Forget the old textbook definition of life--something to the effect that being a self-perpetuating, nonequilibrium process based on carbon chemistry and driven by the influx of solar energy. That never resonated with anyone who mused on life. No, life must be something much richer, immeasurably more worthy of our attention. Life is mystery and masterpiece--an overflowing abundance of perfect compositions.....the physical forms of life are expressions of something deeper, something immovable, something perfect.
We do sense, as Axe claims, that each species is a perfect creation, but what can we possibly mean by that when we look at species as radically different as platypusses, vampire bats, dragonflys, stingrays and orangutans? Further, if we consider how many individuals of those species, including our own, suffer from a variety of defects and illnesses, it makes it that much more difficult to comprehend this perfection. And yet, this sense of the perfection of each species is undeniably there. In fact, if individuals of each species suffer 'imperfections' that very word implies that there is a perfect specimen from which these individuals vary. So what makes this perfect specimen, not only perfect in relation to less well endowed members of its own species, but perfect in an objective, non-comparative sense?
The answer is that each living being is born not only with a remarkably complex and synchronized and precise array of equipment that we call an organism, but also with a remarkably specific sequence of desires that perfectly aligns with the equipment that it is given. This biological equipment allows us to fulfill our desires, and to sometimes struggle, and learn and grow stronger and wiser as we attempt to fulfill those desires. And this remarkable alignment between desires and the equipment to fulfill those desires is an essential part, if not the central part, of this idea that species are perfect creations rather than haphazard works in progress, as Darwinists would have it.
Much has been written recently about members of our own species that are born into male bodies but have female desires, or vice-versa, and the confusion and suffering that that mismatch creates. But imagine if you were born into a human body with the desires, not of the opposite gender of your species, but the desires of a different species. Simply, that condition, of having humming bird desires, or earthworm desires, or elephant desires, and being trapped inside a human body, would be not only insufferable, but not even survivable.
Do you know Mary Oliver's poem, 'This Morning'? Here it is:
This morning the redbirds' eggs
have hatched and already the chicks
are chirping for food. They don't
know where it's coming from, they
just keep shouting, "More! More!"
As to anything else, they haven't
had a single thought. Their eyes
haven't opened, they know nothing
about the sky that's waiting. Or
the thousands, the millions of trees.
They don't even know they have wings.
And just like that, like a simple
neighborhood event, a miracle is
taking place.
Now you can say that the chick's innate craving for food is the result of a genetic arrangement which is the result of a long and slowly perfecting process of evolution. But does that make sense? We are not talking about gradual improvements here. We are talking about life and death. For this system to work, not only must the chicks be born with an overwhelming desire for food, they must have an innate response to that desire by making sounds loud enough for the parents to hear them. And they must have parents who have an overwhelming desire to provide that food. They must be sheltered in a nest that is elevated, protecting them from all the ground dwelling prey that could end their brand new existence. Their parents must be able, not only to have the know how and enormous agility and muscular control and precision to build that nest, but to have the unwavering desire and commitment to do so, plus having the startling aerial precision to deliver that food precisely into the beaks of their unseeing children once they do arrive. Could this have happened over a Darwinian length of time, of untold generations?
Now we are talking about life and death here. Were these bird children first born with no desire for food, and then gradually evolved 'hunger,' because only the ones that were fortunate enough to accidentally get the right genetic mutation evolved a desire for food? Of course not. As I say, this is life and death. There is no time to waste on an excruciatingly long and random Darwinian process. These children must be born with hunger from the first inception of life and they must be fed. What about the parents? How did they ever reach maturity if they didn't start out their lives with an overwhelming desire for food and the ability to cry out for it; and if they didn't, themselves, have the parents with the know how and commitment to provide that food for them? And then of course, there is the problem of the parents of these parents and their survival to maturity, and so on.
No. If there is to be survival, the whole system, of synchronized genes and synchronized desires, must be in place from the beginning, not only in the chicks, but in the parents of the chicks that produced them and cared for them. And don't forget the perfect food, perfect for young bird digestive systems and young bird development, must be available and have grown and developed in that same environment; and the parent's ability and desire to search out and remove that best food for their children, must be there as well.
So the chicks innate desire for food, the chicks innate response to that desire, to call out, the parent's innate ability to recognize their own chick's voice and to know how to respond to it, the parent's remarkable ability to locate the food, and gather the food, and their dazzling aerial ability to return that food to their children's mouths, and their passionate desire and commitment to do just that; and their children's desire to eat that perfect food and their ability to digest it and transform it into the materials for their growing bodies; all of that is perfect, isn't it?
