Believing everything is explainable is a human weakness
The origin of the universe, the meaning of life events… Shouldn’t humanity be mature enough by now to accept there are some questions we just don’t have the answers to?
Good friends of mine are into subtle worlds, the influence of the energy of the universe on our lives, that kind of thing. There are a lot of great ideas in there, for example ‘there’s more to life than the fulfillment of physical needs’ or ‘just because science can’t explain something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist’.
Where I no longer agree is when you extend this way of approaching the functioning of the world to explaining the advent of all the events of life, including things like success or failure, sickness, and even our presence on Earth. It comes down to saying there’s a reason for everything, even when we don’t understand that reason. But maybe sometimes there is no such thing as a “reason”, however hard that is for us to understand.
Smart monkeys have it all figured out
It’s absolutely true there are many things our current knowledge of the universe cannot explain. Through the centuries, we humans have been able to understand and explain a mind-boggling list of things, from thunderstorms to wounds getting infected, that our terrified ancestors could only attribute to the action of god(s). But with all our brains and theories and scientific apparatus, some questions still remain, including the simplest and most fundamental one of all: how come we’re here?
To me, it’s a problem to believe that these questions are unanswered because they are the results of the actions of mysterious powers we cannot see — call them god, the universe, fate… — rather than simply because their explanation is beyond our human minds.
After all, who said we should be able to understand everything?
We humans are just a group of sentient mammals having evolved a freakishly large brain that has enabled us to see far beyond our daily realities and understand complex things like the structure of matter and the layout of the universe. That is certainly unique (at least on our planet), but we’re still just a bunch of smart monkeys. And that has to come with its limits.
In fact, a lot of things are just too much for our minds — very big numbers, the infinitely large or small or the absence of a reason for things to be — and that’s PERFECTLY NORMAL. Our brains aren’t wired to fathom these things. What’s amazing is that we are able to understand everything we do, not that they are still some things we just can’t wrap our minds around. The fact we can build rocket ships doesn’t mean we know why outer space exists.
There’s a good reason for not getting it
Speaking of our quest for impossible answers necessarily takes us back to that most fundamental question of all, ‘why are we here?’. Millenia of accumulated knowledge have enabled us to answer many aspects of it by figuring out things like the formation of Earth, the appearance of life and the evolution of species, pushing the answer ‘because god/the universe wanted it’ further and further away.
But ultimately, the great big question mark remains: after having retraced our steps all the way to the Big Bang (or to any other theory about the creation of the universe including religious ones, for that matter), we are still at a loss when it comes to understanding why.
The answer to questions such as this one is as simple as it is hard to accept: we don’t know. And to add insult to injury, the fact we don’t know isn’t significant. There are still tons of things we don’t know, and their ever-evolving list, as they shift from ‘not understood’ to ‘understood’ in the great book of human knowledge, doesn’t change anything to the truth of the matter.
When we say things like ‘the Big Bang happened because God created it’, or ‘things happen in life because the universe is sending you a message’, we are attempting to explain the unexplainable. That’s a perfectly understandable trait of the human mind, but the universe doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the functioning of the human mind. My spouse got cancer, the Big Bang happened, human beings came into being on this planet, whether we understand it/like it/approve of it or not.
Just because we can see no explainable reason for something doesn’t mean there is a hidden one.
We humans are uncomfortable with blank pages, but it’s up to us to deal with that discomfort. Things will just keep being, whether we understand them or not, and even whether we’re there at all to try and understand them. No one was there to witness and explain the extinction of dinosaurs or the formation of the oceans, but that doesn’t change the reality of those events.
It’s actually quite pretentious on our part to believe that there always has to be an explanation that can be understandable by the human mind. ‘God/the universe did it’ is a reasoning our brains can understand, whereas ‘things are the way they are for no reason accessible to our us’ isn’t. Then again, being pretentious is another natural human trait of character: if we don’t get it, there has to be a good reason.
Chaos sounds about right
Don’t get me wrong. Even among the things we are capable of understanding, science does not and cannot explain everything. Human knowledge is very incomplete and it’s clear that there is more than meets the eye out there. When you look at a cookie, a rock or a dog, how could you possibly infer that they are made up of trillions of minute, constantly vibrating spheres? It’s so counter-intuitive it seems wrong. Yet there they are: we’ve seen them, weighed them, even split them open: atoms exist even though we didn’t know about them for most of our existence as humans — and they existed for all the time there wasn’t anyone in the universe capable of even conceiving their existence.
Similarly, there necessarily are many other things in the world that have explainable reasons for being, but that we just don’t know about. For example, there is certainly a lot going on with the circulation of energies across the universe and between living things that we only can suspect, as my friends I initially mentioned rightly believe.
The Chaos Theory is a great way of breaking down the unexplainable without slapping a readymade, reductive explanation on it. It suggests that many phenomena in the world are the result of the combination of a very large number of little factors and events. Each one of them is individually understandable, but their sheer number and the way they all impact each other and the event in question makes the whole thing way beyond our understanding.
You can successfully apply that theory to explain weather patterns, the evolution of species or the way two trees or two sets of fingerprints never have the exact same structure. While we cannot rationalize the exact list of reasons for which these things happen the way they do, we can understand that the way the whole thing works is beyond our understanding.
If you’re looking out a 15th floor window at the crowds on a plaza, you know that each individual person has a reason for the direction they’re going, but that it’s impossible to make sense of the overall pattern they are generating. And you can accept that impossibility, because you instinctively know that you couldn’t apply any form of rationality to this uncoordinated, purposeless collective movement.
Why don’t we seem capable of applying that same instinctive consciousness of our own limits when it comes to figuring out the universe? Accepting that we cannot know why good or bad things happen, why the Earth is just the right distance from the sun to allow the appearance of carbon-based life or how come we’re here asking ourselves these sorts of questions in the first place should be simple common sense. Knowledge is great, but like many things, it’s not infinite. Being at peace with that simple fact without having to run around creating explanations for what we cannot explain would be a sign of great maturity for us smart monkeys.
This is not nihilism, which is believing in nothing. Instead, this is believing in putting things in their right place. Humankind, in all its greatness and misery, has a very small place in the universe. That thought may be tough on our collective ego, but believing otherwise means choosing denial, and denial is never the way forward.
