Sermon: The Best Of All Possible Worlds

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Astrophysicists these days like to say that there is not just one universe, but many. That’s if by “universe” you mean everything you could possibly see, reach, know about, get to, or that could possibly affect you in even the slightest way. Anything outside of this area is beyond what they call our “cosmic horizon.” It is so far away that light from there has not had time to travel here since the big bang. So even in principle, we can’t see it. And since nothing travels faster than light, if light hasn’t had time to reach us, nothing else has either. Nothing from any other universe has been able to impact us at all. And yet there is almost certainly more stuff out there. Why wouldn’t there be? Why would our cosmic horizon define the limits of reality? In fact, many scientists today believe that there are an infinite number of universes out there, each with its own cosmic horizon, so far apart that they have literally nothing to do with one another. It’s an infinite multiverse.

 

I was trying to explain all this to my six-year-old kids this summer and they eventually wandered off to go play in their room. But I guess my daughter tried to keep the conversation going because at one point I overheard my son say to her with annoyance, “Would you please stop talking about what’s going on in outer space?” He has a point. Why should we care about what’s going on in outer space… beyond our cosmic horizon… if it can’t possibly affect us in any way? Well here’s where it gets pretty theological pretty quickly. Because the question of what’s going on in outer space has everything to do with whether we humans are just matter and energy, just a flock of quarks, or whether, as we tend to feel, we are something more. It has everything to do with whether we have free will. It has everything to do with whether we actually make choices or whether we just fall like dominoes in a meaningless chain of cause and effect.

 

Imagine you’re in a spin class. For those of you who’ve never done a spin class, it’s where you and a bunch of other people ride stationary bicycles in a dark room with pounding music while a macho instructor yells at you to pedal faster. So imagine you’re in a spin class and you’ve just done innumerable 30-second sprints where you go as hard and as fast as you can. You’re exhausted, you’re out of breath, your heart is racing, and all your muscles hurt. The instructor yells at you that you’re going to do one more – just 30 seconds more. “Come on,” the instructor shouts, “show me what you’re made of!” You know you’ll feel really good afterwards if you do it but right now you just don’t have it. You just want to curl up in a fetal position and/or eat a large pizza. What determines whether you do or don’t go for one more 30-second push? Is it just the combination of what you ate today, how much sleep you got, what your upbringing was like, and all the little bits of nature and nurture that conspired to make you who you are at this moment? Or is there something more?

 

If you ask a physicist like Brian Greene, there is nothing more. What determines what you do is the arrangement of your particles. He writes, “Tell me how the particles making up the earth, the sun, the galaxy, are arranged and you’ve fully articulated reality… One’s physical and mental characteristics are nothing but a manifestation of how the particles in one’s body are arranged. Specify the particle arrangement and you’ve specified everything.” So if you could feed all the information about your particles into a really big computer, it could predict with 100% accuracy whether you’ll go all out for that extra 30 seconds or whether you’ll bail.

 

This is a trivial matter when you’re talking about a spin class, but it becomes quickly non-trivial when you apply it to the greatest of human challenges. What determined whether Rosa Parks would stay seated at the front of the bus? What determines whether a protester at the Standing Rock Reservation will keep advancing toward the bulldozers when security releases its guard dogs on the crowd or whether he will retreat to safety? What determines whether the victim of domestic violence will find the courage to leave her abuser? What determines whether the abuser will be able to stop abusing? What determines whether a grand jury will indict the police officer who shot an unarmed black man? What determines whether the bright, hard-working teenager will become the first in her family to go to college? Unitarian Universalists tend to feel that what determines it is the person themself – that we have freedom and the “inherent worth and dignity” promised by our First Principle. We are animated by something like a divine spark and we are each unique as a snowflake.

