Discovering that it actually makes logical sense for the universe to basically come from what our minds would consider ‘nothing’ has been quite a mental trip for me. Despite the fact that I feel confident that I can lay out the psychological reasons why it is difficult for me to accept I still find myself repulsed by the idea. I know that repulsion to an idea does not make the idea impossible and that is where I felt I just needed to resign myself to the conflict.
However, a recent thought popped into my head that gave me a completely new and beautiful perspective – and I thought I would share it.
There seems to be a connection between the theists perception of rarity and their confident assertion the universe and particularly human beings were designed. Let’s try to ignore the fact that if life was common in the universe they would argue that it is common because obviously God designed the universe for life and yet when faced with how rare life is they get all goosebumpy and argue this is evidence that it could not have just happened. To be quite honest, I grant them that life does not just ‘happen’. We never see things that just ‘happen’ because there is always a process of nature or some unknown force or intelligent being behind every event. However, it is a categorical mistake to assert that a being and not a process is behind something we know little about.
Consider the vastness of the universe… infinite stretches of space. Trillions of stars and planets and comets and black holes and galaxies and endless combinations of all the above. Now consider something else. What precise conditions are required to produce a single snowflake? You have to have an atmosphere the right temperature and with the exact right humidity. There has to be a planet with water and a star at just the right distance to produce air currents. The atmosphere has to have just the right sized dust particles so that water can condense into tiny frozen particles. There must be a clash of cold air with warm air to produce the storm. The list could go on. The point is simple: in our universe a single snowflake is a miracle. For all we know, ours is the only planet that has just the right conditions to produce a snowflake.
But when snowflakes happen… they happen millions at a time!
Now consider: the snowflake is generated by completely natural processes which can all be identified and even reproduced.
Then it clicked.
Life is like a snowflake.
With just the right conditions, why could nature not produce a life generator just as it can produce a snowflake generator?
Just consider all the possibilities that nature may hold: the combinations of conditions we cannot even grasp or imagine yet. The right mixtures of temperatures, elements, atmospheres, lakes, genetic material, proteins… and on and on.
And now it makes sense to me. All those scientists slaving away in their labs trying to find the right conditions to produce life. They aren’t stupid, they are like the first scientists who were trying to analyze the right conditions to produce a snowflake.
Imagine that a million years from now a civilization finds records of our stories of snowflakes, but the atmosphere can no longer produce them for some reason. Imagine how hard it would be for their scientists to create a snowflake generator without being able to watch snowflake generation happening naturally.
That is similar to what scientists are trying to do in the lab to produce the right conditions to generate life. We don’t even know what the simplest life form possibility is, but for all we know at some point in the past natural conditions were reached so precise and so rare that a life generator was born, spewing out little living creatures en mass like snowflakes – probably one of the rarest events in the universe.
And shoot… the universe itself may be like a snowflake… perhaps with just the right conditions of “nothingness” entire universe systems can be spewed out en mass by a universe generating cloud of nothingness.
So it happened, in that one moment walking down the sidewalk – watching that rare and beautiful phenomena we call snow that I often take for granted – that I was filled with awe at just how precious and rare life is.
- Josh
