The Goldilocks Planet

1.    The Drake Equation

In one of the first essays I wrote for this blog, back in January 2011, I produced a critique of the Drake Equation: a formula devised by Frank Drake in 1960 in order to estimate the number of technologically advanced civilisations (N) likely to be found in our galaxy. The equation has seven variables and states that:

N = R* · f_p · n_e · f_l · f_i · f_c · L

where:

R*        is the number of stars formed in the galaxy each year.

f_p            is the percentage of those stars with planets.

n_e            is the number of planets in each of those planetary systems capable of supporting life.

f_l             is the percentage of those planets on which life actually develops.

f_i             is the percentage of those planets on which intelligent life then evolves.

f_c             is the percentage of those planets on which advanced communications technology then develops.

L          is the length of time such technological civilisations then endure.

While, for reasons that have always eluded me, this equation has long since been accepted as a useful heuristic device for estimating N, the most critical phase of its deployment, of course, is in the assignment of values to each of the variables, the most critical of which is n_e, the number of planets in each planetary system capable of supporting life. This is because, given enough time, a planet capable of supporting life will very probably do so, which will then very probably evolve into intelligent life capable of producing advanced technology. It is with respect n_e, therefore, that one has to be particularly careful in assigning a value, not least because while the precise set of conditions necessary for a planet to support life is unknown, it could be fairly extensive, thereby greatly limiting the number of planets which qualify.

To appreciate what this set of necessary conditions for a planet to support life might include, one can start by just looking at some of the more obvious parameters, such as the physical and chemical composition of the planet, a gas giant, for instance, being very unlikely to support life. Then there is the type of star the planet is orbiting, the amount of energy the star radiates and the radius and eccentricity of the orbit itself. A planet orbiting too far away from a red giant, for instance, is unlikely to be warm enough to support life, while a planet orbiting too close to a white dwarf is likely to be too hot.

Then there are the slightly less obvious parameters such as the planet’s size and whether it has a molten iron core. This is important because it is a planet’s molten iron core which creates its magnetic field, without which its atmosphere, if it ever had one, would be torn away by the stream of charged particles released from its star’s outermost atmospheric layer: a stream of particles which, in the case of the sun, we call the solar wind.

This is why the size of the planet is also important. For in order to maintain an atmosphere, a planet has to be large enough to exert enough gravitational pressure on its core to keep it molten. A good example of a failure in this regard is Mars, which is generally thought to have once had a molten iron core and an atmosphere. Being slightly smaller than the earth, however, it could not maintain enough gravitational pressure on its core which consequently cooled and solidified, collapsing its magnetic field and allowing its atmosphere to be stripped away.

Then there are the planetary attributes necessary for life which I am fairly sure Drake didn’t even consider but which have become far more salient in recent years as a result of our study of the climate. One of these is the need for a planet’s atmosphere to be largely composed of nitrogen and oxygen, with the nitrogen being just as important as the oxygen. This, as I have already explained a couple of times in recent essays, is because most of the carbon on earth has been created in the upper atmosphere by the free neutrons in cosmic radiation striking the nuclei of nitrogen atoms, thereby dislodging one the atom’s protons and turning nitrogen it into carbon. Each newly formed carbon atom then binds with an O₂ molecular, to form CO₂, which, being 50% heavier than either oxygen or nitrogen, then descends to the earth’s surface where it is absorbed by plants through photosynthesis. Without both oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere, there would consequently be no carbon dioxide and no plant life on earth, which is to say no life at all.

Another planetary attribute which is almost certainly necessary for life – or, at least, ‘life as we know it’ – is the presence of large bodies of water, which are necessary not just in order to provide a medium in which life is more likely to evolve, but because sunlight falling upon large bodies of water creates water vapour, which, as I have also explained in recent essays, plays two vital roles in maintaining a stable and habitable climate. The first of these roles is as a greenhouse gas. In the case of the earth, in fact, it is the most abundant greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, accounting for more than 90% of the infrared radiation retained within it and raising the mean surface temperature from minus 18°C, at which it is very doubtful whether the earth could support life, to a balmy plus 15°C, at which temperature life flourishes.

