There
are two reasons I’m giving this sermon today: my dog and Netflix. I started
listening to podcasts on my twice-daily walks with our dog a few months ago,
and Radiolab quickly became a favorite. It’s a popular science-oriented podcast
that is accessible, earnest, curious, and often moving. Even spiritual, as I
understand spirituality in my own way. What about Netflix? Well, we missed
Cosmos reboot narrated by the wonderful Neil deGrasse Tyson when it aired last
year, and we were thrilled to discover that it’s available on Netflix’s
streaming service. We’re almost done with the series, and have enjoyed watching
it together as a family. Often jaw-dropping and inspiring, Cosmos explores the
history of science and questions about earth and its place in the universe.
There’s something about both that make them, at times, unsettling. I love this
about science. How curiosity and the search for truth – for explanations – can
be unsettling.
So
I’ve had science on the mind, and what it has taught us about our place in the
cosmos. But it’s not like I’ve had some big epiphany. After all, I haven’t
learned a whole lot that I didn’t already know. But you know how the same ideas
can affect you differently at different times in your life. So what I’ve been
thinking about is how this enterprise we call science has gradually dislodged
humans from the center of, well, everything, and humbled us in the process,
forcing us to confront new realities. And we’re often slow – quite slow – to
confront those realities.
Why
were we ever at the center of things? Our seemingly superior intelligence and
complexity surely made our ancestors feel that they had some purpose on this
planet. Our ability to find and recognize patterns, coupled with our need for
meaning and purpose, led those ancestors to find meaning in the stars. And to
tell stories of where we came from. Stories of gods. And creations. We seemed
to be at the center of the universe. Everything seemed to revolve around us.
But as Carl Sagan so wonderfully put, “We have not been given the lead in the
cosmic drama. Perhaps someone else, perhaps no one else has. In either case, we
have good reason for humility.”
Scientist Dave
Pruett writes that, “The back-to-back punches thrown by Copernicus and Darwin
disfigured the human face in the mirror of self-perception. The message from
science runs counter that of religion, which proclaims our divine origins and
special status. It is like having two parents, one who underscores our
uniqueness and the other our commonness. Whom should we believe?”
Of course,
we used to literally think that everything revolved around us. Ptolemy’s
geocentric view of the cosmos lasted until Copernicus argued that the Earth and
other planets revolve around the Sun. It took more evidence, of course, which
was furthered by Galileo’s telescope and others who would come along. But this
was a huge revelation that brought the ire of the Church. Again, from Dave
Pruett, ““Of all discoveries and
opinions,” Goethe observed, “none may have exerted a greater
effect on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus.” Why? Einstein appreciated that
Copernicanism “… was … the severest shock [our] interpretation of the cosmos
ever received [because] it reduced the world to a mere province … instead of it
being the capitol and center.”
In his
book Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan writes
of a “series of Great Demotions, downlifting experiences, demonstrations of our
apparent insignificance, wounds that science has, in its search for Galileo’s
facts, delivered to human pride.” The next Great Demotion was our realization
that our Sun isn’t even at the center of the universe, but is rather thirty
thousand light years from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way. Other
demotions would come. Our galaxy is, of course, one of billions. Then, of
course, we began to further see our insignificance. We have been on this earth,
4.5 billion years young, for but a brief moment. And that our universe is
nearly 14 billion years old. In the series Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson often
stands on a graphic presentation of the Cosmic Calendar, which condenses the
13.8 billion year lifetime of the Universe into a single year. Our Sun didn’t
come along until the last day of August. It wasn’t until late September that
life appeared on earth. Mammals? The day after Christmas. Primates come along
on December 30. Hominids on the last day of the year, well into the afternoon.
The first humans show up, but pretty late to the New Year’s party. Just an hour
and a half before the end of the year. The first dynasty of Egypt appears with
twelve seconds to go. The Roman Empire with just five seconds to go. Modern
science and technology? The American Revolution? The World Wars? The moon
landing? All in the final second of the year.
But we
were placed on earth in that final second for some great cause! Created for a
special purpose! Charles Darwin, of course, showed how one species can evolve
into another by entirely natural processes. We are latecomers, evolved from other
life on earth, and very intimately (and genetically) related to all other life
on earth. The earliest documented members of the genus Homo are Homo
habilis, which evolved around 2.3 million years
ago; the earliest species for which there is positive evidence of use of
stone tools. We now
know that anatomically modern humans evolved from archaic Homo sapiens about
200,000 years ago. But
even before that, Darwin sensed that this revelation would not be well
received, when in response to a review of his Descent of Man he wrote, “I shall soon be viewed as the most
despicable of men.”
