Purpose

Dr. Albert Mohler, a conservative Christian and president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, issues a daily podcast on current events called The Briefing. It has become a kind of hobby of mine to respond to him when it moves me, from my own liberal atheist perspective. I would not do this if I did not respect Dr. Mohler and take him seriously, and if I did not think he was an influential intellectual -- exerting an influence I wish to counter. My longer comments will now be posted here rather than to Dr Mohler's Facebook page.

Dr. Mohler and I disagree on just about everything, except this: the country is deeply divided by families of assumptions called "worldviews", and if we are to understand each other, we must take worldview differences into account. When he misrepresents liberal positions, I will try to correct him. When I see contradictions, confusions or obfuscations in what he says, I will point them out. My goal is better mutual understanding, and if possible, a narrowing of differences. I will not try to convert him or his followers to atheism. This is about issues, about our shared public life -- about living together -- not about religion per se. Reader comments are welcome.

Friday, March 10, 2017

Churchill, Kant and Extraterrestrial Life

Response to 2/27/17 Briefing, Part I

Dr. Mohler and I are interested in many of the same subjects, although we come at them from very different perspectives. In February 27’s podcast he discussed exoplanets, extraterrestrial life, space travel, the discovery of a surprising essay by Churchill on these subjects, what Kant had to say about the starry heavens and the world within, and, last but not least, prenatal language-learning and the distinction between babies and fetuses. I have some bones to pick, but also some points of historical interest to add along the way. The part about babies and fetuses is taking me longer to write, so I’ll post this first, on the subjects related to outer space.

Here’s a bit of a coincidence: Dr. Mohler, discussing Churchill’s newly discovered essay, “Are We Alone in Space,” said, “Here you’re talking about a scientific layman, but he had identified two of the most crucial issues in terms of the question as to whether or not there might be life on other planets.” Later in the podcast, Dr. Mohler referred to Kant’s quote about “the starry heavens above and the moral life within.” (Kant, being Kant, actually said, “the moral law within.”) But something Dr. Mohler may not be aware of is that Kant, though a philosopher, not an astronomer or physicist, also wrote with great insight and originality about goings on in outer space. It was in his early work, Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens or An Essay on the Constitution and the Mechanical Origin of the Entire Structure of the Universe Based on Newtonian Principles  – a much more serious effort than Churchill’s 11-page manuscript. In it he proposed two important theories that later turned out to be true:

The first, his “nebular hypothesis”, held that a vast spinning cloud of gas flattened and then condensed into spinning stars and planets by the operation of Newton’s universal law of gravitation, forming the Milky Way and planetary systems that compose it, including our own solar system. Of course, no other solar systems had then been observed, nor had the rotation of the Milky Way.

Kant also proposed that those smudges in the sky which astronomers called “foggy stars” were actually other “island universes” like our Milky Way. We now call them galaxies. That theory expanded the visible universe into something much huger than previously imagined. It was not confirmed until 1924 with Edwin Hubble’s observations of the Andromeda galaxy.

Kant’s nebular hypothesis was not just astronomy. It was cosmology and cosmogony – a theory of the emergence of the grand structure of the universe out of chaos by natural means – and, for Kant, it was also natural theology, the combination of laws and matter that could give rise to such beauty and harmony being testimony of God’s intention:
“The nebular hypothesis exemplified Kant’s envisioned union of Newtonian mechanics and immanent teleology. The mechanical forces acting on matter are sufficient to account for the well-ordered organization of the solar system. Whereas Newton thought it necessary to summon the hand of God in order to explain the arrangement of planets around an ecliptic plane extending from the sun’s equator, Kant showed that mere physical forces alone are the final vehicles responsible for the ecliptic arrangement.” (The Philosophy of the Young Kant: The Precritical Project by Martin Schonfeld, p. 114.)
By “immanent teleology” is meant Kant’s idea that (in his words) “God has set in the forces of nature a hidden art of developing a perfect world order out of chaos on their own.” Had Kant known of Darwinian evolution, he might have made the same claim of divine intention worked out by natural means for biology as he did for astronomy, with Darwin in the place of Newton.

Here’s another point of historical interest. Dr. Mohler characterized fascination with the possibility of life on newly discovered exoplanets as over-excitement. He said,
“So long as the Christian understanding of the creation of the world by God and God’s special creation of human beings ... held sway, there really wasn’t that much interest in whether or not there just might be life on some other planet light-years ... away from us. But now that there is the eclipse of the Christian worldview, there seems to be a particular urgency to the human imagination in the secular age, trying to figure out if we are alone.”
I think an historical perspective provides a different view.

In the ancient earth-centered universe, there was no other place to live for beings like us but earth, the realm of change, the sublunary world. Above it – according to Aristotle and Ptolemy -- circled only perfect heavenly bodies affixed to transparent celestial spheres. They were not even made of a familiar substance, but of an “exalted” substance whose natural motion was circular and whose “superior glory” was “proportionate to its distance from this world of ours.” Beyond those spheres perhaps, for Christians, lay heaven itself (Dante’s Empyrean).

The one ancient exception I knew which portrayed the planets as habitable was a fantastic and irreverent tale of travel to the moon I read long ago, by the second century Roman satirist Lucian. It told of a ship blown off course to the moon, and of war between the moon and sun kings over colonization of Venus. It was anything but serious. However, while writing this I discovered that there are other ancient references to “moon-dwellers.” One especially of interest here (and possibly a target of Lucian's satire) is a dialogue by the first century Greek author Plutarch called “Concerning the Face which Appears in the Orb of the Moon”.

