Order & Indifference

I’m writing from New York, and what better place to finally reveal my long-awaited views on intelligent design! As I stood in Grand Central Station, watching the people hustle and bustle by, I noted—guess what!!-- a paradox. If you looked into the face of each person, he or she seemed to be boiling over with intention. Each person looked determined to get somewhere, to be somewhere, to do something critical to some large enterprise. Yet if you pulled back and looked at them again and in total, all their striding and dodging and bumping looked comical and senseless. Masses of anything—be it people, feeder goldfish, or balls in the playarea of a McDonalds—always look impressive at first and then silly. A mass, though it depends on lots and lots of parts, still makes those very parts seem inessential. Steal a plastic ball, and the ball bin can still be jumped in and fouled by some kid. A belly-up fish in the tank is hardly of note, and a simple Midwestern girl needing prodding and guidance through the crowd neither adds nor subtracts from the overall sense of it. Even her stupefied pauses and downhome commentary: “Where are all these people going? There can’t possibly be a point to all this hustle-bustle!” are smoothly subsumed within the crowd she doubts.

So is all this teeming the teeming of “creations” or is it the teeming of organisms produced by an unthinking chain of reactions? What’s interesting to me about intelligent design is that the reasons why people want to believe in it seems to conflict with the implications of the belief. If you want to believe in an intelligent designer, you want to believe because:
1. You want humankind to have the meaning inherent in being designed by a conscious force.
2. If there is a designer, he/she/it likely has a design—a plan—for us. There is comfort in knowing that anything seeming random to us isn’t—its simply a part of the plan that remains inscrutable to us. (And, we can reassure ourselves, perhaps inscrutability is part of the plan!)
3. If we have a designer, he/she/it wouldn’t create us just to destroy us. Believing in a creator is believing that there might be some after-death purpose for us. It is a way to reassure ourselves that our existence has meaning, and will therefore go on. It is a yearning for the infinite.

Fair enough! Who wouldn’t want to believe all that? The problem is, a creator—a fixed point of origin—is actually dependent on the exact OPPOSITE of the above.
The whole idea that we were created out of nothing at a particular moment is contrary to the notion of eternity or the infinite. In fact, a belief in intelligent design shows most acutely the human inability to comprehend the infinite, or to think beyond life/death terms. When people want to doubt intelligent design on an easy level, they simply ask: “Well, if there’s a creator, who created the creator? And who created the creator’s-creator?” And so on. For some reason, endless origins (or endless creators with small roles, which I suppose could describe evolution itself) that stretch back forever in time feels to us like no origin at all. Why is it that we want ONE creator, creating us (or the conditions for our existence) in ONE moment in time? Why not believe that our beginnings stretch back and back and back to pre-primordial slime, pre-Big Bang, pre-anything we know now? Why not want to believe that there was no one moment when everything began, but rather that the universe is, and always will be, ongoing? It seems to me that believing in no start to the universe, or no one moment of our creation, naturally leads to believing in no end to the universe—or us.

But when we say that life, or the world, began at one point, we are allowing that it could likewise end at a point. We are putting the universe in a frame of duration, yet if we really want “forever” we should avoid these terms completely. In some ways, this shows our inability—or, as I sometimes suspect, our unwillingness—to truly think of eternity. Meaning for human beings, unfortunately or fortunately, is inextricably dependent on the notion of time. An endless background of our creation doesn’t appeal to us because meaning, in a person’s life, happens in the moment and by the moment. So, of course, we can only think of a meaningful start to the world as happening in a certain moment and by a certain force’s will. But what this implies is that our meaning making is framed around duration: A start and therefore an end. A life and therefore a death. Moments have meaning for us, and eternity does not. If you believe in a creator, you are tacitly and rightly believing in the necessity of your own death. Think of it:

If you cannot conceive of, or be comfortable with, the idea that the world’s past/origins stretch infinitely back in time and do NOT finally originate at some creator or point of creation, then you probably can’t really accept (as much as you seem to want to) the corollary: that we too will, in some sphere of being, exist forever.

The reason to believe in intelligent design is that it is a comfort against death and the unknown of the afterlife, yet the premise of intelligent design necessitates time, beginnings, endings and therefore death itself. We want a fixed origin and an endless existence, but infinity is not borne of the finite.

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I was watching Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man right before I left for New York, and a bit of the narration made me consider something else about intelligent design. Late in the film, right before Timothy Treadwell’s death at the hands of one of his precious grizzles, Herzog narrates something like this over a close up image of a grizzly’s face and eyes:
“When I look into the eyes of these animals, I see but a vague pursuit of food and nothing more. All I see is the vast indifference of nature: its essential cruelties, its innate brutality, its unforgivingness.” (This is my recreation of the quote, retaining the central point that nature is cruel and indifferent.) My first reaction to this was annoyance: its not exactly new to muse grimly at how brutal nature may be. Then I thought a little more about it: why is it that nature is described as “indifferent” and “cruel”? Is that why people find evolution so unfulfilling spiritually, because of its seeming indifference (mindless advancements of species) and cruelty (survival of the fittest, for one)? But why is nature considered indifferent at all, when, as ecologists will tell you, there is a balance and a cycle that preserves life? Of course, this is nature sans human intervention that I’m speaking of here. Nature seems anything but indifferent when you consider the inherent harmony and well-being of species in an unmolested natural landscape. If there are too many predators, a few will starve to rebalance things. Too much prey, and more predators might move into the area to compensate. Nature’s processes seem anything but indifferent; instead, they represent the height of attentiveness. Every insect has a purpose, every dead leaf nourishes, everything has a role. Evolution is merely a description of those roles as they changed--and changed species--over time.

I think that evolution and nature are considered indifferent not because they really are, obviously, but because they are too orderly. The order of nature and the order of evolution strike us as cold. Could it be that order itself is unappealing to humans in some way? I’d love to write a book called “Order & Indifference", the main thesis being that even though humans claim to strive for order, efficiency, properly used and gathered data, we actually are terrified by the spiritual lack we see in it. Machines are orderly, statistics are orderly, personal computers are orderly, but we have yet to commune with our motherboards when struck with a mortality crisis. There is more emotional and spiritual warmth in chaos and illogic: more comfort in the chaos of a creator, inexplicably appearing to create a world for an inexplicable reason, a creator strange enough to create life, death, and the afterlife, where the disembodied essences of all these personalities he painstakingly designed can gather in a state of bliss that for some unknown reason he withheld for our time on earth. Faith is likewise chaotic: it depends on believing, fiercely, in the unseen. The spiritual dependence on chaos is just another way that humankind is solipsistic: chaos reminds us of ourselves because it reminds of personality--the quirks and oddities and irrationality of the individual--while order reminds us of masses and machines and the perfect march of logic: the not-us.