Religion and science are two contending sources of the creation stories by which we humans define ourselves, our moral codes, and the meaning of our existence. Since the beginning of the scientific revolution, religion and science have been engaged in a competition to be the exclusive purveyors and interpreters of the reigning creation story of modern life. Each of these establishments has allowed the more dogmatic extremists within its ranks to define its story in terms that emphasize the contrast between its own position and that of the contending party.
In keeping with the win-lose dynamic of Empire, the struggle for power between the two competing establishments has trumped the search for truth. This leaves the rest of us to choose between two partial stories or to live in divided allegiance between them. To guide our steps on the pathway back to life, we need a shared creation story for our time that honors the whole of the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the species.
Fortunately, there are individuals of significant standing within each of these establishments who are able to look beyond the dogma in search of a deeper convergence. Reaching out across institutional lines, they are joining forces to challenge the partial stories of their respective traditions and to construct and communicate a more complete and factually grounded contemporary story that draws on the accumulated knowledge and experience of the species.
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CHAPTER 16
Creation’s Epic Journey
The dynamic dance of nature is ever conscious at every level, from the tiniest particle to whatever its currently largest configuration or holon is. That is my basic assumption about the living universe, no stranger than any of the assumptions of physics. It is shared by all the indigenous cultures I have come in contact with, as well as all esoteric traditions.1
Elisabet Sahtouris
Life is planetary exuberance, a solar phenomenon. It is the astronomically local transmutation of Earth’s air, water, and sun into cells.… It is matter gone wild, capable of choosing its own direction.2
Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan
Creation reveals itself to humans in many ways. It spoke to the ancients through the inner voices of the mystics. It speaks to our time through scientists who plumb the secrets of matter, living organisms, and the evolving cosmos. Strip away the scientific dogma that denies the existence of spiritual intelligence, and we can see that the cutting edge of scientific knowledge provides a rich source of ever deepening insight into the purpose of Creation, life, and the human species.
A CONTEMPORARY CREATION STORY
The 14-billion-year story of Creation, based on the available scientific evidence, goes something like this:
Long ago a new universe flared into being in a massive burst of energy that dispersed tiny energy particles across the vastness of space. With the passing of time, these particles organized themselves into atoms that swirled into great clouds that coalesced into galaxies of countless stars 268that grew, died, and were reborn as new stars, star systems, and planets. The cataclysmic energies unleashed by the births and deaths of billions of suns converted simple atoms into more complex atoms and melded them into molecules — each stage transcending the stage before in definition and capacity to create ever more wondrous possibilities.
It took 10 billion years to prepare the way for the seed of life to gain a foothold on the planet we now call Earth. To this day science knows not from whence life came.
Microscopic in size, the early ancestors of all Earth life were single-celled bacteria so simple they lacked even a cell nucleus. Yet these modest creatures proved to have a capacity for learning that gave them remarkable creative potential. The planet’s first chemists, they learned to build new kinds of proteins, including new enzymes, to invent new molecules, and to exchange genetic material through their cell walls to share their learning with one another.
As the fruits of life’s learning multiplied, individual cells evolved to become more complex and diverse. New bacteriological strains emerged as individuals learned to exploit new ecological niches by cultivating different lifestyles and expertise. The arts of fermentation, photosynthesis, and respiration were discovered in turn, with individual strains specializing in one or another in a competition for food and resources. Each advance allowed the whole to gain greater advantage from the available resource base and prepared the way for the emergence of more complex organisms of still greater potential.
Eventually some of these early competitors reached an accommodation with one another by binding together to create supercells that combined the abilities of individual strains. Over a period of roughly a billion years, these tiny single-celled creatures rearranged the materials of Earth’s crust and transformed and stabilized the chemical composition of the entire planet’s atmosphere to open the way for yet more extraordinary accomplishments.
Up to this point DNA strands floated freely within the walls of individual cells. Then, some 2 billion years after life first appeared on the planet, the partnerships that had created the supercells led to the clustering of DNA into a nucleus, creating a single nucleated cell a hundred to a thousand times the size of the individual bacterium cells of which it 269was composed. This in turn prepared the way for the emergence, roughly 900 million years later, of the first multicelled plant and animal life in the form of seaweed, jellyfish, and flatworms.
All the varieties of plant and animal life followed in due course —including dinosaurs, birds, apes, and humans. Step by step, life converted the matter of the planet’s surface layer into a splendid self-organizing web of complex, choice-making multicelled organisms, each with capacities far beyond those of their individual cells. Continuously experimenting, interrelating, creating, building, the evolving web of life unfolded into a living tapestry of astonishing variety, beauty, and ever growing capacity for intelligent choice.