The second vital role that water vapour plays, as Dr John Clauser explained in his famous 2024 lecture, is in regulating atmospheric temperature by keeping it within certain bounds. This it does by forming clouds, which then limit the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface, thereby limiting the amount of water turned into water vapour by evaporation. This then reduces the number of clouds being formed, allowing more sunlight to reach the earth’s surface and creating a continuous feedback loop in which a warmer earth’s surface causes more clouds to form, thereby cooling the surface, which then causes less clouds to form, thereby warming the surface. The result is that, for most of the time, when not affected by extraneous factors such as volcanos, the entire system is more or less self-regulating.

With so many varied and often intricate conditions needing to be met for a planet to support life, it is a wonder, therefore, that there are any planets in our galaxy with life on them at all, let alone the 50,000 technologically advanced civilizations Frank Drake believed to exist in 1960. Back in 2011, when I, myself, undertook this exercise, assigning far more conservative values to Drake’s seven variables than he had done, I came up with the number of 10. Today, factoring in the need for a mostly nitrogen and oxygen atmosphere and for a large percentage of the planet’s surface to be covered in water, I am surprised that there is even one, making the earth not just a goldilocks planet, where all the conditions for supporting life are ‘just right’, but very possibly ‘the’ Goldilocks Planet: the only one in our entire galaxy.

2.    The Religious & Materialist Perspectives

In my last essay, ‘On Stupidity’, I argued that the most dangerous form of stupidity is societally based. After all, we do not learn or discover for ourselves most of the things we believe; we acquire them from the society of which we are a part. What’s more, we tend to regard a general consensus in favour of a particular proposition or conjecture as a strong indication that it is true, even if there is no independent evidence for it and we have never actually thought about it ourselves. As a result, we can come or be led to believe some of the stupidest things imaginable, such as the now almost universally accepted view that greenhouse gases, essential for all life on earth, are ‘bad things’, which, in the case of humanly produced carbon dioxide, which we exhale with every breath, must be eliminated. To emphasise just how stupid this is, in fact, I then half-jokingly quipped that, far from being the work of the devil, the existence of both water vapour and carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is probably the best argument in favour of the existence of God I have ever come across.

Not that I actually thought very much about it at the time: it was just a way of making a point In the weeks that have followed, however, my thoughts have continually returned to it. Indeed, it is what brought me back to the Drake Equation. For if the odds against the existence of our goldilocks planet are as a great as I suspect they are, it is not unreasonable to consider whether that existence might not be entirely accidental. Yes, I know what most people will say to this: that such a line of thinking embodies one of the oldest fallacies in the book. For even if the odds against a goldilocks planet are a billion to one, with more than a billion stars in the galaxy, there is a good chance that at least one goldilocks planet will in fact exist. This argument, however, is also entirely specious. In fact, it closely resembles an argument I used to hear when I was growing up: that if one gave an infinite number of typewriters to an infinite number of chimpanzees and allowed them to keep pressing keys at random for long enough, eventually they would clatter out the complete works of Shakespeare. This, however, is simply false. For an infinite number of chimpanzees could produce an infinite number of random combinations of letters, numerals and punctuation marks without one of them being the complete works of Shakespeare. Similarly, our galaxy could produce an infinite number of planets without one of them being a goldilocks planet.

The only sound argument in this regard, in fact, is the one that says that if, within a closed system, something is not impossible, then no matter how improbable it may be, once it has occurred, one can explain it as the result of random chance without positing the existence of an external agency. The problem with such an explanation, however, especially in the context of something as momentous as the existence of our goldilocks planet and therefore ourselves, is that it is not really an explanation at all. For if the answer to the question, ‘Why are we here?’ is ‘Random chance’, then what we are actually saying is that there is no reason for our existence, which, given how both significant and unlikely that existence is, is somewhat less than satisfactory, especially as it has such profound implications for how we live our lives.

