Why Are We Here?
There are certain fundamental questions of
philosophy. What is existence? What was its beginning, and what will be its
end? Does it have a purpose? What is right and wrong? And if we can’t answer those questions, how do
we know right from wrong - how should we live? All these questions depend on answering the one
most basic question of all: Why are we here?
Unless we know this primary answer, we can’t hope to approach any of the
other derivative questions with certainty.
If we don’t know our goal we can’t possibly know what’s important, which
actions advance our purpose and which retard it.
This is very probably one of the first questions humans asked
when we first developed language (perhaps right after “Can I have some of that?
and “Come here often?”) It’s easy
to imagine some early hominid looking up at the stars one night, feeling that same
chill of wonder we’ve all felt, and for the first time wondering where she fit
into it. How big is the world? What are the stars? How did it all begin? Why are we here? Those first philosophers had no way to even
begin to search for answers. But the
desire for answers, the need for an explanation, was so overwhelming, they
invented the world’s first mythologies.
As other cultures sensed the same mysteries, they developed other myths
to answer their questions. What else
could they do? And religions are still
being born every day
As gratifying and comforting (or terrifying) as those myths
were, they had no empirical support – no reason to believe them except the need
to believe in something. They became the
foundation of culture. You learned the
myths of the culture into which you were born and that was the end of it. Some cultures did not permit questioning the
myths, others were more open to doubt, but it made no real difference – one
culture’s guesses were as unverifiable as every other’s. They had no tools to help them determine the
truth.
Remarkably enough, we now have those tools.
Over the millennia since that first question, the situation
has not really changed, but our interpretation of the terms has altered
drastically. The first people to ask it
probably thought of “we” as “you and I” or “our family.” Most tribal cultures think of their tribe as
human beings and all others as something non-human. As populations increased and human
communities grew in size, “we” expanded to refer to a village, a city-state, a
nation, a race. For some enlightened few,
“we” truly means all of humanity. Today
we’re seeing the beginnings of a step beyond even that. Many of us in the 21st century
commonly see ourselves as only incrementally different from other living
things. Earth’s biosphere evolved as a
whole over billions of years, and humans are an integral and inseparable part
of it. We’d die without the biosphere we
were born in – but it would not die without us.
We are only one of many races that inhabit the planet, all voices in the
eternal chorus of life. We can accept
organisms as diverse as viruses, octopuses, tube-worms, and anaerobic bacteria as
our relatives. Rather than “Why are we
here?” it seems most logical now to ask, “Why is life here?”
In an analogous process, the word “here” of the original
question has expanded immeasurably. It
might have started as “this valley” or “our tribe’s land.” As we grew to identify with larger
communities, so our home territory expanded.
Recently most people would have defined “here” as the planet Earth. But there are now people living off the
planet, and by the end of the decade our probes will have visited every planet
in our system. It no longer seems like
science fiction to talk of colonies on the moon or other planets. Even if the rest of the galaxy turns out to
be lifeless, the question of its origin and meaning has lost none of its
relevance. And there are hundreds of billions
of galaxies beyond. If there is sentient life anywhere out there, no matter how different, no matter how separate in
origin, are we not related, if only by experiencing the same universe
together? It may be an immense
geographic leap to push the boundaries of “here” to the edges of the universe,
but it is a small step for philosophy.
So if we (some of us) have now advanced to the point where
we can abandon our provincial anthropocentric and geocentric view, then “we”
does not exclude any “they” and “here” allows for no “there.” The question has become even more elemental: “Why
is there something rather than nothing?”
Of course, we can continue to provide answers as the first
philosophers did – by inventing gods and supernatural forces that created
everything and established the rules by which it moves. But this is pure guesswork. No matter how morally or spiritually
satisfying such constructs may be, it is impossible to either prove or disprove
them. Intellectually we are left with no
more certainty or understanding than that puzzled hominid ancestor. We live in an age of reason, in which science
is continually expanding our frontiers and routinely providing us with tools
and knowledge that former ages would have judged as miraculous, magical, divine – or diabolical.
The methods of science have proven undeniably effective at
developing technologies and providing solutions. We can predict the motions of the planets,
travel to other planets, build computers and machines and vehicles that far
exceed the abilities and powers of those who build and use them. Science has been so successful that many of
those seeking answers to the deep questions now turn not to our theologians and
philosophers but to our scientists.
