The core of Monod’s thesis is that the decisive event of life coming into being took place
once and once only
. Monod says: “Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent illimitable universe, from which he emerged by chance. Nothing about his fate and his duty was ever decreed.”
Life as a winner of nature’s lottery? Although the atheistic professor’s ideas may have an impeccable scientific foundation, the decisive question still remains unanswered. What primordial force prepared the chemical substances for the coming into being of life? Whence came the ingredients for the primordial soup on which the first life swam like the circles of fat on top of consommé?
Out of the atmosphere, of course, answers science. But that answer does not satisfy me. Like a curious child I ask: where did the atmosphere come from? From the envelope of the cooling earth, my son. And where did the earth come from? It is a part of the sun, my son. And the sun? It is a part of the Milky Way, my son. Where does the Milky Way come from? It is part of all the other Milky Ways in the universe, my son. And where do those Milky Ways come from? There are only theories about that, my son.
Professor Georges Lemaître, physicist and mathematician from Brussels, introduced a phenomenal idea into the endless discussions about the origin of all worlds. Billions of years ago all the matter in the universe was compressed into a single original atom, a heavy mass of matter, the cohesion of which pressed permanently against its nucleus. The incredible forces involved added and multiplied so that the lump of matter exploded. Splintered into many, many billions of pieces, the bits of matter assembled into finitely numerous galaxies over a long period of consolidation. The Russian physicist George Gamow (1904- ), who came to the University of Michigan by way of Paris and London, is known in the scientific world for his knack of inventing catch phrases. He introduced into scientific literature the handy phrase “big bang” to describe the theory which was accepted as most probable in scientific circles that the origin of all worlds and therefore of life was due to a gigantic explosion. It is completely credible that the creation began with a “big bang.”
The big bang theory has the advantage over all the other theories of being susceptible of
proof
by what is known as the Doppler effect. In 1842, Professor Christian Doppler (1803-1853), an Austrian physicist, discovered the effect that applies to all kinds of waves, including light and sound. “The Doppler effect” consists in an alteration of the pitch of sound when the source of sound or the listener moves. If their distance apart increases, the tone grows deeper, if it decreases, it rises. This phenomenon can be observed when a whistling locomotive approaches or recedes. In light waves the spectrum shifts towards blue if the source of light moves towards the observer, and towards red if the source of light moves away from him. The velocity of the movement of all stars can be measured by the Doppler effect, because it has been proved that the stars in all galaxies have the same chemical consistencies and often the same physical conditions as the stars in our Milky Way.
On the basis of this established fact the astrophysicist Edwin Powell Hubble (1889-1953) discovered during his work on cosmic mist and stellar systems at the Mount Wilson Observatory that the shift of the galaxies to red increased as their distance away from us increased. Professor Hannes Alfvén, Professor of Plasma Physics at the Royal Technical College in Stockholm, says: “The galaxies are moving away from us at speeds that are proportional to their distances from us.” The frequency of light becomes one per cent smaller if the source of light moves away from us at a speed of one per cent of the speed of light (= 186,000 miles per second). The reader should imagine a colored children’s balloon that has not yet been blown up. If red dots are added to the deflated balloon and it is then blown up, each of the red dots moves away from the others at a proportional speed, because every dot is pulled faster and further from the others the larger the balloon gets. Obviously one can work out when all the dots were together at one center from the speed given by the distances of the dots from one another and from the directions in which they move.
The age of the universe has been calculated by the red shift method, giving an age of six to ten billion years. Just as everyone had agreed to this estimate, George Abell, Head of the Astronomical Department of the University of California, spoke up in November, 1971 and said: “You’re wrong, gentlemen. After thirteen years of observing eight widely separated galaxies I can prove that the universe is twice as old as was previously thought.”
Big bang!
The universe is no lady who can be insulted by making her older than she is. And it makes no difference to me whether six, ten or twenty billion years have passed since the original big bang. Its
age
says nothing about the
origin of the first life
. But no matter when the fireworks took place, something must have been present before them. The explosion of the primordial atom may explain the origin of the galaxies with billions and billions of stars. Scientists of all disciplines and even philosophers may penetrate ever deeper into the secret of the atom as the beginning of all things. Atheists may deny with ever increasing vehemence the existence of a power whom for want of a better word we call “God.” In the beginning there was a creation.
If the matter composing all the stars comes from the primordial atom, it is only logical that the stars in all the galaxies are made of the same stuff, i.e. consist of the same elements. Either the big bang theory can be proved by the red shift, in which case all matter was originally compressed into one lump, or there was no big bang and then nothing can be deduced from the red shift or the Doppler effect.
Actually, precisely during the last two years, more and more amino-acids and complexes of molecular compounds have been established in extraterrestrial matter. On October 29, 1971, the geologists Gosta Vollin and David B. Ericson of Columbia University, New York, announced in
Nature
that during laboratory experiments they had succeeded in producing amino-acids by irradiating a mixture of four kinds of matter that demonstrably exist in the universe. Almost simultaneously research workers at the Radio-astronomical Observatory of Green Bank, West Virginia, reported that in gas cloud B2 in the constellation of Sagittarius they had found a substance that contains all the prerequisites for the origination of life. It was cyano-azethylene, the most complicated chemical compound that it has so far been possible to demonstrate in interstellar space. Molecules of hydrogen, carbon monoxide, ammonia, water, hydrocyanide, formaldehyde, formic acid, methyl alcohol and a series of carbohydrates have been shown to exist in the universe, as have amino-acids in meteorites and lunar rocks. In October 1971, NASA scientists reported that they could prove the existence of 17 (!) amino-acids—including ones found as protein builders in all terrestrial organisms—in the Murchinson and Murray meteorites (named after the sites in South Australia). The University of Miami found two free protein-building amino-acids, glycin and alanin, in lunar rocks brought back by the crew of Apollo XI.
