Robert Sawyer - Calculating God

“Don’t make your decision right now,” said Dr. Kohl. “Think about it.” She gave us some pamphlets to read.

Hollus believed in God.

T’kna believed in God.

And me?

“Maybe I’m getting hung up on the word God,” I said to Hollus, once we were back in my office. “Certainly, if you want to propose that evolution on Earth was interfered with by an outside source, I can’t say you are wrong. After all, you yourself told me that there were intelligent aliens in this part of the galaxy as much as three billion years ago.”

“The race from Eta Cassiopeae A III, yes.”

“Aren’t those the ones who blew up their moon?”

“No; that was the race of Mu Cassiopeae A Prime, 5.5 light-years from Eta Cassiopeae.”

“Okay. Well, the beings from Eta Cassiopeae — let’s call them Etans — had a technological civilization three billion years ago, back when life was just beginning on my world. Surely the Etans could have come here then.”

“You are glossing over a lot of time,” said Hollus, “for you said life had existed here for at least eight hundred million, if not a full billion, years prior to three billion years ago.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“And, of course, my own sun, Beta Hydri, had not even formed that long ago; as I told you before, it is only 2.6 billion years old, so no one from Eta Cassiopeae could have ever visited it.”

“Well, maybe it wasn’t the Etans, then — but beings from some other star could have come here, or gone to your world, or to the Wreed world. All the actions you ascribe to God could have been the doing of advanced aliens.”

“There are two problems with your argument,” said Hollus, politely. “First, of course, even if you dispense with the need for a god in recent events — events of the last few billion years; events after other conscious observers had emerged in this universe — you have done nothing to dispense with the need for a designer who set the relative strengths of the five fundamental forces, who designed the thermal and other properties of water, and so on. And therefore what you are doing is contrary to the razor of Occam you spoke of: you are increasing, not reducing, the number of entities that have influenced your existence — one unavoidable god to create the universe, and then optional lesser beings who subsequently became interested in manipulating the development of life.

“Second,” continued Hollus, “you must remember the timing of the mass extinctions apparently orchestrated to occur simultaneously on our three worlds: the oldest was 440 million years ago; the most recent, 65 million years. That is a span of 375 million years — and yet, as we have found, the lifespan of an intelligent race, measured from the point at which it develops radio, is apparently no more than a couple of hundred years before it either destroys itself or disappears.”

My mind raced, careened. “All right,” I said at last. “Maybe the fundamental parameters were tweaked to create a universe that could give rise to life.”

“There is no supposition involved,” said Hollus. “The universe was clearly designed to be biogenerative.”

“All right. But if we accept that, surely simply creating life can’t be the sole goal. You must believe your putative designer wanted not just life, but intelligent life. Unintelligent life is really nothing more than complex chemistry. It’s only when it becomes sapient that life really gets interesting.”

“That is a strange thing for someone who studies dinosaurs to say,” observed Hollus.

“Not really. After all, the dinosaurs disappeared sixty-five million years ago. It’s only because of the advent of intelligence that we know they ever existed.” I paused. “But you are touching on the point I’m trying to make.” I stopped again, searching for the appropriate metaphor. “Do you cook?”

“Cook? You mean make food from raw materials?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Well, I do, or at least I used to. And there are things that you simply can’t make by throwing in all the ingredients together at the beginning. If you want to cook them, you have to intervene halfway through.”

Hollus thought about this. “So you are suggesting there is no way the creator could have achieved intelligent life without direct intervention? Many who are religious would object to that notion, for occasional intervention implies a God who is usually absent from the universe.”

“I’m not implying anything,” I said. “I’m just analyzing the assumptions inherent in your beliefs. Look, the dinosaurs dominated this planet for far more time than mammals have, and yet they never achieved anything even remotely like real intelligence. Although their brains got slightly bigger over time, even the most intelligent dinosaur that ever lived” — I picked up Phil Currie’s Troodon skull, now on a shelf behind my desk — “was no more intelligent than the dumbest mammal. In fact, there was no way they could ever become substantially more intelligent. The part of the mammalian brain in which intelligence resides doesn’t exist in reptiles.” I paused. “You told me that the creatures that were dominant on your planet until sixty-five million years ago — those pentapeds — were also dumb brutes, and you said that a similar situation existed on Delta Pavonis.”

“Yes.”

“And that your ancestors at that time were like my ancestors and the ancestors of the Wreeds: small creatures, living at the margins of the ecosystem.”

“That is correct,” said Hollus.

“But those ancestors did have brains capable of evolving intelligence,” I said. “My ancestors were crepuscular: they were active at twilight. And so they developed big eyes and sophisticated visual cortices. And, of course, the brain power to process the resulting images.”

“You are suggesting that the infrastructure for intelligence can only arise in those animals at the — what was your phrase? — at the margins of an ecosystem? Animals forced to forage at night?”

“Perhaps. And if that’s so, then intelligence can only come to fruition if the dominant, dumb animals are wiped out.”

“I suppose,” said Hollus. “But — oh, I see. I see. You are saying conditions that might give rise to life, and even the beginnings of intelligence, could be coded into the very design of the universe, but there is no way to bring intelligence to the fore, to let it flourish and develop, without direct intervention.”

To my own surprise, I said, “That’s my proposal, yes.”

“That explains the extinctions sixty-five million years ago. But what about the earlier extinctions?”

“Who knows? Presumably they were also required to move the ecosystem toward the eventual development of intelligence. On Earth, the end-of-the-Permian extinctions helped clear the way for mammallike reptiles — the ancestors of mammals. Their ability to regulate body temperature was perhaps irrelevant in the benign climate that existed until the worldwide glaciation that caused those extinctions. But during a glacial event, even a primitive thermal-regulatory ability would be an asset — and I rather suspect that the true warm-bloodedness, which evolved from that capability, is another prerequisite for intelligence. So the Permian extinction was a way to substantially increase the percentage of nascent endotherms, making sure they weren’t outcompeted and eliminated from the gene pool.”

“But how could the creator force an ice age?” asked Hollus.

“Well, if we assume he lobbed an asteroid at each of our worlds to end the Cretaceous, he could have broken up an asteroid or two in orbit to form rings around each of the planets at the end of the Permian. A ring like that, properly tilted, could substantially shade the planet, lowering its temperature enough to bring on massive glaciation. Or he could have generated a dust cloud that enveloped all of this part of the galaxy, shading all the planets — yours, mine, and the Wreeds’ — simultaneously.”