LA VIE DANS L’UNIVERS. RÉFLEXIONS D’UN PHYSICIEN de Freeman J. Dyson NRF, Gallimard, 2009, 46 p., 20 €
"On comprend aussi, du coup, pourquoi le physicien renommé n’hésite pas réfléchir à partir de quelques auteurs de science-fiction : imaginant des mondes nouveaux, il renouvelle aussi l’expérience quasi « religieuse » du monde. Ce que Dyson appelle des « théofictions », et qu’il assimile un peu rapidement à des discours théologiques, ont notamment l’avantage de nous préparer à respecter dès à présent ceux qui, du fait de déficiences neurologiques par exemple, font déjà d’autres expériences intéressantes du monde.
Le droit à la pensée « hérétique » en science est ainsi souvent revendiqué par l’auteur. Ceux qu’il appelle les « renards », – des scientifiques capables de faire émerger des sauts conceptuels dans un domaine de pensée – l’ont toujours impressionné et ont beaucoup compté dans son propre parcours. Reprenant à son compte la distinction de l’antique poète Archiloque entre les « hérissons », nécessaires, qui ne connaissent qu’une seule astuce et qui s’y consacrent avec persévérance, et les « renards », encore plus nécessaires, qui se dispersent dans beaucoup de directions, J. F. Dyson a visiblement choisi son camp. Et ce n’est pas celui des hérissons."
In the final section of this lecture I shall talk about theological insights that we may derive, not from stories of imagined people, but from stories of real people who live in mental worlds different from ours. They live in different worlds because they suffer from different varieties of neurological impairment. They are truly alien intelligences living together with us on planet Earth.
We have known for hundreds of years that the universe has room in it for other intelligent inhabitants living on other planets. If our ongoing attempts to detect their existence should be successful, this will be a big triumph for science but will not be in any sense a setback for theology. Since the time of Giordano Bruno, the multiplicity of worlds has frequently been a subject for theological speculation. Isaac Newton himself remarked in one of his theological manuscripts:
“And as Christ after some stay in or neare the regions of this earth ascended into heaven, so after the resurrection of the dead it may be in their power to leave this earth at pleasure and accompany him into any part of the heavens, that no region in the whole Univers may want its inhabitants,’’ (Manuel, 1974).
God may be portrayed in a million different shapes in a million inhabited worlds, without any diminution of his greatness.
Likewise, the transition from a Newtonian cosmology of infinite space and absolute time to an Einsteinian cosmology of relativistic space-time has not changed the age-old mystery of God’s relation to the physical universe. I see no reason why God should be inconvenienced if it should turn out that our universe started with an unpredictable quantum fluctuation giving rise to an inflationary expansion, or if it should turn out that we live in one of a multitude of universes. My conception of God is not weakened by my not knowing whether the physical universe is open or closed, finite or infinite, simple or multiple. God for me is a mystery, and will remain a mystery after we know the answers to these questions. All that we know about him is that he works on a scale far beyond the limits of our understanding. I cannot imagine that he is greatly impressed by our juvenile efforts to read his mind. As the Hebrew psalmist said long ago, [Ps. 147], “He hath no pleasure in the strength of an horse, neither delighteth He in any man’s legs.” Translating the psalmist’s verse into modern polysyllabic idiom, we might say, “He hath no pleasure in the teraflops of a supercomputer, neither delighteth He in any cosmologist’s calculations.”
We do not need to postulate alien intelligences in the sky or cosmologies with multiple universes in order to raise new questions concerning religion. Religious questions are best raised by looking at real people with real problems and real insights. Neurology comes closer than cosmology to the questions that are at the heart of theology. Neurology gives us evidence of the way human perceptions and human beliefs come into being. By studying the perceptions and beliefs of people who live in worlds different from ours, we may better understand our own. I am a physicist with no pretensions to be an expert in neurology. When I write about neurology, I write as a layman. My knowledge of neurology is largely derived, not from the technical literature, nor even from the non-technical literature, but from television programs addressed to the general public. I have in mind four one-hour television programs that I recently watched, with the neurologist Oliver Sacks as guide. These depict in vivid fashion the four different worlds inhabited by four groups of people with different kinds of neurological impairment. They have certain features in common. Each of the four neurological impairments is congenital, each of them deprives the affected people of an important human faculty, and each of them is ameliorated by the amazing ability of the human brain to work around obstacles.
