The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [99]
People pay attention to these puerile marvels mainly because they promise something like old-time religion, but especially life after death, even life eternal.
A very different prospect for something like eternal life was once proposed by the versatile British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, who was, among many other things, one of the founders of population genetics. Haldane imagined a far future when the stars have darkened and space is mainly filled with a cold, thin gas. Nevertheless, if we wait long enough statistical fluctuations in the density of this gas will occur. Over immense periods of time the fluctuations will be sufficient to reconstitute a Universe somethinj like our own. If the Universe is infinitely old, there will be ai infinite number of such reconstitutions, Haldane pointed out.
So in an infinitely old universe with an infinite number o appearances of galaxies, stars, planets and life, an identical Eartl must reappear on which you and all your loved ones will be reunited. I’ll be able to see my parents again and introduce then to the grandchildren they never knew. And all this will happen no once, but an infinite number of times.
But in this reflection I have underestimated what infinit; means. In Haldane’s picture, there will be universes, indeed ai infinite number of them, in which our brains will have ful recollection of many previous rounds. Satisfaction is at hand tempered, though, by the thought of all those other universe which will also come into existence (again, not once but an infinit number of times) with tragedies and horrors vastly outstrippin anything I’ve experienced this turn.
The Consolation of Haldane depends, though, on what kind c universe we live in, and maybe on such arcana as whether there’ enough matter eventually to reverse the expansion of the uni verse, and the character of vacuum fluctuations. Those with deep longing for life after death might, it seems, devote them selves to cosmology, quantum gravity, elementary particle phys ics, and, especially, transfinite arithmetic.
Clement of Alexandria, a Father of the early Church, in hi Exhortations to the Greeks (written around the year 190) di: missed pagan beliefs in words that might today seem a little ironic
Far indeed are we from allowing grown men to listen to such tales. Even to our own children, when they are crying their heart out, as the saying goes, we are not in the habit of telling fabulous stories to soothe them.
In our time we have less severe standards. We tell children aboi Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy for reasons w think emotionally sound, but then disabuse them of these mytt before they’re grown. Why retract? Because their well-being as adults depends on them knowing the world as it really is. We worry, and for good reason, about adults who still believe in Santa Claus.
On doctrinaire religions, ‘Men dare not avow, even to their own hearts’, wrote the philosopher David Hume,
the doubts which they entertain on such subjects. They make a merit of implicit faith; and disguise to themselves their real infidelity, by the strongest asseverations and the most positive bigotry.
This infidelity has profound moral consequences, as the American revolutionary Tom Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:
Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the, chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.
T.H. Huxley’s formulation was
The foundation of morality is to ... give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions