The World Tricked Us

Mother Nature played a trick on us, and it has turned out to be a very expensive one. We have reason to be irritated. Nature placed systemic blind alleys in our quest for the truth. Our species is homo sapiens, man the knowing. But the exercise of that ability to understand has been anything but direct and unerring. We can, however, even the score with Mother Nature by understanding the mechanics of the deception and using that understanding as a guide to help us work through the toils and intellectual snares of the new millennium we have just entered. The path to truth is thorny, but not impossible.

It took us until into the 20th Century to develop much of an understanding of the duration and process of our racial development. Even now, we do not see clearly all the details of that very complicated history, but we have made inroads into what was previously dark territory. We know now that we did not appear suddenly in the stream of life's adventure on Planet Earth. With increasing certainty, we know that the hominid line evolved from about 3,000,000 years BCE, and that homo sapiens, our direct line of descent, has been around since about 200,000 BCE. We do not seem to have changed much physically since our species first appeared. Most of the advance that we have made has come from cultural rather than biological progress, and that is intrinsically intermingled with the nasty trick nature played upon us. The invention of alphabetic writing was a major quantum leap forward in the history of the race. Human thought is an immensely facile and variable phenomenon, as is the language we use to communicate it. Languages consist of 4 or 5 dozen phonemes, as a generalization. Phonemes can be expressed in 1 or two letters, little squiggles that are easily learned even by the very young. This means that 2 dozen brief symbols are sufficient to record essentially the entire range of human thought, which is an incredibly efficient achievement!

Easily written language was developed as a practical vehicle between 1500 and 1000 BCE throughout the Mediterranean, and what a marvelous invention that was! Within a handful of generations, a broad literature developed covering a vast range of subjects: the Iliad and Odyssey, Hesiod's Works and Days and the Theogony, the great philosophical works of the Greeks, and the Jewish Bible, to mention important milestones.

The invention of writing fixed human memory for life events and natural happenings. Writing facilitated a sense of stability and history, and made possible the development and maintenance of intellectual and spiritual cultures. Prior to writing, tribal memory proved to be a feeble vehicle for the preservation of events remembered. After a few generations, in an oral tradition, only blurred recollection endures. Lore maintains rather than history. And this is where nature's nasty little deception comes in.

It took man quite a long time to get around to inventing writing, although once it was there, things exploded like fireworks. But, in preliterate ages, active memory of racial events was limited. Our ancestors had lost all but the foggiest memories of their own racial development. Man forgot about the lengthy centuries and millennia it took him to evolve both biologically and culturally. As corollary, he thought, generally, that he had come into existence suddenly and magically. We forgot where we came from. And that was nature's sneaky little trick!

A literary and philosophical tradition flourished once writing had been invented. But, here's the rub: as a result of Nature's trick, solutions given by early thinkers to the mysteries of existence tended to skew away from empirical observations, and lean towards anthropomorphic, mythological and moral explanations for the phenomena of nature. Literary, religious and philosophical endeavors tended, overall, to be humanistic and anthropocentric, rather than based on hard observational data.

Physical theories, to the extent they were propounded, tended to stay close to direct sensory experiences. The Greeks speculated on how many elements there were. Earth, air, fire and water won out. Thinking about the sun, the moon and the stars tended to be of two types: either astrological, attempting to penetrate to the effects that sky events have on human lives, or based on common sense, holding that things are as they appear to us to be. This general drift in thinking played a controlling role in the development of our understanding of things on our home planet.

It appears as though the heavenly bodies rise in the East, traverse the sky, and set, hours later, in the West. It was generally believed that not only did those entities appear that way, that's literally the way they functioned, too. Phenomena like the phases of the Moon tended to remain shrouded in mystery.

The theocentricity of the Jews, which was later to take over Western mainstream culture, seems to have flowed from two fountainheads: first, that the world called for an external, anthropomorphic and omnipotent creator; and second, that that creator, Yahweh, had a special relationship with the Jewish people. The stories of the Jews about the origins of the human race had little to do with biology or physical generation, but a great deal to do with the moral aspects of creation. Man was created in Eden, and his mate Eve soon thereafter. Their charge was to remain faithful to the injunctions of God the Creator, with whom Adam walked in the evening after the heat of the afternoon sun. The history of the race had nothing to do with biological competition, and everything to do with eating the apple and being driven from the Garden by God's Angel, bearing the sword of flame. Having forgotten the details of our actual history, we substituted a mythological account. Nature's mendacity continued to influence mainstream thinking, and it was only much later that we learned to think outside of the box.

