Creator and Redeemer of All the Worlds

He is the Creator and Sustainer of all the worlds, whether those worlds are known or unknown to mankind. -sample that serves as an antiphon to J-Tron, "Via Media", My Apologies , Celtic Cross Productions, 2006.

Some interesting conversation started on Dean Knisely's blog . I have my own take on this question, because while I am not an astrobiologist per se , I do have very close interactions with them. In fact, I was accepted to a graduate program in astrobiology not too long ago. So I've had to reflect for some time on the implications of our continually growing knowledge about the conditions under which life evolved in this stellar system and on this planet and the increasing possibility that we are not so very unique in the scheme of things. What follows here is an exercise in the long view of affairs. Unless I am much mistaken, we will not confront the problem of extrasolar evangelism for a few centuries yet.

And in those centuries, the Church faces a crisis of affairs more potent than even the destruction of the western Roman Empire. I'm not sure what form it will take. On one hand, it could be an event of near human extinction in which our manipulations of the climate and planetary biogeochemistry finally reduce much of the planet to marginal human habitability for an extended period without the prospect of quick recovery. In that case, the Church may have to return to its role after the failure of Pax Romana victoriis Romanis to twist Augustus' odd phrase in the Res Gestae . But we must remember that the Church in that period was not just a caretaker of knowledge, but it was also a caretaker of values. Respect for innocent life and meum et tuum may not be upheld by law in future ages. Nor might there be much concern for the guilty. This is why it is so important for Christendom to maintain a modicum of its social teaching in the midst of regional disorders such as Zimbabwe and the military adventures of our own government. To where shall we look if it fails globally?

Alternately, our problems may be technologically soluble. Just this week, I was talking with a gentleman who raises funds for and otherwise promotes private experiments in nuclear fusion for power generation. While he admits the low likelihood of success of what he is doing, we might just get lucky. A new source of abundant energy, if properly distributed and used, would go a long way to mitigate the effects of the toxic mix of economic inequality and environmental degradation that is the wind in our door. But if technology pushes the limits of plasticity once more, we likely face another and epistemologically stranger outcome by the end of the century. Advances in biotechnology and computer science may present us with options for modifying ourselves and our children or just push us further into electronic intimacy, in which our presence to one another becomes more and more mediated by machine. C.S. Lewis envisioned that the Moon is constantly embroiled in civil war between the barren side that faces us and the fertile garden that he imagined on the other side. Of course, the "dark side" of the Moon is nothing like this. But his veiled talk of "cold marriages," where lovers construct robots with artificial gonads rather than accept in their own bodies physical intimacy and reproduction, may not be a lunatic fantasy in the world of 2090 (see the movie Demolition Man for another example). In the era which the futurists call the Singularity, I see the Church's witness to the Incarnation could be crucial. A God with us is a God who encourages us to be present and engaged with one another and with the raw physicality of the created order, even when we do not want to face them.

But in a few hundred years time, provided we are equipped for it, it will be quite easy for us to put a large transmitter array in orbit of Mercury or elsewhere and listen and look very carefully for the signs of other civilizations. Even within my lifetime, I will not be surprised to have seen evidence for the existence of a planet like our own. Three months or so of the Iraq war would pay for such a search (as it would pay for other, more fungible things). What should the Church's witness be to another sentient species? With what should we evangelize the stars?

In the words of Get Religion, astrobiology has a very strong religion ghost attached to it. Many trace the beginnings of the scientific investigation of life beyond the Earth to Giordano Bruno, who was condemned for heresy and burned at the stake in the Campo de Fiori in Rome on that account. Bruno speculated on limited evidence that the fixed stars were like the Sun and that there were an infinity of worlds orbiting their own stars. Descartes comes very close to admitting this, too, in his slightly later Treatise on Light , which remained unpublished until his death on that account. It's not clear what the nature of Bruno's heresy was, since the official record of the trial likely was suppressed and lost. A contemporary (Luigi Firpo) claimed the charges were:

"Holding opinions contrary to the Catholic Faith and speaking against it and its ministers.
Holding erroneous opinions about the Trinity, about Christ's divinity and Incarnation.
Holding erroneous opinions about Christ.
Holding erroneous opinions about Transubstantiation and Mass.
Claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity.
Believing in metempsychosis and in the transmigration of the human soul into brutes.
Dealing in magics and divination.
Denying the Virginity of Mary.

