The possibility of purpose in the universe can be understood in terms of a hierarchical conception of the cosmos. These are some of the questions that modern science has raised for those of us who believe or hope that there really is an ultimate meaning to our life in the universe.
The Cosmic Adventure: Science, Religion and the Quest for Purpose by
John F. Haught
Chapter: 1: The Problem of Nature and Purpose
Scientific Materialism
And the history of human beings must be told in the last page or two of the last volume!1 Is this evolutionary process purposeful? However, in the last three hundred years it has become possible to imagine the universe as devoid of any cosmic mind.
Mind in Nature
As in ancient mythic visions, our minds themselves belong to the context of the cosmos. 7. One of the most visible aspects of our experience is the sense of being.
Matter and Life
It may not be immediately obvious, however, how our discussion of the question of the independence of biology relates to the general theme of this book. Our discussion of the reducibility of biology to the physical sciences is therefore a kind of test case. I think it is highly questionable whether a complete breakdown of the hierarchy can be done consistently and logically.
The result is that the proteins in the encoded organism in the translation process will be restructured in accordance with the mutated DNA. It is clear that the meaning or information you are receiving now is primarily a result of the specific order of letters on this page and not the chemistry of ink and paper. We cannot locate any cosmic informant in the interstices of the loosened and realigned acids of the DNA chain.
Quoted in John Hermann Randall, Jr., The Making of the Modern Mind (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. Instead it can be taken to mean the metaphysical principle of order and newness that.
Non-Energetic Causation and Cosmic Purpose
None of the entities in nature can be fully explained in terms of the movement of molecules. But Sheldrake is not put off by the fact of the apparently vaporous nature of morphogenetic fields. Through specific experiments, however, science can contribute little intensively to the legitimacy of the idea of formative causation (although it can certainly do so cumulatively).
The architect's formative designs are remarkable for the energetic mechanical laying process of the bricks, and yet they have a profound impact. The goals of the urban planner are external to the methods of architecture, and yet they are the cause of the pattern that the architect's designs follow. Each level relies on the lower level, but cannot be exhaustively explained in terms of the lower level.
Although non-energetic in itself, landscape shape is a determining factor in the amount of energy available in a river's flow. It is now possible to study the flow of the river while avoiding the landscape entirely.
Chance and God
34;Designer," and it thus seems logically exclusive of the indeterminacy often implied by the idea of chance. First, however, we need to look briefly at some of the confusion surrounding the use of the word "chance." To begin. there is what we might call the epistemological use of the term.
Readers of Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity will find there perhaps the best recent example of the metaphysical enthronement of Chance. And yet there is the possibility that forms of order can gradually be teased out of the chaos of indeterminacy. When one level of nature's hierarchy (say the level of life or mind) engages a lower level (that of matter), it is not surprising that the lower level will not be in every respect favorable to the imposition of the new organizational principles of the higher .
It is quite possible that the emergence of the first living cell involved an aspect of chance. It is easy enough to do so when we talk about the epistemological, physical and mathematical dimensions of chance.
Purpose and Nature’s Hierarchy
It's a notion that seems to fit the Hellenistic rather than the evolutionary view of the cosmos. Schumacher is right when he says that it is their particular perspective of "faith" that leads them to place all reality at the molecular level. This is why they cannot be displayed or understood at the lower level.
The overall design of the city is not to be found in the joints and components of the masonry. The global organizational pattern does not appear as one fact among others at the level of urban masonry. The epistemology of control is simply the transfer of the will to power to the realm of the mind.
Our sense of cosmic hierarchy today cannot be the same as that of our ancestors. Faith as the transmission of a mystery has little meaning outside the context of a hierarchical universe.
Beauty
Thus, if we are to speak of cosmic purpose in a credible manner, we must remain fully aware of the tortuous and confusing nature of its evolutionary trajectory. For these critics, the universe is condemned because it does not correspond in its behavior to that of the ethical person: therefore, it is not good. There is no reason for us to dismiss the possibility that similarly chaotic and monotonous episodes of all experience, ours and nature in general, may also contribute to the value of the whole when viewed from a cosmic perspective (for which of course we ourselves do not have access).