I say this because, as I explained in my essay on Dostoyevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’, this materialist way of looking at both the universe and ourselves inevitably leads us to the conclusion that our lives are pointless, which just as inevitably leads to the kind of nihilism which Dostoyevsky predicted would result in the totalitarian regimes and death camps of the 20^th century. If, on the other hand, we believe that it was not purely random chance that produced us, suggesting, therefore, that we were created for a reason, this then leads to the formation of a completely different set of values, which necessarily includes the need to understand what that reason might be.

Nor is this the only modification in our attitude to both ourselves and the universe that flows from our adoption of what we might call the ‘religious’ perspective, a term I use in a very narrow sense merely to denote just these changes in the way we think about the world as a result of not viewing our existence as purely accidental. In regarding our goldilocks planet as not just special but extraordinary, for instance, we inevitably see ourselves as also having a duty to look after it, not in the sense of today’s climate activists, many of whom will have almost certainly adopted this modern day mission in life as a way of injecting some meaning into an otherwise meaningless existence, but more in the sense of not wanting or needing to waste the earth’s resources on acquiring material possessions which we then just throw away when something newer and more fashionable comes along: a trait in human beings which, as Dostoyevsky noted in ‘Notes from Underground’, is anther more or less inevitable consequence of a purely materialist outlook on life.

Another way in which our behaviour is modified by this change in our perspective is the emergence of an urge to pass on this sense of the extraordinary to our children. In part, this urge arises in order to help fend off the tide of materialism which has engulfed western civilisation since the middle of the 19^th century and which has significantly impaired the quality of the lives we now live. Of even greater importance, however, is the gift of meaningfulness and purpose which a sense of the extraordinariness of our existence confers on all those who embrace it. For if our goldilocks planet was created so that life might evolve here, and if we are the pinnacle of that evolution, being the only beings of whom we are aware who are not just sentient but self-aware, there is a sense in which we are the medium through which the universe has actually achieved consciousness, making it incumbent upon us to at least try to understand this extraordinary phenomenon, which is simply impossible from a purely materialist perspective.

Of course, at this point it will be objected that we cannot just choose what we want to believe on the basis that it might afford us a better, more meaningful life. Similarly, we cannot choose not to believe in something simply because it leads to nihilism. We believe what we believe because, based on reason and evidence, we believe it to be true. And, apart from its extreme improbability, there is no evidence to support the view that our goldilocks planet is the result of anything other than random chance. More to the point, we cannot even say what would count as evidence either for or against any assertion to the contrary, making any such assertion not just unscientific but a threat to what we regard as our enlightened age, in which it is one of our most important guiding principles that all issues are to be settled, not by dogma, but by evidence and reasoned argument.

The problem with this argument, however, is that dogmatism is not an intrinsic attribute of the religious perspective as I have so far defined it and can just as easily arise in societies that are entirely immersed in the materialist perspective. Take, for instance, the belief that anthropogenic emissions of carbon dioxide are a threat to the planet, which is so dogmatically held by the vast majority of people that anyone who dares speak out against it, even a Nobel laureate such as John Clauser, is instantly cancelled. It is neither the religious nor the materialist perspectives in themselves, therefore, which give rise to dogmatism but, far more commonly, power and corruption, which are used to play on our collective stupidity in order to keep the powerful in power.

That’s not to say, of course, that the natural sciences, to which the materialist perspective have given rise, haven’t, in the past, greatly helped to overcome dogmatism. They taught us to think critically by teaching us to question everything. The problem was that they were actually too successful, especially with regard to the huge range of new technologies to which they gave rise, leading us to believe that the material universe they described was the only reality and that this description, itself, was the only and absolute truth. We consequently forgot that for a theory, explanation or description to be scientific it has to pass the test which all assertions based on the religious perspective manifestly fail to pass: it has to be falsifiable. That is to say that we have to be able to specify what empirical evidence would prove it false, which means that no scientific theory, explanation or description is true in any absolute sense. For they are all provisional, pending falsification.