The charge of interest to this work is "claiming the existence of a plurality of worlds and their eternity." Considering the nature of Bruno's other theological opinions, this was a penny compared to the pound. The Catholic Encyclopedia suggests his heresies veered toward Gnostic fantasies of various sorts including various beliefs anathematized by the Fifth Ecumenical Council concerning the Holy Spirit as anima mundi . But Bruno's celebrity is not the creature of anyone who cares about these matters, so I long had the impression that it was the plurality of worlds that so dismayed the Inquisition. After all, if there were intelligent life, would it be necessary for Christ to be incarnate on all of those worlds and die over and over again? C.S. Lewis may have had Bruno at the back of his mind when he orders the universe in his Space Trilogy to be ruled by Archons, angels of God that do act like animae mundorum . However, most planets including all of those outside the Solar System do not have life, regarding it as a burden or a humiliation. Venus has human life, thanks to the Incarnation, but they do not fall thanks to the assistance of a Christian Earthman. Martians apparently don't quite have free will. And if the Venusians had fallen, God would have had to come up with some new plan. They could not be justified by faith in God in Christ. Fortunately, we do not live in Lewis' modified Neoplatonic fantasy world or Tolkien's passingly similar Arda (Old Solar and Valinorean are practically the same language, after all. If you like the Lord of the Rings , you really should read The Space Trilogy).

To this soteriological puzzle, I propose an alternate solution to Lewis'. My first inspiration for this idea is that great hymn of Athenagoras many of us sing in the evening, "O gracious light...you are worthy at all times to be praised, o Son of God, o Giver of Life, and to be glorified throughout all the worlds." The 1979 BCP translates the Greek kosmos as "all the worlds." What is interesting about this translation is that it is perhaps the most accurate of all the translations I can read. The Latin has saecula , which is ridiculous, suggesting an extent of time usually signified by the Greek aion , though "aion" in the sense of "world to come" or "age to come" is a known use. Everyone else generally translates it as "world." The New Testament speaks of three kinds of worlds, oikoumene , which I take to mean the world of the secular powers, for this is the world of "and the decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed." This is the world of our limited imagination and the world of our conceits about power. There is ge , the word for soil expanded to all the inhabited land. It's very important. John, who generally does not use it as much as the other Evangelists, uses it in places such as 12:24 and 12:32, where it has soteriological relevance, connecting Christ's death to curse of the ground and evil power of the air. But otherwise, John uses kosmos , famously at the words of John the Baptist, "Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world." Τῇ ἐπαύριον βλέπει τὸν Ἰησοῦν ἐρχόμενον πρὸς αὐτόν, καὶ λέγει, Ἴδε ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ θεοῦ ὁ αἴρων τὴν ἁμαρτίαν τοῦ κόσμου. . The world of John's Gospel is primarily the cosmos, a word best understood in English as "order" in the sense of the "created order." Thus, if we take John 3:16 literally, for instance, we must admit that salvation is through Christ's Incarnation on earth.

Moreover, the linguistics of the Great Commissions can be read to suggest the importance of humans to the economy of salvation generally. Matthew's version commands us to evangelize every ethnos . Mark's version tells us to go through the kosmos and preach the gospel to every ktisis or created being, which is a wide commission that only St. Francis and a few others have taken seriously. In the Song of the Three Young Men, the authors encourage the whole created order to praise the Lord, matching the scope of the Markan commission. The Acts commission speaks of the ge , but an alternate translation of eschatos ge might be "end of the world" as opposed to "furthermost part of the world." For God, time and space must be quite interchangeable, so it is quite interesting how terms about space and time are quite interchangeable in the Scriptures.

But these linguistic arguments matter very little if the Evangelists operated under a limited worldview and vision of the cosmos . If in their view, we were alone, their use of cosmos really might be restricted to the Earth. Although, as we will see later, I believe in the power of prophecy to put into words visions beyond the prophetic imagination, the argument from usage has been warned against since at least Augustine's treatment of the linguistic arguments about love in City of God that still stimulate the theological imagination (see Pope Benedict's Deus Caritas est . However, in the same way that love is one, I argue that salvation is one, through Jesus Christ, and chiefly but not exclusively mediated through the missionary efforts of His Church.

For indeed, the Evangelists likely did not have a limited vision of the created order and the importance of Christ's saving work to it. Their contemporary, the Apostle Paul, stretched the limits of the Hellenistic worldview when he wrote:

The created universe is waiting with eager expectation for God's sons to be revealed. It was made subject to frustration, not of its own choice but by the will of him who subjected it, yet with the hope that the universe itself is to be freed from the shackles of mortality and is to enter upon the glorious liberty of the children of God. Up to the present, as we know, the whole created universe in all its parts groans as if in the pangs of childbirth." (Romans 8:19-22).

And so there is to be no doubt about Paul's meaning (he isn't just talking about the natural environment on Earth), you can read Ephesians 1 or this famous line closing the book:

"Our struggle is not against human foes, but against cosmic powers, against the authorities and potentates of this dark age, against the superhuman forces of evil in the celestial spheres."

Yes, I realize there is nothing particularly obvious in these passages. But put into a more modern context, I suggest that we take them more seriously as encouragement to think about how Church can fulfill its commission to bring the fullness of Christ to all things in anticipation of the eschaton when we all shall be free.

Why Now?

