How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [145]
Suddenly things are not what they used to be, and the changes are mostly slanted toward the negative. The people George helped financially are instead poor and wretched, the buildings he constructed are nonexistent, his wife is a lonely unmarried librarian, his children unborn, and the town is renamed “Pottersville,” after the treacherous banker whose miserly ways prevented those George had helped from ever owning their own homes. His brother, whom George saved in childhood, is not there to save other lives in that specific battle, with the contingent consequences that the lives the brother saved are now also gone. As Clarence guides George through his now unfamiliar surroundings, he is dismayed and shocked. The history of his town is quite different without the influence of George Bailey. He never realized just how many people were dependent upon his seemingly routine existence. “Strange, isn’t it?,” queries Clarence to George at the appropriate moment of enlightenment. “Each man’s life touches so many other lives, and when he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?”
In the end, of course, Clarence restores the historical sequence to its original condition, with George’s contingent influence intact, and makes a reassuring pronouncement to him: “You see, George, you really had a wonderful life.” In this sense, then, we are all individuals of power and importance. Whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, every encounter and every action, can and does make some degree of difference, ranging from virtually negligent to powerfully diverting. A seemingly innocuous decision, carefully placed in time and circumstance, may affect uncounted others in multitudinous ways.
Because of the trigger effect and contingent-necessities, and the fact that at any point in the system it could be early as well as late (since we do not know when our personal system will end), one never knows which actions will or will not make a difference. Only the historian looking back is privileged to so judge. It is this lack of foresight and prognostication that makes the potential for the power of contingency and individuality so puissant. Since we do not know for certain which actions will matter and which will not, it is as rational as not to assume the former than the latter. It may be nothing but wishful thinking to desire one’s place in history to be contingently significant, but since we do not know, why not act as if it does?
FINDING MEANING IN A CONTINGENT UNIVERSE
I am often asked by believers why I abandoned Christianity and how I found meaning in the apparently meaningless universe presented by science. The implication is that the scientific worldview is an existentially depressing one. Without God, I am bluntly told, what’s the point? If this is all there is, there is no use. To the contrary. For me, quite the opposite is true. The conjuncture of losing my religion, finding science, and discovering glorious contingency was remarkably empowering and liberating. It gave me a sense of joy and freedom. Freedom to think for myself. Freedom to take responsibility for my own actions. Freedom to construct my own meanings and my own destinies. With the knowledge that this may be all there is, and that I can trigger my own cascading changes, I was free to live life to its fullest.
This is not to say that those who are religious cannot share in these freedoms. But for me, and not just for me, a world without monsters, ghosts, demons, and gods unfetters the mind to soar to new heights, to think unthinkable thoughts, to imagine the unimaginable, to contemplate infinity and eternity knowing that no one is looking back. The universe takes on a whole new meaning when