by Tsvi Bisk
Who needs religion? We have science, we have reason, we have that infinite resource, the human imagination. Of what use are the Bronze and Iron Age babblings of our legacy traditions? Aren’t these religions a tremendous barrier to humanity’s ability to build a space-age civilization? And why should devotees of Science Fiction even care about these questions? My answer would be: read the entry Transcendence in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and pay attention to what the giants of the genre say themselves. Stanley Kubrick stated that “the God concept is at the heart of 2001 — but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God”. Arthur Clarke said that the film’s final act reveals “a realm that I think can best be characterized as spiritual.” In his book Sacred Space: The Quest for Transcendence in Science Fiction Film and Television, Douglas Cowen demonstrates how religious ideas are presented in Science Fiction as the genre of possibility and hope in an era of despair and anxiety; that there is something larger than ourselves that gives our lives meaning and value. The best of Science Fiction reinforces our hope that outside the boundaries of everyday living there lies something greater.
It is remarkable how many prominent agnostics and atheists have expressed the need for some kind of alternative transcendent veneration as necessary to our “being” human. Freud’s disciple, Otto Rank, wrote that the “need for a truly religious ideology … is inherent in human nature and its fulfillment is basic to any kind of social life”. Carl Jung agreed when he wrote that without a divine drama we cannot have meaning and without meaning we are set adrift and cannot be well. Carl Sagan encompassed both these views when he wrote: “A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.” Einstein anticipated Sagan by writing “… the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.” Einstein’s other musings include, “What is the meaning of human life or of organic life altogether? To answer this question at all implies a religion … the man who regards his own life and that of his fellow-creatures as meaningless is not merely unfortunate but almost disqualified for life”.
In other words, ‘What does it all mean?‘ is still the ultimate question regarding the human condition. This riddle has motivated religious and philosophical speculation, scientific endeavor, artistic creativity and entrepreneurial innovation throughout the ages. It is the question we try to answer in order to make sense of our own existence. Indeed, it has generated the modern concepts of angst and alienation. Centuries ago, French mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, wrote:
When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed into the eternity which precedes and will succeed it … the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there: there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this place and time allotted to me?
Pascal’s despair is the first cry of modern-day anxiety; a product of our own scientific progress. What, after all, is the point of our own individual, ephemeral lives on this small planet around a mediocre star in a midsized galaxy of some 400 billion stars whose closest galactic neighbor, Andromeda, contains one trillion stars, in an ‘observable universe’ that numbers two trillion galaxies (the largest containing 100 trillion stars)? The “observable universe” being just a tiny portion of the universe which may contain 500 trillion galaxies and might be an infinitesimal part of a multiverse containing trillions upon trillions of “universes”!
Increased awareness of the vastness of existence has introduced anxieties from which humanity has never recovered. Pascal wrote in the 17th century. What gloom are we supposed to feel today when “the infinite immensity of spaces” is immensely more immense? Never in history has Pascal’sdespair been so relevant. After all, even within the cosmically insignificant history of our own planet, what is the real significance of our own lives? Consider that Earth is 4.5 billion years old; that life arose 3.8 billion years ago; mammals 200 million years ago; primitive humans 2.5 million years ago; modern humans 150,000 years ago; recorded history 6,000 years ago; the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Constitutionalism, Industrial Revolution and Democracy all within the last 500 years. Currently, humans have an 80-90 year lifespan, which might increase to 120-150 years by the end of this century. What is this in relation to the “eternity” which preceded human civilization on this planet and which will succeed it? Does the Cosmos ‘care’ who is elected President of the United States? Does the Cosmos ‘care’ about the 3.8 billion-year history of life on this planet? Would it ‘care’ if runaway global warming turned our planet into another Venus? When contemplating this time scale on the background of the vastness of our Cosmos, it is difficult not to plunge into existential desolation.
The irony is that science – a creation of the human spirit reflecting our species’ curiosity and imagination at its highest stage of development – has revealed an existence of such vastness and complexity that it makes our collective and individual lives seem inconsequential. Since the 20th century, the elemental question for thoughtful people had become: Is life worth living? Existentialist author Albert Camus wrote,
There is but one truly philosophical problem and that is suicide … Whether or not the world has three dimensions or the mind nine or twelve categories comes afterward”. Indeed, why not commit suicide and avoid the tribulations of a meaningless existence? Everything else, all our cultural and scientific product, is marginalia to this ultimate existential question.
In response to Camus, and other pretentious prophets of meaninglessness, I would say that our subjective human experience is future-directed; we implicitly assume it is leading to something significant and this makes sense of our lives. This is why we do not commit suicide. We assume our individual lives have meaning. We assume (and recent science supports this assumption) that every individual is unique, that every individual is distinctive in the entire Cosmos, that in all of infinite nature, no one is identical to us. There is, of course, correspondence and species similarity connecting every human being, and probably all conscious beings in the Cosmos, by virtue of their consciousness. But our own individuality is a cosmic absolute, as is the uniqueness of every distinctive culture and civilization which is a product of self-reflective conscious life. Cosmic evolution produced our uniqueness and perhaps this uniqueness might be valuable to cosmic evolution. It is up to us to decide.
We now realize that evolution is the salient characteristic of existence itself, having produced ever more complex elements, which eventually evolved into life and continued to produce ever more complex life forms, until it produced self-reflective consciousness. We must allow the possibility, along with philosopher Henri Bergson, that evolution will eventually produce a supra–consciousness that will ultimately produce a supra-supra-consciousness, and so on, until a ‘life form’ will have been created that will appear to us as if it were a God. In the words of Israeli thinker Mordechai Nessyahu “not ‘in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,’ but ‘in the end an evolving Cosmos will have created God'”. This would be Cosmodeism – the veneration of the Godness of existence as such. Science fiction is rampant with such speculations. Arthur Clarke, in 2001 A Space Odyssey wrote:
A few mystically inclined biologists went still further. They speculated, taking their cues from the beliefs of many religions (italics mine), that mind would eventually free itself from matter. The robot body, like the flesh-and-blood one, would be no more than a stepping-stone to something which, long ago, men had called “spirit.” And if there was anything beyond that, its name could only be God.
