Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia; Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.
Evolution or Devolution?
Post 55.October 22, 2018
Let There Be . . . Information! Evolution versus Devolution
Since Milton assumed that God was not only Omnipotent and Omniscient, but also Omnibenevolent, he felt it was incumbent upon the apologist poet to find someone else to blame for the imperfections of the world, and for the suffering of its sentient creatures. So, following the Torah's lead, he blamed the victim. But that deflect-the-blame defense opened a new question : how a child-like caveman could so easily ruin the perfect order of Paradise. For that, he had to find a more powerful and devious scapegoat : a recently dethroned angel from God's own heavenly kingdom ─ ironically labeled Lucifer, the lightbringer. Turns out that the naive humans were merely clueless pawns in a celestial chess-match.
The irony of God's new creation being spoiled by his old heavenly nemesis, via creatures made in His own likeness, makes the master of the universe seem to be less than Omnipotent and Omniscient. So, in my defense of deity, I have taken a completely different approach to the perennial “problem of evil”. Instead of kicking the can around, and pointing fingers at underlings, I go straight to the top, where the moral buck stops. From the BothAnd philosophical perspective, the Omni-everything Creator of the universe is ultimately responsible for everything that happens in the Creation, both Good and Evil 8. Which means that human suffering must be part of The Plan. Fortunately, as moral agents, humans are free to choose from a range of options between those extremes : good enough or not so bad. [Click Good & Evil God at left ]
So my hypothetical G*D’s purpose was not to create an instant paradise for his little likenesses. But to develop living creatures with a modicum of god-like will, whose mission is to live & learn how to survive & thrive in an imperfect world. The Greek & Hebrew myths of origins presumed that God was a top-down designer like humans, but judging by the results, was a pitiful failure at forcing freewill upon animals with selfish needs & values9. But our scientific understanding of evolution, indicates a bottom-up method of creation, whereby moral wisdom is incrementally increased by filtering-out the unfit. Apparently godlike FreeWill is too dangerous to put into the hands of those driven by self-serving intuition. Unlike the Buddha’s instant nirvana, the path of Reason is a slow & laborious route to enlightenment for a whole species.
I’ve been working heretofore, primarily on the technical aspects of the theory of Enformationism, and its BothAnd corollary. But now I’m turning my attention to a more common vocabulary amenable to a general audience10. Sadly, unlike the English Homer11, I don’t have a divine muse to dictate these ideas in a smooth effortless flow of mellifluous prosody. Whereas Milton wrote from Inspiration, I seem to write from Constipation. In any case, my metaphors and analogies should not be taken literally, but merely as means to convey abstract ideas from physics and mathematics in concrete imagery.
Just as the heroic Genesis myth began with a Fiat Lux ─ "Let there be light" ─ the origin of my own little saga is portrayed as a light-bulb in the Mind of G*D. It represents a Platonic Idea and ideal Form that serves as the design for a new world. The design is executed in gradual degrees of Illumination (evolution) by the creative process of EnFormAction.
End of Post 55
8. Good versus Evil : That moral dichotomy only applies to the dualistic space-time world. In the non-dual realm ofEnfernity, there are no values other than ∞. See Post 32 Deistic Theodicy. Click for popup Good & Evil God
9. Selves : In my theory I distinguish between the Bronze Age notion of a spiritual Soul, and the Information Age concept of a self-conscious creature with selfish drives that we call Will & Purpose. See Post 50 Unitary Self See Glossary Living Selves
11. English Homer : Both the 8th century BC Homer, and the 16th century Milton, were blind poets who wrote grand sagas revealing glimpses into the invisible world of heavenly gods who pull the strings of their earth-bound puppets.
DEVOLUTION • In Biology, degeneration; negative evolution. • In Genesis, a fall from the state of grace in Paradise to a state of suffering in earthly Purgatory. • In Existential Angst, humans nuclear bombing themselves back into the stone age.
DIVINE JUSTICE The G*D of Enformationism is just only in the sense of being totally impartial and dispassionate toward human trials & errors. Automatic rewards & punishments are built into the evolutionary system. If you don’t like G*D’s justice, you are free to imagine a more partial & passionate deity, who rewards with postponed promises and punishes with eternal torment.
Good and Evil God
If you can wrap your head around that non-dual concept, you'll see that there’s no need to blame God for his tyranical parenting methods. Instead, I suspect that the reason for creation in the form of prolonged evolution was to allow time for emergent creatures to learn by trial and error : what’s good for personal or social survival and what’s not. My god-model is not like a cruel & ruthless king, demanding perfect obedience from his abject subjects. S/he’s also not an anxious spectator cheering & booing at our good & bad plays, but more like a dispassionate Programmer searching for the best possible solution to life in space-time, given the limitations of a natural world. Presumably, it will all work out according to divine plan in the end. Eventually, our accumulated physical & social understanding might make us homo sapiens more god-like. In the mean-time, the only Justice in this world is of human origin. As a still-emerging species though, we are now more like ethical adolescents, rebelliously testing our limits, and leaving the laws of Nature to clean-up our messes.
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