A proper response

When the topic of my atheism comes up in conversation, as it does from time to time, I seem to be always asked the same two questions, usually linked, with only slight variation. They are, firstly, "But how can you not believe in anything bigger?" and secondly, "But don't you think life is special? You really think it was just an accident?". I almost always give the same response, but over time I've become more and more dismissive of this particular line of questioning. Why this is, I am not entirely sure; perhaps it is the implied answer of the questioner, 'God', that irks me. An answer that comes too quickly, from too little speculation, or thought, or even imagination (the irony of which does not escape me), I may prejudge. Or perhaps I am simply tired of hearing the same questions over and again, and so every time I respond, I become more impatient and to me, my answers become more and more trite and superficial, and that is not something I like. Or perhaps there is some other answer, another, maybe even simpler explanation.

However, my feelings on the subject are largely irrelevant. Having re-examined the questions and my own answers to them, I've decided that, despite everything I don't like about them, they are questions that I should answer, and I owe a proper response to whoever asks them. This is not to say what I've told people in the past was false, or a misrepresentation, no, not at all. Instead, I mean that a proper response requires the sort of time and delicacy to be formulated and explained in order to be sufficiently effective that an on the spot response simply cannot suffice, no matter how much practice one has delivering it. And so I have decided to use my blog here to give a proper response, a response that I feel does the questions justice without being needlessly convoluted. And of course, the advantage is that, if anyone were to come to this blog and read this primer which I am about to write and are curious enough to look for further details, well, they need not look very far at all! So, without any further delay, my response.

You say I don't believe in anything bigger than "just this". You say you think there's something else, something grander, more magnificent perhaps, I imagine. Well, I do believe in "just this". Let me tell you what "just this" is. Take the carbon atom. It is not an object I imagine you have paid much attention to in the past - neither have I. It is something which is incredibly small, almost unimaginably so, and so I think we can be forgiven for not dedicating a great deal of thought to it, and yet, without it we would not exist. And yet, even this is made up of smaller particles: protons, neutrons and electrons, electrons having over a thousand times less mass than protons, and existing on a scale which is impossible for us to see, not even with the most powerful optical microscope. Here, "inside" the atom, the rules which appear to govern our world seem to break down. This is a quantum world, a world entirely alien and unfamiliar to our experience and perception, better represented with numbers and graphs than by even the best estimation of human imagination.

In reality, this quantum world is everywhere, its effects universal. But we are so big in comparison, we cannot even begin to notice its bizarre rules in operation. How big? Let me tell you. Glucose is a molecule which contains six of our carbon atoms, along with twelve hydrogen and six oxygen atoms. Put together, the molecule has a diameter nearly three times as great as the singular carbon atom. As wide as this and nearly four times as long is your garden variety phospholipid. If you don't know what a phospholipid is, I won't bore you with the details, except to say that it is much bigger than our carbon atom, which in itself is incredibly bigger, if such a term can be used, than our friend the electron. Now, nearly four times longer again than the phospholipid is the antibody, a type of protein you may remember from your science classes on the human body. If you do not recall so readily, antibodies are an essential part of our immune system, existing in our blood to neutralise microscopic threats to our health, such as viruses.

But how big exactly are viruses? A singular rhinovirion, a nasty little thing which in great enough numbers has caused many a headache to bosses the world over for its role in causing the common cold, has a diameter two and a half times greater than the length of an antibody, and it's tiny as far as viruses go. A standard influenza virion might be easily four times greater in diameter than that rhinovirion, if not more. Now, if you're even vaguely familiar with any of this, you've almost certainly heard of Escherichia coli, better known by its abbreviated name E. coli. E. coli is a species of bacteria which, if one is unlucky enough to come across a particularly nasty breed, can cause food poisoning, and well and truly ruin a lovely evening. An E. coli bacterium is in itself rather large, compared to our influenza virion at least, at nearly five times as broad and over 23 times as long as the virion's diameter. If you're having trouble picturing that, draw a circle of diameter one centimetre, and next to it, a rectangle of dimensions 4.6 x 23.0 centimetres, and now you have a rough approximation of the comparable size of the bodies (not including E. coli's flagella).

