Nature's Plan for Humankind
Prolog
Prolog: The Nature of Meaning and the Meaning of Nature
If nature is divine artifice, as religious faith supposes, then nature is of a kind with technology. Nature is somebody's science project.
Think
you're Bright?
Rise and Shine at http://starlarvae.blogspot.com/ |
A
peculiar virus struck the world of ideas in the fall of 1998. Alert minds
perceived suddenly that science and religion had become reconciled. A
flurry of books and articles announced the reconciliation. The two rivals
had buried the hatchet, finally.
The New
Republic, not to miss a trend, featured as the cover story of its
October 12 issue an excerpt from Greg Easterbrook’s "Beside Still Waters: Searching for Meaning in an Age of Doubt
The urge to reconcile the rival worldviews and present them as chummy
is understandable. But no matter the eagerness of the matchmakers, without
a new conceptual framework the rivals will head further apart into extremes
of the secular and the sanctimonious. The star larvae hypothesis redirects
the scientific and religious impulses. It proposes not only that human
purpose fills the gaps in science's account of nature, but that science
points the way toward a natural theology.
With regard to religion the hypothesis is ecumenical. It integrates motifs
from across the spectrum, from shamanism to "The
Tao of Physics." It is Catholic in its emphasis on ascension
to the celestial. It is Jewish in its regard for humankind as God’s partner
in the ongoing project of Creation. It is Gnostic in its burdening of
humankind with the task of engineering its own salvation. It is Pagan
in that it regards nature as ensouled. It is syncretic with regard to
many brands of religion, because it shares with them a teleological view
of history—the belief that natural and human history proceed purposefully,
according to a plan.
With regard to science the hypothesis adopts biology as the fundamental discipline, or at least the fundamental metaphor, rather than physics. This move is justified by the universality of metabolism. Because human beings are biological organisms, biology is the cross section of nature’s metabolism that most easily reveals nature's habits (because biology operates roughly at a human scale—at least compared to the microscopic and astronomical scales of physics). Habits of nature identified on the biological scale apply generally to the larger and smaller scales of nature, given the unifying universality of metabolism across all physical scales and systems.
 |
Courtship Dance of The Spiral Galaxy, "My dear, you have the loveliest nebulae."
In
his New Republic excerpt, Easterbrook reviews scientific advances,
such as the Big Bang, the discovery of DNA, and the concept of the "Higgs
Field." Based on his review, he concludes, "Regardless of whether
our mettle is natural or supernatural, purpose is something people can
make by leading moral lives and helping carry one another’s burdens."
Whether or not humankind has a purpose, it is incumbent upon humans to,
in Easterbrook’s words, "treat one another lovingly and with
justice." What such ethical bromides have to do with the achievements
of science is anybody's guess. Nonetheless, New Republic hyped
the story as "Science Sees the Light—The Rediscovery of Higher
Meaning." The editors are guilty of conflating meaning and virtue.
Virtuous behavior doesn't’t connect science with "Higher Meaning."
Only involvement with a teleological program can do that. Any hoped-for
integration of science and religion will have to deal squarely with the
need for an overarching plan, inherent in nature, that gives human existence
meaning—and not gloss over the issue with ethics talk.
The star larvae hypothesis presents itself as a candidate for an integration
that meets this requirement. It assigns a specific purpose to humankind
within cosmic nature. It draws from science and religion, but not always
from their orthodox doctrines. Rather, it leans on science’s innovative
fringes and religion’s archaic roots. The fringes of science include
self-organization, quantum theories of mind, and various other odd technical
conjectures. The roots of religion include belief in a machinery of cosmic
fate, fueled by the stars, within which human activity unfolds. These
seemingly unrelated branches of understanding, avant-garde science and
primal religion, form the operational underpinnings of the hypothesis.
Among the advances of science, the theory of complex systems provides
an obvious access point through which religious ideas can flow into the
scientific model of the world. The theory invites notions of an animate
universe to re-enter the marketplace of ideas. Central to this about-face
in scientific thinking is the concept of spontaneous self-organization.
This is science’s new term for the tendency of matter and energy,
under the right circumstances, to arrange themselves into complex, dynamic
structures. These structures, kept stable metabolically, can persist for
long periods in far-from-equilibrium conditions. Curiously, this observable
phenomenon is not predicted by the laws of science that typically are
used to describe the tendencies of matter and energy. In particular, spontaneous
self-organization does not conform to the predictions of the Second Law
of Thermodynamics. The Second Law decrees that entropy, or disorder, increases
with the passage of time. But, by legitimizing the concept of nature’s
spontaneous self-ordering, science acknowledges the occurrence essentially
of miracles, even if it tries to conceal the discovery under a shroud
of technical argot. But spontaneous self organization by any other name
still smells like a miracle.
