Three Big Bangs Read online

  We must attach loving to logic, if we are to understand the outcome of this third big bang. Reason is yoked with emotion, cognition with caring. The natural forces, thrusting up the myriad species, produced one that, so to speak, reached escape velocity, transcending the merely natural with cares super to anything previously natural. A complement of this eternal mystery is the possibility for better and worse caring, for noble and misplaced caring, for good and evil.

  In this humans are unique; there is nowhere in animal behavior the capacity to be reflectively ethical. After a careful survey of behavior, Helmet Kummer concludes, “It seems at present that morality has no specific functional equivalents among our animal relatives” (Kummer 1980:45). Jerome Kagan puts it this way: “What is biologically special about our species is a constant attention to what is good and beautiful and a dislike of all that is bad and ugly. These biologically prepared biases rend the human experience incommensurable with that of any other species” (Kagan 1998:191). Peter Singer’s Ethics has a section, “Common Themes in Primate Ethics,” including a section on “Chimpanzee Justice,” and he wants to “abandon the assumption that ethics is uniquely human” (Singer 1994:6). But many of the behaviors examined (helping behavior, dominance structures) are more pre-ethical than ethical; he has little or no sense of holding chimpanzees morally culpable or praiseworthy.

  Frans de Waal finds precursors of morality, but concludes:

  Even if animals other than ourselves act in ways tantamount to moral behavior, their behavior does not necessarily rest on deliberations of the kind we engage in. It is hard to believe that animals weigh their own interests against the rights of others, that they develop a vision of the greater good of society, or that they feel lifelong guilt about something they should not have done. Members of some species may reach tacit consensus about what kind of behavior to tolerate or inhibit in their midst, but without language the principles behind such decisions cannot be conceptualized, let alone debated. (de Waal 1996:209)

  As before with “culture” and with “teaching,” finding “ethics” in nature is partly a matter of discovering previously unknown animal behavior, but mostly a matter of redefining and stretching what the word “ethics” means to cover behavioral adjustments in social groups.

  Christopher Boehm finds that in some primate groups, not only is there a dominance hierarchy but also there are controls to keep such hierarchy working because this produces arrangements that the primates can live with, improving their overall success. Chimpanzees fight with each other over food and mates, but fighting is unpleasant, so the chimps will allow the dominant to break up such fights. If, however, the dominant becomes overly aggressive, the chimps will gang up on the dominant, who can control one but not several arrayed against him. The result is more “egalitarian behavior” (Boehm 1999). Perhaps such behaviors are the precursors out of which such maxims as “treat equals equally; treat unequals equitably” once emerged, but it must be equally clear that such chimps are orders of magnitude away from deliberate reflection on how to treat others fairly, respecting their rights, much less their dignity.

  After her years of experience with chimpanzees, and although she finds pair bonding, grooming, and the pleasure of the company of others, Jane Goodall wrote:

  I cannot conceive of chimpanzees developing emotions, one for the other, comparable in any way to the tenderness, the protectiveness, tolerance, and spiritual exhilaration that are the hallmarks of human love in its truest and deepest sense. Chimpanzees usually show a lack of consideration for each other’s feelings which in some ways may represent the deepest part of the gulf between them and us. (van Lawick-Goodall 1971:194)

  Our primate relatives do not negotiate the presence of an existential self interacting interpersonally with other such agents in the process of thinking about and pursuing goals in the world. Higher animals realize that the behavior of other animals can be altered, and they do what they can to shape such behavior. So relationships evolve that set behavioral patterns in animal societies—dominance hierarchies, for example, or ostracism from a pack or troop. But it is not within the animal capacity to become a reflective agent interacting with a society of similar reflective agents, knowing that other actors (if normal), like oneself, are able to choose between options and are responsible for their behavior. Animals lack awareness that there are mental others whom they might hold responsible. Or to whom they might be held responsible. This precludes any critical sense of justice, of values that could and ought to be fairly shared because they are enjoyed by others who, like oneself, are existential subjects of their own lives. Such consideration is not a possibility in their private worlds, and neither is any morally binding social contract such as that in interhuman ethics. Yet all this, undeniably, has emerged within the human genius.

  The demand that we be ethical pushes the further question of who we are. Persons set up a reflective gap between the real and ideal that orients action. Humans may desire, for instance, to preserve and enlarge family and tribe. We may come to care that democracy survives in the world, or that the wisdom of Shakespeare not be lost in the next generation, and work to fulfill such ideals. Persons may admire and try to be Good Samaritans. Cognitive science sometimes thinks of the mind as a kind of computer. But the embodied mind is not hardware, not software; it is (so to speak) wetware that must be kept wet, sometimes with tears, struggling to do right, surrounded by wrongs. A merely computational mind would be an incompetent judge of good and evil. “Temptation” is not found in computers. The human desires to be moral; however brokenly, ideal mixes with real.

