Harper, Jr., Charles

Chuck is Senior Vice President of the John Templeton Foundation. A former research scientist in planetary sciences at Harvard and specializing in galaxy evolution and the origins of our solar system (especially the earliest history of the Earth and moon), he is co-editor of Science & Ultimate Reality: Quantum Theory, Cosmology and Complexity and Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine Tuning, and editor of Spiritual Information: One Hundred Perspectives. His doctorate is from the University of Oxford for a thesis on the nature of time in cosmology. During his thesis research, he was awarded a Squire-Marriot scholarship to study theology at Oxford and was granted the Diploma in Theology. The following is an how Chuck begins and ends his article, “Beginning to Explore an Infinite Cosmos of Living Worlds.” “Wolfgang Pauli gave a lecture at Columbia in 1958 in which he proposed a somewhat flamboyantly speculative conceptual scheme in particle theory he had been developing with Werner Heisenberg. Pauli’s presentation aroused the intellectual ire of the redoubtable pioneer of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr. The story has it that at the conclusion of the lecture Bohr rose in disapproval. Striding forth, he faced Pauli across the table on which the lectern had been placed, glowering. Pauli glowered back, noting defensively that the idea surely had merit precisely because it seemed so radical. Best of all, Pauli remarked, it was “crazy.” “Not crazy enough!” responded Bohr. The two great physicists began to circle each other round the table, Pauli repeating, “Crazy!” Bohr responding, “Not crazy enough!” To many intelligent, well-educated people, the scientific search for “other life-bearing worlds” may seem to be an odd fascination. In everyday experience, such issues are left mostly to the domain of popular Hollywood fantasy; to take the quest for extraterrestrial life and intelligence seriously does seem a bit crazy. To take it seriously in terms of the future development of religious thought seems truly wacky. However, if we are stretched by science and its futuristic frontiers in directions that seem peculiar, perhaps it is only because the boldness of our imagination fails us—because we as scientists simply are “not crazy enough…. As theology speculates about the long-term future of the biological destiny of life on Earth, it unhesitatingly raises one great question of the nature of the human adventure: Is the future ultimately an exploration of love—and therefore of God? Mystics have pointed the way. Scientists may do so as well. The study of the evolution of life is beginning to provide hints and clues that the great drama of life may be more than a meaningless fluke. Is life ultimately a drama of good versus evil in which reality groans as in childbirth, waiting in hope for the triumph of love? And, if so, what might the future bring? An answer, perhaps, is that we shall never know unless we create that world. In a future to be created, ignorance is a given. Perhaps such a vista of ignorance also can provide at least a humble recognition that, as a form of life, we may be really quite primitive. Perhaps we do not yet have a very good sense of what the universe is really like. A great ocean of possibility spreads out before us in all directions—unknown, untouched, unseen, dark but illuminated faintly by the distant fires of an infinity of stars—while, like a weak, flickering candle, the spirit of adventure and the possibility of love burn close within each of us.