The moon’s mottled surface, you see, posed a problem for Aristotle’s theory of celestial perfection. Characters in Plutarch’s dialogue have serious astronomical and physical arguments over the nature of the moon, and conclude that it is earth-like: “just as our earth has certain great gulfs, so that earth [the moon] yawns with great depths and clefts which contain water or murky air; the interior of these the light of the sun does not plumb or even touch, but it fails and the reflection which it sends back here is discontinuous." But here is where it get’s interesting for worldview fans. The character Theon says:
“I should like ... to hear about the beings that are said to dwell on the moon — not whether any really do inhabit it but whether habitation there is possible. If it is not possible, the assertion that the moon is an earth is itself absurd, for she would then appear to have come into existence vainly and to no purpose, neither bringing forth fruit nor providing for men of some kind an origin, an abode, and a means of life, the purposes for which this earth of ours came into being....”
This is a pagan work, but purpose – with man its focus – pervaded that world like the Christian one. And this view of a purpose-filled world inclined men to believe that, if there were other habitable worlds, they would be inhabited by beings like us. Otherwise, what would be the point? There followed in the dialogue considerations of whether moon-dwellers would fall off, and whether the moon would be too hot or too dry, and it was pointed out that not all places on the earth are good for dwelling, but they serve other purposes, and so might it be for an earth-like moon.

Fast-forward to the turn of the 17th century. The New World had been discovered, so people’s worldviews had been opened to the possibility of new, yet-undiscovered worlds. Copernicus had proposed the unsettling theory that the earth was not stationary, but that it twirled, and orbited the sun. Giordano Bruno had used that as a starting point, and philosophized, "Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds," and then inaugurated the new century by being burned at the stake. True, he had been heretical in other ways, but his belief in the plurality of worlds had figured in his trial. Then in 1610 Galileo pointed his telescope at the sky and published sketches of the craggy surface of the moon in “The Starry Messenger”, and it finally became clear that earth was a planet, and the moons and planets were not stars, or perfect heavenly orbs, but other earths.
People immediately started speculating about what or who might live there. A common opinion was that God would not create all these worlds for no reason, but would populate them. So this interest had nothing to do with the eclipse of Christianity. It was the discovery of a huge new realm of possibilities that excited imagination and curiosity.

In fact, Kant himself, in an appendix to the work cited above, speculated on the inhabitants of other planets. He considered the question of whether other planets must be inhabited, given that everything is created for a purpose, and like Plutarch, decided in the negative. But nonetheless he concluded “most of the planets are certainly inhabited.” Since the other planets in our solar system would be so much hotter or colder than earth, he surmised that their inhabitants would have to be made of different stuff, and this would lead to differences in their spiritual capacities: “The excellence of their thinking natures, the speed of their imaginations, the clarity and vivacity of their ideas... are more excellent and more complete in proportion to the distance of their dwelling places from the sun.” The minds of those living on Jupiter and Saturn exceed ours, as ours do those of Mercurians and Venutians. All this was written before Kant discovered Hume, took on the challenge of answering Hume’s skepticism, and radically upped his game.

This work of Kant’s was little known. A much more famous work (and really a quite delightful one) – popular especially among women readers – was Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. It introduced the new Copernican system of the world to readers by way of a light-hearted dialogue between a philosopher and a noble lady. It features great flights of fancy to help the reader vividly imagine this new world view. The Marchionesse inquires about the inhabitants of the moon: “I should be very glad if I could find out ... [their characters], for really, one feels a painful degree of curiosity in knowing that there are beings in the moon we see yonder, and not having the means to discover what they are.” The philosopher pleads ignorance, but argues that someday we may travel there and find out, or they might travel here. For this the Marchionesse calls him crazy, and he professes to have been only testing her good sense. If only Bruno had had such a light touch.

For centuries we learned nothing about whether these distant worlds were inhabited. There was a brief frenzy over canals falsely spotted on Mars. Then came growing knowledge that our planetary neighbors were not hospitable to life like ours. Dr. Mohler describes the “Goldilocks zone” idea. Earth seemed special, perhaps uniquely so; the other planets, barren. We visited the moon, but it was as dry as dust, and airless. As a result, speculations about extraterrestrial life were relegated mainly to science fiction, although NASA set off on its expeditions and SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) was initiated. So far their life-searches have been fruitless, but there is still hope for oceans under the ice on moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

But now, finally, after centuries, we are beginning to find and actually observe other planets like ours enough to – just possibly – support life similar to life on earth. That is exciting – maybe not as revolutionary as discovering a new continent, but still.... Men and women have wondered about this ever since they realized it was a possibility.

Dr. Mohler makes two unsupported claims about the practical significance of the recent discoveries of possibly earth-like exoplanets: “There’s no way ... that in any foreseeable future we would even know whether these planets might be hospitable to human life, much less available for life.” And “That’s a trip we’re not going to make.”

Regarding the first claim, there are some prospects of getting a closer look in the not too distant future.  Not only are new telescopes in the works, but, surprisingly, there’s a nascent plan for sending tiny probes at great speeds on the journey to the nearest stars to do some scouting: www.scientificamerican.com/article/100-million-plan-will-send-probes-to-the-nearest-star1/ .

As for ever making the trip ourselves, perhaps whether this seems possible to you or not depends on how long you think the human future may be. Is it measured in centuries? In millennia? If we learn how to survive and get along, could our descendants be around in a hundred thousand years? A million? A billion?  Or is Jesus coming the day after tomorrow, bringing a new heaven and a new earth? If so, human horizons in this world drastically contract, and it becomes easy to say what will never be.

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