David Cowles
Sep 1, 2024
“Cosmologists cannot rely on science any more than astronomers can rely on religion. There can be no successful TOE (‘Theory of Everything’) without both. ….”
“It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you’re ‘a good person, kind to others and respectful of the environment’. At the end of the day, that’s all any religion can ask, and you don’t need religion for that.”
I’m guessing that the majority of Europeans and North Americans agree with this proposition, even if they don’t say so publicly. But we ask a lot more of our religion than that! While we ‘trust’ science to tell us how the Universe came to be as it is, we rely on religion to tell us why.
For 300+ years, we have imagined that science and religion were enemies, that their models of reality were incompatible. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They address completely different questions, and they desperately need one another to fill each other’s gaps. In the words of Ezra Pound, “The grove needs an altar.”
Cosmologists cannot rely on science any more than astronomers can rely on religion. There can be no successful TOE (‘Theory of Everything’) without both. The specific ‘facts’ uncovered (aletheia) by science need to be positioned in an overall conceptual framework (logos) that science alone cannot provide.
Phrases like ‘Big Bang’ and ‘Negative Vacuum Pressure’ cannot satisfy our deepest longings. If the question, why is there something rather than nothing? has meaning…and an answer…that answer can only be found in Metaphysics, religion’s first cousin once removed.
Science tells us that we, I mean our ‘bodies’, each consist of 30 trillion independent life forms called cells. By comparison, only 8 billion human beings are alive today. Likewise, a total of 100 billion human beings have lived since homo sapiens evolved. By normal life expectancy, 100 trillion cells will have participated in forming your ‘body’.
These cells are the direct descendants of a single unicellular life form (bacterium), powered by a single DNA molecule that evolved on Earth some 4 billion years ago, shortly after the planet was formed. As far as we know, life evolved on earth only once…once! Why then? Why there? Why?
Are we alone? Or has life also evolved in other places in the Universe? If not, might it still? If not, why not? The Universe is 14 billion years old and encompasses at least a trillion galaxies. Our sun is just one of 100 billion stars in just one such galaxy, the Milky Way. The notion that this is all just an accidental ‘one off’ will never satisfy us…even if it turns out to be true. As Carl Jung said, “Man (sic) cannot stand a meaningless life.”
We are aware of ourselves, and we are aware of the world around us, and we are aware of ourselves being aware of the world, all at the same time. We call this a unit of consciousness. Uncannily, it follows the contours of dialectics: Thesis – Antithesis – Synthesis, all at once! Science is attempting to work out how this works and in recent years great progress has been made toward that goal.
Human beings have a complex nervous system, including the cerebral cortex and extending throughout the body. These ‘brain cells’ express your unique DNA in a particular way that is specifically suited to their function. So far so good!
Except, it seems as though all (or most) life forms are conscious, right down to unicellular bacteria and including each of the 30 trillion cells that make up our bodies. Yet most of these life forms lack any sort of physiology that we’d recognize as a brain. So efforts to reduce consciousness to a particular physiology seem doomed from the outset.
You are conscious at the level of the organism. The 30 trillion cells that make up your body cooperate to generate that single fact of self-awareness lovingly known as ‘you’. Yet each of these constituent cells is also conscious. Is there any overlap between consciousness at the cellular level and consciousness at the level of the organism? In other words, is the content of consciousness at the level of the organism in any way dependent on or reflective of the content of consciousness at the level of the cells? There is no reason to believe so but, frankly, who knows?
And that’s not all. Could there be intermediate levels of consciousness? For example, is the heart conscious? My poor, abused liver? If so, do the contents of such consciousness relate in any traceable way either to consciousness at the level of the cell or to consciousness at the level of the organism?
On the other end of the scale, are there conscious entities that include the human organism in the same way that the human organism includes the cell? Might consciousness emerge on the level of social groupings? Families, communities, nations? How about the species level? The level of the biosphere? The planet (Gaia)? The galaxy? The cosmos? Again, we currently have no way of making such determinations. Finally, if the Universe as a whole is conscious, is that a manifestation of what we call ‘God’?
Here materialism, realism, and empiricism must give way. We need to situate mundane phenomena in the context of a more general model of reality. Such an uber-model is the subject of Religion (formerly known as Mythology, currently known as Metaphysics). A complete understanding of Universe requires an all-encompassing conceptual framework (religion) and a swarm of verifiable data points (science).
St. Paul's Letter to the Colossians (the congregation at Colossae, east of Ephesus in Asia Minor) includes a very old Christological Hymn (1: 15-20), possibly the earliest liturgical Christology extant. Perhaps it offers the conceptual framework we need to understand Universe as a whole. Check it out:
"He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God,
the first-born of all creation,
for in him all things were created…
“All things were created through him and for him.
He is before all things
and in him all things hold together…
“He is the beginning, the first-born from the dead.
For in him all the fullness was pleased to dwell,
and through him to reconcile all things for him…"
Can we peel back the leaves of this artichoke? First, God is insensible, but Christ is the sensible image of God. Creation (Genesis and/or Big Bang) is the moment of minimal entropy (maximal order) – it would be, wouldn’t it? Christ is maximal order, the ordering principle in fact, as well as order itself (logos).
Christ is universal and eternal. Therefore, Christ conditions everything that comes to be. Christ is the locus of whatever is (was or will be). He is the origin of whatever is (efficient cause) and its destiny (final cause). Because all things (events) share a common origin (Christ) and a common destiny (Christ), all things hold together; but because Christ is also the locus of all events (above), all things hold together in him.
Death is the moment of maximal entropy, minimal order; it would be wouldn’t it? You can’t be any deader than dead! Whatever emerges from maximal entropy must (by definition) manifest an incremental increase in order, so whatever emerges from a state of maximal entropy (death) manifests Christ resurrected. Christ is not just the sensible image of an insensible God; Christ is God. ("In him all the fulness was pleased to dwell.")
Entropy in the spatiotemporal world steadily increases due to conflict. Outside of spacetime (i.e. in Christ), reconciliation (through Christ) transmutes (for Christ) order-eroding conflicts into order-enhancing contrasts and ultimately into cosmic harmonies.
Christ is not just the sensible image of an insensible God; Christ is God. ("In him all the fulness was pleased to dwell.") Entropy in the spatiotemporal world steadily increases due to conflict.
Outside of spacetime (i.e. in Christ), reconciliation (through Christ) transmutes (for Christ) order-eroding conflicts into order-enhancing contrasts and ultimately into cosmic harmonies.
David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com
