Is the Universe Alive?
The possibility that we live in a universe that has a life of its own has intrigued human beings for centuries. Religion tells us that the universe is imbued with the divine force of the Creator; therefore it is alive. But I’m responsible for revisiting every concept with a mind that takes both science and spirituality seriously. This isn’t easy, since science takes the position that the first primitive life-forms emerged 3.8 billion years ago, which is the same as saying that the Earth—and the universe—was dead before that moment. Why is it so necessary to make death the foundation of life, as if it is more real? That’s what science insists upon.
Even more real than death, however, is flux. The cosmos is part of a never-ending process that recycles matter and energy. Nothing has a fixed identity: not a star, a galaxy, an electron, or a person—not you or me. Nothing, then, is truly dead. This isn’t just philosophy but an observable truth. Every atom in your body came from an exploding supernova or interstellar gases; you and I are made of stardust. Our lives extend far beyond what happens to us personally, and at a subtler level, Nature is also recycling information and memory. Every time a cell divides, it must remember how to do that from the cells that came before it, which means that the molecules that produce enzymes and proteins inside a cell are programmed with the information, or code, for what to do.
You are the embodiment of a dynamic universe, which means you extend far beyond such narrow identities as “I am a Caucasian male” or “I am forty and happily married.” Seeing yourself in any bounded way is illusory, just a wisp of thought drifting by in an eternal continuum. Spirituality provides a way to know yourself beyond the personal, which leads to enlightenment. I know this sounds lofty. To bring it down to earth, we need to build an argument on credible facts. The first fact is the one we’ve just discussed, that the universe is a living process, despite claims to the contrary.
Obviously we witness physical aspects of death all around us. But to equate that with death itself is shortsighted. Science and spirituality come to a decisive break in this regard, because science defines death in purely physical terms. Without a space suit, a human being (or any living thing, presumably) would die in the freezing vacuum of outer space within seconds. This fact, however, is irrelevant in determining whether the cosmos is animate. What’s at stake in deciding between a dead universe and a living one is consciousness. If the cosmos is self-aware, as I’ve argued, it is alive.
Discovering consciousness in the universe is much more momentous than discovering gravity, although science doesn’t seem to think so. There are good reasons for this resistance. In the materialistic scheme, matter must precede the emergence of life. The universe must be considered dead before DNA appeared. Even so, it seems like a miracle—or the remotest chance in the universe—that DNA learned to reproduce itself, a molecule that somehow reaches down and unzips itself into identical mirror images. No molecule had that ability before DNA appeared (although crystals are capable of simple replication, as children learn when they dip a string into a saturated sugar solution and watch sugar crystals begin to form on it, like stalactites in a cave). Spirituality doesn’t need a miracle to explain life once the concept of a dead universe is discarded. What I want is to shed light, not make the case for magic. Far stronger is the argument that the universe gave rise to complex life because life has always existed, going back to the precreation state.
A cell that grows and multiplies looks much like a robot that has learned to build itself. Such a robot is logically impossible without a creator, since somebody or something had to assemble the first robot and program it. I apply the same logic to the cosmos. It creates itself, and if that is physically impossible without some kind of programming, then the miracle that DNA pulls off—self-replication—must be only one aspect of the cosmic program. At every second the universe disappears into the void and returns by re-creating itself. Physics explains this rebirth by pointing to the laws that govern the universe: they act like the meshed gears of a grandfather clock, only in this case the gears are invisible.
I am arguing that the recipe for life on Earth is wrapped up in the underlying existence of cosmic self-creation. The technical term used is “autopoiesis,” literally “auto” (self) combined with the Greek word meaning “to make.” No one can deny that the universe creates and maintains itself, just as a paramecium does as it floats on a pond in the sunlight.
On a cellular level each paramecium isn’t a descendant of the first one that evolved billions of years ago: it is that first one. Completely identical versions are made by cell division, adding and subtracting nothing. It is true that new raw materials have to be collected to construct each generation of paramecia (and mutations may occur along the way, most dying out), but that is secondary. Life is like a house that keeps standing, looking the same from day to day, even though each brick is constantly being changed out for a new one. Food and air constantly fly in and out of every living cell, but something remains intact.
