Authors: William Mitchell
“I don’t doubt them, but that’s not the issue here.”
“So, what don’t you like about the big-bang idea?”
“Nothing, it may well be true for all I know.”
“Which implies you think it might not be.”
“No, I never said that. Look — I don’t have a problem with the idea at all, but you shouldn’t just accept it as absolute truth. Scientists are always claiming they’ve got the one true explanation that brushes everyone else’s beliefs out of the way, then changing their minds again a couple of years down the line.”
“What do you mean, changing their minds?”
“Like, I don’t know, like when Newton thought he’d figured out gravity, and everyone called it the ‘Law of Gravity’, as if it couldn’t work any other way, then all of a sudden Einstein came along and it turned out the old version was completely wrong.”
“That’s putting it too strongly,” Safi said. “Einstein’s ideas didn’t replace Newton’s altogether. In most situations you get the same answers from both.”
“But scientists are always saying that their version of the world is the ‘right’ one, and half the time they can’t even agree among themselves. How can that be if they only ever deal in facts?”
“Well,” Safi said. “Any scientist who says that any theory is the absolute truth isn’t doing their job properly. The most you can ever say is that it explains everything it’s meant to explain and it’s passed all the tests people can throw at it. But if an exception comes along that can’t be explained, then you need a new version
of the theory.”
“Doesn’t that mean that they’ve wasted their time?”
“Not at all. If people increase their understanding by comparing old and new hypotheses then that’s a step forward, not backward. That kind of progression is a strength of science, it’s just easy to portray it as a weakness. But everything is based on real observations of the world. That’s the bottom line: none of it is just made up.”
“So, Gillian,” Victor said. “If you don’t believe the Bible story of creation, and you’re not convinced by the scientific one either, then what do you believe? And where did your answer to the original question come from?”
Gillian was the centre of attention now, and even though the others were reacting with genuine interest, she looked as though she was starting to feel singled out.
“I don’t think evidence is everything,” she said. “You can show me all the evidence you want that the universe is this many years old or the Earth weighs that many tons, but what happens if something completely different turns out to be ‘true’ the next day? You can’t build your life on things that could be overturned like that; only compassion and morals and faith are solid enough to build your whole existence around. I don’t think that scientists can ever give us the full picture of what the universe is or how it was created. There has to be something more to it, some higher power. Science can do a lot for us, but trying to work out why we exist by doing experiments and testing things in labs is never going to work. It’s just not something we’re equipped to understand.”
“And what about the origins of life, and evolution?” Victor continued. “What’s your view on that?”
“The same. I can see how all the evidence supports it, but it can’t be the full story. When I look around at all the life on this planet, especially in a place like this island, I can’t think of any other way that something so amazing could have been created
except by some deliberate plan. If life has changed and adapted over millions of years, then that ability must have been part of the plan too.”
“But if you don’t buy the scientific view, then what stops you from believing the biblical six days story outright?” Safi said. “It sounds like you’re trying to find some kind of compromise.”
“The fact that something exists that is bigger than me, bigger than all of us. That’s defined by the love it holds for us and expects nothing but the same in return? There’s no compromise there.”
“So do you object to children being taught the scientific explanation?” Victor said.
It was an inevitable question, still as relevant now as it had been decades before, and Gillian paused before answering. “I’m not against children being taught about science,” she said, “but I think that if they’re taught to see the world as something cold and amoral, that doesn’t care about us or what happens to us, they’ll live their whole lives in a cold, amoral way. And I just can’t imagine why someone would knowingly set children down that path.”
A few of them cast curious glances at Max at that point, obviously wondering whether those sentiments were aimed at him.
