Cosmic neurons

Cos­mic neurons

Fair warn­ing to our Loyal Read­ers. This arti­cle will be dif­fer­ent from what you’ve come to expect. It’s not about politics…except that it is. It’s not about cur­rent events…except that it is. It’s not about Democ­rats and Republicans…except that it is. And it is intensely personal…except that it’s not.

It’s about sci­ence and spec­u­la­tion, and whether we as a nation should fund basic research with no expected prac­ti­cal ben­e­fit — except it’s really about reli­gion and spir­i­tu­al­ity and why we should fund that.

I make my liv­ing writ­ing soft­ware. I also write fan­tasy and sci­ence fic­tion nov­els. I’m also a min­is­ter. Here’s why it’s all the same thing.

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)

Gre­gor Mendel

The world’s first geneti­cist was a Catholic monk named Gre­gor Mendel. I’m not going to say much about him except as a model to emu­late. If you don’t know about him, you should learn.

In the mid-​​nineteenth cen­tury, through his hobby of breed­ing pea plants, he dis­cov­ered the rules of genetic inher­i­tance. Not too many years later, his work became the basis for the sci­ence of evo­lu­tion. Mendel saw no con­tra­dic­tion between his stud­ies and his faith, because he viewed his work as an explo­ration of the uni­verse that God cre­ated. He stud­ied how the world worked, and sim­ply accepted the why. If his reli­gion taught him there was a deity who cre­ated the world, then describ­ing that world was a form of devo­tion to his reli­gious faith. Keep this thought in mind.

Much of mod­ern physics deals with both the very large and the very small. Sci­en­tists work­ing at the Large Hadron Col­lider at CERN (the Euro­pean Orga­ni­za­tion for Nuclear Research) are engaged in the study of how mat­ter and energy work. Not why, but how. They are study­ing the small­est sub­atomic par­ti­cles and the way they inter­act. Their work has impli­ca­tions for the first sec­onds of the Uni­verse, the actions and events that occurred when real­ity was only a few moments old, because that’s when these sub­atomic par­ti­cles came into being. Real­ity works the way it works because it’s in its nature to work that way.

Mod­ern cos­mol­ogy (the study of uni­ver­sal cre­ation) holds that the Uni­verse came into exis­tence about 13.5 bil­lion years ago, in a mas­sive explo­sion called the Big Bang. All mat­ter and energy that exists today was cre­ated then. Real­ity began as an undif­fer­en­ti­ated fire­ball of nuclear power. Real­ity has changed its form since then, coa­lesc­ing into com­plex struc­tures and the intri­cate dance of plan­ets and stars and life and cul­ture, dust and fire and air and peo­ple. But all the stuff of which we are made — all the stuff of which every­thing is made — came into exis­tence then, in a sin­gle moment. All of sci­ence is noth­ing more (and noth­ing less) than a study of what hap­pened after.

On the sur­face, this story con­tra­dicts a lit­eral read­ing of the cre­ation story in the Bible, which says the world came into being through the work of a con­scious deity who cre­ated real­ity basi­cally as we now know it, over the course of a sin­gle week. This shap­ing of real­ity hap­pened about six thou­sand years ago. The Texas leg­is­la­ture (and law­mak­ers in var­i­ous other parts of our coun­try) want the lit­eral Bib­li­cal descrip­tion to be taught along side (one must sus­pect, “instead of”) the story told by mod­ern physics. Gre­gor Mendel might say this is an error. If God cre­ated the Uni­verse in a way that looks like Real­ity is 13.5 bil­lion years old, maybe there’s a rea­son the Cre­ator wanted us to look at the clues He (or She or They) left.

I’m about to change the subject…except that I’m not.

A few years ago, I wrote a story about chil­dren who learn secrets of spir­i­tu­al­ity from con­tact with con­scious cells within their own bod­ies. Imag­ine that the cells that flow through your veins are think­ing beings. How would these tiny crea­tures come to under­stand the real­ity of their world? Could they learn to com­pre­hend the hopes and fears, loves and pol­i­tics, enter­tain­ments and reli­gions, of the body of which they were a part? (My first novel, Still Life, was a sequel to that story. Maybe some­day I’ll make the orig­i­nal tale available.)

