Dawkins on the Wonder of It All

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28 January 2007 - I am really enjoying Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in which he represents science against religious fundamentalism with wit and vigor. But I also feel that his purely scientific view of reality doesn’t adequately acknowledge the limitations of our human perspective, or the profound mystical experience of contemplating the Einsteinian “God as Nature.” A non-anthropomorphic concept of God as the unfathomable, multidimensional process of which we are part is still pretty awe-inspiring.

So it was with some delight that I discovered this excerpt from Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow which he quoted in a recent radio interview, and which will be read at his funeral someday:

“We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. …In the face of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. Here’s another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time, the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, the present century. The present moves from the past to the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to be alive and so am I.”

Poetic as it is, his Wonder takes the clinical tone of “Gee, what are the odds?” and “Aren’t we lucky.” Feels a little chilly. But this is one expression of how a scientific mind ponders the Infinite, and I find it fascinating.

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