When human children are about a year old, they start having an overwhelming and persistent desire to stand up and walk. This continues in spite of numerous and sometimes painful failed attempts. This desire is inextricably linked to their developing vision and their developing ability to recognize objects at some distance from them, and to identify those objects as either things that they would like to get closer to, or things that they would like to get further away from. They also, at this time, begin to develop an unrelenting curiosity to explore everything about their environment. To look under and over each object. To smell, taste and touch them and to listen to them, if they makes a noise, or if the child can manipulate them in some way to create a noise. Why does every human baby have this overwhelming desire to explore this world that they find themselves in? Could it be that this is the environment that they chose to be in, that they wanted to be in when they chose to attach themselves to this particular organism prior to birth?
Foals, on the other hand, are born with the desire to stand up immediately. It takes them about thirty minutes to master this skill. Of course, even though they were just born, they arrived with the leg muscles and coordination to be able to do that, and they are driven by the overwhelming desire for their mother's milk, which can only be accessed by them standing. Mother, of course, is waiting right there, her udder's swelling with the absolutely perfect food for her hungry children and with an overwhelming desire to feed them. The mother, as well, is born with the know how to nurse, and the foals are born with the know how to suckle. Perfect, yes?
The caribou are the most migratory land animals on earth. Some large herds migrate three thousand miles a year. Caribou calves are often born as their mothers are in the process of migration. Caribou calves can run within ninety minutes of their birth, and within a few hours they can follow their mothers across the tundra, galloping along at up to forty-five miles per hour! Again, perfect and miraculous.
When Watson and Crick discovered the arrangement of nucleic acids in the DNA molecule, they thought they had discovered God. When, some forty or fifty years later, when we could sequence all the genes in a genome, we, again, thought we had discovered God. But God is not a separate thing that can be studied in pieces. God pervades the whole. There is the genome, but far, far more complicated than that, is the system whereby the specific genes of the genome are fired in precise sequences, trillions upon trillions of times, and trillions of times simultaneously, to allow fertilized eggs to grow into children ready to be born. And more complicated than that is the system whereby each of these genes are copied and then translated into amino acids, which are then folded into proteins, which are then sent on their way to the precise location in the body where they are needed. And more complicated than that is the way one cell, one fertilized ovum, in the process of many, many mitotic division, differentiates itself into the two thousand different types of cells that make up a human fetus, and each of these cells, although they all contain the same sequence of over six billion nucleic acid base pairs, that we call the genome; these genome copies are folded in two thousand different ways so that the gene sequences needed for transcription are exposed to the nucleoplasm of the cell where the proteins that direct the transcription have access to them; each type of cell specializing in the manufacture of a different set of proteins coded by a different sequence of genes unique to that cell type.
But beyond this dazzling complexity, which, by the way, has always been there, even in bacteria, the very beginning of life, or life would not have been possible at any level; there is also the environment into which the newly born finds itself. And this new born greets its environment with an innate sequential set of desires which will make it powerfully desire to do the things it needs to do, not only to survive, but to thrive and derive intense pleasure from this environment. Yes, mother's milk, whatever one's species, is the biologically perfect food for one's developing body, but it is also the food that the young one craves. Nursing is not just a matter of survival. It is a matter of ecstasy, for both the child and the mother. Walking, as well, is, again, not just necessary for a human's survival, but increases the child's ability to explore a world in intimate detail, a world that it finds wondrous.
All of this is part of the perfection of life. Of course, with our 'modern' understanding, we have reduced embryonic development and childhood development, into a tedious exercise in one's ability to survive. The result of a series of uncanny 'accidents' producing a result that we, willy nilly, are 'stuck' with. Childhood, and one's relationship to one's parents, has been reduced to a minefield with the possibility of 'traumatizing' events lurking around every corner. And, as a continuation of our infernal materialist perspective, life has become a rapacious quest for the acquisition of material things, even the rapacious acquisition of other people. If not people that one owns outright, as in harems and slavery, which still thrive in many places, then people that are within one's hegemony of power and dependency. It may be too direct, too gauche, to outright brag about how much one has in the way of cash and stocks and houses, and cars and boats; but to gloat about how many people you employ, as if this is your gift to society, and not, what is really meant, a way of profiting from each and every one of them, so that you, the listener, can just barely imagine what kind of money the speaker makes.....well, that is perfectly acceptable.