Actually man, who so dislikes being alone, ought to be very happy about these scientific proofs which assure him that he is not alone in the cosmos, and that on the contrary probably lots of clever playfellows are waiting there for him to pick up the traces of their former visits that they left behind. For according to the present state of knowledge we should accept the following facts:
All matter in the universe was originally united in one primordial atom.
The chemical prerequisites for life exist on other stars in our galaxy.
The personification of the force that
must
have existed
before
the original big bang as God, and the conceptions of this kindly old man produced for the faithful by the catechists simply blindfold us.
The original prodigious force which existed before the beginning of all being was a neutrum. IT existed before the big bang. IT unleashed the great destruction. IT caused all the worlds in the universe to originate from the explosion. IT, incorporeal primordial force, the decisive primordial command, became matter and IT knew the result of the great explosion. IT wanted to reach the stage of lived experience.
In the course of countless discussions I have tried to express this concept of mine by a highly simplified example.
Terrible simplificateur!
I suggested that one should imagine a computer that works with 100 billion thought units (bits in computer jargon). It would have a “personal consciousness,” as Professor Michie, of Edinburgh University, who developed the prototype of the first
thinking
computer, called it. The computer’s personal consciousness is tightly attached to the complicated machinery with its billions of circuits. If this computer exploded, its “personal consciousness” would be destroyed, had not the intelligent computer magnetized all its billions of bits before the explosion. The explosion takes place. 100 billion bits shoot off in all directions at various speeds depending on their size. The originally centralized computer consciousness no longer exists, but the clever self-destroyer had programmed the future
after
the explosion. All the magnetic bits with their separate information will meet again sometime at the center of the explosion. Once it is back, each bit adds a new factor, personal
experience
, to the original “personal consciousness” of the great machine. From the moment of the explosion to the moment of return no “bit” knew that it was a minute part of a larger consciousness and was now going to be so again. If an individual bit with its minimal thinking capacity had been able to ask “What is the sense and purpose of my headlong journey?” or “Who created me, where do I come from?” it would have received no answer. Nevertheless, it was the beginning and end of an act, a kind of “creation” of consciousness multiplied by the factor “experience.” Only right at the end, at Teilhard de Chardin’s (1881-1955) Omega-point, shall we know again that we unite in ourselves the cause and result of creation.
It seems to me to be an incontrovertible idea that IT, synonym for the concept GOD,
must
have existed
before
the original big bang. St. John the Divine, who shows in Revelations that he had access to secret texts, described the origin of all being:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
“All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made.”
That would all be logical if the concept God had not been loaded in the course of two thousand years with accretions which provide us with a story of the creation suitable for children and savages, but which prevent us from getting to the heart of the real mystery of the creation. But if the phenomenon IT (God) decided to transform itself into matter, then IT is the creation and at the same time a product of its creation. What does Professor D. L. Pieper of Stanford University say? “Panic fear of a mistake is death to any form of progress. Love of truth is its letter of safe conduct.”
Like the computer bits we find ourselves again in a unity. We are parts, minute parts, of the IT, which will find their way back to the infinite cosmological community. All theories, all philosophies torture themselves with the questions “why” and “whence.” “Knowledge,” writes the theologian Professor Puccetti, “does not necessarily have to be won on scientific paths and in fact no so-called religious truth of importance has ever been arrived at in this way.”
On the threshold of the third millennium of our era the world is split into five great rival religions and thousands of fanatical sects.
With great certainty technology will enable us to establish communications with alien intelligences in the cosmos.
How do we imagine them?
As Catholics? As Protestants? As Lutherans? As Mormons? As Muslims? As Buddhists? As Hindus? As Greek Orthodox?
Shall we be looked on by an alien intelligence as mentally deficient because we never switch on the light on Saturday? (Orthodox Jews.) Because we do not eat pork? (Mohammedans and Jews.) Because we look on skinny cows and fat rats as sacred? (Hindus and kindred religions.) Or because we nailed our almighty God to the cross in gruesome fashion?
I suspect that with the step into the interstellar third millennium the end of terrestrial polytheism will inevitably come.
With the assumption that we are all parts of the mighty IT God no longer has to be simultaneously good and bad in some, inconceivable way; He is no longer responsible for sorrow and happiness, for ordeals and acts of providence. We ourselves have the positive and negative powers within us, because we come from the IT that always was.
I cannot avoid this question of the IT, or God, in more inflated language, nor do I want to, because I am convinced that religions with their countless gods hinder progress. How often have religions and sects, each of them vowed to one god, been the cause of wars, misery and abominations! And if their insight does not improve, they will be a contributing cause of the end of human existence.
The systems analyst Jay W. Forrester of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has made an extremely detailed study of the rates of human growth and its consequences.
The Limits of Growth
(May, 1972) is the title of the book in which Professor Dennis Meadows confronted the world with the terrifying future prospects based on Forrester’s calculations. The number of human beings grows daily, hourly. A human flood is inundating our planet. All men need food, clothing, housing. All men produce refuse and excrement, increase nitrogen. More agricultural land and more raw materials are needed than are available on our planet. Like the metastasis of a cancer-like tumor the earth’s surface is overgrown with towns and settlements. Yet if man roots up jungles and forests in his dire necessity, he is committing suicide. He is destroying the sources of oxygen. The elixir of life, water, is no longer sufficient even if the oceans and the volume of the polar ice are taken into account. The scientists warn us that the earth will perish before the year 2100.