In Defense of DeoLogic

Clay Farris Naff

The Argument, Part II

>Is DeoLogic Sufficient?

1. How does DeoLogic propose to address the needs that religion serves?

• It may be impossible to prove or disprove the existence of God, but there are excellent reasons for adopting a posture of indifferent agnosticism toward such controversies.

• While the evidence is suggestive of a godless universe, it does not disprove the existence of God (or gods). Yet, even if there is a God, and if He rewards virtuous behavior, the best choice is surely to be a virtuous agnostic, rather than to hazard all one’s fortunes on one "faith bet" in blatant pursuit of salvational self-interest.

• No. We need not resort to a supernatural Creator to locate a foundation for the meaning of life. We have discovered DNA and deciphered its code. From that code, we may abstract a single, universal value: life must perpetuate itself.
  
  
• Thanks to Darwin, we have no need to consider this value an indicator of intelligent design. In the hostile environment of the universe, any replicator subject to evolution must share this value or necessarily be weeded out. Natural selection is a harsh schoolmaster. It expels all slackers. Thus, surviving genes – though they may carry large volumes of ‘free riders’ (junk DNA) – produce phenotypes that are bent on perpetuating the DNA within them.
  
  
• From this knowledge, we must infer that we too are here merely as ‘survival machines’ for DNA – or rather, for the information sequences embodied in DNA. This can be a quite literally dispiriting view of our existence. But it is surely possible, and even desirable in the absence of supernatural assumptions, to breathe on that tiny flicker of value and coax it into a flame of meaning.
  
  
• Let us attempt a little rational inspiration through interrogation:
  
  
• Why life must persist?

• Why should that matter?
  
  Because only a phenomenon with that tendency could naturally give rise to a conscious meaning-maker such as ourselves.
  
  
• Yeah. So?
  
  If we are a natural phenomenon, then we are an integral part of the universe.
  
  
• Granted. But I still don’t see what you’re driving at.
  
  Well, Carl Sagan put it this way: "We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself."
  Now, Sagan’s fondest hope was to discover other intelligent life in the universe. But so far as we know, we humans are the only creatures in existence able to contemplate the entire sweep of existence and assign it meaning and value. In other words, to the best of our knowledge, without us the entire Cosmos would be meaningless and absurd.
  
  
• Wow. I never thought of it that way. That’s quite a responsibility.
  
  Exactly. But we’ve only just started. Until the last hundred years, we had only the haziest idea about life, the universe and everything. But thanks to Darwin, Einstein, Hubble, Heisenberg, and a few others, we’ve got a fairly detailed if mind-blowing map.
  
  
• Hey, wait a minute. I got carried away there for a moment by your lofty rhetoric. If we weren’t here, then the Universe wouldn’t care that it was meaningless, any more than a tree cares whether it makes a sound when it falls in the forest.
  
  No flies on you, eh? But remember we are the Universe, or at least, we are the thinking, feeling, meaning-making part of the Universe. Your statement is the same as saying, "You wouldn’t care if you were dead, because you would be dead." Even if I agree, that hardly means I’d be justified to kill you because you won’t care once it’s all over.
  
  
• Are you claiming the Universe is alive?
  
  In a limited, nonmystical way, yes. To say otherwise is to resort to the supernatural concept of
  "special creation" for us. To a philosophical naturalist, there can be no rational justification for considering life as somehow separate from the Universe.
  
  
• But we’re just a tiny speck in a vast ocean of space-time…
  
  ‘Sweetheart, you and I don’t amount to a hill of beans.’ Oh, sure, I know that feeling of humbling awe. No doubt the first living cell, if it had known how big Earth was, would have been overawed too. Yet, if it reproduced as effectively as today’s e-coli do, it could have covered the whole planet in under a week.
  
  
• Hmmm… What’s your point?
  
  If we accept that life is good, because it allows for meaning to arise in the Universe, and if we recognize that we humans are the cup-bearers of meaning for the Universe, then we accept a heavy burden of responsibility: to make ourselves immortal. That requires plans to move on up and out. It also implies a natural, nonarbitrary basis for ethics.
  
  
• Whoa! That was one helluva a big leap you just made. If you expect to persuade me, you’re going to have to do more than make big, abstract generalizations.
  
  Sorry, my enthusiasms carry me away. Away, but not astray. Let me offer you some qualifications to go with those claims:

• Immortality sounds like a supernatural concept, but it is not necessarily so. The need to strive for it is implicit both in DNA’s imperative and in our ratio-emotional rebuff of extinction. There are at least three natural scenarios under which it could, in principle, be accomplished: the Dyson conjecture of perfect adaptation, an unknown technology for taking advantage of time reversibility, or an unknown but already conjectured mechanism for creating a new universe to specification.
  
