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Edited on Tue Jun-12-07 02:34 PM by Peace Patriot
design. Why would Nature create our brains in such a way that they look for design, and long for design, and, throughout human history, have imagined A DESIGNER (in various guises), if there were no "intelligent design" in Nature's productions?
It reminds me of the several science fiction stories--on TV and in print--where a human-created, artificial being, such as Data in Star Trek (often mistaken for a robot, by people who don't know him), or the hologram Doctor in Star Trek Voyager (who develops consciousness), and how these clearly sentient beings are subjected to legal trials, which attempt to determine their rights. Their rights as real people are seriously questioned. The judge in the Data case (an episode called "The Measure of a Man") at one point calls Data nothing more than a "toaster." These always interesting stories, which try to define just what a "human being" is, however, always fail to heed the most obvious fact: If a "thing" claims to have intelligence, or claims to have a soul, then it does. End of argument.
If your lawn mower suddenly started talking to you, and claiming to be sentient, and demanded that its rights now be respected, you would be obliged--if you can be sure that you are not crazy (or that someone is not tricking you)--to RESPECT THOSE RIGHTS, and to regard that "thing" as a being equal in value to yourself.
Similarly, when we USE OUR INTELLIGENCE, to observe and think about Nature (which CREATED our intelligence), we miss the OBVIOUS--that our pattern recognition, our ability to analyze, our ability to objectify, our ability to create mathematical models, our ability to think of the far future, our ability to create instruments that reach out to the farthest corners of the cosmos, our complicated languages, our packed libraries of information, and both our Platonic (abstract) and Aristotelian (evidence-based) inclinations, and all the works of the human mind, IMPLY a Design in Nature, if not a Designer.
We are ever looking for First Causes: WHAT moves or animates this thing we are observing? We're now down to the levels of subatomic particles and DNA, and principles of electro-magnetism. It is our abiding desire. WHAT moves things?
It is therefore--for lack of a better word--NATURE's desire as well. And that implies that "Nature" has a desire TO KNOW. And if Nature has a desire to know--as evidenced by OUR desire to know--then WHAT is it KNOWING? It is knowing ITSELF. Is that not God?
It could be that development of human intelligence is an ARTIFACT of other evolutionary survival mechanisms, and is not telling us the truth about the Universe: that it is organized, in a physical sense, and that it is aiming at intelligence--and maybe at the highest form of intelligence (the ability to appreciate the beauty of Nature, and just to BE). There are many seering accounts of human beings who "lose faith" and feel themselves to be stranded and helpless in the face of the utter indifference of the Great Universe. (Try Camus' "The Stranger.") My suspicion is that those accounts are based on alienation from community, not from God or the Universe--or are the result trauma (seeing too much death) whereby the alienated one projects the evil that human beings have committed onto all of Creation, and cannot get around his or her injured myopia (the syndrome of the suicide). Suddenly all things seems revoltingly alien. (Sartre's "Nausea.") (Both works are products of the catastrophic violence of world war, and also of leftist disillusionment with the violence of Stalinism, leaving no viable alternative to western materialistic greed.)
But whether belief in God, or in gods, is the grandest of all human delusions, or some kind of echo of the future in which we BECOME God, or the Gods (due to our fast-growing ability to behave like Gods, to gain the powers of Gods)--that is, Nature creating God, through us--or whether complete "realism" and objectivism is the truth (you get what you see--this life, this material reality--nothing more), or whether the truth lay somewhere in between and we do not yet understand it (for instance, that humans together, in that resonance we feel in large, like-minded crowds of people--at a musical concert, or a football game, or at a political protest--do, in fact, have a communal power that is greater than its parts, and that has been called spiritual or telepathic, but is in fact manifestation of a power that some people call "God" and that can "move mountains," so to speak)--however we consider these matters, we cannot deny our own desire for order, for pattern and for causes. It is characteristic of us. And that is what leads people to posit a God, or Gods.
