Robert Sawyer - Calculating God

I returned the eurypterid fossil to its drawer. “I grant that water is an unusual substance, but—”

Hollus touched his eyes together. “But this strange expanding-before-freezing is hardly the only remarkable thermal property water has. In fact, it has seven different thermal parameters, all of which are unique or nearly so in the chemical world, and all of which independently are necessary for the existence of life. The chances of any of them having the aberrant value it does must be multiplied by the chances of the other six likewise being aberrant. The likelihood of water having these unique thermal properties by chance is almost nil.”

“Almost,”I said, but my voice was starting to sound hollow, even to me.

Hollus ignored me. “Nor does water’s unique nature end with its thermal properties. Of all substances, only liquid selenium has a higher surface tension than does water. And it is water’s high surface tension that draws it deeply into cracks in rocks, and, of course, as we have noted, water does the incredible and actually expands as it freezes, breaking those rocks apart. If water had lower surface tension, the process by which soil is formed would not occur. More: if water had higher viscosity, circulatory systems could not evolve — your blood plasma and mine are essentially sea water, but there are no biochemical processes that could fuel a heart that had to pump something substantially more viscous for any appreciable time.”

The alien paused. “I could go on,” he said, “talking about the remarkable, carefully adjusted parameters that make life possible, but the reality is simply this: if any of them — any in this long chain — were different, there would be no life in this universe. We are either the most incredible fluke imaginable — something far, far more unlikely than you winning your provincial lottery every single week for a century — or the universe and its components were designed, purposefully and with great care, to give rise to life.”

I felt a jab of pain in my chest; I ignored it. “It’s still just indirect evidence for God’s existence,” I said.

“You know,” said Hollus, “you are in the vast minority, even among your own species. According to something I saw on CNN, there are only 220 million atheists on this planet out of a population of 6 billion people. That is just three percent of the total.”

“The truth in factual matters is not a democratic question,” I said. “Most people aren’t critical thinkers.”

Hollus sounded disappointed. “But you are a trained, critical thinker, and I have described to you why God must exist — or, at least, must have at one time existed — in mathematical terms that come as close to certainty as anything in science possibly could. And still you deny his existence.”

The pain was growing worse. It would subside, of course.

“Yes,” I said. “I deny God’s existence.”

“Hello, Thomas,” Dr. Noguchi had begun on that fateful day last October, when I’d come in to discuss the results of the tests he’d ordered. He always called me Thomas instead of Tom. We’d known each other long enough that casual names were surely appropriate, but he liked a little bit of formality, a touch of I’m-the-doctor-and-you’re-the-patient distance. “Please sit down.”

I did so.

He didn’t waste time on a preamble. “It’s lung cancer, Thomas.”

My pulse increased. My jaw dropped.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

A million thoughts ran through my head. He must be mistaken; it must be someone else’s file; what am I going to tell Susan? My mouth was suddenly dry. “Are you sure?”

“The cultures from your sputum were absolutely diagnostic,” he said. “There is no doubt that it is cancer.”

“Is it operable?” I said at last.

“We’ll have to determine that. If not, we’ll try to treat it with radiation or chemotherapy.”

My hand went immediately to my head, touching my hair. “Will — will that work?”

Noguchi smiled reassuringly. “It can be very effective.”

Which amounted to a “maybe” — and I didn’t want to hear “maybe.” I wanted certainty. “What — what about a transplant?”

Noguchi’s voice was soft. “Not that many sets of lungs become available each year. Too few donors.”

“I could go to the States,” I said tentatively. You read about that all the time in the Toronto Star , especially since Harris’s cutbacks to the health-care system had begun: Canadians going to the States for medical treatment.

“Makes no difference. There’s a shortage of lungs everywhere. And, anyway, it might not do any good; we’ll have to see if the cancer has spread.”

I wanted to ask, “Am I going to die?” But the question seemed too much, too direct.

“Keep a positive attitude,” continued Noguchi. “You work at the museum, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you’ve probably got an excellent benefits package. You’re covered for prescription drugs?”

I nodded.

“Good. There’s some medication that will be useful. It’s not cheap, but if you’re covered, you’ll be okay. But, as I say, we have to see if the cancer has spread. I’m going to refer you to an oncologist down at St. Mike’s. She’ll look after you.”

I nodded, feeling my world crumbling around me.

Hollus and I had returned to my office. “What you’re arguing for,” I said, “is a special place in the cosmos for humanity and other lifeforms.”

The spiderlike alien maneuvered his bulk to one side of the room. “We do occupy a special place,” he said.

“Well, I don’t know how the development of science went on Beta Hydri III, Hollus, but here on Earth it’s followed a pattern of repeatedly dethroning us from any special position. My own culture thought our world was at the center of the universe, but that turned out to be wrong. We also thought we had been created full-blown by God in his image, but that turned out to be wrong, too. Every time we believed there was something special about us — or our planet or our sun — science showed that we were misguided.”

“But lifeforms like us are indeed special,” said the Forhilnor. “For instance, we all mass the same order of magnitude. None of the intelligent species, including those that vacated their worlds, had average adult body masses below fifty kilograms or above 500 kilograms. We all are, more or less, two meters along our longest dimension — indeed, civilized life could not exist much below 1.5 meters in size.”

I tried again to lift my eyebrows. “Why on Earth would that be true?”

“It is true everywhere, not just on Earth, because the smallest sustainable fire is about fifty centimeters across, and to manipulate a fire you need to be somewhat bigger than it. Without fire, of course, there is no metallurgy, and therefore no sophisticated technology.” A pause, a bob. “Do you not see? We all evolved to be the right size to use fire — and that size is poised directly in the logarithmic middle of the universe. At its maximum extension, the universe will be some forty orders of magnitude larger than we are, and its smallest constituent is forty orders of magnitude smaller than we are.” Hollus regarded me and bobbed up and down. “We are indeed at the center of creation, if only you know how to look at it.”

When I started working at the ROM, the entire front part of its second floor was given over to paleontology. The north wing, directly above the gift shops and deli, had always housed the vertebrate-paleontology displays — “the Dinosaur Gallery” — and the south wing had originally housed the invertebrate-paleo gallery; indeed, the words “Museum of Paleontology” are still carved in stone along the top of the wall there.