A reasonable person cannot
completely discount the possibility that there may be an intelligent entity
busily involved in the on-going creative evolution of what we have come to term
‘the universe’. If there is in fact a purposive unfolding my own guess would be
that the earth and its inhabitants evidently retain for this entity a particular
pride of place - if only on the grounds that biological life forms display a
wondrous complexity and seeming purposiveness when compared to the relatively
inert forms of material found in non self-replicating matter.
Now, if this entity has gone to the trouble of seeing to such important details as, for instance, the exact binding strength required of an electron to ensure it stays fastened to the orbit of a hydrogen nucleus and once mastered this feat and countless others of like nature, moved onto cellular substances and then onto DNA and the institution of the conditions whereby life as we know it may thrive; we may pause and ask ourselves: Has S/He given leave to the life forms thereby created to go about things entirely as they see fit - the classic argument of ‘free will’ - OR, does S/He occasionally intervene to ‘tweak’ evolutionary development so as to keep things progressing more or less in the direction of a ‘Grand Design’?
Being of the belief that an entity which has gained sovereignty over the intra-atomic realm will not rest but must perforce expand ‘Its’ horizons outwards and create from this subjugated and mastered territory yet another vista - that of one whereby S/He may bind together these like atoms into compound ‘molecules’ - and so, having attained mastery of the physic therein S/He may after long aeons progress finally to our complex biological selves. Is it now conceivable that S/He will wish to stop here and rest content with this latest hierarchy - is it not more plausible to suppose that plans are already afoot to move ‘Creation’ onto a more advanced phase necessarily impossible for ‘Us’ to conceive - for are we not ourselves but bit parts to the process?
A striking binary becomes apparent; our human limitations, our need for water, food, rest and shelter makes of us beings with selfish cores - yet the entity remains resplendent, a detached ‘miraculate’- but both touching and being touched, Creation brings the Creator further into Being - and so realising our necessity to IT - we can finally allow ourselves to be nourished - but with what? The knowledge? No. It can only be the At-Traction - which can only be felt, not known.
This gets back to the phenomenology of a ‘Being’ that can either marshal, exist within or be ‘composed of’ the elements of Nature. It cannot, in any sense, be ‘like us’. There is a problematic here related to our being circumscribed by our human form, - our retinas pick up e/m waves within a certain frequency and so on - if we posit the existence of a God Entity what form can ‘It’ have - given all that science and common sense has taught us - does ‘It’ have a form that is comprehensible to us, or is S/He ‘invisible, refined out of existence’ as the empiricists would have us believe?
On the question of imposed teleology it's as well to clear up for starters that there are many thinkers and social theorists whose paradigms have been viewed as ‘teleologic’ insofar as they insist on a definite progression from some supposed primitive state to a more advanced form - Marx obviously and some of the ‘Social Darwinists’ such as Herbert Spencer. Herder’s notion of the ‘perfectability of the species’ definitely falls within this category.
Most of these ‘grand narratives’ received a stinging assault from the post-structuralists, mainly on the grounds that they excluded and suppressed other narratives, Spencer’s brand of social evolution for instance being used by apologists of Empire. This was a tendency Foucault counteracted in ‘The Archaelogy of Knowledge’ and ‘Madness and Civilization’ where he unearthed ‘subjugated’ or ‘lost’ narratives and thereby retroactively reversed the telos of the dominant narrative which had managed to establish itself as orthodoxy.
Derrida once determined narrative writing itself to be ‘the origin of pure historicity, pure traditionality, the telos of a history whose philosophy is always to come’. The science writer as storyteller is no different. He adopts certain conventions, follows trusted paths, codes and formulas. Whether the topic is the ‘big bang’, E=Mc, the microwave background or the GUT we may expect the discipline of the genre to assert itself; I have come across the same metaphor to explain black-box radiation in three separate works from writers whose sub-disciplines would lead one to expect that the phenomena would be viewed from a fresh angle. Anyway, though Derrida’s logic is often crushingly brutal it does leave us with a view of all narratives, even those founded on the most rigorously tested scientific hypotheses, to be necessarily ‘teleologic’.