In the 1990s, ecol­o­gist James Love­lock pro­posed the Gaia Hypoth­e­sis, the idea that the Earth func­tions as if it was a sin­gle coher­ent liv­ing entity. The Earth main­tains itself, and sus­tains life on its sur­face,  through the same sorts of meth­ods and self-​​referential feed­back loops that a liv­ing body uses. Imag­ine for a moment that is is real­ity, that the Earth itself is a liv­ing crea­ture. How could we tell? How could we prove it, one way or the other, whether the Earth was alive and aware? Is there any way we’d be able to under­stand the thoughts or expe­ri­ences of a liv­ing planet? We’d have as much chance as a white blood cell does to under­stand human music. Yet, accord­ing to Lovelock’s fas­ci­nat­ing research, the ecol­ogy and geol­ogy of the Earth really does func­tion as if it were a sin­gle, enor­mous liv­ing body.

If the Earth is alive, it can­not be the only planet which is. So must be every one of a hun­dred bil­lion worlds in our galaxy — at the very least, every one with a com­plex ecol­ogy and active geology.

We are not aware of the liv­ing entity that is the Earth, because of an acci­dent of scale. We are too small in com­par­i­son to the Earth to under­stand its thoughts and dreams, just as a sin­gle white blood cell in our bod­ies would be unable to com­pre­hend what we humans are. We are still more unable to relate to the envi­ron­ment in which the Earth-​​being exists, what­ever cul­ture and ecol­ogy and soci­ety of which the Earth is a part.

Much of this is wild spec­u­la­tion. But most is mun­dane physics and ecol­ogy. If you aren’t aware of Lovelock’s work, please explore it — his research is solid. Then con­sider one fur­ther factor.

Solar sys­tems are orga­nized into star clus­ters, and these are col­lected into galax­ies. These, in turn, are bound into galac­tic clus­ters, and then into super­clus­ters. Recent sky sur­veys of super­clus­ters exhibit immense struc­tures of cen­tral knots and long fil­a­ments, as shown in the image at the start of this arti­cle. Mate­r­ial, both mat­ter and energy, flows along these ten­drils. The phys­i­cal rocks on which we stand may have come from a dif­fer­ent galaxy, and only fell together to make a planet when they arrived here.

The large-​​scale struc­ture of the uni­verse resem­bles noth­ing so much as the struc­ture of the human brain, with nerves and ten­drils con­nect­ing each bit with each other bit, and with sig­nals in the form of elec­tro­mag­netic energy flow­ing through it all.

Think about that. The Uni­verse, on the largest scale we can per­ceive, is struc­tured pre­cisely the way our brain is formed. If the phys­i­cal process of our thoughts and dreams have any­thing to do with the phys­i­cal struc­ture of our brains (which psy­chol­o­gists and anatomists claim is indeed the case), then the Uni­verse itself is shaped in a way to dupli­cate those processes on an immense scale.

When we look at whole-​​sky sur­veys of the Uni­verse, we may well be look­ing at the phys­i­cal struc­ture of the mind of God. The process of sci­ence may be noth­ing more (or less) than an explo­ration of the Being within which we are sim­ply tiny cells.

This would mean that fund­ing basic physics and cos­mo­log­i­cal research is, at root, a reli­gious activ­ity. It is the study of the phys­i­ol­ogy of God. As a min­is­ter, I approve of that. As a sci­ence fic­tion writer, I can­not resist the temp­ta­tion to explore it. As a soft­ware cre­ator, I’m fas­ci­nated by recent work on arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, in which these processes are sim­u­lated and dupli­cated inside bod­ies made of silicon.

I’m amused by crit­i­cisms of sci­ence fund­ing as being “sec­u­lar human­ism”. I’m equally amused by objec­tions from sci­en­tists that their work is unre­lated to reli­gion. I’m also amused (and frus­trated) by reli­gious lead­ers who object to the explo­ration of God’s uni­verse by sci­en­tific research.

If we are a reli­gious nation, per­haps a Chris­t­ian nation, as many con­ser­v­a­tives claim, then fund­ing sci­en­tific research should be at the fore­front of their priorities.

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