Now some of you may say, Matt, it's the genes that create the desires. The genes create certain proteins and they wind up, after an excruciatingly complex process, stimulating neurons in the brain that create desires. If that were the case, it still would be an absolutely remarkable process of staggering complexity that defies a simple process of evolution, and that would need to begin with staggering complexity in order for there to be any survival. But desire is an experience. You can try to explain our human experience by material things, but you have to come up with a ridiculously far-fetched notion of random accidents to account for the complexity and you still have not explained what you cannot explain by material means, the leap from material to experience. The leap from an electric current running through a neuron, to a sensation. From my perspective it is the desires, or the desire to have a certain kind of experience, or the desire to provide a certain kind of experience that creates the material complexity and the complexity of design, and not the other way round. Certainly that is how our world of human creation works, isn't it? Every human artifact and creation is there because someone wanted it to be there, and that desire, which is a non-material, immeasurable wisp of an experience, begins in consciousness and ends in a material creation.
You may also say that many of those behaviors that we do are based on things that we learn as we develop and that other creatures learn. They are taught to us and to them by parents and teachers. True. But, as anyone with any experience in education knows, there is no learning unless there is a desire on the part of students to learn and desire on the part of teachers to teach. Animals may learn the details of hunting techniques, and evasion techniques and building techniques from their elders, but all of that learning would not be possible unless it were grounded in the young animal's desire to learn and the older animal's desire to impart that learning. And that desire, for both the young and the elder is not, itself, taught, but is innate, not in the genes, but in the spiritual make up of each separate being. And these things that are being taught are the very things that are essential to the survival of the newer generation. Perfect!
In a natural world, all of this would be so evident as to not even justify calling anyone's attention to it. But in our flat, de-mystified, materialist society, life has become a tedious and draining chore of survival. Our joy of life is demolished by the fearful way in which we were reared by our terrified parents, convinced by the latest psychological fad, that any false move in child rearing is sure to cause permanent trauma; our natural health is ruined by mass produced, chemicalized food that advertisers seduce us into eating; and excessive medications that materialist doctors insist that we take; and our naturally boundless curiosity about the world is extirminated by the anxious and tedious schooling that we have received and that is organized, not to provide us with a deeper and richer understanding of life, the natural world and human accomplishments, but to stressfully prepare us for a tension filled competition for entry into a rapidly disappearing middle class. But underneath all the layers of bad education, and bad religion, and bad advertising, and fearful child rearing, that we have inherited, we can still glimpse and intuitively sense the perfection that underlies it all.
I welcome your comments.
We do sense, as Axe claims, that each species is a perfect creation, but what can we possibly mean by that when we look at species as radically different as platypusses, vampire bats, dragonflys, stingrays and orangutans? Further, if we consider how many individuals of those species, including our own, suffer from a variety of defects and illnesses, it makes it that much more difficult to comprehend this perfection. And yet, this sense of the perfection of each species is undeniably there. In fact, if individuals of each species suffer 'imperfections' that very word implies that there is a perfect specimen from which these individuals vary. So what makes this perfect specimen, not only perfect in relation to less well endowed members of its own species, but perfect in an objective, non-comparative sense?
The answer is that each living being is born not only with a remarkably complex and synchronized and precise array of equipment that we call an organism, but also with a remarkably specific sequence of desires that perfectly aligns with the equipment that it is given. This biological equipment allows us to fulfill our desires, and to sometimes struggle, and learn and grow stronger and wiser as we attempt to fulfill those desires. And this remarkable alignment between desires and the equipment to fulfill those desires is an essential part, if not the central part, of this idea that species are perfect creations rather than haphazard works in progress, as Darwinists would have it.
Much has been written recently about members of our own species that are born into male bodies but have female desires, or vice-versa, and the confusion and suffering that that mismatch creates. But imagine if you were born into a human body with the desires, not of the opposite gender of your species, but the desires of a different species. Simply, that condition, of having humming bird desires, or earthworm desires, or elephant desires, and being trapped inside a human body, would be not only insufferable, but not even survivable.
Do you know Mary Oliver's poem, 'This Morning'? Here it is:
This morning the redbirds' eggs
have hatched and already the chicks
are chirping for food. They don't
know where it's coming from, they
just keep shouting, "More! More!"
As to anything else, they haven't
had a single thought. Their eyes
haven't opened, they know nothing
about the sky that's waiting. Or
the thousands, the millions of trees.
They don't even know they have wings.
And just like that, like a simple
neighborhood event, a miracle is
taking place.