One key mythos of science is that it constantly leads us to consider how small and insignificant we are before the infinity of the cosmos. While I admit the utility of this mythos for inculcating in us humility, I think there is a strong possibility that there is a happy medium between our insignificance and our centrality to the universe. I would argue that the human species arose at an opportune moment in the history of the universe. The primary evidence for this is chemical. The observations over the last decade of extrasolar planets have demonstrated something quite important about planets, they very much tend to form around stars with high amounts of heavy elements observed in their atmosphere, things like iron and magnesium (or carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen for that matter), which are essential for our enzymatic systems. Stellar evolution models suggest that the heavy element concentration of the stars (their metallicity) has increased over time, as the nuclear fusion processes that power the stars and their fiery destruction in supernovas gradually produce more and more heavy elements from the primal hydrogen and helium of the early Universe. These heavy elements also form the nuclei of the cores of the giant planets in our Solar System.

The Sun is a later generation star. Its initial heavy element reservoir, which condensed out to form the planets and similar bodies we know today, is a legacy of at least 500 stars by last count. Evidence for this inheritance comes from relics of these stars in the form of silicon carbide and diamond grains that formed from these stars and were blown out into the nebula out of which the Sun formed with different chemical properties than the meteorites in which they are typically found. It's possible that the Sun may be among the first generation of stars with enough heavy elements to form terrestrial planets, though that particular idea is controversial. But what if it is true? At this point, our planet had a variety of advantages:

It orbits a G-type star, which produces a significant flux of photons with energies between those necessary for electronic and vibrational transitions (tending toward low atmospheric absorption of incoming radiation). A planet orbiting a G type star at a distance at which it is generally warm enough to have water probably will not become tidally locked to its star (as Mercury and Venus in some sense have). Moreover, G-type stars have an early phase of strong UV flux followed by a period of gradual brightening, which may have been necessary for early organic synthesis and the development of photosynthesis. Although I would not go as far as James Lovelock in arguing for biological regulation of the Earth's climate, the possibility that the rate of evolution is optimized by a slowly changing radiation budget is intriguing. Moreover, if Lovelock is right, timing is crucial. Carbon dioxide (despite our hiccups) has been declining over the history of the Earth as the Sun has brightened. However, if carbon dioxide falls below 150 ppm, photosynthesis is greatly reduced. Thus in a few hundred million years, the Earth either will be too warm or too carbon-deficient for plant life.

In a few centuries, I suspect we will have a far better idea of how special we are and how early we are in the general scheme of intelligent life. One possibility is that we are among the first fruits of a brief flowering of intelligent life. In that case, the Scriptures give us hope of an eschaton in which Christ will recreate the universe and bring us into union with him. As the universe expands and we wonder if the rate of stellar enrichment in heavy elements will outpace the reduction in density, this is hope indeed. The era of the terrestial planets may be quite brief. To any civilization with our sophistication, the news we bring may be good indeed if we still hold it in sincerity.

Why Us?

The challenge of extrasolar evangelism, no doubt, will vex future theologians. After all, it's far easier for Jesus to be an "astral traveler" from the practical perspective. It would absolve us of responsibility if Jesus became incarnate for each fallen intelligent species. But my heart cries against this on several grounds. First, the universality of Christ and his sacrifice is limited by his "dying over and over again." The preacher of the Hebrews was insistent on one death alone to cleanse our conscience.

Second, the idea that Christ would have to become incarnate for each species presents problems for the principle of our equality before God. The kingdom of our God is one for every language, tribe, people, and nation. While the Creed we say today speaks of Christ becoming a human being, our future Creed may speak of the Creator becoming a creature. We have founded our principles of equality on us all being created in the image of God. Is the image of God to be found in our particular form? Or does it lie in our creative powers, truly iconic of the Creator? I won't pretend that this presents an evangelical challenge. But it will be best for our future relations with our extraterrestrial brothers and sisters if we are insistent that we are like them in the most fundamental way, that God created them in His image, and died for their sins in our common vulnerability. To argue otherwise will raise questions of superior and inferior and the spectre of exploitation. This is not to say that I am certain of this, and I think we will have to listen carefully to their stories and be prepared to have our minds changed. But I think our default assumption should be that we share the Kingdom with them through Jesus Christ, first revealed in the flesh in Bethlehem Ephrata.

Third, I fear there may be additional objections on the grounds that it will take a long time to evangelize the universe. What will happen to those who never hear the Word? In the first place, every other species will have the same opportunity as we do to know God through the order of his creation, which is evidence of the Son and therefore the Father. Those who live in this light have excuse on the day of judgment as Paul suggests. The larger problem lies in the harrowing of Hell, when Jesus supposedly preached to the "souls in prison." I still don't know how this is supposed to work with aliens.

Some also might wonder why should we be the only evangelists? If the acts of God were seen by all, it would be more efficient. But if we are among the first intelligent species, this makes some sense. We should realize these issues have arisen before. For the LORD made distinction between Israel and the nations, while proclaiming that the nations should have salvation in the seed of Abraham. At Morning Prayer lately, I have been reading the Story of the Three Young Men and the Fiery Furnace from Daniel. In this story, King Nebuchadnezzar learns of the power of the one true God through the faith in the face of death and deliverance of three of his court officials, who are Jewish. In this sense, humanity may be special, but it is an obligation. The maintenance of our habits and our faith in the darker corners of space will be a proclamation of Christ.

