What’s the Question?

A consideration of the dominant grand theories of our time
/Evolution and the Theory of Everything (TOE).

Evolution is a theory of diachronic determinism and chance; we are to a large extent governed by our genes, which are the residue of a diachronic process of chance. Love, war, altruism, capitalism (I joke) can be explained away by Natural Selection, a mechanism of chance mutation and conferred advantage.

The mechanism of evolution is said to be: copy, vary, select… copy, vary, select… ad infinitum (or at least until we destroy life on earth or perhaps rip apart space-time altogether). But that explains very little. What is intrinsic to this that leads to life and sight and consciousness and humour and love and … and why is their light and time at all? Why doesn’t copy, vary, select not just lead to detritus. For anything to come into existence it must have been intrinsically possible in the first place, even if it takes a process of copy, vary, select (and even if this involves chance as claimed, whatever that may be) to realise the possibility.

TOE works under a similar assumption but takes us deeper into time and matter. The whole universe is composed of a single substance, vibrating strings from which all else emerges governed by the universal laws of physics. That the universe should evolve to this physical state is assumed to be the result of these laws but is never proved. Do these universal laws of physics predict the emergence of life… of human beings? Do they predict the world human beings have constructed? Do they account for my behaviour? There are no known physical laws to account for my behaviour . On the emergence of life the physicists (as do all honest scientists) fall silent. And beyond the point of life emergence, they capitulate to the evolutionists whose explanations mostly fail to satisfy the rigorous scientific criteria ostensibly held by the physicists. The physicists will say it is enough to reduce everything to a single substance and postulate the universal laws that governs this stuff. Ironically like postulating God, these universal laws mystify rather than demystify nature. That a single substance and a few universal laws can conjure such a manifold wonder of galaxies, nebulae, planets, canyons, lakes, rainforests, entrained starlings, The tragedy of King Lear, Gorecki’s Sorrowful Songs, Groucho Marx, free will, mystical experience, the skylark, can no less astonish the soul. And why those universal laws? And if the answer is that ‘it is just so’, then it is no less a wonder and moreover no less pressing on us to discover our place in the scheme of this ‘it is just so.’ Laplace tried to replace God with the laws of the universe, but this begs the question, why those laws. And if it is a ‘just so’ answer then we are back at the beginning of an unfathomable mystery.

To reduce the manifold wonder of the universe to a point of singularity is to not go far enough. But the big picture can be viewed through the other end of the telescope. The evolution of the cosmos is transcendental, for beings with free will have evolved. And if I’m faced with an ethical choice, quantum mechanics and string theory are irrelevant to what is significant to the situation. When it comes to the most important questions the limits of science are all too apparent. Science seeks deterministic laws to explain everything, but what defines us as human beings is our free will. The question each of us must answer for ourselves is: what is the meaning of my free will? And ultimately, what is at stake? It seems before we seek the answer to life, we are asked to seek the question, and this calls for a religious perspective.