The two preceding Chronicles have taken as their presupposition that the emergence in our universe, first of self-perpetuating and then of self-reflecting creatures was a quasi-inevitable product of “matter” itself, using this term to include as well energy that physicists oppose to it at the first stage of ontological differentiation.
None of this explains the origin of the universe, but clearly no such explanation can be satisfactory, given the absence of preconditions determined by other means. Or as Heidegger might have put it, we have no ground for discussing “why there are essents (Seiendes) rather than nothing,” and this would be true even if the latter were no more complex than an electron—which for all we know may be as complex as a galaxy if we could observe in in sufficient detail. Such speculations serve only to discourage the “ontologist,” but hopefully the universe as we know it permits more useful reflections on its composition.
If indeed the universe is limited to that initiated by the “big bang” some 13 billion years ago, then the obvious ambiguity of our understanding of it, which becomes increasingly insistent with every new discovery on the path to the “theory of everything,” would almost suggest its creation, not by the divinity of the Old Testament, but by a trickster god, not necessarily malicious, but bent on maintaining a paradoxical relationship to the creatures who attempt to decipher it: the more they learn, the number of parameters necessary to incorporate this knowledge, rather than decreasing to the speculative minimum of a “theory of everything,” continues to increase. One wonders how Einstein, were he to return among us, would situate the spukhafte Fernwirkung of quantum entanglement in today’s context of “dark matter/energy” and the uncertainty of the cosmic constant.
My conclusion from reading popular science periodicals over the past 70 years is that the distance between the scientific and the popular understanding of fundamental physics has not ceased to increase. And this suggests to me not that writers are increasingly less capable of explaining the science in terms accessible to the layman, but that the scientific “facts” themselves are increasingly distant not only from the layman’s empirical knowledge but from his intellectual imagination. Years ago, we knew that in an atom, protons and electrons weren’t little spheres spinning around a nucleus, but had the impression that this image, analogous to that of the planets of the solar system, described the atom well enough so that we could understand its basic construction and how it combined with other atoms to form molecules, compounds, and the rest. Today “dark matter” suggests no image whatsoever, and physicists admit that they really don’t know what it is themselves. No doubt this development reflects “progress” in our attempt to understand how matter/energy is composed. But what guarantee is there that this substantial chronological period of a human lifetime, which has combined (1) vastly increased knowledge of the universe with (2) vastly less total understanding of the universe, is in the process of coming to an end?
My physicist neighbor, who retired from UCLA not long after the COVID epidemic forced him to teach his classes in the format the French call distanciel, tells me that young physicists are greatly encouraged by the new research possibilities opened up by the recurring signs that there remains much—and perhaps ever more—to discover, and consequently, that funds for further research will continue to be forthcoming. And there is little doubt that many new discoveries will have a strong potential of leading to practical applications, bearing the promise of technological progress and financial gain. Indeed, our failure to achieve the “theory of everything” is in fact a positive result; any kind of “end of history” would destroy our sense of time as necessarily productive of increased understanding and progressive improvement, as has been the case ever since the big bang. Nevertheless, the sense that the stronger the light we shine into the darkness, the deeper this darkness recedes, offers an irresolvably ambiguous satisfaction.
The providential sacred
Although we tend to think about the sacred only in the narrow confines of organized religion and its rituals and doctrines, in fact the sacred, the object of Pascal’s pari, dominates our existence, in which each human being experiences a personal emergence into what we call “sentience,” self-consciousness not simply as proprioceptive sensation, but as the articulation on an interpersonal scene of representational interactions with fellow humans subject to our conscience of “good” and “evil.” It is through the acquisition of language that the infant becomes a full-fledged human being, acquiring the moral différance that separates him from other animals. And as we have seen, the obvious explanation for this development is the need to counter the threat of mimetic desire to the stability that, unlike humans, animal societies are able to acquire via reflexive, unconscious inhibitions.
Pascal’s point that il faut parier, that the individual must bet on God’s existence, can be stripped of its supernatural elements, including that of the soul’s immortality, without losing its pertinence. On the contrary, what we must bet on is not that God will give us the chance to spend eternity in Paradise, but simply the eternity of the sacred itself—our sense of right and wrong. Our faith in the persistence of the sacred is our wager on the “eternal” capacity of the universe to maintain the existence of our species, contingent on our respect and general observance of Hillel’s summary of the Torah: don’t do to another what you wouldn’t want him to do to you.
Seen in this light, the question of “the existence of God” can be understood in cosmic terms, yet without requiring us to attribute a human-like self-consciousness to the organization/organizer of the universe. We have no knowledge and indeed, no expectation, that the universe itself possesses self-consciousness. All we know is that, in its originary formation—assuming we can even speak of an “origin” either in or of time—the human was a realizable possibility. And given that, to again return to Hillel, our existence indeed depends on a moral principle, the idea of a benevolent God who serves as our example is anything but an arbitrary myth, however fantastic may well be our various religions’ and individuals’ conception of its incarnation. This is not because we have arbitrarily created, like the horse- and ox-gods of Xenophanes, sacred beings in our own image, but because our conscience, our moral sense, is experienced as in harmony with the universe that has nurtured our species, and whose rootedness in the nature of matter/energy itself is illuminated by evolutionary theory as driven by its tendency to form complex structures under the tautological rule of “the survival of the fittest,” leading from the first particles/waves to ourselves and probably beyond.
The sacred, in a word, is inherent and incarnate in our universe, and the simplest demonstration of this truth is the existence of beings—at the very least, ourselves—who are, in whatever terms, aware of it. As for whether the evolution of such beings as we will conquer ever higher summits, destroy their world, which will have to begin again from a lower level, evolving in endless cycles of growth and destruction, “only time will tell.”