Pale Blue Dot

  Most of these other universes reach a maximum size and then collapse, contract to a point, and disappear forever. Others may oscillate. Still others may expand without limit. In different universes there will be different laws of nature. We live, Linde argues, in one such universe—one in which the physics is congenial for growth, inflation, expansion, galaxies, stars, worlds, life. We imagine our universe to be unique, but it is one of an immense number—perhaps an infinite number—of equally valid, equally independent, equally isolated universes. There will be life in some, and not in others. In this view the observable Universe is just a newly formed backwater of a much vaster, infinitely old, and wholly unobservable Cosmos. If something like this is right, even our residual pride, pallid as it must be, of living in the only universe is denied to us.1

  Maybe someday, despite current evidence, a means will be devised to peer into adjacent universes, sporting very different laws of nature, and we will see what else is possible. Or perhaps inhabitants of adjacent universes can peer into ours. Of course, in such speculations we have far exceeded the bounds of knowledge. But if something like Linde's Cosmos is true, there is—amazingly—still another devastating deprovincialization awaiting us.

  Our powers are far from adequate to be creating universes anytime soon. Strong Anthropic Principle ideas are not amenable to proof (although Linde's cosmology does have some testable features). Extraterrestrial life aside, if self-congratulatory pretensions to centrality have now retreated to such bastions impervious to experiment, then the sequence of scientific battles with human chauvinism would seem to have been, at least largely, won.

  THE LONG-STANDING VIEW, as summarized by the philosopher Immanuel Kant, that "without man . . . the whole of creation would be a mere wilderness, a thing in vain, and have no final end" is revealed to be self-indulgent folly. A Principle of Mediocrity seems to apply to all our circumstances. We could not have known beforehand that the evidence would be, so repeatedly and thoroughly, incompatible with the proposition that human beings are at center stage in the Universe. But most of the debates have now been settled decisively in favor of a position that, however painful, can be encapsulated in a single sentence: We have not been given the lead in the cosmic drama.

  Perhaps someone else has. Perhaps no one else has. In either case, we have good reason for humility.

  CHAPTER 4: A UNIVERSE NOT MADE FOR US

  The Sea of Faith

  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

  Retreating, to the breath

  Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

  And naked shingles of the world.

  —MATTHEW ARNOLD, "DOVER BEACH" (1867)

  What a beautiful sunset," we say, or "I'm up before sunrise." No matter what the scientists allege, in everyday speech we often ignore their findings. We don't talk about the Earth turning, but about the Sun rising and setting. Try formulating it in Copernican language. Would you say, "Billy, be home by the time the Earth has rotated enough so as to occult the Sun below the local horizon"? Billy would be long gone before you're finished. We haven't been able even to find a graceful locution that accurately the Heliocentric insight. We at the center and everything else circling us is built into our languages; we teach it to our children. We are unreconstructed geocentrists hiding behind a Copernican veneer.1

  In 1633 the Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo for teaching that the Earth goes around the Sun. Let's take a closer look at this famous controversy. In the preface to his book comparing the two hypotheses—an Earth-centered and a Sun-centered universe—Galileo had written,

  The celestial phenomena will be examined, strengthening the Copernican hypothesis until it might seem that this must triumph absolutely.

  And later in the book he confessed,

  Nor can I ever sufficiently admire [Copernicus and his followers]; they have through sheer force of intellect done such violence to their own senses as to prefer what reason told them over what sensible experience plainly showed them . . .

  The Church declared, in its indictment of Galileo,

  The doctrine that the earth is neither the center of the universe nor immovable, but moves even with a daily rotation, is absurd, and both psychologically and theologically false, and at the least an error of faith.

  Galileo replied,

  The doctrine of the movements of the earth and the fixity of the sun is condemned on the ground that the Scriptures speak in many places of the sun moving and the earth standing still . . . It is piously spoken that the Scriptures cannot lie. But none will deny that they are frequently abstruse and their true meaning difficult to discover, and more than the bare words signify. I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments and demonstrations.

  But in his recantation (June 22, 1633) Galileo was made to say,

  Having been admonished by the Holy Office entirely to abandon the false opinion that the Sun was the center of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth was not the center of the same and that it moved . . . I have been . . . suspected of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the Sun is the center of the universe and immovable, and that the Earth is not the center of the same, and that it does move . . . 1 abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the same errors and heresies, and generally all and every error and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church.

  It took the Church until 1832 to remove Galileo's work from its list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read at the risk of dire punishment of their immortal souls.

