” THE END IS NEAR ! “

The message on the fanatic’s sandwich-board – most of us saw them only in cartoons – used to make us smile.  It turns out that it is, indeed, later than we used to think, and few of us are smiling as the Amazon burns and the ice of Antarctica plunges into the sea.

Before ecologists began, in the last couple of years, to tell us we have till 2030 or at best 2050 before we are engulfed in an apocalyptic, global, end-of-the-world disaster, an eminent French scientist, Director of Research in the prestigious Institute of Astrophysics in Paris (“Science et Avenir”, July, 2008) told us we need to plan for exiting Earth.  Questioned about how long we have left before we need to leave to settle on another planet, he replied : “In one hundred or several hundreds of years, we will have nothing in terms of resources.”  Hence the absolute necessity, he said, of allowing our species to survive by developing the technology that will permit a tiny fraction of humankind to move to Mars or to one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa (he is a scientist, so he never even mentioned exoplanets).  He believes that our first emergency exit is closer to home – the vast oceans of our planet.  He seriously envisages humans living on the ocean floor, to give us time – a thousand years at best – to develop the means of a definitive departure into space and one of the rare planets with enough water to allow our species to survive.

The idea is not entirely new.  One hundred and fifty years ago, another Frenchman, who was not a scientist but a novelist, Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) wrote : “When the Earth is worn out, humanity will leave for the stars”.  Science fiction ?  Apparently not.  We are living the End-Times.

Believers and unbelievers must surely wonder about God’s supposed rôle and intentions in all this.  A minuscule number of human beings may survive.  We have long known that whatever about biblical prophecy, our world is destined anyhow to disintegrate and disappear … in five billion years.  We now have to revise the estimation of the time we have left.  We, personally, you and I, will not be around to worry about this a century of two (or perhaps just decades) from now.  But surely this scientific projection is a wake-up call for those still naïve enough to believe in God and Intelligent Design.  The majority of people, however, will probably dismiss all this as absurd.  And believers who recognize the reality of impending annihilation, will beg their loving Father in Heaven to deliver their descendants if not from Hell on Earth at least from the other one.

But many non-atheists and their godologians will buy the following “reasoning” :  the demise of the superb planet God gave us is our fault, not His.  It’s the Garden of Eden all over again, only this time , after our disobedience and sinful waste of His precious gift, He does not expel us; we expel ourselves.  He is not only a God of Love but the God of Justice.  If we are so stupid as to ignore His commands to care for the Earth, to love one another and to share His gifts with our brethren, we have only ourselves to blame.  Q.E.D.  None so blind as those who will not see.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

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WHO’S IN CHARGE ?

In the intergalactic game of expansion, destruction and survival, one could, from our infinitesimal, insignificant observation post at the edge of our galaxy, ask the question : “Is there anyone, or anything, in charge ?”

It would seem that the Universe is crashing ahead, creating new galaxies, black holes, stars and planets, with no end or purpose in sight.  But some people prefer to see it differently.  There must be a God, they say, a Master-Mind, who is in charge.  However, non-atheists do not understand and cannot explain, anymore than we atheists do and can, what He is supposed to be up to, or why He bothered to create an expanding Universe, including at least one pocket of living beings, some of whom consider themselves intelligent, on a minuscule planet its inhabitants call Earth – all of which and of whom are destined for extinction.

We atheists do not believe that “God” exists, nor therefore that “He” is behind all this.  There is no one behind all this.  It just happened.  Hard to accept, yes.  But more credible, when you look at the facts, than those theories, pipe-dreams and beliefs about a Creator, Intelligent Designer, Divine Watchmaker and Grand Architect of the Universe.

We will never know.  But, as a punter from Randwick race-course, I would bet my hair-shirt on a God-less Universe running wild, intent only on its own mindless, purposeless expansion.

In the meantime we can make the most of what we have : a volatile but manageable micro-climate where human life – for the nonce – is possible and potentially enjoyable, fulfilling, rewarding and worth living … for as long as it lasts.  No need of a God for that.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

“WHAT A WONDERFUL WORLD !”

Louis Armstrong’s signature song : a great tune, memorable lyrics, an inimitable interpretation.  Our world is indeed full of wonder, full of awe, wonder-full, awe-full.  We all have our reasons for admiring the grandeur of our planet – the Alps, the oceans, the Grand Canyon, Antarctica, the beauty and bounty of nature, and, perhaps most of all, the staggering immensity and complexity of the Universe.  All this is so breath-taking that many are tempted to attribute it to the hand of God.

