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  Human beliefs can be divided roughly into those that offer comfort and those that offer order vis-à-vis the given world. The first type promises reward, salvation, a final reckoning of sins and merits, to be crowned in the hereafter with an ultimate justice. To an imperfect world is added a perfect continuation. Most likely such beliefs owe their great longevity, generation after generation, to their property of soothing our complaints against the world. On the other hand, the old myths, instead of offering the peace and promise of a just goodness in a well-run eternity — whatever one may say about paradise and heaven, not a scrap of chance exists there: no one will go to hell as a result of divine error or oversight, and no one will find himself in a posthumous jam because a foul-up prevents him from entering nirvana — the old myths offer an order that is often cruel but necessary. Neither the goodness nor the order resembles a lottery.

  Culture exists and has always existed in order to make every accident, every kind of arbitrariness, appear in a benevolent or at least necessary light. The common denominator of all cultures, the source of ritual, of all commandments, of every taboo, is this: for everything there is one and only one measure. Cultures have taken chance in small, careful doses — for fun, as games and amusements. Chance, when domesticated and held in tight rein as a game or lottery, ceases to be dangerous. We play the lottery because we want to; no one forces us.

  A believer can see chance in the breaking of a glass or in a wasp sting, but he does not attribute death to chance. In his thoughtless head, Divine Omnipotence and Omniscience seem to assign a subordinate role to accidents. And science, for as long as it could, treated chance as the effect of currently insufficient knowledge, as an ignorance that a future discovery would dispel. These are not jests; Einstein was not joking when he declared that “God does not play dice,” because “He is subtle, but He is not malicious.” This meant: the order of the world is difficult to know, but since it is rational, it is possible to know.

  The end of the twentieth century has seen a general turning away from those thousands of years of stubbornly, desperately held beliefs. The destruction-or-creation alternative must finally be rejected. The huge clouds of dark, cold gases circling in the arms of galaxies are slowly undergoing fragmentation into parts as unpredictable as shattered glass. The laws of Nature act not in spite of random events but through them. The statistical fury of the stars, a billion times aborting in order to give birth once to life, a life slain by a chance catastrophe in millions of its species in order to yield intelligence once — this is the rule, not the exception, in the Universe.

  Suns form from the destruction of other stars; the remains of protostellar clouds congeal into planets. Life is one of the rare winners in this lottery, and intelligence an even rarer winner in the subsequent draws: it owes its appearance to natural selection — that is, to death, which improves the survivors — and to catastrophes that can abruptly increase the odds for the emergence of intelligent beings.

  The link between the structure of the world and the structure of life is no longer doubted, but the Universe is an enormously profligate investor, squandering its initial capital on the roulette wheels that are galaxies. (What brings regularity to the game is the law of large numbers.) Man, shaped by these properties of matter, properties that appeared when the world appeared, turns out to be a rare exception to the rule of destruction: man, the survivor of hecatombs and holocausts. Creation and destruction alternate, overlap, interact, reciprocate, and from them there is no escape or appeal.

  Such is the picture that science is building little by little — so far without comment. It pieces the picture together from discoveries in biology and cosmology, like a mosaic from pebbles found one at a time. I could stop here, but I will take another moment to consider the final question that we are permitted to ask.

  VII

  I have sketched a picture of the reality that the science of the twenty-first century will popularize, because even today the outlines are visible. This picture will receive the seal of approval of the best experts. The question which I wish to pursue where even speculation cannot reach has to do with the permanence of this world-view. Will it be the last?

  The history of science shows that each picture of the world, in turn, was thought to be the last; then it was revised, only to crumble eventually like the pattern of a broken mosaic, and the labor of putting it together was taken up anew by the next generation. Religious beliefs stand on dogmas whose rejection has always been tantamount first to vile heresy, later to the birth of another religion. Living faith, to those who profess it, is the Ultimate Truth; there is no appeal. In science, there is nothing ultimate and everything can be appealed. The “certainties” of scientific knowledge are not all equally certain, and there is nothing to indicate that we are getting close to the Goal of Cognition, that final fusion of Immovable Knowledge with Irresistible Ignorance. Our increments of reliable knowledge, proved through concrete application, are unquestionable. In science, we know more than our nineteenth-century predecessors; they, in turn, knew more than their forefathers — but at the same time we recognize the world’s inexhaustibility, the fathomlessness of its secrets, for we see that each atom, each “elementary particle,” turns out to be a bottomless well. It is this astounding bottomlessness of knowledge (though everybody is accustomed now to this marathon without a finish line) that renders every “ultimate view of reality” suspect. It may be that the principium creationis per destructionem will prove to be but a phase of our diagnosis that applies the human measure to a thing as inhuman as the Universe. It may be that someday a deus ex machine will cope with these inhuman, overcomplicated measurements, inaccessible to our poor animal brains: an alienated, human-initiated machine intelligence — or, rather, the product, pretermechanical, of a human-launched evolution of synthetic mind. But here I overstep the twenty-first century into a darkness that no speculation can illumine.

  Copyright

  English translation copyright © 1986

  Notes

  1

  This involves the manipulation of this electronic extension of intellectual work to bring unlawful profits to the programmer. Recently it has expanded to include activities that, at the moment, are not recognized as crimes, on the principle of nullum crimen sine lege: it is not criminal to use the huge processing power of computers to increase one’s chances of winning the lottery or in gambling. A couple of mathematicians showed that you could break the bank in roulette by analyzing the movements of the ball, for no roulette wheel is completely random; that is, the wheel deviates from theoretical chance, and the deviation can be determined and exploited by computer.

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  2

  If one disregards the chief destructive result of such visitations — that is, the total loss of vegetation and cultivated crops.

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  3

  The word “chance” is not found in any scripture of any faith.

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  Stanislaw Lem, One Human Minute