Three Big Bangs: Matter-Energy, Life, Mind
Scientific natural history discovers "three big bangs," each marking a serendipitous singularity. - At the primordial big bang, matter?energy appears, initially in simpler forms, but with the remarkable capacity to generate heavier elements, without which life would not be possible.
- Life explodes on Earth with DNA discovering, storing, and transferring information. Across a singular natural history, life persists in the midst of its perpetual perishing, generating and regenerating billions of species. These increase in biodiversity, with trajectories escalating biocomplexity.
- The human genius, a massive singularity, crosses a trans?genetic threshold, generating language and making possible cumulative transmissible cultures, radically novel in kind and in scale. Life becomes ideational; ideas pass from mind to mind. Ideas generate ideals.
The nature of matter?energy, the nature of genes and their genesis, invites those at the center of complex caring intelligence to wonder where they are, who they are, and what they ought to do. Is there sacred Logos in, with, and under a cybernetic system with such breakthrough creativity?
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Holmes Rolston, III, is University Distinguished Professor and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Colorado State University. Recent books are: Genes, Genesis and God; Science and Religion: A Critical Survey (20th anniversary new edition in 2006); Philosophy Gone Wild, Environmental Ethics; and Conserving Natural Value. He has written chapters in eighty books and over one hundred professional articles. His books have been used as texts in three hundred colleges and universities at home and abroad. He was recently Visiting Distinguished Professor at Yale University. His articles have been anthologized over one hundred times. His work has been translated into fifteen foreign languages. Rolston was laureate for the 203 Templeton Prize in Religion, the award presented by Prince Philip in Buckingham Palace. He was awarded the Mendel Mendal by Villanova University in 2005. He gave the Gifford Lectures, University of Edinburgh, 1997-1998, has lectured on seven continents, and is featured in Joy A. Palmer, Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment.
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