This is something of which we have been very dramatically reminded over the last two and a half years, in fact, since the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in December 2021. This is because the JWST has a mirror with a diameter 2.7 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope  and can therefore detect objects – principally galaxies – much further away than the Hubble can. This means that the light from these objects originated from much further back in time, with the result that they are often referred to as very ‘old’. The fact is, however, that they are actually very young. The light from the most distant galaxy which the JWST has so far discovered, MoM-z14, began its journey across the galaxy just 280 million years after the Big Bang, making it a mere baby at that time.

What this also means is that these newly discovered galaxies should exhibit all the typical features of very young galaxies, the two most significant of which are, firstly, that the stars within them should be composed almost entirely of hydrogen and helium and, secondly, that their form should be rather chaotic, without the spiral arms which are a feature of older galaxies such as our own. What is very odd, therefore, is that the stars in MoM-z14 contain large quantities of nitrogen and that, while considerably smaller than our galaxy, it has a very similar shape, for which there would appear to be only two possible explanations.

The first is that both stars and galaxies can develop in ways contrary to what we have previously believed. The problem with this explanation, however, is that there nothing in our current physics that would explain such a divergence in development timelines. The second possible explanation, therefore, is that the universe is actually a lot older than the 13.8 billion years we previously believed to be. In fact, some people have suggested that it could be as much as twice as old. The problem with this, however, is that, if the universe has been consistently expanding at the rate specified by the Hubble constant, 67 kilometres per second per megaparsec (a megaparsec being 3.26 million light years), then, at 27.6 billion years of age rather than 13.8 billion years, it should be a lot bigger than it is.

To complicate matters further, measurements taken using the JWST have confirmed Dr Adam Riess’ 1998 discovery – for which he shared the Nobel prize for physics in 2011 – that the rate of the universe’s expansion is actually accelerating, which, given the fact that a decline in the gravitational pull which galaxies exert on each other as they move apart is already built into the Hubble constant, should not be happening.

As a result of the JWST, in short, the standard cosmological model, including the Big Bang theory itself, is rapidly unravelling and, as yet, no workable alternative has been put forward to replace it. That’s not to say, of course, that one won’t eventually emerge. I’m sure it will. However, I am also fairly sure that it will involve a very substantial paradigm shift, painting a very different picture of the universe than the one with which we are currently familiar and making it very hard to believe that it will actually take us any closer to the absolute and final truth.

3.    The Transcendental Perspective

The irony is, of course, that while we cannot fully believe in any proposition emanating from the religious perspective in that it will always be unfalsifiable, so too we should never fully believe in any proposition emanating from the scientific/materialist perspective in that it will always be provisional, pending falsification. Our biggest mistake, however, is not just in assuming that these two perspectives are in permanent opposition and that we have to choose between them – with the result that, based on its enormous success, we have now almost universally committed ourselves to the materialist perspective and believe that everything science tells us is true in an absolute rather than provisional sense – but that we believe that these are the only two perspectives that exist. There is, however, another perspective which transcends both the religious and materialist perspectives and which actually puts them into perspective, allowing us to see that while they both have their limitations, they both have their value.

This transcendental perspective is grounded in the work of the 18^th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who actually began his career as a physicist and only turned to philosophy in his fifties when he felt the need to ground the laws of physics – and, indeed, of all science – in something that would give them absolute certainty, which he knew was not to be found in their ever shifting empirical content. After all, we have spent the last sixty or seventy years thinking that all young stars are composed purely of hydrogen and helium and then, in the space of just two years, we discover half a dozen galaxies comprising very young stars which actually contain nitrogen. The answer, Kant therefore realised, had to reside in those laws or forms of knowledge which underpin all the sciences, regardless of their empirical content, and which we can know to be true with absolute certainty precisely because they are not part of the empirical world, being expressions, in fact, of the way our minds work.

To those unfamiliar with Kant, this idea that one could possibly ground scientific laws with absolute certainty, not by empirically studying the material universe, itself, but by looking at ourselves, will probably seem somewhat less than credible. It will hopefully become slightly more so, however, when one considers that the first of these laws of thought, as Kant called them, comprises the laws of logic, the cornerstone of which is the law of non-contradiction and excluded middle, which says that any unambiguous proposition p is either true or untrue and that it can’t be both and can’t be neither: a law which is also, non-coincidentally, the basis of all computing, as demonstrated in the basic architecture of standard microprocessors, all of which comprise binary switches which are either open or closed, on or off, true or false and can’t be both and can’t be neither.

