Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we here? Good morning, I’m Eric Thiel, I come from over thataway, and I’m here to give the sermon.

Albert Einstein, who was known as a scientist, dabbled a little bit in philosophy as well, and said at one time, “God does not play dice with the universe”. This was meant, perhaps, to express his belief that there is a kind of rationality behind the workings of the universe. I think he was wrong. I think that God, if there is such a thing, is the game of dice. I think that the trend of science is leading to an understanding of the universe and our place in it that means that, far from being a joke, the way I answered the philosophical questions I posed in opening is the only meaningful way of responding to them.

What I want to explore today is the idea that there is no meaning to life, no reason for us to be here, that our identity is not separate from the rest of the universe, and that we come from everywhere and right here. This idea isn’t new with me or to me; but the reading I’ve been doing lately in evolutionary biology, physics and cosmology started me thinking more in detail about what the implications might be. These theories seem to explain pretty well the way things work. I am neither a biologist nor a physicist, and this particular congregation contains professionals in both fields. I hope that what I say today will stimulate further explorations by those who know more.

I don’t want to give a lecture, and I want do want to place this concept within some spiritual context, since this is a religious fellowship, so I’d at least like to speak briefly of what spirituality means to me. I never felt any real connection with Christianity, although I was raised in the Lutheran church. And I really don’t seem to be a very spiritual person in the sense of feeling awe before certain thoughts or feelings or phenomena. Mostly I’m pretty prosaic; things are as they are and I’m most interested in the knowable quality of that “are” and why things have that quality, where a reason can be shown. Like a lot of people today, I have searched my roots for a source of spirituality or a set of mythological wisdom and wonder. Where most Europeans seem to turn out to be Celts lately, especially Irish Celts, there’s no doubt that my background is Teutonic—German on my father’s side back a just a couple generations and Norwegian on my mother’s, just one generation removed from Trondheim. Norwegian myths don’t have that magical, intricate, poetic quality that people find so attractive in the Celtic stories. They’re pretty grim, in fact, mostly about who killed whom and raids and treachery and ultimate doom for humans and gods alike. But our major god, Odin, is interesting; he put out one of his own eyes and submitted to extended torture in order to gain understanding of the runes—the Norse alphabet. That’s a pretty high value placed on knowledge. Perhaps I can find a sort of spirituality there; I do feel a kind of awe when I finally understand a new theory or come into possession of a previously unknown fact.

Let me just outline the new theories and discoveries that I have found most fascinating. In the field of biology, I have been particularly interested in the writings of Stephen Jay Gould and in his theories of evolution. Gould has proposed, with others, the theory of punctuated equilibrium to explain what the fossil record is gradually revealing as long periods of stasis interrupted by quick bursts of speciation—the formation of new species. At least some of these periods of speciation have been triggered by mass extinctions, themselves triggered by global catastrophes such as the asteroid impact whose traces were discovered a decade or so ago. Punctuated equilibrium is a refinement of natural selection, not a departure. The key here is the natural disaster itself—a random occurrence that can cause the extinction of a number of species without regard for their “fitness” or level of adaptation to their particular environment. In the book “Wonderful Life”, Gould notes that he got his title from the old movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life” in which the lead character is prevented from committing suicide through the intervention of an angel who shows him how his community, would have changed had he died. The point is that if we could go back to the time just before such a mass extinction, or to the beginning of life, events would not play out the same way twice; different species might survive each time. Had the lineage from which primates branched not survived one of these episodes, we would not be here, although the animal kingdom itself might be otherwise much the same. Gould adds to this theory of contingency a statistical analysis in his book “Full House”, that suggests that there is no “direction” to evolution. The evolution of more complex life forms than the bacteria that were the original earthlings is simply a set of variations around a mean that can only vary in the direction of complexity. Life, in other words, could not get less complex than a single-celled organism, so that variation in the system would have to be more complex; the most complex organisms are rare extreme variations. We are one such.

That is a biological argument against a purpose to life or any special status for human beings as an organism. We now burst the surly bonds of earth and try to briefly cover the cosmology, which is to some extent linked to the arcane specialty of quantum physics, which seems to lend weight to the biological argument. A book I’d like to mention here is “The Whole Shebang” by Timothy Ferris. It was from this and an earlier book by the same author “Coming of Age in the Milky Way, that I began to get some grasp of physics and cosmology, after something like that pains Odin underwent for the runes. Most people are probably familiar with the “big bang” theory that postulates that our universe began with time and space exploding out from a single point. Quantum physics, which deals with the physics of the world of particles, has provided experimental support for this theory; although the exact nature of the big bang event is still uncertain, there is little doubt that it was such an event that originated our universe. The quantum world is rather peculiar; particles can pop in and out of existence, or suddenly appear in another location without having traveled there. In some sense, quantum particles sometimes behave as though time and space don’t exist, reflecting the state of existence before time and space began expanding. It’s one thing to hear some dogmatic philosopher say” We are all one”. For me, though, it is far more exciting to understand that there is a rational, potentially testable theory that holds that before the beginning of the expansion of space and time, everything in the universe really was at the same exact point and that, on the quantum level, we perhaps still are. But the main thing that strikes me is that the quantum world is a world of probabilities, or chances; events are not certain and cannot be determined in advance. The big bang may have had as its source a super black hole, where time and space cannot be said to exist and the word “beginning” has no meaning. It may be the result of a quantum event in another universe, which puts any question of an ultimate beginning far beyond our view anyway. There are other possible sets of physical laws than the ones we ended up with. So what Gould calls contingency in biology seems to also be operating in the universe as a whole. In another big bang, things would not have turned out the way they did and planets and stars might never form, and organic life could not exist.

