THE FACT OF THE MATTER
BY PAUL HOPKINS
Yer Man at the bar says: “We won’t feel it now ‘til Christmas. The evenings have well gone back and that Hallowe’en nonsense is over. And then, be japes … are you ready for it”?
“For what?” I ask.
“The end of the world, no less,” he says. “According to those Mayans. It’s the phenomenon which, I’ll have you know, comprises a range of eschatological beliefs according to which cataclysmic events will occur any December now.”
“Really,” I say, feigning interest.
“You see,” he continues, “it will be the end-date of a 5,000 and odd-year-long cycle in what is called the Meso-American Long Count calendar. Various astronomical alignments and numerological formulae have been proposed as pertaining to this, and, Bob’s your uncle, it’ll be the end of the world as we know it.”
And I leave him humming the REM song, against the twinkling Christmas tree in the corner by the fire.
My newspaper the next morning brings back the traditional Christmas debate about evolution v. creationism, rearing its head again in the Letters page. Like I don’t hold any truck with Yer Man at the bar and his end-of-world beliefs, I don’t hold very much truck either with the notion that life – for many Creationists, in the US and, indeed, Northern Ireland – as we know it has only been around for about 6,000 years, give or take a lost weekend or two.
However, my jury is still a little out on the argument of ‘intelligent design’ in that just because I can’t get my head around the image of a bearded man sitting on a fleecy cloud for eternity (what a depressing thought — eternity, that is) does not mean, unlike the evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, that I am ruling out the notion of a divine originator that, for all I know, may have gone off and simply forgotten about us (which would explain why a lot of the world right now appears godless).
There was a time in recent memory when the sciences held out the hope that some day the great question would be answered — if we can create life in a petri- dish, then surely someday we can explain its origins?
But the other school of thought, one not one with the Creationists, has it that, as the universe persists in its expansion, cosmologists in the future will, in fact, continue to understand less. Calculations by Harvard theorist Avi Loeb suggest that the best time to study the cosmos was actually more than 13 billion years ago, about 500 million years after the Big Bang. The theory proposes that the farther into the future you travel the more information you lose about the universe’s origins.
In tandem with this is the argument that some of the greatest mysteries of the universe may never be resolved because “they are beyond human comprehension”. That’s according to one of the world’s greatest astrophysicists, Martin Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society in Britain and Professor of Cosmology at Cambridge University.
According to Lord Rees, a “true, fundamental theory of the universe may (well) exist but could be just too hard for human brains to grasp”. In short, what Martin Rees is saying is: just as a goldfish may be barely aware of the bowl in which it swims, so the complexity of life, and the universe in which we humans swim, may be too much for our brains to handle.
I think about this as I sit at the harbour the other day, in the grand winter light, thinking of the death of a friend — which had me, however momentarily, ponder my own mortality.
The water is gently lapping against the shore, the boats in the harbour white against the grey-blue sky, as I watch a sand ant, the smallest and most insignificant of creatures, make its way across grainy soil. Like our goldfish friend, it appears oblivious to its surroundings, content enough with getting from here to there, for whatever reason. And I think, if Lord Rees is right, surely our inability to understand it all should not take from the joy of cherishing the moment while we are here? Christmas somehow just reinforces all these thoughts within me.
That we exist at all is, in itself, both mystery and miracle.