A Tale of Two Cosmoi

Man has been able to manipulate lots of things about his environment without understanding it entirely. A child can do many things with what it finds around it, even though its knowledge of them is only quite superficial. That points to a characteristic of human action. Knowledge is a requisite for doing much with anything, but acting with only partial understanding is a character of the human condition. Man came into his world with only a limited comprehension of that world, and our knowledge is still incomplete. We recognize that the ultimate nature of things is not evident in experience. We are not even certain how far down the avenue of knowledge we have come. We are not sure whether anything like an ultimate understanding of things is possible, or what it would be like. We do not know what we would do with ultimate knowledge if we had it. Those are very puzzling questions, but they are questions we would wish to ask.

We have seen that it was an intrinsic aspect of man's early development that he did not carry with him an active memory of the details of his own racial experience. Writing had to be invented before humans could develop a profound and lasting culture. There are, in one sense, as many views of the world as there are humans. Each of us sees things in our own way. But, with time and experience, areas of consensus tend to emerge.

For the purposes of discussion, let us simplify things ... a great deal. Let us say that in Western cosmic thinking there have, historically, been two important views of our world, and that these views have been widely shared by people alive through different historical periods. This may be dissecting history with a meat axe rather than a forceps, but it will help us make some important points.

The first view was forged through the centuries of classical Roman and Greek thought, and reached high water during the Middle Ages. The second is the view of the universe that we have developed since that time; since, say the time of Galileo.

Cosmos I was based on two major foundation stones, which seemed of primary importance at the time. The first was that the universe depended on a supreme creative force, which was referred to as God. The second was that man had had throughout history a special moral relationship with that God.

Cosmos II came into existence as humans came to realize the factual limitations of Cosmos I. Cosmos II contains many drastic revisions of views held by Cosmos I. How much of Cosmos I was true in spite of empirical errors is a continuing riddle. We have come a long way with Cosmos II, but are not done with it yet. And, how to relate the enduring truths of Cosmos I to the truths of Cosmos II is knotty indeed. If it becomes possible to achieve such a rapprochement, a metaproject then looms: what would we do with it then, and how would that platform become the basis for a next phase in the history of emerging consciousness on the planet?

Cosmos I

Plato (427-347 BCE) thought that the earth was in the center of the universe, and that the Sun, Moon and stars revolved around it carried by crystal spheres. This idea was further developed by Eudoxus, a member of Plato's academy. These theories became more or less accepted belief and were carried forward into Europe's Middle Ages. They became deeply intertwined with the philosophy and theology of the western Church, and ultimately were accepted as orthodox teaching, so that to withhold belief came to be viewed as heretical. Movements in the heavens were thought to be in perfect circles, and, indeed, imperfection was held to exist only here below on our Earth, where creation was thought to have been sullied by Adam's fall from grace as recounted in Genesis.

Saint Augustine, a convert to Christianity circa 375 CE, became a bishop and a prolific scholar. He did perhaps more than anyone else to solidify Christianity's view of history and the hierarchy of significance in this world in which we find ourselves. Augustine, as was true of most post-classical Europeans, accepted the Jewish Bible as God's revealed truth. As such, the Bible was an adequate textbook for understanding both the physical universe and also the saga of the human adventure. The details of physical theory tended to be much less important than the relationship of man to God, and the meaning of history.

About 1620, James Usher, an Irish prelate, calculated that the world had been created in 4004 B.C. It's remarkable that prior to that no one, through all the centuries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, had even got around to doing that much. How old the universe was didn't make much intellectual difference. What was important was the moral battle that was going on, and how the word of God was being understood, promulgated and lived.