The most ancient conception of nature, so far as we can determine, was
in a commonsensical, intuitive way a deeper understanding than is today’s
scientific view. Science since Descartes has regarded nature as dead and
living organisms as some weird anomaly. But conceiving of nature on the
whole as being an integrated living system is more true to humankind’s
experience of nature than is science’s conception of nature as inanimate
particles and fields drifting steadily toward equilibrium—and from
which nihilistic context biological life improbably sprung. Complex systems
theory revives the ancient conception in which biology is only one expression
of life in an animate cosmos.
“I think it not improbable that man, like the grub that prepares a chamber for the winged thing it never has seen but is to become—that man may have cosmic destinies he does not understand.” —-
Oliver
Wendell Holmes, Jr. |
Given science’s unfulfilled promise of a grand unified theory and the unlikelihood of ever fulfilling that promise (given obstacles such as Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem, the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, and the conundrum of conscious experience), religion can only feel increasingly emboldened to challenge the suppositions and authority of science. But religion performs no better than science when it comes to presenting a grand unified theory. Religious doctrines provide moral instruction, but they are vacuous as technical explanations. Equations in computers and dogmas in catechisms are equally unsatisfying substitutes for understanding—and understanding must be the goal of an integration of science and religion: an understanding of the place that humankind occupies in the unfolding of cosmic events.
Science, for all its technical successes, has failed to find a necessary place for human beings in nature. Science describes a reasonably comprehensible physical world but within which humankind has no particular purpose or historical destiny. That should not bother scientists, because it is not the mission of science to find any particular purpose for people (other than employment). But insofar as science provides an account of the workings of nature, and insofar as human beings are products of and participants in the workings of nature, it might seem that by now science would have something to say about human purpose and destiny within the context of nature’s operations.
The inability of science to find a destined role for humankind has at least something to do with the ideology of science itself. This ideology regards questions of meaning and purpose as psychological questions, which have to do with the workings of the mind, which are epiphenomenal to, or contingent upon, or derivative of the workings of the brain, and which therefore cannot be fundamental to—cannot a priori be built into—the workings of nature. Therefore, science fails to, and possibly never can, locate for humankind any natural meaning, purpose, or destiny. Science in this sense continues the project of Gnosticism. It throws the prospect of any kind of redemption for humankind back onto human beings themselves. But even the Gnostics regarded nature as the creation of a deliberative, purposeful mind (albeit a mad one).
Any apparently purposeful design in nature, any seemingly discernable pre-ordained patterning, say the scientists, is merely a coincidence of undirected patterns drawn by the universe’s various physical laws, intersecting this way and that. The religious sensibility takes issue, perceiving the coincidence of patterns as evidence of a creative mind at work behind the appearances of nature. Religion, in contradiction to science, places human meaning and destiny at the center of a purposeful creation. It grants humankind a special place in nature—but only a folkloric understanding of the technical side of natural processes. Where science uses the details of physical law to complete, or nearly complete, its picture of a godless universe, religion tends to sidestep the details of physical law to find significance for humankind in a universe that is rooted in a metaphysical reality, a reality decreed more real than the merely physical reality described by science. Nonetheless, science’s inability to discover a larger context for humankind, within which humans serve as necessary participants, has not hindered science’s ability to usurp much of the cultural authority once wielded by religion, though the tide, or the worm, may be turning.
"We
shall not cease from exploration —
T. S. Elliot |
According
to science, at least since Darwin, perceptions of design in nature are
illusory. A bird’s beak, for example, being shaped necessarily in
a particular way, has no purpose as such, no matter how well it serves
the bird as a tool for acquiring food, attracting a mate, or any other
use to which the bird might put it. Purpose can be assigned only
by a conscious mind making choices in pursuit of an outcome. The
beak serves the bird, but it was not designed intentionally to do so,
according to science. The religious sensibility, in contrast, assigns
to the beak a purpose that embodies the intent of a conscious mind, that
of the creator of nature. The presumptions of science and religion can
be distinguished in greater detail, but these broad strokes cover them
well enough to establish their fundamental incompatibility—at least
within their normative exegeses.
The star larvae hypothesis proposes to subordinate and supercede both
science and religion in terms of explaining humankind’s place in
nature. It repositions scientific and religious descriptions into a common
context. This repositioning involves pulling the scientific, religious,
and historical data from their neatly indexed files, spreading the facts
messily around and linking and configuring them in unconventional ways.
The need for a novel interpretation of the facts is demonstrated, for
example, by the uncanny number of coincidences in physics that science
declares necessary to keep our particular universe’s house in order.
Religious sensibilities point to these coincidences as evidence of a grand
design. And so the debate wraps itself around itself over and again.
If nature is divine artifice, as religious faith supposes, then nature is of a kind with technology.
Nature is somebody's science project.
Welcome
to the Star Larvae hypothesis
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