New Eden

by Kishore Tipirneni

  “What’s wrong with a little uncertainty?” Joshua asked.

  “Personally, I think there’s enough information out there to make an informed decision.”

  “You do get straight to the point as always,” Joshua proclaimed with a grin. “So what about you?”

  “Me? What about me?” Rachael picked up a breadstick from the brown basket on the table, snapped it in half, and took a bite while waiting for a reply.

  “Yes, you—and that information you speak of. Do you believe that God created the world in seven days and all the rest of it—Noah’s ark and Moses on Mount Sinai carrying around two giant stone tablets? And let’s not forget Adam and Eve, who allegedly started the entire human race from only two sets of genes. Surely you don’t believe that all of those things can possibly be true.”

  Rachael rolled her eyes. “No, I don’t believe all those things are true—at least not literally. That’s fundamentalism. Contemporary theologians believe that the Old Testament is genre fiction that was composed to teach lessons to the Hebrews of the time. More to the point, I definitely believe in science and evolution—and the Big Bang. Like Aquinas said, there has to be a first cause. Nevertheless, I don’t believe that religion and science have to be mutually exclusive. I view God as an architect, not a magician with a magic wand.”

  Carrying their food slightly above his shoulder, Gianni appeared twenty minutes later and placed their orders on the table with a reminder that the plates might be hot. “Enjoy,” he said.

  “Vegetarian, huh?” Rachael commented.

  “Yup.”

  “Sorry. I should have consulted you before ordering. You don’t mind my eating chicken, do you?”

  “Not at all. Like Gianni advised, enjoy your meal. I was raised in a mixed family. Plenty of tolerance. I’m a real mensch.”

  “Just out of curiosity, why are you a vegetarian?” Rachael asked. “Nothing in either Christianity or Judaism prescribes a meatless diet.”

  Joshua twirled his pasta with a fork expertly as he answered. “When I was eleven, I decided that I never wanted to eat anything that had a brain when it was alive. I guess it was the budding scientist in me. I’d been studying biology, and while cows and other animals that humans eat may not be able to solve the quadratic equation, they’re still conscious of their environment. Some even display emotions. Dogs especially. They can sense the feelings of their owners.”

  “Consciousness? Emotion? Intuition? You’re perilously close to invoking a religious concept,” Rachael warned with humor, “but okay, I get it.”

  “So, let’s get back to this creator thing,” Joshua said. “It intrigues me. Why do you believe in God? I myself need tangible evidence. I just can’t accept any kind of religious belief on blind faith. I think I gave the rabbi several nervous breakdowns with my unending questions. I need proof! It’s mother’s milk to a scientist.”

  “There’s a great deal of proof, Josh. You just have to be willing to look for it.”

  Taking another sip of wine, Joshua looked directly at Rachael as he spoke. “It’s a Catch-22. What constitutes proof? For believers, proof is so damn arbitrary and subjective, which means it may not be proof at all.”

  Rachael couldn’t suppress a smile. “Remember, I’m as big an advocate of the scientific method as you, but proof is built on hypothesis.”

  “I’ve learned that many times over in the course of the past two days. And may I add that you’d make a formidable debater. In fact, we’re having a robust debate right now.”

  “We’re having a relaxing dinner with stimulating conversation,” Rachael said, wrinkling her mouth in a good-natured frown. “Nothing more.”

  “Gimme a break. You were on the debating team in college, right?” Joshua asked.

  “The captain,” Rachael replied. “Now you were saying?”

  With each passing hour, Joshua was learning that the knowledgeable reporter from Scientific American—a woman who didn’t take no for an answer—was totally disarming. Her charm was mesmerizing.

  “I was saying that I want to know why you believe in God. What proof do you have of his existence?”

  “Like I said, there is proof of a creator if you’re willing to look for it,” Rachael replied, “but many scientists simply dismiss the evidence of a creator because they discount the idea of a creator.”

  “Not sure if I’m following.”

  “Let me explain by example.” Rachael put down her fork and spoke directly to Joshua. “Have you ever been hiking in the woods and seen a tower made of rocks by the side of the trail?”

  “Sure,” Joshua replied, “people sometimes put those there to mark the trail. I believe they’re called cairns.”

  “Yes, cairns,” Rachael replied. “When you see a cairn on a trail, do you ask yourself what natural process could have caused the rocks to be stacked liked that or do you think someone must have put them there on purpose?”

  “Obviously, someone put them there,” Joshua replied.

  “Why?”

  “Because, it’s too complex and ordered a structure to have happened randomly by chance.”

  “Exactly!” Rachael exclaimed happy to have gotten her point across. “I believe that there are cairns in nature that are too complex to be randomly formed by chance. They must have been created by someone, a creator.”

  “Really?” Joshua asked. “Like what?”

  Rachael picked up her fork and made a three-word reply as she placed a bite of chicken in her mouth. “Like the cell.”

  “What?” Joshua was caught off guard by the brevity of the response. “Did you say cell—as in cells that make up biological organisms?”

  “Exactly. Everything from amoebas to whales are made of cells. In fact, I have no problem whatsoever with evolution progressing from the first cell all the way to humans and their complex brains. Natural selection is one of the most sophisticated mechanisms I can imagine for creating sentient beings, and it all started with the cell.”