FutureScripture/LoveSounds

Let us conclude this fanciful set of speculations by considering a key question: if we are meant to evangelize space, how will the Scriptures speak to us if they are written from a worldview in which our present limits are very much the limits of the important universe. I would suggest that the Scriptures were revealed in such a way that this problem could be evaded by creating an analogy between outer space and the sea. Best of all, this analogy is at the very beginning of the Old Testament, where the Spirit hovers over the face of the waters. Other creation accounts suggest that God created the universe by killing the primal sea monster. Thus in the Scriptures, I think many references to the sea also could refer to outer space in the same way that many of the events of the history of Israel and Judah and the rituals of the Law also refer to life of Christ. The other planets then become islands and coastline. Think of what the Psalmist says, "The LORD is king. Let the earth rejoice and the multitude of the isles be glad!" (Psalm 97). It seems a tad redundant, but it might signify to us a wider view of creation. Or think on the words of Isaiah, "A bruised read he shall not break and a smoldering wick he shall not quench until he establishes justice on Earth and the coastlands wait for his teaching...Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise from the end of the earth: Let the sea and what fills it resound, the coastlands, and those who dwell in them" (Isaiah 42:3-4,10). Indeed, Isaiah is clearly referring to Earth as he knows it with Kedar and Sela giving glory. But as the Church has made a practice of Christological reading, She may in future have to practice cosmological reading. The coastlands indeed may be waiting for His teaching, groaning aloud for the revelation of the children of God. Amen.

I.1 Returns

The science is a little less mungy. A little poetic in places. But I did correct the gross inaccuracies about early photosynthesis. Next Time: 2. The First Global Biogeochemical Crisis: The Rise of Oxygen and the Snowball Earths


Part I: The Mysteries of Ancient Times

Hear my teaching, O my people;
incline your ears to the words of my mouth.
I will open my mouth in a parable;
I will declare the mysteries of ancient times.
That which we have heard and known,
And what our forefathers have told us,
We will not hide from our children.
We will recount to generations to come
The praiseworthy deeds and the power of the LORD,
And the wonderful works he has done.

(Psalm 78:1-4)


1. How Did We Get Here?: The Origin(s) of Life on Earth

It is tremendously hard to date when life first arose on Earth. The usual approach is to bracket the origin of life within an age range. The first date is the time before which life was unlikely to exist and the second date is the time at which fossils become unambiguously identifiable as fossils. Both dates have been tricky to pin down. Traditionally, the first date corresponds to the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment, a hypothesized period of extremely intense meteoritic impact primarily inferred from dating of some of the rocks found by the Apollo astronauts, which contain an material that is indicative of asteroid impact. This glass probably forms when an asteroid hits the Moon, vaporizes lunar material, and the material flash-freezes. Some of this material happens to be orange, though not necessarily the impact glass in the older rocks. (I’ve actually seen some of it under the microscope. It may be the most colorful substance on the Moon.)

The story the rocks tell is that ~3.8-3.9 billion years ago, there was some disturbance in the Solar System that sent many comets and/or asteroids spiraling toward the Sun. Although the Sun is big and the Earth and Moon are small, there was apparently enough material spiraling Sunward that the Earth would have experienced the cosmic equivalent of anthropogenic Mutually Assured Destruction every 10-100 years or so. The Moon did not fare much better and some of the largest craters on the Moon probably date from this period. In addition to producing a crater (~ 30 km. or so on the average), such a large impact would have stripped off a bit of the atmosphere, flash-boiled the surface of the ocean within ~100 km., and sent a potentially cell damaging sonic wave over the immediate area. Condensing vaporized rock and other impact fragments also might put particles into the air that would scatter sunlight. Until interest in possible extraterrestrial microbial life grew in recent years, it was generally thought impossible that life could survive in such circumstances, let alone develop. Now, there is less pessimism about the development of life during this entirely too exciting time. Michael Russell, a professor at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre, argues that the most likely origin mechanism would have to have a high probability of repeatability, since life would have been wiped out constantly. However, the nature of the first date does not change too much, since it now marks its “emergence” rather than its origin.

The second date very quickly becomes a matter of opinion? What is a fossil? How can you tell that some structure in a rock is evidence that something was once alive? Well, the oldest strategy is what is called aktualism. You assume that lifeforms in the past might have looked like present organisms or made similar kinds of holes in rocks and draw parallels. Although this particular example of aktualism sounds fairly reasonable, it was quite controversial in the 17th century when Nicholas Steno, a Danish scientist employed by the Grand Duke of Tuscany, argued that the things that looked like seashells in the mountains north of Florence actually were seashells and not random inorganic structures. Of course, aktualism only works if the potential fossil organisms have modern analogs.