Now, throwing your minds back to those viruses I mentioned, and the antibodies that fight them. As you'll no doubt again recall from those science classes of old, all of this happens in the blood stream. Blood, now there's something you're a little more familiar with, yes? And red blood cells, those red disk-shaped cells that deliver oxygen around the body and populate the blood stream, you remember those as well? Those are two and a half times as wide as are E. coli bacteria long, and there are 20 to 30 trillion of them in your body at any one time. Impressive, no? But we are still only just at the beginning of our tour, and things are only just getting interesting. The next exhibit is the human ovum, the first that can be seen without the need for a microscope and, coincidentally, is the largest cell found in the human body. Compared to the red blood cell, its diameter is 16 times and its volume is five orders of magnitude as great.

If this is beginning to do your head in, well, allow me to ease you into a more familiar world. The diameter of a human ovum varies from 100 to 200µm. A grain of salt, by comparison, is approximately 0.5mm, or 500µm wide, though this is certainly nothing in comparison to something the size of, say, a coffee bean, which might be about a centimetre in length, give or take. Welcome to the world of the visible and tangible, my friend! Just to prove it is so, let me pick up that coffee bean, and hold it in my hand. It's not so large, you know, compared to me at least. Why, I myself stand at about 181cm tall, many many times taller than this coffee bean is long. But before we move on, I'll remind you of how far we've come. Our electron, one of six constituting our friend the carbon atom, has a mass of roughly 9.11x10^-31kg, which would make it about 32 orders of magnitude smaller than my own mass (a closely guarded secret, I assure you). For those of you who would like a bit of context to that statement, there are 3 to 7x10^22 stars in the observable Universe, 10 orders of magnitude less than our multiple above. For those of you who are wondering what 10^32 actually looks like, here it is (although those who are pregnant or have heart conditions may want to look away): 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's how many electrons it would take to mould an electron version of me (though that's certainly not advisable).

So, we've finally arrived at the human form. If you have a head on your shoulders, you've probably already figured out the purpose of this tour, and you may wish to get off. You may leave at any time, of course, but remember, you still won't have the answer to your question. Not the proper answer, in any case. If you've the constitution to stay the course, strap in, because things are about to start moving quickly now that we've come to the supposedly privileged human being. After all, we have to, for we have a great deal more ground to cover, so to speak, now that we are to venture from our common experience to far, far bigger things.

Humans are not generally large creatures, not even by our own standards. After all, if we were, would we look on at the skeletons of dinosaurs with such awe and wonder? Take, for example, Amphicoelias, a sauropod which may have grown to be 60m long, or, for a slightly more recent creature, the Blue Whale, the heaviest of which on record weighed just shy of 177 tonnes. But even so, these come nowhere near the sheer size of human creations, such as the tallest skyscraper in the world, the Burj Dubai, which stands at 818m tall. But what is this in comparison to the size of the Earth, with a radius of over 6,300 km and a mass of 5.97x10^24 kg? The entirety of the human race and all of its construction is barely a scratch in the surface (in more ways than one) of this planet, which we presume to be master over. And how far have we gone from our home? Only so far as the Moon, which is never much further away than 400,000 km from the centre of the Earth. This may seem like a lot of course, but to say we've only just stuck our toe in the tide pool of the cosmic ocean is probably something of an exaggeration.

For our little rock is whizzing around the Sun at this moment at a distance of about 150,000,000 km. The Sun, a ball of gas that could comfortably fit one million Earths within its girth and then some (and is not even very big by stellar standards), which emits some 3.83x10^26 joules of energy per second by nuclear fission, a process which all the nuclear weapons on Earth could not nearly replicate. It is the centre of our Solar System, which extends beyond the reach of any human spacecraft. The furthest planet from the Sun, Neptune, maintains an orbit of about 4.5 billion km from the Sun, but beyond here lies the Kuiper belt, an asteroid belt which contains a number of dwarf planets including Pluto, and it extends as far out as 8.2 billion km. The furthest man-made object from Earth, Voyager 1, is currently further than even this; it is now travelling in the heliosheath at a distance of some 16.5 billion km from the Sun. The furthest extent of the Solar System, the hypothesized Oort Cloud of comets, may reach to as far as 50,000 Astronomical Units (the mean distance of the Earth from the Sun), or almost 7.5 trillion km away. Welcome to the edge of the Solar System.

