Ep. 6 – Cosmic Plinko

TRANSCRIPT

[SFX: retro tv channel flipping sounds?]

JESSE EUBANKS: January 1983. Shag carpet. Corduroy chair. You’re home sick. Watching TV. And in the 80s— that meant one thing.

ARCHIVE — JOHNNY OLSON (energetic): “Regina George… come on down! You are the next contestant on The Price Is Right!”

[SFX: Cue crowd roar, cheerful bells.]

JESSE EUBANKS: America’s favorite guessing game.

FAITH STULTS: You guess the price of a blender. A sofa. A dining room set.

JUDY (archive): “I want to bid XYZ, Bob!”

FAITH STULTS: Closest without going over wins.

BOB BARKER (archive): “I say the actual retail price is $1021. Judy, you win!”

JESSE EUBANKS: That’s Judy. She’s bouncing toward Bob— Grinning. Shocked.

FAITH STULTS: She leans in. Kisses him on the cheek.

BOB BARKER (archive): “Now… what can Judy win?” JOHNNY OLSON (archive): “A chance to win up to $25,000 in cash!”

FAITH STULTS: No one knows it yet, but they’re watching the birth of a legend.

BOB BARKER (archive): “That’s right! Let’s head right over here and play our brand new game… PLINKO!”

JESSE EUBANKS: Plinko. A ten-foot board. Tilted back. Rows of silver pegs in a tight geometric grid.

FAITH STULTS: A staircase to the top where you stand above the board. Holding your chips.

JESSE EUBANKS: At the bottom: nine slots. Some worth a hundred. Some nothing. And one, dead center— five thousand dollars.

FAITH STULTS: One at a time, Judy drops her first three chips. They bounce. They scatter. Together, she wins $1,500.

JESSE EUBANKS: But then, she drops her final chip.

SHOW CLIP (archive): (Sound of chip falling.)

JESSE EUBANKS: It hits one peg. Falls to the right. Then another. Falls to the right again. Then to the left. The right.

SHOW CLIP (archive): (Crowd frenzy swells. Disc lands. Crowd goes wild.)

JESSE EUBANKS: She does it. Her chip lands in the center slot.

BOB BARKER (archive): “You did it! $5,000!”

FAITH STULTS: Judy becomes the first winner in a game that feels unpredictable.

SHOW CLIP (archive): (Sounds of Price Is Right fade away.)

(beat – transition)

JESSE EUBANKS: Now imagine a different Plinko board. Not ten feet tall. But fourteen billion light-years wide.

FAITH STULTS: At the bottom— not nine slots. But more empty slots than you could ever count. All zero. Except one. Land there— and you get everything. Galaxies. Gravity. Golden retrievers. You.

JESSE EUBANKS: Miss— and there’s nothing. No stars. No life. You let your chip fall.

FAITH STULTS: And somehow— in an endless sea of empty slots— it lands. You win existence itself.

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: So was it luck? Or something else?

JESSE EUBANKS: Tonight on Wonderology— we’re dropping the chip again.

FAITH STULTS: We’re exploring the space between probability and destiny. Between accident and intention. We’re asking the question: Are we here by chance?

JESSE EUBANKS: I’m Jesse Eubanks. A storyteller and journalist.

FAITH STULTS: I’m Faith Stults. A science educator.

JESSE EUBANKS: So… let’s get curious.

ACT 1 — THE MISSING INGREDIENT

FAITH STULTS: At its heart, science has one job. Create models that explain reality. What we can test. What we can repeat.

JESSE EUBANKS: So what do you do when science says one thing— but reality says something else?

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: That’s the problem keeping one man up at night.

ARCHIVE MEDIA — THE COSMOLOGISTS: [Video Intro Music]

ARCHIVE MEDIA — THE COSMOLOGISTS: Man has always gazed at the night sky in awe and wonder… (crossfade)

ARCHIVE MEDIA — THE COSMOLOGISTS: Tonight, we meet Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University…

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: Fred Hoyle is a man who likes taking solitary hikes in the woods to think. Deeply loyal to his inner circle of friends. He writes science fiction with his son as a hobby.