But is this a reasonable expectation? Learned as they are, scientists are only
human, and their methods require them to measure and test. How can we expect them to discern the structure
and history of something as unimaginably ancient and extensive as the entire
universe, let alone address the question of its meaning?
Rather surprisingly, given the physical limitations of our
bodies and minds – tools developed to find food and avoid being food – and our
geographical isolation in a remote backwater spiral arm of a middling galaxy,
we have actually developed techniques that can answer the primal question with
reasonable certainty. It is now possible
to say how we got here, and by extension, why.
One of the most mysterious and ineffable mysteries is the
experience of our own consciousness.
Previously attributed to a soul or some divine spark that set us forever
apart from the “lower” physical and animal world, recent developments in
neuroscience and the ability to map brain activity have found no evidence for
any non-physical component of our existence.
Our consciousness is simply the subjective experience of having a brain
that absorbs and analyzes the various sensory input, governed and influenced by
the subtle mix of chemicals that constantly ebb and flow through our
brains. We have found infinitesimal
gates that open and close on our neurons, allowing only molecules with specific
shapes to pass. Microscopic organic
factories release neurotransmitters and hormones to control sleep and waking, emotions
and urges – even religious feelings – all precisely balanced to better adapt
our bodies to the needs of survival, finding food, and mating. We are far from understanding how it works,
but we can see the machinery. There is
no need to imagine an ineffable spirit that inhabits our minds, a homunculus
sitting in a control room. There is no
control room in the brain, no sensory organs, no ego or will directing its
functioning. Given a brain,
consciousness is what happens.
Where then did the brain come from – how did such a complex
structure arise? That too is easily accounted
for. We can see the progression of brain
development in other animals, from the simplest neural node in a sponge or
flatworm, through progressively more advanced structures, until we reach the
current state of the art, the modern human brain. Our ability to communicate and innovate has
given us technology that has allowed us to cover the planet and even alter its
systems. And yet there is no clear evidence that the human brain is qualitatively different from those of other
mammals, just proportionally larger. The
development of the brain parallels the development of all the other organs and
structures that make up living organisms.
They get more complex and efficient at helping their host bodies to survive,
because their hosts must reproduce. If they fail, that genetic line ceases to exist. Only successful organisms can exist. No will, no purpose, no guiding hand is
necessary.
We understand the principles of genetics, of sexual
reproduction and heredity, of mutation, competition, and evolution. Natural selection answers every question that
can be asked concerning the origins of biological structures, functions, and
complexity. Given a living organism that
can reproduce, evolution inevitably leads to change and increased complexity as
organisms compete and adapt to changing environments. Once the process is started, it will continue
(barring a catastrophic destruction of the Earth itself). We have found evidence of life on Earth 3.5
billion years ago, not long after the planet had cooled after its
formation. Continents have split apart
and smashed together, mountains have been pushed up and eroded away, asteroids
have pummeled the planet, millions of species have arisen, evolved, and gone
extinct - and still that original chain of life continues. It is not inaccurate to say that the first
organism capable of reproducing is still alive.
It is us, in the larger, modern sense - everything that lives.
So we can explain all that came after that first organism
came to be. But doesn’t that first step require
some sort of miracle? How can life have
arisen spontaneously from non-life?
Surprisingly, scientists can now answer even this.
Chemists and physicists have explored the physical nature of
matter and the forces that control it to unprecedented depths, on scales from
the cosmic to the sub-nuclear. There is
good understanding of how subatomic particles interact to make the infinite varieties
of objects we see around us, including ourselves. But what are these particles – what are they
made of and where did they come from?
The problem is analogous to one in geometry. Given a set of unprovable assumptions (a
point has position but no dimensions; a line always ends in two points, etc.),
complex proofs can be constructed to build unshakable logical constructs that
have both beauty and utility. But why
are these axioms as they are? In
mathematics no answers have been found.
But in physics the axioms have been reduced to what is known as the “six
numbers” - the mass of an electron, the relative strengths of the basic forces,
and so forth. With the values they have,
all the complex interactions can be explained.