  
• The basis for nonarbitrary natural ethics rests in the imperative for survival. This is, admittedly, an instance of the ends justifying the means. We have good reason to be extremely cautious about any such system. Fortunately, however, there are solid reasons to believe that a survival-derived ethics will be at least as humane and compassionate as the predominant ethical systems we have today, and in some ways more so. While I cannot lay out the entire argument here, the basic reason is this: in any civilization, creativity and progress arise most efficiently from free individuals in a compassionate and just system of competition. That’s the lesson of the 19^th and 20^th century socio-political experiments. From Southern slavery to Nazism to Stalinism and even the nursemaid oppressiveness of socialism to the failed nations of Islam, states and organizations that too tightly bind the human spirit fall by the wayside. Does this mean that efficiency becomes our only ethic? No, in an age when any one of us can throw a monkey wrench (or worse, a bomb) into the delicate works of civilization, it has never been more important to eliminate the sources of discontent. But efficiency cannot be ignored either: we cannot, for example, choose to spend 100 percent of our national (or global) wealth on health care for the terminally ill. Nor can we simply redistribute wealth to eliminate poverty (and by implication, terrorism.)

• Okay, I don’t think we want to start that conversation right now. If I want to hear more about terrorism, I can turn on the Fox News Channel.
  
  Ugh! If it's torture you want, why not just stick needles under your fingernails and save on the cable bill? Anyway, you’re right, we don’t want to go into that now. I’ll just point out that terrorism is only one manifestation of what I call the universal veto. The price of having relatively free societies is that you have to keep just about everyone happy enough that they don’t exercise their veto by running amok. Of course, there is a small percentage of people who are likely to be violent criminals no matter what. They must be locked up or otherwise neutralized, but in general, justice, education and equity are cheaper than lockdowns. I predict that investments in social justice would rise under a DeoLogical ethical system, to a point rationally calculated to give incentives to everyone to strive for personal and prosocial fulfillment. The right balance between comfort and competition, you see.
  
  
• Yeah, well, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Not unless campaign finance reform gets passed, anyway. But can we get back to the point?
  
  Yes, of course. The point is this: for those who have a choice about survival, including the collective choice of all of human civilization, life must be worth living. If the Buddhist precept that all life is suffering should come to be true, then we would be justified in abandoning the quest for survival, for by extinguishing ourselves we would be relieving the Universe of suffering.
  Let me just sum up then: working from DNA’s single as if value – that life must endure – we can derive a whole, nonarbitrary, human-centered worldview. It has meaning ("We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself."), it has purpose ("We have a responsibility to the Universe to make ourselves immortal."), and it offers hope ("Judging from our progress to date, we have a real shot at doing this.") It also offers us a nonarbitrary, natural basis for ethics. They are not absolute ethics, but they derive from an absolute end.
  
  All of this lends itself nicely to a unitary ideology organized around terms drawn from supernatural religion: in becoming immortal, we will, if successful, evolve into something that deserves to be called the Supreme Being, or God, for short. The future God will not be a) supernatural, b) omniscient, or c) omnipotent. But it’ll be a mighty impressive God all the same, with one huge advantage over all the others: being there.
  
  And that, my friend, is a lot to offer in place of supernatural explanations and promises.
  
  

And so, our dialogue comes to an end.

3. Is that your whole case then? Even if we accept your premise about sufficiency, how can you claim this is enough to change people’s minds?

I don’t. I believe I have concisely shown, that DeoLogic meets the test of sufficiency in principle, but without a plausible scenario for actuating it, the thing would be a mere academic exercise. The problem is not so much in the far future. If 4.5 billion years were enough to transform inert chemicals into the vast array of complex life on Earth today, then an equal portion of time appears more than adequate to allow deliberate evolution to do its work throughout the galaxy. That work, we have already argued, is to make intelligent life immortal.

• The real problem is how to get from here -- our quarrelsome, religion-riddled world – to there, a peaceful, united, spacefaring civilization. If this sounds too much like Star Trek, consider the alternatives.

And that’s all there is to it, really. As I said, no magic, no mysticism, and nothing that in principle violates any laws of nature. On this view, we are very likely not the children of God, but we may well be the ancestors of the deity.

Comments are most welcome.

Regards,

Clay