FAITH STULTS: But Hoyle is also an astrophysicist. A cosmologist. Sharp. Confident. Confrontational. And he’s not interested in explanations he can’t test.

HOYLE (TAPE): I don’t like the idea that something is dependent on a cause that I can never verify.

JESSE EUBANKS: Hoyle loves a good fight. And he writes constantly. What you’re about to hear are his words— read for us.

FAITH STULTS: He’ll fight scientists.

FRED HOYLE (Tape): “The reason why scientists like the ‘big bang’ is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis.”

FAITH STULTS: He’ll fight religion.

FRED HOYLE (Tape): “Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves.”

JESSE EUBANKS: But what he’s about to find will give both sides something to argue about for the next seventy years.

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: It’s the 1950s. Hoyle is standing at a chalkboard. The equations say something strange.

FAITH STULTS: According to the math— the universe shouldn’t have much carbon. But everywhere he looks— there it is. Carbon in meteorites. In oceans. In every living cell.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which creates a real problem. Because the model says this shouldn’t be happening.

FAITH STULTS: Hoyle isn’t alone. Scientists around the world are wrestling with it.

JESSE EUBANKS: Because this isn’t just about carbon. Given the physics we know— should complex life exist at all?

FAITH STULTS: The math says no. We shouldn’t be here. Something is wrong with the science.

JESSE EUBANKS: The puzzle starts inside a star.

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: Stars are chemical factories, building bigger elements from smaller ones. Atoms slam together, and step by step the periodic table grows.

JESSE EUBANKS: But carbon— the element that binds complex life together— isn’t cooperating.

FAITH STULTS: The atoms needed to build carbon won’t fuse consistently. They touch. Push back. Separate. No matter how many times they run the equations, the connection won’t hold.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which means carbon should be rare. Complex organisms shouldn’t exist. Why does science say one thing while reality says something else? This is what Hoyle can’t shake.

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: Imagine the universe is a cake. You can see it. You can taste it. But every baker trying to copy the recipe fails. The cake always falls apart.

JESSE EUBANKS: So the bakers assume the recipe must be wrong. Is the timing off? The portions?

FAITH STULTS: But Hoyle asks a different question. What if the recipe is right— and the real problem is that we’re missing an ingredient?

JESSE EUBANKS: The other bakers hate that idea. We know the ingredients. Fix the recipe.

FAITH STULTS: But Hoyle goes looking for a missing piece anyway.

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: Back at the chalkboard, Hoyle spends months plugging numbers into the equation and running the reaction again and again. And then, one day, he finds it. One number makes the math work. A number that feels almost absurd.

FRED HOYLE (Tape): “…a rather precisely tuned resonance… about seven point six five million electron volts…”

FAITH STULTS: Hoyle proposes carbon has one exact setting where the reaction works.

JESSE EUBANKS: A secret setting no one has ever observed.

FAITH STULTS: The question is— Is Hoyle imagining something that doesn’t exist? Or is he discovering something real hiding inside every carbon atom?

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: Hoyle can’t test it himself. He’s a chalkboard guy. So he sends the prediction to a nuclear physics lab at Caltech. The atom smashers.

FAITH STULTS: And essentially tells them— “You should find something right  here.” Like sending someone to the grocery store to buy an ingredient no one has ever seen.

JESSE EUBANKS: Hoyle is predicting something that no one thinks actually exists.

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: So the lab goes looking. They fire particles at carbon nuclei. Scanning energy level after energy level. Searching for the one Hoyle predicted.

(beat)

And then— they see it.

JESSE EUBANKS: Exactly where Hoyle said it would be. Seven point six five million electron volts. Dead on. The missing ingredient is real.

FAITH STULTS: Today scientists call it the Hoyle state.

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: But here’s the strangest part. This energy level is incredibly precise. Move it even slightly— and the reaction fails. Think about baking a cake. The recipe works… but only if the oven temperature is exactly right.

JESSE EUBANKS: And in this case, it’s like the recipe is calling for a temperature of 350.001 degrees.

