costs of seeking and finding highly complex living configurations of matter. In a sense, the surrounding cosmos is not the creation - living things are the creation - but our surroundings, most of which are seen as they were billions of years ago, symbolise the scaffolding and other trappings of a work in progress; a work that was ultimately to be the home of an exceedingly rare organic configuration - humanity. (*3)

Given the vast mathematical space of possibilities from which living configurations have been extracted, the great canvass of the universe is, at the very least, an eloquent comment on the priceless rarity of living conscious material beings such as ourselves. The cosmos is a grand statement on the physio-mathematical cost of life and the living planet is an oasis of interest amidst the relative banality of its astronomical surroundings. "For a single rose a field of thorns was spared", goes a Jewish saying; a picturesque metaphor apposite to the hard mathematical truths of creating organised complexity, truths which imply that something as beautiful as a rose comes with an unavoidable cost. Likewise, the ample and seemingly superfluous cosmic dimensions are ironic allusions to the truth: We may well ask "Doesn't it all seem rather of a waste?" when, in fact, "waste" may be exactly what the universe is! Not all waste, but 99.9999....% of it is waste, waste in the sense that it symbolises the necessary collateral output of an ultimately purposeful activity, output not unlike the workings of a vast calculation. And in case we should have any doubts, the generation of waste is clearly within the Divine prerogative as is testified by the many natural processes that generate what we would evaluate as waste. In the cosmic case the waste we see represents Divine workings on an unbelievable scale; the unavoidable mathematical waste products similar to the workings of a vast calculation, a calculation needed to arrive at highly sophisticated end results; namely, ourselves and the living forms with which we share the planet.

The Turing Bombe: Searching for rare solutions.

If this guess is correct then we have before us the extraordinary irony that whilst on the one hand the vastness of the cosmos could be construed as conferring upon us our utter insignificance (as the psalmist provocatively suggests in Ps. 8:3&4:), yet the true interpretation is precisely the opposite. The vast and beautiful overall appearance of the heavens is like some breath taking work of art, an elaborately prepared canvass, which when looked at closely reduces to rough smudges of oil paint, but it is, in fact, a sophisticated piece of finesse with an ironic message. That work of art actually tells us of our staggering uniqueness as living configurations and of the astronomical mathematical costs of creating such configurations. Perhaps the Creator would not have bothered with the universe beautiful though it is, but for living things: "The whole universe was created for the Pentateuch" asserts another Jewish saying, a saying which well expresses the lengths the Creator goes to sieve out that which He seeks and that which He desires. If it was required to search a whole universe for something extraordinary beautiful or desirable it seems that the Creator will do it; and it seems that we are the one sought for case in that Universe.

...Final part added 24/09/2001...

The creation is an extraordinary Divine achievement and its underlying lesson is cost, cost of staggering proportions; literally the computational cost of seeking and finding the incredibly elaborate material juxtapositions we call living things. An alternative view is to regard the creation as a display of magic; the primitive notion that raw brute power precipitates existences from nowhere without effort, without work, and without thought. In a word magic embodies the idea of something for nothing and in the magical context the dimensions of the created order seem unintelligible and superfluous, and perhaps even something to be denied (*4) I don't believe in magic, but I do believe in the Divine propensity to support costs of incredible magnitude. The creation is a virtuoso display of seeking and finding the combinatorial novelties called life, but the Divine person seems to be prepared to go much much further in His seekings and to pay a far greater price than the physical costs of solving mere computational problems, which to Him are no doubt trifles. One cannot underestimate how far God is prepared to go in bearing cost. In fact His main motivation seems to be that of bearing cost for the sake of that which He loves; for it seems that all the achievement of the creation is the mere base and show case, as it were, in which He has set some even greater and more wonderful act of seeking and finding: I am talking, of course, of the costs of redemption. The cost of finding human organic forms, lost in the mathematical pathways of computational complexity, although very great, is nevertheless finite, but in contrast it seems that the price of redemption, the cost of seeking and finding the morally lost involves a far greater Divine personal cost than that of creation. For unlike the creation the work of redemption required, even of an infinite God, the kind of giving we call sacrifice; that is, giving where the giver gives in such proportions that his wealth is compromised. Because somehow, and to us incomprehensibly, in the work of redemption God gave up His greatest possession, namely, the unity of the Godhead. Perhaps no greater sacrifice can be imagined than of Him who has most to give and therefore has most to lose: He who had all things gave up all things, and thus, in a sense, God gave up being God and He revealed that His love was a far greater force to be reckoned with than His hold on honour, glory, strength, power and wealth (Philippians 2:6ff). Thus, He chose to live, not just the humble life style of a primitive Palestinian artisan, that even by our standards was unthinkably crude and basic, but to also suffer loss of honour, shame, pain and above all the nameless horrors of a kind of self-rejecting schism in the Godhead. This is how far He is prepared to go in bearing cost for that which He loves and seeks. If finite resources are required to create finite beings why are the infinite resources of the Godhead needed to redeem finite beings? Perhaps it has more to do with the resources needed to cross the infinite gap that separates us from Him.