Such a reaction is eminently understandable.  To both simple and sophisticated individuals, primitive peoples and highly evolved civilizations over the millennia, belief in God has seemed not only reasonable but self-evident.  Many never even discovered that the existence and intervention of gods or God could be put into question.  God is a given.  He comes with the territory.  An omnipotent, omniscient, wonderful God gave us a wonderful world.  Period.

I have friends who tell me that I, like so many authors far more gifted than yours modestly, should not destroy or even disturb the faith that has given meaning to life to countless millions from time immemorial.  But if we propose hard-hitting questions, if we sow doubts in the minds of the faith-full, if we rock the boat of religion and even the barque of the Rock himself, first Pope of the Catholic Church, it is because people deserve the truth.

We do live in a wonderful world, though we have no illusions about the dangers it presents, nor the chaos that can, and does too often – often through fault of our own – disrupt and devastate apparently providential order.  But for those who can take it, for those courageous enough to wonder about the origins of this wonderful world, we propose liberation from myth and a chance to discover the mystery that good old Satchmo could not even suspect.  Which is no reason not to enjoy a wonderful song.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

INTERLUDE : A GUEST-POST CONCERNING THE CATHOLIC CHURCH’S DEVOTION TO RELICS

ALBAN  DOPPEE, a regular reader of our blog, has permitted me to publish here a piece he wrote recently, in his mother-tongue, French, which immediately caught my eye and which I am pleased to present here in my own free translation.  Among the posts I have myself included in this blog, “The Relevance of Relics”, dated May 9, 2017, provides another insight into this thoroughly extraordinary if not disgusting practice of the Catholic Church, along with references to other posts on the subject.

Alban Doppée is a talented writer who wields a pen dipped in vitriol, in particular in his ferocious vivisection of Biblical texts.  Check out his name on the Web to discover the list of books he has published.

” I would like to share with you something that has always intrigued me.  Among the most credulous if not brain-dead people I know are Catholics who venerate a collection of the relics of Saint Whatsherorhisname, which would fill the holds of giant ocean-liners like “Le France” or the “Queen Mary”combined.  O.K. : profaning a dead body – or perhaps a skeleton – is in itself an abominable practice.  But hacking it up and displaying the bits and pieces for congregations of semi-hysterical sadists, marks the perpetrators as rivals of primitive Homo Ergaster, whose sole conscience was his Basic Instincts.

“How can we imagine that the most deserving object of pious devotion could disappear from the face of the Earth without having a follower or hero-worshipper snip off a piece of nail or a clump of hair of the “Lord” before He rose from the dead, made that trip to Emmäus and lifted off in the grand finale which was His Ascension ?  It is true that certain crackpots did manage sneakily to salvage His foreskin, umbilical cord and milk-teeth, although curiously all of these “holy relics” appeared miraculously only in the Middle Ages – which puts a certain strain on their credibility . . . “

“A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL ?”

It is amazing that many people are not amazed at the immensity of the Universe and its literally astronomical dimensions.  Some of us need glasses to correct our myopia.  But just about all of us are astronomically short-sighted when we look at the night-sky, with or without a telescope, or read about the numbers (“figures” in English) that fill astronomers’ descriptions of the world of which we, and even our planet, are only infinitesimal parts.

Just a few, mind-blowing examples :

1.   It takes me twenty hours, stopovers excluded, to fly from France to Australia.  18,000 kilometers.  Fifty years ago we began flying to – and, fortunately, back from –  the Moon, 386,000 kms away.  Soon we will attempt to fly to, and return from, Mars.  The Sun, our own unreachable star, is a little farther out : 150,000,000 kms.  Already we are at a point where figures become meaningless.  Think of some place 150 kms from your home – and then imagine having to do the trip one million times.  Man, that’s a long haul.
2.   Earth is one of the Sun’s planets.  Some of the others are smaller, some a lot bigger, all of them – like the lover of the lady with the yellow ribbon around her neck – far, FAR away.  Mars is in our backyard.  Pluto is forty times the distance between us and the Sun.
3.   We speak of distances in space in terms of light-years.  From our school-days we may recall Einstein’s formula, E equals m multiplied by c squared, and even remember that E stands for Energy, m for Mass, and c for Celerity, the speed … of light !  But 300,000 kms/SECOND (!), compared with the already impressive speed of our space-ships (56,000 kms/HOUR (!!)), makes us sound like space-snails.  That sunlight you are enjoying took more than eight minutes to get here.  For us to get to the Sun – if we were crazy enough to want to try – would take us over 393 years.