  This coupling of the ideal with broken embodiment amplifies in humans our earlier worries about struggle in the biological processes, whether and how far struggle is required for vital creativity. Perhaps from the first big bang, astronomical and chemical processes are fine-tuned, but the evolutionary epic cannot be. Now, at the level of personality, of spiritual creativity, fine-tuning seems even more irrelevant. One cannot fine-tune the adventures of incarnate minds navigating hyper-immense possibility space. Although Jesus would not have existed without the fine-tuned resonance states of carbon and oxygen, the life of Jesus was not fine-tuned, nor could it have been—whatever account a theologian might give of divine foreordination or his sense of destiny (“He set his face to go to Jerusalem,” Luke 9.51). A parent—even a heavenly father—does not fine-tune the rearing of a son or daughter. Suffering love is never clockwork precision. If there is resonance, this is in sympathy and solidarity, spirit attuned to spirit, beset by hopes and fears in an ambiguous and challenging world.

  Chemical reagents remain effective in human biochemistry, but spiritual agency, superimposed on this, is a radically new level of being. We find in persons an agent who must be oriented by a belief system, as, in the biological world, animals are not. That leaves us with the question of how to authorize such a belief system. In persons, the self-actualizing and self-organizing doubles back on itself with the qualitative emergence of what the Germans call “Geist,” what existentialists call “Existenz.” Matter can, the physicists say, be “excited” under radiation. The neural animal can, the biologists say, become “excited,” emotional. Here, what is really “exciting” is that human intelligence is now “spirited,” an ego with felt, psychological inwardness that cares about itself and its role in the world.

  Persons have egos. They feel ashamed or proud; they have angst, self-respect, fear, and hope. They may get excited about a job well done, pass the buck for failures, have identity crises, or deceive themselves to avoid self-censure. Humans are capable of pride, avarice, flattery, adulation, courage, charity, forgiveness, prayer. They may resolve to dissent before an immoral social practice and pay the price of civil disobedience in the hope of reforming their society. They weep and say grace at meals. They may be overcome with anomie, or make a confession of faith. They may insult or praise each other. They tell jokes. Persons act in love, faith, or freedom, driven by guilt or seeking forgivenes
s—to use categories that theologians have thought fundamental.

  Persons have unique careers that interweave to form storied narratives in cultural heritages. They have heroes or saviors who may die for the sins of the world, launch the Kingdom of God, or launch other passionate ideologies about the meanings of life and history. Persons may become disciples of these sages and saviors, and when they do they realize that to be a person includes a dimension of “spirit.” Where there is reflective, sacrificial, suffering love, there is spirit. There is spirit where there is a sensing of the numinous, the sacred, the holy. There is spirit where there is awe, a sense of the sublime. There is spirit where, along with an explosion of knowledge, nature escalates as a wonderland. There is spirit when persons confront the limit questions, when persons get goose pimples looking into the night sky or at the Vishnu schist at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. Or pondering the three big bangs.

  R. L. Stevenson pondered the “incredible properties” of dust stirring to give rise to this creature struggling for responsible caring:

  What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming;—and yet looked at nearlier, known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably condemned to prey upon his fellow lives: who should have blamed him had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous? And we look and behold him instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in pain, rearing with longsuffering solicitude, his young. To touch the heart of his mystery, we find in him one thought, strange to the point of lunacy: the thought of duty; the thought of something owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency, to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. (Stevenson 1903:291, 293–295)

  The embodied story is the human legacy of waking up to good and evil (as in Genesis 1–2) or the dreams of hope for the future (as with visions of the Kingdom of God). This, as much as logic and love, may be the differentia of the human genius. The generation of such caring is as revealing as anything else we know about natural history. The fact of the matter is that evolution has generated ideals in caring.

  Nor should we be surprised that this generating has been a long struggle. The evolutionary picture is of nature laboring in travail. The root idea in the English word “nature,” going back to Latin and Greek origins, is that of “giving birth.” Birthing is creative genesis, which certainly characterizes evolutionary nature. Birthing (as every mother knows) involves struggle. Earth slays her children, a seeming evil, but bears an annual crop in their stead. The “birthing” is nature’s orderly self-assembling of new creatures amidst this perpetual perishing. Life is ever “conserved,” as biologists might say; life is perpetually “redeemed,” as theologians might say. Let us call it the “generation and regeneration of caring.” Resulting from the second big bang, there is life, perpetually perishing, which can only be continued in explosion if there is struggling through, dying for the next generation. Resulting from the third big bang, there is mind, spirited mind acting in sacrificial love.

  We contemporary humans, perhaps more than previous generations, have reached a critical turning point in the long-accumulating story of cognition actualizing itself. We are now coming around to oversee the world and to face the prospect of our own self-engineering, to the genesis of a higher-level ordering of the world in the midst of its threatening disorder. Increasingly we are like gods. But there is an information gap about good and evil. We need the wisdom of God, and that programs poorly on computers and is not found in physics, chemistry, or biology textbooks.

