In Southwestern Peru, about five kilometres from the city of Ica there is an oasis. A small village of about one hundred people has been built up around it called Huacachina, and its unique image as a little mini-city around a lake surrounded by desert makes it an attraction to tens of thousands of tourists every year. Photos taken from the right angle seem to show nothing but miles of sand dunes with a compact little world tucked in the middle.
No camera angles are required to show our own island of existence in the vastness of space. The famous pale blue dot image taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 shows the earth as it is, an infinitesimal spec in a galaxy of 100 billion stars in a universe of 2 trillion galaxies, absent of life for all that we have ever found peering outwards, a veritable desert. What is man that You are mindful of him.
There are lots of arguments for God that begin with an evaluation of our own experience and consciousness. There is no doubt the human mind has immense capacity for experiences of mind shattering love, or that we encounter felt sense of givenness, beauty and an inexhaustible longing for something beyond every horizon. Consciousness itself seems miraculously irreducible, biologically inexplicable.
So? From the cosmic perspective you could point out that claims about human consciousness and experience are laughably pointless. Physicist Lawrence Krauss once said “We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a one percent bit of pollution in a universe…we are completely irrelevant.”
Even outside of religion many people today have a “spirituality” that relies on generous evaluations of human consciousness. From meditation to psychedelics many have found their own capacity for experiences of self-transcendence and a sense of consciousness expanding into all that is justifies belief about the significance and meaning of our own being within reality.
But arguing that consciousness, human morality or human values have any meaning ontologically means reckoning with the apparent infinity of time and space stretching away in every direction from us. Can we give value to our experience or are we just “a one percent bit of pollution?”
The problem of assigning value is problematic in any degree. After all, what really is value? Is the oasis in an infinite desert the only real thing that is? Can we even call ourselves an oasis? In some ways it seems no less arrogant to suggest we have value by our existence alone in the universe than to wish to diminish our position for the sake of the feeling of superiority over others who do assign us value, something that without doubt motivates figures such as Krauss. The belief that life is a cosmic accident is only that, a belief, and the infinitesimal exactness of mathematical constants required for life to exist in the universe suggest the opposite argument could equally be made.
Rather than pure cosmology many arguments about our apparent insignificance are made on the basis of evolution. The laws of natural selection give several problems to a generous theism or spirituality, one being an apparently reducible cause to life that explains behaviour and many of our impulses, and second being the problem of a path of life which suffering and death are written into from the outset, something that challenges our idea of a benevolent creator.
Many popular attitudes and ideas within science are more influenced by philosophy than we often like to think. Just like the cynical reductionism and materialist outlook of our time does not coincidentally mirror the materialism of our commodified society, so Darwin’s theory was less a lightbulb, apple from the tree, Eureka moment of discovery than something deeply reflective of the industrialising, progress obsessed world of the post-enlightenment. From Hegel to Marx to ideas that led to Darwin’s own, theories of progress and teleology were common stock, and Darwin himself, it’s worth remembering, had never heard of a gene or the theories of genetics we now possess.
Today evolution as a theory currently stands at somewhat of a point of tension between those who wish to remain firmly on the synthesis of Darwinism with later theories of genetics, and those who claim other fields are undermining that reliance, a 2014 paper in nature saw a group of scientists argue that:
“The number of biologists calling for change in how evolution is conceptualized is growing rapidly. Strong support comes from allied disciplines, particularly developmental biology, but also genomics, epigenetics, ecology and social science…the mere mention of the EES (extended evolutionary synthesis) often evokes an emotional, even hostile, reaction among evolutionary biologists. Too often, vital discussions descend into acrimony, with accusations of muddle or misrepresentation. Perhaps haunted by the spectre of intelligent design, evolutionary biologists wish to show a united front to those hostile to science.” (1)
This comment on what is ultimately not a re-questioning of the entire theory but of the fields that are incorporated within it, is extremely telling. Scientists don’t want to examine the foundations of evolution because it is the only game in town, and the other games in town are distinctly unlikeable. They may have a point about ID, but it is a stark reminder that Darwin’s idea was an outline that has been sprinkled with evidence and fortified against an opponent, rather than an unequivocal construction of bottom up epistemology. Evolution is a metanarrative, one that was of its time and that is now a guarded jewel in the materialists crown.
But let us put those personal gripes to the side. I am not a literal creationist by any means, and while evolution may be incomplete no doubt certain parts of its framework are true. But it has a basic problem when it comes to our evaluation of value, which is that it cannot account for the ground of our valuing of anything, and this tells us that using evolution (as strong or weak a metanarrative as it may be) as a way of reducing our value is an error.
Evolution gives us explanations for motivations towards some things we might label as value. Survival, reproduction and their behavioural corrollories go quite far in terms of explaining much of why we do what we do or care about what we care about. But above these things is the basic grounding of abstract value itself: consciousness.
Without consciousness there is no value. Value is an abstract noun, and like beauty or goodness it is a word that accounts for a set of felt experiences related to a sense of higher order good. That good itself only exists in regard to consciousness, to our experience. If consciousness is removed and we are only our behaviour (as some in the sciences essentially like to imagine is the case), then there are no horizons beyond our particular behaviour, no morals as we understand them consciously, there is only the behaviour. Our sense that goods themselves cohere into an abstract value is entirely reliant on the conscious contents of that experience. Values are words for something only enabled by consciousness.