Of course, it may be argued that human beings are not as restricted as computers in the way we think and are not only able of holding contradictory beliefs but can simultaneously believe that a proposition is both true and false. These two forms of contradiction, however, are actually very different. For while the former is a kind of cognitive dissonance, brought about by a combination of self-deception and strict compartmentalisation, the latter is invariably the result of the proposition being ambiguous, such that, interpreted in one way, it appears true, while interpreted in another way, it appears false. In order to resolve the apparent contradiction, therefore, one has to start by resolving the ambiguity, which one does by formulating the proposition in a more precise way, which is also a very common feature of science.

As demonstrated by Bertrand Russell in his 1903 book ‘The Principles of Mathematics’ and expanded upon by Russell, himself, and Alfred North Whitehead in their three volume work ‘Principia Mathematica’, published between 1910 and 1913, the laws of logic are also the foundation of all mathematics, which means that by grounding the laws of logic in the way our minds work, Kant effectively, if indirectly, grounded the laws of mathematics in the same way, thereby going a long way towards achieving his goal of grounding the laws of physics with absolute certainty.

Of course, it may be asked why grounding the laws of logic and mathematics in the way our brains work gives them this certainty. Unless we have suffered brain damage, however, we cannot really doubt the reasoned arguments and calculations we make as a result of our brains’ normal functioning. Indeed, to question the validity what we have concluded on the basis of what we believe to be sound reasoning would, itself, be dysfunctional.

The problem gets a bit more tricky, however, when we come to Kant’s next category of synthetic a priori knowledge, which is to say knowledge about the world which we know to be true prior to empirically studying the world. This is because it concerns our innate senses of space and time, which Kant argued are just as hard wired into a brains as the laws of logic, his argument being that because we cannot conceive of space not extending infinitely in three dimensions or time not proceeding in one direction without a beginning or an end, these are categories of knowledge which we cannot have learnt from experience. For if this knowledge were empirical rather than a priori, not only would we have to examine every cubic inch of space to find out whether it was actually three dimensional, but it would not come as a surprise to us to one day encounter the edge of space or discover that time had come to an end. The fact is, however, that neither of these  experiences is actually possible.

To see this more clearly, try to imagine encountering the edge of space, for instance. What would that be like? Would it be like encountering a wall? If so, wouldn’t we wonder what was on the other side of it or try to find a way round it? And if so, wouldn’t that be like not encountering the edge of space? Similarly, try to imagine discovering that time had come to an end. The difficulty here is that this would entail experiencing a point in time when time was still continuing and then experiencing another point at which it had stopped. To experience a point in time after time had stopped, however, would mean that, for us, time was still continuing.

If our concepts of space and time are thus hard wired into our brains, however, this then raises a question which did not arise in the case of the laws of logic for the simple reason that our conception of the laws of logic is not filtered by the way our brains work: the laws of logic are the way our brains work or, at least, part of the way our brains work. In the case of space and time, however, the role of our brains as a kind of filter is very much an issue. For if the dimensionality and infinitude of space and time are aspects of the way perceive and conceive of the universe, one has to question whether space and time, as they exist in themselves, beyond our perception and conception of them – what Kant calls the noumenon or the universe’s noumenal reality – are the same as our phenomenal experience of them. And the answer, of course, is that we cannot know. For regardless of their noumenal reality, we will always perceive and conceive of space as extending infinitely in three dimensions and of time as flowing from the past into the future without a beginning or an end.

Of course, it will be objected that modern cosmology does, in fact, conceive of time as having a beginning and the universe as being finite. This, however, may be one of its problems. For in postulating something which violates the laws of thought and then combining this postulation with empirical observations of a phenomenal universe which is actually shaped by these laws of thought, it was more or less inevitable that the standard cosmological model would throw up the kind of inconsistencies which the JWST has discovered.