In Western culture, the first broadly accepted cosmology stated that the universe was spherical, with the earth at its center. God created man in the Garden of Eden, destined to spend a while on earth and then join God in an eternal Kingdom. Man ruined the plan by Original Sin. In the fullness of time, God became man in Jesus, who redeemed the human race in his sacrifice of obedience to the Father's will. How to assure salvation, whether one was or might be predestined, and how the moral mechanics of the plan worked out were what was really important. Not a big thing just how the crystal spheres got their job done. While this view of the universe never achieved universal acceptance, it nonetheless affected thought and culture profoundly. This is the point I wish to make: the development of this world view had been strongly encouraged by Mother Nature's nasty little trick upon the race.

When Galileo around 1600 began to teach and publish about a heliocentric universe, he rocked the boat. Anecdotally, at least, as he was receiving the censure of the Church, he is supposed to have muttered under his breath, Eppur si muove (Nonetheless, it moves).

Metamorphosis

The beliefs of Western man, not to say the whole race, had never been really homogeneous. Saint Paul's epistles are full of entreaties to regional churches not to quarrel over internal divisions. Splinter groups within the body politic had occurred from the beginning. The first few centuries of Christian history were filled with bickering and dissension, with a degree of homogeneity resulting from the Councils. In the midst of the Crusades the Knights Templar teetered on the edge of heresy. The Albigensians in southern France held very contrarian opinions, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, bringing down upon themselves the wrath of orthodoxy. Intellectual uniformity was always, as they say, honored "more in the breach than in the observance."

The trouble was with those darned spheres. They didn't fit the observations. Scholarship gave men the confidence to question principles and foundations. That questioning led to discoveries which were wonderful at the time, but which would turn the picture of Cosmos I upside down. Copernicus (1530) placed the Sun at the center of the universe. Galileo (1610) started dissecting the known universe with his primitive telescopes. Kepler (1618) decided that the orbits of bodies needed to be elliptical to fit the observations. Newton in his Principia Mathematica (1687) developed the laws of gravity, and stated for all time a mathematical basis for basic astronomy. Cosmos I was doomed, but has yielded only while kicking and screaming. It's death rattle, indeed, continues to reverberate. We have not figured out how to restate comprehensively the valid insights of religion in an idiom that is consistent with empirical discovery. That is a project still tinkering on our workbench.

Over the centuries, Christendom had built a formidable bureaucracy. It is impossible to have human social groups without organization. That is the nature of things. The overt motivation for the development of the Church was the preservation and dissemination of the teachings of Jesus Christ, a Jewish rabbi who lived when the Roman Empire was first getting its feet on the ground. The Church became a great deal more than that would seem to have demanded. Sometimes a champion of the people against the excesses of a military governing upper class, sometimes an oppressor in its own right, the largest single landowner in medieval Europe, the enduring patron of education and art, constantly struggling within its own ranks, the Church is a unique phenomenon, yet one sharing in all the glories and foibles of mankind.

There had always been dissention inside Christianity. From the 16th Century on, the Church was split into major divisions. The Protestant Reformation shook European civilization to its foundations, and much blood was spilt. Also, however, much innovation and discovery was powered by the energies set loose. In the light of later developments, the religious quarrels of those years seem strange. And indeed, much more important was the development of new cosmic perspectives.

Columbus went adventuring across the sea in 1492. In the intervening 500 years, we have had an avalanche of scientific energy and discovery. There are relatively few stones in the garden of our discontent which we have not moved to see what lies beneath. Leeuwenhoeck in biology. Harvey and circulation. Vesalius and anatomy. Laovoissier in Chemistry. Mendel and inheritance. Darwin and evolution. Jenner and vaccination. Neils Bohr and the planetary atom. Einstein and relativity. Watson and Crick and the DNA helix. Hubble and the expanding universe. Hawking and the mathematics of time and deep space. Rees and just 6 numbers.

Cosmos II

There are myriad results which spring from the efficacy of science in understanding and coming to know the world. Our planet was dethroned from cosmic centrality and importance and took its place as an infinitesimal speck in a cosmic vastness. Instead of being created "as is" on center stage, the earth finds itself as a satellite of a middling star at an undistinguished position in an average galaxy adrift as literally one of billions of galaxies in a universe of unimaginable dimension.