I can choose to call this invisible organizing power “life,” but a specific explanation emerges only when we look more closely at autopoiesis, or self-creation. Four elements are involved, and I apologize in advance for how technical they sound. To be self-creating, you need:
1. A mechanism that is unified, with the ability to build itself
2. Component parts that self-organize into that mechanism
3. A network of processes that can transform themselves into anything the unified mechanism requires
4. A self-contained space that doesn’t depend on an outside cause
This is much more abstract than saying “We reside in a living universe,” although that is the conclusion to which these four requirements lead. Let me break them down by looking at an embryo gestating in the womb. The embryo is unified—we see one cell dividing into two, four, eight, sixteen, and so on, through fifty replications, all tending to the same goal: a baby. It grows as its components (food, air, and water) come together to serve the common goal. A network of processes constructs each cell, leading to another network that turns stem cells into specialized heart, liver, and brain cells. Finally, there is no need for an outside cause. The fertilized ovum can be put into a test tube, and even in such sterile isolation from the mother, as long as the first three components are provided for, a baby will begin to grow.
A skeptic will argue that the universe doesn’t work this way. It only looks like a living organism. By analogy, the sugar crystals growing on a string when it is dipped into a saturated sugar solution aren’t alive, even though they grow and reproduce. But autopoiesis can’t be compared to crystals. The universe had no growing medium, no equivalent of a sugar solution. It created itself out of nothingness. Self-creation simply changes its costume when a baby is born. A baby, a galaxy, a photon, and the ecology of the rain forest look nothing alike, yet when you examine life at the deepest level, nothingness is creating every aspect of the living universe. Life is the universe’s way of inventing eyes and ears to see and hear itself. The human brain is an observation deck for the cosmos to experience itself.
If you follow this path of inquiry, there is abundant evidence that the potential for complex life-forms has been embedded in the cosmos from the beginning. Since we will be discussing life at greater length in upcoming chapters, I will only offer a summary here in order to set the stage.
The universe can be understood as a living thing because of:
1. Autopoiesis: Any living thing grows from within.
2. Wholeness: Living things function as a single process, unifying many separate parts.
3. Consciousness: Living things, whether primitive or complex, exhibit awareness. Unlike inert chemicals, they respond to the environment.
4. Life cycle: Living things pass from birth to death, and in between they sustain themselves.
5. Spontaneous reproduction: Living things multiply and gather into populations. Within these populations there is a relationship among the individual members.
6. Creativity: Living things evolve; they don’t mechanically reproduce clones. Thus we see a display of constant creativity.
7. Manifestation: An animate organism takes abstract ingredients and projects them into space-time, like a living hologram. These projections can be seen; they communicate; they enter the dance of life. When you break down any living thing, including the universe, you arrive at the abstract level again. Along the way, the spark of life seems to vanish. Examined under a microscope powerful enough to reveal molecular structure, living tissue can be reduced to inert chemicals. In reality, however, the spark of life didn’t go out, because there was never a spark to lose. Life is in the void, too, but so abstractly that it takes a hologram—like you or me—to manifest it.
From a spiritual perspective, asking whether the universe is hospitable to life is a meaningless question. The universe and life are the same. We cannot be fooled by the mask of materialism. Behind the mask, the dancer is the dance, ever and always.
In 1944 psychologists Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel made a short film featuring a circle, a large triangle, and a small triangle. The action involves these geometric figures chasing each other around until a final scene in which one moves offscreen and another breaks apart. You might think that such a movie would have the emotional resonance of a text on Euclidean geometry. But when Simmel and Heider asked subjects who had viewed the film to “write down what happened,” the subjects made it sound like Academy Award material, interpreting the geometric figures as people, assigning the inanimate figures human motivations, and inventing a plot to explain the figures’ movements. People like a good story enough to read one into just about anything. We anthropomorphize everything from cats and dogs to cars and, apparently, even our geometry, so it’s easy to understand why a metaphysical theory about a universe that lives and thinks appeals to us.
Deepak offers an attractive story in which equating the physical aspect of death with the end of life is said to be “shortsighted,” for we are all part of a universe that is “self-aware” and therefore “alive.” In order for the statement that the universe is a living entity to have meaning, we must understand what it means for something to be alive. One can say that a piece of toast is alive, but try getting it to butter itself. A rock could be called alive, but chances are you’ll never see one give birth. Usually when we think of something as alive, we mean at a minimum that it reacts to its environment and is capable of reproduction. What do these criteria mean when we speak of the universe?
