Evolution's Only Truth is Time Itself

By Greg -
Environing Need
Organizing Environment
Conceptualizing Organism
Modeling Conception

Subsequent experience informs the simple litany I came up with in my early twenties. I knew then but I know better now how the process repeats and persists at every level and at every step of evolution and transformation. The words will differ, and the details of its calculations will change, but the theme is constant, and includes consciousness as easily as it includes the organism and the nucleated cell, the biosphere and the prokaryotes, mass and gravity, charge and electromagnetic radiation, self and culture. It was unnecessary for civilization to dominate culture. I really don't think of God as a natural consequence of our self-awareness. God has always been an imposition on our common sense, and God's truth has never been self-evident. Truth that can only be known through indoctrination is quite naturally challenged by imaginations nurtured by personal experience. Science and religion are interchangeable, and there are true believers regardless of the label. A "true" scientist is just as rare as a "true" Christian. And both, insofar as they admit their imperfections nevertheless recognize their limitations in comparison with the ideal. The ideal for these believers isn't just some mathematical fiction, like infinity or the square root of negative one, a convenience for performing calculations, an abstraction against which to measure the world. The ideal is, for all true believers, the timeless and irreducible principles that define and regulate reality. And reality, for them, is only the ideal's shadow, its crude consequences, the brief castaways aspiring always for their reunification with the source. This yearning of civilization does not fit the pattern of biological and cultural evolution. Yearning, we backed into the future. Believing, we dismissed experience and stopped thinking. And in desiring God we embraced death and regarded life as exile, arduous, suffering to be extinguished by the sanitary, undiluted, and unadulterated truth.

Evolution's only truth is time itself. The rest is creation and emergence.

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