Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Perceiving Perspective.


I don't know why they had to choose ME for this job…. I am by no means a brilliant scientist. The department head didn't even respond the first time I sent him my CV. I was only taken on begrudgingly and then used, in the same way as one accepts an unwanted gift, not because it is useful, but only because a friend gave it that you do not wish to offend.


Well, actually, I do know why I was chosen. You must understand that the capacity to communicate in any form other than the language of mathematics and numbers is completely absent in my line of profession. Writing was never my forte either, but once it was discovered in our lab that I could put pen to paper, I was given all of the unwanted communication with the rest of the known world. But still…. I never signed on to be the bearer of bad news. I only progress in my career by pleasing people: telling them what they want to hear. Honesty doesn't get anyone anywhere.


It all began two weeks ago. One of the graduate students, a man who was possibly one of the brightest scientists (and knew it), barged into the office where my research professor and I were documenting the results from his last experiment. What followed was what we thought would be the greatest finding of the century.


There is life on Mercury.


Then we realized, no one would ever believe it. Which is why the project was entirely turned over to me. No one wanted to put their names behind such an unbelievable claim. The idea was to let me spread the word among the conspiracy theorists, the people who acted as if they knew more than anyone but really knew nothing at all, until it grabbed enough attention to be at least considered by the rest of the academic community. In this world, there is no way to completely disagree with the consensus of all scientists while keeping your job. Even if that wasn't the case, professors enjoy and bask in their status and fame. None of them would dream of being labelled a conspiracy theorist, or even worse: religious. For myself, I wasn't important enough to have the privilege of an objection.


The life that was discovered was human in appearance, and, unscientifically put, it was very beautiful. Or at least, they were thought to be beautiful on the first day that we discovered them. The creatures (for…. we cannot really give them the respect that we give to our own evolved species, however beautiful they may be) are tall, slender, with their heads held high and eyes gazing down upon each other. Through our instruments, we managed to discover beautiful cities and technology that we are still unable to completely ascertain. It is as yet unknown how they live seemingly without working.


That was the first days' discovery. Of course, no one will believe my story, so there is no point in trying to convince anyone. We did learn that no one has observed life on Mercury before because these creatures do not reflect light in the wavelengths visible to human eyes. They reflect light in the ultra-violet part of the spectrum, so ascribing a color to them doesn't make sense to our human minds. They can see each other perfectly well, of course, since their eyes can detect UV rays.


The next night we immediately set all of our UV telescopes to work scanning the surface of the planet and observing as much as we could of the people. But this time, what we saw was appalling. We had configured our telescopes to translate the ultra-violet light from the creature's bodies into white light that we could see, and what we saw can only be described as pure evil. Beautiful, terrible, consistent, premeditated evil.


In our world, we have (apparently) evolved in such a way that we can only survive is by working together. And therefore we do. Families, societies, governments, and business only succeed by cooperation. It appears that this was once the case among the creatures, but not any longer. As we observed on the first day, their technology has brought them to a state where they need not work any longer. The earthly problem of scarcity is nonexistent on Mercury. Or at least scarcity of food and pleasure, if they are stimulated by the same things that we are, which appears to be true. But, as a result, they need each other no longer for any purpose. And the result is terrible to behold.


On the streets, murder is everywhere, if they can get away with it. It seems like there was once some sort of law and order, but this has long turned to anarchy as the government became corrupt. There may be no need to have slaves for the pleasures that they provide, but removing scarcity hasn't removed the raw desire to have power and dominate. It's not a desire for sex, or food, or other people's property, for they have all the artificial pleasure stimulators they could desire. It's the intended evil that is the attraction: the malice, the pride, the desire to leave others destitute.


Families are nonexistent, in our sense of the word. Of course children are born by some mechanism (we aren't sure how yet), and survive by the same technology that allows everyone else to survive. But the older creatures consider the younger to be dirty, ignorant, and less valuable than themselves. There is plenty of sex and plenty of offspring, but there is not a father or mother to be found among them.


That was day two. It was a busy day. But day three brought even more challenges. This day, we discovered their library. It was found that education was free and wirelessly broadcasted to the whole population. We were able to tap into their signal and peruse so much knowledge that was far beyond our own.


But, we were observing the creatures, which meant we focused on what we could learn about the creatures through their library. In their psychology research, it appears that they have completely fathomed the complexity of their own brains. Their brains are not identical to our own, and we cannot assume that ours work in the same way. But at some point, it appears that their research on their minds came to a screeching halt just as it reached it's climax.