Deepak lists seven requirements for life that he says the universe satisfies. First on the list is growth. Does the universe grow? To grow means to increase in size or substance. The universe is not increasing in substance, and physicists believe it is infinite, so the size issue is a subtle one. But if you place any boundary within the universe, that region will grow because, as I explained earlier, space is expanding. So the requirement of growth can be said to be satisfied. His second criterion, wholeness, requires that a living thing function as a unit. That’s a squishy requirement. Pick your favorite sports team. Does it function as a unit? A good one does, a bad one doesn’t, and coaches, writers, and fans can argue endlessly without coming to any definitive conclusion. But the universe by definition includes everything, so it would be hard to argue that the universe doesn’t satisfy “wholeness.” The life cycle requirement, that living things pass from birth to death, is satisfied by all objects that don’t last for an eternity. The birth of a child is not the same as the birth of a chocolate cake, but still, one might say the universe also satisfies this criterion. On the other hand, most mainstream physicists would not say that the requirement of reproduction is satisfied. One might consider leaving this as an open question, since some untested and highly speculative models in cosmology—like the so-called ekpyrotic universe—come close to this, allowing that universes can be reborn, phoenixlike, from their own remains. But even in those models, the newborn universes don’t “multiply and gather into populations” as Deepak requires, so one can only conclude the criterion of reproduction is not satisfied. The consciousness requirement—which is said to mean that an organism responds to its environment—cannot be applied to the universe, because the universe, being “everything,” has no environment. Similarly—as I argued in chapter 4—because the universe does not exist in an external environment and undergo natural selection, it cannot be said to be evolving in the biological sense of the term. So the universe does not satisfy this criterion, either. Deepak’s concept of a living universe is an interesting one, but these latter three criteria show that, even according to Deepak’s own definition, the universe is not alive.
Could the universe be considered alive in some more abstract or generalized sense? Deepak talks about changes that happen within the universe, such as the development of galaxies and life, and asserts that “life is the universe’s way of inventing eyes and ears.” The real criterion for judging if the universe is alive, he offers, is not his checklist of the usual characteristics, but this: if the cosmos is self-aware, or conscious, it is alive.
Deepak believes that discovering consciousness in the universe is more momentous than discovering gravity, but “science doesn’t seem to think so.” Actually, science would think so. True, there might be the vociferous opposition that often accompanies new approaches. But if it were discovered—rather than merely proposed—that the universe is conscious, history shows that scientists would eventually swarm all over the discovery, and before long you’d have Nobel Prizes awarded and thousands of articles written on the psychology of the universe, with titles like Are Supernovas Self-Destructive? and Are Black Holes a Sign of Depression? Scientists make their careers on new and revolutionary ideas—especially young scientists, whose reputations do not depend on the continued usefulness of the old revolutionary ideas. But to gain acceptance in science the idea must have testable implications, and this concept of universal consciousness doesn’t seem to.
The evidence Deepak offers is this: he says universal consciousness explains how life originated in the universe. We’ll get to that claim soon, but first let’s clarify the issue. Deepak compares the appearance of DNA to a zipper that somehow learns to reach down and unzip itself. Where did DNA come from? he asks. That is something that needs explaining. We know what happens once simple-celled organisms have formed: Evolution brings about the ever-developing progression of life-forms from simple to complex cells, then multicellular life, and then insectlike creatures, fish, amphibians and reptiles, birds and mammals, and finally primates, and us. But though evolution creates organisms of increasing complexity, all these organisms, going back to even the simplest bacterium, have something in common, which is that they are packed with molecular machines that create energy, transport nutrients, relay messages, build and repair cell structures, and perform many other amazing tasks. These molecules are mostly a type of molecule called an enzyme, which is a catalyst made from proteins (a catalyst is a molecule that changes the rate of a chemical reaction). Since all life utilizes such molecules, one might conclude that they are a requirement of life, at least of life as we know it. The issue is that if even the first simple living organisms from which everything today evolved included these structures, then how did these molecules first come into being?