Footnotes

*1 That we, our very selves, are material concomitants is apparent from the fact that in Earthly life even our thoughts and feelings are inextricably mixed with the distributions of matter and electric fields within our anatomy and brains. But this mapping between physical matter and our thoughts and feelings, rather than demystifying the mind, probably points to the deeply mysterious nature of matter, a fact that any one who has studied physics understands.

*2 There is often an attempt to disguise the non-trivial nature of the creation by suggesting that the processes needed to form living things can be quite banal. But whatever way you look at it far from trivial conditions are the logical prerequisite of life: Whether appeal is made to the off-the-peg information found in the wonderful complexities of random sequences or the enormous computational resources needed to arrive at complex configurations from scratch, we are dealing with qualities whose existences are in themselves remarkable and deeply mysterious. Ultimate truths, whether we believe them to be simple or complex, being the outermost explanatory context, cannot themselves be explained with reference to greater things; thus, standing as peculiar one-offs they will thereby seem strange and inexplicable.

*3 I have fought shy of affirming a too literal relation between God's creative mental act of conceiving creation and the expansive cosmos by suggesting that the latter is only representative of the former. Thus, cosmic dimensions may only symbolise a mathematical point about the singularity and cost of life by juxtaposing it with its prosaic alternatives by way of an enormous cosmic tableau that contrasts the novelty of life against overwhelming numbers of discarded cases. Certain aspects of physics, however, may suggest a more literal connection between the development of the universe and God's act of creation; if this is true, one may then wonder if omniscient Divine Intelligence could not have short cut what sometimes appear to be the inefficient and haphazard random workings we see in the universe. But a closer definition of the nature of intelligence leads one to believe that its power is to be found in the ability to explore pathways and possibilities in abundance, almost regardless of efficiency. The ease with which we ourselves draw conclusions may blind us to the fact that what comes easily to us actually involves an enormous number of neural events and a very large database of knowledge.

*4 Young Earth Creationists and Christian geocentrists both have difficulties accepting with the size of our space-time context and our physical insignificance. They cope with the apparent slight on our significance with a denial of our physical circumstances; Viz: denial of the temporal dimensions of the cosmos and the non-centre place we have on its stage.

The Cosmic Perspective: Part 2

I was always fascinated by the stars. The extreme dimensions of the velvet black void they inhabited first came to me as a child when I learnt that those delicately twinkling points of light were in fact suns in their own right; huge balls of nuclear fire dwarfing the Earth and even, in many cases, our own sun. It was obvious to me even then that it must take a very, very great distance to diminish the light of something as bright as the Sun to such an extent that it became a barely discernible shimmering fairy light. The vast distances of the heavens thus dawned on me for the first time.

My cigarette card collection of the planets also fascinated me. These showed the planets as perfectly spherical objects with surfaces as smooth as a billiard ball, but marked with the diffuse and patchy details discernible in Earth based telescopes. One of those cards even illustrated Mars with the mysterious Schiaparelli canals, now thought to be an illusion. But my pre-space vehicle collection was soon obsolete: As the transmissions of robotic probes came back across millions of miles of vacuum, high resolution scans displayed one feature which removed any remaining mystique that the planets may have: They showed each planet to have texture. Texture! That great destroyer of mystery! As the filmmakers well know, anyone or anything can look beautiful and ethereal under blurred and misty focus! Remove that inadequate focus and the object is seen for what it is. And so it was with the planets; gone was the veil of the Earth’s atmosphere and the attenuating effects of countless miles of intervening distance to reveal, in some cases, a wrinkly and gritty earthy texture. We saw pictures of mountainous landscapes, tumbled and complex fields of dust and rock, and the long defunct riverscapes and flood plains on Mars. Grab a handful of beach sand at Gt. Yarmouth and I don't suppose it feels much different to a handful of dust from one of the rocky planets. The gas giants, like Jupiter, showed chaotic weather systems, and high speed winds that evidenced violent change on an enormous scale. These entities were as changeable as anything on Earth.

None of these revelations, I suppose, were really unexpected or upset any fundamental ideas, but any vestigial feeling that there might exist out there something really mysterious, like those ineffably sublime crystal spheres of the middle ages or the little green and gray men of more recent years, was finally dispelled by the compellingly down to earth reality (so to speak) of those pictures from space. Yes it was marvelous, but perhaps only because objects that had been out of reach for the entire history of man were now shown to be so earthy. To ancient people for whom the reaches beyond the atmosphere were utterly unreachable the heavens were the location of sacredness, the domain of unearthly principles, perhaps even the dwelling place of ineffable beings. But they cannot be so for us and, in fact, in a post enlightenment milieu we never really expected them to be anything radically different: There might be the occasional exotic object like a black hole or a neutron star but even these are just an extreme application of a physical paradigm hammered out in near Earth vicinity. When it comes down to fundamentals there is nothing out there, it seems, that is of a radically different quality to what is found on Earth.

The empyrean looses its mystique:The planets are not sublime and ineffable.