Anyhow, let’s keep out of the Sun and settle – if possible – on Mars.  Tests have been performed on volunteers to see how they would stand up to an eight-month trip and several years – to make the trip worthwhile – of confinement, as well as the stress and isolation from Earth contact (forty minutes back and forth between radio-communications), and the total lack of a safety-net if something went wrong.  Now consider going even further, let’s say to the edge of the visible Universe (nothing tried, nothing gained).  The distance is at least 90,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles.  But that’s just OUR Universe.  Astronomers consider there may be a lot of others.

The Milky Way, our galaxy, was believed, just a century ago, to be the only galaxy there was.  We now know that there are thousands of billions in the visible Universe, all desperately rushing away from each other to avoid collapsing into a Black Hole.

I could go on.  But the point is, in the context of these Reflections, not the numbers but Napoleon, and his permanently pertinent question : “Et Dieu dans tout cela ?”  (“And God in all that ?”).  The scientist Laplace famously replied : “Sire, God is not included in my hypotheses”.

Many people, aware of the beauty, grandeur and immensity of the Universe, see it as evidence of God as Creator and of His infinite power and intelligence.  Some nombrilistic and credulous earthlings even suggest that all this is part of a divine plan, of which WE are the center !  There is one fatal flaw in such self-centered, wishful thinking.  We, not just as mortal individuals but as a species, will inevitably disappear, to become, like so many of our companion species on Earth, extinct, like our Sun, because precisely of its own extinction – unless of course we jump the gun and pollute our planet to death before then.  The Sun has five billion years left, which means that our Universe will have had a pretty good run, 18 billions years’ existence.  After that, the party’s over.

We may not have to wait that long.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change five years ago modified its 2007 estimate of a two feet rise in sea-level by 2099 to three feet.  More recent studies suggest that even a 8.9 feet rise is “physically plausible”.  We are told that if all the ice in Antartica melts, the sea will rise 71 meters !  However long it takes for seawater’s thermal expansion and the melting of land-based ice-sheets and glaciers to flood the Earth, it would seem that our planet will one day be a worldwide Atlantis.  “Waterworld” will no longer be just the name of aquatic parks in the Costa Brava or of a Kevin Costner movie.  In the meantime, let us enjoy – for as long as we have left (personally and globably) – what is still a minuscule, astronomically insignificant but wonderful world.

P.S.   I wouldn’t count on either a modern Noah’s Ark or a Cosmic Exodus to a backup exoplanet.  As Johnny Cash sang : “How high’s the water, Momma ?  She said it’s six-feet high and risin’ “.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

HABITABLE EXOPLANETS

As of September 27, 2019, NASA has confirmed the existence of 4,057 exoplanets, planets outside our Solar System with temperatures similar to ours , -3° C to 40° C, and therefore potential sites for water.  All of them were detected within only the last thirty years.  A dozen of them are considered habitable.  The closest is Proxima Centauri b, at 4.22 light-years (700,000 times the distance between Earth and Mars !), the furthest Kepler 1638 b, at 2,866 light-years.  One light-year, remember, is 10,000,000,000,000 kilometers.  Even traveling at the speed of the space-probe “New Horizon”, on its way to Pluto at 17 km/sec., it would take us 78,000 years to get to Proxima Centauri b.  Forget about having a BBQ anytime soon with our possible next-door neighbors, either in their backyard or ours.

The recent discovery of exoplanets is a reminder to us of how much we still don’t know about our immense Universe, and how incredible it would be that they and the rest of the Cosmos were the result of some “divine will”.  More and more I feel that “God” has nothing, nothing on Earth or anywhere else, to do with all this.  We are part of a world that chemistry and physics created.  From mankind’s beginnings, 200,000 years ago, people have imagined, with the blind faith of primitives and the blind folly of the majority of our contemporaries, that a Divine Creator was behind it all.  Honest to God, when will they ever learn ?

                                 RIDENDA      RELIGIO

THE UNIVERSE

Few of us have had the privilege of contemplating – the only appropriate word – the night-sky seen in Australia’s Outback, far from city lights.  Rare are people lucky enough to have scanned the skies through the powerful telescopes of professional astronomers.  But all of us have been gobstruck by the beauty of photos of far distant galaxies taken by the Hubble telescope.  And when we discover the statistics concerning the Universe’s astronomical distances and the estimated number and dimensions of stars and galaxies beyond our own star, the Sun, and our galaxy, the Milky Way, we are left in awe.  It is a short step between justified wonder and unjustified belief in a God who, the credulous believe, must have made all this happen.  The following half-dozen posts are meant to remind us of the permanent challenge the Universe presents to religious debate.

