The Longest Journey
Many Unitarian Universalists have gone on long and meaningful journeys, but none has gone quite as far as Clyde Tombaugh.
Clyde was born 1906, and ever since he was little he wanted to be an astronomer. A hailstorm that destroyed the family’s crop meant that there was no money to send him to college, but he built telescopes and lenses on his own.
The astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto here shown with his homemade 9-inch telescope. Photo circa 1930, Public Domain
People at the famous Lowell Observatory were so impressed with his drawings of Jupiter and Mars that they offered him a job.
While he was working at the Lowell Observatory Clyde Tombaugh explored the sky using photographs taken through a telescope, and through a special procedure discovered that what he suspected was true—there was another planet out beyond Neptune.
Although that planet, Pluto, was later reclassified as a dwarf planet, it was an important discovery about our solar system.
What about the longest journey? Well, Clyde Tombaugh died in 1997, at the age of 90. He was cremated, and some of his ashes went onto the New Horizons spacecraft that made it all the way to Pluto, and recently sent us back stunning pictures of the dwarf planet at the edge of our solar system.
Truly an amazing journey!
Free Will, Fate, and Destiny: A Humanist Perspective
Human religions have always been built upon foundations of the best available science of the time. Sometimes that science said that the middle earth sat in a large tree. Sometimes science said the earth sat on a turtle’s back. Ezekiel knew that the earth had four corners and was held up by pillars–heavens above, Sheol below. Upon these foundations, human beings built views of how the world worked.
An important reason that I became a Unitarian Universalist many years ago was the movement’s tradition of incorporating reason and science into religious understanding. When science finds that the earth moves, Unitarian Universalists don’t have to deny science. We say, “Hmmm. That’s interesting!” That’s why I’m a humanist and religious naturalist, standing in awe inside the great cosmic show.
Nowadays we know that our fate lies within the unfolding of the Big Bang. We still don’t know whether that fate lies in a universe that will expand forever, eventually succumbing to heat death, or if there might be a Big Crunch in our future, one that might even lead to another Big Bang. Whichever way the future may pan out, our ultimate fate is sealed in forces considerably larger than primate consciousness.
Similarly, carbon-based creatures have a predictable trajectory, from our constituent elements created in the explosion of stars, to the momentary cohesion that we call life, to our decomposition, and, eventually, that aforesaid fate at the end of the Big Bang.
So, what of this consciousness we experience now, in this fleeting moment we call human life? What better way to spend those brief moments than in awe and gratitude?
Is there free will or fate? Whether or not there’s a deity that has the hairs of our heads numbered, bad things keep happening to very good people. Observation indicates that a lot of chance is involved. After all, for each of us, our genetic material has more immediate and local origins than that birth in the explosions of stars. We arise as individuals in hemispheres, nations, regions, tribes, genders, and economic situations, all at specific times, all with measures of power within us and over us.
For example, a recent study shows that where I was born, in the Southern United States, only four percent of people become professionals. Four out of one hundred. That’s fate . . . Created not by the gods, but by very human decisions. (Don’t get me started on the sequester!)
Is there free will? Yes–it’s all up to us. Except when it’s not. A fact of our realities is that the fate of each of us belongs not only to you or me, but ALL of us. All of us.
That’s why I’m a humanist. In this very human world, it’s all up to us. We create problems; we can solve them, if we work at it. That’s the beauty . . . and the challenge . . . of how it is, according to science and reason.
It’s just how it goes in the backwash of that really Big Bang . . .
What We Measure
I read an interesting study recently, which indicated that it turns out that being overweight, or even somewhat obese, doesn’t contribute to overall mortality. Now, the study was interesting in that it called into question our national obsession about weight, but my odd little brain went somewhere different with it. This meta-study, which examined a huge number of direct studies, looked at weight as related to risk of mortality. But isn’t our risk of mortality 100%? If you study everybody for long enough, doesn’t it turn out that everyone dies? Now, I understand that they were probably studying people’s risk of dying within a certain period of time, or before a certain age, or something meaningful, but still, I had to wonder. Why is it that the one question they seem to have asked was whether weight was related to dying? Surely there are significant concerns related to living. I would want to know whether weight was related to whether your knees allowed you to hike or dance, how it affected the level of comfiness your lap provided for a cat or a toddler, whether it made a difference in the amount of health care intervention a person needed. I don’t presume to know the answers to these questions, but frankly, I think they’re at least as interesting as the question of a person’s risk of dying in any given year.
