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Aristotle wrote: “philosophy begins in wonder.” This idea included
in the word “wonder” is not a simple curiosity about the world or
the nature of reality. It is a state of being that Abraham Joshua
Heschel, the great 20th century rabbi called “radical amazement.”
This is the state of openness that comes upon us when we are open
to the great mysteries of life and our existence. We are born, we
live a short time and then we pass on. But in between that birth and
passing we undergo a remarkable journey of exploration. We do
this personally and we do it culturally. It will be my task this year
to take you through some of the greatest thoughts of humanity
found in the great philosophical and religious systems. But where
did all of these thoughts originate? They were created in the minds
of people who knew how to ask the great questions. Allowing
yourself to experience the state of wonder fosters the great
questions. Today’s lecture is to share the world of cosmology with
you so that by the end of this hour we can all partake of this grand
opening to the mystery of life. My text is the wonderful book: A
Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson loaned to me by
Dorothy last semester. Are you ready to start our year together?
“Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could
make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was
a little tougher than you realize (Bryson, p. 1).
“To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms
had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging
manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and
particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this
once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will
uncompromisingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative
efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the
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supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known
as existence” (Bryson, p. 1). I am reminded of some friends who
had a sign on their refrigerator that said: “Old age is not so bad
when you consider the alternative!” To be alive! How amazing! To
be aware of being alive, to be able to reflect and think, how utterly
amazing it is. It seems unfortunate that we can so easily forget how
unbelievable it is to be alive and aware. To cone back into touch
with this feeling is to enter the state of wonder that is the beginning
of philosophy.
We don’t know why we exist. We know there are all sorts of
“answers.” From religion and philosophy pour out hundreds if not
thousands of reason why life is purposeful and meaningful, but in
fact, as the great Socrates will teach us throughout this year, we do
not know why we exist. Why did the universe organize it self in
such a way that I (that we) can be aware of it? “Why atoms take
this trouble [to come together as each one of us] is a bit of a
puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic
level. For all of their devoted attention, your atoms don’t actually
care about you indeed, don’t even know that you are there. They
don’t even know that they are there. They are mindless particles,
after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting
notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one
atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust,
none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been
you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will
answer to a single overarching impulse: to keep you you” (Bryson,
pp. 12). The state of wonder begins in me when I really let in the
fact that my aliveness is sustained by particles that are themselves
not alive!
The good news is that this all works somehow. “The bad news is
that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting fleeting
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indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000
hours [74 years average]. And when that modest milestone flashes
past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your
atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be
other things. And that’s it for you” (Bryson, p. 2). It amazes me
that no energy is lost, it just takes on new forms. What
disintegrates in one form reassembles in another form. I sometimes
wonder if this knowledge is not somehow embedded deep in us as
an instinct and that is where we get all of our ideas about eternal
life. We experience birth and death on a certain level, but in reality
things just change. In fact, one of the few things you can really
know for yourself with real confidence is the Buddhist notion of
impermanence. Nothing stays the same and everything is always
changing. We will see over this year that much philosophical
wisdom is geared toward helping us accept that fact of life with
serenity rather than resistance.
While it is true that our atomic nature is not too concerned with
how we feel about our short existence, “you may rejoice that it
happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe it doesn’t, so far
as we can tell. This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so
liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on
Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere.
Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously
mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a dash of
sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements nothing
you wouldn’t find in any ordinary drugstore and that’s all you
need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that
they make you. That is of course the miracle of life” (Bryson, p. 2).
Once again I ask you: Isn’t it amazing that we are alive? Wow!
The state of wonder is as close to us as our breath and the
contemplative life is the life lived in that awareness. While
philosophy begins in wonder, it ends in contemplation. For
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Aristotle the philosophical life the best life by the way is the
contemplative life.
Let’s continue our journey with our atomic nature… Whether or
not atoms make life in other corners of the universe, they make
plenty else; indeed, they make everything else. Without them there
would be no water or air or rocks, no stars and planets, no distant
gassy clouds or swirling nebulae or any of the other things that
make the universe so usefully material. Atoms are so numerous
and necessary that we easily overlook that they needn’t actually
exist at all. There is no law that requires the universe to fill itself
with small particles of matter or to produce light and gravity and
the other physical properties on which our existence hinges. There
needn’t actually be a universe at all. For the longest time there
wasn’t. There were no atoms and no universe for them to float
about in. There was nothing nothing at all anywhere” (Bryson, p.
