A second example of wholeness involves the ordinary experience of looking up at the sky at night and seeing the vast number of stars. We see this nighttime world by means of the light ‘carrying’ the stars to us, which means that this vast expanse of sky must all be present in the light which passes through the small hole of the pupil into the eye. Furthermore, other observers in different locations can see the same expanse of night sky.
Henri Bortoft
As physicists have pointed out, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for stars are a necessary part of any universe capable of generating us. Again, this does not imply that stars exist in order to make us. It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table, and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see is stars.
Richard Dawkins
The light of the moon covers the earth, yet it can be contained in a single bowl of water.
Dogen Zenji (1200-1253)
Only God knows the reason for those changes linked with the mystery of the future : for men there are truths hidden in the depths of time; they come forth only with the help of the ages, just as there are stars so far removed from the earth that their light has not yet reached us.
Chateaubriand
From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze – light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.
Roland Barthes
Creation Time
Flying back from Luxembourg I continued reading Richard Dawkins’ wonderful book The Blind Watchmaker. As someone who has taken Evolutionary theory for granted, I’ve realised since starting this book how little I really knew and how much I’ve subsequently learned. I’ve also begun thinking more seriously about religion and in particular Creationism. Creation myths are beautiful stories – I’ve always thought that – but when they are posited as theories and fact, one can only look on with some degree of despair. Reading this book has deepened that sense within me for Evolution and Natural Selection is not only an astounding theory but a beautiful fact of life.
I’ve often wondered what it is that Creationists and other religious persons object to when they insist that Evolution isn’t true – when clearly it is- and I think it can be summed up in one word: Time. We all find it very hard to conceive of Geological Time, that vast, incomprehensible span which makes each of us, as individuals, appear absurdly insignificant. We can easily imagine a century and even a millennium. We might if we have good imaginations contemplate the ice-age. But when we start considering the emergence of man 2 million years ago – let alone the Dinosaurs at 65 million – then we really start to struggle. Trying to imagine the age of the earth and we start gasping like a fish out of water.
As Professor Dawkins explains, we are not built to conceive of such spans of time such is why mutation (such as the fish leaving the water to walk upon the land) appears to us as absurd as a fish on a bicycle. We tend to ‘see’ these changes in our mind’s eye as happening within a length of time relative to our own brief lives. We see a fish suddenly sprout legs and leap onto land as if it were one in a garden pond taking a stroll on the lawn. Clearly it wasn’t like that. The length of time that was required for this process to occur is simply beyond our comprehension.
Before science began making strides out into the Universe and into ourselves, no-one could imagine the Earth and the Universe were so old. It made perfect sense to give them – or at least the Earth – an age within the grasp of human comprehension. It could be argued that the age of the Earth – given as a few thousand years – was arrived at, because it was at the limits of what the human mind could reasonably conceive. But what about the after life? Surely people could happily imagine eternity as a span beyond the supposed age of the earth? Well, yes, perhaps they could. But the difference between the eternity of life after death as opposed to the comparative eternity of time before life is stark. In the former, the individual being exists – one assumes as a soul, but in the latter the individual being has to contend with non-existence.
One of the most beautiful descriptions of the vastness of time comes from the seventeenth century and was written by Sir Thomas Browne in his book Urne Burial.
“We whose generations are ordained in this setting part of time, are providentially taken off from such imaginations. And being necessitated to eye the remaining particle of futurity, are naturally constituted unto thoughts of the next world, and cannot excusably decline the consideration of that duration, which maketh Pyramids pillars of snow, and all that’s past a moment.”
It was one thing to conceive of a span of time which made ‘all that’s past a moment,’ as being time of which one would somehow be aware or a part, but to conceive of the same span of time before one’s birth was – and is for many – quite impossible. My aunt once said to me ‘you have to believe in something.’ If you take that argument and turn it around it becomes quite telling: you can’t believe in nothing. Is religion therefore a consequence of a fear of nothing? And is a fear of nothing a fear of time?
Chance as a Draughtsman
I have recently been reading Richard Dawkins’ fantastic book ‘The Blind Watchmaker’ and was struck by the following passage as regards the work I’ve been doing over the past few years:
“We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully ‘designed’ to have come into existence by chance. How, then, did they come into existence? The answer, Darwin’s answer, is by gradual, step by-step transformations from simple beginnings, from primordial entities sufficiently simple to have come into existence by chance. Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to its predecessor, to have arisen by chance. But the whole sequence of cumulative steps constitutes anything but a chance process, when you consider the complexity of the final end-product relative to the original starting point. The cumulative process is directed by nonrandom survival. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the power of this cumulative selection as a fundamentally nonrandom process.”
The first sentence in this passage struck a chord with me as regards thoughts I’ve had on the sheer unlikelihood of my ever being born – my entire existence. When one considers that in order for us as the individuals we are to be born as we were, everything every one of our ancestors did had to be done exactly as it was, the mind implodes beneath the weight of our sheer improbability. Indeed as individuals we are teetering on the cusp of impossiblity; it’s almost as if we have been designed to be who we are (which of course is not the case). In many respects this problem of coming to terms with our individual existences in light of what amounts to seemingly random acts on the part of our forebears mirrors what Richard Dawkins discusses in his book; the idea that we as human beings are a product of chance.
As he writes: “Each successive change in the gradual evolutionary process was simple enough, relative to its predecessor, to have arisen by chance. But the whole sequence of cumulative steps constitutes anything but a chance process, when you consider the complexity of the final end-product relative to the original starting point.”
Every step our ancestors took in the process of our eventual being was also simple enough. They were more often than not steps taken quite by chance. But the ‘whole sequence of cumulative steps,’ as Richard Dawkins writes regarding Evolution ‘constitutes anything but a chance process’. I’m not – at present – trying to come up with any conclusions to this line of thinking save to say there is something there, a link between the process of Evolution and our individual arrival in the world: the subtle changes which allow flora and fauna to evolve and the subtle actions of ancestors which cause us to be born. That link exists in the individual’s (animal, plant… or ancestor) progression through life – a progression which is a constant (battle might be too strong a word) will to survive.
We journey through life with intentions of doing things, going places and so on, always considering our own safety (survival) even if that consideration resides somewhere within our subconscious minds, rising to the surface every now and then when danger become more manifest. And along the way chance plays a part, altering our movements, delaying our progression, speeding it up, slowing it down and so on. Traffic Jams, the weather, forgetting keys… the list of things which impact upon us is endless; chance encounters with people we’ve never met or know very well etc.. If in retropsect we could map or list everything that happened to every one of our ancestors, such a map would appear to us (not only very big!) to have been designed (indeed, anything seen in hindsight appears to be so). It would seem utterly impossible for chance to be such a draughtsman; to create a specific individual from such an enormous number of utterly unlikely events in the course of what we call history.
But that is what chance did. As I said, I’m not looking at this moment to come up with any great conclusions, save to say that thanks to Richard Dawkins I’m looking at my work in a slighty new light…