Where does this leave God? Nothing I have said goes to prove or disprove the existence of God. I am not a believer in a Supreme Being, nor do I disbelieve; and I am not an agnostic, saying that God’s existence is unknowable. I just plain don’t care whether or not God exists. God is not important to my life. I think of God, if there should be such a thing, as the game of dice that came up with the number of our particular universe that produced us and who knows what else in its vastness. The universe having come into being, the game no longer matters; it has gone on to other random events.

What I do find intriguing in all this is that there may be some basis for stating that there is no meaning or purpose in life to be sought. We may be here just a random event; even as a part of life we may be no more than an unlikely occurrence among a whole set of possible occurrences. In fact, this is my view of life and I would like to share with you what I think the implications are. What does this lack of meaning mean? Again, it is not entirely a joke to look for the meaning of no-meaning; Zen monks have been doing it for years. I think there is something to be taken and cherished out of the idea that there is no meaning to life. Far from indicating our estrangement from the universe, I think it brings us into the universe. And instead of stripping our lives of meaning, I think that the purposelessness of the universe and of life in general imbues our existence as individuals and as a species with meaning. To say that life is purposeless doesn’t mean that nothing we do makes any difference; it means that everything we do always makes the most profound difference. This is like the hurricane that starts in the Caribbean because a butterfly has fluttered its wings in the Himalayas. The interaction of hundreds or thousands of small random events is the driving force in many systems, especially complex systems; things are unpredictable because there is no way to account for all random events. We share this planet with each other, with all life and with all inorganic beings; our random interactions are what drive the course of history. Our meaning is what we mean to each other, what we can do to enhance each other’s life. If we were disconnected from others, then our lives, like the universe, would be meaningless; but we can never be disconnected, no matter what tragedies or separations we may experience. And our very individual existence, although it may be a random occurrence, is the focus of a whole chain of random occurrences that would not have been realized without the particular set of energies our existence releases.

Further, if there is no place that we came from and nowhere we are going to, the thing that matters most is the moment we find ourselves in, and those that we share that moment with. It is a spectacularly improbable chance that we are here at all, and that we happened at such a time as to share with those whose paths cross ours; isn’t this a reason for celebration? For me, at least when I’m paying attention, it lends value to each thing I do, each conversation I happen to have, and each relationship I happen to be a part of. I find the idea of life’s meaninglessness very focusing. The more I explore the idea, the deeper is the meaning I find in work, play, love and the world I inhabit.

How then should we live? After all, if things are random and God isn’t around to give us an instruction manual, we get to make up our own rules, right? But I think a kind of moral imperative can be gained from the vast impersonality and chaos of the universe. Everything on our planet was formed by the same set of improbable circumstances. Rocks, water, flowers, poison ivy, birds, cockroaches, dogs, iguanas (whether radioactively mutated or not), and people each have the same value in our world; they all have the right to existence. People are biologically so similar that it is just as close to the truth to say that we are all the same—men, women, black, white, gay, straight, spiritual or Norwegian—as it is to say that we are each unique. It is from the findings of scientists that I take these precepts, my own interpretation of the data presented; like Sgt. Friday, it is just the facts, ma’am, I am after. I cannot trust rules handed down by sages who gain their knowledge from mystical communions that they cannot explain. If it can’t be explained, why should I accept? Even quantum physics can be explained; it just takes a really long time.

I still don’t quite understand what spirituality is, I guess; sometimes I feel like I am lacking a capacity that most people have; that I’m dealing with an unknown language. I do enjoy the discussions of spirituality I have heard in this place; perhaps I can learn some of that language thanks to the generous openness of this fellowship. But I think there are others in the congregation who are also more interested in the intricate, wonderful and factual workings of the earth and the universe than in speculation about the workings of the divine. I would like to see as much emphasis on the natural as the supernatural (in the sense of that which is unknowable through rational thought) in our meetings. I have found constant wonder and even some comfort in the concept that life, the universe and everything have no meaning. Life, like Shevek in the quote at the top of the order of service, comes to us with empty hands. It offers us nothing but the chance to make it what we want. It is through this that I find my approach to life, finding happiness in the bizarre reality of our humdrum world, offering my empty hands to you and answering the question “Who am I?” like Jehovah and Popeye-- “I yam that I yam—and that’s all I yam”.