Brian Greene and the Insignificance of Earth

The folly of glibness and of bumper-sticker sized statements came home again to me when I wrote for Facebook this:

On earth when something is rare we call it precious. In the universe when something is rare we call it insignificant.

It was in response to a short video I’d just watched in which respected, in fact brilliant, physicist Brian Greene made a statement (which I quote from memory) to the effect that this is undeniable that the earth is insignificant in the vastness of the universe.

It wondered as soon as I heard it why he would call this rarity undeniably insignificant, given that on earth rarity has the opposite meaning in most instances. Gold is rare, precious gems are rare, love is rare. To make things more valuable, we limit with availability, diamonds and art prints. Rare means precious.

Of course that’s not always true on earth. But is it obviously false in the universe? Could earth not be insignificant but all the more significant because it’s rare. Could it be precious?

If I can say of the same thing with equal logic that it is “precious” and “insignificant,” at the very least I can deny that the earth is “undeniably” insignificant.

But can I arbitrate between the two? Can I look at the universe and say with any authority that it is precious or that it is insignificant?

I cannot. As soon as I say “in itself” precious or “in itself” insignificant, I run into the old nominalist/realist problem that things don’t exist in themselves. These concepts have to be put into a context to give them meaning. Precious or insignificant—compared to what? For what purpose? What makes something one or the other.

Take of loaf of bread. In it put a single molecule of some radioactive material. Is the molecule in that rising loaf precious or insignificant? Well, if I want to eat the bread, it is insignificant. One molecule of this radioactive substance will not harm me. But what if I need a molecule of this substance for some experiment or just to test my Geiger counter? If I can find no other molecule but I know this one is in there, it now becomes precious.

This is how the concepts of precious and insignificant work.

But Brian Greene will insist that life is insignificant in the vastness of the universe. And he will use this as evidence that human life is existentially meaningless and that God does not exist. He may well be right. These are not points I care to argue. But I must also observe that he is using a circular logic. The cart is pulling the horse. It’s not the insignificance of life in the universe that produces logical godlessness. It is godlessness that produces the insignificance of life in the universe. This discussion highlights the difference, the nonparallel difference, between the position of a theist and an atheist. The theist can rightly claim that life is precious because God made it. The atheist cannot make a claim one way or the other. The words “precious” and “insignificant” in this context are both theological. They invoke the meaning of a universe in reference to something, and that something can only be God. It’s true that God may not exist and that that nonexistence renders the universe itself and everything in it without “in-itself” significance. But you can’t logically argue from insignificance to the nonexistence of God. You can’t establish the insignificance without first positing the nonexistence. While the theist believes he has a standard against which to declare life in the universe precious, the atheist has no standard against which to proclaim anything in the universe insignificant. A subatomic particle in a radioactive molecule in a rising loaf of bread cannot declare the loaf insignificant.

But let me be clear: nothing I’ve said bears any relevance to the question of whether God exists or does not exist, whether life is precious or insignificant. The only point that can be made by this analysis is that a scientist, however brilliant, cannot meaningfully declare anything in the universe insignificant without first declaring the context in which that judgment is made. And it cannot be made is evidence for or against the reality of anything outside of or apart from the physical universe.