Unweaving the Rainbow: Lottery of Life

Say what you will about Richard Dawkins, he does have a way with words.  I came across this passage from his book Unweaving the Rainbow, and found it a beautiful passage.  It's this sort of wonder and romanticism that debunks the oft referred to canard that knowing and understanding science leaves one unromantic or jaded.  If anything, it heightens one's amazement at how lucky we really are, and paints a much more grand view of the universe than some primitive bronze age fable.  Anyway, I highly recommend the book.  And look at how wonderful, amazing, and rich the universe is without the need for some petty, unimaginative, impotent sociopath lording over us.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. the potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets then Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth, against all odds.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently ...spinning, green and gold harvest festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random would have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation would put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship's ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship's robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

The story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn't that what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn't arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn't burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not subtract from its wonder.

Of course I am playing tricks with the idea of luck, putting the cart before the horse. It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed. Privileged, and not just privileged to enjoy our planet. More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close for ever.

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

If Science Worked Like Religion

One of the arguments against religion(s), is that it all very regional, and one could even say provincial. So Sir Dawkins takes an interesting perspective on it and here is a brief movie where he runs a thought experiment.



I found it entertaining as a thought experiment. Sadly, AGAIN, theists will make excuses, and deny that their view of the universe is flawed. They will make baseless statements that science and religion are not related (and on the strictest sense they aren't in the same way that being wrong is not at all the same as being correct). Or they will trot out some provably false statement like the bible is 100% true and accurate (only because it says it is, ignoring the thousands of contradictions and outright demonstrably false statements).

I suppose that reality is just too difficult for most people to actually grasp, so hiding in bronze age fables is their way of dealing with it?

My Thoughts on RD.Net meltdown and a post

So I'm sure that people have already posted their thoughts on the RD.Net meltdown of the forums and such. I really don't have a lot to add to it. I think that it has been an interesting portal into human emotions though. In my opinion, Dr. Dawkins was totally within his rights, and setting up a new format is again within his rights. The method may have been less than ideal, but so what. It does highlight that we are emotional animals though. The reactions have been a bit out of sorts I think, but that's what sitting at a keyboard in your pajamas allows.

Anyway, I found this post on the new forums that have been set up, and I wanted to share it. it basically sums up some of my thoughts quite well:

The Sweary One wrote: Anyone who is familiar with my posting history here will know that I am a vocal opponent of religion. I doubt that I need to argue my credentials in that regard. With that in mind, there’s something I’ve been pondering recently, and I think it’s valuable enough to post here.

I think there’s a marked tendency developing for people to trivialize religion in order to dismiss it. And I think that’s a problem. It doesn’t lend itself to critical thinking. When people deride religion’s historical significance and its place in the development of human culture and society, they’re being intellectually lazy.

More than that: given the of beastie that the human is, religion or something like it was probably an inevitable aspect of our cultural and social development. I have no desire or need for it, and am actively opposed to it, but the key point here is: in a modern context. In as much as ‘fortunate’ means anything, I’m incredibly fortunate in that I live at the time that I do. That I exist at a point in human history when vast swathes of knowledge are available to me virtually instantly, where my intellect is free to discover, when education is so wholly and widely available. A time and place in which I don’t have to spend every waking hour struggling to put food in my belly, in a society in which I don’t stand liable to suffer state-sanctioned torture and murder for refusing to kowtow to men in funny dresses who claim to have the ear of god/s.

And most importantly the history of human knowledge is available to me. I get to be a non-believer because of all that has happened in the world before me, and because much of that has been recorded. And throughout that history, religion has played a major part. Trivializing that is simply to ignore history. It’s also a symptom of falling victim to confirmation bias.

In order to maintain intellectual honesty, it in necessary to acknowledge the place and importance of religion in that history. It is also important to acknowledge what religion actually is. I’m struggling to come up with a decent description of the word that fits the reality. Faith is often a part of religion, but it is by no means the whole. The same goes for superstition, social hierarchy, and many other aspects. Not one of these things is central to religion, or defining of it. Religion seems to me to be one of those words that seems trivial to define but on closer examination defies easy description. It’s an amorphous, non-binding meta-category, and anything but trivial.

But I would like to go back a little, and give a really rough stab at defining religion from a different perspective to what we may have seen in the past. Religion is a conglomeration of evolved behaviours, rooted in the justification of those behaviours, in a social, tool-using ape capable of thinking abstractly and recursively. See? Even that doesn’t really convey much. But it’s reasonable to go with it for now, and give a little explanation for it.

A social animal, by virtue of the fact that it’s a social animal, will by necessity have behavioural tendencies that dictate to some degree its social interaction. These will manifest, in part, in the establishment of a hierarchy. At its simplest, the establishment of hierarchy comes down to who can kick the shit out of whom. Once the ape starts being able to ask questions (“Who made you king?) then answers need to be given in order to maintain that hierarchy (“Fucking God did, that’s who. Someone kill that mouthy cunt.”)
That’s not all. Pretty much any question to which the answer isn’t readily apparent attracts that sort of answer. The tendency to assign assumed agency comes into play very readily, and when people start asking difficult questions (“Hey, king, why hasn’t it rained for three months?”) it’s actually good for social stability for an answer to be provided, even if it’s total gobshite (“Because you’ve pissed the Raingod off. Someone kill that sacrilegious cunt.”) – because revolt and the like never, in the short term, makes things better. The long term is another matter, and beside the point.

If one were to take a (bullshit) view of human cultural evolution from the (bullshit) stand-point that it was somehow intended to produce, say, me, then it could be said (bullshat) that religion was a sort-of stop-gap. It was only because of the existence of religion (and its intimate relationship to social stability and abstract thought) that the modern world (and, hence, me) even exists. As I say, that’s bullshit, but only because human cultural evolution doesn’t have a goal.

It was, after all, the Church that nurtured the development of reason in the ill-named Dark Ages. It was the only institution that could do such a thing. Trivializing and dismissing that is reactionary dumbfuckery. It’s as ridiculous as dismissing the work of Pythagoras or the Brotherhood that bore his name on the basis of their religiosity.

I am not religious, and I am an opponent of religion. I think we have discovered enough about reality that religion, as it has existed, is rendered unnecessary. Religion in the form of dogmatic organizations based on ancient ideas now rendered ideologically ridiculous becomes harmful. But trivializing its importance throughout history is just foolish.