Instead of being created according to biblical days, the earth turns out to be about 5,000,000,000 years old in a universe that seems to have started about 15,000,000,000 years ago. The universe we know seems to have started from a seemingly impossible state where everything was in an infinitely dense singular condition, which then exploded creating our vast expanding cosmic stage. Our earth is in a heliocentric system in our very limited stellar neighborhood. But it is anything but heliocentric in a larger sense. It is cosmically interesting that a mere 500 years ago Galileo and others were hounded to exasperation for budging the earth off center stage. On the one hand, the inertia which resists moving ahead can be monumental; on the other, progress overall has been amazingly rapid.

Man felt different enough from his surroundings that he saw himself as discontinuous with them. The fact that man did not carry with him an active memory of his development throughout the ages of prehistory contributed to his thinking that he was introduced suddenly into the world by some creative or magic miracle. During the centuries of Christian tradition, the account in the Hebrew bible was accepted as a literal account of how man came to be. Only recently, in cultural terms, did we realize that we evolved from the backdrop of matter in the universe.

In the 19th Century, Charles Darwin introduced the idea of natural selection to provide a mechanism for evolutionary change. This was a powerful idea, but it does not explain the entire evolutionary phenomenon.

With the discovery of the double helix of DNA in the middle of the 20th Century by Watson and Crick, the ground was established for a much clearer picture of evolutionary process. The essence of this is that as more complicated life forms have developed, adaptation encourages phenotypic changes. As an example, nervous tissue proliferates with activity, at least under certain conditions. That modification can be carried back to the reproductive cells of the organization and incorporated genotypically, through processes we are only currently coming to understand more clearly.

We do not have all the details of the system worked out, but the overarching insight is that through graded feedback mechanisms, matter has been able to evolve organisms of immense complexity and marvelous function. We are there.

There has been a general rejection of the idea that there is any conscious plan which has directed the development and operation of things in the visible universe. This was due the fact that a too anthropomorphic view of God had guided thinking through the Christian centuries, and it came to be seen that that obstructed the development of an understanding of the natural causes and antecedents of things.

However, as our understanding of the physical universe has become more and more complete, particulary through the latter stretches of the twentieth century, we have come to accept that far from being haphazard, the universe is indeed very finely tuned, and could not work the way it does were many basic physical values other than precisely the way they are. We are not content with the idea of a gray haired God sitting in the sky planning the way the world goes, but it continues to be profoundly true that the source of plan and order in the universe remains a persistent mystery.

Dialogue Millennium III

So, to thumbnail the history of culture to current time. Man evolved for millennia without recording an active memory of his evolution. Solid cultural memory requires writing, which in the Mediterranean basin was developed only about 1500 -1000 BCE. Once the system was developed, man at blistering speed developed a wide range of historical, artistic, practical, and philosophical works. Having lost memory of his long centuries of development, man assumed he had appeared or was created into his environment by magic or omnipotence in relatively recent time. Seeing causality and some sort of order in the world around us, we decided that everything must have been made by a powerful agent, identified as gods, God or Demiurge. We further decided, whether by extrapolation of our personality or the personification of the powers of nature, that we were in some sort of relationship with the creative force.

We went through centuries when we threw far too much weight into the Christian mythology of Sin and Salvation. Over the last five hundred years we have made inroads into an empirically based understanding of the physical universe.

As we enter the third millennium, we are in a position to recognize both the importance of empirical discovery and also, as a correlative phenomenon, the degree of plan and design that the universe manifests. We will never, nor should we, cram our horizons into biblical frameworks, but without abandoning intellectual bastions dearly won, we are also at a plateau where we can listen to the messages of both science and religion with respect for both, and in an effort to hear what both are saying. We cannot foresee the future. We have never waited around to clean up logical consequences before moving ahead. And, we have always made guesses about where we are headed, although we have, more often than not, been very poor prognosticators of the way history was going to develop. In current time, we have entered a new period of dialogue. Perhaps both science and religion have reached a stage of maturity where they can share strengths and supplant weaknesses. Gould's idea of Dual Magisteria (that the two fields simply are irreconcilable ways of knowing, each with its own range of authority) is clearly wrong and unacceptable.

