I recently watched a Netflix documentary narrated by Morgan Freeman called Life on Our Planet. The documentary is about the different kingdoms of life that rose and fell through massive changes in earth’s geology, chemistry and climate over the last four billion years. In that time asteroids, volcanoes, climatic disruption, sea-level changes and alterations in atmospheric chemistry caused five mass extinctions in which at least 75% or more of all species were wiped out. These have been punctuated by numerous minor extinction events and periods like the five ice-ages. Some scientists hypothesize the most severe ice-age lasted 100 million years during which the entire planet virtually froze over, creating a “snowball earth”. Our hominid family has experienced its own near-extinction events, the worst of which, genetic studies show, occurred about 750,000 years ago, reducing the whole population to perhaps as few as 1,200 individuals. The number of times such catastrophes have pushed life to the edge of oblivion is somewhat unsettling.
My takeaway from all this is that we are astronomically lucky to be here. The long thin thread leading to us could easily have broken so many times. And yet here we are. Some take this to indicate that humans and traits like intelligence or consciousness were somehow fated to emerge, that evolution always produces smarter and smarter versions of life. But our existence was no more probable than all the many alternatives. We were just lucky. If dinosaurs were still around because the Chicxulub meteor hadn’t hit, this wouldn’t imply that small-brained gigantism was the preferred direction of evolution.
And yet evolution is often falsely thought of as a kind of progress towards greater complexity and intelligence — from microbes at the bottom to humans at the top. This false narrative about progress has influenced many fields of thought from evolution to social history to religion. In the 1950s, the writings of scientist-theologian Teilhard de Chardin convinced many that cosmic and biological evolution were driven by a spiritual impulse compelling matter to self-organize in more intelligent and harmonious ways. Evolution in his eyes progressed from the geosphere to the biosphere to the “noosphere” of human thought and technology. he argued the latter would eventually converge on an “Omega Point”, a more harmonious state of cosmic unity reconciling matter and the universal spirit.
His ideas continue to influence thinkers today like Eric Steinhart, a philosopher whose ideas can be broadly classed within the tradition of spiritual naturalism. As such Steinhart rejects Chardin’s idea of spirit as something supernatural or immaterial, arguing that spirit just is matter in a more complex form; “spirituality is evolved complexity”. But Steinhart agrees with the notion of evolutionary progress “All things in the universe, and the universe itself, strives to climb ever higher”. He sees things arriving at an Omega Point in the form of “superhuman animals, robots and godlike computers” that will keep self-improving, eventually colonizing the galaxy and bootstrapping the cosmos into a being of “infinite spirituality”.
I think all this is hubris to say the least with little relevance for a spirituality of everyday life. But such claims arise from the more widely accepted idea that the cosmos is predisposed to evolve in ways that amplify human traits like intelligence and tool-use. A recent popular work by Philip Goff, Why?: The Purpose of the Universe, makes a similar argument regarding life and consciousness. He thinks that the physical constants of nature like the strength of gravity, the speed of light and the mass of the proton have been ‘fine-tuned’. If they had been only slightly different, things like planets, complex chemistry and biology would be impossible. This may be true, but who can tell what other kinds of interesting but non-biological phenomena might have emerged if the constants had been different? Again, we should avoid reading some cosmic purpose into what is more a matter of dumb luck. It’s like the Australian ice skater Steven Bradbury who won gold at the 2002 Winter Olympics after the other competitors all tripped over each other. To conclude from Bradbury’s win that he must have been the superior athlete or that the race was rigged would only express a bias one way or another.
Ultimately I think Steinhart and Goff’s kind of thinking springs from the bad habit of judging nature according to the traits we value as humans. Animals are judged to be inferior because less intelligent and God to be superior because supposedly super-intelligent, all-knowing etc. But as the ancient Greek thinker Xenophanes once observed “The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, while the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. Yet if cattle or horses … had hands and could draw … then the horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle”. In other words thinking of nature and cosmos in terms of humanity’s distinguishing traits is just looking at things from our own species’ biased perspective. We need to take a more rounded, objective view of things.
When we do, it’s clear that evolution is not about the realization of human qualities like intelligence any more than it is about realizing the methane-producing qualities of cows or the earth-digging qualities of earthworms. Evolution could have taken (and might take in the future) any number of different paths in which things like high complexity, braininess and sociality are absent. Nor is the existence of that complex mode of matter, life, a cosmic necessity. After all, out of 100 billion, billion planets, life is known to exist on only one, and of all ordinary matter only 3% is in the form of stars and planets. Given our dire environmental situation, understanding the fragility and marginality of life is, I believe, what’s needed right now instead of a false confidence that we are somehow meant to be here.
Spiritual naturalism should counterpose to the anthropocentric myths of cosmic purpose and progress, a more down-to-earth narrative about the contest to survive and thrive in an often hostile world. Part of that struggle is to find meaning and realize higher values like compassion, justice, beauty and kindness, both personally and collectively. Whatever headway we make in that regard, it is far from guaranteed by either cosmic or biological evolution. On the contrary, life is an inherently dangerous enterprise, the threat of defeat, loss and suffering always close. For individuals and societies to live and live well then, requires constant effort, commitment and resisting the temptation to go with behaviors motivated by baser drives whether prejudice, fear, superstition or lethargy.
Despite their outdated dogmas, traditional religions have had fairly consistent things to say about the importance of such values and the need for things like self-discipline, ritual and practice to strengthen and maintain them. Christ’s message of universal love, the Buddha’s call for compassion, Lao Tsu’s counsel to follow the Way of nature and Krishna’s veneration of cosmic unity for example are invaluable spiritual treasures even if in today’s world they should be read from a naturalist, more scientifically informed perspective. We can also take inspiration from developments in more recent times like the abolition of slavery, the rise of democracy, the outlawing of torture, the emergence of women’s rights and the historical significance of things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We ought to celebrate these spiritual achievements more than our technological ones, as the real signposts of our progress and maturity as a species.
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Notes:
1) Zwart, H. (2022). “Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenology of the Noosphere”, in Continental Philosophy of Technoscience. vol 38.
2) The remaining 97% of ordinary matter is in the form of relatively uneventful, interstellar hydrogen.
About 150 years ago, Nietzsche had this to say about “the real truth of nature and the lie of culture that poses as if it were the only reality” (as quoted in Alexander Nehamas’ Nietzsche: Life as Literature, p. 43):
‘But what makes tragedy even more remarkable in Nietzsche’s eyes is that in the very process of revealing this painful truth, it offers a consolation for the negative and desperate reaction this is bound to generate. It shows that ultimately we are not different from the rest of nature, that we are part and parcel of it, and belong totally to it. It leaves its audience, which at least for a moment ceases to regard itself as separate from the rest of the world, with the “metaphysical comfort… that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearance, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable”, and that its blind and purposeless, constant ebb and flow is to be admired and celebrated.’
I appreciate you taking the time to explain this.