They discovered that they have no freedom to make choices. They are completely a product of their genes and circumstances and the electrons whizzing around in their individual networks of neurons. This definitely does not mean that they don't want to do everything they do. No one ever does something they don't want to do, even in our own society. The creatures want evil, and they find it.


It is not as though they have no conscience or notion of morality. They do have a morality, and some of them take pride in "doing the right thing". They will refuse to do the worst actions performed by the others, and avoid murder of those who not in their way if they can. They form groups and societies and look down upon the other creatures, and occasionally wage war upon them, destroying man, woman, and child. We thought these may be the hope of their society, but then it was found that their goodness was only superficial. Within their own ranks, they lie, compete, and even kill each other to achieve the ranking positions. Officially, murder is justified if the creature is over a certain age and their death is expedient.


Not much else remains to be said from what we learned of them that day. Our research continued, just verifying what we had observed before. The whole atmosphere in our lab was changed as we, day after day, observed a society more evil than any we could have imagined ourselves.


The next day, we discovered what we thought at first was a comet coming unusually close to earth that was not forecasted in our astronomical models. Then, using our ultraviolet scopes, we were horrified to discover that one of the creatures was on her way towards earth. We haven't the least idea what she will do when she arrives, but none of us expect anything good. There is no reason to think that they may conquer us. Their technology removes the problem of scarcity, but no military strength has been found.


The question of what to do remains up to us. The creature has no free will. But does that matter? By it's nature, it cannot do anything but pure evil, and will certainly follow its nature when it arrives.


Okay, I've had my fun. I''m a rubbish fiction writer. I wish I was better. But everyone has to start at some point. And there is a point to the fiction. It is setting up a scene to demonstrate a moral point. One of the most common viewpoints about God that I've heard is, if we are better than most people, or if we do more good than bad things in our lives, then we will get into heaven. After all, isn't God love? Isn't He fair? How could a good God really send people to hell?


This is where the analogy with the creatures from mercury is valuable. They would have been from a society where a certain level of "goodness" is the norm. As they compare themselves against each other, the better ones may have thought, "hey, I'm a good person. I haven't killed any children. Only the people that annoyed me. And I'm definitely better than 90% of my neighbors." Now take one of those creatures and plop it in our society. I don't think that any one of us who believes in morality would let them off if they behaved that way in our world.


Now consider, still hypothetically, that there was another society looking down on our own in the same way that we were looking down at Mercury. Except this society that observes us really is good in comparison to us. Divorce is unheard of. Fathers sacrifice themselves in love for their children and wives, and no one would dream of aborting a baby because it is convenient. No one lies, no one looks at another with pride, lovers are faithful, children share their toys and love their parents, and people choose to give to the poor instead of having to be coerced by some government to do good. Do you think that they would let any one of us off for the things that we have done? In their eyes, would it not be better if we were wiped away from the universe as the giant puss hole that we are?


That is the way that God looks at us. Except He isn't just some more moral society. He is the inventor of the good. He IS love. In light of the analogy, those words should now be terrifying rather than a comfort to us. The God of the universe who invented love, pleasure, and every good thing there is, is also aware of us, of you, and of me, and of all of our deeds. The reason why we think that God should let us off is because we've grown up in a fallen world. We don't know any different. We don't know what good is really like.


By the way, recall the world that was better than us and observed us. Now, assume they were much much better than us, but still less than perfect. Then imagine another society that observed them, except this society was so close to perfect that they were shocked at the evil doings of the former society. They would have reason to think that the former society was evil as well, and probably would come to the same conclusions as we did about the creatures from Mercury. The point is that, if there is morality, no one who is not perfect ought to escape judgement. (Notice that it's a calculus-ish limit-to-infinity form of argument).


"You who are of purer eyes than to see evil

and cannot look at wrong."

-Habakkuk 1:13a


There is a standard of perfection that is defined by God, and any society that falls short of that standard should be condemned. To our ears that sounds really ridiculous, because we are so used to admiring the "better" ones in our society, and thinking that we will get into heaven if we are good enough.


So, the answer to the question of how can a good God send humans to hell is that we haven't properly understood just how good God is, or how evil each one of our sins are. I hope the story helps you understand the former. I tried to put a little bit of the latter into preamble of the story, but it really deserves it's own blog post.