To counter this argument, one could of course argue that if the standard cosmological model is wrong, it is not because it violates the laws of thought, but because it is inconsistent with empirical observations and that this is therefore a purely scientific matter not a philosophical one. This, however, is to ignore the fact that our empirical observations will always be consistent with the laws of thought for the simple reason that, as demonstrated with respect to time and space above, we could not experience anything that was inconsistent with them. Nor can it be argued that the standard cosmological model doesn’t have to be consistent with the laws of thought because what it describes is actually noumenal, a common mistake made by undergraduates. For the noumenon is simply a label we attach to that which, to us, is unknowable. It doesn’t have any attributes and cannot be used to explain the phenomenal universe as the  standard cosmological model purports to.

Despite the noumenon simply marking the limits of our knowledge, however, there is a slightly odd asymmetry in our relationship to it. For while we can neither say what the noumenon is, nor what it is not, our inability to say what it is not produces a number of anomalous consequences which are best illustrated by Kant’s last main category of synthetic a priori knowledge which concerns ‘causality’, which, he argues, is as hard wired into our brains as our senses of space and time, his argument being that, just as we do not have to check every cubic inch of space to find out whether it is three dimensional, so we do not have to check out everything that happens to find out whether it had a cause. We may need to study it to find out what that cause was, formulating hypotheses and testing them until we arrive at a satisfactory explanation, but even if a satisfactory explanation is not forthcoming, we would never conclude that it just happened spontaneously without something or someone causing it.

Nor is this merely a feature of our scientific age and our materialist perspective upon the universe. For even in more superstitious times, when we believed in magic and miracles, the magic or miracle always occurred as a result of some form of agency, whether that be another human being, a demon or, indeed, God. Indeed, the very idea of God, or of gods in the plural, may have been invented simply to satisfy our need to identify a cause when none could otherwise be found. Today, in contrast, we simply assume that, even when we do not know precisely what caused something to happen, there must have been some causal chain of events that led to its occurrence. Thus, in the case of our goldilocks planet, we may not know exactly how it got to be the way it is, but we assume that it must be the result of a series of random and highly unlikely but nevertheless causally determined chemical transformations in the earth’s atmosphere, for instance. The point is, however, that while causality must always be an attribute of the phenomenal universe, if it is primarily a law of thought, like space and time, it may not be an attribute of the noumenal universe as it exists in itself, in which case it is perfectly possible that, in the noumenal universe, things could come into existence spontaneously, without a cause, or as a result of forces of which we have no knowledge and could not comprehend even if we did.

That is not say, of course, that this is actually what happened with respect to our goldilocks planet. Because we do not know what the noumenon is, indeed, it is pointless even to speculate about this. Because we do not know what the noumenon is not, however, we cannot entirely discount it, the asymmetry between these two sides of the knowability coin thereby opening the door to the religions perspective.

4.    The Mistakes Religions Make

While simultaneously limiting the scope of the materialist perspective, Kant thus provided the first and so far the only sound philosophical basis for entertaining the possibility that our existence may not be purely accidental. The problem, of course, is that some unknowable and incomprehensible force or intelligence within the noumenon is not what people typically mean when they talk about God. For in most religions, God not only has knowable attributes, such as gender, but intentions which are comprehensible in human terms even if they are slightly mysterious. This is because, in most religions, of course, God is not noumenal, most religions having been founded long before Kant wrote the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, during eras when it was perfectly normal for people to project human characteristics on to their gods, even when they became monotheistic.

Even more importantly, Kant’s transcendental idealism is both hard to understand and difficult to accept, with the result that, except for a brief period during the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, it was largely shunned outside of Kant’s native Germany, which was the only country in which it gained any traction within Christian theology. Not only has this general failure to entertain Kant’s transcendental vision been one of the worst philosophical mistakes of the modern era, however, it has also been something of a cultural disaster. For unless one accepts that’s the phenomenal universe is at least partly a product of the way our minds work, one will not be able to see that the materialist perspective does not represent the ultimate reality, thus leaving us with no basis for the religious perspective. For it is only when one accepts that there is more to the universe than the laws of physics that one can entertain the possibility that there are things within it that are beyond our understanding.

