Final Fridays by John Barth

microlevels of particle physics and the macrolevels of astrophysics, such counterintuitive bi-zarries are in rigorous conformity with empirical observation; quantum physics has been an extraordinarily successful scientific theory, with formidable predictive power. The Anthropic Principle, which comes in several flavors, 9 carries these extrapolations to startling lengths: Had our universe not happened to develop precisely within a number of very critical parameters (as could just as possibly and much more probably have been the case), there would have been no evolution of planetary systems, of life, and of intelligences capable of measuring (never “innocently”) and theorizing upon those critical parameters. Depending on whether you take your Anthropic Principle in its diluted or its industrial-strength versions, the universe may thus be said to have evolved precisely such that astrophysicists can exist to understand its evolution, or it may be said to exist as we observe it to exist at least in part because we make those (never non-disturbing) observations. As John Wheeler succinctly puts it, “The observer is as essential to the creation of the universe as the universe is to the creation of the observer.”
    Without rigorous amplification, at least, this smacks of teleology, not to say tautology, as even some proponents of the principle agree
(Wheeler declares that he wholeheartedly believes in his Participatory Anthropic Principle “every February 29th”). It also echoes, in my ears anyhow, the “Christian-dramatic” view that the universe was created as the theater of mankind’s fall and messianic redemption. On this view, while the Old Testament implies and validates the New, the New reciprocally completes and validates the Old (more to come on this reciprocity). Every playwright and novel-plotter knows that while the events of Act Two will appear to the audience/reader to have been necessitated by the events of Act One, it is reciprocally true that the events of Act One may be said to have been necessitated by the requirements of Act Two. To Chekhov’s aforenoted injunction I would add that many a scriptwriter has been obliged to go back and hang a pistol on the wall in the story’s beginning because it turns out to be needed for firing at or near the story’s end. 10 Do physicists observe the universe to be such-and-so because its evolution has narrowly permitted the existence of physicists, or vice-versa? Was the Messiah’s coming necessary because of Original Sin, or was Original Sin (in Catholic tradition, felix culpa , Man’s “happy fault”) necessary for the Messiah’s coming?
    Either way, it all begins in the beginning, dramaturgically speaking, prefigured in Adam and Eve’s tasting the forbidden fruit of knowledge—including self-knowledge, the original causative, uninnocent observation:
    And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that
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    they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made
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    themselves girdles....
    And they likewise stitched together, in their subsequent/consequent generations, everything from scripture and scriptural commentary to quantum physics and the Anthropic Principle—all implicit, though not predictable, bereshith .
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    NOT PREDICTABLE? SO says chaos theory about the exfoliation of any complex system, such as the weather or the evolution of life on earth, “sensitively dependent on initial conditions”—small differences among which (Eve eats the apple; Eve doesn’t eat the apple; Eve eats, but Adam doesn’t; they both do) rather quickly generate large differences in outcome. 11 But such paradoxes of postlapsarian self-consciousness as the Anthropic Principle permit us to muse on some other modes of “reciprocal validation,” which I’ll approach via a brief detour from scriptural into secular literary classics.
    Virgil’s Aenead is more