FAITH STULTS: Miss that setting— and the cake never forms.

JESSE EUBANKS: And in this case… the cake is carbon. And without this cake— nobody ever will be celebrating a birthday.

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: And once physicists see how delicate the carbon reaction is… they start asking a new question. If one setting has to be that precise— what else does?

FAITH STULTS: So they start checking the other numbers that shape the universe. Gravity. The nuclear forces that hold atoms together. The rate the universe expands. And they discover the same thing again and again. Change them even a little— and the universe doesn’t run the same.

FAITH STULTS: Scientists call this fine-tuning. Not because the laws of physics would break— the universe would still run. But complex life only appears inside a very narrow range.

JESSE EUBANKS: It’s like discovering the oven that baked the cake doesn’t have one dial. It has dozens.

FAITH STULTS: And every one of them has to be set almost exactly right.

JESSE EUBANKS: Miss even one— and life as we know it never happens.

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: And once we start seeing how narrow those ranges are, the question changes. It’s no longer just: How does the universe work? It becomes: What are we supposed to make of it? And for some, the conclusion is obvious.

TAPE — CLIP:  A very reasonable explanation is that there is a fine tuner or a mind who has said it that way. 

 

TAPE:  I think it actually glorifies God the most to see that how wonderfully constructed nature is that everything works. 

TAPE:  If somebody was going to convince me of the need for for a God, it would be 

 

JESSE EUBANKS: The Plinko chip could have landed in billions of empty slots. But somehow— it landed in the one place that hit the jackpot.

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: When something this unlikely happens— how do we explain it?

JESSE EUBANKS: After the break— the Mayflower heads into a storm. And decides the fate of millions. We’ll be right back.

 

ACT 2 — TESTING THE ODDS

JESSE EUBANKS: Welcome back to Wonderology. Jesse Eubanks.

FAITH STULTS: Faith Stults.

JESSE EUBANKS: We just watched scientists run into something unsettling. The universe doesn’t just sort of work. It works on a knife’s edge.

FAITH STULTS: Change the wrong number even slightly, and life as we know it never gets a foothold.

JESSE EUBANKS: So, what do we do with the long odds of fine-tuning?

FAITH STULTS: When something wildly unlikely happens— we don’t stay neutral. We interpret it.

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: September. 1620. The Mayflower leaves England. Over a hundred passengers. Thirty crew. Wood groaning under strain. Salt air chewing at the beams.

FAITH STULTS: They’re headed for Virginia. But…

RICHARD PICKERING (tape): “they were going right into the stormy season.”

FAITH STULTS: This is Richard Pickering. Senior historian at Plimoth Patuxet (puh-TUK-et) Museums.

RICHARD PICKERING (tape): “The earliest weeks of the Mayflower voyage were fair and pleasant, and then all of a sudden they are caught in such horrific storms…”

JESSE EUBANKS: One of the passengers is a man named John Howland. We don’t have his own words. What you’re about to hear is a reconstruction from actor Sam Allen.

SAM ALLEN AS JOHN HOWLAND (tape): “It was quite the storm. During the crossing, the sky was black as night for near a week and the ship did creak and groan and sway.”

JESSE EUBANKS: One night— the storm turns violent. The ship lurches.

RICHARD PICKERING (tape): “…the ship is suddenly dropping down, dropping over…”

FAITH STULTS: As the boat drops, a huge wave rises and slams the side of the boat.

SAM ALLEN AS JOHN HOWLAND (tape): “The wave swept over the deck…”

JESSE EUBANKS: The seasoned sailors aboard know how to react.

SAM ALLEN AS JOHN HOWLAND (tape): “…and all the sailors well braced for it— let it pass by them.”

FAITH STULTS: But Howland isn’t a sailor.

SAM ALLEN AS JOHN HOWLAND (tape): “I did not see the wave as it came.”

RICHARD PICKERING (tape): “John Howland is thrown into those churning waters.”

SAM ALLEN AS JOHN HOWLAND (tape): “…it took me and into the sea.”

