Reddit reviews Just Six Numbers: The Deep Forces That Shape The Universe

This thread has been around for a few hours so I'm afraid this comment might get buried, but since nobody who has commented so far on this thread is actually Catholic, I'll bite.

There are a few fundamentals that need to be cleared up before I can progress to considering the four questions you posed.

Firstly, I am not sure as to whether or not Catholics are actually required to believe in the existence of a literal Adam and Eve. Though in Humani Generis Pius XII wrote that the faithful were to affirm the historicity of "a sin truly committed by one Adam," John Paul II made no mention of a historical Adam and Eve in his "Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Evolution" (typically when a pontiff disagree with previous pontiffs, they do not call them out directly, but rather omit that with which they disagree from their own teaching).

The story of Adam and Eve is meant to implicate all humanity: before the fall they do not even have proper names but are rather referred to in the Biblical text simply as "man" and "woman" (seriously, go take a look). It is, then, entirely correct to affirm that these two literary characters, this primordial couple who disobeyed the will of God represents all humanity. Whether or not we can therefore claim that the story is completely allegorical and that Adam and Eve as such did not exist is beyond my competence, but for my part I do not think that the belief that they exist is technically required.

Secondly, original sin is a descriptive term for the fact that human beings are born with something deficient in their wills. This fact is obvious: human nature includes a desire to seize, possess, to advance the interests of the self over the interests of others, to elevate the ego (as Augustine observes in his Confessions). This, I think, is indisputable, and this deficiency, this willingness to prioritize the self over other people and over the good, is precisely what the term "original sin" means. The word "sin" in the term "original sin" does not mean that people are born with personal sin, that people enter the world already guilty of wrongdoing; rather, the word "sin" refers to a condition in which not everything is as it should be, in which something is lacking.

1. Evolution might have happened randomly, but at some point beings existed that had rational capacity and thus also the capacity for moral action (morality being a function of reason). Rational capacity, though perhaps a product of biological processes, presupposes the ability to act against instinctual urges for the sake of what one knows cognitively to be right. Thus evolution cannot be thought of as abjuring choice: if we have evolved to be rational creatures in a non-deterministic universe (as the Church believes we are), then the rational capacities we evolved necessarily entail our freedom in making our own choices.
   
   Perhaps the greatest revelation that Christianity brought into the world, the greatest "religious innovation," so to speak, is this notion that God is love. God wishes us to be united with him in love and does not wish to punish. Yet love to be real must be freely chosen; a love that is forced is by its very nature not love. If God allows us to participate in his being by loving, he is required to give us the choice of not loving.
   
   Thus I think the "sin" component of "Original Sin" is entirely coherent. The difficulty lies instead with the "original" aspect—how exactly is it that previous sin entails that the rest of us also enter this world in a state in which something is lacking in our wills? I am not entirely sure (and the Catechism itself says that "the transmission of original sin is a mystery"), but my personal theory is that any sin, by its very nature as a turning-away from God, effects a separation between the physical and the divine realms such that when sin entered into the physical world, the physical world became imperfect. If this realm of existence has become tainted, we who come after the tainting enter a world of imperfection, of lackingness and thus are conceived in lackingness. Something—some element of salvific grace proper to the divine realm—is missing.
   
   
2. Even if early humans "had less thinking capacity," their status as rational animals made them moral agents. According to Thomas Aquinas, conscience itself is an act of the intellect by which a human being can judge the morality of an action, and thus morality depends upon intellect, upon knowing.
   
   Perhaps the point at which human beings became capable of obeying or disobeying God was the point at which one of our ancestors was capable of giving him- or herself fully away, of surrendering himself not for his own good (and not for the survival of his genes either; as Dawkins brilliantly observed before he dabbled into fields beyond his competence, it is the gene that is truly selfish and thus we can observe seemingly "altruistic" behavior in animals like bees, who sacrifice themselves to protect their kin and thus perpetuate their genes even though they die) but rather for the good. The point at which a human being was able to surrender him- or herself for a good cause simply and exclusively because it was the right thing to do seems to be the point at which true love becomes possible, and thus relationship with God as well.
   
