In the beginning was... what?
Since before the dawn of recorded time, we humans have grappled with our origin story. How did we explain how we came to exist, how our world came to exist, how our universe came to exist and why? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are we here to participate in the great unfolding of the universe? How do we make sense of reality of which we are a part?
At such moments of existential curiosity, we have always been able to devise answers to fill the void.
Every culture has its creation myth. And every one of these myths required supernatural intervention to kick-start existence. A god or gods, standing outside of the day-to-day routine of human life. From those oral traditions – myths and legends passed on from generation to generation around paleolithic campfires – to written accounts that would formalise into the great religions of the world, myth morphed into theology. Today, the language we use for our creation myth is that of science. The Big Bang, 13.8 billion years ago.
The Enlightenment shed new light on creation. Descartes stripped away the material from the spiritual, creating dualism; two worlds, one material and one spiritual, the latter being an invisible realm of the soul, of angels and of God. Newton turned alchemy into science; the scientific method demanded that every effect have a cause. And for Newton, a God-fearing man, the first cause was God. But subsequent generations of scientists bore down in ever-greater detail into the physical world of matter, with more and more coming to reject the need for a Supreme Being to explain reality.
By 1885, Nietzsche could proclaim – without fear of being put to death as a heretic – that God is dead. Indeed, who needs God if you have steam engines, telegraphy, weaving machines, newspapers and hygiene? And as a theory posited by Darwin, evolution has great explicatory powers to answer questions about how we came to be. Descended from apes, which in turn were descended from early mammals, which evolved from fish that learned to adapt to life on dry land. And all the way back to the last universal common ancestor, then back to the first primitive life forms on our planet.
While science was getting to grips with the inner workings of the atom and the cell, and the vastness of the Cosmos, our lives were becoming more and more focused on the acquisition of material possessions. The spiritual aspects of human life withered away under pressure from consumerist ways, especially in 'advanced' Western societies as the 20th century wore on.
Atheism spread through societies as they urbanised. Science preached cause and effect, and if no cause could be found, then randomness and complexity were the answer. The implied physicalism of the Universe – everything is composed of matter. And by analogy, materialism came to mean the craving to buy stuff because that's become the meaning of life. If there's no God, no metaphysical dimension to the human experience, then what's left? Matter, and its acquisition, for the sake of indicating status. We work to buy, we buy to show off.
After a century or two of science's primacy that brought about huge improvements in the material quality of human lives, serious questions – doubts even – started to emerge.
Scientific progress stalled.
Theoretical physics of the past half-century has had but one major breakthrough – confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson. Beyond that? String theory? Going nowhere. Dark energy and dark matter? We don't know. A hundred years on from the foundations of quantum mechanics and there's still no consensus as to how to interpret quantum effects. And why does the universe appear to be so precisely fine-tuned for life? Then there's the question of abiogenesis – the leap from inanimate non-life to life that feeds and breeds. How did complex chemistry turn into simple biology? Don't know (although some interesting progress has been made in investigating space gum from asteroid Bennu which contains all five nucleobases essential for RNA).
But above all, the greatest mystery is that of consciousness. And it is in consciousness that my spiritual journey is grounded.
Consciousness is the bedrock. It is there; it is a real experience, that cannot be negated. No one can tell me that I'm not aware, that I'm not experiencing consciousness. Materialist-reductionist physicalists would argue that consciousness is either an illusion or a byproduct (epiphenomenon) of evolution, a thing our brains do. I would argue that consciousness is absolute, it is the fundamental property of the universe; without consciousness there would be no spacetime, no matter, no energy.
So – in the beginning was Consciousness. [Consciousness comes before thought, thought is articulated and communicated as word.] If we accept that in the beginning was Consciousness rather than its derivative's derivative, then we can take it as the ground zero from which to ask all further questions about the spiritual, the metaphysical, the supernatural nature of our reality. You are conscious, therefore you are. Let's start from there.
More tomorrow about consciousness tomorrow.
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