  Pontifical disquiet with modern science has ebbed and flowed since the time of Galileo. The high-water mark in recent history is the 1864 Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX, the pope who also convened the Vatican Council at which the doctrine of papal infallibility was, at his insistence, first proclaimed. Here are a few excerpts:

  Divine revelation is perfect and, therefore, it is not subject to continual and indefinite progress in order to correspond with the progress of human reason . . . No man is free to embrace and profess that religion which he believes to be true, guided by the light of reason . . . The Church has power to define dogmatically the religion of the Catholic Church to be the only true religion . . . It is necessary even in the present day that the Catholic religion shall be held as the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship . . . The civil liberty of every mode of worship, and full power given to all of openly and publicly manifesting their opinions and their ideas conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people . . . The Roman Pontiff cannot and ought not to reconcile himself or agree with, progress, liberalism and modern civilization.

  To its credit, although belatedly and reluctantly, the Church in 1992 repudiated its denunciation of Galileo. It still cannot quite bring itself, though, to see the significance of its opposition. In a 1992 speech Pope John Paul II argued,

  From the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment down to our own day, the Galileo case has been a sort of "myth" in which the image fabricated out of the events is quite far removed from reality. In this perspective, the Galileo case was a symbol of the Catholic Church's supposed rejection of scientific progress, or of "dogmatic" obscurantism opposed to the free search for truth.

  But surely the Holy Inquisition ushering the elderly and infirm Galileo in to inspect the instruments of torture in the dungeons of the Church not only admits but requires just such an interpretation. This was not mere scientific caution and restraint, a reluctance to shift a paradigm until compelling evidence, such as the annual parallax, was available. This was fear of discussion and debate. Censoring alternative views and threatening to torture their proponents betray a lack of faith in the very doctrine and parishioners that are ostensibly being protected. Why were threats and Galileo's h
ouse arrest needed? Cannot truth defend itself in its confrontation with error?

  The Pope does, though, go on to add:

  The error of the theologians of the time, when they maintained the centrality of the earth, was to think that our understanding of the physical world's structure was in soiree way imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scriptures.

  Here indeed considerable progress has been made—although proponents of fundamentalist faiths will be distressed to hear from the Pontiff that Sacred Scripture is not always literally true.

  But if the Bible is not everywhere literally true, which parts are divinely inspired and which are merely fallible and human? As soon as we admit that there are scriptural mistakes (or concessions to the ignorance of the times), then how can the Bible be an inerrant guide to ethics and morals? Might sects and individuals now accept as authentic the parts of the Bible they like, and reject those that are inconvenient or burdensome? Prohibitions against murder, say, are essential for a society to function, but if divine retribution for murder is considered implausible, won't more people think they can get away with it?

  Many felt that Copernicus and Galileo were up to no good and erosive of the social order. Indeed any challenge

  from any source, to the literal truth of the Bible might have such consequences. We can readily see how science began to make people nervous. Instead of criticizing those who perpetuated the myths, public rancor was directed at those who discredited them.

  OUR ANCESTORS UNDERSTOOD origins by extrapolating from their own experience. How else could they have done it? So the Universe was hatched from a cosmic egg, or conceived in the sexual congress of a mother god and a father god, or was a kind of product of the Creator's workshop—perhaps the latest of many flawed attempts. And the Universe was not much bigger than we see, and not much older than our written or oral records, and nowhere very different from places that we know.

  We've tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we've not been very inventive. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. Few found the similarity suspicious.

  Then science came along and taught us that we are not the measure of all things, that there are wonders unimagined, that the Universe is not obliged to conform to what we consider comfortable or plausible. We have learned something about the idiosyncratic nature of our common sense. Science has carried human self-consciousness to a higher level. This is surely a rite of passage, a step towards maturity. It contrasts starkly with the childishness and narcissism of our pre-Copernican notions.

  But why should we want to think that the Universe was made for us? Why is the idea so appealing? Why do we nurture it? Is our self-esteem so precarious that nothing short of a universe custom-made for us will do?

  Of course it appeals to our vanity. "What a man desires, he also imagines to be true," said Demosthenes. "The light of faith makes us see what we believe," cheerfully admitted St. Thomas Aquinas. But I think there may be something else. There's a kind of ethnocentrism among primates. To whichever little group we happen to be born, we owe passionate love and loyalty. Members of other groups are beneath contempt, deserving of rejection and hostility. That both groups are. of the same species, that to an outside observer they are virtually indistinguishable, makes no difference. This is certainly the pattern among the chimpanzees, our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. Ann Druyan and I have described how this way of viewing the world may have made enormous evolutionary sense a few million years ago, however dangerous it has become today. Even members of hunter-gatherer groups—as far from the technological feats of our present global civilization as it is possible for humans to be—solemnly describe their little band, whichever it is, as "the people." Everyone else is something different, something less than human.