One less obvious example of aktualism more relevant to early life is the controversy about the stromatolite. A stromatowhat? Well, stromatolites are structures in layers of sedimentary rock that look like little sets of half-circular layers disturbing the exceptionally regular layers of early sedimentary rock. (I’ll probably mention later why sedimentary rocks tend to have more mottled structures). The original hypothesis was that stromatolites still existed as algae still living in one of the harshest environments on Earth, the intertidal flat, the large piece of shoreline that is alternately covered and uncovered by the tide in areas with a large range between high tide and low tide like the coast of Newfoundland. This particular habitat is a tricky one to occupy, since the chemistry of the water changes radically between high tide and low tide etc. The algae, however, are chemically flexible, just very vulnerable to being eaten, so they do well in intertidal flats but rarely remain as coherent structures on any other surface in modern marine environments. The algae also secrete mucus, like any other typical cluster of cells. This mucus tends to trap clay particles, eventually killing the algae, but forming a new place for their descendants to live on: the graves of their ancestors. Eventually, these algal colonies form mounds that are similar in size and shape to semicircular structures first seen in the rock record about 3.5 billion years ago. Much later, stromatolites actually show evidence of being eaten. Are modern stromatolites the same as ancient stromatolites? Well, the present consensus is that ancient stromatolites differed biologically from modern stromatolites, being cyanobacteria (photosynthesizing bacteria) as opposed to more closely related to the plants like algae. Smaller examples of cyanobacteria fossils are preserved in rocks as old as 3.8 billion years old, suggesting that photosynthesis, a chemical process so complex that humans cannot reproduce it, i.e., use sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen at high efficiency, is at least as ancient as the oldest rocks that possibly could preserve evidence of it.

Rounding out our story of controversial fossils might be the hypothesized biological structures within ALH84001. And by ALH84001, I mean the first meteorite found in the 1984 field season in the Allan Hills area of Antarctica. Or indeed, by ALH84001, I mean a 4.2 billion year old or so chunk of Mars that was knocked off the surface by meteor impact and eventually landed on the Earth. Because no one knows if there is life on Mars or what it might look like, the features of ALH84001 that are proposed to be biological supposedly look like the most primitive microbes on Earth. The more scientifically trained reader might enjoy Allan Treiman’s courageous attempt to keep an open mind about ALH84001 , but the present consensus is that all properties of the meteorite, including its texture, could be produced without biological interference.
Why have we spent so much time talking about dating and early fossils? Wouldn’t the mechanisms of the origin of life be of more interest? Well, they are. In fact, there was heated discussion in the Letters of Science last week of the two major competing hypotheses about what kind of environment produced the first microbes. But it is the dating issue that has stimulated more theological reflection lately.

I really do not know the full story I am about to tell in any detail. I have picked up bits and pieces over the years in my reading and conversing with evolutionary biologists and people who think they have found a proof for the existence of God, but I’ll try to give you a basic idea. In the 1950s, Harold Urey and Stanley Miller at the University of Chicago created organic molecules by shocking a miniature model of the primitive Earth’s atmosphere. This was supposed to simulate lightning on the early Earth. Later research has suggested that the early atmosphere may have been compositionally different (and more or less favorable to organic production) than what was believed in the 1950s. But the chief problem with the Miller-Urey experiment was not its experimental setup but how it has been interpreted in the textbook literature and popular thought. Miller and Urey did not create life. They created organic molecules, the building blocks of life, which at the time seemed fairly close to life. However, organic molecules, we have learned since, are fairly ubiquitous in the Solar System. Meteorites, for instance, contain some fairly sophisticated organic molecules, though of a particular and limited kind. Titan, the chief moon of Saturn, has a much broader organic repertoire in its atmosphere, which has parallels with the atmosphere of the early Earth.

By the early 1980s, researchers realized that the major property that distinguished life from organic molecules was the ability to remember how to manufacture certain kinds of organic molecules that would be useful for the organism. Presently, our own bodies have DNA and RNA to perform that function, but DNA and RNA are far too sophisticated to have been produced by abiotic organic synthesis at random . What was needed was some sort of inorganic substance that could store “information” and eventually make the sophisticated molecules that would replace its function. By the early 1980s, information also was a technical mathematical term, connected with probability, permutation, entropy, and digital computing. Moreover, the analytical techniques of mineralogy had advanced greatly, allowing the structural diversity of naturally occurring inorganic substances to be understood. Soon there developed the Clay Mineral Hypothesis, which proposed that the first life began very much like your grandmother’s wedding china, as polymerized layers of closely bonded silicon and oxygen, filled with magnesium, potassium, iron, aluminum, and water, like a sandwich. Accounting for structural defects and the particular arrangement of metal ions and layers, clays have high potential information content for an inorganic substance. Moreover, clays are ubiquitous, as any mother knows when her small child comes in from playing in the rain. Mud is mostly clay. Clays also typically are a byproduct of volcanically heated water solutions altering volcanic rock, one of the proposed settings for the origin of life.