The Sun's light from about 2005 is now reaching Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighbour at 4.2 light years (39.7 billion km), and light from 1999 is now reaching Epsilon Eridani, the home of the nearest known exoplanet, a Jupiter-sized gas giant imaginatively named Epsilon Eridani b, which is at a distance of 10.5 light years (99.3 trillion km). Beyond this point, any use of kilometres becomes so cumbersome, I shall refer only to distances in light years (the distance light travels in a single year, for those who did not know). After all, a trillion of anything is beyond any form of unassisted human comprehension, and it is not my purpose to make your head spin by citing as many zeroes as the Universe may hold in store. So let's continue on our journey to our next milestone - at a distance of approximately 60 or 70 light years, you can turn off your portable radio, because this is the furthest extent of human radio transmissions, made so many years ago. Beyond this point we have stars and more stars, of types varying from dwarfs to hypergiants, of many different colours and temperatures, sizes and temperaments, and these stars constitute, along with numerous other phenomena, the galaxy we like to call the Milky Way, a large spiral galaxy spanning 100,000 light years across.

Many people confuse the Galaxy and the Universe, and if you've come this far already, and can even begin to grasp the scale of the 200 to 400 billion stars which comprise it, then you might be forgiven for making that same mistake. But oh no, we're not even close. The Milky Way has its own satellite galaxies, most notably the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds and the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy (though there are a number of others) which orbit it, and all together, our Galactic Realm is but a small part of the Local Group, a group of about 30 galaxies which are near to us, and includes the Andromeda Galaxy, one not unlike our own, which is destined to collide with the Milky Way in about 2.5 billion years or so. The Local Group, our small galactic neighbourhood, is itself about 10 million light years in diameter, but even it is only a speck in the Local Supercluster, a large group of at least 100 galaxy groups which has a diameter of 110 million light years. We currently know of at least 40 of these superclusters, which are, along with other galaxies, found in structures known as galaxy filaments and galaxy walls, which are typically about 80 megaparsecs in length (261 million light years).

At a distance of 13.7 billion light years, we find the afterglow of the Big Bang, the extent of cosmic microwave background radiation. Beyond here, at a distance of 46.5 billion light years, we find the edge of the observable Universe, though it seems likely the physical Universe exists even beyond this point. So, 46.5 billion light years - think about that. That's about 439,622,855,430,000,000,000,000,000 metres, in case you were wondering. Can you even try to imagine that? Honestly? Can you come anywhere close to truly comprehending that scale in all of its enormity? If so, please say so, because that would probably make you the first.

Now that we've completed our journey, from the smallest of small to the biggest of big, and you have, so to speak, seen it all, perhaps now you can see what you mean when you speak of "just this", and if you've got any sense you'll hang your head in shame for having looked on all of cosmos with such ignorant scorn. You think there needs to be something bigger than all this? Does this not satisfy you? Is it too "material? for you? Has its scale alone not touched you? You dare demand more in existence, as though all of what I've described to you, itself only a pathetic fraction of all there is, is incomplete, imperfect, without an invisible man to sit and watch it? That is my answer to the first question. My answer to the second is far, far more brief.

Do I think life is special? Yes, I do. But that does not mean it is important. Why should it be? Look at how pathetically tiny we are, tiny even in our own backyard, and that is not even so grand as a speck in the Universe. If you feel such a desperate need for import, by all means, believe there is a god watching over you, and that all the vastness of space means nothing to you in your cosy little home. It makes no difference to me. But do not presume to think of me as the ignorant one. And yes, I do think life is an "accident". Accidents happen, and they happen frequently, and I think it is a far more likely explanation that at a particular place at a particular point in time where conditions were good for life, conditions by no means necessarily unique, life arose, simply by natural means. If it is possible, why not? Can something not be special if it was not willed or manufactured? Is there nothing special about a snowflake just because nobody wished for it explicitly to form as it does, God or otherwise? Or is every snowflake in history the direct manifestation of the (apparently otherwise unengaged) Almighty's will?

That is my response, proper and in full. I apologise for any rudeness, but sometimes a certain brusqueness is required in making one's point forcefully. Other than that, I can only hope you've found my response to be, if not eye-opening, then at least somewhat educational; I myself learned a great deal in doing the many hours of research required to put together this reply, and I only hope that transfers well to you, the reader. On that note, I sign off until next time.