Now you can say that the chick's innate craving for food is the result of a genetic arrangement which is the result of a long and slowly perfecting process of evolution. But does that make sense? We are not talking about gradual improvements here. We are talking about life and death. For this system to work, not only must the chicks be born with an overwhelming desire for food, they must have an innate response to that desire by making sounds loud enough for the parents to hear them. And they must have parents who have an overwhelming desire to provide that food. They must be sheltered in a nest that is elevated, protecting them from all the ground dwelling prey that could end their brand new existence. Their parents must be able, not only to have the know how and enormous agility and muscular control and precision to build that nest, but to have the unwavering desire and commitment to do so, plus having the startling aerial precision to deliver that food precisely into the beaks of their unseeing children once they do arrive. Could this have happened over a Darwinian length of time, of untold generations?
Now we are talking about life and death here. Were these bird children first born with no desire for food, and then gradually evolved 'hunger,' because only the ones that were fortunate enough to accidentally get the right genetic mutation evolved a desire for food? Of course not. As I say, this is life and death. There is no time to waste on an excruciatingly long and random Darwinian process. These children must be born with hunger from the first inception of life and they must be fed. What about the parents? How did they ever reach maturity if they didn't start out their lives with an overwhelming desire for food and the ability to cry out for it; and if they didn't, themselves, have the parents with the know how and commitment to provide that food for them? And then of course, there is the problem of the parents of these parents and their survival to maturity, and so on.
No. If there is to be survival, the whole system, of synchronized genes and synchronized desires, must be in place from the beginning, not only in the chicks, but in the parents of the chicks that produced them and cared for them. And don't forget the perfect food, perfect for young bird digestive systems and young bird development, must be available and have grown and developed in that same environment; and the parent's ability and desire to search out and remove that best food for their children, must be there as well.
So the chicks innate desire for food, the chicks innate response to that desire, to call out, the parent's innate ability to recognize their own chick's voice and to know how to respond to it, the parent's remarkable ability to locate the food, and gather the food, and their dazzling aerial ability to return that food to their children's mouths, and their passionate desire and commitment to do just that; and their children's desire to eat that perfect food and their ability to digest it and transform it into the materials for their growing bodies; all of that is perfect, isn't it?
When human children are about a year old, they start having an overwhelming and persistent desire to stand up and walk. This continues in spite of numerous and sometimes painful failed attempts. This desire is inextricably linked to their developing vision and their developing ability to recognize objects at some distance from them, and to identify those objects as either things that they would like to get closer to, or things that they would like to get further away from. They also, at this time, begin to develop an unrelenting curiosity to explore everything about their environment. To look under and over each object. To smell, taste and touch them and to listen to them, if they makes a noise, or if the child can manipulate them in some way to create a noise. Why does every human baby have this overwhelming desire to explore this world that they find themselves in? Could it be that this is the environment that they chose to be in, that they wanted to be in when they chose to attach themselves to this particular organism prior to birth?
Foals, on the other hand, are born with the desire to stand up immediately. It takes them about thirty minutes to master this skill. Of course, even though they were just born, they arrived with the leg muscles and coordination to be able to do that, and they are driven by the overwhelming desire for their mother's milk, which can only be accessed by them standing. Mother, of course, is waiting right there, her udder's swelling with the absolutely perfect food for her hungry children and with an overwhelming desire to feed them. The mother, as well, is born with the know how to nurse, and the foals are born with the know how to suckle. Perfect, yes?
The caribou are the most migratory land animals on earth. Some large herds migrate three thousand miles a year. Caribou calves are often born as their mothers are in the process of migration. Caribou calves can run within ninety minutes of their birth, and within a few hours they can follow their mothers across the tundra, galloping along at up to forty-five miles per hour! Again, perfect and miraculous.
When Watson and Crick discovered the arrangement of nucleic acids in the DNA molecule, they thought they had discovered God. When, some forty or fifty years later, when we could sequence all the genes in a genome, we, again, thought we had discovered God. But God is not a separate thing that can be studied in pieces. God pervades the whole. There is the genome, but far, far more complicated than that, is the system whereby the specific genes of the genome are fired in precise sequences, trillions upon trillions of times, and trillions of times simultaneously, to allow fertilized eggs to grow into children ready to be born. And more complicated than that is the system whereby each of these genes are copied and then translated into amino acids, which are then folded into proteins, which are then sent on their way to the precise location in the body where they are needed. And more complicated than that is the way one cell, one fertilized ovum, in the process of many, many mitotic division, differentiates itself into the two thousand different types of cells that make up a human fetus, and each of these cells, although they all contain the same sequence of over six billion nucleic acid base pairs, that we call the genome; these genome copies are folded in two thousand different ways so that the gene sequences needed for transcription are exposed to the nucleoplasm of the cell where the proteins that direct the transcription have access to them; each type of cell specializing in the manufacture of a different set of proteins coded by a different sequence of genes unique to that cell type.
