I consider myself a pretty simple man; one almost devoid of scientific knowledge. Nor do I consider myself a theologian at all.
But while I don’t totally discount the possibility of there being other life on other planets, one would think, given the billions upon billions of them, and given that the law of averages would seem to suggest that if life existed on any significant number of them, some of that life would be intelligent. And if any of it is intelligent, it would likely discover lots of the things we have discovered, perhaps long before us, including the use of radiation of various sorts; sound, microwaves, light, radio waves of all kinds of bandwidths, discharges of radiation from atomic testing.
And yet, having been listening to the universe for a lot of decades now, we have heard not a peep. Nothing suggesting the radiation (and no, I don’t know what all of it is) of anything indicating the likelihood some kind of intelligent life generated it. So, as far as we know, we, as corporeal and spiritual creatures are as alone in the universe as alone gets.
If it’s so, or even if some planet at the remotest edges of the universe is just hitting the metaphorical telegraph key in earnest, without answer from us because we haven’t received it yet despite millions of years having passed from the transmission, why does so very much of it seem utterly void of life? Is God wasteful? If not, is it somehow necessary for one of the zillion of physical requirements for our having existed at all, for all of those seemingly unrelated parts to be where and what they are?
Maybe it’s so, but it hardly seems likely that some galaxy so far away that its light hasn’t even reached us yet must exist for, say, there to be liquid water on earth. But perhaps we just lack sufficient imagination to know how that is.
I also know that science hits the wall at certain things; like what was energy like (or matter if it existed at all) before the Big Bang? Some say we can’t know because the nature of the Big Bang was such that everything would have been changed by it, including the rules by which the universe operates. I’m inclined to think there are a number of blank walls to knowledge out there…we don’t know and we’re not going to know in this life.
My own idiosyncratic speculation is that the universe exemplifies many purposes and many things. We are informed by faith, for example, that there are, indeed, other creatures called angels. They are incorporeal, totally unified in intellect and will, magnificent beyond comprehension and somehow serve God’s overall purposes in creation in ways we really don’t know.
Physicists tell us that the universe is, as far as they know, “in harmony”. It is not inherently self-contradictory. The laws governing how it works are knowable at least to an extent, and to the extent they are knowable they are not conflicting. E=MC squared is always E=MC squared. But scientists tell us our harmony is not the only possible one. The tiniest change in something fundamental would, for instance, make life totally impossible, or even make carbon, out of which we’re made, totally impossible. But such a “harmony” would not, itself, be impossible. It would just be different; a universe in which, perhaps E does not equal MC squared.
So, what do we want to think about the “rules of the harmony”, most of which we probably don’t know and possibly never will? I guess I can’t help thinking that somehow much of the universe has no purpose other than the “song it is singing” (physicists would call it the rules of physics; chemists the rules of chemistry, etc) We are informed in the bible that there are choirs of angels who perpetually sing in chorus before the throne of God. Does that singing resemble Bach, perhaps, or is it massively, massively, massively more complex than that. Is it the universe? Is, say, nuclear physics nothing but the song of one of them? Is astrophysics another? What about entropy? Does the song stop, or does the harmony take on other meters, other tones?
As a Catholic Christian, I marvel to think of the possibility that, being “a little less than the angels”, we are at times able to hear a note here and there, view a bit of the score, but that someday we will be able to dive right into the middle of it, understanding more than any physicist knows today in instants like a ticker tape on warp drive, and simultaneously with all of the harmony.
In other words, we will be let in on “the song”, and know the singers for what they are, and the Creator who simultaneously holds every bit of it in His Mind, He whose thoughts automatically are a reality so vast an eternity cannot suffice for us to plumb it.
And maybe that’s why we are able to see bits of it now; so we’ll know it’s there. And maybe there’s really not a whole lot more to know about it, from our point of view, than that.