Hegel once wrote: “God does not remain petrified and dead, the stones cry out and raise themselves to mind.” Today, scientists would give this explanation for how the stones cry out. Billions of years after the Big Bang, stars cooked within themselves the heavy elements needed for forming planets. On one of presumably billions of planets, those elements gave rise to life by a process that is still not understood. After countless eons, sentient life arose, followed by self-conscious life. In effect, then, humans are stones that have evolved into animate and self-aware beings. Life did emerge on Earth, but the odds against life emerging anywhere else again are said to be staggering. The cosmic conditions needed for life evolve are so “finely-tuned” that the idea of cosmic purpose has come back into vogue in some circles. NASA scientists suppose that anywhere the “cosmic soup” (water, amino acids, right temperature, etc.) is in place, life will emerge. According to physicist Paul Davies, however, this supposition conflicts with the prevailing scientific view that life on Earth resulted from processes so accidental and implausible that they would never be repeated, if we rewound the clock on terrestrial evoluition. According to Davies, if we were to discover life on a planet other than Earth—a planet that, unlike Mars, could not have been “seeded” by terrestrial life—this would be proof that the laws of nature encode a hidden subtext, a cosmic imperative, which tells them: “Make life!” This is a breathtaking vision of nature, magnificent and uplifting in its majestic sweep. It would be wonderful if it were correct. But if it is, it represents a shift in the scientific world-view as profound as that initiated by Copernicus and Darwin put together.
Until recently most twentieth century scientists agreed with the nihilistic views of Jacques Monod and Stephen Gould, according to whom the universe is meaningless, life is accidental, and cosmic development absent. Davies and a number of other contemporary scientists, however, now conclude not only that cosmic development (from atoms to life) has occurred, but also that the universe is somehow “rigged” in favor of life and even of self-conscious life. Discovery of life elsewhere would be proof of cosmic purposiveness: “Only if there is more to it than chance, if nature has an ingeniously built-in bias toward life and mind, would we expect to see anything like the developmental thrust that has occurred on Earth repeated on other planets.”