 

But Brian Greene and other serious, not-on-drugs scientists claim that actually we are not unique at all. If we live in an infinite multiverse and our whole world is nothing but one big arrangement of particles, then we, and our world and everything in it exactly as it is right now exist not just here but in an infinite number of other places as well. Parallel universes. In Brian Greene’s book, he gives an awesome description of how they get to this conclusion. If anyone wants to geek out with me after the service, I’ll tell you about it—it’s actually semi-comprehensible. But the important thing to know is that in this vision of reality, our world repeats an infinite number of times and places. An infinite number of exact copies of you exist in other places just as fully as you do here. They’re all sitting there listening to this same sermon and feeling the exact same way as you. They’re all identical configurations of particles. There’s no one of them that’s the “real” you. Any sense of being “real” that we might feel is just a function of how those particles have produced the feeling of realness. And each one of “you” is fated to remain in lock step with all the others forever.

 

To me, this concept is fascinating and utterly deflating. It means that we are no different from robots – that at the end of the day, although we work so hard to make good choices for ourselves, our loved ones, and our world, really we’re all just part of a big computer program, running infinite loops in the sterile operating system of the cosmos. At the end of the day, there’s just no one home. And to be truthful, sometimes it feels like this. I think many of us know this feeling when we just can’t seem to make the changes that we dream of in our lives and in our world. We find ourselves repeating the self-destructive patterns that we’ve been trying to change for decades. We hear our parents’ words coming out of our mouths when we reprimand our kids. One young black man after another is killed by police. One mass shooter after another has legally and easily bought his AR-15 assault rifle. One wildlife species after another goes extinct because we clearcut their forests or pollute their water. It sometimes feels like we are just running our program and being run by our programming, and we have no real choice at all.

 

When we feel like this, demoralized and hopeless, the only thing that can save us is faith. When the whole world seems to argue for the inevitability of violence and the impossibility of change, faith shows another way. Because although we can never prove it – certainly not to the likes of Brian Greene – we have experienced times when we have leapt off of the trajectory of our fate. We’ve experienced times when we have been able to finally change an old childhood pattern; we’ve experienced times when we’ve been able to end a family cycle of abuse; we have experienced massive social changes, liberations they said could never, ever happen. We have crashed the computer program time and again. We can testify to our spectacular human capacity to change. Unitarian Universalists, with our Seven Principles and our actions in the world have great respect for the insights of science. But we also embody the faith that we are more than the sum of our particles. This “more” is what I call God – the force in the universe that makes transformation possible.

 

When you’re in that spin class, being yelled at to push for another 30 seconds, you can make a decision: you can say, “maybe in that other parallel universe, the “me” in that spin class will go get a pizza, but this is going to be the universe where I give it all I’ve got. And at that moment, you can almost hear the rending of the fabric of the cosmos as our universe peels off and separates from its clones. And everything from that moment forward is different. We can make a decision: Maybe in some other universe I’m going to keep repeating childhood patterns, but this will be the universe where I become the person I’ve always wanted to be. Maybe in some other universe, we continue burning fossil fuels until our ecosystems collapse and humans go extinct but this will be the universe where we come together and heal our earth. Maybe in some other universe, violence against people of color and Muslims and Jews and queer people will go on and on and on, but this will be the universe where we learn to cherish our differences and love one another. And if this means that infinite parallel worlds will do the same thing and love will pervade the cosmos, so be it. The whole multiverse is welcome to thank us.

 

The Unitarian voice of our faith teaches that we are all one –there is no cosmic horizon where one sphere ends and another begins. Everything touches everything. And the Universalist voice of our faith teaches that the universe is not a static, indifferent operating system; it’s a gravitational force drawing us toward love and reconciliation. Those of us who are working to heal the earth and lift up all its creatures have the explosive power of the cosmos on our side. Reality bends and even tears when we engage that power. We may not really know and some of us don’t care what’s going on in outer space. Parallel universes and black holes and light years and quarks and strings can do what they will. But we here can make a decision: through faith and action we can do everything in our power to make this the best of all possible worlds.