But beyond this dazzling complexity, which, by the way, has always been there, even in bacteria, the very beginning of life, or life would not have been possible at any level; there is also the environment into which the newly born finds itself. And this new born greets its environment with an innate sequential set of desires which will make it powerfully desire to do the things it needs to do, not only to survive, but to thrive and derive intense pleasure from this environment. Yes, mother's milk, whatever one's species, is the biologically perfect food for one's developing body, but it is also the food that the young one craves. Nursing is not just a matter of survival. It is a matter of ecstasy, for both the child and the mother. Walking, as well, is, again, not just necessary for a human's survival, but increases the child's ability to explore a world in intimate detail, a world that it finds wondrous.
All of this is part of the perfection of life. Of course, with our 'modern' understanding, we have reduced embryonic development and childhood development, into a tedious exercise in one's ability to survive. The result of a series of uncanny 'accidents' producing a result that we, willy nilly, are 'stuck' with. Childhood, and one's relationship to one's parents, has been reduced to a minefield with the possibility of 'traumatizing' events lurking around every corner. And, as a continuation of our infernal materialist perspective, life has become a rapacious quest for the acquisition of material things, even the rapacious acquisition of other people. If not people that one owns outright, as in harems and slavery, which still thrive in many places, then people that are within one's hegemony of power and dependency. It may be too direct, too gauche, to outright brag about how much one has in the way of cash and stocks and houses, and cars and boats; but to gloat about how many people you employ, as if this is your gift to society, and not, what is really meant, a way of profiting from each and every one of them, so that you, the listener, can just barely imagine what kind of money the speaker makes.....well, that is perfectly acceptable.
Now some of you may say, Matt, it's the genes that create the desires. The genes create certain proteins and they wind up, after an excruciatingly complex process, stimulating neurons in the brain that create desires. If that were the case, it still would be an absolutely remarkable process of staggering complexity that defies a simple process of evolution, and that would need to begin with staggering complexity in order for there to be any survival. But desire is an experience. You can try to explain our human experience by material things, but you have to come up with a ridiculously far-fetched notion of random accidents to account for the complexity and you still have not explained what you cannot explain by material means, the leap from material to experience. The leap from an electric current running through a neuron, to a sensation. From my perspective it is the desires, or the desire to have a certain kind of experience, or the desire to provide a certain kind of experience that creates the material complexity and the complexity of design, and not the other way round. Certainly that is how our world of human creation works, isn't it? Every human artifact and creation is there because someone wanted it to be there, and that desire, which is a non-material, immeasurable wisp of an experience, begins in consciousness and ends in a material creation.
You may also say that many of those behaviors that we do are based on things that we learn as we develop and that other creatures learn. They are taught to us and to them by parents and teachers. True. But, as anyone with any experience in education knows, there is no learning unless there is a desire on the part of students to learn and desire on the part of teachers to teach. Animals may learn the details of hunting techniques, and evasion techniques and building techniques from their elders, but all of that learning would not be possible unless it were grounded in the young animal's desire to learn and the older animal's desire to impart that learning. And that desire, for both the young and the elder is not, itself, taught, but is innate, not in the genes, but in the spiritual make up of each separate being. And these things that are being taught are the very things that are essential to the survival of the newer generation. Perfect!
In a natural world, all of this would be so evident as to not even justify calling anyone's attention to it. But in our flat, de-mystified, materialist society, life has become a tedious and draining chore of survival. Our joy of life is demolished by the fearful way in which we were reared by our terrified parents, convinced by the latest psychological fad, that any false move in child rearing is sure to cause permanent trauma; our natural health is ruined by mass produced, chemicalized food that advertisers seduce us into eating; and excessive medications that materialist doctors insist that we take; and our naturally boundless curiosity about the world is extirminated by the anxious and tedious schooling that we have received and that is organized, not to provide us with a deeper and richer understanding of life, the natural world and human accomplishments, but to stressfully prepare us for a tension filled competition for entry into a rapidly disappearing middle class. But underneath all the layers of bad education, and bad religion, and bad advertising, and fearful child rearing, that we have inherited, we can still glimpse and intuitively sense the perfection that underlies it all.
I welcome your comments.