Chaos theory is an interesting response when confronted with the overwhelming complexity found in those non-linear systems where there is such a proliferation of forcible variables that traditional predictive models lose their potency. I think it is being more usefully deployed nowadays to attempt to establish the range of parametric expansions associated with temperature variations on open-ended ecologies and the effects of ’runaway’ positive feedbacks on the biosphere.
If you read the earlier ICCP reports you would see that they had to assign a ‘value’ for the presumed shrinkage in income gap between the middle classes and an upwardly mobile urban proletariat in developing countries that could be used as a variable in Global Climate Models. The main problem was that the value chosen assumed a constant closing of this gap whereas in reality the income gap ratio had increased over the observed period. Thus a single ‘chaotic’ component undermined the overall predictive value of the GCMs.
The best researchers in any field have I think always borne in mind that observed effects are localised and contingent - which is why its so interesting nowadays to see just how dark matter and dark energy are being incorporated into the Standard Model. I think Nietzsche would have tremendous fun nowadays tearing strips off this process - the SM being today's equivalent of 'God' for the arch-iconoclast.
We have often heard the paradox; “Is it possible for God to create an object so heavy that he can not lift it?”. However, I can't proceed from this point since these two conditions look awfully like properties imagined by early believers as to what type of powers an original creative entity would or should possess. They seem very much like human derived mental constructs projected onto the blank canvas of our unknowing. Where did the notion that God can do “anything” emerge from to begin with? Was it with the Abrahamic faiths or did it emerge from earlier religious forms? What was the Zoroastrian conception of God's powers - was he in that tradition equally as omniscient and omnipotent? Are we basing our presumed properties of the Deity upon knowledge received through scriptures or did our notions of God's omnipotence emerge through philosophical speculation, only tacked on much later to sophisticate tribally derived genesis myths?
Personally, if there is one, I see 'Creation' going back to the big bang. Many particle physicists are struck by the distribution of properties of the various fundamental particles; not just atoms but quarks and their properties. They ask themselves for instance; well, if the binding strength required to hold an electron of a hydrogen atom where just one hundredth of a power more or less well then we couldn't have complex molecules; this kind of thing. Now, I'm not a chemist or a physicist but I do find intriguing the thought of a god entity operating on a tiny scale - at the level of superstrings - and moulding matter upwards. By the time of planetary formation when the elements necessary to life will have been created through stellar explosion I'm thinking this God has already made his mind up (broadly) as to how 'life' should be created. From this god entity's perspective the vastness of the biological kingdom and it’s self-replicating lifeforms affords a comfortably wide range of possibilities. Perhaps, in a certain sense, a self-replicating life form, once brought into existence has become already beyond His/Her/it's powers of manipulation.
It would seem to me that the act of bringing the universe and all it's properties into being, including our good selves would require, evidently, a certain degree of sophistication and complexity on the part of the Creator. Haven't we now reached the point through anthropology and the cross-comparative study of tribal belief systems where we can safely assert that all properties hitherto ascribed to gods, God etc are derived from early man's attempt to explain to himself the ineffable mysteries of the world? Given what we now know from what science is unveiling about the properties of the universe shouldn't we proceed - again assuming that we still retain "belief" - from this point? What kind of creature is this God - the one who has created the very laws of nature?
For a start S/he/it cannot (clearly?) be omnipotent, nor omniscient - but like all artists perhaps - is just learning their trade. Why create sentient organisms on millions of different worlds incapable of communicating with one other? Why is it necessary to create so many intermediate lifeforms - trilobites etc. that ran into an evolutionary dead end? Was "God" toying with the notion of letting them develop sentience and then for reasons best known to Himself scuppered their progression?
