The best future once possible is probably no longer possible. Somewhere along the way creation took a turn that opened up some possibilities but closed others. We have to build from where we are.
66 million years ago, or about the time Donald Trump became President, an asteroid crashed into earth and set off a series of events that resulted in the extinction of three quarters of all of the species then living on the Earth.
Bad news for the dinosaurs, which had been the dominant form of life on the planet for 160 million years. But good news for small, furry, nocturnal animals called mammals. With the dinosaurs out of the way, mammals became dominant, leading eventually to humans, and you and me, and Donald Trump.
160 million years. And then one asteroid and bam! The dinosaurs are done.
And what bad luck.
Not only is an asteroid of that size hitting the earth an exceedingly unlikely event. But some scientists now believe that if the asteroid had hit the earth in just about anywhere on the planet except where it did, that the asteroid event wouldn’t have had the consequences that it did and the dinosaurs might have survived.
You see the dinosaurs weren’t hit by the asteroid directly. At least not many of them. Instead, the asteroid hit the earth at a location that is today the northwest corner of the Yucatan peninsula. The crater is centered on a small town called Chicxulub, so it’s called the Chicxulub crater. This particular location, just happened to be rich in deposits of sulfur, hydrocarbons and organic deposits, like those we think of today as “fossil fuels” such as oil and gas.
If you drove to church this morning, you know that when that kind of material gets set on fire it burns. The impact of the asteroid provided enough energy to ignite the fuel. The fuel burned, throwing massive amounts of soot into the atmosphere. The soot then blocked out the sun and lowered planetary temperatures for hundreds of years. Plants, deprived of sunlight died. Animals deprived of plants for food starved to death, and so on, and so on, and well, here we are.
But here’s the “Aw Jeez!” part of that story. Only the Yucatan peninsula and about 13% of the rest of the surface of the earth had sufficient carbon deposits to cause the kind of chain reaction catastrophe that resulted in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction that killed the dinosaurs. If the asteroid had landed in the deep ocean, or missed the earth entirely, the biggest threat to the dinosaurs might have been the La Brea Tar Pits.
So that we are here at all is an incredibly random circumstance. Fortunate or unfortunate depending on how you look at it, and whether you’re a dinosaur or a human, it’s just luck that our planetary history followed the path that it did.
And the asteroid is only one, spectacular example of what could have happened, and did; or might have happened, but didn’t.
And that asteroid only hit 66 million years ago. The universe is actually more like 13 and a half billion years old. That’s an incredibly long time frame for something to happen that then caused something else to happen that then caused something else to happen, that either resulted in this morning looking like it does, or more likely, far more likely, looking like something entirely different. One path with us standing here at the end of it, and thousands of millions of other paths that didn’t happen.
So imagine then, that we are standing, somehow, on the side lines, at the occasion of the “Big Bang”. The creation event when all the material that ever has or will exist is compressed into a single location, and then with a gigantic explosion is violently thrust apart in all directions creating space and time.
At that moment, actually before there even are “moments”, but at that first event before anything yet had ever actually happened, if we could look far off into the future, say 13 and a half billion years later, we could have seen, trillions and trillions of possibilities for what might happen: good/bad; terrible/awful; best possible/worst possible. Actually an incalculable number of what might happen. Actually, if we’re talking about the moment just before “moments” began, there would be an infinite number of possible futures. Because until the Big Bang gets things started there are no limits at all to what might happen.
And then, the Big Bang does happen, and suddenly a lot of the formerly possible futures instantly become impossible. This is because as soon as creation happens, not only does a lot of stuff get created in a particular way, but also the laws of physics get created in a particular way. The actual laws we got, like electromagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear force and gravity, and the specific ways they relate to each other, define some stuff as possible, and a lot of other stuff as impossible. Right from the start. Before we even get to the first second of existence an amazing amount of stuff happens, subatomic particles are created and their associated anti-particles are created and most of the pairs immediately annihilate each other, but just enough matter remains that everything that now exists is left over.
As every moment passes vast numbers of possible futures became impossible. They won’t ever happen. We’re still left with further vast numbers of possible futures, but every moment that goes by more and more of them become impossible, too, at an astounding rate.
