The Great Accident or....
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Selecting the Right Lens
Recovering the Deep Logos:
Accidental Goodness and Meaning Detection
Jay B. Gaskill
When we cut through the post-modern cultural fog, two competing world pictures emerge on front stage.
They differ greatly in the details, of course, but the two categories that contain and define these competing camps become obvious once you stop to examine the overall pattern.
The essential conflict is between a vision of reality governed by random accidents, one in which meaning and purpose are evanescent bubbles in space-time, only fleetingly real and arbitrarily meaningful. In this world model, all our notions of good, bad, holy, evil, beauty and ugliness are mere projections, even delusions.
There is another world view (and it includes both secular and spiritual versions). In its various forms, it presents us with a reality picture that is embedded with meaning and purpose, one in which accident and randomness operate within the larger framework of creation engendering order. This is a universe whose deep meaning, beauty, goodness and purpose remain open to discovery; they are unfolding – a process that is visible with the right lens.
Each view is the product of a different lens. With the right “viewing equipment”, we can see the universe wherein meaning is discovered rather than invented and where accident and randomness operate as the necessary preconditions of ongoing creation processes. It is an unfinished universe, wonderful and shot through with new and old meanings, awaiting our attention and discovery.
For many of us, the random and indeterminate elements in our physical universe are a good thing. They are strictly necessary if the world is to remain hospitable to creation. Random variation permits the emergence of novelty. The random events in the universe engender the ongoing processes of creation by breaking through that which would otherwise be a fixed and rigid realm (dead, really), a world of utter predictability.
Of course, a third word view exists, as well, but it is now “out of the running”. I make this claim in spite of its millions of adherents. It presents the unsettling picture of a universe riddled with an essential contradiction. Based on (what I believe to be a misreading of scripture and of the accumulating evidence) these adherents imagine that we live in a world that was created instantly in finished form, a fractured and “fallen” realm whose imperfections cast doubt on the goodness and even the reality of the agency of creation itself. I believe that this view has been pushed backstage by the current drama. The conflict between the two views I’ve just described is the new game in town.
As I will develop in this essay, whether you can accommodate and “live into” the second view of things – we’ll call it the meaningful and good universe - depends on what you are able to “see” operating in the world around you. This requires a special lens…
The former bleak world view is still alive and well in the world, still popular - even dominant - among the intelligentsia. It holds that we humans are here only because of a string of accidents. Beyond this facile observation, some intellectuals have almost gloatingly carried the implications further into very bleak territory indeed. For example, in a 1997 article in the New York Review of Books, Stephen Jay Gould, the late humanist atheist, captured the spirit and content of contemporary Darwinist accidentalism in this passage:
“To these beliefs Darwinian natural selection presents the most contrary position imaginable. … so why not take the ‘cold bath’ of recognizing nature as non-moral, 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?”
But surely the actual world, the real universe, cannot be fully or completely described in purely mechanical terms. Meaning is real to those of us who are endowed with the capacity for meaning detection. It is palpably evident that we are not “making this up” any more than Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz independently “made up” the calculus. To deny the “objective” reality of meaning requires a sort of self induced blindness. This is subjective only in the sense the detection of meaning requires a mind, but objective in the larger sense that that meaning is independent of any individual person, place or circumstance – it is found, not invented.
The world-without-meaning picture makes little “sense” – especially when seen from a moral and esthetic perspective – unless it is observed exclusively through an arch-materialist lens. This is the kind or arch-materialism that can only “see” a Chopin polonaise as air pressure variations that affect electrochemical changes in the brain. By arch-materialist lens, I refer to something that actually gets in the way of our cognitive window into the full nature of things. Arch-materialism is really a mental filter that denies and therefore filters out, a priori, any aspect of the non-material realm – including meaning and beauty. It denies the domain of reality that includes form, order, and – as I propose - the very architecture of space-time, matter and energy and the form/design of all complex living organisms in the biosphere, except as mental inventions. [And note that this view has strangely edited us out of the universe, as if we are some alien observers instead of integral and central foci of ongoing creation. In the natural realm, we are the awake, sentient, morally aware parts of the universe, not some bizarre epiphenomena.] And – and this is perhaps the most important “view-blockage” it denies the reality of the underlying moral order upon which we are able to erect civilization itself.
The materialist mindset (really the materialist ideology/ontology) represents a stubborn denial indeed because it persists even when these non material existents tend repeatedly to manifest in nature.
As I will outline in a moment, the overall arc of evolutionary development is almost unmistakable: From non-life, life emerges; from non-conscious life, conscious life emerges; from morally unconscious states, moral consciousness emerges; from brutal and disorganized exchange relationships among people, the morally ordered relationships of civilization emerge.