Is the human form a desirable blueprint which he had in his mind's eye; the acme of biological perfection, or are there more aesthetically pleasing forms elsewhere scattered about the heavens to which we cannot begin to approach? Was there something about the admixture of material with which S/he had to work - his artist's pallet - protons, neutrons, quarks etc. which necessitated a slow evolutionary development through the biological kingdom? Does the creator take pleasure in creating hideous killing machines like trap-door spiders? If so, why, and to what purpose? Is/was earth being used a testing ground for his experiments on other worlds? Is the creator capable of alighting simultaneously on these worlds? If so, what mode of transport does s/he use? If s/he can fashion the material world then isn't s/he in a sense a part of that physical world? Can God be detected? Is s/he bringing her own detection into being by creating beings capable of making this perception? Is God gendered - from whence or what could a being like this emerge?
Yes, I think it's plausible to say that after aeons of manipulating matter to create cellular life a certain conception of form would have developed - an aesthetic sense that propelled the diversion through the mammalian kingdom into hominids and then to Sapiens. Perhaps s/he has dispensed with physical evolution and is now actively creating the conditions for a further evolutionary leap - but this time in the sphere of consciousness?
The god entity must exist in some sense as simultaneity - time being a property of the material created and s/he residing underneath, betwixt and between; 'immanent' to all - thus the Plan 'progresses' in our eyes, unfolds through time, but is in fact, at all times, coterminous from the entity's perspective. How is it's awareness distributed with respect to it's creation, with the evolution of life forms - is there a single consciousness that can perceive all things at once, somehow grasp what is happening in the quark realm up through all the strata that finally alights on human needs and emotions; or are there multiple sensation points wherein it's awareness is distributed and s/he must determine where best to allocate it's attention.
For us, it is the overwhelming randomness to be found in nature - but we inhabit a timebound and shrivelled perspective and in such schemes it is easy to discount ourselves as having any particular importance; for we are at a loss to grasp the larger picture wherein we occupy such a smaller role. From the perspective of the god entity, however, it must be infinitely more interesting to observe human folly in action than to watch the predictable trails of comets and the elliptical orbits of the spheres. Perhaps we were brought into being merely to stave off the impossible boredom of being eternity incarnate, mere baubles of a timeless mind.
Now, if this entity has gone to the trouble of seeing to such important details as, for instance, the exact binding strength required of an electron to ensure it stays fastened to the orbit of a hydrogen nucleus and once mastered this feat and countless others of like nature, moved onto cellular substances and then onto DNA and the institution of the conditions whereby life as we know it may thrive; we may pause and ask ourselves: Has S/He given leave to the life forms thereby created to go about things entirely as they see fit - the classic argument of ‘free will’ - OR, does S/He occasionally intervene to ‘tweak’ evolutionary development so as to keep things progressing more or less in the direction of a ‘Grand Design’?
Being of the belief that an entity which has gained sovereignty over the intra-atomic realm will not rest but must perforce expand ‘Its’ horizons outwards and create from this subjugated and mastered territory yet another vista - that of one whereby S/He may bind together these like atoms into compound ‘molecules’ - and so, having attained mastery of the physic therein S/He may after long aeons progress finally to our complex biological selves. Is it now conceivable that S/He will wish to stop here and rest content with this latest hierarchy - is it not more plausible to suppose that plans are already afoot to move ‘Creation’ onto a more advanced phase necessarily impossible for ‘Us’ to conceive - for are we not ourselves but bit parts to the process?
A striking binary becomes apparent; our human limitations, our need for water, food, rest and shelter makes of us beings with selfish cores - yet the entity remains resplendent, a detached ‘miraculate’- but both touching and being touched, Creation brings the Creator further into Being - and so realising our necessity to IT - we can finally allow ourselves to be nourished - but with what? The knowledge? No. It can only be the At-Traction - which can only be felt, not known.