At this point, I think it would be fair to mention that both the Urey-Miller Experiment and the Clay Mineral Hypothesis had a peculiar attraction to the more religious biologists. The latter especially reminded them of mankind being formed out of the dust of the earth as the second creation account of Genesis implies (and these sentiments have made it into the scientific literature). I think at the back of the mind of many serious Christian scientists is that Moses may have been shown the creation and subsequent events by God and had some trouble comprehending what he was shown, thus any hypothesis that sounds anything like Genesis strengthens one’s faith. Other proponents of the Clay Mineral Hypothesis may like that it is a rehabilitation of the spontaneous generation hypothesis common among the Greeks.

Interest in the Clay Mineral Hypothesis comes and goes. The mineralogists, of course, are fans. Michael Russell (mentioned earlier) seems sold on it. But it serves an illustration of why life is more than organic chemicals. It is the ability to reproduce. It is the ability to resist entropy, i.e., absorption of its own information to the decaying information of the universe. It is the ability to perform the same reaction over and over again, even though the rest of the environment naturally might do something else. In other words, life is coordinated imbalance of the abiotic world. Any hypothesis for the origin of life has to explain why the biotic appears to have a will of its own.

And when photosynthesis developed, life’s role in creating a coordinated chemical imbalance became quite important (wait for the next chapter) The first evidence of this chemical imbalance, the apparently biologically mediated oxidation of iron, is found in rocks in Greenland slightly older (give or take 100 million years) than the first cyanobacteria fossils. In other words, life could not have developed or developed very much before 3.8 billion years, the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment. And yet, life was so chemically sophisticated by the end of the cosmic blitz that it had developed a primitive form of photosynthesis. Is that fast or slow? Well, the first life survived by various simple chemical reactions called oxidation-reduction reactions, typically called chemotrophy. One simple example might be reduction of iron by oxidation of acetate. If you don’t remember your chemistry, it doesn’t matter. The basic reaction is somewhat like spraying rusty metal with WD40, and it produces energy. Chemotrophy, however, doesn’t produce much energy, so the reaction must be repeated at fairly high frequency to keep the organism alive, not unlike a human being trying to survive by eating celery constantly. Worst of all, much chemotrophy results in some sort of solid substance forming in the cell such as iron, which eventually poisons the cell. So chemotrophs must export solids to the environment, which is very energy-intensive.

Despite its disadvantages, chemotrophy is a popular manner of life in hydrothermal vents and other extreme environments. Moreover, the simple chemistry of the chemotrophs appears to be the foundation of the much more sophisticated activity of our own cells and the equally interesting plants. Photosynthesis itself probably began as a modified form of chemotrophy, perhaps as some reactive intermediate absorbed sunlight and split. The hypothesized earliest form of photosynthesis involves the absorption of infrared radiation, just a little redder than the human eye can see. The energy of this absorption was used to oxidize the iron ion Fe2+ to Fe3+, almost always producing iron hydroxide in the presence of water.
In the 1980s, mathematicians became interested in quantitative evolutionary biology. And the evolution of the microbes seemed to be the simplest problem. So these mathematicians tried to produce a mathematical model of how various chemical reactions and structures could evolve, accounting for radiation damage mutations and sex (bacterial sex is a fun subject apparently) etc. The eventual results were that the evolution of the photosynthetic cyanobacteria should have taken billions of years. But I told you earlier that it barely took any time at all. Photosynthesis apparently developed much faster than it should have.

I was in high school when I read the first stories about the emerging intelligent design movement. On one hand, the intelligent design movement stems from the attempts of old earth creationists to rehabilitate their parlor tricks or culture warriors to justify their vision of Biblical morality by giving the intellectual classes a reason to believe in God or something. I once was in charge of catechizing the parents of infants about to be baptized in my parish and the issue of the swift evolution of the bacteria was brought up by one of the parents. So on the other hand, there is an important scientific problem at the heart of intelligent design. The biologists do think carefully about it. Indeed, Joseph Kirschvink, perhaps one of the most gifted thinkers about the origins and ends of life, has speculated that life probably developed in the potentially more favorable environment of Mars.

The theological content of this problem is not quite what William Dembski et al. would like us to believe. The Creeds proclaim a God intimately connected with life, especially through the Person of the Holy Spirit. But while photosynthesis developed relatively quickly, more than a billion years passed before these organisms were dominant. And indeed, at least another billion years passed before the full oxygenic photosynthetic reactions we know today were developed. Before inferring God’s special providence from a potentially fallible mathematical model, let us consider how the Scriptures speak of life and death, particularly Psalm 104, “You send forth your Spirit and they are created…you turn your face away and they fall to dust.” Aristotle, one of the greatest biologists of the ancient world, classified souls in terms of the ends they pursued in unity with their bodies. In more modern terms then, the soul is very much the information content of our body, directing our life processes relative to the abiotic world and hopefully being led to its end in God. Perhaps, the origin of life came when sufficient information content was available to some organic chemicals that the Spirit provided them a nutritive will to sustain them, the basis of the natural law of self-preservation. Perhaps, this consequence was enough to reduce the randomness of evolution, quickly evolving the diverse lifestyles of microbes but was not the specific direction by God to the end of dominant oxygen photosynthesists, for why did it slow? I think I know what answer Dembski would give me, but that will be tackled in my next chapter.

