id life emerge complete or it evolved from “little”?
In all lifeless structures on Earth and throughout the D universe, the general order of things is that without Life they tend to break down with time.
Water and oxygen attacks metal and soon the shine on it turns red as the metal rusts. Eventually the metal cracks and disintegrates—and then all but disappears. Erosion depletes a discrete structure in one area, only to randomly deposit its material elsewhere. The only structured gain evident in all the complexity of an entity is through Life itself—whereby an organism starts off from something very small and evolves ( really this time)—into a larger, mature organism.
However, once this “Life-force” disappears, the beautifully structured organism undergoes an inevitable breakdown of its constituent components that were once held together by this unseen force—a process known as decomposition. For the duration of time where there is “Life” within an entity, synthesis is the controlling force that seems to act against the natural order of the universe—analysis.
Atoms, which become molecules, which become cells, are all held together by mysterious forces that can be disturbed.
In the absence of Life the natural propensity is for these forces to weaken rather than strengthen…which is why all inert objects tend more towards breakdown than synthesis.
A few chemical reactions do lead to synthesis—whereby two or more elementary substances exchange electrons, and a more complex compound results having the combined elements of the reacting substances. It is what gives the idea 24
that unstable, reactive compounds—as with amino acids—
emulate and are the basis of the behavior of Life itself.
So, most of us hardly think of the universe as having begun from the complex which then broke down—analyzed—into the simpler; we tend to think of the universe as having started from something simpler and then synthesized to something more complex. Our guide is the way a house is built. The loose bricks—basic building blocks—join together in a certain way to make the house.
Similarly, some view that the universe must have started from the simplest element—hydrogen—which has only one proton and one electron, which then became more complex until it formed our complete periodic table of elements, sometimes called the “electromagnetic spectrum”.
But the process of building needs a builder who has a
plan in mind as to how each part will fit together with the other and how it is all sustainable. Otherwise , effectively, one could end up with either an untidy pile of bricks or a neat and hospitable house, depending on whether the builder is also a Designer or not.
And it is even more complex for an automobile which has locomotion and all the complexities that go with that, including what fuels it, how it moves, how it is serviced. And there is hardly a person on this planet who will say that the automobile is more complicated to plan and arrange than an android (human-like robot). After all, motor vehicles have long been around, but a robot that will dance and is able to complete a challenging obstacle course and responds well to spontaneous, verbal human questions and commands is still under research and development.
And no one can say that the planning that goes into making an android is less daunting than if someone was to plan and build a whole human being from scratch. We can hardly make even a single living cell, let alone a tissue, let alone an organ. Indeed, in the previous chapter we went through a list 25
Chapter Six Cyclicity: the Chicken-Egg Conundrum of achievements that are common in animals of all kinds but technology has yet to catch up with.
And some of those animals have been around for tens of millions of years…or even went extinct that long ago after more millions of years of roaming the planet Now, per Dawkins, if we argue that “God did it all”, we saw that it is a response that does not answer or advance in any way the question of who or what did the planning because it is substituting the desired solution regarding what caused this incredible complexity with an even greater complexity”.
Yet we want to drill down to the most basic cause…the one responsible for it all.
But even he had no real answer to the Grand Beginning illogicality. His axiom of hydrogen as the most basic element or primal building block from which all other elements sprang does not answer in any effective way how it, too, got there in the first place. And this is what we attempt to find a workable solution to and put to bed in this chapter
In fact, when we deeply think about it, all the complexity we see—even the astounding matter of sentience we discussed in the previous chapter—was all impliedly embedded in that hydrogen. But it is little different from insisting that all the astounding designs we see are embedded in a “simplest” unit that—for lack of a better term—we may call “God”.
There are many ways to view “God”. Two prevailing views is of a God that is immanent to Creation (i.e. is the very stuff of Life and the universe—the Pantheist view) or of a God who transcends Creation altogether and simply spoke it into being.
Presumably, what the Great Being thought and “spoke” is what formed the basic building blocks of Creation.
Either way, that simplest unit must have the wherewithal to successfully build up into a complex unit. If it produces something wonderful in the way it integrates—even a synergy; something greater than the sum of the parts—it is because that resultant property was latent in this most basic unit.
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Since this concept of “one basic substance” seems to be borne out by Science in that the atom is to be found in all substances in the universe, it allows us to call up a single, fundamental, irrefutable, logical “and/or” premise.
I do not presently know if any scientist or philosopher may have written it down somewhere…but the following view, in any case, is one I independently arrived at:
Only two fundamentals of reality can ever be: (1)
the Grand Nothing (the Void)… or
(2)
the Grand Everything…
…with nothing in between.
So, there was either…
(a) Totally nothing at all—not even thought or substance, or….
(b) “Something”…a mysterious, axiomatic substance or entity of “irreducible complexity” (i.e. whose make-up cannot be reduced further) has always been there (it could not have come from nothing, or nowhere…could it?), and within that entity was everything—every possible capability
Well, since here you are reading this, we know the answer to the above paradigm. People tend to make the fundamental mistake of beginning somewhere in between, thus getting into all sorts of muddles. In short, in most cases they create in their minds artificial disconnects between one form of matter and energy and another. Even more subtle, they tend to create a disconnect between thought and matter…as if they are two strangers with no common connection.
What drives this rather casual view is that when one looks at a stone, for example, just because it is not alive they see no possibility that the core substance responsible for its make-up also has the latent ability of thought in it—even though the stone itself may not exhibit what we measure as “living”.
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Chapter Six Cyclicity: the Chicken-Egg Conundrum Indeed, even Science has come to understand that there is no substance in the universe totally unrelated to another: everything—be it hydrogen, a stone, water, air or a block of iron. All are made up of the same basic organization, which—
for the time being—we call the atomic structure.
As physicist Albert Einstein put it, everything is essentially in the form of matter or energy. And fundamentally, these are one, per his famous equation e=mc2.1 Neither of these two forms, he classically determined, can be created or destroyed, only converted from one form to the other.
Simply put, if matter is the power to BE and energy is the power to DO, then it is not like we can separate these basic, intertwined realities as the Primordial Duo. Einstein, though, leaves out sentience (self-awareness) ’in his equation—but quite evidently, self-awareness makes the “being” part while adding direction to the “doing” of this Primordial Duo. All considered, thought has to be a form of energy…a shape-shifting driver of all reality.
Science views awareness as the end product of matter.
Some mystics, on the contrary, view matter as a by-product of awareness; as the “dream material” it generates. So, did sentience bring up matter, or did matter bring up sentience?
In short, “which came first, the chicken or the egg? Which gave birth to the other? Which of the two best emulates Grand Everything? It is a conundrum, a never-ending cycle.
However, science makes the mistake of plotting a linear evolutionary path to what is clearly cyclical—the mysterious All-Source—as if it first began in simplicity a long, long time ago. But neither the chicken nor the egg is simple. They are potent, complex—each with a copy of itself within itself. So, what is the more logical argument in place of linear time? We address this in the next chapter.
1 Whereby e=energy, m=mass (substance), and c=the velocity of light.
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