Music of the Spheres

Making joyful noise ...


One thing notably absent from Quaker meetings is music. At ours, the only exceptions are the annual Christmas celebration at which carols are sung, and the rare occasions where one of our members is moved to give his message in song form -- a unique and pleasant form of vocal ministry.

I've been known to feel musical envy for those other religions, like the Catholic and Lutheran, which have generated such rich troves of sacred music. I suppose I got this from my parents, both classical musicians, to whom it was so important that it was the main reason we ended up being Unitarians for a time -- because the organist played a lot of Bach. Reason enough!

Of course, not all musicians are as profoundly spiritual as J.S. Bach, who was known for inscribing the title pages of his works, "To the Glory of God In the Highest." Yet in a very fundamental way, the impulse to sing, to "make a joyful noise unto the Lord," must have been there at the earliest beginnings of human music. It certainly formed the foundation of Western European music, the notes and scales and rhythms and forms of which continue to define what music is, however hard we may try to twist it into something new.

What else is there to do when contemplating Divinity, or the Universal, or simply a beautiful day, but to sing its praises? So perhaps it is not surprising that I often find myself with music on the brain as I sit in supposed silence in our meeting for worship. Today it was Tchaikovsky -- the achingly beautiful slow movement to his First Symphony -- and later part of Leonard Bernstein's Mass, where the priest sings, "Let us sing the Lord a simple song ... for God is the simplest of all." But other times it has been Bach, or Beethoven ("On your knees now, O millions? Do you sense your Maker, world?"), or any number of the other selections that my brain has become stuffed with over the years.

I ended up thinking of an interview I saw with a physicist (I believe it was Phillip Morrison) who was asked, if we ever established contact with a civilization of alien beings, what would we have to say to each other? He answered that one thing we might do was to compare accomplishments. For example, he said with a smile, we might say, "We've got Bach's B-minor Mass ... what have you got?"

Well, that sounds like bragging to me. But it does raise the prospect that if such communication ever does happen -- and it may -- then perhaps it will be the music of the alien civilization that speaks to us most directly, and tells us that we have a common origin, and that we share the same desire to praise That From Which We Came. In short, it could be the most profound thing we have to say to each other, though it will come as news to neither of us.

Happy Birthday, Mr. Darwin

Attacked by the religious right, he could be done in by the atheists ...

Elsewhere in this meandering blog I have railed against those who would have us throw science out of our schools and embrace a world view which is on a par with believing in a flat Earth sitting motionless at the center of the universe.

But I'm equally irked to hear that a local Atheist Society is vocally supporting a celebration of Darwin Day. Don't the Creationists -- I mean, Intelligent Designers -- have enough arguments already without a bunch of disbelievers feeding the frenzy by confirming the idea that Darwin's theory is tantamount to godlessness? This is like a US political candidate getting an endorsement from the Communist Party -- thanks for your support, guys, but ...

Now, I don't mean to demean atheists by comparing them to Communists. Even though Karl Marx famously condemned all religion as "the opiate of the masses," and even though the Soviet Union worked diligently to stamp out religious practices, there is of course no reason why a believer in democracy can't also be a disbeliever in divinity -- and many are. But my complaint is that by publicly endorsing Darwin's theory at a time when it is a source of such contention, they are only making things more difficult. And by appearing to embrace the theory as evidence to support atheism they are doing as much harm to the truth as those who consider it a negation of religion.

The reality is that Darwin described a mechanism to explain the observed fact that species change and evolve over time. He realized that human beings were an integral part of this process, and must have emerged from earlier ancestors just as all other plants and animals have done over the billions of years since life first came into being on our planet. Anticipating the furor that could result over this concept, he waited twenty years before publishing it, and was nearly beaten into print by Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the same theory independently. This is yet another example of how the truth will emerge when the time comes, regardless of who takes the credit. It would be no different to us today if it were called Wallace's Theory of Evolution.

As products of their age, neither man was an atheist. It was a time when science and religion were seen to cooperate more than compete. Wallace in fact had some wild ideas of spirituality that made him suspect in the scientific community. But their work was not done either to prove or disprove the existence of God. It was simply to learn more about how our natural world works, and to learn more about our place in that world.

So I have similar questions to pose to both ends of the radical spectrum. If you are a fundamentalist Christian, can you not still find wonder -- even greater wonder -- in considering a God who brought a whole universe into being in a single explosive instant, and who molded its stars, planets, and living things with a single set of basic rules that made it inevitable that beings like ourselves would arise from the dust? And if you are an atheist, can you not find the same sense of wonder in contemplating that same universe, and can you not admit that your sense of awe in the presence of that reality corresponds to what the religious feel in the presence of their God?

We are all human. We all belong to the same world in the same cosmos. And none of us really knows why. All the rest is argument about terminology.

  

Google celebrates Darwin

It's (Almost) Alive!

Life in a test tube? Coming right up ...


Way back when I was taking high school biology our text book described an intriguing experiment where a scientist had cooked up a laboratory version of the primordial soup in which life was supposed to have originated. After heating it and zapping it with artificial lightning bolts in a piece of sealed glassware, he examined the results and discovered that primitive amino acids -- the building blocks of proteins, and eventually DNA -- had been formed. It was easy to imagine that we were only a few steps away from creating "life in a test tube," one of the big dreams of science fiction buffs everywhere.

The reality has turned out to be a bit trickier. Even though we have learned a great deal more about how cells work, and even though we have decoded DNA and begun to play with it like a set of tinker-toys to create new combinations, we don't seem to be a lot closer to actually creating living organisms from inanimate chemicals.

But now in this article New Scientist reports a further breakthough on the road to discovering how life may have originated. Beginning with a synthetic molecule they created themselves, with the ability to assemble a copy of itself from short segments of RNA, they were able to show a working model of a self-replicating molecular unit which, while not quite alive, fulfills one of life's primary functions, and may be an example of the kind of step that preceeded the first living organisms.

Even more fascinating, they were able to demonstrate a low level form of evolution by allowing competing molecules to vie with each other for available raw materials. Those with the best ability to make copies of themselves soon dominated the others.

This marvelously simple demonstration of the power of natural selection shows how the process may have played a key role even in the original formation of life from proto-organic compounds. Once again we must stand in awe of a cosmos in which this drive toward life and higher consciousness appears to be built into the most fundamental laws, leading with inevitability from atoms to stars, stars to planets, simple molecules to life, and life to intelligence.