But I don’t think natural law arguments for evolution are theological content either. The question that the origin of life on Earth presents to us is one of our uniqueness. If life is very common, our responsibilities in the wake of Christ become quite complex. The possibility that there are other rational beings out there might direct us to use the resources of the planet as a vehicle for witness, a means of evangelism. But if life is very uncommon and endures with difficulty, we are quite alone and the words of Psalm 95 ring out, “The Earth is the Lord’s, for he made it.” Life on Earth is of such amazing variety and sophistication even in comparison with the inorganic world that there is no possible higher purpose to govern our responsibility to the rest of the world than to preserve this splendid work of God whole and undefiled. It is this principle of uniqueness and the value of the rest of biological life as the masterwork of God’s hands that divides those who believe that they will be held accountable for not exploiting from those who believe they will be held responsible for exploitation of the Earth’s resources.

Part I Begins

Upon further reflection and a seminar by one of the experts on the Clay Mineral Hypothesis, I've realized that a little bit of the science here is mungy (i.e., how did photosynthesis work 3.8 billion years ago?) or I've given a little more impression of certainty than is justified by the evidence (i.e., Late Heavy Bombardment). So I'll try to get back to revising things after I take a little time to let Lent begin. If you've been linked here by Fr Kniseley etc., please enjoy the Context and Preface below.

Notes on the Coming Biogeochemical Crisis: Preface

Preface

I walk into my office and say to my officemate: “you have to see this figure.” My officemate presumably just has returned from brunch after Mass and I’m fresh from a meeting after Eucharist. But soon we’re staring at several maps of the Northern Hemisphere in polar projection: output from NCAR’s CCM3 sea ice model.

Some people, including former professors of mine, tend to become quite romantic about “climate models,” about the perfection of the physics on which their based and on the splendor of their verification against past data of one sort or another. But every month or so, I notice some almost “fundamental” flaw in the climate model on which I work or hear how a climate model represents the world correctly by doing two things wrong in the right way. These are the times I catch my breath and remember that the telos or more truly the idea of the climate model is founded on the very Word and Wisdom of God, in God doing what the Psalmist asks in 104, “Send forth your Spirit, O Lord, and renew the face of the Earth.” These partially coordinated sets of clever approximations are not being itself. They are an ikon of the Living God at work in His Creation, even if we imagine that work is very standard and unexceptional.

Yet with all their flaws, the climate models have become an uncertain harmony on an increasingly certain melody, like the music of the Ainur as Arda first came into misty form. If some stranger were to come and notice that there were many different depictions of Christ in your churches but wondered why so many of them depicted him in association with two crossed bars, you would be sure to tell him of the wondrous Cross. Well, climate modelers feel much the same way. They see a variety of visions of the future and wonder which disaster will come. And unlike SimCity, Godzilla isn’t one of the options.

The disaster that confronts me and my officemate on that Sunday afternoon is disappearing sea ice. The shores of Antarctica and the North Pole of the world are covered with a thin layer of ice, built up over countless millennia as powerful storms, drew cold winds from the land over the warmer waters, transferring heat to the air and freezing the water to compensate. I am sure that anyone with the experience of a snowy winter remembers there often being an especial chill in the wake of the cold front after a snowstorm in comparison with that after a rainstorm. That impression is not just a matter of how cold the air behind the front is. In addition, the snow reflects additional sunlight from the surface, resulting in less radiation from the ground that can be absorbed by greenhouse gases. This cool blanket of snow, however, does happen to be a poor conductor of heat and thus insulates plants and animals below its cover. Sea ice plays a similar but far less inconstant role, especially reducing the potential of absorption of sunlight during the long polar summer.

Sitting in those colors and geographic outlines and a lone black curve of the climate model output was a frightening result: most sea ice would be gone by 2050. And worst of all, most of that loss would happen in the space of five years, 2025-2030. The Northwest Passage. The Northeast Passage. Both would be a reality by 2030. And during that long polar summer, almost all solar radiation at the North Pole would be absorbed by the ocean. If this occurred, I now recalled, the change locally would be radical. North of Scandinavia lies the Norwegian territory of Svalbard. Last winter , most sea ice was present unusually far north of Svalbard, inconveniencing hunters and outdoors enthusiasts used to spending time on the sea ice. January temperatures were twenty four degrees above normal Fahrenheit. For reference, observations at Svalbard have been taking place as long as many sites in the United States, i.e. since about 1900. Salt Lake City in 2003 had its all time warmest January, recording a mean temperature 9 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. By July, Svalbard had broken its all time record temperature by 1.5 degrees, reaching 19.6 degrees Celsius. See RealClimate for more details . Svalbard’s ice-free year might be a portent of Svalbard’s ice-free future. Would future Polish legislators be praying for rain (as they were this summer)? Nothing is certain in the geosciences, but the impact on the Arctic alone of sea ice loss in the span of a decade would be disastrous. The IPCC speaks very much about what will happen in 2100, and this kind of thinking had lulled even me into a false sense of security.