Of course, medical studies are far from the only place where the question of what we measure seems oddly constrained. For instance, in any given week the news on the radio or TV will undoubtedly share with you the percentage of people in the country who are unemployed, and whether the stock market is up or down. But you will not hear about the percentage of people who find their work meaningful and rewarding, nor will your standard news report share with you what percentage of the wealth invested in the stock market is held in the hands of, say, 500 people. We only learn what we ask, and what we ask is narrowed down by what those doing the asking feel that we need to know. Where are the statistics on the percentage of parents this week who carved out time to take their kids to the park? Who is going to tell us how the mental health of people who talk to their pets varies from those who don’t? Where’s the weekly update on the percentage of the population who spent time this week engaged in making music or art?
We don’t have a lot of control over what the economists measure, what the TV and radio stations report, what makes it into the medical journals. But we do have the opportunity to change what data we gather for ourselves. Instead of stepping on the scale each morning to see what we weigh, we could check the number of stairs we could run (or walk) up before getting out of breath. Instead of comparing how much our neighbor’s car cost compared to ours, we could count up the places we manage to go without driving. Rather than keeping tabs on how many friends or likes we got on Facebook, we could keep track of how many kind things we had done for those around us on any given day.
What we measure is a way of saying what matters. What will you measure in your life?
A Place in the Family
I pretty much only listen to radio in the car, which explains how I stumbled on just a few minutes of a call-in show which featured an evolutionary biologist. I suppose it shouldn’t have been surprising that the question I heard as I was pulling into my driveway went something like this: “Scientists have looked at millions of fossils, but no one has found the fossil that shows the transition from a fish to a lizard, or a chimp to a human. Why should I believe that I’m related to a chimp or a giraffe or sludge at the bottom of the sea when there’s no real evidence?”
I tend to be a little…unsympathetic toward this kind of question. Luckily, I was alone in my car as I shouted back at the caller: “DNA! Have you never heard of a little thing called DNA?” Fortunately, the presenter responded calmly that the caller had brought an excellent question. Then he went on to describe how, based on their scientific knowledge, he and a colleague had predicted where one would find a fossil that showed the transition of species from fish to lizard, and what such a fossil might look like. And then they found it. Where they had predicted (Canada), and with many—but not all—of the characteristics they had expected to find.
The biologist went on to explain how DNA shows us the way in which we are related to all other living beings. “It’s beautiful!” he said. “The chimpanzees are our close cousins and the sea sludge is a distant cousin and the giraffe is somewhere in the middle, but we’re all related.”
And then I got it. The two world views I was hearing about were not simply between someone sophisticated in the uses of the scientific method and someone with less understanding. The caller didn’t want to be related to a chimp or a giraffe or, God forbid, sea sludge. He wanted to be the pinnacle of creation, something utterly different from—and better than—the rest of the living world. To see himself as related to a giraffe would mean being shoved off of the pedestal, removed from his rightful place in the Great Chain of Being. Being related to a chimp would, I imagine, mean losing his relationship with the God who had placed him, as a human, in dominion over the rest of the world.
The biologist, by contrast, couldn’t have been happier to be related to sea sludge. He loved being cousins with the chimp and the giraffe, and his devotion to understanding more and more of the family genealogy was part and parcel with his joy in being a part of the family of things. I don’t know anything about this man’s theology, but as someone who shares his joy in this web of relations, I would imagine that if he believes in God at all, it is a God who is within all beings, in relationship with all beings. He, or at any rate, I, would find the Holy in the whole creative process of evolution, in the unfolding of diversity over time. There would be no worry about losing a relationship with God if we tumbled from the top of the pyramid, because God was never at the top to begin with. Neither were we humans. God was—is—in the connections, in all the crazy ways that we are interrelated with the Family of Life.
I have no idea whether anything shifted in the caller when he heard about the fish/lizard fossil or the linked DNA. How could he process such information, when the price of believing it was so high? But I couldn’t help but wonder whether it felt lonely up there, at the top of the Great Chain, looking up toward God and the angels in the invisible distance, disconnected from the chimps and giraffes and lizards below. Me, I’d rather be down here with the sea sludge, representing just one of the crazy cousins in this massive family gathering we call Planet Earth.