Origin and Beauty
I spent some time reflecting on the ideas of creationism and evolution this past week, and I had a thought which was more rooted in aesthetics that is worth drawing out here.
The debate between these two camps tends to center around ad hominem attacks based on intelligence. You know how this goes. If the creationists had any brains, they'd believe in evolution, so say the evolutionists, and vice versa. It's worth re-emphasizing that I don't think either side of this debate is lacking in intelligence, or the ability to reach conclusion based on what seems, at least on the surface, to be sound reasoning.
While the evidence for evolution pretty much overwhelms any "intelligent design" ideas, I'm trying to intellectualize less these days. I like to live up inside my head, weaving together complicated ideas in the hopes that I assemble something altogether new, and then I share these with people in the hopes that they'll appreciate the threads I've stitched together. This is just a defense mechanism I use to keep people at an arm's length, to hide the vulnerable me that's below the surface. Since this hasn't really gotten me where I need to go, I'm earnestly attempting a change of tack.
Here is what the creation story would have you believe: there is an all-powerful, all-knowing creator God who is capable of achieving anything without limit. If you believe in the story of the fall of Adam and Eve, then you have to believe that human beings are fundamentally flawed. We are imperfect creatures. Meaning that you believe a God who is capable of perfection, and of creating an earthly organism who would be perfect, has created us to be the most successful species on the planet.
I find this idea depressing, when I hold it in my head at length. This means that this God could actually do much, much better than us. You could imagine several different kinds of organisms who are much closer to perfect than human beings are being created by this god. In terms of the potential organisms that could be created, even if they don't actually exist, we are pretty far down on the totem pole. It places humankind in a very lowly place. And this is only relative to what God might create in our world. It says nothing of the low place we occupy relative to perfection of beings the occupy a divine realm to which we are supposed to go after death.
Contrast this with the core ideas from evolution. In this story, human beings exist because of a long string of improbabilities that have serendipitously chained themselves together to give rise to the human species. Scientists are careful to assert that we are not the pinnacle of evolution, we are merely a very successful species that have managed to invert the pattern that applies to most other animals. That is, we do evolve in our biology to be adapted to the environments in which we exist, but we have learned how to manipulate and warp our environments so that they are better adapted to us. And we use technology to further adapt ourselves, beyond just our biology, to our environments.
This is phenomenal. As a species, we have come to possess the cognitive faculties to understand the natural world well enough that we can dream of ideas and futures that are altogether unnatural and novel, and are empowered to bring them to fruition. This is to say nothing of the plethora of biochemical reactions happening constantly at the molecular level inside of us that keep these faculties alive in a homeostatic system. And it is not just that we use technology to facilitate our own survival. It has given us the likes of Shakespeare, Bach, and all manner of artistic expression that makes existence so much more rich and fulfilling than just a struggle to survive and reproduce.
And why has this happened? You could believe it's because a higher divine being of ultimate perfection has instilled within us a spark of the divine. I still find this troubling, because it implies a withholding parent. In this scenario, we could be so much more, to have so much more potential, but cannot because of the limits imposed on us by our creator.
I find it an infinitely more beautiful idea that we are what we became by chance, because of the geological course of our world since it began, and how it affected the development of species over hundreds of millions of years. It's not that a drop of water fell from heaven to seed us, but that nature self-organized her chaos in one pocket of a vast universe, in the face of the laws of entropy, and has given us not just the opportunity to exist, but also the faculties to find meaning and beauty in the world we occupy.
You could despair of not being sure to whom or to what you should direct your thanks concerning all of this, but I've stopped wondering if that's even an important question. For me, in my chest, I appreciate the beauty of all of this, and the gratitude is there, all the same.
The debate between these two camps tends to center around ad hominem attacks based on intelligence. You know how this goes. If the creationists had any brains, they'd believe in evolution, so say the evolutionists, and vice versa. It's worth re-emphasizing that I don't think either side of this debate is lacking in intelligence, or the ability to reach conclusion based on what seems, at least on the surface, to be sound reasoning.
While the evidence for evolution pretty much overwhelms any "intelligent design" ideas, I'm trying to intellectualize less these days. I like to live up inside my head, weaving together complicated ideas in the hopes that I assemble something altogether new, and then I share these with people in the hopes that they'll appreciate the threads I've stitched together. This is just a defense mechanism I use to keep people at an arm's length, to hide the vulnerable me that's below the surface. Since this hasn't really gotten me where I need to go, I'm earnestly attempting a change of tack.
Here is what the creation story would have you believe: there is an all-powerful, all-knowing creator God who is capable of achieving anything without limit. If you believe in the story of the fall of Adam and Eve, then you have to believe that human beings are fundamentally flawed. We are imperfect creatures. Meaning that you believe a God who is capable of perfection, and of creating an earthly organism who would be perfect, has created us to be the most successful species on the planet.
I find this idea depressing, when I hold it in my head at length. This means that this God could actually do much, much better than us. You could imagine several different kinds of organisms who are much closer to perfect than human beings are being created by this god. In terms of the potential organisms that could be created, even if they don't actually exist, we are pretty far down on the totem pole. It places humankind in a very lowly place. And this is only relative to what God might create in our world. It says nothing of the low place we occupy relative to perfection of beings the occupy a divine realm to which we are supposed to go after death.
Contrast this with the core ideas from evolution. In this story, human beings exist because of a long string of improbabilities that have serendipitously chained themselves together to give rise to the human species. Scientists are careful to assert that we are not the pinnacle of evolution, we are merely a very successful species that have managed to invert the pattern that applies to most other animals. That is, we do evolve in our biology to be adapted to the environments in which we exist, but we have learned how to manipulate and warp our environments so that they are better adapted to us. And we use technology to further adapt ourselves, beyond just our biology, to our environments.
This is phenomenal. As a species, we have come to possess the cognitive faculties to understand the natural world well enough that we can dream of ideas and futures that are altogether unnatural and novel, and are empowered to bring them to fruition. This is to say nothing of the plethora of biochemical reactions happening constantly at the molecular level inside of us that keep these faculties alive in a homeostatic system. And it is not just that we use technology to facilitate our own survival. It has given us the likes of Shakespeare, Bach, and all manner of artistic expression that makes existence so much more rich and fulfilling than just a struggle to survive and reproduce.
And why has this happened? You could believe it's because a higher divine being of ultimate perfection has instilled within us a spark of the divine. I still find this troubling, because it implies a withholding parent. In this scenario, we could be so much more, to have so much more potential, but cannot because of the limits imposed on us by our creator.
I find it an infinitely more beautiful idea that we are what we became by chance, because of the geological course of our world since it began, and how it affected the development of species over hundreds of millions of years. It's not that a drop of water fell from heaven to seed us, but that nature self-organized her chaos in one pocket of a vast universe, in the face of the laws of entropy, and has given us not just the opportunity to exist, but also the faculties to find meaning and beauty in the world we occupy.
You could despair of not being sure to whom or to what you should direct your thanks concerning all of this, but I've stopped wondering if that's even an important question. For me, in my chest, I appreciate the beauty of all of this, and the gratitude is there, all the same.