2). Some say this is the first philosophical question: Why is there
something rather than nothing? In fact, Aristotle found this
question so disturbing that he could not tolerate it and simply
decided that the universe was eternal. But this only begs the
question of how there could be anything at all that had no
beginning…
“So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms
and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of
what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twentyfirst
century and smart enough to know it [and smart enough o be
taking Gentrain!], you also had to be the beneficiary of an
extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth
is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of
species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time,
most 99.99 percent are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see,
is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of
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our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at
promoting life but even better at extinguishing it” (Bryson, pp. 2
3). This is extraordinary. Science tells us that the Earth has passed
through all sorts of ages in which there were creatures (such as the
dinosaurs) that are no longer with us today. One can only wonder
if that is the fate of the human species as well. Will we only be a
footnote to the world’s long history? We naturally resist such a
picture. Humans think they are special and that we have a God
who is watching out for us. This is the faith of billions. While we
cannot deny what billions believe, we can (as philosophers that is)
question what is it that we really know rather than what is it that
we believe. Are we being watched out for? Thankfully I only have
to ask the questions in this class rather than answer them! One
belief that many people seem to be sharing these days is the
awareness that we are living at a time and in a generation where
the future of humanity (or lack thereof) will be decided. If God is
going to rescue us, she needs to do it soon! And if we have to
rescue ourselves, we had better get started because the other living
creatures on this planet do not have a great track record.
Some species manage to last a long time, but almost all surrender
to their seemingly inevitable fate sooner or later. “The average
species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you
wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the
atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything
about yourself shape, size, color, species affiliation, everything
and to do so repeatedly. That’s much easier said then done,
because the process of change is random. To get from
‘protoplasmal primordial atomic globule’ (as Gilbert and Sullivan
put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to
mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an
exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8
billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it,
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grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air
with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground,
lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a
million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these
evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave
walls or lolling walruslike on some stony shore or disgorging air
through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet
for a mouthful of delicious sandworms” (Bryson, p. 3). In other
words the journey that life has taken to produce you sitting in this
room today is enough to make you dizzy with wonder and truly
radical amazement. But we are not done yet.
“Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time
immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been
extremely make that miraculously fortunate in your personal
ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of
time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every
one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to
find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed
by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of
your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned,
starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise
deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic
material to the right partner at the right moment in order to
perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations
that could result eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly in
you” (Bryson, pp. 34). This is truly too amazing to really take in.
In fact, let’s just shorten it to biblical time. Even then, how many
generations had to come together just perfectly for you to be here
today. Jus the right people had to meet at just the right time! Think
about your own parents. How did they meet? What if one of them
had not shown up at the movies or the camp or the shared job?
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Where would you be? It is so amazingly fortuitous that we are
here! The odds are really against us!
What more have we discovered about our odds? Quite a bit. The
current universe story states that the universe exploded into being
about 14.5 billion years ago. We don’t fully understand what
happened. “It is enough to know that in a single crackling instant
we were endowed with a universe that was vast and perfectly
arrayed for the creation of stars, galaxies, and other complex
systems. What is extraordinary from our point of view is how well
it turned out for us. If the universe had formed just a tiny bit
differently if gravity were fractionally stronger or weaker, if the
expansion had proceeded just a little more slowly or swiftly then
there might never have been the stable elements to make you and
me and the ground we stand on. Had gravity been a trifle stronger,
the universe itself might have collapsed like a badly erected tent,
without precisely the right values to give it the right dimensions
and density and component parts. Had it been weaker, however,
nothing would have coalesced. The universe would have remained
forever a dull, scattered void” (Bryson, p. 15). Some of the
numbers here are staggering.
“For example, for the universe to exist as it does requires that
hydrogen be converted to helium in a precise but comparatively
stately manner specifically, in a way that converts seven one
thousandths of its mass to energy. Lower that value very slightly
from 0.007 percent to 0.006, say and no transformation could
take place: the universe would consist of hydrogen and nothing
else. Raise the value very slightly to 0.008 percent and bonding
would be so wildly prolific that the hydrogen would long since
have been exhausted. In either case, with the slightest tweaking of
the numbers the universe as we know it and need it would not be
here” (Bryson, p. 16). What are the chances of this happening? So
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small it is almost impossible to imagine. As a result some see the
hand of a divine intelligence most call God but others simply
see that given infinite opportunities and infinite big bangs the
numbers were bound to eventually turn up right. I certainly have
no idea how it all happened. My purpose in sharing some of these
figures with you is not to make any claims but to simply allow
amazement and wonder to creep up on us all. Who knows how it
happened? What is truly stunning is that it happened at all and we
are all here together today to think about this!