JESSE EUBANKS: He’s overboard. English people in this period do not swim. His wool clothes instantly absorb water.

SAM ALLEN AS JOHN HOWLAND (tape): “My clothing was sodden and as heavy as lead.”

RICHARD PICKERING (tape): “A ship the size of the Mayflower, to save someone, it would have to turn around… It would take 90 minutes.”

JESSE EUBANKS: That can’t happen. Not at night. Not in a storm. Not in the middle of the Atlantic. He sinks.

SAM ALLEN AS JOHN HOWLAND (tape): “I cannot tell you how deep I went, but enough that all was dark about me… The air in my lungs burned into fire.”

RICHARD PICKERING (tape): “…he was fathoms below the ship.”

SAM ALLEN AS JOHN HOWLAND (tape): “So I offered unto God every sin I had ever committed for I thought I was soon to meet the man.

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: But as he falls— disoriented— he reaches out blindly. And grabs something.

SAM ALLEN AS JOHN HOWLAND (tape): “I suppose God did fill my hands with a rope as I fell… Where the rope did come from, I cannot say.”

JESSE EUBANKS: A rope trailing from the ship. Still attached.

SAM ALLEN AS JOHN HOWLAND (tape): “I clung to it…”

FAITH STULTS: From underwater, he climbs.

SAM ALLEN AS JOHN HOWLAND (tape): “I broke the surface and that first breath was like manna from heaven.”

JESSE EUBANKS: He begins crying out.

RICHARD PICKERING (tape): “They use a boat hook… and pull him out.”

FAITH STULTS: Against every expectation— John Howland lives.

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: He makes it to land. He recovers. He marries. He has children. His children have children.

FAITH STULTS: And that line doesn’t break. Generation after generation, it continues.

JESSE EUBANKS: John Howland has millions of living descendants today— more than any other documented passenger on the Mayflower. Possibly more than anyone else in American history. One of which is…

FAITH STULTS: Me. Thank God for ropes.

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: Go back to that night. Same storm. Same ship. Same wave. Remove one thing. The rope.

FAITH STULTS: John Howland doesn’t make it back aboard. And in that instant— every life that follows disappears. Not just me. Every parent. Every child. Every generation in between.

Change one moment— and everyone on the other end vanishes.

JESSE EUBANKS: So when you ask, “What are the odds that I exist?” They’re staggering. Astronomical.

FAITH STULTS: And when odds get that extreme— they stop feeling statistical. They start feeling personal.

JESSE EUBANKS: That can’t be nothing. That can’t be pure accident. It almost feels like the rope was handed to him.

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: And this is where something interesting happens. Because once something feels personal— we don’t just want to observe it. We want to explain it.

JESSE EUBANKS: And when we do, there are two ditches we often fall into.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “So there are people who really… are attracted to these arguments of fine tuning of the universe… like… how likely or unlikely it is that the universe would have just exactly the right fundamental constants to have developed the way that it did…”

JESSE EUBANKS: This is astronomer Jennifer Wiseman.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “I work at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Senior Project Scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “And so this fine tuning is interesting and it is sometimes used beyond just the walls of scientific analysis to inform philosophical conclusions or even theological conclusions”

FAITH STULTS: She says people look at the constants— gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, and say: If these were even slightly different, life couldn’t exist.

JESSE EUBANKS: Which is true. But, speaking personally outside her role at NASA, Jennifer thinks we need to slow down.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “My problem is when Christians take the fine-tuning theory and run with it as a strong apologetic, I would urge great caution.”

JESSE EUBANKS: She worries we see something astonishing or something we don’t fully understand and turn it into evidence for faith.

FAITH STULTS: As if improbability itself is proof of God.

JESSE EUBANKS: The problem with that is that science keeps moving.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “So what if, just hypothetically, we find out next year that, lo and behold, these fundamental constants in the universe that we’re experiencing could be anything. They could be a wide range, and we’d still end up with stars and life bearing planets. Well, then, if that turns out to be the most likely case, what happened to our apologetic?”