Mystery is provocative and when something loses its mystery it may also lose its fascination. As one ponders the data that has come back from outer space giving proof positive that the planets are little more than tiny textured pieces of rock or gravitationally concentrated balls of gas embedded in billions of cubic light years of emptiness, one might plausibly claim that this loss of fascination is precisely what has happened to the heavens. In fact one might even feel that there is a touch of banality about what it has taken multi-million dollar hi-tech projects to reveal; just more of the same - gas, dust, rocks, magnetic and gravitational fields and above all plenty of space; nothing out there to really excite the casual observer for long, unless (s)he is perhaps an astrophysicist trained to be excited by theoretical nuances. For the average observer it might all feel, well, rather boring.

But whilst the postmodern atheist may dismiss any substantial existential interest in the heavens, the irony is that for the theist, particularly the theist who believes in a deeply personal God, the demystification of the heavens has cleared the ground of superstition to reveal an overwhelming mystery, a mystery that has simply taken on a new form. For whatever the demystification of outer space has cost in terms of a public interest deficit, there remains that one really mind blowing feature that we all appreciate, namely, the sheer scale on which those physical parochialities are fashioned. Lots has been written about the dimensions of outer space, but illustrations of those dimensions never fail to leave an impact: It is a place where something the size the solar system (a structure traversed by a beam of light in as much as 10 hours) which if scaled to the dimensions of a pin head still leaves the Galaxy, on the same scale, as an object with a colossal 1000 mile diameter. These immense distances are only rivaled by the depths of time: Distance and time are intimately related in space by the travel time of light and some of those distant Galaxies are seen as they were billions of years ago. For the theist, given that these grand dimensions are the work of a Deity, the questions start crowding in and the mystery of the heavens is raised to new and provocative heights of subtlety. It all seems a rather uneconomical creation for what one might expect to be a parsimonious God, a God who could surely be more selective. What's it all about? What's He up to? In fact as most of what we see in the heavens is the distant past, perhaps we should ask what has He been up to? Why fashion so much time and space, when, if as some seem to think, God need only utter the right word of magic for something to almost instantaneously to jump into sight? Does He really require so much space and time? Doesn't it all seem rather of a waste?

Deep Space: A waste of space?

The Cosmic Perspective: Part 1

Here is the first part of an essay I wrote in 2000 AD....

Power Paradigm: Give the old V2 some portals and you've got a fifties sci-fi rocket. As for reaching the stars, it’s about as effective as climbing a church spire; if you've still got one to climb.

In the science fiction genre of the 1950s space travelers were often depicted using WWII V2 style rockets, up until then amongst the fastest thing man had invented. With their powerful and sleek lines those machines at least looked up to the job. After the war a burgeoning rocket technology dramatically shrunk the planet with vehicles that could reach their destination within minutes. Surely, I remember thinking as a boy; these were the tools with which we were going to conquer space. Moreover, in outer space the remarkable speeds of rockets would be enhanced because their progress would be unhindered by atmospheric drag. In fact, whilst engines burn space vehicles never reach a terminal velocity (unless it be the speed of light) and just keep getting faster and faster. But the sleek sci-fi rockets of the 50s were misleading; those smooth bullet shaped hulls might give them a fast look, but sharp aerodynamics, although creating an impression of speed and power, does nothing to improve performance in the high vacuum of space, and the ungainly and fragile looking pioneer 11, an essay in naked machinery, is as equally up to the job and as the sci-fi V2 based rockets. In fact Pioneer 11, as it was catapulted past Jupiter in 1974, reached a speed of over 106,000 miles an hour and became amongst the fastest of all man made objects. At that speed one can circle the Earth four times in an hour or make the trip to the moon in just over two hours. 

Given that we are capable of such technological power surely we can make vehicles that can rapidly consume astronomical distances unhindered as they are by atmospheric resistance? But as everyone knows there is that one very basic, simple and unsophisticated snag which confounds the best technology; space is simply too big even for the fastest vehicle we can think of, let alone construct. Rockets may be able to eat up the miles on Earth, but the beckoning depths of space are so immense that we may as well send an arthritic snail on an round trip to Australia as send a rocket to the stars. However, a more practical proposition than trying to get there is the Hubble space telescope, which, like pioneer 11, is another piece of space bourn Information Technology. It is an incredibly powerful instrument many orders of magnitude more acute than the first telescopes. It is capable of resolving some of the surface details on a ten pence coin placed 50 miles away. With this power it has extended our sight across the universe and way back towards the beginning. But even in its keen gaze the most distant galaxies, huge objects though they are, seem as insignificant flecks of light.

Compared to Neolithic man who first cast his eyes into the heavens, we are unbelievably more powerful. But the cosmic leviathan (Job 41) makes a mockery of that power and has the potential to soak up and consume everything we can throw at it as if our existence was inconsequential. That sense of our apparent inconsequentiality on the enormous astrophysical stage is just another special case of a more general malaise of ultimate futility which plagues our society at so many levels and means that theists must come to terms with, and begin to understand, the COSMIC PERSPECTIVE....

Information technology: Pioneer 11 beams down its messages. Naked machinery replaces naked power.