The simplest of the four syndromes is achromatopsia, the severe form of color-blindness in which the color-sensing cones in the retina are missing and only the rods remain, [Sacks, 1998]. People with achromatopsia have excellent night-vision but are almost blind in direct sunlight. Many of them adapt to their disability by learning to live like nocturnal animals. Oliver Sacks showed us a community with a high incidence of achromatopsia, living on a South Pacific island. There the achromatopes specialize in night-fishing, a productive occupation for which their disability turns into an advantage.
Far greater obstacles are faced by people with Usher’s syndrome, who are born totally deaf and then in middle age become gradually blind. They too can adapt to their disability if they live in a supportive community. As children they become fluent in sign language. They are able to communicate with one another and to absorb an education as readily as other deaf children. Then as adults, when their sight begins to fade, they can continue to communicate by sign language, the listener touching the hands of the speaker to feel the signs. They can continue to read and write by transferring their skills from print to Braille. Within the community of the deaf-blind, they are not isolated by their double disability and can maintain the social contacts that give meaning to their lives.
The third of the four disabilities is Williams’s syndrome, a genetic defect with consequences less easily described but more profound than Usher’s syndrome. People with Williams’s syndrome have all their five senses but lack the ability to integrate their sensory universe into a quantitative framework. They do not live in the solid three-dimensional world that normal people take for granted. They have great difficulty in forming concepts of shape and size and number. They cannot draw pictures of things, and their world contains no mathematics. They have a characteristic facial appearance which marks them as different from other people. To compensate for these disabilities, many of them are verbally and musically gifted. They are also socially gifted. They have a child-like spontaneity and a cheerful temperament which enables them to make friends easily.
The fourth and most mysterious disability is autism. Autistic people have their senses unimpaired and have no difficulty with abstract concepts of shape and number. Their disability lies at a deeper level. They are born without the normal human ability to attach meaning to things that they see and hear and feel. They have great difficulty learning to talk, and many of them remain speechless all their lives. It happens that the leading character in the autism section of Oliver Sacks’s program is Jessica Park, a lady whose family I have known since before she was born forty years ago. Her mother Clara Park has described her agonizingly slow development in a book with the title The Siege, a classic in the history of autism, (Park, 1982). Jessica was, as her mother wrote, “faced with a world in which an unreadable welter of impressions obscures even the distinction between objects and human beings.” Like other autistic children who learn to speak, for many years Jessica used the pronouns “I’’ and “you’’ interchangeably. She had no concept of her own identity or of the identities of other people. Her mother recorded the fact that she used the word “heptagon’’ correctly before she used the word “yes’’. Through the patient and devoted efforts of her parents and teachers, she has continued for forty years to learn new social skills and to increase her command of spoken language. Her intellectual growth has never stopped. Every year she becomes more independent and more capable of managing her own affairs. Through her paintings she is able to communicate glimpses of her inner world that cannot be communicated in words. Her paintings are exhibited and sold and bring her a modest income. In the television program we see her as she is today, after forty years of adapting to a world that is still largely beyond her comprehension. She speaks to a public audience and responds to questions. She is proud and happy because her gifts as an artist have been recognized. She talks about her paintings. Her speech sounds unnatural but is loud and clear.