But first a few reminders :

1.   Close (??) to home, the planets of our Solar System and their distances from the Sun.  In MILLIONS of kilometers  :  Mercury – 58; Venus – 108; Earth – 150; Mars – 228; Jupiter – 779.  But in BILLIONS of kilometers : Saturn – 1.4; Uranus – 2.9; Neptune – 4.5 (!!).  (Jupiter, by the way, is three hundred times bigger than the Earth.)
2.    We toss around astronomical distances with too many zeroes and call them “light-years”, and fail to realize that a L.Y. is 10,000 BILLION kilometers, or 10 TRILLION kms (10,000,000,000,000 kms).
3.    Our galaxy, the Milky Way, measures a hundred thousand light-years, 100,000 x 10 TRILLION kms or one MILLION TRILLION kms (1,000,000,000,000,000,000 kms.)  Our two Voyager space-probes, now beyond our solar system, are still traveling at 17.3 km/sec.  At that speed, it would take them, to cover its length, 1,700,000,000 years; at the speed of light, it would take only 100,000 years.  Unfortunately it is, according to Einstein, impossible to attain the speed of light.
4.    In April, 2019, an astrophysician in Lyons, Hélène Courtois, discovered “Laniakea”, the amas in which our Milky Way is situated.  It measures 500 million light-years.
5.    In the Fish constellation, a galaxy (MCG +01-02-015) has been identified as the most isolated of the visible Universe.  It is 290 million light-years away.  (That’s 2,900,000,000,000,000,000,000 kms … or three thousand billion billion clicks !)  It may be a long way to Tipperary from Sydney (18,000 kilometers) but MCG qualifies as a whole galaxy of hundreds of thousands of Unreachable Stars.  The Universe itself, as a whole, contains no less than 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies. 

We are still waiting for astronomy’s Charles Darwin to explain to us how the Universe happened.  Don’t hold your breath.  And don’t bother to ask WHY it exists.  Even Darwin, who called himself an agnostic, could not tell us why Natural Selection ever occurred.  “Fools give you reasons, why men never try” ? “Fools step in where Angels fear to tread” ?   Non-atheists say that the heavens proclaim the glory of God.  Their blind faith and blind folly are as mind-blowing as the Universe.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

 

INTELLIGENT DESIGN : HERE COME DA JUDGE !

“The molecular motor that drives the bacterial flagellum – which creationists believe has ‘irreducible complexity’ and therefore could not have been designed except by a designer” constitutes the most famous basis for the argument for “Intelligent Design” (Matt Ridley, “The Judge Who Ruled for Darwin”, TIME magazine, May 8, 2006).   But it and other “evidence” of I.D. – “a mere relabeling of creationism”, in the words of Judge John Jones – was rejected in his December 2005 judgement, reinforcing the 1987 ban on teaching creationism in U.S. Public Schools.  The Lutheran, Republican, Bush-appointed federal judge also described Intelligent Design as “a breath-taking inanity” that fails the test of science.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

GONE WITH THE WIND

A selection of pearls of Darwinian wisdom which contradict his earlier fascination with and admiration of Paley’s “Natural Theology” and his watchmaker argument – all of which should have made “Intelligent Design” unthinkable :

“The old argument of a design in nature, which in the past seemed to me so conclusive, falls apart, now that the law of Natural Selection has been discovered.”

“It seems there is no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection than in the direction in which the wind blows.  Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.”

“This universe, immense and marvellous, including man with his capacity to look deep into the past and far into the future, is the result of blind chance and of necessity.”

“The mystery of the beginning of everything is insoluble for us, and as far as I am concerned I must satisfy myself with remaining agnostic.”

“I cannot see, as banally as others do, evidence of design and benevolence around us.  It seems to me that there is too much misery in the world.”

Intelligent Designists, eat your heart out !

RIDENDA      RELIGIO

WONDER – FULL , CRAZY WORLD

Scientists tell us that there are in the Universe no less than 125,000,000,000 galaxies and 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars capable of being surrounded by countless planets containing potentially some form of life.  However all but one of the 4,055 “exoplanets” already discovered – as of September 12, 2019 – are far too close to their suns, and therefore too hot,  to support any form of life.  Anyhow, even at 32,000 kms/hour, it would take us 142,000 years to get to the nearest one (4.24 light-years away).

This is not belief.  This is fact.  One has to wonder, if God produced all this, what on earth (!) – or what, for His sake (?) – He had in mind.  To me, it looks like a pointless, random, uncontrolled, unexplainable, meaningless multiplication of matter.  Whether or not we are the only (supposedly) intelligent life-forms in this incredible Universe here on this tiny, perhaps unique, planet, it seems highly unlikely, to say the least, that this is the product of “Intelligent Design”.

RIDENDA      RELIGIO