  “Is everything satisfactory?” Gianni asked, approaching the table, hands behind his back.

  “The food’s amazing,” Rachael said. “I could use another glass of wine, please.”

  Joshua held up his finger, seconding the request.

  “So you believe in evolution,” he said, “and yet it’s a purely scientific process. Where’s the hand of God in survival of the fittest?”

  Rachael sliced a piece of chicken and speared it with her fork as she contemplated her response.

  “Try this out,” she said. “I’ll concede that with reproduction and natural selection, you can have evolution that can progress over billions of years to a human. Darwin got it right, but you must have reproduction in the first place for evolution to work. This reproduction not only has to copy the physical properties of an item, but also the information contained in the item. The cell is the basic unit of reproduction upon which evolution on Earth is based.”

  Joshua knew Rachael well enough by now to know when she was toying with him. Her pause had been calculated to make sure that he was hanging on her every word.

  “But where did the cell come from?” she continued. “Even simple cells are highly complex. They have a cell membrane to contain them and genetic material with enzymes to unzip and replicate DNA, not to mention all of the structures needed for protein synthesis. They are highly complex entities. Did they just self-assemble from random organic molecules? Hardly. To me they are like cairns. They’re too complex to have just randomly formed from natural forces.”

  Joshua put his knife and fork down while he contemplated what Rachael was saying. She was definitely making a rational argument. “You’re perfectly aware that the cell, with both reproduction and genetic material self-organizing from organic molecules, is accepted scientific theory, right?”

  Rachael sipped from her second glass of wine and held up the palm of her left hand. “Wait a second doc. History is littered with accepted scientific theories that were later proven wrong. You�
�re saying that if you mix a soup of organic molecules in a glass and stir them up like Julia Child making a vinaigrette, you’re going to randomly cook up a cell? That’s some pretty amazing scientific cuisine. No one has ever been able to do it with science, and yet life has been around for almost four billion years. Again, you have no problem seeing a tower of rocks and deducing that some intelligence put them there, but you have an issue with something much more complex than a bunch of rocks, like the cell, and saying that intelligence didn’t create it? It magically self-arranged itself randomly? Now who’s the believer in magic forces here? Me or you?”

  “You’re oversimplifying matters, Rachael! You need the right atmosphere, temperature, chemistry, and a catalyst, such as a lightning strike. Early Earth was a violent planet with fierce storms.”

  Rachael dabbed the corner of her mouth with her napkin. “But you’re just proving my point. You just added a number of complex variables to the equation for creating a cell—for life itself. The lightning bolt comes, and Dr. Frankenstein suddenly cries, ‘It’s alive!’ Mary Shelley wrote a great novel, but it’s long on suspense and short on believability. You’re going through a lot of mental masturbation and conjuring up a lot of specific pre-conditions to try to justify the natural existence of cells while ignoring the possibility that the cell had a creator.”

  Rachael continued after taking a bite of her meal. “Let me ask you something. If during your presentation with the Martian rover, you had moved the rover and discovered some cairns on Mars, then what? Would you be looking for a natural cause, or would you be thinking there must have been some intelligence that created them?”

  Joshua thought about the question for a moment. “That’s a tough question,” he finally replied. “Not sure what I’d think.”

  “That’s my point exactly,” Rachael said. “On Earth, you assume cairns are created by humans because you believe in the existence of humans on Earth, but on Mars you’re not sure because you don’t want to believe in alien intelligence. Pure science should not depend on pre-conceived notions or beliefs. I think that most scientists have a preconceived notion that there is no creator, so they ignore the potential evidence of one. In fact, did you know that after Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe, and after the Big Bang theory was proposed, many scientists rejected the theory outright because, to them, it smacked too much of creationism?”

  Joshua wondered how to reply to the quick-witted woman sitting across from him. She could verbally parry and thrust with the best of them. “I did know about the initial resistance to the Big Bang theory, and I’ll concede that a number of variables were needed to start evolution on Earth, but maybe chaos theory could account for how they combined. Random conditions produce non-random results. That was one of your best articles, by the way. I loved it.”

  Rachael was thoroughly enjoying the discussion. She disagreed with Joshua, but there was something compelling about his passion and enthusiasm. She’d interviewed countless other scientists, but never one so young and so sure of himself. He had a rare combination of confidence and playfulness. He also appreciated her wry humor and directness, which some men found threatening.

  “Chaos theory?” she said. “It almost explains your point of view, but not quite. Even chaos theory dictates that there be some form of programming to initial conditions—conditions not unlike your random set of variables required for life. There needs to be some catalyst.”

  “And your catalyst is God?”

  “Maybe, but let’s return to the Big Bang for a moment. Where did the initial singularity come from? Where is the first cause, the programmer?”

  Joshua appeared frustrated, and the look on his face was a gentle Come on, you can’t really be saying that. “As you well know, the laws of physics don’t apply inside of black holes, singularities, event horizons—or before the Big Bang.”

  “My point exactly, which is why I was captain of the debate team.”

