God, a kindly mother or father, is without saying devoutly to be wished. Many of us would settle for the reality of the highly structured hierarchy of the Grecian divinities who in the main control the visible world and are protective. Alas, it is but a wish, a grand fantasy to give us hope that in the end there resides a high purpose to heretofore unspeakable sacrifices and atrocities of early and current development. We pray that our departed loved ones have not died just to be tagged by paleontologists of the third millennium and tossed in the bins of fossils. Even pet owners envision a safe haven for their animal friends so that they are not simply expendable dumb brutes.
This is understandably animal faith begging for hopefulness in face of Dostoevsky’s assault on a God who is willing to create irrespective of horrendous catastrophe and tragedy. Those who defend God by explaining away evil inflictions and untold sacrifices as a test of our faith and courage are preaching to the winds of chaos. Those who deny God — that is, an indigenous essence of decoding — likewise are skating on thin ice against the solar winds still in their adolescence perhaps to grow ultimately a better world on the back of horrendous expendability. The agnostic under the guise of indifference actually in his heart plays it both ways or wait-and-see what science in another millennia can come up with.
The Darwinist is incomplete because he focuses on the trees without the forest. Molecular selection is pointless without the chemistry; nor does it account for Bergson’s élan vital of free-wheeling human life connected to some mysterious aim.Darwinism helps describe, not explain, much of the biological clutter in the world. Natural selection — more apropos, the carrying out of efficient causes inherently coded within its non-transcendental essence — is simply another way of explaining away the blindness of absolute chance and at the same time denying the incursion of deities in development; surely, no divine insertion could possibly bother itself, nor have the patience with the myriad of such atrocities; nor could chance, aside, perhaps from galactic transformation of solar systems, be responsible for systemic élan vital in micro-organisms.
Why Philip Johnson bothered to put Darwin on Trial is in itself a mystery since Darwin himself — however conflicting to religion his bias — never intended scientific cultism; rather, in face of eons of time, a systemic account of how to fill in the vast gaps to his theory. Johnson by contrast naturally selects straw men — in the main those who mis-speak of evolution as a “fact” before thorough exploration of all the pieces — to show that because of all the gaps and contradictions in Darwin these gaps are mysteries privy only to God, even though Darwin, however skeptical, conceded that conceivably there is breathing room for god to cover his tracks by selecting a particular course of events in the infinite ordeal of evolution.
The latest endeavor to soften the absurdity of creationism is to come up with — philosophers with abandon have used God, First Cause, or Ideas — the entity of intelligent design as though it were something new because it does not contradict the vastness of geological time while giving God a voice but not the final say: as Spinoza would put it there is no divine purpose to the universe.
Neither three, however, give much satisfaction to the ultimate curiosity of mind as in all matters that require definitiveness to why. The biblical story of creation is poetry; even John Paul II implies this in his acceptance of evolution, though inspired by God. Intelligent design is nothing more than this official catholic approval. Natural selection, however godless Darwin might have perceived it, is but the blind faith of instinctive design in molecular realm which is as native as the innate driving force of the entire universe if one accepts the big bang theory of modern cosmology.
The very first infinitesimal particle that drove the macrocosm as we perceive it today certainly is inherently a natural selection for the origin of stars. There does not seem to be any doubt that this solar system is the result of a happy accident but because of the vastness of the universe that appears to behave similarly to the Milky Way there is a the probability that happy accidents occur universally and when they do the perception of instinctive purpose takes hold. However ludicrous it is that there is a fundamental law springing from the violence of stars, there is no need to go beyond the acceptance of this ferocious lunacy that might incidentally generate the possibility, if not probability, of some value or good.The unhappy accidents of natural selection such as the creatures of the deep, the hapless dinosaurs and reptiles and worst of all man’s inhumanity to man cannot possibly be by intelligent design unless one were to accept an intelligence gone mad. Nevertheless, molecular structures appear to be infinite and as a result anything can pop up in the almost unending course of time just as astronomers are continually surprised by the unpredictable behavior of inorganic cosmic dust. There is but one certainty: the mother particle of all that there is may or may not “create” again when it collapses upon itself but deep within its infinitesimal entity there is always the potential for becoming.
However, the big bang theory, widely accepted, may not be the answer either since it is no more than observable data of the modern mind just as the ancients were limited by their era. That stars are literally being blown away by the initial dynamic and presumed to return to its source does not necessarily follow that in the vast stretches of dark matter beyond the stars there is no other source of a beginning in becoming an improved modus operandi of clearer purpose and rapid ascension of macromolecular structures and consciousness rather than this violent accidental pervasiveness bent on ineluctable self destruct even though at its interim stages it may have glittered with magnificent existence teeming with extraordinary, purposeful intelligence of exquisite identities that other star systems have had or will have as their accidental destiny.
Because the universe as perceived is a hodgepodge of accidents, incidentals and coincidentals does not imply that the mother particle is in itself but Chance; it is on the contrary a law unto itself that may very well contain cosmic amendments in its ensuing pulses to eventuate such things as natural and unnatural selection or causation on the cosmic level as well as the molecular. These amendments can give rise to solar systems conducive to molecular development and instinctive saltation in RNA and DNA. There can be no inference drawn that amendments are godly intervention or Plato’s Demiurge working feverishly to make a better world. Nonetheless, what can be drawn is that they are stepping stones to Consciousness, the daughter of the mother particle; for, without this consummation of awareness there is literally no reality, no value, just a busy billiard table on auto pilot signifying nothing as was the case for some four billion years.
It may be tempting to ascribe intelligent design to the stepping stones except that infers a conscious deity at the outset of pulsation which is impossible. A deity would by definition be in control at all times, but the perceived universe, in spite of its governing laws and cosmic selections, are inherently out of control. No God would design billions of aimless galaxies, nor a solar system such as ours only to be engulfed in flames as the sun approaches its demise. No, we of human consciousness is stuck with a Mother particle with a learning disability. It could conceivably take millions of more explosions and implosions to get it right — especially with clarity the origin of species, ninety percent of which would hopefully be extinct once and for all.
If in another part of the universe — there can be no other universe — there could be a parallel mother particle that in previous explosions before the current big bang learned a more refined technique — not as blustery, that is, energy under greater control — a much friendlier system could be in progression. Surely, there would be much more focus on conservation, minimizing galaxies, and less taxing on the delicate balance of gravitation and the magnetic field, preventing devastating black holes. For as each big bang progresses toward enhanced consciousness of its intelligent beings, natural and unnatural selection will wane as “artificial” or conscious selection reigns supreme — not till then will there be intelligent design, weeding out redundancy, incompetence, cataclysmic disease and barbarity, let alone arrant evil.
Copyright © 1999 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: October 25, 2003 .