So, to return to my "sales pitch" for the integrative vision being offered in this series:
Would you be interested in a way of understanding our humanity that offers a well-reasoned, empirically-based, intellectually responsible "way of understanding" that offers a meaningful way to see the realm of value -- categories like good and evil, right and wrong, and even "the sacred" -- as an essential and real part of our human reality?
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Evolution As a Meaningful Story
To begin to chart the way toward filling those "empty spaces"".
At the heart of the secular understanding of who we are, and how we got here, is the story of the evolution of life on earth. Science says clearly, this is how we came to be.
For many, this evolutionary view -- in which the living world is shaped by a process with an apparently wholly impersonal and opportunistic modus operandi -- has seemed to strip our being of some of its important meanings. Like the reality of good and evil. Like a dimension worthy of calling "the sacred."
But there's another way of comprehending that evolutionary view.
The story of evolution, far from closing off our access to the important moral and spiritual "spaces" that religions have filled with their different stories, provides us a meaningful way to understand the reality of "the good" and "the sacred."
It is on those positive dimensions that this installment will focus. But in a subsequent entry, I will show how that same perspective provides the necessary context for understanding how -- as a consequence of our species' rather recent breakthrough into civilization, after four billion years of the story of life on earth -- humankind inadvertently unleashed a force that might reasonably be called "evil" into our world.
There are two reasons that it is the positive part of that pair -- how evolution gives rise to "the good" -- that should come first. It comes first chronologically, in terms of how value gets built into the organic structure of creatures such as ourselves. And it should come first also logically, in terms of laying the necessary foundation for seeing how the subsequent breakthrough into civilization of a culture-creating animal like homo sapiens would inevitably generate a force of brokenness.
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The Good as an Emergent Reality
From the secular perspective, it appears that values like "the good" and "the sacred" are not built into the cosmos, "out there." But those values are "emergent" realities -- arising out of the evolutionary process. Realities that have been instilled, by that process, into our very being.
In a nutshell, here is the argument for how one can get from the realm of "objective" reality, that science presents, to the realty of "the good."
- Evolution (natural selection) systematically chooses life over death;
- Natural selection, in time, by favoring those who are motivated to do what survival requires, crafts creatures to find fulfillment from those things that have ancestrally been life-serving;
- The fulfillment of sentient creatures -- creatures to whom things matter experientially -- is the only criterion for "the good" that makes any sense.
(Those first two points are fairly basic in the realm of evolutionary thought, though the language about "choosing life over death" and "finding fulfillment" are my own way of framing those ideas. The third idea has a degree of kinship with the philosophical idea of utilitarianism. Taken together, they form the framework for an argument" well, I wouldn't know how to counter it!)
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