TRUTH AND THE PURSUIT OF MEANING

A new Bible should start with the origin of life and the evolution of species


The Bible has been a one-off historic accomplishment without precedent and most likely without any legendary literature of similar magnitude ever to follow. One could argue that only the Koran comes close but then, the Koran was largely drawn from Biblical resources.

Of course we could think of new religions in the distant future which feed on legends of their own making. They would however have to compete with the kind of factual records of history that Biblical writers lacked from the time of Abraham well unto the early years of Christianity. The absence of a mature historic tradition established the Bible’s immediate credibility as a historic document and as a source of religious inspiration.

In the mean time history and archeology have either corroborated Biblical claims of truth, sometimes only contextual, or they have added substantive question marks to them.



Especially the Roman Catholic tradition has been very keen, throughout the centuries, to defend both the factual truth of the Biblical accounts and its own authority in their interpretation. Even in hindsight we can still ask why. What interest did Rome have in its vehement assertion that Earth stood at the center of the Universe rather than being a mere planet circling an accidental sun in a vast galaxy? The answer has been obvious, for acknowledging this would principally undermine God’s unique position in the process of Creation. The same is true for accepting the facts of Earth’s geological history and the origin of life.

However, even though this position may seem evident, we might also argue that knowledge about the position and the origins of the Earth, including the origin of life, could have been around at the time that the Bible was written and still, God could be placed at the center of it. But this is only true if, at least in its contemporary use, the Bible is most of all seen as a metaphorical source of truth rather than a source of real facts. Even so, many Christian believers remain keen to know the ‘reliability’ of the Bible as if only factual accuracy can persuade them to appreciate the Bible’s underlying messages. The ongoing debate in certain circles, especially in the United States, between “creationists” and “evolutionists” reflects an extreme example of an unnecessary antagonism.

At the same time, and perhaps only to underscore the last observation, our geological and biological knowledge has been vastly extended over the centuries, but this hasn’t as yet solved every mystery. The spectacle of our Universe and the detailed view we have of its evolution still leave many questions unanswered. Moreover, the processes which led to the advent to complex living organisms have been unraveled only to a point. There remains an instant of ‘creation’ of which science might never fully uncover its actual nature.

Given above, I see no basic contradiction between accepting the fruits of discovery and science on the one hand and nourishing a belief system that embraces the concept of divine creation on the other – of one so wishes. It follows too that – in my view - ongoing efforts to disprove one with arguments of the other are futile if not outright ridiculous.



Should everything therefore remain where it is? First of all, there is no reason for any religion to adopt history or science as its foundation. Truth is a very broad concept if only it isn‘t used in absolutist terms. But, secondly, I believe that any religion could draw many salient points at the heart of human morality from them and add a broader sense of purpose or meaning to them. Neither can be provided by science or by any ‘knowledge’, not even at a distance.

People have a choice to embrace (or not) a religious impulse in their lives to provide these underlying answers. The ‘reliability’ of biblical stories or similar books nor the debate about the factual history of our planet will ever satisfy them in this respect. I am tempted to say, on the contrary. Facts are arbitrary and never absolute. It is what we make of them that counts.

But even this may not suffice to broaden our perspective in addressing prevailing conflicting claims of religious versus secular antagonists. They may well never be resolved as long as their arguments fly cross-purpose from one side to the other. There may well be as many good arguments to re-design the concept of religion as those relating to the scope and implications of science.

One can not expect that such a process would readily arise out of the established traditions on either side, even less so given the present-day persistence by which certain religious leaders and scientists profess their certainties.



But we could also say that it is a people’s choice. We could make it a collective project, to write a new book of human inspiration, the assembled wisdom of all humanity. I, for one, would take the logic and the beauty of evolution – such as the fundamental urge to live that we share with all other living things, plants and animals – as its basic premise.

The more I think of it, the more I believe this is a good idea.

CAN HUMANITY STILL IMPROVE ITS WAYS?

