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Epilog: The Meaning of Purpose

To spare humankind the hell of a technocratic, fundamentalist hive, humanism needs to mount a postmodern revolution—a revolution that rejects the alienation of a plotless history. The star larvae hypothesis lays the foundation for such an essential revolution.

The scientific innovation known as complexity theory proposes that, when conditions are right, matter and energy spontaneously self-organize into complex systems. The process is ubiquitous; it is credited with producing everything from biological cells and industrial economies to planetary biospheres and spiral galaxies. All of these complex phenomena exhibit spontaneous self organization.

For better or worse, this model of nature exorcises uniqueness from biological life. It relegates biology to an undistinguished place in the broad class of complex phenomena. It makes "being alive" a suspect or wholly generic category.

Nonetheless, most complexity theorists probably would disavow the notion that the Milky Way galaxy, for example, lives—even though, like a biological organism, its dynamic stability is a product of spontaneous self-organization.

So, when is a complex system alive and when isn't it?

Are stars alive? Astronomers tell us that stars are born—metaphorically. But what distinguishes a metaphorical from a literal stellar birth? By wrapping living organisms into the broad category of complex systems, complexity theory challenges science to re-categorize biological processes. They might be particular expressions, via protoplasm, of universal processes that operate outside of biology as well as within it. There's no a priori reason to suppose that anything at all is essentially unique about biology.

If a subset, such as biology, of the broad class of complex systems, behaves in a certain way, it raises the question as to whether the whole class behaves in that or some analogous way. The underlying premise of complexity theory is that complex systems are as alike in their governing principles as they can be diverse in their constituent materials. Consequently, one type of complex system managing its affairs in a particular way suggests that other complex systems might manage their affairs in corresponding ways, owing to their shared principles of governance. If birds do it, and bees do it, then, according to complexity theory, galaxies and solar systems might do it, too.

Among the biological processes potentially applicable to nonbiological complex systems, ontogeny promises to be the most troubling for science. This is because ontogeny invites to the party that persona non grata of science, teleology. If ontogeny is a general attribute of complex systems, admittedly a big "if", then complex systems can be regarded as conforming to teleological principles. At first blush, the teleological dimension of the star larvae hypothesis would seem to position it outside of the metaphysical framework of normal science, and, therefore, within the purview of science, the hypothesis would seem to be a non sequitor. But because science accepts the natural teleology of ontogeny, it cannot dismiss the hypothesis on account of its teleological basis.

In the jargon of postmodern philosophy, the star larvae hypothesis proposes a "grand narrative;" it regards history not just as a narrative, but one with a definite plot. The plot encompasses human history and the natural history of the Earth's biosphere, and ultimately of the universe, because it positions all events within a teleological framework. That framework includes history’s purposeful culmination in the birth of a new genration of stars. The hypothesis proposes an affirmative eschatology. For these reasons it cannot be rejected outright on religious grounds. It has no patience for the implicit nihilism of modern science. Edward O. Wilson formulates that nihilism concisely in On Human Nature:

"The first dilemma, in a word, is that we have no particular place to go. The species lacks any goal external to its own biological nature. It could be that in the next hundred years humankind will thread the needles of technology and politics, solve the energy and materials crises, avert nuclear war, and control reproduction. The world can at least hope for a stable ecosystem and a well-nourished population. But what then?"

Wilson offers no answer.

Technological industry can seem inimical to nature, especially when nature is sentimentalized as a pastoral woodland of bambis, bunnies, and babbling brooks. Through such a selective lens the smokestacks, strip mines, and strip malls of urban development seem to insult the natural world. But nature can handle it. Nature is bigger than the schemes of the power elite. Human industry serves nature's aims. Humankind's seemingly endless variety of technologies advances nature's plan. What else but hubris could suggest that human accomplishment lies somehow outside of nature?

We believe that the human capacity to exercise free will transcends the seeming determinism of natural law. But only a mind alienated from nature in the first place could fragment nature into dumb, dead, deterministic stuff on the one hand and human minds that can act in some magical way outside of the processes of natural law on the other. In the quotation from Erwin Schroedinger that concludes Quantum Gravity and the Ontology of Consciousness the physicist points out that there can be no such dualism, with different laws of nature applying to different situations depending on whether the atoms, of my hand, say, are moved by my will or by purely deterministic physical forces. The products of the mind are as much the products of nature as are the Earth's flora and fauna.

Admittedly, the Earth cannot host an indefinite expansion of human industry. Only when technology frees itself from the constraints of this planet will it be able to fulfill its natural calling, which is to extend its productive powers onto the largest possible scale. Insofar as it is driven by economics, the industrial program would seem to want to satisfy itself by doing everything with nothing, because economics rewards efficiency, the doing of more with less. This consideration aims human history on a course that dovetails with cosmology. The Big Bang theory proposes that universes break into being ex nihilo—from nothing—the perfection of factory automation. In its craving to maximize growth and efficiency, industry is driven by its essence to manufacture new universes. This formulation of a cosmic destiny for humankind’s descendants coincides on an even larger scale with the theory of cosmological natural selection.

Some cosmologists explain the precise tunings of the universe’s physical constants by proposing that the tunings evolved through many generations of universes, the evolution being driven by a natural selection that favors profligate star producers. But a universe whose physics is tuned to spawn stars coincidentally has a physics tuned to spawn biology. Given this dual result of cosmological natural selection, evolutionary pressures might actually be favoring universes able to turn the coincidence to their advantage—able to apply biology to star-building.

To dismiss biological life as a nonentity in the cosmic drama is surely to sell nature short. Only an anti-serendipitous prejudice would conclude that, though stars and biological organisms require the same tunings of the universe’s physical constants, organisms are irrelevant or only incidental to the process of cosmological selection. But that is what science has done with its anti-teleological doctrines. Religion, fortunately, addresses this deficiency of science.