This gets back to the phenomenology of a ‘Being’ that can either marshal, exist within or be ‘composed of’ the elements of Nature. It cannot, in any sense, be ‘like us’. There is a problematic here related to our being circumscribed by our human form, - our retinas pick up e/m waves within a certain frequency and so on - if we posit the existence of a God Entity what form can ‘It’ have - given all that science and common sense has taught us - does ‘It’ have a form that is comprehensible to us, or is S/He ‘invisible, refined out of existence’ as the empiricists would have us believe?
On the question of imposed teleology it's as well to clear up for starters that there are many thinkers and social theorists whose paradigms have been viewed as ‘teleologic’ insofar as they insist on a definite progression from some supposed primitive state to a more advanced form - Marx obviously and some of the ‘Social Darwinists’ such as Herbert Spencer. Herder’s notion of the ‘perfectability of the species’ definitely falls within this category.
Most of these ‘grand narratives’ received a stinging assault from the post-structuralists, mainly on the grounds that they excluded and suppressed other narratives, Spencer’s brand of social evolution for instance being used by apologists of Empire. This was a tendency Foucault counteracted in ‘The Archaelogy of Knowledge’ and ‘Madness and Civilization’ where he unearthed ‘subjugated’ or ‘lost’ narratives and thereby retroactively reversed the telos of the dominant narrative which had managed to establish itself as orthodoxy.
Derrida once determined narrative writing itself to be ‘the origin of pure historicity, pure traditionality, the telos of a history whose philosophy is always to come’. The science writer as storyteller is no different. He adopts certain conventions, follows trusted paths, codes and formulas. Whether the topic is the ‘big bang’, E=Mc, the microwave background or the GUT we may expect the discipline of the genre to assert itself; I have come across the same metaphor to explain black-box radiation in three separate works from writers whose sub-disciplines would lead one to expect that the phenomena would be viewed from a fresh angle. Anyway, though Derrida’s logic is often crushingly brutal it does leave us with a view of all narratives, even those founded on the most rigorously tested scientific hypotheses, to be necessarily ‘teleologic’.
Chaos theory is an interesting response when confronted with the overwhelming complexity found in those non-linear systems where there is such a proliferation of forcible variables that traditional predictive models lose their potency. I think it is being more usefully deployed nowadays to attempt to establish the range of parametric expansions associated with temperature variations on open-ended ecologies and the effects of ’runaway’ positive feedbacks on the biosphere.
If you read the earlier ICCP reports you would see that they had to assign a ‘value’ for the presumed shrinkage in income gap between the middle classes and an upwardly mobile urban proletariat in developing countries that could be used as a variable in Global Climate Models. The main problem was that the value chosen assumed a constant closing of this gap whereas in reality the income gap ratio had increased over the observed period. Thus a single ‘chaotic’ component undermined the overall predictive value of the GCMs.
The best researchers in any field have I think always borne in mind that observed effects are localised and contingent - which is why its so interesting nowadays to see just how dark matter and dark energy are being incorporated into the Standard Model. I think Nietzsche would have tremendous fun nowadays tearing strips off this process - the SM being today's equivalent of 'God' for the arch-iconoclast.
We have often heard the paradox; “Is it possible for God to create an object so heavy that he can not lift it?”. However, I can't proceed from this point since these two conditions look awfully like properties imagined by early believers as to what type of powers an original creative entity would or should possess. They seem very much like human derived mental constructs projected onto the blank canvas of our unknowing. Where did the notion that God can do “anything” emerge from to begin with? Was it with the Abrahamic faiths or did it emerge from earlier religious forms? What was the Zoroastrian conception of God's powers - was he in that tradition equally as omniscient and omnipotent? Are we basing our presumed properties of the Deity upon knowledge received through scriptures or did our notions of God's omnipotence emerge through philosophical speculation, only tacked on much later to sophisticate tribally derived genesis myths?