Surely one of those futures would have been better than this one, right?
At any point between the beginning of time and space, and the present moment, a divine observer, like God, for instance could have looked at every possible future that was then possible at that particular point in time. And this divine observer, God for instance, could have then judged all of the possible futures according to some divine criteria, like total happiness, or beauty, or peacefulness, or artistic brilliance or technological genius, or animals with the ability to fly, or the optimal balance between personal freedom and social responsibility, or whatever God thinks is worthwhile.
And then God could have arranged all of the possible futures for the universe into a single line with the futures judged the worst off to one side, and the futures judged the best off to the other side. And way over there, on the furthest far side of the line, there would be the one future that at that particular moment was judged to be the best of the best, the best of all possible worlds, the very best future possible.
To actually get to that particular future, 66 millions years later, or 13.5 billion years later, would require tracing the thinnest of lines over countless changing circumstances with everything happening just so: just the right proportion between quarks and anti-quarks, an asteroid hitting in just the right spot on the northwest corner of the Yucatan peninsula, and then, eventually, animals like humans making choices to do one thing or another, trillions and trillions of choices everyday from what to have for breakfast whether to drive or take the train, what to buy and where to shop, to call your congressman, or march in the street or vote or not, and which candidate to choose.
And so, you can probably agree with me, that the future we actually got, the present we are in, the world we inhabit, is almost certainly, in fact as certain as certainly can ever be, not the best future possible.
Certainly there was a future where Clinton is our President, not Trump. Or Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren, or whomever you like. A future where John Lennon wasn’t assassinated, where Hitler was assassinated, where Los Angeles still had street cars instead of freeways. A future where the Earth was a little closer to the sun, or gravity was a little lighter, or I hadn’t said what I did, or I wrote that check that I meant to write but never did, or Dodo birds ran a little faster than the people with clubs that killed all of them.
Surely this, beautiful and terrible planet isn’t the best of all possible worlds. It’s equally unlikely that this is the worst of all possible worlds. But somehow that truth doesn’t provide sufficient comfort to balance this indisputable truth: things could have been better.
The world could have been better, but this one, the one with Kim Jong Un and Kim Kardashian, and facebook and fake news is the one we got.
Darn.
Now assumed in what I just gave you was a bit of theology that you may have missed.
In a lot of churches this morning there are a lot of preachers telling their congregations exactly the opposite of what I just told you.
A lot of preachers will tell you that this is the best of all possible worlds, because in fact this is the only possible world. And the theological difference that gets you to that statement is that I told you a theology in which there are trillions and trillions of moments in which events could have happened a different way. And a lot of religions will tell you that, no, everything had to happen exactly this way because God is in control and God made the world precisely to be exactly the way it is. I told you a theology of probabilities and choices: a 13% chance of an Asteroid hitting a location on Earth with sufficient carbon deposits to create an extinction level event, a world where 7 billion people make independent free decisions about their lives.
But a lot of people would say to me, and not just religious people but scientists, too, what do you mean the Asteroid “could have” hit somewhere else? Asteroids follow trajectories defined by physics. Human beings are controlled by genes, and social systems, and unconscious urges. Once things got going in a certain way, once creation got created in a certain way, every material thing from asteroids to humanity simply followed the one path that was possible given the rules, given the “laws” of physics and nature.
Religious people who believe in what I call the “omni” God (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and eternal) believe that God, with total freedom, made the world and everything in it exactly as He intended. Six days to get started, a day of rest, a foolish couple named Adam and Eve and since then God is still in charge of every event, large and small. Everything happens for a purpose. We may not understand why God needs to cause the terrible suffering and violence that sometimes happens in our world, but we have to trust that God has a plan. And because God is good, this world He created must of course be the best one possible.
Science, on the other hand, would say that the universe knows nothing of “good and bad”. There is no divine judge who can say “better or worse”. We just get what is. What had to be.
Call it the hand of God, or call it blind luck, or call it “the mystery,” or call it a cold and uncaring, impersonal universe, the world is what it is.