The religious intuition of "something greater" uplifts the soul. But the intellect has had to content itself with imagining that the greater something exists only after death, for the individual, or following an apocalypse, for the collective. Now these interpretations can be recast as metaphors for future stages of natural history. Industrial technology enables biological organisms to relocate literally to the heavens, where objects are weightless and minds are supersentient. In this sense, the industry born of science, ironically, has the capacity to out-literalize religious fundamentalists. The prospect of humankind delivering itself to the heavens and there metamorphosing into a society of angels, constitutes a secular last-laugh at the expense of scriptural literalism. As McLuhan observed, anything pushed sufficiently to its extreme will invert into its opposite, and so it is with the rationalist, empiricist program of science, which developed at least in part in opposition to religious authority. Now, with twenty-first century technologies and concepts in hand, science circles back to outmaneuver religion in the pursuit of Heaven.

Probably few scientists would welcome a model of history in which science serves as the implementation of a religious blueprint. A certain ideology that seems prevalent in the scientific mind equates religion with superstition and authoritarianism and rejects the package. But science has evolved its own brand of superstition and authoritarianism. The heirs of the Enlightenment have allowed the humanistic ideals that they inherited to decay into a dogma of materialism and theophobia, complete with canonical scriptures and the excommunication of heretics. As historian of science Thomas Kuhn points out in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," science's appeal to authority to render judgment on any innovative idea is "one of the aspects of scientific work that most clearly distinguishes it from every other creative pursuit except perhaps theology." He characterizes the education of the scientist as "a narrow and rigid education, probably more so than any other except perhaps in orthodox theology." In other words, science has grown to resemble religion in its institutional forms.

Premonitions of space colonization can emerge from the unconscious in fantastic forms.                 The Feast of the Gods, by Cornelis van Poelenburgh

That is an unfortunate development. But more unfortunate is the failing of science and secular society to produce a naturalistic theology. It was inevitable that, without a theological base, the liberated worldview that grew from the Enlightenment would run its course and fundamentalist religious inclinations would reassert themselves.

Instead of building a better mousetrap, as it were, science and secular society decreed mousetraps unnecessary. Meanwhile, the mice have overrun the granary—discontented souls told that their existence is a pointless chemical accident have re-embraced the superstitions that the Enlightenment was supposed to vanquish. Human nature fundamentally remains what it always has been, soul in search of meaning. The soul, the seat of subjectivity, craves an understanding of its situation in terms of meaning and purpose. The contrived "meanings" assigned to it by atheistic humanism or invented by individuals exercising their existential "freedom" constitute a poor man’s, and ultimately a poor, simulation of genuine meaning, or natural purpose. To cite just one sad consequence of this failing, the U.S. public education system in the early years of the twenty-first century confronts the prospect of Biblical Creationism (aka Creation Science, aka Intelligent Design) re-entering the classroom. Somewhere Biblicists must be planning similar attacks on geology using the young-Earth doctrine and on astronomy using a revived geocentrism.

One means by which scientific humanism might recapture disaffected hearts and minds is by appropriating and claiming as its own the promise of transcendence through ascendance. Science has the power to translate the supernatural promises of religion into the natural promise of human industry. Science need only integrate its most recent discoveries into a coherent model of nature-as-organism. Complexity theory, quantum theories of mind, astrochemistry, and other avant-garde threads of scientific thought are the new ingredients needed to transform the current model into an organismic one, one that recognizes that the evolution and history of life on Earth serve a natural, cosmic purpose, the regeneration of stars.

The momentum of history has carried humankind along a path that now diverges upwardly toward Heaven and downwardly toward Hell. The ascendant path is one along which at least some of our descendants can embark and so then graduate to the superhuman state dreamt of in the religious imagination. Human beings seem to be programmed to metamorphose into angels, weightless and supersentient, once released from the terrestrial environment and into the celestial. Once transfigured, they will be in a position to advance the project of Creation through another generation of stars. This is the calling of organic life.

But callings are sometimes refused. A future technocratic elite could relegate humankind to Hell, which might look like the automated tyranny depicted in the Matrix movies. A late-term abortion for Gaia could take the form of the interminably static and authoritarian hive. The bleak, ingrown, planetbound subsistence of the imperial self-serving mechanism could be the natural fate of biospheres that fail to release their industrial energies into space, producing a prison planet.

The way out is to mutate into a new species in a new environment, to transcend the human condition and realize the metaphysical promise—but to learn by doing so that the metaphysical promise is a prescriptive metaphor for ordinary history. The celestial superhumans of the religious imagination are not metaphysical angels but physical extraterrestrial posthumans, our evolutionary descendants.

However, none of the teleological arguments behind this position should be taken as endorsing scriptural literalism. The world’s scriptures, myths, folklore, fables, and fairy tales reveal the mechanics of the psyche, but only conjoined with the achievements of science can they function as meaningful programs for history. Although science and secular culture have failed to articulate a satisfying natural theology, they obviously have accomplished much of profound significance. Casting about in the natural world, they have discovered novel facts about the physical universe and human existence. This knowledge and its fruits need to be integrated into a new theology.

Put otherwise, Humanism needs to mount a postmodern revolution. A revolution that dumps science’s superfluous dogmas, those that divorce nature from her purpose. A revolution that delivers a new model of nature and a new theology—a worldview that respects scientific fact and existential longing, is free of superstition, acknowledges the soul, and unbinds the spirit. A revolution that rejects the alienation of a plotless history and liberates humankind from the hellish prospect of the technocratic fundamentalist hive. The star larvae hypothesis points the way toward such an essential revolution.

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