In Childhood’s End, Clarke introduced the concept of the Overmind as a cosmic collective of supra–conscious species under the direction of a supra-supra consciousness to determine if and when conscious species were ready to ‘grow up’ and advance towards amalgamating with the universal supra-supra consciousness. Nietzsche, with his concept of the Overman (Supraman) certainly would have been sympathetic to Clarke’s view. More significant, Clarke speculated that “It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God but to create him.” In similar fashion, the magnificently unique science fiction writer, Olaf Stapledon, spoke about the emergence of God in a talk at the British Interplanetary Society entitled “Interplanetary Man”:
Perhaps the final result of the cosmical process is the attainment of full cosmical consciousness, and yet (in some very queer way) what is attained in the end is also, from another point of view, the origin of all things. So to speak, God, who created all things in the beginning, is himself created by all things in the end.
Such notions of God as the consequence rather than the cause of the Cosmos are not unusual in serious theological and philosophical speculations. Jesuit priest, Teilhard de Chardin, viewed God as both the cause and the consequence of cosmic existence and evolution. He saw the end of human history as pure consciousness becoming one with the creator Alpha God to spawn the created Omega God. Anglo-Jewish philosopher Samuel Alexander, in Space Time and Deity, promoted the idea that the internal logic of evolutionwill eventually result in the emergence of deity. German philosopher and theologian Benedikt Göcke has written: “We … are therefore responsible for the future development of the life of the divine being.” Architect and philosopher Paolo Soleri, greatly influenced by de Chardin, saw technology as being an instrument enabling sentient life to evolve into ‘God’.
Historian Robert Tucker noted that “The movement of (German) thought from Kant to Hegel revolved in a fundamental sense around the idea of man’s self-realization as a godlike being, or alternatively as God”. According to him what attracted Marx to Hegel was that “he found in Hegel the idea that man is God”. History for Hegel was God realizing itself through the vehicle of man. Recently Dr. Ted Chu in Human Purpose and Transhuman Potential: A Cosmic Vision of Our Future Evolution argued the case for the eventuality of a Cosmic Being (the CoBe).
For me it is axiomatic that existence is hierarchal: evolution producing ever more complex configurations, of which self-reflective, volitional consciousness is Planet Earth’s current pinnacle. Our human duty, therefore, is to strive towards a transcendent humanism; to volitionally seek to evolve our species into supra-humans (or as Nietzsche might have put it, into Supraman). It is our duty to overcome ourselves; to realize our divine potential; not to transcend humanism but to become transcendent humans: supra-humans.
The Godding of the Cosmos is an inherent characteristic of its evolving actuality. Godding is a word coined by Rabbi David Cooper in his book God is a Verb in which he notes thatthe Hebrew word for God is a verb not a noun. Yehova literally means ‘will become manifest’ and is an imperfect verb. The Burning Bush tells Moses its name is ahiya asher ahiya. This isalso an imperfect verb formwhich has been poorly translated as “I Am that I Am” but which properly translated means “I will Be what I will Be”.
Conscious life on this planet is an integral and vital part of this divine cosmic drama. What our species does, and what we do as individuals will contribute to or detract from this process. Accordingly, our individual lives do have cosmic consequence, no matter how infinitesimally small (similar to the butterfly effect of chaos theory). The very chaos of our existence is the vital ingredient creating the cosmos (order) of existence. This is to place the emergence of self-reflective consciousness at the center of the Jungian Divine Drama; to affirm that cosmic purpose has been created as a consequence of the evolutionary cosmic process. This is a neo-teleological perspective, the civilizational consequences of which might be as profound as those of Monotheism. This would be the proper antidote to Pascal’s despair, rather than a self-deceptive return to the ‘eternal verities’ of the legacy monotheistic religions or existentialist invented meanings or wallowing in postmodernist anxiety.
Arguably, cosmic civilizations that pursue this ambition will succeed in transcending their bodies by scientific and technical means, thus isolating and enhancing the most essential part of their ‘humanness’ – their consciousness. They will, in effect, have become pure consciousness, or if you will, pure spirit expanding throughout the Cosmos. Arthur Clarke in 2001 anticipated this with the kind of speculative imagination we should be cultivating in ourselves and in our children:
… evolution was driving toward new goals. The first… had long since come to the limits of flesh and blood; as soon as their machines were better than their bodies it was time to move. First their brains, and then their thoughts alone, they transformed into shining new homes of metal and plastic… they had learned to store knowledge in the structure of space itself, and to preserve their thoughts for eternity in frozen lattices of light. They could become creatures of radiation, free at last from the tyranny of matter. Into pure energy, therefore, they presently transformed themselves…
Consciousness will have become one with a Cosmos that has dissolved into pure radiation as an inevitable consequence of entropy. Thus the Cosmos will become in its entirety a conscious universal being – i.e. a ‘God’ as the consequence of the Cosmos and not as its cause. The fateful question that every conscious civilization throughout the Cosmos must eventually address is: will we take part in this cosmic race for survival in the ‘End of Days’, or will we perish along with the rest of all that exists? Will we accept the limitations of our physicality, or will we try to transcend them?
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Bio:
Tsvi Bisk’s most recent book (available on Amazon) is Cosmodeism: A Worldview for the Space-Age: How an Evolutionary Cosmos is Creating God from which this article is derived.
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