FAITH STULTS: Her concern is simple. If faith is anchored to what science hasn’t explained then every new explanation can feel like a threat. If God is used to fill the gaps in our knowledge, what happens when the gaps close?

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “I don’t like that approach very much.”

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: She’s not dismissing wonder. She’s resisting overreach.

JESSE EUBANKS: Don’t baptize the numbers. Long odds aren’t the same thing as meaning.

FAITH STULTS: Don’t turn “That’s unlikely” into “Therefore, I know.”

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: So, that’s the first ditch. The rush to meaning. The second ditch?

(beat)

ALISTER McGRATH (tape): “When I look at the remarkable structure of our universe… the fine constants of our universe, the remarkable way in which they seem to be there in a way that encourages life to occur. I think I find that quite remarkable.”

JESSE EUBANKS: This is Alister McGrath.

ALISTER McGRATH (tape): “Senior Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology at Oxford.”

JESSE EUBANKS: A theologian trained in molecular biophysics.

ALISTER McGRATH (tape): “The idea of chance is very interesting because very often people will say it all happened by chance but very often when you’re thinking about life events, when you talk about something happening by chance, when you look backwards, you suddenly realize, actually maybe that was meant to happen.”

FAITH STULTS: He says we’re quick to dismiss things as chance alone.

ALISTER McGRATH (tape): Very often talking about chance is very much a matter of perspective.  What for one person is chance, random, for another person is part of a bigger picture.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Sometimes “chance” just means, I don’t see the pattern. And because I don’t see the pattern, I assume there isn’t one.

FAITH STULTS: To take something rare and flatten it. To move from “It happened by chance” to “And that’s the end of the story.”

ALISTER McGRATH (tape): “From some perspectives the world may seem to be random and meaningless. But we can see it in a different way.”

JESSE EUBANKS: We don’t have to see it as senseless.

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: That’s the second ditch. The rush to meaninglessness.

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: Two ditches. The rush to meaning. The rush to meaninglessness.

FAITH STULTS: Rarity pushes us toward interpretation. One baptizes the moment. The other flattens it.

JESSE EUBANKS: So what do we do?

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: We live in a story. And stories force us to ask why. Not just why the Plinko chip falls the way it does— but also why there’s a Plinko board in the first place.

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: The rope was provision. Or it was chance.

JESSE EUBANKS: The constants point. Or they don’t.

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: And that choice doesn’t just explain the moment. It shapes the kind of world you think you’re living in.

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: After the break— two people try to stay out of the ditches. They show us that however you interpret it, you gain something. But you also pay for the story you choose. Stay with us.

Commercial 2

ACT 3 — GAINS AND LOSSES

JESSE EUBANKS: Wonderology. Jesse.

FAITH STULTS: Faith.

JESSE EUBANKS: The universe holds together by a knife’s edge. Change the numbers and we don’t exist.

FAITH STULTS: And once you see that, you can’t stay neutral. So are we here by chance?

JESSE EUBANKS: Whatever answer you choose— it doesn’t stay in the stars. It lands on you.

FAITH STULTS: And every explanation that gives you something will also cost you something.

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: Let’s start in a snowstorm.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): “My daughter was about six years old, I was walking with her through a snowstorm in New Hampshire.”

JESSE EUBANKS: This is Marcelo Gleiser.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): “Appleton professor of natural philosophy at Dartmouth College.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Physicist. Cosmologist. But on this night— just a dad in the snow.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): “She was asking me about snowflakes.”

FAITH STULTS: They’re falling everywhere. A snow globe come to life. Magic to a six-year-old.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): “I was telling her that it’s amazing that no two snowflakes are alike.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Same storm. Different journeys.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): “There are so many processes that go into making a snowflake… temperature, pressure, wind speed.”

FAITH STULTS: Tiny shifts that make each of them unique.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): “And then I had this idea… look at our planets.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Venus. Mars. Earth. Same solar system. Each one-of-a-kind.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): “They were all born more or less at the same time… and they’re all different…”

JESSE EUBANKS: Just like snowflakes.

FAITH STULTS: And one of those planets— ours— ended up with oceans. Atmosphere. Life.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): “There is no Earth 2.0.”

