Three Big Bangs Read online

  If radioactive decay caused a mutation that altered efficiency in photosynthesis and conveyed survival advantage, that would affect events at ecosystem scales. Indeed, by the usual evolutionary account, the entire biological tale is an amplification of increments, where microscopic mutations are edited by macroscopic selective processes. These increments are most finely resolved into molecular evolutions.

  Mostly, quantum indeterminacies wash out at our native range levels. That is required for the order of natural law. A macrodeterminism remains, despite a microindeterminism. The physical world is in fact routinely described in statistical terms. This is often because of our epistemological uncertainty, incomplete information. But objectively random processes at one level can yield reliable results at other levels; the random distribution of grains of clay in a brick nevertheless permits a stable and ordered wall in a building. Despite the atomic uncertainties, we can still have clocks accurate to millionths of a second, because the averages are that reliable. Stochastic processes at lower levels are compatible with determinate processes at upper levels. If this is all there is to be said, the atomic indeterminacies imply nothing for human affairs or for a broad-scope worldview.

  But in statistical systems with chaotic elements, some of them genuinely indeterminate, random differences at a threshold during initiation can lead to widely different outcomes. Whether a fire starts when a spark falls into a dry forest depends on coincidences at the start—a few drops of rain, a puff of wind, how a few fallen leaves happen to lie—although once the flame is ignited, spread of the fire becomes nearly certain. Even on a global scale, climatologists now allow that weather systems, even climate systems, have indeterminate dimensions (Lorenz 1968). Given billions of years of natural history, it seems likely that at times and places, mutations bubbling up from atomic indeterminancies have resulted in important shifts in adapted fit.

  (4) The contingencies at physical levels, present as ongoing openness and indeterminacy, seem also to be subject to a novel biological “top-down” causation. If we turn from the random to the interaction possibilities in physics, we gain a complementary picture. Physical nature, as it resulted from the explosive big bang, is not just indeterminate in random ways; when organisms arrive at the second big bang, biological nature takes advantage of physical nature. We gain space for the higher biological phenomena that physics leaves out, yet for the possibility of which physics provides. In the chapter to come, we will discover that microscopic indeterminism provides a looseness through which an organism can steer itself by taking advantage of the fluctuations at the micro levels, resulting in an explosion of biodiversity and biocomplexity. This provides a different perspective on the mixing of order and disorder. Complexity requires multiple distinct parts with multiple connections. Too much distinctness yields disorder, chaos, contingency. Too much connection yields rigidity, determinism, order. Complexity must be situated between order and disorder.

  Systemically, there seems a mixture of inevitability and openness, so that one way or another, given the conditions and constants of physics and chemistry, together with the biased earthen environment, life will somehow both surely and surprisingly appear. Manfred Eigen, a thermodynamicist, concludes “that the evolution of life… must be considered an inevitable process despite its indeterminate course” (Eigen 1971:519). Life is destined to come, yet the exact routes it will take are open and subject to historical vicissitudes. Others, although they may agree about the openness, are not so sure about the inevitability.

  Our particular universe is “singular,” as we have recognized, but then it develops nomothetic order, the laws of physics, chemistry, geology. But nothing in these laws demands that this proper-named planet, Earth, be produced. Certainly, anticipating our second big bang, life on Earth was a unique singularity, which hardly seems to have been “front-loaded” in any astrophysics, microphysics, chemistry, geology. There is no way that the most learned extraterrestrials visiting our galaxy, arriving at our solar system, flying by Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, could predict the elephants they will find on Earth. All this driven/attracted behavior of matter-energy contrasts with a more mixed, open account in biology, to which we next come.

  So one of the surprises of contemporary physics is that the human person is composed of stardust, fossil stardust! Or if you prefer to be more dismal about being lost in the stars, we humans are leftover nuclear waste. What should we make of this? Sometimes we dismiss the puzzle, noticing that in no other kind of universe could humans have evolved to worry about these things. We are here and it really is not surprising that the universe is of such kind as has produced us. We knew before we started our search that the universe has all the prerequisites for our being here. The anthropic principle is an observer selection effect, something like being surprised that all your ancestors survived long enough to reproduce, human and prehuman back to the startup of life. But those who want a fuller explanation will find it quite impressive to discover that what seem to be widely varied facts really cannot vary widely, indeed, that many of them can hardly vary at all, and have the universe develop the matter, life, and mind it has generated.

  Stephen M. Barr, as a theoretical particle physicist, comments that physicists

  cannot get around the fact that our universe is a special kind of place—indeed, doubly special…. It is a very curious circumstance that materialists, in an effort to avoid what Laplace called the unnecessary hypothesis of God, are frequently driven to hypothesize the existence of an infinity of unobservable entities [such as other universes]…. It seems that to abolish one unobservable God, it takes an infinite number of unobservable substitutes. (Barr 2003:156–157)

  Perhaps an answer to whether these ongoing results of the big bang are predictable or surprising is to ask whether, from the beginning, the possibilities were already there. William R. Stoeger, both astronomer and theologian, considers this from a theological perspective.

