That which can be asserted without evidence,
can be dismissed without evidence.
Christopher
Hitchens
If it turns out that there is a God . . . .
the worst that you can say about him is that basically he's
an underachiever.
Woody Allen
Properly read, the Bible
is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
Isaac Asimov
Why
is there something and not nothing, or how does something evolve
out of nothing asked Sophocles in the 5th century BC; an unsettling
question taken up by the philosopher Martin Heidegger in the
20th century in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1935).
The query presupposes the existence of a creative intelligence
(God or Prime Mover) that is the cause of everything that is,
otherwise known as the universe. But the inquiry is doomed to
St. Peter out as an reductio ad infinitum because if
there is a God, we must ask how did It come into being, and
then what came before It – and so on.
Epistemological
dualism (light-dark, good-evil) proposes that from the very
outset the wrong question has been asked and allowed to set
the tone for metaphysics for more than two millennia. It beggars
belief that philosophy and theology’s greatest thinkers
have been ensnared in a cause and effect loop that has significantly
diminished their sphere of influence, a development not helped
by the ascendency of astrophysics (astronomy).
When
it comes to accounting for everything that is, the principle
or law of dualism proposes that evil does not originate or evolve
out of the good or vice versa, that hot does not issue out of
cold, and intelligence does not erupt out of dumbness, but rather
they are co-dependent, co-existent. So where you have one, you
simultaneously have the other.
Dualism
is founded on the notion that whatever anything is, it has an
opposite, or at a minimum something other than itself. It is
impossible for there to be one of anything. The one implies
the many. Singularity cannot exist without plurality. If there
were only one single unvarying temperature of 27 Celsius, the
very concept of temperature would disappear. In order to exist,
27 Celsius requires other ‘unlike’ temperatures.
As a universal organizing principle, dualism knows no circumvention
or eclipse. It is the basis of everything that is – and
isn’t.
The
nothingness out of which presumably issued the universe, a cause
and effect we attribute to God or a Prime Mover, is an untenable
premise. Inherent in nothing is something: you cannot have one
without the other. We do not require a conventional God or Prime
Mover to account for the universe. The universe, as a something,
which implicates a nothing, or a void, has always been there.
Just as dumb, non-sentient life and intelligence have always
co-existed. Every concept presupposes its opposite or something
unlike itself.
The
reason it is so difficult to wrap the brain around the idea
that there is no beginning or end to the universe is because
everything we know of life, which includes all manifestations
of life, begins and ends: the workday, the calendar year, friendships/relationships;
even an obdurate cliff side will one day crumble into pebble
and sand. But the universe itself has always been.
Therefore,
we need not ask from out of what originates intelligence since
it has always existed as a vital counterpoint to dumb nature,
a fact which renders nul and void questions such as what does
God expect of us or how does God move through us or why does
God permit suffering.
Notwithstanding
the limitations of human intelligence, the God-seeker’s
primary challenge is to isolate the known operations of the
universe with the view that they might infer the existence of
a cosmic (creative and controlling) intelligence. In particular,
the seeker, perhaps a metaphysician, an astronomer, will want
to bring into unconcealment the relationship between the order
and chaos that constitutes the very heartbeat of the universe.
And beyond that, he will want to know if there is a correspondence
between the notion of order and a creative intelligence.
Since
Spinoza (1632-77), who introduced the concept of pantheism (deity
as everything that is), the orbit of God has not been brought
any closer to human understanding. Or, to cite Nietzsche: “we
are all equidistant from God.” The only thing we can state
for certain, in accordance with the principle of dualism, is
that a creative intelligence exists in opposition to dumb nature
since there can’t be one without the other.
The
universe simultaneously features both chaos and order as co-dependents.
To better understand the ordering principle that governs the
universe, as well as the categorical insufficiency of human
intelligence to make it intelligible, we adduce a cell in a
human foot which belongs to a body that is maneuvered by an
intelligence (the mind) that it cannot begin to fathom. The
foot that is made to move is forever dumb to the cause of its
movements. We know as fact that a single human intelligence
can be the cause of moving thousands of non-sentient legs and
feet of other intelligences, such as when a Field General commands
his troops to take up strategic position on the battlefield,
or when a business hub sends out a workforce. The feet in these
massive movements cannot begin to comprehend the cause of their
mobility.
We
know that human intelligence can decide to observe and track
the behaviour of a colony of red ants or douse it with kerosene
and eliminate it altogether. The colony cannot begin to conceive
of the intelligence that allows it to either dwell in peace
or decides on its total destruction or why a small percentage
of it was saved while the rest were conflagrated. From the surviving
ants’ perspective, there is no why they were saved; some
were and some weren’t. The flow of intelligence between
the human and ant is strictly one way, just as a meaningful
encounter between the intelligence that inheres in the universe
and human intelligence may be strictly one way. For all we know,
we – the planet and the life it supports -- may be no
more than dumb cells in an intelligence that is comprised of
billons of galaxies.