  Presence with Presence

  The singularities, if we may use a theological word, might also be “revealing” not simply about human spirit but about divine spirit, about “Presence.” Science gives us three principal data points: matter-energy, life, and mind. The first is universal; the second is rare; the third is single and we are it. Surveying this trajectory from nature to spirit, we have repeatedly been wondering whether these three explosions are all somehow front-loaded into the system, or whether each is a one-off surprise. A frequent modern attitude is that before puzzlement one ought to be scientific about figuring things out. But we have found that no sciences settle what historical, much less what philosophical account to give of these three big bangs. Science is not well equipped to deal with singularities, one-off events; science prefers lawlike regularities.

  Could the surprises have been anticipated? Each stage is necessary for the next, but no stage seems sufficient for the next. Each stage allows the next, but no stage logically implies the next. No scientific law, plus initial conditions, predicts each surprise. In some moods, the vast distances between the three, billions of years apart, suggest minimal connections. There is emergence, but is it driven or spontaneous? Even more provocatively, each stage launches escalating serendipity. Outrageous luck? Or are there “attractors”? Is there a subtending field, a deeper source?

  We have ranged over a spectrum of options: random chance, probability, selective tendencies, necessity, design; and these permit some mixing. The formation of heavier elements in stars may have been inevitable, but the formation of a suitable planet may have been random chance. The launching of life may have been random chance, but, once launched, biodiversity was highly probable, biocomplexity less probable but likely. The formation of human mind may have been serendipitous, and after that cultural diversity may have been highly probable. Cultural diversity may be peculiar and local, or local on isolated islands but cumulative on continents and accelerated at crossroads between continents. The causal connections are likely themselves to be complex.

  At such levels of complexity, we will often be in “over our heads,” but one conclusion is inescapable: what is “in our heads” is as startling as anything else yet known in the universe. We will be left wondering how far what is going on “in our heads” is key, at cosmological and metaphysical levels, to what is going on “over our heads.” Is mind key to the whole? Are we detecting Mind in, with, and under it all? We humans are spirited presence. Are we an icon of deeper Presence, Spirit suffusing the universe story?

  Often those who had hoped to be scientific about answers will say that even if science does not give answers, we should still be naturalistic. Matter-energy, life, and mind are events in nature. With the evolution of each later stage, the tectonic potential of nature actualizes into something higher. Each of the emergent steps is “super” to the precedents, that is, supervenes on and surpasses the principles and processes earlier evident. Each transcends previous ontological levels. The category of the natural is elevated as it enlarges. Nature proves richer, more fertile, brooding, mysterious, than was recognized before. A spirited history, a history of spirit, supervenes on matter-energy. The generative power is lured toward spirit, evident in human spirits. And such nature is a supercharged nature, but still nature. There is no Supernature, but nature is super. Three big bangs document that. There is no God, but Nature should be spelled with a capital N, because Nature is sacred, the ground of our being. Looking ahead, this inexhaustible creative openendedness is greater than we now know, or can foreseeably know.

  At this turn of thought, others may want still deeper explanations: a Transcendence in which this self-transcending nature is embedded, a Ground of all Being. Supercharged nature signals Transcend
ent Presence. The upper-level accounts cast their light back across what might in short-scope perspective have seemed complete naturalistic accounts. They cast shadows over them. The earlier events begin to figure as subplots within a larger story. Afterward, the naturalistic explanations do not look so compelling, as they earlier did. To believe in the supernatural is to believe that there are forces at work that transcend the physical, the biological, and the cultural. These spiritual forces sway the future because they have for millennia been breaking through and infusing what is going on. We may detect from our present vantage point intimations of a fourth dimension (Spirit) when three dimensions (matter, life, mind) are already incontestably evident and the fourth seems to be secretly and impressively also at work.

  Almost anything can happen in a world in which what we see around us has actually managed to happen. The story is already incredible, progressively more so at every emergent level. Nature is indisputably there, and what are we to make of it? Both good induction and good historical explanation lead us to believe in surprises still to come and powers already at work greater than we know. For all the unifying theories of science, nature as a historical system has never yet proved simpler or less mysterious than we thought; the universe has always had more storied achievements taking place in it than we knew. To suspect the work of spiritual forces is not, in this view, to be naïve but rather to be realistic. This subtending Presence is eternal, equally co-present at the startup and en route.

  Einstein concluded, famously, that “the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility” (Einstein 1970:61). Going beyond Einstein, I am concluding that “the eternal mystery of the universe is its generating of comprehending, caring mind.” In this sense, the astronomical, the evolutionary, the genetic, the neurological, and the psychological explosions all suggest that rational minds comprehending three big bangs may well believe that we inhabit a “spirited,” a “spiritual” universe. We can wonder if there is a “Logos” in, with, and under the logic of such nature. Maybe we are not so lonely after all; our presence is embraced by another Presence.