vol 2: Synopsis
part III: Modern physics
page 23: Life
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
Life
From the scientific point of view, the universe is a vast network of interacting particles which is responsible for its own movement and structure. From earliest times, life has been described as self motion, so it is natural to see the universe as a living organism, This organism is partitioned into smaller organisms, such as you and I and all the other entitites we can distinguish in the whole. Acting together,these partial events form the life of the universe, tantamount to the life of God.
We can communicate with one another because we share a common life. When I say 'I feel sad' you know what I mean because you have felt sad too. And so with all the communications that we have with one another. Meaning is made possible by shared experience. It may be one of the complex feelings that surround our reproductive activity, or the simple statement 'this is a brick'.
We may look at life from two points of view: one, from the outside, is the point of view taken by biology. We learn about the world around us through our five senses. The other is from the inside, my private experience of life, whose study ranges from psychology to mysticism. There are thousands of words to describe private experiences, and the body language we have adapted from our more animal past provides another broad channel between private and public experience.
The most important example of life to me is my own life. I am aware of my own life, and as Descartes noticed, this consciousness proves to me the reality of my own existence. It is also clear that my life is deeply dependent upon my body, although the actual connection between the conscious 'soul' and the unconscious 'body' has been a subject of speculation for thousands of years.
One school of thought, whose origins go back to ancient Greece, is that the soul is a separate (or at least separable) entity, and continues to live after the body dies and decays. At the other end of the spectrum are people who hold that the terms soul and body are just names for different aspects of one entity, the living thing, and that when an individual dies, everything that pertained to that individual is lost.
There is a middle way between these extremes enshrined in the modern theory of evolution, which serves as the fundamental explanatory structure in biology. Every creature alive today can trace its ancestry in an unbroken line to the first lives which appeared on earth three or four billion years ago. Given the short lifetime of many of our early ancestors, this implies a continuous thread of life one thousand billion (= 1 trillion) generations long.
The continuity between these generations is maintained by reproduction. The ability to reproduce serves as the broadest definition of life. Reproduction is a recursive process which has no natural ending as long as parents have the resources to create children. The continuity of life through reproduction rests on two foundations. The first is the genetic information handed from generation to generation encoded in DNA or RNA. The second is the living cell which is able to read genetic information and act upon the instructions therein to convert some of its food into itself.
The biological evolution of life is mirrored by our spiritual evolution. Through nurture, each generation of people pass on their language and culture to their offspring. Language and culture evolve from generation to generation, adapting people to the changing environment of their lives. This text is part of this cultural exchange, and so part of the spiritual life of the human species.
Books
| Berndt, Ronald M, The World of the First Australians : Aboriginal Traditional Life Past and Present., 1988 Foreword: '[This book] gives a comprehensive picture of traditional Aboriginal culture, with special attention to certain areas which the authors know personally. This is how life was lived before the coming of Europeans, or before European influence dramatically modifed it. ... Here the major focus is on traditionally oriented Aborigines whose way of life is rapidly disappearing. Over most of the Continent it is already a thing of the past. The material is fully dicumented, with references. Amazon back |
| Sigmund, Karl, Games of Life: Explorations in Ecology, Evolution and Behaviour, Oxford UP 1993 Jacket: 'This book takes us on a tour through the games and computer simulations that are helping us to understand the ecology, evolution and behaviour of real life - from cat and mouse to cellular automata, from the battle of the sexes to artificial life, from poker to prisoner's dilemma.' Amazon back |
| Smolin, Lee, The Life of the Cosmos, Oxford University Pres 1997 Jacket: 'Smolin posits that a process of self-organisation like that of biological evolution shapes the universe, as it developes and eventually reproduces through black holes, each of which may result in a big bang and a new universe. Natural selection may guide the appearance of the laws of physics, favouring those universes which best reproduce. ... Smolin is one of the leading cosmologists at work today, and he writes with an expertise and a force of argument that will command attention throughout the world of physics.' Amazon back |
| Stewart, Ian, Life's Other Secret: The new mathematics of the living world, Allen Lane 1998 Preface: 'There is more to life than genes. ... Life operates within the rich texture of the physical universe and its deep laws, patterns, forms, structures, processes and systems. ... Genes nudge the physical universe in specific directions ... . The mathematical control of the growing organism is the other secret ... . Without it we will never solve the deeper mysteries of the living world - for life is a partnership between genes and mathematics, and we must take proper account of the role of both partners.' (xi) Amazon back |
| Suzuki, Daisetz Teitaro, Studies in Zen, Rider and Co, for the Buddhist Society 1953 Studies in Zen is the eigth volume of the collected works of DT Suzuki. Jacket: 'These studies, packed with the jewels of Zen wisdom, and written with unrivalled knowledge, will appeal to all who seek a deeper understanding of Eastern ways of thought and spiritual achievement. For Zen is unique in the whole range of human understanding, and Dr. Suzuki is accepted as its greatest exponent. Amazon back |
| Wilson, Edward Osborne, Sociobiology: The new synthesis, Harvard UP 1975 Chapter 1: '... the central theoretical problem of sociobiology: how can altruism, which by definition reduces personal fitness, possibly evolve by natural selection? The answer is kinship. ... Sociobiology is defined as the systematic study of the biological basis of all social behaviour. ... It may not be too much to say that sociology and the other social sciences, as well as the humanities, are the last branches of biology waiting to be included in the Modern Synthesis.' Amazon back |
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