   Says Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI:
   
   > The clay became man at the moment in which a being for the first time was capable of forming, however dimly, the thought of "God". The first Thou that—however stammeringly—was said by human lips to God marks the moment in which the spirit arose in the world. Here the Rubicon of anthropogenesis was crossed. For it is not the use of weapons or fire, not new methods of cruelty or of useful activity, that constitute man, but rather his ability to be immediately in relation to God. This holds fast to the doctrine of the special creation of man ... herein ... lies the reason why the moment of anthropogenesis cannot possibly be determined by paleontology: anthropogenesis is the rise of the spirit, which cannot be excavated with a shovel. The theory of evolution does not invalidate the faith, nor does it corroborate it. But it does challenge the faith to understand itself more profoundly and thus to help man to understand himself and to become increasingly what he is: the being who is supposed to say Thou to God in eternity.
   
   -Ratzinger, In the Beginning...
   
   
3. For this question I have no concrete answers, but I can offer some thoughts.
   
   Firstly, God is timeless. Therefore the span of time between the creation of the universe and the appearance of the first rational/moral agent is of no consequence.
   
   Secondly, it appears that this universe is unusually conducive to life. Now, I'm a theologian, not a physicist, and so I may be talking out of my ass here, but as Martin Rees writes in Just Six Numbers there are six fundamental constants that "constitute the 'recipe' for a universe," such that if any one of them were even slightly different, this universe would be utterly incapable of producing the advanced forms of life capable of rational inquiry and moral reflection that are relevant to our discussion. For example, the value of the fundamental constant ε is 0.007, and "if ε were 0.006 or 0.008, we could not exist." Thus I don't think we can say that this is the case of a "laissez-faire" creator; rather, it would seem that this creator ensured that rational beings would eventually come to exist in the universe that he created and that we were thus intended.
   
   Thirdly, God does not disappear from the scene at the point at which beings are capable of acknowledging him. He makes his presence known and is active in history (and with the incarnation he even enters history).

Not OP, just helping out with some formatting (and links!) because I like these suggestions.

> 1) The Magic Of Reality - Richard Dawkins
>
> 2) The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
>
> 3)A Brief History Of Time - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)The Grand Design - Stephen Hawking
>
> 4)Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari (Any Book By Daniel Dennet)
>
> 5)Enlightenment Now - Steven Pinker
>
> 6)From Eternity Till Here - Sean Caroll (Highly Recommended)
>
> 7)The Fabric Of Cosmos - Brian Greene (If you have good mathematical understanding try Road To Reality By Roger Penrose)
>
> 8)Just Six Numbers - Martin Reese (Highly Recommended)

• Breaking The Spell by Daniel Dennett
  
• Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman
  
• The End of Faith by Sam Harris
  
• The Elegant Universe by Briane Greene (about string theory)
  
• Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees
  
• Before The Beginning by Martin Rees
  
• Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter
  
• The Demon-Haunted World by Sagan
  

There's a number of fundamental constants to our universe. If any of them were even 5% or more different, the universe wouldn't be capable of supporting life.

This book is a very accessible explanation of (some of) them.

first thanks a lot, great comment. since it's obvious you are increadibly knowledgeable, i want to ask you a question: isn't the multiverse theory basicly a response to books like

https://www.amazon.com/Just-Six-Numbers-Forces-Universe/dp/0465036732

that basicly says that the fact that we live in an inhabitable world in no shorter than a miracle? doesn't this theory try to explain in scientific way the unprobability of our very existence?

That's a very tortured reading of just one of the stories of a post-resurrection appearance.

I was thinking about what you said about us deserving more proof. Frankly, I think we've got far more than we have any right to when compared to previous generations.

In Jesus' day, only a few thousand people saw him work a miracle. Only a thousand at most saw him after the resurrection. In all of human history, seeing the supernatural has been confined to a relative handful of people.

Today, though, every single person in the developed world has access to

• scientific proof the universe began at a finite moment in time
  
  
• solid evidence of intentional design in the fabric of the universe, our planet, and biology
  
  
• documented evidence of miracles
  
  
• documented evidence of a non-material aspect of humans, some would even say of life after death
  
  
• solid evidence that the gospels are trustworthy
  
  
• and evidence that whether the gospels are historically reliable or merely "religious stories", Jesus really did rise from the dead.
  
  No, we don't get to see Jesus in the flesh -- walking on water or otherwise -- but we've got more than any generation since his has had. Far more. And we're going to be held responsible for what we did with that privilege.

I took an entry-level astronomy class in which we read this book which outlines this idea.

Just Six Numbers, Martin Rees

Just Six Numbers, The Origin of Consciousness, The Blind Watchmaker, Synaptic Self, and Animals in Translation are some of my favorites.

The sensitivity of this ε value (and the values of other dimensionless constants) is explained by Martin Rees in this book.