Watch and watchmaker(cosmic)

William Paley, the 18th century Christian philosopher is famous for popularising the Watchmaker Analogy or, as it's more commonly known now, the argument from design. Briefly, it goes thus: Human artefacts are products of intelligent design (or purpose) and the universe resembles such artefacts.

Therefore the universe must be a product of intelligent design (or purpose) too. But since the universe is vastly more complex and gigantic than a human artefact, it must have been designed by a vastly more powerful and intelligent designer. In other words, just like the design of a watch implies a designer, so does the design of the universe.

The reasoning is so viscerally persuasive that despite advances made by science to explain complex phenomenon in terms of natural processes, its lure is still tempting. Thus if we say that the location of mountains can be described by plate tectonics or biological structures by natural selection and planetary systems by the nebular hypothesis, watchmaker proponents can always come back with: yes but these natural processes are the result of the creation of the universe. Which natural process created that?

Although the rebuttal may seem iron-clad, a fatal chink in its armour may now be developing through the field of cosmology which can strike it a death blow. Scientists are beginning to think that the Big Bang model of the creation of the universe may not be correct after all.

According to some theories of quantum gravity everything in existence today could not have been packed into a singular point of infinite density, temperature and curvature. More importantly, they think that the current expansion of the universe was preceded by the collapsing phase of a previous universe which went through a Big Crunch and bounced out into this one.

Basically, this means everything was not created when scientists used to think it was but also existed before that. And perhaps before that too. This is where the design argument collapses completely because if a watch was never made but always existed, it obviously wouldn't require — or even imply — a watchmaker since only something that's been created needs a creator. So how do some faiths which also believe that the universe has always existed reconcile with their belief in a creator too? Simple: they say the creator has also always existed. In fact they rather imply that the two are inseparable aspects of each other.

Mukul Sharma : Do you have a soul ?

Having an immortal soul is a very important and integral part of Christian theology. But it comes with a heavy scientific price — especially as science advances our knowledge of human lineage and evolution.

. For instance, it was easy at one time for doctrinal apologists to answer the question as to who was the first person to have a soul. All they had to say was: Adam. Unfortunately, that answer doesn’t work any longer since only a handful of ultra fundamentalists today attempt to retain the rather simplistic mythology of Genesis. Even the papacy acknowledges the evidence of Darwinism as pretty well established and that humankind goes back millions of years in its making from proto-hominids to homo sapiens.

However, that doesn’t solve the problem either. For if we are to grant that humans possess an eternal soul, there must have been a first-case scenario before which no humans had one. When did such an infusion take place that determined who was mortal and condemned to dust and who were to enjoy or suffer everlasting bliss or damnation?

Any god, it seems, would have to be fairly arbitrary in deciding at exactly what point along the continuum of a slowly evolving human species, he, she or it should make the soul come into the picture. And if indeed there was such a precise transition point, one would have to accept that some particular child then existed who had a soul while its parents didn’t.

To say that all proto-humans, irrespective of their candidature for sapiency, were infused with souls right from the beginning only pushes the question further back. Would the shrew-like creatures from which monkeys and humans descended even understand the import of having a soul or be able to deal with its moral implications? And why deny modern monkeys a soul in that case? (Incidentally, if only resurrection is considered instead of a continuously existing immortal soul, then who in the sequence of ancestors leading out from the first to the present will be the first whose body shall be resurrected?)

No, the concept of having an immortal soul reserved for only a select few inside a broader range of individuals just doesn’t work unless every living organism including bacteria and moss are also considered. And even then viruses are between animate and inanimate. So why leave out rocks and minerals? Funnily enough, there are some religions that actually say everything has a soul. Maybe we could go with them.

(cosmic) concept of universal goodness

The problem with trying to describe a universal morality is that differences in cultural traditions and customs filter down through social groups
to ultimately operate in individuals. Thus, while in one part of the world honour killings may be sanctioned as morally advisable, in other places it’s still murder. The same sort of questions even influence scientific research when the government of one country bans foetal stem cell research
and another pushes for it. This notion of everyone having a different idea of good and bad, called moral relativism, is now being questioned by some scientists who feel they may be close to discovering a common basis for it.

Marc Hauser, author of Moral Minds and director of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard University, believes his research is adding credence to the idea of a “universal goodness impulse” — just like there’s also a universal language impulse. The impulse may generate different kinds of mutually incomprehensible speech patterns but the underlying stimulus remains the same. University of Maryland neuroscientist David Poeppel on the other hand feels that the moral rules we follow — such as when to do the right thing — is set in a sort of default position when we’re born, like the factory settings on a PC, which form the basis of morality. Later the switches are set to particular values as a function of experience.

Like-minded researchers believe this so-called “urge to good” must be universal because it’s also seen in the altruistic behaviour exhibited in animals who often show an unselfish concern for the welfare of others. Most evolutionary scientists, however, refute the moral argument by saying that it’s nothing but instinctive cooperative behaviour that may be detrimental to the individual but occurs nonetheless because it contributes to the overall survival of the species in the long run.

But this doesn’t answer a far more fundamental question as to why survival itself should be deemed so important by all living things. What possible benefit could there be in making copies of our genes, ourselves or our groups? (Saying “survival benefit” is merely tautological.) Obviously if it was bad to survive, nothing would have, even if it got infused with life somehow. Therefore, there’s no getting away from the corollary that it must be good to survive. Why this is so is what science must now investigate.