Ethan James - The 11 Greatest Mysteries Of The Universe

(Untitled)

The 11 Greatest Mysteries of the Universe

Ethan James

7. IS THERE LIFE AFTER DEATH?

Introduction

IT WOULD BE A GREAT LIE

If I said I didn't get butterflies in my stomach when Austin Carl and Dylan Russo Burgierman, respectively editor-in-chief and editor-in-chief of SUPER, both old partners in scientific journalism, invited me to write this book. It's hard not to feel a little smug when your mission is, in theory, to bring answers to the "great mysteries of the Universe", as the title on the cover says. It's the kind of task that no one feels really ready for except for the occasional megalomaniac guru, perhaps.

Why did this pineapple end up falling into my lap? Well, if you believe what Dylan told me at that fateful meeting and, as he is usually a sincere guy, I don't think I have much reason to doubt his justification one of the main reasons is the fact that, in addition to Although I have relatively good knowledge of applied science to our list of existential doubts, I am also not the type who thinks that science has answers to everything, simply crushing other ways of reading reality and understanding what it means. If this is true, I hope that this non-triumphalist approach of mine helps make it clear that the answers in these pages are tentative, complex, multifaceted. Every mystery revealed is, at bottom, also an expanded mystery when one realizes how the outside world is virtually inexhaustible in its richness and complication. Understanding it in depth is, if not a task for eternity, at least a task that, from the point of view of creatures like us, will never really finish.

You may be curious about the selection criteria that led us to our list of 11 questions. I suspect that few really crucial doubts, of those that have populated the human imagination since the dawn of time (as people from the 19th century would say), have been left out, because we really wanted to bet on the questions that, from our point of view, move deeper with the greatest number of people. The other big requirement, however, was that each of the mysteries could be approached, in some way, through the lens of science and rational inquiryagain, not because my editors and I felt that was the only way to see the world. world, but because it is perhaps the only way that gives all people, at least in principle, a common language to discuss such matters.

There is no such thing as Marxist, Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish or existentialist science (nor, strictly speaking, atheistic science, mind you): there is only science, whose hypotheses and theories must be testable to anyone, anywhere accepted if they decently explain the facts, rejected if they turn out to be lame. Does this mean that this type of investigation will always be the last word on everything? Not necessarily but it does mean a possibility to view the cosmos in a relatively dispassionate way before we put our beliefs and values into the equation. That's why, for example, another great mystery, even suggested by me to enter the list in this case, Why does evil exist?, didn't reach the cut-off, so to speak. Although human beings have been asking this question since the world was a world,

And speaking of the things that we believe in from the start and that are important and defining: of course I have them. Therefore, I would like to establish from now, in these first pages, a pact of honesty with you, gentle reader: whenever that is the case, I want to make these things clear. (For starters: I'm a practicing Catholic, which means I believe in God and some form of an afterlife plus I think it's virtually certain that there is some kind of living thing outside our planet, for example.) I do this. not only for the sake of transparency, but also because I think that the mysteries that we are going to address in the next pages touch everyone so closely that it is an illusion to imagine - even with the "vow of poverty" of seeing them only from the scientific side - that our personal position does not makes a difference when trying to understand them. You can't pretend that you don't believe in anything, that your head is a blank page; what we can do, however, is be fully aware of our starting positions and make an effort to put them in parentheses as we examine whether they are supported by the facts or not. If, even after this effort, the subject decides to keep his beliefs in spite of the data well, fine. At least the thing was done consciously. what we can do, however, is be fully aware of our starting positions and make an effort to put them in parentheses as we examine whether they are supported by the facts or not. If, even after this effort, the subject decides to keep his beliefs in spite of the data well, fine. At least the thing was done consciously. what we can do, however, is be fully aware of our starting positions and make an effort to put them in parentheses as we examine whether they are supported by the facts or not. If, even after this effort, the subject decides to keep his beliefs in spite of the data well, fine. At least the thing was done consciously.

1. DOES GOD EXIST?

says the profession of faith that billions of Christians around the world (among them Catholics, Orthodox and Anglicans) have repeated in their ceremonies for centuries. For it is in him [in God, in this case] that we live, move and exist, proclaims Saint Paul in the biblical book of the Acts of the Apostles, when preaching the Christian faith in Athens, the cradle of Greek and Western culture. For most people alive today, these beliefs, or others very similar to them, are a kind of cornerstone of reality, the foundation without which the Universe is meaningless. How to understand the order, complexity and beauty around us without putting God at the center of it all? From this point of view, it would be logical to expect the world to be full of divine fingerprints. It would suffice to examine the cosmos with a minimum of care for the signs of the activity of a higher intelligence to be evident, clearer than sunlight, to any honest observer. In other words, scientific evidence that God exists should be commonplace.

Unfortunately for those who believe in the Creator, things are far from that simple. I must confess, kind reader, in the name of our pact of mutual trust and respect established since the introduction of this book, that this is a sensitive topic for this scribe. To be absolutely sincere: I am one of the subjects who professes the above Creed at Sunday mass; I am one of those who agree with Arthur when he says that the structure of the Universe came from divine hands, that to be alive is to experience God. I don't think this is the kind of subject on which it's possible to have a really disinterested detachment all of us, believers or unbelievers, have our own biases and prejudices when it comes to dealing with an issue that touches so deeply on meaning (or on lack of it) which is attributed to existence. However, believing, or wishing,

When we consider only the scientific data that could be used to support the idea of the existence of a Creator, the thing is much less obvious. For those who have faith, it is clear that science can never kill God (a topic I want to return to at the end of this chapter). But non-believers may well argue, on the basis of the most detailed and reliable data of modern science, that divine intervention does not seem to have been necessary for the emergence of the Universe and life. It is in this bowl that we are going to put our hands from now on.