Personally, if there is one, I see 'Creation' going back to the big bang. Many particle physicists are struck by the distribution of properties of the various fundamental particles; not just atoms but quarks and their properties. They ask themselves for instance; well, if the binding strength required to hold an electron of a hydrogen atom where just one hundredth of a power more or less well then we couldn't have complex molecules; this kind of thing. Now, I'm not a chemist or a physicist but I do find intriguing the thought of a god entity operating on a tiny scale - at the level of superstrings - and moulding matter upwards. By the time of planetary formation when the elements necessary to life will have been created through stellar explosion I'm thinking this God has already made his mind up (broadly) as to how 'life' should be created. From this god entity's perspective the vastness of the biological kingdom and it’s self-replicating lifeforms affords a comfortably wide range of possibilities. Perhaps, in a certain sense, a self-replicating life form, once brought into existence has become already beyond His/Her/it's powers of manipulation.
It would seem to me that the act of bringing the universe and all it's properties into being, including our good selves would require, evidently, a certain degree of sophistication and complexity on the part of the Creator. Haven't we now reached the point through anthropology and the cross-comparative study of tribal belief systems where we can safely assert that all properties hitherto ascribed to gods, God etc are derived from early man's attempt to explain to himself the ineffable mysteries of the world? Given what we now know from what science is unveiling about the properties of the universe shouldn't we proceed - again assuming that we still retain "belief" - from this point? What kind of creature is this God - the one who has created the very laws of nature?
For a start S/he/it cannot (clearly?) be omnipotent, nor omniscient - but like all artists perhaps - is just learning their trade. Why create sentient organisms on millions of different worlds incapable of communicating with one other? Why is it necessary to create so many intermediate lifeforms - trilobites etc. that ran into an evolutionary dead end? Was "God" toying with the notion of letting them develop sentience and then for reasons best known to Himself scuppered their progression?
Is the human form a desirable blueprint which he had in his mind's eye; the acme of biological perfection, or are there more aesthetically pleasing forms elsewhere scattered about the heavens to which we cannot begin to approach? Was there something about the admixture of material with which S/he had to work - his artist's pallet - protons, neutrons, quarks etc. which necessitated a slow evolutionary development through the biological kingdom? Does the creator take pleasure in creating hideous killing machines like trap-door spiders? If so, why, and to what purpose? Is/was earth being used a testing ground for his experiments on other worlds? Is the creator capable of alighting simultaneously on these worlds? If so, what mode of transport does s/he use? If s/he can fashion the material world then isn't s/he in a sense a part of that physical world? Can God be detected? Is s/he bringing her own detection into being by creating beings capable of making this perception? Is God gendered - from whence or what could a being like this emerge?
Yes, I think it's plausible to say that after aeons of manipulating matter to create cellular life a certain conception of form would have developed - an aesthetic sense that propelled the diversion through the mammalian kingdom into hominids and then to Sapiens. Perhaps s/he has dispensed with physical evolution and is now actively creating the conditions for a further evolutionary leap - but this time in the sphere of consciousness?
The god entity must exist in some sense as simultaneity - time being a property of the material created and s/he residing underneath, betwixt and between; 'immanent' to all - thus the Plan 'progresses' in our eyes, unfolds through time, but is in fact, at all times, coterminous from the entity's perspective. How is it's awareness distributed with respect to it's creation, with the evolution of life forms - is there a single consciousness that can perceive all things at once, somehow grasp what is happening in the quark realm up through all the strata that finally alights on human needs and emotions; or are there multiple sensation points wherein it's awareness is distributed and s/he must determine where best to allocate it's attention.
For us, it is the overwhelming randomness to be found in nature - but we inhabit a timebound and shrivelled perspective and in such schemes it is easy to discount ourselves as having any particular importance; for we are at a loss to grasp the larger picture wherein we occupy such a smaller role. From the perspective of the god entity, however, it must be infinitely more interesting to observe human folly in action than to watch the predictable trails of comets and the elliptical orbits of the spheres. Perhaps we were brought into being merely to stave off the impossible boredom of being eternity incarnate, mere baubles of a timeless mind.
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