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tendency to make a tidy little order of things, sometimes where there is no order to be had. We look for order, we long for order, we sometimes invent order, and we can't stand disorder and weird things with no explanation.
I've often wondered why the universe makes spheres out of matter, and organizes galaxies into swirls and globules. Do we really understand enough about gravity to explain this? Why did it/does it happen?
The ordering human mind at work.
I PERCEIVE order, design, some scientific law--based on knowledge and experience, to a certain extent, but also, based just on LONGING FOR ORDER. I want to know WHY, even if the answer is God swirling her finger into the pot of paint. (Why does she do that?) But is there really an orderly explanation for this? Such vast, vast, vast distances involved, and vast, vast, vast amounts of matter. Do we even have a clue how this all works? Do we have adequate brains and languages to comprehend and describe it, and make predictions from it?
Is the concept of God--which seems so universal in human culture--a bit of our DNA at work to CREATE the order that we need to FEEL, or be convinced of, in order for the species to survive? Have we selected for this "longing for order" DNA bit, because it helped us to plan for the future, survive catastrophe, and prosper and procreate, despite many menaces to our existence? And is it this bit of DNA that makes us posit a great ordering of everything, to which we give human attributes BECAUSE it really is us, or a bit of us, that we are imagining writ large? In worshiping God, are we actually worshiping this bit of our DNA?
Is God imagined (or even in fact produced, in some way--given existence) by a remnant of the dawn of human thought? Once we could perceive order, and started ordering things in our minds, did we then take a leap and extrapolate that evolutionary development into the God of the Trees, the God of the Waters, the Gods of the Stars, etc.? (???)
(It's not just these bones and shells here that I've organized into a necklace; EVERYTHING is organized. Or, because I see that everything is organized, I will now organize these bones and shells into a necklace that identifies me as a member of this tribe, and as so-and-so's daughter, not to be messed with--the order of community, the order of future thinking and planning, the order of relationships, expressed in orderly bones and shells.)
It is a fascinating question to me, WHY we believe in God. We DO, even if we don't. We believe in the God of science, or the God of the law, or the God of money--or even the God of atheism. BELIEVING IN SOMETHING seems to be a basic need. And some call it God--the pure essence of all the somethings we believe in. Or we believe, maybe, just in tomorrow; that the universe will keep spinning, and we will be in it. The God of tomorrowness.
Sometimes we are mistaken in the order that we imagine to be there (although chaos theory and ghost stories make you wonder if we are ever "mistaken" in seeing order). But order is a great need, whether we are mistaken on a given set of facts or not.
We may be very mistaken about human evolution--as we were about the earth being the "center" of the solar system. THAT possibility should most certainly be taught in science class: the great minds who have been dead WRONG (often because of limited facts--but also because of cultural or mental limitations, or a limitation on available tools).
There is OBVIOUSLY, to my mind, something--or a lot of things--we are NOT SEEING. Perhaps science, as it is presently understood, just doesn't have the breadth, or the tools, or adequate facts, to comprehend the totality of what we are--these animals who posit a God.
Isn't our positing of God--and our worshiping of various Gods--essential to the story of our evolution as physical beings? Has it not INFLUENCED our evolution as physical beings?
What has belief in God done to our selection for survival traits, for instance? Are religious restrictions on mating limiting the selection for survival (or assisting it in some way--for instance, by taboos on inter-bloodline marriage)? Why do we, alone among creatures, often select against the interests of survival? For instance, fertile people marrying infertile people? Why do scientists and doctors spend their lifetimes helping people with poor survival traits--such as serious genetic diseases--live and procreate? Does this not directly contradict the theory of evolution, that species pass along their best survival traits through selective breeding of the survivors?
I don't know if any research has been done on this matter, but it appears to me that humans are violating the laws of evolution all over the place, and are doing so largely based on religious or religious-related beliefs: such as the sacredness (religion) and equality (religious-related humanism) of every human being. We do not engage in random coupling based on obvious survival traits (the un-obvious might be the intelligence of a person with genetic disease), and we DO cherish individuals, and help them survive, prosper and procreate, no matter what they may contribute to, or how they may harm, the survival of the species.
Is this not God at work (whatever God is) ALTERING the PROCESS of evolution--toward some--dare I say?--higher goal than mere survival?
Mere survival, mere enjoyment of the flesh, and mere procreation have never been our gig. For some of us maybe, but not for most of us. We aspire; we long for; we plan; we manipulate whatever comes our way; we see order even when there is no order; we make order; we insist on order; we think and we scheme and we transform; and we create religious and humane principles, and punish the violators of them (or try to), and we see ourselves as SPLIT OFF from nature, sometimes above it, commanding it, other times in stark fear of it, sometimes trying to "get back to it," occasionally living in peaceful co-existence with it, but always, always alienated from it, to some degree.
We refuse to be ruled by nature--for better or for worse. That is a fact about us. And we thus, perhaps, refuse to be evolved the way nature has so far evolved living matter.
Maybe our LOOKING AT evolution--our perceiving it--is changing evolution (as the very process of observing subatomic particles can alter what they are). Maybe our evolution into sentient beings is changing the nature of the universe, even as we observe it and photograph it and posit theories about it.
And maybe that's what God is, the thing inside of us pulling the consciousness of the universe outside of matter, to exist apart from it and to transform it in some way, or make new universes, or just to be, to contemplate, to exist for its own sake.
Bones and shells can't tell us why the bones and shells are there, organized into a necklace. We have to imagine why. And is not that ability to imagine not both a product of evolution, and an influence upon evolution? Why should we limit the study of evolution to our digits and our backbones and our skull size--to the bones and shells themselves--and not include WHY--the why of the necklace, the whole, and what moves us, what motivates us, to live, as we do, alienated from nature, and often in outright defiance of its supposed laws?
These kinds of issues are lost in the very limited debate that pits science, on the one hand, against "intelligent design" (or a God-created universe) on the other. Although I am aware of the rotten political uses of this debate, on the rightwing side, perhaps they are leading us somewhere positive, in spite of themselves. We tend to dig in our heels, when such political assaults arise, and defend something that maybe shouldn't be defended: science as God, and strict scientific rationalism as dogma. Will we really ever understand the universe, or ourselves, from that limited point of view?
If only the rightwing were into the human mind playing with the possibilities, and not into enforcing THEIR dogma on us all!
And back and forth we go...
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