The nature of consciousness itself is beyond problematic for evolution. The properties of something like an eye can at least in theory be explained by reference to their construction by contents of structure reducible to the structure of the universe itself (stress in theory), but consciousness requires a change in kind or quality. Evolution cannot produce it unless something of the substance of what it is working with already contains it, or at least contains its possibility, a stumbling block for materialism so significant many materialists simply settle at ignoring it.
Some however recognise the problem. Scientist and proponent of Integrated Information Theory Christof Koch, who once bet David Chalmers that neuroscience would solve the hard problem (he lost), has got closer to acknowledging that we cannot understand consciousness as a mere byproduct of evolution. He said in an interview:
“Yes we are continent on evolution. However we do live in a universe that’s strangely conducive to form complex structures, molecules that then assemble and self assemble and once you have molecules you start evolution by natural selection — it’s a fairly automatic process — the fact that we evolved I think is contingent but the fact that complex creatures evolved is much more predictable and automatically once you have complex systems in which you have lots of non linear feedback systems they have conscious sensations. So in that sense it’s not contingent…consciousness comes along it’s not contingent. What does that mean? I don’t know.” (2)
On examination, the idea that evolution undermines the valuing of consciousness is wrong, or at least it’s not justified by any evidence that we actually have about what consciousness actually is. Reductive explanations have up till now failed at reducing or explaining the thing they are ultimately trying to reduce.
Let us return then to our island in the desert. However we got here, we are here, “thrown” in Heidegger's terminology into reality dewy eyed and conscious not just in the abstract but in the sense of actually and really aware that we actually and really exist. With this comes a set of questions, as Michael Bitbol puts it:
Why do I live now, in this special period of history? Why am I me, born in this family, in this place of the world? I was taught that there were many other possibilities: being any person, at any time, or even just not being at all. And yet here I am, in front of you. Me, not you, here, not there, now, not then…What is the reason, if any, of this inescapable singularity? Does the fact that we all live through this mystery alleviate it in any way? (3)
Scale does little to diminish this question. It remains if the universe ends at the circumference of Earth’s atmosphere or if the universe continues into infinite space. Just like someone’s love for their husband or wife is unchanged by the population size of another country, so our evaluation of what it means that consciousness has been flung into reality is not exactly dependant on the mind boggling scale of the universe.
The argument might be made however in regard to purpose, that scale dwarfs our position not just because of its size but because that very size makes it hard to argue that the universe is designed or created in order for us to exist in it. In this view, the Lawrence Krauss view, we aren’t an island in a desert, we’re just an insignificant speck of sand in a desert of sand.
Again, however, what is left out is the stupefying fact of consciousness on this particular spec of dust. Philosopher Thomas Nagel put it: “The existence of consciousness is both one of the most familiar and one of the most astounding things about the world. No conception of the natural order that does not reveal it as something to be expected can aspire even to the outline of completeness.”
Christof Koch in the same interview already quoted suggests that his struggles to comprehend consciousness in reductive scientific terms have led him to re-think its value in the universe:
“Yes…I’m a reductionist because I use the good old reductionist techniques of science to study consciousness but I’m a romantic because I find myself in a universe where I can decipher the contrails of meaning. We live in a universe that’s particularly conducive to life, thats the anthropic universe, where the fine structure, the laws of physics are tuned to be conducive to life. We also live in a universe where complex structures — the ones that produce life — give rise to consciousness, so therefore we seem to be in a universe that’s conducive to being ever more conscious…For all I know maybe the universe is evolving towards some sort of a strange level of self consciousness…this makes me very hopeful. I don’t know what it means but it gives a gigantic arc to the unfolding history of the universe.”
A reminder again that Koff is a computational neuroscientist who bet David Chalmers science would solve the problem of consciousness. He was asked at the end of the interview if his ideas constituted something like a teleological view of reality, he responded: “It’s certainly a possibility…it fills me with hope.”
Exhausting reductionist views of our value, of consciousness, and of the worth we ascribe epistemologically to our experience then have many problems. The universe and its scale gives us no reason not to see this island of glittering light in the desert as its pinnacle any more or less than “a one percent bit of pollution”. Neither answer is any more or less of an interpretation. But we must say that any view of reality that doesn’t give serious consideration to our experience of reality as significant in regard to the universe as a whole is woefully and haplessly inadequate. It is to what that experience of reality can tell us that we will turn to in the next essay.
Darwinism is pure speculation, and not nearly as entertaining as speculation on the existence of God.
Not sure what all that has to do with God, but I guess I will find out in the follow-up you mention.
It is actually quite easy to see how consciousness can arise through evolution. Animals other than filter feeders need to make choices in order to survive. Eat that grub now or hide from whatever that looming big thing is and live to eat the grub later? Can I grab it quick enough to still have time to escape the threat? Mobile living creatures face choices between opportunity and danger. Not only that but the world contains subtle mixes of both. The animal that can hold before itself a mental picture of the world, that is, the one that is AWARE can make better picks among the array of possibility spread before it. The animal gains further advantage by placing ITSELF in this mental map. This is not an exhaustive description of how self-consciousness arose by evolution, but rather a reason why it could be selected for.
If you read Michael Tommassello's The Evolution of Agency you will get the intermediate steps filled in.
As for God, I've always trying to square the circle formed by my extensive scientific education and my church attendance, especially the emotional importance I attach to mystical rituals such as the Eucharist.
Here is one such effort:
https://open.substack.com/pub/godanddeatharefunny/p/how-to-believe-in-god-even-if-you?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=dw6fu