While some of his fellow MPs were busy racking up expenses, Michael Meacher was preoccupied with astronomical figures of a different kind, such as the rate of expansion of the universe, or its temperature moments after the Big Bang.
The veteran left-winger, who entered the Commons 40 years ago last month, has written a book, whose title, boldly alluding to Darwin, proclaims its intellectual ambition. The product of 15 years' work on and off, it asks the question: is there a purpose to the universe or are we all here by chance?
Meacher has researched all sorts of disciplines, from cosmology to evolutionary biology, and his book takes a rapid tour through a host of theories - string, complexity, Gaia, to name just a few. "I am not a scientist," he says, "but I have tried to do something that I don't think anyone else has tried to do, which is to put it all together - from the origin of the universe and theories about it, the evolution of the universe, and then how, and why, life started on earth, and then the evolution of life forms, which is the most improbable story."
Whereas neo-Darwinians argue that the world is essentially meaningless, its development driven by random forces, Meacher believes science can support the idea that there is some kind of "cosmic blueprint" behind the unfolding universe, although we are merely at the beginning of understanding it. "The evidence begins to stack up pretty strongly that there is more to it than this is an accidental world and we just happen to be there," he says.
The evolution of the universe and the emergence of life result from conditions so finely tuned that the tiniest fraction of a difference could not have produced life as we know it. To give an example, if the forces after the Big Bang had not been so precisely balanced, the universe would either have expanded too rapidly to allow the formation of galaxies or collapsed in on itself.
You see God in some people’s lives
Citing a calculation by the mathematician Roger Penrose, Meacher says: "the chances of the world being the way it is if it were purely an accidental concatenation of forces is one chance in ten followed by 123 noughts. This is as near to an infinity of unlikelihood as you get."
He wrote the book from an agnostic viewpoint, he stresses, although he remains a practising Christian whose mother wanted him to become an Anglican priest. Spiritual beliefs, he argues, derive their validity from human experience and intuition, such as "the overwhelming sense of numinous power which almost societies from the earliest have had", or the "ineffable witness of the mystics" or the transformative experiences undergone by some people which completely changes their lives. He himself professes an affinity with the prophetic teachings of the Hebrew Bible. "You see God in some people's lives," Meacher believes.
While science and religion remain different categories of thought, he argues that they must "be consistent because there is one indivisible reality". Hence religions cannot cling on to obsolete doctrines in the face of scientific knowledge. The second half of the book looks at religion and the implications of scientific discovery for its future.
Given his interests, it is hardly surprising Meacher finds party politics "shallow and ephemeral". He is now at work on another book, about the end of neo-liberalism and "unfettered market capitalism" championed by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. He compares the current debate between parties to "fiddling with grains of sand when there is a tsunami coming".
Reading Destination, you might be struck by the number of scientists with Jewish names that feature in it - and perhaps wonder where are the Jewish books that, like Meacher's, ponder the impact of science on religious thought.