On
February 14, 1990, the Voyager 1 space probe took a photograph from a record
distance of about 3.7 billion miles from earth. In the picture, Earth’s
apparent size is less than a pixel. A tiny dot in the vastness of space. Carl
Sagan’s 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision
of the Human Future in Space is named after the photograph. In it, he
writes:
From this distant vantage point,
the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's
different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it
everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human
being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering,
thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every
hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of
civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother
and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals,
every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme
leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived
there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in
a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals
and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary
masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the
inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable
inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how
eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings,
our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged
position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our
planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our
obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will
come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known,
so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to
which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not,
for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that
astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no
better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of
our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly
with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home
we've ever known.
Yet,
our narrow-mindedness, our lack of proper perspective – it runs deep. We’re
slow learners. I recently listened to a Radiolab episode the story of a skull.
A famous skull found in Tanug in South Africa in 1920s. Europeans digging mines
at the time opened up cave and found what looked like bones. It appeared to be
a child’s skull, but smaller than human skull. The foramen magnum at the
bottom, which meant that creature walked upright. A “link” between the apes and
us. A man named Raymond Dart published his findings, but they were rejected by
European scientists, because Africa was thought to be “backwards.” Our human
origins must be in Europe! The Piltdown Man already found in England, was thought
to be missing link. This started a long debate among scientists. The idea that
only 2 million years ago our ancestors had smaller brains was disturbing to
many. But more fossils started popping up in Africa. Scientists found
increasingly that the Piltdown Man was an anomaly. He was different. And, a
fraud, it turns out. This 2.2 million year old child helped prove that our
origins are in Africa. On that pale blue dot, people who should know better
were reluctant to accept the evidence, because it was it found on the wrong
part of that dot, and because it unsettled their ideas about what it meant to
be human.
In
a fascinating (and delicious) twist, there ended up being considerable debate over
how did the child died. It was originally thought that she must have been
murdered by other a community member or enemy of the group. Or by a large cat.
But based on careful analysis of the skull, it was discovered that an eagle or
large bird probably killed the child!
We’re
still slow learners. Last fall, a documentary called The Principle was released. The film questions the Copernican
principle, the assumption that neither the earth nor the Sun are in a central,
specially favored position in the universe, and seems to promote geocentrism.
And, of course, we live in an age when we ask each other whether we “believe in
evolution.” According to a 2013 Pew Research Center survey, a third of American
adults believe that “humans have existed in their present form since the
beginning of time.” A quarter of adults believe that “a supreme being guided
the evolution of living things for the purpose of creating humans and other
life in the form it exists today.” So very deep runs our need for meaning! For
purpose! For meaning and purpose at which we are the center. I find this human
feature to be incredibly wonderful, but worry sometimes that it all too often
divides us into inward-looking collections of humans called religions, races,
and nations. And that it makes us slow to see the pale blue dot.
We need both principles, the dynamic of the one and the many, to fully ground our message. That older call of individual liberty was a deep and true insight. But it is missing something. The Seventh Principle calls to the wisdom that is in our very hearts about how and why the individual is precious. The knowledge that we are completely woven out of each other and the cosmos itself in a living song of intimacy is where we find our completeness. We find within this insight of “I” and “We” an ethic for our individual lives, we find guidance for how we gather together as people, and we see how we need to relate to the planet from which we take our being. We understand it as the perennial story sung around ancient campfires, the heart of Jesus’s message, the Buddha’s word, the teachings of sages of the Advaita Vedanta, as well as the truth constantly revealed by scientific inquiry.
I think that all of us, in our great variety, need to engage it from the traditions that inform our lives separately within this great spiritual cooperative that is our contemporary Unitarian Universalism. We need to look at the many facets of this wisdom jewel. We need Jewish and Christian interpretations. We need earth-centered and rationalist humanist interpretations. We need Buddhist interpretations.
It is my hope that we can learn to be more grateful for the precious gift that is life, while rejecting views of our place in the universe that are too comforting and too short-sighted. As Sagan suggests, “If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”
I'll close with one more quote from Carl Sagan, "Every one of us is, in the cosmic
perspective precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred
billion galaxies you will not find another...."
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