What the fuck does it all mean? Seriously. The age-old question of why we are here and what we are supposed to do regularly drives people to end their lives. It causes countries to go to war. Perfectly healthy people all around the world pollute their bodies with narcotics and booze to avoid thinking about it. For thousands of years, shysters charlatans and various organized religions have preyed upon people’s need to know and grown wealthy and powerful in the process.
For the last two thousand years, most people in the world have lived their lives in some kind of rigid theological dogma. There are some 4,300 religions around the world of which Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism scratch the spiritual itch for about seventy five percent of humanity. This is not necessarily a consensual arrangement. In the middle ages, expressing creative philosophical thoughts would regularly result in being burned alive or tortured to death by various gruesome methods allegedly favored by the merciful Almighty. Historians estimate the ironically named Inquisition put to death some 5,000 inquiring minds. Not to be outdone, the Aztec’s believed a steady supply of human blood and still-beating hearts was not merely pleasing to the gods but a universal imperative. Their human sacrifices dispatched as many as 1.5 million by obsidian blade.
The last few generations in the developed world have seen some of the first un-assailed spiritual inquiry in the last two millennia. As recently as 1975, seventy percent of American families attended Sunday church. For the first time in a long time it is possible to question long-held philosophical conventions without risking social isolation or worse. Many parts of the world still labor under strict social norms that reward expressed curiosity with stoning, amputation, shunning, banishment, imprisonment or death.
Critical thought has not been kind to ancient spiritual traditions. Regular church attendance has collapsed in the developed world, declining by one fifth in the last two decades. And while non-believers are becoming the social norm rather than outcasts, the damp blanket of atheism has hardly warmed the human heart. Fewer than five percent of Americans identify as atheist and the numbers are not on a significant upswing. Meanwhile, experts on suicide identify spiritual emptiness as a leading cause of the grim decision to meet oblivion rather than endure uncaring existence.
People are reaching out for some spiritual comfort from other religious traditions as a way of escaping their own, or at least the historical baggage that goes with it. Over a million people in North America now identify as Buddhists. Christianity is collapsing in Italy and French Canada, but is finding new adherents in Africa and Asia. Kabbalah, Zoroastrianism and other faiths are all finding resurgence in seekers hoping that the ancients had a better existential clarity than we can see today.
Yet the sad fact is that just because a belief is old doesn’t mean that it is any more insightful. The ancients made sense of the universe based on the best knowledge they had at the time. The Egyptians believed their pharaohs were living gods. When they died as inevitably as the rest of us their carefully embalmed bodies were buried with tools, food and embalmed slaves would allow them to thrive in the afterlife. However, the few un-looted royal crypts were found fully unanimated, with gods and slaves just as dead as when they were entombed thousands of years ago.
We are born with the same innate need to know why we are here and what we are supposed to do while we are alive. This psychic weight of self-awareness is as pressing now as it was in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. But we can see farther than the ancients. We have more knowledge of the Universe and if anything it is more mystifyingly immense and humbling than anything our ancestors could have imagined. They saw the sun and moon and planets and enlivened countless celestial dramas and gods to inform our mortal journey.
We can peer into the fundamental specks of matter that form our universe, and gaze back to the very birth of the cosmos. For one of the first times in human history, this most universal knowledge is not the exclusive purview of a priest chaste or jealously guarded by a spiritual elite. During this new philosophical golden age it is freely available to anyone who is inclined to learn about it.
But just because celestial knowledge is no longer concealed doesn’t mean most people can understand it. What we know about the cosmos so far is vastly weird. Multiple invisible dimensions, holes in space and time, subatomic particles apparently composed of minute vibrating strings – this is where our current knowledge of the universe has led us.
Vibrating strings are also not particularly spiritually comforting. Is this really informing our lives in a way that is philosophically satisfying? While science has failed to provide much in way of cosmic reassurance, we should remember that most scientists are loathe to tiptoe anywhere near spiritually, and for good reason.
Science is the rational and humble search for provable universal truths. A good scientist is exceedingly cautious to avoid stating anything that cannot be backed up by replicable measurements or sound mathematical theory. Thankfully philosophy has a much longer leash, and has the long-standing liberty of jumping off from what we know of the natural world to draw conjectures about our place in it.
And while science has rightly not provided any answers to our philosophical quandaries, it has of late provided some very interesting questions. While scientists are naturally averse to seeing ourselves as anything more than bags of biological activity, a small group of physicists have quietly pondered a peculiar coincidence in the fabric of our universe that seems strangely conducive to the development of intelligent life.
Specifically, there are twenty five fundamental constants, aptly named because they are constant throughout the universe. These include the mass of the electron, the force that holds atomic nuclei together, etc.
From what we know about physics, these constants could have had a wide range of values and were fixed in place at the time of the big bang, much like pulling the handle on a celestial slot machine. If that is a fair analogy, then we happened to hit a jackpot of such long odds it is almost incalculable.
Many of these constants are so tightly calibrated to favor the development of intelligent life that scientists have coined the phrase the fine tuned universe to flag this flummoxing question. One explanation is that there are potentially an infinite number of universes other than our own and we just happen to live in one capable of producing physicists who can ponder that odd anomaly.
Whatever the potential reason, the fact remains that this particular universe seems to like life, or at least does not prevent it from happening, as apparently is the case in an almost infinite number of alternate universes. What does this say about our own particular place in the cosmos?