  They both exploded in laughter as Joshua settled back in his chair and started drinking his second glass of wine. He was thoroughly enjoying the non-threatening give and take.

  “Alright, I know where you’re coming from,” Joshua said, placing his napkin on the table, “but here’s my point. What you’re calling proof is conjecture. It’s a . . . best guess in the absence of any concrete evidence.”

  “Au contraire,” Rachael countered. “Why, just today we received more evidence of a creator, evidence that I find the most compelling yet.”

  Joshua looked perplexed. “Then I missed it. I’m clueless.”

  “Don’t you find it awfully convenient that entangled spookyons were created by the Big Bang?”

  “Amazing, perhaps, but convenient? No. Convenience is an emotional concept, not a scientific criterion.”

  Rachael smiled as if she’d just scored the crucial point in their discussion. “You asked me to bear with you several times while we were driving today. Now you’ll have to bear with me. I’m going somewhere with this.”

  “I’m your captive audience. Hold forth.”

  “To begin with, we live in a universe that allows for intelligence to evolve. There may be many intelligent societies out there but each with a different level of intelligence.”

  Joshua nodded, “Okay.”

  “For the sake of argument, let’s say that the aliens are more advanced than we are. Hawking himself claimed that they might not be so friendly. No little gray intergalactic beings zipping through the universe playing music as in Close Encounters. Maybe some are as mean and nasty as wolverines and live to conquer other races because their advanced technology gave them . . . oh, I don’t know, delusions of grandeur from mastering their machines and the laws of nature. As the adage goes, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Is this science fiction? Maybe not. Time and again, science fiction has been an accurate predictor of the future.”

  “I’ll stipulate that last point, but I’m still not seeing God in all this,” Joshua said.

  “If you were creating the universe, wouldn’t you want to build a system in which intelligent beings could evolve to intelligence and then communicate with other intelligent beings without the fear and destruction that actual physical contact might entail?”

  “You mean like a cosmic quarantine imposed by the enormous distances between stars?” Joshua asked.

  “Exactly! So if you were to create the universe, you create it on the grandest of scales where nothing with mass or energy can travel faster than the speed of light. But information—that’s different. From the moment of creation, you inject into the system an unbelievable communications network so that civilizations can speak to one another without fear of conquest.”

  “In other words, a communications network composed of entangled spookyons,” Joshua said as he started to get the gist of Rachael’s argument.

  “It is, as the saying goes, a system elegant in its simplicity. Assuming that’s what we’ve stumbled across, was this network a fluke, a random accident? No way. To me, it’s another cairn, something too ordered and purposeful to be random. There has to be a programmer to assemble the random variables in just the right fashion. Otherwise—and I’ll invoke a hallmark of science—entropy carries the day. Randomness. A total lack of organization.”

  Joshua looked away from the table momentarily and then back at Rachael. “I can neither prove nor disprove your hypothesis, Professor Miller, but I have to admit that it’s compelling and well-constructed. It’s quite interesting and certainly merits more thought.”

  “I guess we’re two interesting people,” Rachael said, raising her glass.

  “I have to tell you, Rachael, that it’s refreshing to have such stimulating, intellectual conversation for a change.”

  Rachael appeared puzzled. “Really? You have a brain trust back at the particle center. The cream of the intellectual crop. There have to be lots of people to have great discussions with.”

  “Yeah, but somehow I feel that they mostly just agree w
ith whatever I propose. Maybe they’re intimidated because I’m the director. The conversations are usually very one-sided and banal. But you, you’re not intimidated at all which is refreshing. You also have some compelling opposing views which is also refreshing.” Joshua looked up from his pasta. “Besides, no one at the lab certainly is as interesting to look at as you are.”

  “I do believe I’ve been paid a compliment,” Rachael replied with a slight blush on her cheeks.

  “Indeed you have. So tell me—did you win most of your debates?”

  “Nah, I made that up. I was never on a debate team.”

  Joshua slapped his forehead with the palm of his hand. “You really had me going. Why on Earth did you tell me that?”

  “Because it sounded awfully good and grabbed your attention. Reporters always have a few tricks up their sleeves.”

  They finished their meals and paid the bill. “I wonder what Vinod’s up to,” Rachael asked.

  “Something good, I hope. The history of the human race may hinge on his algorithm. Let’s find out.” Joshua got up and retrieved the case.

  “I hope that spookyon of yours has a call-waiting feature,” Rachael said as she also got up from the table.

  “Apparently all spookyons do. It’s why we made contact. It’s as if someone was waiting for our response.”

  “And maybe not by chance,” Rachael added as she grabbed her purse and turned away before Joshua could reply.

  They walked to the door, Joshua carrying the case and again drawing stares. He followed Rachael into the parking lot, blown away by their scintillating conversation. But this conversation would pale in comparison to the one they would soon be having.

  15

  Fat Pipe

  Having finished his task earlier than expected, Vinod sat on one of the couches in his study while programming new music into Layla when the doorbell rang. He glanced at his smart phone since he’d installed a new security system that tied into his Android so that he could see who was at the door from anywhere in his home. Rachael and Joshua were right on time, so he pressed the keypad and spoke into the phone.