Homage to Archaeopteryx: perhaps the world's most famous fossil.
I’m watching an episode of House, where our delightfully snarky protagonist is having a conversation with Thirteen regarding his atheism:
“Where’s the fun in that?” asks Thirteen. “A finite, un-mysterious universe…”
“It’s not about fun,” House replies. “It’s about the truth.”
He’s right, of course. A true skeptic (in the correct, non-pejorative sense) is not concerned with the reality he wants; it’s the reality that presents itself that matters. But Thirteen’s objection touches on a quality commonly ascribed to a world that operates only by natural law: a world without mysteries, without wonder, and whose most intricate mechanisms, once deciphered, render it dry and uninspiring.
2M1207b orbiting the brown dwarf 2M1207: one of the first candidate extrasolar planets to be directly observed. Photo: Wikipedia Commons
Yann Martel, in his Life of Pi, is highly dismissive of agnostics, deeming them unworthy of consideration. “To choose doubt as a philosophy of life,” says Pi, the protagonist, “is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.” (I have issues with this very critical misunderstanding of what agnosticism is, but that is a rant for another day.) However, the real argument that Martel is trying to put forth is one that allows us to consciously choose to accept a theistic world view, even when it does not follow from what we have observed. When faced with two possible explanations where the correct one cannot be known, why should you not select the more fabulous of the two? The allegory here, of course, is the quest for faith in the face of reason. To equate faith with the better story, however, is a matter of perspective.
Engineering by AI: A tiny space antennae designed through genetic programming. Photo: NASA
The natural world provides us with explanations that none of us could have predicted, and that exhibit a complexity that we may never be able to get our heads around. Religious explanations of our world — however they may contribute to spiritual wellbeing — are comparatively simple. You can become lost in the task of contemplating the infinite (whether it be physical or metaphysical in nature), but reality holds far more mysteries than this.
The scientifically minded are portrayed as without awe or an open mind, who describe the world in a dry, unimaginative and precise vocabulary. Which is odd, because none of us feel this way. Nearly every day I’ll be watching a report or reading an article or catching up on my favourite science blog and find myself saying, “Now that’s cool!” The simplistic explanations of theism and the supernatural that some would hoist on reality are at best not an explanation at all, and they deny the world its intricacy, its complexity and its elegance. We have discovered things that turn common sense completely on its ear, that no one had the creativity to even imagine, and it is fascinating. And we can discover these new things for all of eternity.
Elysia chlorotica, a sea slug that captures solar energy by stealing both chloroplasts and genes from the algae it eats. Photo: PNAS
So here’s to those who don’t halt at a proclamation, who move beyond to seek out reality and the wonder of the universe. And to those whose discoveries will always give me another reason to pause and marvel at the miraculous thing that is our world.
Happy Darwin Day!