And as the creative progress of the universe brings more and more novelties into view, the events of the past are constantly given new and unforeseen significance. Therefore, the purpose of the universe cannot be adequately told from our condition. Thus, an aesthetic understanding of the universe is able to express the religious sentiment that all things are "care" in an ultimate but hidden way.
But as most great religious visionaries themselves have learned, the ethical vision is not ultimate. norms are not the final judge of the meaning of things, nor of human lives, nor of history, nor of the universe. Because of the precarious nature of heroism and genius, we value them more than everyday human qualities.
Permanence and Perishing
In the present chapter I will ask whether it is possible to view the universe as a context of care despite the most basic case of evil, the fact that things perish. The most blatant proof of the existence of evil is the plain and simple fact that things perish.1 Perish means the loss of order, the collapse into disorder and indeterminacy. The ideal of historical reporting is to be as faithful as possible to the facts of the past.
Even more explicitly than Bergson's, it shows that the preservation of the past in the present refers to the entire cosmic reality and not only to our human memory. It claims that the very essence of physical reality, and not just consciousness, is whatever it is. And this fading of the present into the past and then the fading of the past itself is "the ultimate evil in the temporal world."13 This loss of immediacy invites our most agonizing questioning.
Paul Tillich explains this anxiety about losing the present to an irreversible past in terms of our own mortality. In God's sense of the world, the uniqueness and individuality of every aspect of reality is preserved as such.
The Cosmic Adventure
The world is therefore not obliged to pattern itself rigidly and immediately according to the form of the concerned. My suffering is then justified by the contribution it makes to the aesthetic value of the universe. It is inexcusable that any alleged deity would sacrifice the particular for the sake of the universal.
This at least seems to be the spirit of the Whiteheadian approach to the problem of suffering. If we are going to talk about God at all today, then, we must connect the idea of God with that of cosmic adventure. It is tempting, then, to return to the traditional idea that God is only the source of order and to associate innovation with some other, perhaps even demonic, aspect of the universe.
Such identification is largely the source of the atrocities committed by men throughout history in the name of God. Quoted by John Bowker, Problems of Suffering in Religions of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p.
Christianity and the Cosmos
34; unconsciously" the causal influence of the aesthetic unity of God and the cosmos in the constitution of our being. In the Christian experience we are given a taste of the ultimate meaning of things in the picture of the heroic life story of a certain person. This has done so, I suspect, because it is a representation of universal beauty in a manner commensurate with the experience of a people at this time in the evolution of the universe.
In the same vein, later Christian theological reflection insisted that God also includes suffering and even death as aspects of the divine life. Nevertheless, there is a vulnerability higher to the lower level, especially to the one immediately below it. If this vulnerability of the higher to the action of the lower increases as we move higher in the cosmic hierarchy, then it would follow that the highest level is the most vulnerable of all.
And, if we want to be consistent, this would entail a vulnerability of the ultimate field of meaning to phenomena in auxiliary fields. We are not required to maintain that ultimate existence depends on lesser orders.
Science and Religious Symbolism
Although most of this past is only faintly felt, it is nevertheless related to the experience of the present. It is the function of symbolic expression to awaken in us a more vivid sense of the universal value (beauty, purpose) which we vaguely feel in our primary perception. We must ask what symbols are when viewed in the context of the creative progress of the universe.
Mistrust is possible when there is a weakening of the connection between the intrinsic value of reality and our own consciousness. Even under the most extreme conditions of wounded trust, however, our causal connection to the intrinsic value of the universe is not. In our human experience, the reality (value) of the whole is sensed at the pole of primary perception.
Because it is one in which most of the assumptions we have challenged in this. Once again we are therefore brought back to the question of the plausibility of a hierarchical conception of the universe.