What have these four disabilities to do with theology? Each of the four groups of people that I have described lives in a different world, and we normal people live in a fifth world different from theirs. Since we are the majority and have organized our world to suit our needs, they have been forced to adapt their ways of living so as to fit into our society as best they can. On the whole, they have adapted well to our world, but they still do not belong to it. They are aliens living here as guests. I find it illuminating to imagine the situations that would arise if the people with any one of the four disabilities were the majority and we were the minority. Wells already explored such a situation in his story, “The Country of the Blind’’, a hundred years ago. If the majority were suffering either from achromatopsia or from Usher’s syndrome, we would be in a situation similar to Wells’s story. The gifts of color-vision and hearing which seem to us so precious would have little value in the world of the achromatopes or the world of Usher’s syndrome. In the Usher’s world, our spoken language would be for our private use only. We would be forced to think in sign language in order to fit into the prevailing culture. But these first two disabilities are superficial compared with the third and fourth. The worlds of Williams’s syndrome and autism differ from ours profoundly enough to require a different theology.
In the Williams world there is no mathematics and no science. Music and language flourish, but there is no concept of size or distance. The glories of the natural world are enjoyed but not analyzed. Nature is described in the language of art and poetry, not in the language of science. What kind of a theology can arise in the Williams world? We can imagine many possibilities for a Williams theology, all of them different from our own. Our Judeo-Christian theology begins with the first chapter of Genesis, with days that are numbered and counted. “And the evening and the morning were the first day,” and the second day, and so on up to the sixth day. Our conceptions of God, like our conceptions of the universe, are rooted in an exact awareness of the passage of time. These conceptions are alien to the Williams world. A Williams theology would be more likely to resemble the theogony of the ancient Greeks, with gods riding in chariots across the sky and demi-gods hiding in bushes and caves on the earth.
In the autistic world there is no sin. Jessica Park’s mother remarks on the fact that her word is absolutely trustworthy. Jessica cannot tell a deliberate lie because she has no concept of deceit. She cannot conceive of other people’s thoughts and feelings, and so the idea of deceit cannot arise. There is no way for her to imagine doing deliberate harm to other people. When she hurts people, by losing her temper or throwing a tantrum, the hurt results from impatience and incomprehension, not from malice. If sin means deliberate malice, then Jessica is incapable of sin. When Jessica’s father was asked whether she loves her family, he answered, “She loves us as much as she can.” That is a precise statement of Jessica’s condition. In the autistic world, humans love each other without understanding each other, and are incapable of hate. The theology of the autistic world must be radically different from Judeo-Christian theology. Since there is no sin, there can be no fall from grace and no redemption. Since other people’s sufferings are unimaginable, the suffering of an incarnate God is also unimaginable. The autistic theology will probably be like Jessica’s character, simple and transparent, concerned only with innocent joys and sorrows. The strongest link between Jessica’s world and ours is that we share a common sense of humor and can laugh at each other’s jokes.
The most important lesson for us to learn from imagining these alternative worlds is humility. In each of the four worlds, humans are well adapted to their situation and are totally unaware of what we consider to be their disabilities. They believe that they are well informed and aware of everything that is going on in the world around them. In the Williams and autistic worlds, I imagine them building a religion and a theology to explain their world and their place in it. We know, of course, that they are unaware of huge and essential parts of their environment and are incapable of understanding what they cannot imagine. We know that their religion and theology are deeply flawed because they are based on a partial view of reality. If we are honest, we must ask ourselves some hard questions. Why should we believe that we are different? Why should we believe that our view of reality is not also partial, that our religion and theology are not equally flawed? How do we know that there are not huge and essential features of our universe and of our own nature of which we are equally unaware? Why should we believe that the processes of natural selection, which shaped us to survive the hazards of living in a world of fierce predators and harsh climates, should have given us a brain with a complete grasp of the universe we live in? These are the questions that neurology raises. Oliver Sacks has shown us glimpses of alien worlds. His glimpses are powerful arguments for the thesis that there may be more things in heaven and earth than we are capable of understanding. With this conclusion, William James and Sir John Templeton can both agree.