Then, 4 million years ago, Creation embarked on its most ambitious and daring experiment. It took a first step toward bringing into being a species with the capacity to reflect on its own consciousness, to experience with awe the beauty and mystery of Creation, to articulate, communicate, and share learning, compose symphonies, build cathedrals, reshape the material world to its own ends, and anticipate and intentionally chose its own future.
The hominids came first, followed 1.4 million years later by Homo habilis, larger-brained species that developed skills in hunting and in using stone tools. It took another 2.4 million years to arrive at the next step — a species with a capacity for intentional choice far beyond that of any other. That was a mere 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. We call ourselves human.
The science of the past hundred years has made a seminal contribution to our knowledge of the sequence of events that marked the creative unfolding of the universe and all its wonders. The patterns of that unfolding suggest that the cosmos, and all within it, are the manifestation of a great unifying spiritual intelligence engaged in an epic quest to know itself through the discovery and actualization of its unrealized possibilities. If this is so, then all being exists both as a product of this quest and as a co-creator in the continued unfolding. As it is for all being, so is it is for all of life, including humans.
LIFE IS THE POWER TO CHOOSE
As a young student of psychology, I was required to read the work of B.F. Skinner, a well-known behavioral psychologist of that time famous for his theory that free will is an illusion. By Skinner’s reckoning, all 270behavior is the result of what he called operant conditioning. In essence, our response to any given stimulus depends on what consequences followed from our previous responses to similar stimuli, not as a matter of conscious, intelligent choice, but simply as a mechanistic conditioned response. It is a curious thing that a science dedicated to reason would deny the human capacity for reason, which is by extension a denial of human intelligence and free will. It seemed to me at the time a rather limited view of human possibility, but among academic psychologists seeking to gain respectability for their discipline as a legitimate science, it was qui
te a popular theory—and certainly not one I was in a position as an undergraduate to openly question.
Science still has difficulty with questions of will, consciousness, and intelligence, in part because it continues to operate from a mechanistic premise. Thus, I was struck by the boldness with which Lynn Margulis, one of the world’s foremost life scientists, and her son, science writer Dorion Sagan, proclaimed in their extraordinary book What Is Life? that life “is matter gone wild, capable of choosing its own direction.”3 It is one of those simple, obvious, and yet deeply profound observations that turn a long-established worldview on its head. Life is matter with the capacity to choose, and among the species known to humans, our capacity for choice exceeds that of all others.
Free will does not mean we are free to do anything we want. The realities of an interdependent world bind our actions. Every choice we make is shaped by our context and in turn revises that context. Yet the range of the choices available to us is substantial.
From the perspective of conventional wisdom, an individual human life begins in a mother’s womb some nine months prior to physical birth and ends at the time of physical death. From a deeper evolutionary perspective, however, we are each expressions of an unbroken flow of the choices made by living organisms since intelligent life energy first began to express itself on planet Earth some 4,000 million years ago.4
We can only speculate as to what happens to the individual soul after physical death. We do know, however, that each life is immortal in its contribution, no matter how modest, to shaping life’s continued unfolding into the infinite future. Each flower we pick, each seed we plant, each thought we communicate, sends its ripples forward in time through the unfolding fabric of Creation, leaving its mark —positive or negative, large or small—on the biosphere and the collective human consciousness that the Catholic priest and mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 271called the noosphere. Herein lies the great responsibility of our gift of choice. The choices we make determine whether the mark we leave enhances or diminishes the human contribution to Creation’s great quest to actualize its possibilities. We matter. Our choices make a difference.
LIFE IS STRUGGLE
For many years, I imagined the ideal life-centered society to be a place of peace, cooperation, and contentment in which the basic needs of all are met and humanity lives happily ever after. It was perhaps an image evoked by dim memories of life in the womb before birth. It is a widely shared image similar to that of the popular image of heaven—a place of effortless eternal bliss.
Thus, I was a bit put off when I read in John and Linda Friel’s book on human maturity, The Soul of Adulthood, that “we can only experience life through struggle.” My initial reaction was that the authors must have a warped view of life. Then my mind connected the Friels’ statement to an observation by Margulis and Sagan that the existence of life’s extraordinary ability to invest matter with the capacity to choose depends on life’s success in a continuing struggle against the incessant entropic forces of the material world.5 That idea unlocked for me another profound truth: life is, by its nature, a cooperative struggle for the freedom to choose against the life-denying forces of entropy. Struggle is an inherent condition of living. It is not a curse inflicted on us by a spiteful God. It is, if you will, God’s own struggle manifest through us.
The second law of thermodynamics—the law of entropy—is a formalized observation that all physical systems run down as their useful energy is dissipated, ultimately decaying into the disorganization referred to as thermodynamic equilibrium. It is the way of all mechanical objects. Leave an automobile unattended, and eventually it will disintegrate into a pile of useless rust. By extension, the second law declares the physical universe to be dying, as the inexorable processes of entropy play themselves out toward disorder and loss of potential. Life, by contrast, appears to defy the second law by creating order out of disorder. Life thereby presents science with a troubling enigma.