The next day my officemate and I talked about the implications of this fresh forecast of doom and its immediacy. 2025 is not long from now in the scheme of human affairs. I am not likely to have a child through college by then. Indeed, 2025 likely figured in my thoughts as the stage in my life when I finally might ease myself into respectability in the various endeavors of my life, find myself trying to keep a marriage warm, and begin to think whether I could have a legacy among “famous men, our ancestors in their generations.” Very few of us hold onto the world of their youth, but I at least kept hope that the atmospheric circulation of my youth might not beat me to my grave.

As we reviewed the potential consequences, bringing ourselves to one that might cause the extinction of the species, my officemate commented, “You seem unusually calm about our impending extinction.” I replied that I was calm, not because I was numb or because I did not intend to do something to stop it but because I had hope that there was something beyond the extinction of the species, that the Christian faith encourages both an affection for and a detachment from the sensible objects, thinking mainly of how the Articles describe the Sacraments, the most worthy of the sensible objects, “not ordained…to be gazed upon or carried about, but that we should duly use them”, i.e. use them according to their righteous purpose, the quickening of Grace.

So it occurred to me a few Sundays after that while reading Rev. Sam and listening to John Houghton that if the temporal things are passing away, I might say something about them and the future to which we are rushing as those “who neither know, nor understand but walk about in darkness.” For I think we are coming very close to a major biogeochemical crisis, if we are not already in the midst of one. And while I intend what I write here to be very much a theological view of science, there will be some passing relation of this work to one put out by the Discovery Institute about intelligent design, in which the challenges which life has faced in the past have been overcome through the algorithms of a beneficent God. Indeed, a global biogeochemical crisis is not without precedent and in the pages to follow, I will speak in some detail of the little we know about two or three of them.

And because I confess there to be one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, who became incarnate as Homo sapiens sapiens in Bethlehem Ephrata, I also will warn you that I will take no such optimistic view. I know not when the Kingdom shall come. But I do suspect that it might be of some theological significance that this coming global biogeochemical crisis can be traced to the door of the human race, creatures capable of living in the image of God and charged with the stewardship of this world; creatures are capable of living into the fullness of the natural law through their gift of reason but often heedless of that prescript of Christ to live God and their neighbor, heedless of that parallel dictate of the natural law to paraphrase the Summa : to get along (and love) those with whom we have to live. Creation is groaning in anything but patient expectation. It’s time to hear what the Book of Nature might have to say.

Notes on the Coming Biogeochemical Crisis: Context

Notes on The Coming Global Biogeochemical Crisis

Context

For the last week, I have felt as if I do not have my priorities straight. Bls is right to say that there is no crazy like church crazy and nothing crazier than some piddling young layman in a liberal diocese in a liberal Province blogging about matters that hypothetically more expert people are doing to death. And when I started reading Rev. Sam the Elizaphanian’s series of parish fora and when I heard Sunday Worship last week, I realized that there are some matters on which I do have a unique perspective.

The preacher at Sunday Worship was Sir John Houghton, head of the UK Met Office, a notable Evangelical, and a lead author on the last set of reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Houghton has played a still to be assessed role in the American religiopolitical landscape by using his friendship with John Stott, sometimes called “the evangelical Pope” and an Anglican priest, in order to speak with Evangelical leaders in this country about global climate change. Have you heard about the National Association of Evangelicals and their new work to promote “creation care.” Well, there in the background is Sir John Houghton.

I am a very junior climate scientist. I work on other planetary bodies as well as the Earth. My area of expertise, if it could be called that, is restricted to some aspects of the circulation of the Pacific and vortices so undistinguished that the Australians call them “willy-willies.” But I hear things. I go to seminars. I become distracted from my research reading reports in Science and Nature or other papers and reports that often do not come to public notice. I also have been a professional historian, which has given me a deep interest in historiography and its relevance to the earth sciences and an unusual perspective on the collapse of classical civilization in the Mediterranean world and other collapses in other parts of the Earth.

And I also read roughly five readings from the Bible every day, am never sure whether I ever get through the Psalter, and I sin constantly. Basically, I am just like most of you. What follows may be utter rot. And if it is, I would very much appreciate you telling me that. I will warn you that I may be free with citation, but I will respect copyright, cite all quoted sources, and try to remember from whom I have paraphrased.