FAITH STULTS: Distinct.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): “There is nothing more important in the universe than life… hence, this is a sacred place…”

FAITH STULTS: Sacred. A religious word.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): And so the question you have to ask yourself is what is making Earth such a special place?

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: But— as special as our planet is— Marcelo doesn’t see our home as a place of providence.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): “If I look at it from a strictly scientific perspective… I would say… it’s an accident.”

(beat)

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): “But that leaves me empty, emotionally.”

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: So Marcelo has learned to sit with that feeling.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): Then you have room for mystery. A mystery that makes living worthwhile. And embracing this mystery of existence is a wonderful way to kind of celebrate, you know, the fact that we are here to try to make sense of who we are.”

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: Because if this explanation is true— nothing in the universe was trying to make you.

FAITH STULTS: Life happened. Consciousness happened. You happened.

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): “I always define myself as an agnostic… because… as far as we know, we don’t see any signs of major purpose in the universe yet.” “There is no path that is laid ahead of us. We make the path by walking on it.”

JESSE EUBANKS: If meaning is something we create— what makes it binding? What makes it more than preference?

JESSE EUBANKS: There’s another story too.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “I grew up in rural Arkansas on a small family farm.”

JESSE EUBANKS: This is Jennifer Wiseman again. Growing up on a farm meant dark skies. No streetlights. Just stars.

FAITH STULTS: And it was the 1970s. Which meant outer space was everywhere.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “Fantastic movies about space science fiction were coming out. So the first Star Wars movies…”

[Media: Star Wars lightsaber sound]

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “The first Star Trek movies…”

[Media: Star Trek: “Kirk to Enterprise”]

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “…the movie called The Black Hole, you know, my science fair project in junior high was to build a black hole.”

[MEDIA — THE VOYAGERS 1977 VIDEO (tape): Music begins (0:22+)]

JESSE EUBANKS: Jennifer wanted to understand the sky above her.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “We were starting to get these first images from the outer parts of our solar system.”

[MEDIA — THE VOYAGERS 1977 VIDEO (tape) (0:27)]: Jupiter and Saturn. These giant planets and the moons surrounding them will be looked at close up by two 1,800 pound spacecraft loaded with cameras and scientific instruments.

FAITH STULTS: We began sending probes out into the solar system.

[MEDIA — BBC 1979 (0:39)]: It wasn’t originally intended to photograph Saturn but it’s done so and it’s sent back pictures which are surprisingly good.

[MEDIA — VOYAGER 1 EARLY RESULTS (tape) (1:26)]: “…so it was really a first look and a very very good first look.”

FAITH STULTS: A universe that was no longer far away.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “I thought it was the greatest thing humans had ever done. I still do.”

JESSE EUBANKS: So she became an astronomer. She wanted to know how the universe works. We asked Jennifer: Are we here by chance?

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “You should not have waited till the very end of this conversation to ask that question. I could answer that question with, as a true scientist would, with a no and a yes.”

FAITH STULTS: Yes— because chance is real.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “In all of the natural world, we see random processes.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Asteroids hit planets. Environments change. Life adapts.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “There were some chance things in the development of the universe and the development history of our planet Earth that affected life.”

FAITH STULTS: But randomness does not mean meaningless.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “I think God does use random processes to bring about results that… in the bigger, larger spiritual sense… were always intended.”

FAITH STULTS: So are we here by chance?

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “In the big picture, I would say no.”

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “The universe we’re in was endowed with just what we need so that life could eventually come about.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Because eventually,  in this universe, a specific type of life appeared that could ask the question.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “Having a life form… that can actually relate to one another and relate to God…I think shows that we at least spiritually are the purpose of God.”

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: But Jennifer is careful here.

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “The purpose of the universe is not us.”

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “The purpose of the universe is to glorify God.”

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: Jennifer’s explanation gives purpose. But it also asks a person to accept something difficult. Because if life was intended— then the road that led to life was not incidental.

FAITH STULTS: It includes extinction. Pain. Suffering.