  If this is our natural way of viewing the world, then it should occasion no surprise that every time we make a naive judgment about our place in the Universe—one untempered by careful and skeptical scientific examination—we almost always opt for the centrality of our group and circumstance. We want to believe, moreover, that these are objective facts, and not our prejudices finding a sanctioned vent.

  So it's not much fun to have a gaggle of scientists incessantly haranguing us with "You're ordinary, you're unimportant your privileges are undeserved, there's nothing special about you." Even unexcitable people might, after a while, grow annoyed at this incantation and those who insist on chanting it. It almost seems that the scientists are getting some weird satisfaction out of putting humans down. Why can't they find a way in which we're superior? Lift our spirits! Exalt us! In such debates science, with its mantra of discouragement, feels cold and remote, dispassionate, detached, unresponsive to human needs.

  And, again, if we're not important, not central, not the apple of God's eye, what is implied for our theologically based moral codes? The discovery of our true bearings in the Cosmos was resisted for so long and to such a degree that many traces of the debate remain, sometimes with the motives of the geocentrists laid bare. Here, for example, is a revealing unsigned commentary in the British review The Spectator in 1892:

  [I]t is certain enough that the discovery of the heliocentric motion of the planets which reduced our earth to its proper "insignificance" in the solar system, did a good deal to reduce to a similar but far from proper "insignificance" the moral principles by which the predominant races of the earth had hitherto been guided and restrained. Part of this effect was no doubt due to the evidence afforded that the physical science of various inspired writers was erroneous instead of being infallible,-a conviction which unduly shook the confidence felt even in their moral and religious teaching. But a good deal of it was due only to the mere sense of "insignificance" with which man has contemplated himself, since he has discovered that he inhabits nothing but a very obscure corner of the universe, instead of the central world round which sun, moon, and stars alike revolved. There can be no doubt that man may feel himself, and has often felt himself, a great deal too insignificant to be the object of any particular divine training or care. If the earth be regarded as a sort of ant-hill, and the life and death of human beings as the life and death of so many ants which run into and out of so many holes in search of food and sunlight, it is quite certain that no adequate importance will be attached to the duties of human life, and that a profound fatalism and hopelessness, instead of new hopefulness, will attach to human effort . . .

  [F]or the present at least, our horizons are quite vast enough . . . ; till we can get used to the infinite horizons we already have, and not lose our balance so much as we usually do in contemplating them, the yearning for still wider horizons is premature.

  WHAT DO WE REALLY WANT from philosophy and religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay that the Universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish. You might think that grown-ups would be ashamed to put such disappointments into print. The fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the Universe—which seems truly pointless—but rather to blame the means by which we know the Universe, namely science.

  George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to his play St. Joan, described a sense of science preying on our credulity, forcing on us an alien worldview, intimidating belief:

  In the Middle Ages, people believed that the Earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as one per cent of us could give the physical reason for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.

  A more recent
and very instructive example is Understanding the Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man, by Bryan Appleyard, a British journalist. This book makes explicit what many people feel, all over the world, but are too embarrassed to say. Appleyard's candor is refreshing. He is a true believer and will not let us slough over the contradictions between modern science and traditional religion:

  "Science has taken away our religion," he laments. And what sort of religion is it that he longs for? One in which "the human race was the point, the heart, the final cause of the whole system. It placed our selves definitively upon the universal map." . . . "We were the end, the purpose, the rational axle around which the great aetherian shells rotated." He longs for "the universe of Catholic orthodoxy" in which "the cosmos is shown to be a machine constructed around the drama of salvation"—by which Appleyard means that, despite explicit orders to the contrary, a woman and a man once ate of an apple, and that this act of insubordination transformed the Universe into a contrivance for operant-conditioning their remote descendants.

  By contrast, modern science "presents us as accidents. We are caused by the cosmos, but we are not the cause of it. Modem man is not finally anything, he has no role in creation." Science is "spiritually corrosive, burning away ancient authorities and traditions. It cannot really co-exist with anything." . . . "Science, quietly and inexplicitly, is talking us into abandoning our selves, our true selves." It reveals "the mute, alien spectacle of nature." . . . "Human beings cannot live with such a revelation. The only morality left is that of the consoling lie." Anything is better than grappling with the unbearable burden of being tiny.