SPIRITUALITY IN DEBATE

Mentioning spirituality in debate is like a pail of cold water over the head. It is impossible to debate spirituality. I was arguing that “it” all started with the big bang. My protagonist in the argument was a young physician who was highly trained in science and culture: he originated in India. He recognized that science advanced as human nature advanced. With discovery of an explanation for something man observed in our physical world, scientists soon made irrevocable clear how and why, which moved what ever it was out of the supernatural into the realm of our understanding, some other unknown took its place: earth quakes; volcanoes; thunder, lightening, and rain, sea tides, death, genes etc, etc. It seemed the “supply” of unknowable things “only God knows”, was inexhaustible. You would think that science would have squeezed God into a very small corner, but no. As my protagonist said,  “While, we can know everything since the big bag, down to quarks and bosons  but we will never know where the energy in the big bang come from—that is the spirit.”

Obviously, that was the end of logic in the argument. It has been that way since the development of the mind of man. I know that what we do not know we will someday know but I also know that until we do we have to admit that we don’t know, which is the crack in the door that religion squeezes through. However, the answer seems to be that we are asking the wrong question. The question should be, “Why we feel or sense we need a spirit in the first place?” or alternatively, “What is it that we mean by spirit?” It is the need to survive imbedded in our genome and the genomes of all living things.  

The concept of survival as the result of genetic buffering in a broad sense is common to all living things and not just man and animals; that is, it is unique to all things with genes. It is both biochemical and biological. It is both physical and mental. We can speak about survival just as we speak about thirst, hunger, and all the other feelings carried in our genes that are important to us. It is the result of eons and eons of materialistic-mechanistic systematic probability in the dangerous game of adaptability—obviously dangerous because if you do not adapt you die. On the brink of death due to starvation, freezing, the ravages of disease, in a fox hole surrounded by enemy, or whatever, you unknowingly call on the full force of all your genetic capabilities to survive, you call on the spirit of survival. Thus, the collective and pervasive force of survival is beyond our control but not beyond our scientific understanding.

If you personally refer to the collective forces of survival as “God" then you are obligated to accept the idea that nature created God and not the other way around, unless you are a Deist and believe a God or spirit created the earth with the big bang and then bowed out of the picture as my protagonist alleged. Adhering to that belief, if scientists could ever explain the big bang, a Deist would have to become an atheist but the spirit of survival concept would remain.

As explained above, science has relentlessly worked to lift the veil of ignorance to the point where we believe that everything is knowable, even things we don’t know, which is perhaps the most egotistical thing a man can say. Learning how to create life and survive just took longer than religious history indicates—compares 20 billion years for the beginning of probability to 50,000 years claimed by palioanthorphologists, or the biblical 4000 years. In addition, it did not all happen in the Garden of Eden. In truth, there was no mystical guiding force because it is all scientifically explainable, therefore knowable. Life’s force, using the definition of life as inheritable, dynamic, and sustainable organization, equates the evolution of life to our morphological existence including our nervous system, our mental existence, and our mentality. These things operate in harmony.

An additional revelation concerning our understanding about the creation of life is that we live in two separate but intimately intertwined spheres: the slow plodding genetic sphere developing by random chance and the rapidly expanding supra genetic sphere. A key step to understanding some of the basic conflict concerning religion verses science is to realize where the conflict arises; it is between our deeply held inherent forces and our equally pervasive but deeply held supra genetic beliefs. The supra genetic sphere is where engineers, for example, live and function. Engineers can and do create “things” through intelligent design. That is what they learned to do and that is what they do. Is it total folly to think a transistor radio, for example, can evolve out of cosmic dust as organisms evolved without an intelligent designer— the concept that God is an engineer? I think the thought is the worst of folly. Clearly, a simple radio is a product of the supra genetic capabilities of engineers. The development of a radio can be traced step-by-step from the elements: copper, silicon, carbon, and insulation organized into wire, capacitor, resisters, and antennas. In this sense, the radio evolved with time. The one big difference between organisms and a radio is that a radio and all of its parts were designed by man to allow man to communicate; it was purposeful. Man created the radio by design. In contrast, organisms developed by chance. In other words, G.G. Simpson got it right, “He (man) was not planned.”

Darwin’s theory of evolution is truly the theory that enabled us to put religion in perspective but only after we understood the sweeping force of genetic synergy. Thus, our study of biopoiesis created the understanding needed for man to develop the concept and name the force(s) or sense of survival Allah, God, Buddha, etc. that is create God out of the concept of survival. Irrespective of the name, the concept or belief is no less meaningful or less influential in our lives manifested as some form of religion.

The concept makes a lexicon of terms meaningless: blasphemy for example, resurrection, holy trinity, heaven, Bible, but surprisingly it retains terms usually associated with religion such as everlasting life (via our DNA), individual mortality, and transforms soul into a function of erasable memory. It means man has a choice even if it is genetically guided—you cannot decide not to be a man but you can decide, within genetic limits, to be a good man or an evil man. However, it redefines good and evil in terms of survival. The spirit of survival gives salt its good taste but also its bad taste.

The first commandment takes on special meaning if God is equated to survival: “Put no other God before me”, the consequences of doing so would be your own survival. The concept gives prayer a new meaning—the meaning of a wish, what one hopes for and not a petition for favors. It means that organized religions with all the rules and obligations are products of our supra genetic capabilities. It drives a stake into the heart of so-called divinely guided behavior claimed by religious leaders who often upset social order for personal power.

In the words of Barbara Theiring: “God is not to be found in people, or in places, nor in words; God is that which cannot be named or defined or known.” Thus, the spirit, from which we create God, is an undefined biochemical force found in the synergy conserved in our massive body of genes associated with survival, every thing else about religion is circus. Although information concerned with the “force or spirit of survival” is embodied in DNA, we cannot ignore post-transcription modifications. These supra genetic changes in many respect freed us from our dependence on the slow plodding of random mutations for new and exciting things. Learning how to communicate at a more and more sophisticated level, perhaps the most important supra genetic capability, enable us to know, convey, and debate a number of challenges in the form of unanswered questions. What part “should” religion play in our lives? What does everlasting life mean in terms of our survival as a species? What is our individual soul? What part does determinism plays in our lives? Perhaps the most perplexing question is “What is the purpose of life?” I will leave all of this to the “supra genetic” capabilities of our religious philosophers where it properly belongs. However, I am content I understand what a spirit is.

URL: firetreepub.blogspot.com Comments Invited and not moderated