Religious belief was an attempt to deal with the metaphysical riddle of why anything exists. Though science has enlightened many dark corners, the issue of existence itself remains as much a mystery as ever. Although we have learned much concerning the nature of the physical and biological universes, the basic mysteries of the universe haven't evaporated.

Conceptual knowledge is totally common to us. It is the way we function, basically, and we wouldn't even be here to begin our conversation did we not know things conceptually. Still, it is an odd phenomenon. Simplifying for the sake of focusing, we have this stuff called matter, which over time develops into self-reduplicating units. Everything interacts with everything else one way or another. But living things develop the quality of consciousness, which is a certain sort of luminous self-possession in which, while remaining separate from other things, the animal develops internally a sort of representation of other things which it then uses as a basis for action. In higher animals, especially man, the power of conceptualization proliferates, which makes possible the development of an intellectual life, almost a second plateau of being.

Some aspects of the reality matrix are more fundamental and pervasive than others. All material things are transient, including man himself. All cultures have tried to establish contact with whatever qualities of human life are intrinsically valuable, and with principles which endure beyond the brevity of the day's sunlight. The ability to contemplate and make contact with enduring inherent reality is what we refer to as spirituality.

Religion historically made the attempt to define ultimate reality and man's possible relationship to it prematurely. This occasioned all manner of difficulties and problems. But we should not miss that it also served as a cultural scaffolding on which to build a civilization, a civilization which spawned the empiricism we now so highly enjoy. It made the mistake of trying to answer too many questions too soon, without realizing what it was leaving out. It formulated a system in the context of Cosmos I.

The upside of Cosmos I was that it gave the human race a meaning and a destiny defined by parameters larger than individual satisfaction or aggrandizement. It went on to define man's relationship to God, and the processes by which man should pursue and solidify that relationship. In so doing, it laid out physical and moral theories about the material world, which we have identified as Cosmos I. The downside to Cosmos I was that it proved to be constructed on a very faulty empirical foundation, and that, as a result, its very theories were at best shaky.

The starting point of our consideration was that man, because of a peculiar quirk in his cultural development, was predisposed, in a process sort of way, to fall into a mess of error even while speculating on underlying truths about the universe.

The residual question, the answer to which is not at all clear, is what sort of deeper knowledge about the universe did the centuries of religion encapsulate, even though it was clothed in factual error? Or, what sort of lasting value does religion embody, given the shakiness of its empirical foundations?

Scientists are interested in religion because religion gets at some ultimacies which scientific method cannot touch. Religion is interested in science because of the historical weakness of its empirical foundations, and of the remarkable success of scientific method in disclosing the nature of the measurable dimensions of reality.

As we move into the new millennium and down its highways, we are moving towards new plateaus of spiritual awareness. And, the dialogue between science and religion is one of the major vehicles of that development.

It is unlikely that we will ever cram our knowledge back into a rigid orthodoxy, nor should we. It seems likely that we will agree that there is a high degree of order and plan in the universe. Many scientists point out that there are basic mathematical values which control all of physics, astronomy and the way everything works together. Or, perhaps better, the universe is marvelously crafted to be able to work the way it does. And one of the ways we can come to an understanding of that is through the basic physics of light, gravity, atomic mechanics and the electromagnetic spectrum. The farther we go down this road, the more elegant, and at the same time the more simple, our understanding becomes.

Heraclitus in 500 BC was right when he contemplated the logos, or plan, in reality. We have been deepening that since. Religious man has tended to see the source of logos as God. We cannot say that we are done with that idea.

At this time, we do not know the future of consciousness in the universe, and problems like personal immortality are as prickly as they ever were. We do know that the human spirit is capable of great growth, and that we are stewards of a great creation. From our history we can learn how tricky it is to make progress in understanding our universe. We have seen that early in our cultural history we got duped into thinking we had been magically inserted into our universe, because of the fact that we did not carry forward with us an active memory of our development.

We have the power to consign consciousness on planet earth to oblivion, should we so choose. But, if it means enough to us to restrain our own destructiveness, we can also position ourselves for a yet undiscovered role in an ensouled universe.

And that may be a special relationship with God.