Whether you believe in the absoluteness of physics, or God, or believe, as I do, in the freedom of human choosing, in either case you get to this morning with the facts of the world surrounding you. This is what it is. As a person who tries to live and teach a reality-based religion, that’s a good place to start. I urge you to look around, and see what really is. Because this is all we have. Regrets aren’t useful. Might-have-beens don’t help. This is where we are. Exactly this.
However.
The difference between the two theologies I described are immense: not in where we are, but in where we go from here.
In the Omni God theology, or the anti-theology of cold physics, we are told that this is the only world we can have. You could say it’s the best possible world, but only because it’s the only possible world. And thus with all the world’s manifest flaws there isn’t any better one available. This is all you get. Bad news if you’re a victim of violence, or poverty, or a species about to be made extinct by asteroid or human-caused climate change.
Darn, to say the least.
But even worse is that the Omni God theology and cold physics will also tell you that the next world we get is also the only one we will get, because just as the past could ever only be one thing: commanded by God’s law or forced by natural laws, the next moment is equally, entirely, pre-determined. There is nothing for us to do but wait and watch and hopefully flourish, but quite possible suffer. There is nothing in this theology that human beings can add to creation. Nothing we can do to fix a flaw or to divert the path toward the future slightly more in the direction of love, peace, and justice. If the US Congress will ever enact a reasonable gun control law it will be because God makes it happen, not us. If human history ends as dinosaur history did with an asteroid and a cloud of soot, then that date with death has been set since the beginning of time.
But the theology I believe, a theology of trillions and trillions of branching paths, and choices and options and probability events at the subatomic scale and decisions at the scale of human consciousness tells a very different story of our past and future.
We start where we are. But where we go is up to us. Of course there is something we can do to make a better future. Of course our decisions and our doings are important and meaningful. The universe is not following a single path toward one predestined future, like a bowling ball thrown down a lane with those bumpers put down on either side that force the ball into the pins.
The universe is made by choices and choosing. Human beings have free will. We make free decisions that alter the direction of the future, toward better or worse. The best future ever possible is probably long vanished from our choosing, but certainly we can choose better than this!
Every individual in existence has freedom to do or decide between different open options according to their level of consciousness. Animals clearly make choices. Try to tell me a house cat’s decision to go in and out the door you just opened for them isn’t a free choice. Even subatomic particles behave in ways that cannot be predicted except in terms of probabilities.
Freedom is fundamental in the universe. We feel it. We believe it. Even those who deny human freedom act as though they are free. We can’t help it. We make choices. And we believe that our choices make a real difference in the world. God is not all-powerful because we have power, too. The natural laws don’t control reality; they describe reality. Within the boundaries of what is possible quite a lot of different realities could happen. We get to choose: carelessly throw a gutter ball, or skillfully throw a strike.
We must choose. To help or to hurt. To turn toward or away. To participate or to ignore. To create or destroy.
As we sang in the hymn before the sermon, “Late in time, may we, forsaking all our cruelty and scorn, see a new tomorrow breaking and a kinder world be born.”
We are the product of a cosmic history seemingly leading to us, but only because we look back from where we are. If we instead could look forward from that long ago beginning, the place we are now would be nearly indiscernable amid all the other possibilities. As Joy Atkinson wrote in the words we used for our Chalice Lighting. “The womb of stars embraces us; remnants of their fiery furnaces pulse through our veins. We are of the stars, the dust of the explosions cast across space.”
So this then, this morning, is where we have come to.
Likely not the best world we could have created, but, no regrets. This is what we have to work with. “All are architects of fate, working in these walls of time… For the structure that we raise time is with materials filled; our todays and yesterdays are the blocks with which we build. Build today, then, strong and sure, with a firm and ample base; and ascending and secure shall tomorrow find its place.”
This is not the end. We haven’t arrived at the final future yet. The story continues. This morning for good or ill is where we are but not where we stop. We must step off from here. But from here we can go many places. Right or Left. Right or wrong. Correcting past mistakes to the extent we can. Healing old wounds. Learning to accommodate the burdens of the past we cannot undo. But keep going. “Be that builder trusting good, bitter though the test may be: through all ages they are right, though they build in agony.”
And from here, we commit to building, as much as we can, the best world possible now. “Building up a world, I’m gonna let it shine.”