< omitted material >
A Better Lens
Music, the arts, spiritual awareness itself, all are emergent properties – or faculties – of living conscious being. The materialist filter is a major blinder; when it is in place, the human mind finds the (otherwise miraculous and joyful) arrival in the material/physical realm of event space of a vast variety of very complicated, fine tuned, clever and well functioning systems (of which we homo sapiens are the most amazing local examples) essentially inexplicable -- except as the outcome of “blind luck”.
Put on the lens that exposes a reality teeming with unexpressed, pregnant order and creative novelty opportunistically poised to emerge on the stage of mere” physicals reality. It becomes apparent that random events always precede the emergence of unexpected order in nature. Even natural “design” emerges via a series of incremental steps, each one of which is first presented for “selection” as a result of some random variation.
Our very intelligence – after all, we are the design that is also a designer – provides us with a much more nuanced and penetrating lens. Our lens is the information-interpretive, pattern -recognition, meaning-detection cognitive suite of human consciousness. It is the very same set of mental faculties that enables us to detect, discern, recognize and communicate with other intelligent, feeling beings. Without this set of abilities, Steven Jay Gould, of blessed memory, would not have learned physics in the first place and certainly wouldn’t have bothered to convey his bleak thoughts to the rest of us.
Where do all these “clever” designs reside before they are manifest in our space-time bounded material/physical reality? Where did the topological form of the bubble reside before it first manifested in space-time? Where were the harmonic relationships characteristic of a Helmholtz resonator -- it generates the musical sounds that a bottle of air can make when you blow on it – before the differentiation of the Big Bang plasma into gases capable of propagating musical sound waves?
<Omitted Material>
Here is what we are asked to assume, if we are to follow the strict “everything-is-physics” / “all is matter and energy” paradigm: that all of the vast arrays of emergent order in the universe over the last 15 billion years or so were necessarily “held-for-later release” in some purely physical medium. Then as our imaginary movie of the universe runs backward, we would be witnessing an information compression sequence leading to the singularity, now defined as the maximum possible information stored in the minimum possible singular space-time location. But we have every suggestion that the mother-singularity was non-physical. To my naïve sensibilities, this singularity looks very much like part of a domain where infinite information storage in an infinitesimal point, a perfect geometric point is actually possible – or something breathtakingly similar.
Surely, there is a more elegant explanation for this seeming paradox.
< Omitted Material>
Recall the obvious here: This universe came equipped with all the necessary resources for our eventual emergence, not the least of which were a lot of time and the right physical conditions -- a beautiful set of finely calibrated pre-anthropic parameters that virtually guaranteed our eventual appearance on the stage.
So here is the question of the day: If physics and chemistry – and their implications for biological function – were prefigured … Why stop there? Were the optimum properties of intelligent beings also prefigured? And if they were, then we must ask whether the architecture of civilizations of intelligent beings were also prefigured? And if that was prefigured, then why not also the optimum “normative architecture” on which the various civilizations are founded? What I am calling the normative architecture of civilization can also be described as the fundamental principles of inter-personal morality.
I am personally certain that these insights – assuming they take hold – will form a common ground that can be shared by enlightened theists and universal humanists. I am reasonably confident that, barring a new Dark Age, our species will be on the common ground by the latter part of this century.
<Omitted Material>
The progressive overall pattern of evolutionary processes on the cosmic scale reflects the extraordinary potency of certain clever processes whose designs, once permitted to emerge, acquire a stubborn, self-replicating foothold in Event Space. When this is followed by self-replicating designs endowed with a heightened sensitivity to further creative emergence, the generative processes greatly accelerate. I see all these potent designs as stored in Form Space. Their opportunistic emergence is effectively inevitable, given sufficient time. This is why, given the immense resources of space-time in the current universe (and the inexhaustible reservoir of clever designs), random processes will eventually generate life forms and intelligence in any universe with a similar latent developmental architecture.
<Omitted Material>
We live in a universe governed in part by a generative principle or tendency. The generative principle as creative tendency emerges and takes root in the venue of conscious intelligence as a primal motivation. As motivation, the creative tendency manifests in three forms:
(a) The Survival Imperative;
(b) The Reproduction Imperative, and (when our creative & imaginative capabilities reach critical mass);
(c) The Creation Imperative.
Below, I begin to sketch how these developments complete a circle, knitting together Descartes/Kant/Hume fact-value fissure, and opening the path to our species’ rediscovery of its universal ethical foundations. The topic of ethics, contents and origin, is far too large for anything but a sketch. My purpose here is to suggest that there is a convergence of social utility, evolutionary direction and ultimate “rightness” that takes on an entirely different – and much more encouraging – color when we take off the arch-materialist filter and see reality with the New Lens.
< Omitted Material >
When these remarkable developments are examined with the new lens, the origin of ethics can be seen as emergent design, much as the geometry of cells, the designs of life and conscious being can be understood. The further implication that normative truth, the “oughtness” of relationships between persons, was prefigured in the “universal hard drive” is far more reasonable than the notion that all this, from bacillus to Bach, from protozoa to Plato, was an absurd cosmic accident.
