Spooky Optimism - Renaming The Universe
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Spook & Friend
October 31, 2007
SPOOKY OPTIMISM-
RENAMING THE UNIVERSE
My new article, Renaming the Universe (linked below in PDF format), fits into a larger schema, one that knits together elements of an integrated natural world view with a ‘faith-friendly’ world model, in which deity hovers within and outside all that is, seen or unseen. My latest piece doesn’t require the reader to jump wholeheartedly into the realm of conventional religious belief, but it is an intelligent rebuttal to the “accidentalist” and “heartless void” school of “life, the universe and everything”. That view posits a soulless, mechanistic universe into which we somehow appeared by some absurdist cosmic accident. It was eloquently, if bleakly summarized the atheist-scientist, the late Steven Jay Gould, when he wrote this in a 1997 article in the New York Review of Books:
“The radicalism of natural selection lies in its power to dethrone some of the deepest and most traditional comforts of Western thought, particularly the notion that nature's benevolence, order, and good design, with humans at a sensible summit of power and excellence, proves the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent creator who loves us most of all (the old-style theological version), or at least that nature has meaningful directions, and that humans fit into a sensible and predictable pattern regulating the totality (the modern and more secular version).
“To these beliefs Darwinian natural selection presents the most contrary position imaginable. Only one causal force produces evolutionary change in Darwin’s world: the unconscious struggle among individual organisms to promote their own personal reproductive success—nothing else, and nothing higher (no force, for example, works explicitly for the good of species or the harmony of ecosystems)….
“Darwin’s system should be viewed as morally liberating, not cosmically depressing. The answers to moral questions cannot be found in nature’s factuality in any case, so why not take the ‘cold bath’ of recognizing nature as nonmoral, and not constructed to match our hopes? After all, life existed on earth for 3.5 billion years before we arrived; why should life's causal ways match our prescriptions for human meaning or decency?”
