I do not come to this, the final session, with the intention of concluding the day with a neat rounding off of the topics we have discussed. If today has provided ideas for the next step taken after we have left here, then I for one would be quite satisfied. This is not a session in which I am going to tell you how to find security in uncertainty but one in which I wish to suggest that now, in the twenty-first century, there is a greater need than perhaps ever before for us to explore how this might be achieved.
We are in a culture that is significantly influenced by science. One of the characteristics of science that has had an effect on society is – as we saw earlier – the appeal science makes to reason rather than authority. In the use of reason, it is, as the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Protagorus (5th century BC), suggested, Man – which I take to mean each individual – who is 'the measure of all things'. The onus is on each one of us to reflect upon and evaluate all that we encounter.
Significantly, we appear to be the only animals aware of the fact that we were ourselves born. This we do not know from direct intellectual experience; we are told of our births or we make inferences from what we see happening around us. In natural terms, we wake up to ourselves slowly; after we are born, we gradually become aware of ourselves and those around us. In so doing, we take ourselves – and the fact that there are others around us – largely for granted.
We are also – so far as we can tell – the only animals able to foresee the fact that we must some day die. We are the only animals intellectually aware that we are finite – whose only certain existence is bracketed between a 'before' (when we were not) and an 'after' (when we may not be). And yet this is something that we tend either to overlook – being too busy with other things – or deliberately choose to ignore. Certainly, these are not easy questions to address. Neither are they comfortable questions.
W.H. Davies (1871-1940) concludes what is probably his most famous poem 'Leisure' with the lines:
A poor life this, if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
He had been considering how the beauty of the natural world can go unappreciated. However, these lines could equally well apply to the question of our being. It is a poor life if we have no time to reflect upon the fact of our being. Not only our 'being here' but our 'being at all'. Indeed, for Socrates (c.469-399BC), 'the unexamined life' was not even worth living (Apologia 38a).
Again, we are the only animals that can do this – at least, so far as we can be aware.
The Science Fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) once, rather wittily, opined that he would hate to think that we were the most intelligent beings in the universe. There is, however, still no evidence of any other beings comparable to ourselves anywhere else. While it would be quite a shock if some unequivocal evidence of extra-terrestrial life were found – should a Michael Rennie (1909-1971) (or in the recent remake, a Keanu Reeves (1964- )) land their spacecraft on the White House lawn – it might be worse: we might be totally alone. We have come to assume somewhat that the probabilites are that at least somewhere in the universe surely there must be other forms of life – indeed, intelligent beings – but what if we are totally alone in the universe? Although we can never prove the absence of other life forms, it is possible that we could be the only beings who have or who will ever exist in this universe.
We haven't been looking for signs of extra-terrestrial life for very long – only a matter of a few decades – but what if, in perhaps another thousand years, there is still no evidence. That would not negate the possibility of life in some remote corner but perhaps we might begin to feel more alone. What would it be like to be totally alone in a universe this size?
But consider too the philosophical notion of solipism. Solipism is the idea that the self – or oneself – is all that one can know to exist for sure. There are no convincing arguments that anyone has ever been able to produce to prove the existence of the things around us or even the existence of other people. That is not to say that there are philosophers who don't accept the existence of others but there is no logical proof that one's self is not all that there is.
So, we began today with the heavens telling and being pointed elsewhere. Now, as we draw to a close, I am casting doubt about the veracity of what is inside this very room. I suggested earlier that the knowledge gained via science is provisional. I am now casting doubt even over the constant flow of information obtained via our senses. But I am, of course, not casting doubt that I am here – after all I know I am: 'I think'. To expand on Descartes' (1596-1650) cogito – when he famously said 'I think, therefore, I am', he was stating that he was thinking – he was self-aware – and so there must be something that was: that had being. This too, is our only certainty and it is a certainty known only to each one of us individually. All else, by the very nature of things, is uncertainty. How and why we have evolved to have consciousness – certainly in the form in which we each appear to experience it – is a topic of on going debate. Consciousness does contribute certain survival advantages but not everything in consciousness seems to be open to the shaping forces of evolution as currently understood.
Loneliness and uncertainty are not highnotes upon which to finish. Unless, there is something else to which they point. Perhaps, at its heart, prayer – certainly as practised by Christ – may not so much be about asking for and getting things (which is a very Darwinian, survival-orientated use to which prayer is often put) but about not being alone in a seemingly empty universe; alone in a world full of things we cannot know to exist for certain. To pray, however meagre one's efforts, is a statement that one feels that there is someone to whom one prays; another being who is not only out there – but who is also in here – within – somehow intimately connected to oneself in a way no other being can be.
In all this uncertainty, perhaps it is not what but in whom we believe that is important.
Let me leave the final word, not to Darwin (or to Scripture) but to Darwin's gardener who is purported to have said of Darwin:
'Poor man, he just stands and stares at a yellow flower for minutes at a time. He would be far better off with something to do.'
To Consider:
• Having reflected upon and become acutely aware of the finitude of our being, from whence comes our security? How do we find it? Or, does it find us?