The origin of life is an ongoing field of research, with many questions yet unanswered, but experiments suggest that it is possible for genetic molecules similar to DNA to form spontaneously, and other experiments suggest it is possible for those genetic molecules to curl up and act as catalysts. That means that the earliest forms of life, or what we might call “prelife,” could have consisted of membranes made from fatty acids—another type of molecule known to form spontaneously—that enveloped a mix of water and those genetic molecules. Random mutations could then have taken over, enabling those cells to adapt to their environment, creating life as we know it today. Remember that even if the spontaneous origin of life, or prelife, within any given star system is improbable, that would not preclude its occurrence, because there are ten billion trillion stars in our observable universe. So as long as by “improbable” you don’t mean less than a one-in-a-trillion shot, you could still expect over a billion star systems to harbor life.
Suppose life in any given star system is a trillion-to-one shot. How can we account for being so lucky? If, out of a group of a trillion stars, through the normal processes of nature, exactly one star system develops life, it might seem to the beings in that star system that their presence there is a miracle. Certainly if they chose their home by throwing a dart at a map of the heavens, the odds would be a trillion to one against hitting a life-bearing solar system. But that’s not what happened. They were born into a star system in which life developed. And no matter how rare life is, by definition if living beings look around, they will find that they were born into a star system that harbors life. So that is not a miracle, or even good luck. It is just a consequence of logic.
Scientists may not yet have solved the problem of the origin of life, but our civilization is not so advanced in its discoveries that we should leap to the conclusion that if science hasn’t yet been able to explain something, it never will. As the alternative to science, what does Deepak’s metaphysics offer? How does a living, conscious universe explain how life appeared? He says, “Spirituality doesn’t need a miracle to explain life once the concept of a dead universe is discarded.… Far stronger [than the appeal to a miracle] is the argument that the universe gave rise to complex life because life has always existed, going back to the precreation state.” Such an argument might sound deep when applied to life and the universe, but let’s examine the logic in a more mundane context—say, breakfast foods. Then the argument goes something like this: “We don’t need a miracle to explain how the sunny-side-up egg appeared on my plate once the concept of an eggless plate is discarded.… Far stronger than the appeal to a miracle is the argument that the universe gave rise to a sunny-side-up egg because the sunny-side-up egg has always existed, going back to when the plate was originally manufactured.” This explanation is obviously not very enlightening.
Deepak’s argument is similar to that of Thomas Aquinas’s thirteenth-century “first cause proof” of the existence of God, which goes something like this: Nothing can cause itself, so everything has a prior cause. Each prior cause must also have a prior cause. The only way to terminate this chain is for something extraordinary to exist which requires no cause, and that is God. God is that which can create, but which itself requires no creator. Even if one accepts that argument, it is a giant leap from this concept of God to Deepak’s more specific concept of universal consciousness, or the biblical God that Aquinas employed this argument to justify. The argument really does nothing more than transfer the mystery of how a universe can come from nothing to the mystery of how God could have come from nothing. Simply asserting that God is God because God requires no cause does not get us very far.
After Stephen Hawking and I finished writing The Grand Design, I tried to describe the book to my then-nine-year-old daughter Olivia while waiting for a table at IHOP. Science tackles the big questions, I told her, and we want to explain the exciting answers to people who aren’t scientists. Where did we, and the universe, come from, and why is it the way it is? She listened intently, and then I thought I’d check and see how much she’d absorbed. Why are we here? I asked her. She looked at me with an odd expression. Because we’re hungry! she said. I guess I shouldn’t try to discuss deep intellectual issues before breakfast.
We all have our own approach to the important questions, but once our hungers extend beyond a taste for pancakes to deeper human yearnings, we must be careful to start questioning the tooth fairy. The rigorous approach of science, which Deepak believes obscures the richness of life, is designed to help us avoid believing in seductive ideas that the evidence we reap from nature does not support.
Deepak writes that “higher consciousness allowed the great sages, saints, and seers to attain a kind of knowledge that science feels threatened by.” We can probably all agree that the great sages, saints, and seers penetrated to knowledge that is outside the realm of science, and we can also agree that there are many kinds of subjective knowledge that are hugely important to us. It is important to know what makes one’s children feel loved and secure and happy, for when, as an example, Olivia says that the adjective that best describes her is “joyful,” this adds great meaning to my life. That such subjective experience is important does not threaten a scientist. But the danger of putting subjectivity on a pedestal and uncritically accepting metaphysical speculation as truth is that one will miss out on the most important intellectual understanding we can achieve—that of knowing the real place humanity holds in the physical cosmos. To me, that too is part of the richness of life.