“Don’t worry,” he said laughing, raising his hands in mock defence. “We don’t spend our lives waging some pitched religious battle or anything like that. I do believe that a rational, evidence-based approach is the best way to comprehend the universe, and I think the curiosity and drive that led the Newtons and Einsteins and Darwins of the world to find out what really makes things work is anything but cold and amoral. I think everything we see around us can be explained without resorting to some intelligent creator, and I genuinely think a day will come when people will look back on this age of superstition and shake their heads in disbelief. Gillian knows I think that; it’s not meant
as anything personal against her or people who share her beliefs. For what it’s worth, I think Jesus was a genuine historical figure who had a lot of good things to say about how people should live their lives, and you can quite justifiably celebrate his birth and his life, without resorting to the supernatural. And personally, I’m happy to be part of that.”
“And what will you do if you have children?” Marie said. “How will you raise them, and teach them what to believe?”
“We’re going to let them decide for themselves,” Max said. “It’s the only fair way. It’s not going to be straightforward, but we’ve agreed to raise any children by example, and the fact that people who think different things can still get on is one of the examples we hope to set.”
It was good to be able to think in those terms again. Many people had expressed surprise that two people with such differing views of the world could work so well together; many other couples got on fine despite such glaring differences, and the fact that he and Gillian did too was probably one of their greatest strengths. Now that the threats were no longer a constant feature of his life, now that they weren’t preying on his mind and tainting the relationship he had with Gillian, it was like being back to the way they had always been.
Which made him wonder why Victor had chosen this lame “age-of-the-universe” party game to spring on them, almost calculated to prompt this very discussion. There was something of the manipulator about Victor, despite the charming exterior. He also found himself wondering how Gillian and Safi would get on in future. There was certainly no hostility, but maybe they were just too different for anything more to develop.
“So where did the first life forms come from?” Tess said suddenly. “I mean, we all know about evolution, and survival of the fittest, but what got it started? Can anyone answer that yet?”
She’d been silent for almost the whole discussion, but Max could tell she’d been taking in every word. And now she’d come
out with one of the biggest questions there was.
“That’s a tough one,” he said. “In fact I’ve got some friends back in L.A. who are trying to find the answer even as we speak. It wouldn’t have been a plant or animal as we’d understand it, more like a primitive single cell, filled with a few molecules that could copy themselves if they were surrounded by the right chemicals. And it probably appeared in the sea, that’s the most likely place for it. Once evolution took over, the rest was history.”
“Yes, but you haven’t answered the question. What made it appear in the first place?”
“It just appeared on its own. The sea already had the right chemicals to form it, and once you added sunlight and lightning strikes all sorts of substances would appear and disappear at random; they’re still doing it now. One day the right arrangement appeared, and that was it.”
“That doesn’t sound very likely to me.”
“Well, it isn’t. In fact it’s probably the single most unlikely thing that’s ever happened on this planet. But we’re talking about a whole ocean’s worth of chemicals here, with billions of years’ worth of chances — and it only had to happen once.”
“But that one time it did happen, the Earth had only just been formed, right? You said it yourself when you were answering Victor’s question. It happened almost as soon as the conditions were right, not billions of years later. How likely is
that?
How does the ‘Karman-Lowrie’ number explain
that
away?”
Max looked at her, suddenly realising that she’d known the answers all along, and was leading him on just to see how he’d respond.
“The K-L number is certainly something to bear in mind,” Max said. “But it’s not the final answer. We know something led to that precursor life form, we just don’t know what.”
The Karman-Lowrie number was something Max took great technical pride in, but which had returned to haunt him ever since he’d published the work which produced it. It dated from
his less politically aware days, when the idea that he could be vilified for simply writing up the results of an honest scientific investigation would have been unthinkable to him. All he’d done was apply his biological and chemical knowledge to try and calculate the entropy, the necessary complexity, of the simplest possible self-replicating molecule. Whatever started life on Earth, the logic went, was at least this complex if not more so. Then followed a probability analysis, an estimate of how many randomly recombining atoms and molecules would be needed to produce something this complex within the known lifetime of the Earth. The answer was a concerning one: an ocean five thousand times the volume of all those on Earth would need to be left for four billion years before the probability reached even fifty percent. For the specific case of DNA-based life, the odds were even worse. Max and his colleague, Sheldon Karman, hadn’t meant it to demonstrate that spontaneous abiogenesis was impossible — their own conclusion was that some previously unknown chemical catalyst must have been at play — but that hadn’t stopped those with a political motivation from jumping on the result with fervour, yet another sign of how the scientists were tying themselves up in knots with their lack of faith.