Molecular biologist Mae-Wan Ho, who studies the processes by which living organisms resist the force of entropy, notes that living systems do not actually defy the second law. They do, however, have the 272ability to maintain themselves in a sustained thermodynamic disequilibrium of negative entropy, which in the sometimes perverse terminology of science means that they maintain themselves in a state of active positive energy potential. The processes involved depend on the ability of the organism to engage the continued and highly efficient intake, storage, and throughput of energy and material in continuous exchange with its environment. Living organisms have learned to be “anti-entropic” for so long as they are alive.6
In other words, life observes the classic laws, but it has learned to use these laws to maintain energy in an active flow state through constant exchange and recycling, thereby achieving a sustained state of potential far from the stasis of thermodynamic equilibrium. The what of the process is well documented. The how, however, remains largely beyond the limits of scientific understanding—perhaps because standard science rejects out of hand the possibility of will or intent.
Those scientists with the courage and humility to accept the rather obvious fact of life’s capacity for intelligent, willful action sometimes find it necessary to turn to poetic expression to describe the wonder of the process they observe, as in the following excerpt from Margulis and Sagan:
Thermodynamic systems lose heat to the universe as they convert energy from one form to another. Living matter frees itself from ordinary matter only by perpetually basking in the sun. Confronted with dissolution and destruction, life suffers a permanent death threat. Life is not merely matter, but matter energized, matter organized, matter with a glorious and peculiar built-in history. Life as matter with needs inseparable from its history must maintain and perpetuate itself, swim or sink. The most glorious organic being may indeed be nothing but “temporarily identifiable wiggles,” but for millions of years as life has been racing away from disorder autopoietic [self-directing] beings have concerned themselves with themselves, becoming ever more sensitive, ever more future oriented, and ever more focused on what might bring harm to the delicate wave of their matter-surfing form. From a thermodynamic, autopoietic perspective, the basest act of reproduction and the most elegant aesthetic appreciation derive from a common source and ultimately serve the same 273purpose: to preserve vivified matter in the face of adversity and a universal tendency toward disorder.7
Think of each cell as a packet of self-directing energy potential shielded from entropy’s downward pull by the thin wall of its outer membrane. The cell is a bounded system with the ability to recycle energy within itself and slow the dissipation of that active energy into the environment beyond. Unable, however, to eliminate the dissipation entirely, its survival depends on a constant balancing act by which it must regularly capture new energy potential from its environment to replace that which is inevitably lost.
The complexity and dynamism of the thermodynamics of life are breathtaking. Each individual cell is itself a complex interacting web of thousands of ongoing chemical reactions among its individual molecules, each itself engaged in a constant process of renewal within a nested multilevel holarchy of cooperative, self-organizing, self-renewing systems. As explained by molecular biologist Stephen Rose:
The complex macromolecules, the proteins, nucleic acids, polysaccharides and lipids within each cell have life cycles of their own, continually being broken down and replaced by other, more or less identical cells. The average lifetime of a protein molecule in the body of a mammal is around a fortnight. In an adult human, proteins constitute some 10 percent of body weight, so some 24 grams of protein are being broken down and a fresh 24 grams synthesized every hour of every day—half a gram, or more than a billion billion molecules of protein a minute, throughout our adult life. Why this ceaseless flux?… The answer is simple:… living systems need to be dynamic if they are to survive, able to adjust themselves to the fluctuations which, even in the best-buffered internal mili
eu, their cooperative existence as part of the greater unity of the organism demands.8
LIFE IS MUTUAL EMPOWERMENT
The key to the secret of life’s success in populating Earth with ever larger, more complex, and more capable organisms is its ability to self-organize into complex subsystems of cyclical processes that link reactions 274requiring energy with those that yield energy. Energy flows continuously and simultaneously in a never ending dance of cooperative exchange between the substructures of each individual cell, between the cells of multicelled organisms, between the multicelled organisms of individual ecosystems, and between the ecosystems of a living planet. Through these frugal, self-renewing, and interlinked processes, living systems are able to at once conserve energy and maintain it in an active and immediately accessible state.
These mutually empowering processes are the foundation of life’s struggle to create and maintain new potential against the constant pull of entropy. The cooperative imperative of this struggle explains why life exists only in relationship to other life, that is, in community. The organizing principle of life is partnership, not domination. Indeed, partnership is one of life’s imperatives.
The individual cell or multicellular organism can no more exist without the larger community of life than the community of life can exist without the individuals it comprises. Life is a process of mutual empowerment enhanced by balanced growth and diversification, and it therefore can be understood only in terms of communities of relationships. The more complex, diverse, and coherent the relationships internal to a living system, the greater the potential of the system and each of its component members.
The Great Turning Page 33