JESSE EUBANKS: If the universe was aimed— then the suffering is not just noise. It belongs to the same story.

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: So if this was purpose— why does so much of it feel so painful and costly?

(beat)

ARD LOUIS (tape): “Science is our most powerful way of getting reliable knowledge about the natural world. Now, unfortunately, I don’t think it answers any of our existential questions.”

JESSE EUBANKS: This is Ard Louis. Physicist. Oxford University.

ARD LOUIS (tape) :And I don’t think that any advance of science is going to allow it to answer those questions.

FAITH STULTS: Because eventually the question pushes further back. Not just: Why life? But— why anything at all?

JESSE EUBANKS: And when Ard follows that question all the way down— he says we’re left with only a few possibilities.

ARD LOUIS (tape): “One option is that our current laws of physics were caused by a previous set of laws of physics… which were caused by another set… and another… all the way back… So you get this infinite regress of causes… It’s a philosophical idea. And it’s strange.”

JESSE EUBANKS: Or—

ARD LOUIS (tape): “There was nothing… and then suddenly the laws of nature popped into being… That includes the laws of logic… the laws of mathematics… That’s extremely strange.”

FAITH STULTS: Or—

ARD LOUIS (tape): “There exists something outside of space and time… A first cause… A being who cannot not exist… And that’s strange too.”

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: Three explanations.

ARD LOUIS (tape): “All three of them are— in one way or the other— strange.”

FAITH STULTS: Which means you are not choosing between mystery and no mystery. You are choosing which mystery you can live with.

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: After his discovery, Fred Hoyle thought about these ideas too.

FRED HOYLE (tape): “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.”

FAITH STULTS: A mind behind the laws of nature.

JESSE EUBANKS: But Hoyle chose not to follow that thought to its end.

FRED HOYLE (tape): “I keep every one of my problems in a watertight compartment.”

JESSE EUBANKS: The discovery in one compartment. The implications in another.

FRED HOYLE (tape): “If you try to make everything consistent, the penalty is that you might be wrong in everything. So I keep everything watertight.”

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: But one way or another, the question does demand an answer.

CONCLUSION

JESSE EUBANKS: A chip drops. Peg. Then another. Then another.

FAITH STULTS: Physics can describe the bounces. Gravity. Motion. Angle.

JESSE EUBANKS: Every deflection. Every turn.

FAITH STULTS: Science can tell us how the chip moved.

JESSE EUBANKS: But eventually you notice something. The chip is not the only mystery. There is also the board.

FAITH STULTS: The laws of physics. The constants of nature. The stage where every bounce happens.

JESSE EUBANKS: Explain the bounce— and you argue about chance or intention. Explain the board— and things get strange.

(beat)

[Sound: kids playing and talking.]

FAITH STULTS: Yesterday I was playing with my kids.

[Sound: kids playing and talking.]

FAITH STULTS: We were building LEGOs. And I had this sudden thought. I’m really glad that rope was there. Because if John Howland doesn’t grab that rope… none of this exists.

[Sound: kids playing and talking.]

FAITH STULTS: Not me. Not them.

[Sound: kids playing and talking.]

(beat)

JESSE EUBANKS: One rope. One storm. One moment that could have gone another way. But it didn’t.

FAITH STULTS: So was it intention? Or accident?

MARCELO GLEISER (tape): Science is a very powerful tool to unveil perhaps some of the workings of the universe and of our human body, and perhaps even our brains, but it stops very short of understanding questions related to meaning and values. 

JENNIFER WISEMAN (tape): “Science is designed to work best when we’re asking very specific questions… but if we want to know whether there’s a God behind it or purpose, those are philosophical concepts…”

ALISTER McGRATH (tape): “And for me, Christianity provides a bigger picture… We can see it as having potential. And we can see it as having meaning.”

(beat)

FAITH STULTS: Different ways to see the same universe.

JESSE EUBANKS: Ard Louis has a phrase for it.

ARD LOUIS (tape): “Pick your strange, right? … everybody has to recognize that they’ve gotta pick a strange.”

[Sound: kids playing and talking.]