The horror of this entirely political fight over the science of evolution is that it polarizes opinion into two stupid and stubborn camps, who despise each other, and cannot see the limits--and, indeed, the idiocy--of their own dispute. This dispute was almost entirely instigated by rightwing political forces and the idiocy of the dispute is almost entirely their fault. But they have succeeded, unfortunately, is driving the other side toward a rigid position. Why on earth NOT have a discussion in science class of the issue of DESIGN in Nature? Why are there intricately designed bird's wings and spider's webs, in all the great chaos of the whirling galaxies and exploding suns? Why do we humans SEE patterns and design, and therefore think of A DESIGNER? IS this a religious or a scientific question? Can the two be separated? Are we IMPOSING design where there is none--and thus misinterpreting data--or is design an inherent property of Nature? And, if it is inherent, WHY is that so?
There are so many important questions that cross the line between these two subjects: religion and science. Why stifle thought and creativity--and possibly earth-shaking discoveries--by rigidly separating the two?
The scientists and the rationalists and their many advocates would reply: To protect the First Amendment (that great product of the 18th Century Enlightenment, and prohibiter of religious wars in America)! It's a nearly unassailable argument. Most of us feel it strongly--fear of inquisitions, fear of witchburnings, fear of religious dictatorship. The scientists would specifically reply: To protect the integrity of science--which has been so smashed by religious fanatics in the past. We cannot deny that history. It is compelling. Protect the integrity of objective inquiry. Protect the freedom of the human mind.
BUT, in making these arguments, the great majority miss the obvious (and are pushed into this corner by the rightwing minority): That objective, scientific inquiry may itself be an aberration, that excludes too wide a swath of the human brain, which hungers for more complete meaning, and operates very differently from the rules of rationalism: intuitively making patterns, and intuitively leaping over logic, at hunches and guestimates, and is moved by compassion, by poetry, by meditative insights, by telepathy (connectedness with others), and is neither mechanistic nor utilitarian.
Consider the young student who balks at dissecting a live frog in biology class. Who is the better scientist--the young student who SENSES the wrongness of torturing and killing another living thing, or the cold-hearted teacher who insists upon it, and perhaps says, "The frog doesn't feel anything" (a lie) in order to extract obedience? Or, who promotes the notion that, whether or not the frog feels anything, we must NOT identify with it; we must be OBJECTIVE? (Another lie--or rather, an unscientific bit of dogma.)
The student feels compassion. Science says: Don't feel compassion. Or, ignore your compassion--it is NOT SCIENTIFIC.
In the bigger picture of our science-based society and economy, identification with other living things--that intuitive sense of compassion, and also of beauty--may well be MORE scientific than science generally maintains. It can tell you, for instance, that spraying an entire field of birds, insects, worms and living plants, with pesticides, in order to get rid of one pest, is WRONG. It's the wrong approach. You might FEEL it--say, in seeing a bird on the ground, struggling from poisoned eyes and poison-drenched feathers--and that may lead you to seeing this field in a wholistic way, in which BETTER science, more detailed knowledge, cleverer insights, and more humane methods of pest control can be applied, to the benefit of all agriculture and the survival of our planet and its biosphere.
The FEELING of horror at torturing a frog for science--excluded from, and disallowed by, the ABERRANT science of the corporations (the dominant model, currently)--IS a scientific insight. The FEELING that there is a Great Designer of all that we observe in Nature may also be a scientific insight--or, at the least, a very interesting line of inquiry that could lead to great discoveries about the human mind, as observer, and about our relationship with Nature including our scientific investigations.
The Creationism museum is, from all reports, an abomination. But do we want to continue with its antithesis--a science that creates nuclear weapons and cluster bombs and vast seas of poisons and powermongering, anti-democratic corporations, and that EXCLUDES every "spiritual" caution and insight as UN-scientific?
These two sides of our brains need to come together, it seems to me--and may desperately need to come together to save our planet, and all life on earth, and to achieve our full potential as human beings.
Don't let the rightwing minority dictate the terms of debate! Absorb their insight--the insight of the sincere (not the politicians and powermongers)--that many human beings are suffering alienation in the Corporate State, and are manifesting it in sometimes weird and objectional ways--and they need and desire a bigger dimension in human life. And are the rest of us satisfied with the life that science has brought us? Is that science adequate? Was modern science's understandable break from religious domination--and its particular specific break from the "mother" sciences (alchemy, astrology, herbology, midwifery) perhaps an over-reaction? It was to understand the connection between people and "the stars" that astronomy began, as astrology. That RELIGIOUS inquiry gave birth to astronomy (scientific observation). But what of that initial desire--to be connected? Is it not still with us, still part of us, and still relevant to why we care about science?
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