Coincidences

I watched a movie titled Knowing at a friend's house last night. Its a rather nice story about how the world will end (there's been a few of that lately) and how the next generation will survive.

What surprised me was how an MIT astrophysics professor (played by Nicholas Cage) commits a logical fallacy on the big screen. Well maybe I should blame the scriptwriter because I'm quite certain a proposition like that would never see the light of day in a place like MIT.

You've probably heard it before.

1. If the planet earth was just a mile out of orbit, either closer to or further away from the sun, we would not exist today.
2. Too hot, we'll dry up. Too cold, we'll freeze.
3. The planet has just the right amount of acidity, alkalinity, sunlight, heat, land, water, gravity, etc
4. It is because all these unlikely conditions came together that we humans can live.
5. Its all too amazing* to be a coincidence, therefore some higher intelligence must have put our planet right where it is so we can exist.

Errr.... really?

I am sorry to say this but there are many studies on how our "placed-just-right" sun will ultimately prove to be placed horribly wrong when it fries the planet with abnormal super-flare activity, hurls big rocks from outer space at us using its gravitational pull or puts us in that lop-sided once-in-every-200,000-years orbit that brings us just a bit closer to it, warming the planet enough to cause mass extinction. Any paleontologist will tell you we have been down that road before. And if that doesn't kill us, the sun will sooner or later erupt in a super nova that is the fate of all dying suns and take us along with it.

But we close one eye to things that are inconvenient to the miracle concept that "everything is made just right for life," insisting that the abundance of oxygen, sunlight, water, etc. is proof of something while we stay silent at how these very same things can actually kill life - life that thrives in the depths of the ocean or deep underground where there is no sunlight, in the intense heat and sulphuric poison around volcanic vents, in the oxygenless and highly radioactive environments in spots on the planet we deem uninhabitable. We prefer to ignore that our ideal conditions would kill these creatures in seconds and vice versa.

You can look at it this way. If you live in a nice cozy apartment in the middle of a hostile neighbourhood where marauders routinely beat and gun down people every day, would you call your neighbourhood "a wonderful miracle, made just right for life?" Don't forget you still have to go out and buy your rice and vegetables.

Actually I do believe in miracles, just a different one. I see a miracle not in how the furniture was somehow "arranged" to our tastes like a big birthday present but in how we thrive in spite of the conditions we're born into. I do not think of ourselves as the centre of the universe, where everything in nature came to be for the sole purpose of my existence. Otherwise I'll become like the auntie who scolds the doctor, "Doctor doctor, why did you tell me my husband got serious illness? These things ah, they always like to make me upset!" It just makes me want to tell her, "No Auntie, when your husband's cancer came out, I don't think it had you in mind."

Humility requires me to accept that I am the product of nature, not the cause of it.


*What amazes a kampung guy like me may not amaze a physics professor from MIT, hence my urge to always scrutinize all "amazing coincidences."