“But once it did happen,” Victor cut in, “it would have spread exponentially until it covered the world. It would only have taken a few years before the planet was teeming with them, whatever ‘they’ were.”
“Exponentially?” Tess said. “Is that enough for something that small to cover a whole planet? In just a few years?”
“Don’t underestimate how fast something will grow if you double it time and again,” Victor said, smiling. The fact that their presence on the island hinged on that very principle was obviously foremost in his mind. “There’s a little story I could tell you about someone who did that.”
Marie sighed as if she’d heard it before, but Victor carried on regardless.
“It’s a story from India,” he said. “About a king called Shere Khan, who ruled at the time that chess was invented. Now he was so impressed with the game, so the story goes, that he ordered his whole army to find the man who’d invented it and bring him back with them. Eventually they tracked him down, and his name was Buddhiram. Now, he wasn’t rich or powerful, just an ordinary man who made a living by teaching, but the king greeted him with open arms and promised that whatever reward Buddhiram asked for, he would get it. And back then a king was supposed to be a man of his word: if he promised something he couldn’t deliver then he would lose face. Now I think Shere Khan must have had a reputation for being a bit pompous or stupid, because Buddhiram decided to play a trick on him. He said, ‘This will be my reward. I want you to take your chessboard, and put one grain of rice on the first square. The next day, put two grains on the second square. Then every day after that, put down twice as many as the day before. I’ll come back in sixty-four days and take what you’ve collected as my payment.’
“Shere Khan looked at the small chessboard in front of him, thought of everything else Buddhiram could have asked for and decided the man was an idiot. But he had to stick to his promise, so he called his advisors and asked them how much rice he would need to give him. He was the richest king in India, so he didn’t think it would be a problem. It was only when his advisors worked through the night and came back the next day that he realised what he’d agreed to. ‘There is not that much rice in the whole world,’ they told him. ‘To meet your promise you would have to level every mountain, drain every ocean, and grow rice there for years, and even then you would not have enough to pay him off.’ And he looked again at the sixty-four little squares in front of him and knew how clever Buddhiram really had been. So you see?”
Victor beamed at her, obviously impressed with his own storytelling skills. Tess forced a smile in return. “I’m glad I asked,” she said.
“So you’re the guys who are going to make us all millionaires, right?”
“I don’t know who told you that,” Max said. “Is that really what people think?”
“Ha! No, but there’s a few people who wish it was true. Here, mind your head.”
Max ducked into the cabin of the helicopter and strapped himself in. Garrett Gentry checked the harness was fastened, then walked round to the other door. The tall, heavily built pilot almost had to bend double to squeeze through, but once inside he got the rotors spinning and the machine in the air in no time.
Max took a few moments to enjoy the view once they were up. The colours were what stood out most. Last time he’d seen the island from the air it had been almost night-time, the night of their arrival, but this time the sun was right above them. The rich green of the vegetation, with the rust red of the dirt roads cutting through it, contrasted sharply with the bright white beaches and the pale grey cliff faces. Max couldn’t take his eyes off it; as an example of what nature could produce, it was breathtaking. Then there was the sea itself, thick bands of colour going from clear to turquoise to green, then suddenly turning dark blue as the seabed dropped away into the Pacific depths. Max looked into the blue, trying to see the underwater canyon he knew to be running there right under their flight path. It was invisible, lost in the murk and oceanic solutes which had become a feature of tropical seas over the last two decades.