Of course, it may be argued that we maintained a religious perspective long before Kant showed us that the materialist perspective has its limitations. This, however, was at a time before science dominated our view of the universe, when the materialist perspective encompassed little more than the world of our daily lives and when it was quite possible to combine it with an entirely fabulous religious cosmology in which people believed simply because everyone else did. Today, in contrast, there is no room for heaven and hell within the standard cosmological model and no one literally believes that God created heaven and earth in six days and then rested on the seventh.

The Church may contend, of course, that this has some metaphorical significance. But having entirely embraced the materialist perspective, from which all meaning and significance has been excluded, it would probably be hard pressed to say what exactly this metaphorical significance is. For in a world in which our existence is now regarded as purely accidental and we are only constrained in how we live by the ever-shifting pressures of a fickle media, not only does it make no sense to ask why we are here or how we should live our lives, but there is very little room for the answers the Church used to give to these questions based on the teachings of its founder. The result is that it, too, now largely takes its lead from the shifting social mood, championing every woke cause which grabs the headlines, from the climate ‘emergency’ to transgender rights.

More to the point, it does not understand that these are not concerns which proceed from the religious perspective. For having no real belief that our existence is anything other than the result of natural laws and random chance, it no longer has that sense of our extraordinariness from which the religious perspective springs and cannot therefore fully grasp it, let alone embody it. Instead, it wears it like the liturgical vestments it puts on to preside over the now largely empty rituals it still performs to mark our births, deaths, and marriages, but which, today, have very little religious significance.

It is why so many people now regard Christianity – especially as it is embodied within the Church of England – as an irrelevance: a sad but entirely predictable state of affairs which recently led a friend and regular reader of this blog to ask me what the Church of England needed to do in order to regain people’s respect: a question to which I responded rather inadequately by saying that I didn’t think that there was anything it could do but that, at a minimum, it should start by taking itself seriously. What I should have said, however, is that it should start by taking the religious perspective seriously, by which I mean that it should publicly proclaim that we are not here by accident… and should actually mean it.

The problem, of course, is that the Church of England has no philosophical basis for this and would not be able to back it up in any intellectually rigorous way. For the only sound philosophical basis upon which this claim can be sustained is Kant’s transcendental idealism. And while there have been German theologians, from Friedrich Schleiermacher to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who have based their theology on Kant’s work, I doubt whether there is anyone in the Church of England today who is sufficiently steeped in Kant to do this.

Even if there were enough members of the Church who understood enough of Kant’s philosophy to know that it could provide the intellectual basis necessary to maintain a true religious perspective, moreover, it is questionable whether they would choose to go down this path or could persuade enough others to follow them. For if God is noumenal, an even more shocking corrollary of this transcendental perspective is that so are we. We may experience ourselves and others as phenomenal beings in a phenomenal universe, but that’s just the way our minds work. Like everything ese, we have both a phenomenal and noumenal existence, which means that we are essentially unknowable to ourselves and will only find out who we really are, perhaps, when our phenomenal existence comes to an end.

Even more significantly, it’s perfectly possible that a noumenal God has, at some time, projected part of its being into the phenomenal real in phenomenal form in order to communicate with us. Indeed, this would be the most logical interpretation of the Christian message from a Kantian perspective. To many Christians, however, especially non-German Christians, reinterpreting traditional Christian teaching in this way may well be a bridge too far. We Anglo-Saxons, in particular, prefer something a little less mind-boggling and more down to earth. Many members of the Church of England may well, therefore, baulk at this Kantian option, suspecting that it could easily drive more people away from the Church than it would actually attract.

Given the philosophical battle between Christianity and western materialism, however, which Christianity has all but lost, this holding on to the past, even when combined with the latest woke virtue signalling, is almost certainly a recipe for continued decline. With the standard cosmological model is collapsing under the weight of discoveries by the JWST, therefore, this just might be the time for both physicists and theologians to abandon their opposing positions and come together, perhaps, in a meeting of minds over Kant.