  God, as Creator, endows nature from the beginning with existence and with capacities and dynamisms to evolve the rich diversity of remarkable structures and organisms which have emerged in the course of cosmic history. Included with this endowment is relative freedom and autonomy—the course of evolution was not rigidly determined from the beginning, but the rich potentialities were there. Some of these were realized and others were not…. God’s direct intervention in the evolutionary process as another secondary cause is not needed. (Stoeger 2007: 242–243)

  So no possibilities emerge en route; the potentialities were there at the big bang and have been since unfolding, with some openness in the unfolding.

  John Polkinghorne, physicist and theologian, with his colleague Nicholas Beale, puts it this way:

  The universe started in an extremely simple way. Following the big bang it was just an expanding ball of energy. Now, after 13.7 billion years, it is rich and complex, the home of saints and scientists…. As we have come to understand many of the processes by which this great fertility has come about, we have come to see that their possibility had to be built into the given physical fabric of the world from the start. (Polkinghorne and Beale 2009:13)

  There is no enlarging possibility space. The later singularities were always lurking around, though concealed, from the startup. Nothing ever becomes explicit that was not forever latent. The stars in intense heat are disposed to form sodium and chlorine and, in cooler environments, sodium and chlorine are disposed to form salt. There can be endless openness within structured frameworks.

  Water was already there in the possibility spaces of hydrogen and oxygen, before any water molecule had ever formed, in the sense that if ever two atoms of hydrogen met one of oxygen under certain physical conditions, they would spontaneously join to form water. But DNA molecules coded for making hemoglobin are not already there all along in a soup of the relevant atoms (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus), any more than hemoglobin (an allosteric protein, shifting its shape to carry oxygen in blood, built from four myoglobin molecul
es) is already there in a pile of its atoms before there is any DNA. The relevant information introduces new possibilities not previously there.

  Suppose that a meteorite lands on Earth, releasing some iron atoms as the incandescent meteor crashes into the ground. Suppose some of those iron atoms make their way into my diet, and into my blood. Would not such meteoric iron, from outer space, work just as well as any terrestrial iron atom carrying oxygen to my brain? Does that not mean that such iron atoms have had from time immemorial the capacity for entering into cognitive processes? Passively perhaps, if overtaken by mind, but actively there is no such self-contained potential. A single atom of iron has no such possibilities within itself at all. To claim that it does is like saying that ink and paper have the all the possibilities of the Library of Congress latent within the bottle and secretly coded in the paper pulp fibers. Entering into thinking processes becomes a possibility for such an extraterrestrial iron atom only upon its encounter with (only relative to) the systemic company of enormous amounts of information.

  One can insist that it must always have been possible to put carbon atoms into organic cells and silicon atoms into computers, since we humans do that now somatically and technologically—and the atoms are no different from what they have been for billions of years. But it may have always been possible to do this with these atoms, provided that one had the know-how to do such things, but not possible lacking such information. Such information has to become possible. That is a different claim from the claim that it has always been possible for carbon and silicon to self-organize into organism and computers.

  We know that water, as a polar molecule, has various features that have turned out to be fortunate for supporting life. But you can know all about the polarity of water, and nothing known there leads you to predict lipid bilayers later on, built with their hydrophobic heads and hydrophilic tails, used to make membranes that enclose the life structures. In the forest, a scientist encounters a tree, the wood functioning to hold the leaves up to the sun. But what new can we do with wood? We can build a violin and play music. This gives us no cause to claim that a violin is lurking in the possibility space of the tree with its wood.

  A kaleidoscope always has the possibilities for the patterns it produces, though the exact patterns that become actual also result from the random tumble of the bits of colored glass within it. Snowflakes form in endless variety, but all are frozen into a six-sided crystalline latticework, presumably latent in physical crystallography from the beginning. But does this also mean that the protons, electrons, and atoms were waiting to string themselves together in DNA, waiting for a context of sufficient entanglement to form vital nodes in networks, the metabolisms of life? Kaleidoscopes and snowflakes do not go anywhere; but DNA does, from zero to billions of species, humans included. Is all this latent from the start? Were the rudiments of life always there? Or is there breakthrough? Is there any nudging?

  Stoeger does not find or want any divine intervention. God does everything primordially and pervasively yet not much of anything specifically. But Stoeger soon adds:

  God not only creates the universe from nothing, but also holds it in existence at each moment. And God not only holds it in existence at each moment, but is also working and struggling as Creator through the laws of nature, and the processes of cosmic, biological, and social evolution, to coax it towards the realization of its destiny. (Stoeger 2007:244)

  There seem to be no new potentialities, no intervention, and yet God simultaneously working, struggling, coaxing to make some potentialities actual and to avoid others. God is “actively engaged with and supportive of the emergent capacities (such as personhood) at each level” (Stoeger 2007:247). So does Stoeger think life and mind are front-loaded into matter? Potentially yes, it seems, but not likely to emerge without God’s active (if nonintervening) coaxing.

