God's Unlikely Comeback: Evolution, Emanation, and Ecology

PREFATORY COMMENTS The first point relates to the context of this contribution. Were it fully committed to the academic process, certain things are lost and gained. What is lost is its obligation to base itself in forces in the larger society, as these are set aside in the academic context to afford intellectuals a sharper focus. Intellectuals in academia have no obligation to be comprehensible to the masses, and are asked in return to address current topical issues with increased precision; the state has been happy to provide them with the gain of financial and indeed physical security for this--at least up to recently. If the state continues to withdraw from this role in providing a venue for free inquiry, it is likely that other entities (including an initially "hedge school" coalition of scholars) will fill the vacuum--and historically resources have followed This paper addresses many current issues, some directly, and others more obliquely. In the first section, starting from Kauffman's recent expedition in the area, we consider how the immanence of order has caused even "hard" science--indeed, particularly "hard" science--to consider schemes so outlandish for explanation of the anthropic thrust of the constants of nature that the old saw "God does it on Tuesdays" now seems like a relatively reasonable explanation. This paper is paradoxically being written at a time when believers in "evolution" (limited to an outdated NeoDarwinian ethos) are at odds, politically as well as epistemologically, with "Creationists". It is argued that the first group need to familiarize themselves with the emanationism that Darwin only dimly grasped; for the latter, it is argued that a suitably modified emanationism/evolution is actually their best hope for retrieving the ethos of positive psychological transformation in the context of an over-arching sense of the cosmos in which that transformation is meaningful. This process has led to many of humanity's finest moments. We find a recent effort in this direction in the work of Gurdjieff. But wait! Surely we are not going to countenance a worldview incompatible with modern science in order to generate an emotional frenzy that we then called sacred, the intensity of which will increase as it is contradicted by the facts? Of course not; but neither are we going to commit to a worldview that--in the past century--has variously and absurdly outlawed talk of mental process, trivialized biological inheritance, and announced that some stars are older than the universe. Thus, the paper ends with a tentative cosmogony in which the next step in evolution is seen in a larger context. Moreover, it is proposed that if it is granted that the unfolding of the cosmos, as Paul Davies concluded in his book on the subject, can be seen to point toward humans interacting with it and each other in a meaningful way, we do not need the gear supplied by the Abrahamic religions to transcend ourselves in the manner that the religious have done. In fact, we can work toward preservation of that which we see as sacred. In our case, it is argued that enacting legislation preserving the environment and human well-being in general, fighting corruption, preserving freedom of inquiry and speech, as well as action preserving true methods of inquiry into the real in science and art are examples of such work. Sankara, Ramanuja, Milarepa in the East as well as Marcus Aurelius, Eckhart, John of the Cross and others in the West and scores of others have indicated a state of being in which the transcendent somehow exemplifies itself in a suitably transformed human psyche. This state of Being was available also to those in the active life; as the founder of the Vincentian order put it, pray that its recipients do not experience giving as mere charity. Religious formation, unlike academic formation, is mainly about the transformation of the subject; selflessness is induced, by greater (Mahayana) or lesser (Hinayana) vehicles. …