Searching for Stars on an Island in Maine by Alan Lightman

Author:Alan Lightman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2018-03-27T04:00:00+00:00

Centeredness

For thousands of years, the notion of absolute rest was part of a worldview in which the earth resided at the center of the cosmos. Aristotle argued that there couldn’t be two such centers, because then earth and all earth-like materials would be confused about which center to occupy, contradicting the observations that tossed stones clearly know where to fall. If earth indeed has some special position, it naturally follows that all things were constructed for us—if not for our positive benefit then at least with us earthlings as a prominent part of some cosmic design. Centers do not happen by accident. A cosmic plan with us as the center then leads to the concept of a personal God, a God who cares about human beings as individuals.

Most people in the world today, in fact, do believe in a personal God. A 2008 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 60 percent of American adults believe that “God is a person with whom people can have a relationship.” A similar survey by the National Opinion Research Center found that 67 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that “there is a God who concerns Himself with every human being personally.” In his book Warranted Christian Belief, the prominent Christian thinker and philosopher Alvin Plantinga writes that classical Christian belief holds that “God is a person: that is, a being with intellect and will…a person [with] affections, loves, and hates.”

Recent scientific discoveries seem to challenge the idea of a personal God. Certainly they challenge the idea that the universe was made for us human beings. Data from the Kepler astronomical satellite, launched in 2009 and specifically constructed to search for planets in the “habitable zone”—that is, the right distance from their central star to possess liquid water—suggest that something like 10 percent of all stars have at least one “habitable” planet. At the beginning of 2017, another astronomical satellite, the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope, found seven habitable planets around a single star, only forty light years from earth (close by in galactic terms).

There are several hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone, and a hundred billion galaxies just within the observable universe. Overwhelmingly, the odds favor life forms elsewhere in the universe. Although we do not know in detail how life developed on earth, the odds that no life exists on the billions and billions of other habitable planets would be as improbable as no fires ever starting in a billion trillion dry forests. Almost certainly life elsewhere in the universe would not be like ours. But biologists and even perhaps artists and philosophers would recognize it as life. And with so many life-bearing worlds and billions of years of cosmic evolution, there must be a range of civilizations, some less advanced than ours and some more.

And now back to the question of a personal God. There’s no plausible reason why our particular civilization on planet earth should be more or less worthy of attention than the billion

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