  Polkinghorne and Beale similarly need guidance amid the possibilities:

  The creation has been endowed with great potentiality (remember fine-tuning), but the manner in which that potentiality has been brought to birth in particular ways is through the shuffling explorations of the evolutionary process. The history of the universe is not the performance of a fixed score, written by God in eternity and inexorably performed by the creatures, but it is a grand improvisation in which the Creator and the creatures cooperate in the unfolding of the grand fugue of creation…. God can bring about determinate ends, even if they are achieved along contingent paths. (Polkinghorne and Beale 2009:15)

  So even if these authors hold that there is no enlarging possibility space, they do think that the outcome is not inevitable—short of divine cooperation, co-operation. Using our terms, the first big bang is necessary, but not sufficient for the second and the third. The first big bang makes the other two possible—but if and only if there is some coaxing, some innovation. That sounds, though, as if something more does have to be added to produce the further results.

  There is a tension between two ways of speaking of possibilities. By one account, all the possibilities are there at the start, an all-but-infinite library of possibilities. The big bang is superfertile with possibilities. Each realization of actual events (the formation of the Crab Nebula, or of Saturn) realizes one possibility from among many and thereby shuts down previous possibilities that earlier existed in this immense possibility space (something like marrying one woman or choosing one career shuts down other marriages and careers). Across the 13.7 billion years, the possibilities have been getting steadily fewer with each entity actualized, with any process completed.

  But it seems equally plausible to argue that new possibility spaces do open up that were not there at the start. Life is not possible on Saturn, but it does become possible on Earth. On Earth, it is not possible for trilobites to build jet planes, but that does become possible for humans. We will next be developing how with genetics, much becomes possible that was not previously possible. Especially in the explosions of biology on Earth, new possibilities seem to open up, dramatically, overwhelming with their increase any old ones shut down.

  Polkinghorne and Beale concede this, when they add “active information” to the creative process. “New causal principles come into play…. The behavior of such systems is no longer completely determined by the ‘low-level’ laws and adds a logic of its own.” “Every so often in the history of the universe something intrinsically new emerges from within the deep potentiality with which creation was endowed” (Polkinghorne and Beale 2009:17, 51, 81). That makes the difference between what is necessary and what is sufficient for the sequential three big bangs. The possibility space at the startup permits, but does not require enlarging possibility space to emerge. Natural history happens forward, from start to finish, but narratives have to be understood retrospectively, the beginnings in the light of the endings. In great stories, past, present, and future are in reciprocal illumination.

  These inquiries in recent decades about the character and results of the primordial exploding contrast strongly to the universe portrayed a century back, before quantum physics, relativity theory, and the advent of contemporary physics. In previous centuries, physics seemed to find that we humans, on a small planet, inhabited a fantastically huge clockwork, rockwork universe, a mechanism of matter in energetic motion. The heavens were fabulously big but no longer seemed heavenly. There was celestial decay. In the sky was more dirt, mountains on the moon, asteroids in deep space. Humans were cosmic dwarfs, lost out there in the stars.

  The world that people had thought themselves living in—a world rich with colour and sound, redolent with fragrance, filled with gladness, love and beauty, speaking everywhere of purposive harmony and creative ideals—was now crowded into minute corners in the brains of scattered organic beings. The really important world outside was a world hard, cold, colourless, silent, and dead; a world of quantity, a world of mathematically computable motions in mechanical regularity. (Burtt 1952, 1996:238–239)

  Karl Jaspers found Earth �
�a minute grain of dust in the universe… in an out-of-the-way corner…. The fundamental fact of our existence is that we appear to be isolated in the cosmos. We are the only articulate rational beings in the silence of the universe…. This is the place, a mote in the immensity of the cosmos, at which being has awakened with man” (Jaspers 1953:237). He hoped that, still, this waking up might be authentic and significant. But when Steven Weinberg got back to the first three minutes, he concluded famously: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless” (Weinberg 1988:154). Weinberg does find impressive rationality, but seems unable to ask whether the increasing comprehensibility he and other astrophysicists are detecting is pointing anywhere.

  Roger Penrose is impressed by “the extraordinary degree of precision or ‘fine-tuning’ for a Big Bang of the nature that we appear to observe” He concludes that ours is an “extraordinarily special Big Bang” (Penrose 2005:726, 762). Martin Rees concludes: “We should surely probe deeper, and ask why a unique recipe for the physical world should permit consequences as interesting as those we see around us” (Rees 2001:163). The startup looks like a setup.

  CHAPTER 2

  Life

  Earth’s Big Bang

  The most spectacular thing about planet Earth, says Richard Dawkins, is an “information explosion,” even more remarkable than a supernova among the stars (1995:145). Nature on Earth has spun quite a story, going from zero through several billion species, evolving microbes into persons. M. J. Benton concludes: “Analysis of the fossil record of microbes, algae, fungi, protists, plants, and animals shows that the diversity of both marine and continental life increased exponentially since the end of the Precambrian” (Benton 1995). Steven M. Stanley agrees: “The empirical record of diversification for marine animal life since Paleozoic time represents actual exponential increase” (Stanley 2007:1). Geerat J. Vermeij finds that “escalation characterizes the Phanerozoic history of life” (Vermeij 1987:419). Andrew H. Knoll celebrates “Earth’s immense evolutionary epic”: “The scientific account of life’s long history abounds in both narrative verve and mystery” (Knoll 2003:1).