But if any of these numbers were even slightly different, the universe
as we know it could not exist – it could not form atoms, or stars, or living
organisms, for instance. But why are all
the numbers “just right?” The best
available answer seems to be a combination of the “many worlds” hypothesis and
the anthropic principle - there are many universes and ours is constructed with
just the right values because if it weren’t we wouldn’t be here. While some may find this explanation
unsatisfactory, it meets all the requirements of a scientific theory and the
answers were derived from some solutions to the equations of general
relativity, which have been proven right in every test ever conceived in over a
century of trying, and which make predictions that have proved true in every
case.
No satisfactory explanation has ever been provided for the
axioms of geometry. We simply hold them
to be self-evident. But in the realm of
physics it is a different story. General relativity laid the groundwork. It has been refined, but in spite of the best
efforts of rigorous skeptics, the equations of relativity have withstood every
challenge for over a century. After some
periods of stagnation, work is currently advancing rapidly in this field. Some researchers are working toward a Grand
Unified Theory – a set of equations whose solutions will determine all six of these
numbers – and therefore provide proof that our understanding is verifiably
correct. The recent confirmed discovery
of the Higgs boson went a long way toward validating this approach to
understanding the nature of existence.
And what is the truth these theories reveal? That a universe can spring out of literally
nothing, create all of space and all of time, sprout eleven dimensions, expand by
1078 times in the first 10-32 seconds, and evolve life, with no causal event. Given the
laws we have discovered, once this event occurs, we will have a vast amount of
energy that will condense into very large quantities of hydrogen, about a
quarter of it fused into helium, and all under the influence of gravity, which
tries to draw it into interaction.
John Dobson – astrophysicist, defrocked monk, and inventor
of the eponymous telescope mount that revolutionized amateur astronomy – said
it most succinctly: “What do you get if you have lots of hydrogen under the
influence of gravity for a long time?
Us.” Every step on the path is
understood in its general principles: atoms into molecules, molecules into more
complex molecules, molecules capable of reproducing themselves, living
organisms, intelligence. Great variation
is possible – the current result could not have been foretold – but not
infinite variation. The six numbers
limit the process – stars can only become so big, planets will form around them
in certain ways, atmospheres and energy cycles will arise within certain
parameters. Given those six numbers,
life is inevitable.
So the great
questions are answered. We know what
existence is, how it started and how it became the way we find it now. We could now tell that awe-struck hominid why
we are here. And God is not required. Just as we gave up believing in Thor and
Vulcan when we understood thunder and lightning, we no longer need a god to
explain our existence. While no
scientific experiment could prove God does not exist, we can explain every
mystery without recourse to the supernatural. God can be eliminated, his throat slit by Occam’s Razor.
Is this universe we finally understand satisfying? We have learned we are small and
insignificant, a mote in the eye of a universe so immense in space and time
that we and all our works shrink to an infinitesimal spark in a vast fire. Is it cold and meaningless with no God
lovingly tending it? Many will say
so. People feel the needle of their
moral compass must strain toward some pole, some underlying moral code now
inextricably bound up with religious belief.
If there is no God, there are no morals.
It is only the fear of damnation to your particular cultural nightmare
that keeps us from moral anarchy.
But there is no reason for morals and ethics, the sense of
correct behavior, to be in any way connected with ancient creation myths. In fact it is precisely because of those myths
that we are so violent and fractious. When
Sunnis kill Shias, when Christians kill Muslims, when Protestants bomb
Catholics, we outsiders can’t tell them apart.
People see these religions as comfortable, stabilizing belief systems
that contribute to good behavior. But in
fact they are the exact opposite. There
is no evidence that religious people are less violent or cruel or selfish,
especially to anyone other than their co-religionists. The beliefs contribute to divisiveness,
violence, intolerance, and resistance to the acceptance of proven facts like
evolution and anthropogenic climate change.
They are as real and verifiable as gravity or electricity. The science is not controversial. No one would question these discoveries for a
second if they did not conflict with somebody’s scripture. There is a T-shirt that says, “Science flies
us to the moon. Religion flies us into
buildings.”
We’ve relegated Thor and Zeus and Jove into the realm of
fiction, charming folktales from a simpler, more ignorant time. Isn’t it time for Jehovah and Allah and all the rest to join
them?
