Last Week, Dennis Overbye wrote a piece in the New York Times titled, “Who Will Have The Last Word on the Universe?”
The gist of the article is, well, hopeless:
At some point in the future there will be somewhere in the universe where there will be a last sentient being. And a last thought. And that last word, no matter how profound or mundane, will vanish into silence along with the memory of Einstein and Elvis, Jesus, Buddha, Aretha and Eve, while the remaining bits of the physical universe go on sailing apart for billions upon billions upon billions of lonely, silent years.
It’s all for nothing. The End is Coming. The theory of a rapidly expanding universe was postulated with bits of evidence in 1998 and somehow this judgment foretells a finite end to everything billions upon billions of years in the future. We now know that there was a finite beginning 13.8 billion years ago, somehow. So, we now know that existence is a story with a beginning, our middle, and the end. “Waiter, Check!”
These facts are from the endless human diligent effort to make the infinite finite — a century of hard science has replaced the previous millennia of soft thought and religious conviction, and we now have hard and fast realities. Right.
Humans have discovered the tiniest bits of factoids in an infinite sea of time and space, tiny increments of discernable change have been extrapolated behind us and in front of us, by us, and for us.
Nothing new here. But there is a radical acceleration of what we know. In 2019, Scott Sorokin wrote in Enterprising Insights that,
In 1982, futurist and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller estimated that up until 1900, human knowledge doubled approximately every century, but by 1945 it was doubling every 25 years. And by 1982, it was doubling every 12-13 months. In retrospect, this may sound a little quaint since experts now estimate that by 2020, human knowledge will double every 12 hours.
This explosion of the knowledge of what we know has the reciprocal inflation of understanding what we do not know. Twenty years ago, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defined the reality of “Known Unknowns” (mysteries we know of, without answer) as being as factually true as the “Known Knowns” (what we know) and “Unknown Unknowns”(what we do not know) that we deal with every day.
Overbye’s cry of angst is our angst. The anxiety and stress of “Known Unknowns” have overwhelmed any empowerment of “Known Knowns” we are collecting. When the “Unknown Unknowns” once dominated our world, humans had the God that was as factual as the ground we walked on and the air we breathed. The Tree of Knowledge has, once again, made the God who created everything essentially irrelevant to knowing anything. At least as far as science reporters go.
What is unsaid is that we are God’s creation, and we live in and through God’s creation. But that singularity of being given everything is easily overlooked when part of what you have been given by God is the ability to create, invent, understand and control the tiny parts of His creation. We are like the two-year-old who can jump and think we can fly — because we do not know better. But we are knowing more and more.
Fritz Zwicky was an astrophysicist. In 1934, he discovered what we do not know. Well, he deduced that all of human measurement could not account for the forces exerted for most of the observable, measurable universe. Dubbed “Dark Matter” its absence was, and is, the perfect realization of the “known unknown.”
Ninety years of extreme research since then has led to knowing that we know less. As we see more, understand more, learn more, it is estimated that at least 90% of the observable universe is “unknown” matter and energy. Like Sargent Schultz of the Hogan’s Heroes television show, we “Know Nothing.”
But we know ourselves. And we know that we did not make ourselves. And we now know that our natural wholeness is as imponderably complex as the universe has been revealed to be. Bartleby Research declares, “The human body is one of the most complex productions in the world.” Again, determinations by us, for us.
Humans obsess over our control of outcomes. Survival beyond not dying extends to a death grip desire for control. And control can only exist with understanding of what is to be controlled. But the more we know, the more we do not know.
Zwicky is said to have been an atheist, but once told his daughter, “The universe is so unique and perfect that it could not have originated by chance, but was designed by flawless, creative design.” He even gave her a King James Version Bible in 1962 for Christmas.
In the absolute, overwhelming, inscrutable complexity of creation is something of the face of God — even to Fritz Zwicky.
The Dark Forces that move the billions of years all around our lives that Zwicky discovered and Overbye opines may be fully out of our control, but these evoke existential desperation in Overbye, for whom there is no God, except the god of personal control:
The late, great astrophysicist, philosopher and black hole evangelist John Archibald Wheeler, of Princeton, used to say that the past and the future are fiction, that they only exist in the artifacts and the imaginations of the present. According to that point of view, the universe ends with me, and so in a sense I do have the final word.
With all due apologies, but we all know that we do not have the final word in our lives. Though we determine what we eat for lunch, often our control falls short. We all want to live but we will all die. We want to be loved by others, but are often ignored, even disliked. We want to be satisfied with our technological advancements and mantras of human empowerment — to a futile end. We want meaning: on our terms, for what we do, and the universe.
But humans, whether Zwicky, Overbye or you or me, simply live by the grace of God. Like life itself, we were given Jesus — who embodied and enacted a grace that passes all understanding.
In 1967 The Strawberry Alarm Clock wrote “Incense and Peppermints” in the full hubris of a counterculture of Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll and led with a pretty good take of human impossibility:
Good sense, innocence, cripplin’ mankind
Dead kings, many things I can’t define
Occasions, persuasions clutter your mind.
Many 1967 dorm rooms had a print of Max Ehrman’s 1927 poem, the Desiderata hung on their walls. Its pat answers were fully in line with the hopes of Dennis Overbye and all of us. Its cliched hope and faith gave solace to those running away from religion and cultural pride into personal insight and control – “Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars: you have a right to be here.”
Overbye’s self-serving rationalization of “I do have the final word” was mocked by the era’s best voice of brilliance, The National Lampoon Magazine in its send up of the Desiderata, the “Deteriorata.”
Beyond hysterical parody, the refrain of the Deteriorata was seemingly written for Overbye:
You are a fluke of the universe.
You have no right to be here.
And whether you can hear it or not,
The universe is laughing behind your back.
There are greater truths than what we can construct, and despite our desperate hope to discern transcendent meanings in the “Known Unknowns” we cannot escape the overwhelming truth of our own miraculous existence. That truth is God, the completely irrational, unconstructed, and incomprehensible gift of beauty that includes all the doubt and fear that are simply voided by His grace. If we can hear it, even the laughter.
COMMENTS
4 responses to “The Universe Is Laughing Behind Your Back”
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Another great piece, Duo. Many thanks.
Getting out of the architectural theory rut and into something completely different. Duo, nice work.
Knowing that you do not know something is knowledge. I honestly don’t have a problem with that.
Not acknowledging that you do not know something is the big issue.
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