Homo egoisticus – 4.000.000 B.D.


Many, many years from now, those who will be our descendants might look back at us the way we look at the Neanderthals. They will recognize our advancements and capabilities but they will also see the flaws which after many eons the successors of human kind will have overcome.

Is this a likely scenario? We will never know, of course. But we can speculate.

In essence human kind as it is today is capable of almost everything that it wasn’t made for. This is the beauty and it is our potential tragedy.

It is first of all a recognition of everything that Darwin told us. The clockmaker who brought us to life, was blind and he will always be. Mutations which some 200.000 years ago enabled us to become more skilled hunters, also led us to send a man to the Moon. It is accidental. No intelligent being with a sound mind would ever have concocted the modern human being and let it loose on the planet Earth on purpose to do its work, unbalanced and unfinished as we are.

For instance, why would an intelligent designer think of a life form which is actually a regression from the norm that prevails in the rest of the animal kingdom, which is the natural inclination to preserve life’s balance? Every animal – every predatory animal especially – knows this by instinct. So why not the humans?

Why do humans not have an absolute resistance – and I mean: absolute – against killing off its own kind? One could say, of course: but this is the prerogative of the dominant animal in every other species too. Lions kill the offspring of competitors. Baboons do it too. If you want to have strong genes, needed to maintain the versatility of the species, well, in fact humans are much too kind. So here perhaps is a point in favor too, and not necessarily against ‘us’.

Third: why would an intelligent designer create so much variety, even within a narrow band of genes, in terms of intellect, quality and level of talents, reason, emotion, etcetera? The first answer could be: it isn’t a failure of design, it is a failure of behavior. Humans have cancelled the mechanism of selection on those qualities themselves! They go for stupid things like looks and form. Stupid men prefer stupid blondes. But then, this is the very failure of our design, or it is the handicap that proves the fact that actually there was no designer at all.

I am going for the latter, as people may well understand from my earlier postings in this blog. It is out of pure curiosity, out of my private speculative interest in the future of mankind that I raise this issue. The first issue, of course, is whether in actual fact man is such an imperfect animal in the first place, and whether my alleged weaknesses are not, by further analysis, the inevitable corollaries of our uniqueness – or to put in another way: our very perfection.

We should not get ourselves blindfolded by our own humanity in judging who we are. This is the conundrum. The very qualities which the blind watchmaker, accidentally, ignited in us – indeed: our humanity, our intelligence, our intellect, our variety and so on - in the end both help us to survive and they challenge us, constantly, in our very sustainability. We are destructive and we are kind. One is very necessary to foster the other. Our intellect, which provides us with new ideas, inventions, solutions etcetera, is at the same time our greatest threat. But of course. How can it be otherwise?


We can't just do away with the money wolves, or should we?

Still, the question remains: can we improve? Can we consciously foster the benefits of our qualities and downplay our weaknesses, not just in an individual, but at larger scale, for a longer period, to benefit us all? The dilemma may be whether we can enhance humanity’s beauty – in its widest sense – and relinquish our selfishness at the same time.


Selfless love to the extreme

I am coming back to my first thesis: we are capable of things for which we haven’t been ‘made’. This in fact is a potential of which we haven’t yet seen the absolute limits. We can not say today: this is as far humanity gets; over to some other species. We will never say it.


Is it possible that one day she will walk the Earth?

We can’t look into a million years future. So many things along the way can happen, out of ourselves or just by nature, including out of space. But we do have the capability to critically asses our potential as a species. This is what makes us unique anyway. So why not look at ourselves more critically, in the context that we can reasonably foresee. We can do this in an ambitious way. We can make a treaty to save our planet, as I have been promoting in this blog. But we can also create an agreement, among all human beings, about ourselves. Why wait for another Mozes to lay down some new commandments if we are intelligent enough to make them for ourselves and agree to nourish our strengths and reduce the impact of our imperfection?