Let’s look at some other numbers. How big is our universe? We
don’t actually know! Part of the problem is that we can only trace
the outskirts from the light that reaches us, but there could be quite
a bit more light that has not reached us yet. Just looking up at the
stars at night is a good way to get in touch with wonder, but then
think about what you are seeing. “Surprisingly little of the universe
is available to us when we incline our heads to the sky. Only about
6,000 stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth, and only about
2,000 can be seen from any one spot. With binoculars the numbers
of stars you can see from a single location rises to about 50,000,
and with a small twoinch telescope it leaps to 300,000. With a
sixteeninch telescope you begin to count not in stars but in
galaxies. You can see 50,000 to 100,000 galaxies, each containing
tens of billions of stars” (Bryson, p. 33). So many stars! Who can
tell how many planets there might be? So much room for just about
anything, and yet, as far as we can tell, we are the only intelligent
life around. Chances are there is life in a universe so big, but it is a
whole other question if we will ever meet these other life forms. It
is interesting to speculate how this might change our philosophical
ideas…
Where do we come into the picture? Well we start to come into the
picture with the death of one of these trillions of stars, called a
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supernova. A huge explosion threw out an immense quantity of
matter into the universe and this matter eventually settled into our
solar system. “Virtually all of it 99.9 percent of the mass of the
solar system went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material
that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough
together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment
of conception for our planet. All over the forming solar system, the
same was happening. . Colliding dust grains formed larger and
larger clumps. [As these clumps grew larger they] endlessly
bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in
endless random permutations, but in every encounter there was a
winner, and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the
orbit around which they traveled. In just [!] 200 million years,
possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten
and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that
remained floating about” (Bryson, p. 38). The Earth eventually
formed an atmosphere, one that we could not survive in today but
one that allowed life to develop slowly but surely. The Earth
continued to form for perhaps 500 million years. It was not a
pleasant place for any number of reasons but this process would
eventually lead to creatures 4 billion years later who could begin to
ask the questions about how it all began that led to the birth of
philosophy.
Our atomic nature becomes animate. This is astounding. “Dirt gets
up and writes poetry” is how the philosopher Ken Wilber describes
this transformation. “It starts with a single cell. The first cell splits
to become two and the two become four and so on. After just forty
seven doublings, you have ten thousand trillion
(10,000,000,000,000,000) cells in your body and are ready to
spring forth as a human being. And every one of those cells knows
exactly what to do to preserve and nurture you from the moment of
conception to your last breath. You have no secrets from your
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cells. They know far more about you than you do. Each one carries
a copy of the complete genetic code the instruction manual for
your body so it knows not only how to do its job but every other
job in the body. Every cell in nature is a thing of wonder. Even the
simplest are far beyond the limits of human ingenuity. To build the
most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize
about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing
777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then
somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce”
(Bryson, pp. 371372). The life of a cell is a whole cosmos unto
itself. This is the amazing thing about modern science. Because we
have increased our means of observation through technology such
as microscopes and telescopes the universe only gets more
amazing and mysterious, not less so. This is a cause for wonder!
Let’s finish today’s lecture with a newfound respect for the life of
our cells. “Yeast cells are as nothing compared with human cells,
which are not just more varied and complicated, but vastly more
fascinating, because of their complex interactions. Your cells are a
country of ten thousand trillion citizens, each devoted in some
intensely specific way to your overall wellbeing. There isn’t a
thing they don’t do for you. They let you feel pleasure and form
thoughts. They enable you to stand and stretch and caper… They
manage every corner of your being. They jump to your defense the
instant you are threatened. They will unhesitatingly die for you
billions of them do so daily. And not once in all of your years have
you thanked even one of them” (Bryson, p. 372). We have seen
that a star had to die for our solar system to come into being and
now we see the sacrifice of billions of cells each day. I can only
wonder how this influences our understanding of religion…
A few more facts about aging before we close: “Most living cells
seldom last more than a month or so, but there are some notable
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exceptions. Liver cells can survive for years, though the
components within them may be renewed every few days. Brain
cells last as long as you do. You are issued a hundred billion or so
at birth, and that is all you are ever going to get. It has been
estimated that you lose five hundred of them an hour, so if you
have any serious thinking to do there really isn’t a moment to
waste. The good news is that the individual components of your
brain cells are constantly renewed so that, as with liver cells, no
part of them is actually likely to be more than about a month old.
Indeed, it has been suggested that there isn’t a single bit of any of
us not so much as a stray molecule that was part of us nine years
ago. it may not feel like it, but at the cellular level we are all
youngsters” (Bryson, pp. 373374).
I opened this lecture with a congratulations for being here today. It
is truly astounding. Philosophy begins in wonder and ends in
contemplation. The contemplative life is the philosophical life
because it is the life of living in the awareness of the great mystery
that surrounds us. A life of inquiry and openness is the gate to love
and compassion. Thus happiness is being a philosopher!
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