Human
beings can manipulate entities and introduce products into the
world that never existed: a rock can yield a mineral that can
be bent into a tool, a tree can be sculpted into a chair, an
animal, such as a mule or camel, can be used as a conveyance,
the hides refashioned into protective clothing. None can comprehend
its radical transformation, that is the creative intelligence
directing the purposeful activity.
Chaos
and order are not separate, absolute entities. And while each
operates within in its own singularity or particular law, both
are in constant flux, the one, over time, transitioning into
the other and vice versa. Their relationship or interdependence
is not so much fixed as relative or quantum.
Let
us hypothesize a theater where a dancer enters the stage and
mimics having a seizure. If asked to describe the spectacle
in terms of its aesthetic value, the viewer (reviewer) would
characterize it as chaotic, disorderly and thoroughly displeasing
to the eye. However, if a dozen dancers were to perform those
exact same movements, the viewer would now describe the dance
as meticulously choreographed and aesthetically pleasing. So
depending on perspective, the exact same movements can represent
both order and chaos.
The
orderly expansion of the universe allows for entities being
ripped out of their orbits and sucked into a black hole that
explodes into a galaxy before once again expanding in an orderly
manner. Are these macro-events purely random or is there a creative
intelligence that produces, directs and presides over them?
Everything
that exists is subject to its own particular law that derives
from its particular environment, and this holds true for the
universe. A rock’s erosion is a function of the elementals
of wind, rain and sun. Even in a pure vacuum, which precludes
changes in volume, the rock is subject to gravitational forces
which determine its position at any given moment. But there
is nothing internal in the rock that bears in the unfolding
of its destiny. It has no DNA.
Organic
entities are subject to both their DNA and environmental pressures.
Deciduous trees lose their leaves as the hours of sunlight diminish
or the temperature falls below zero: coniferous trees do not
lose their leaves.
While
animals do not have the capacity to choose, they possess an
energy (an élan vital) that compels them to seek out
environments favourable to survival.
Since
human intelligence is synonymous with choice and the ability
to manipulate entities, is it unreasonable to hypothesize
that the creative intelligence that inheres in the universe
must be capable of manipulating the entities of the universe?
If it cannot manipulate its environment (the universe),
can it be called a creative intelligence?
Human
beings, in perpetuity, are writing their own scripts while being
subject to random events. At this stage of man’s evolution,
human intelligence cannot determine whether the major cosmic
events that have determined the nature of life on the planet
earth are random or the work of a cosmic intelligence. Just
as we don’t know if human life is an accident or the work
of this intelligence. Our planet is subject to its own internal
laws that govern its temperature and topography as well as external
events such as another star’s gravitational pull, but
its much used (and abused) surface tells the story of man’s
very deliberate and measured intervention.
The
sheep species (Ovis Aries) with which we are all familiar shares
a common evolution that does not account for the existence of
Dolly, the world’s first cloned sheep. Dolly owes its
existence to a creative intelligence that it cannot begin to
fathom while all the world’s other sheep are products
of biological determinism. Does the example of Dolly and the
species to which it belongs mirror the workings of the universe?
Did we evolve from the apes, or like Dolly, are we – sentient,
self-conscious -- the product of a creative intelligence that
presently lies beyond the purview of human inquiry?
As
it concerns free choice in the unfolding of destiny of the species,
the power and impotence of human intelligence are co-existent.
Man has manipulated his environment in order to create a vast
supply chain to feed upwards of eight billion people. But he
is powerless to affect the rotation of the earth. Does the creative
intelligence that inheres in the universe similarly manipulate
the entities of the cosmos? Is it random or deliberate when
a galaxy collapses and disappears into a black hole? Since we
exercise partial control over our lives and destiny of the planet,
is the universe, that includes a creative intelligence, subject
to the same selective manipulations? We know that planet earth
hosts many entities that are strictly passive, that is subject
to the physical laws of their environment. Other entities are
subject to the full force of human intelligence.
If
we are presently incapable of isolating and/or assigning attributes
to a cosmic intelligence, there is every reason to believe that
this insufficiency, in accordance with the law of dualism, will,
over time, produce a variant of itself. But for now, it seems
that it is not necessary that human intelligence understand
how and why and what moves this cosmic intelligence. Man fully
grasps as an epistemological certainty that he is the only life
form on the planet earth for whom dumb nature, in whose midst
he dwells, exists, and that dumbness precludes a Creative Intelligence.
He also knows experientially that knowledge, once identified
as such, is subject, over time, to increase, so there is every
reason to believe that human intelligence will one day be capable
of identifying, as fact, something of the nature or essence
of the universe and the Creative Intelligence it subsumes.
Among
the many implicit directives that issue from the above speculations,
one stands out: not in god, but in Mind we must trust.
