As it follows from evolution understood as a process that chooses life over death, that the nature of a sentient creature is molded such that its experience of well-being tends to correspond to what, in the history of the species, has been life-serving, so also does it follow that the life-serving and the fulfilling are two sides of the same evolutionary game.
The game of life operates, then, on two levels. The overall system operates mechanically as if animated by the "purpose" of yielding survival. The sentient creatures the system creates are built to seek fulfillment. From the point of view of the system, that fulfillment is a means to an end. But from the point of view of the sentient creatures, the fulfillment is an end in itself.
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Out of the impersonal processes of evolution, there emerges value, which is to say, there emerge creatures who experience things in terms of the better and the worse.
It matters to a baby whether it is lovingly cared for our callously neglected or cruelly abused. It matters to a kitten whether it is stroked or tortured. (Pleasure and pain are a gross way of expressing the inherent dichotomy. But I think the experiential "good" is richer than "pleasure" connotes. The word "fulfillment" captures more of that richness.) It matters to a human community whether the people flourish or are mired in misery.
The emergence of creatures who directly experience that "things matter" is the entirely logical -- one might say inevitable -- outcome of the process of natural selection. Once life begins to develop out of a cosmos in which, at least as far as science can tell, there was previously no meaningful way in which one thing could be better than another, "the good" will eventually arise as an emergent property.
Filling Those "Empty Spaces" in an Entirely Secular Way
Thus does a scientific, secular perspective provide a meaningful way of recognizing the reality of value. This way of establishing that reality seems by no means inferior -- logically -- to any of the religious stories that claim to illuminate the good and the evil.
As the human good consists of human flourishing, this secular way of establishing value is fully capable of establishing the validity of such principles as "Love thy neighbor as thyself," said by Jesus, or Rabbi Hillel's precursor to the Golden Rule, "What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow." For the practice of such precepts will maximize the fulfillment of the human beings within any community that practices them. Their rightness is affirmed by the experiential reality of sentient creatures.
As "value" is an emergent property in the evolving system of life, so also is "the sacred."
Just as value cannot have meaning except in terms of experience, so also with the sacred. (Unless within a basically authoritarian outlook, in which anything the Supreme Being declares, His creatures must agree to.) Consider "the sacred" as what occasions a special form of the experience of value -- value to the nth degree. Value in excelsis.
Many with a secular perspective regard the concept of "the sacred" as meaningless, as not corresponding to anything in reality. But to deny the meaningfulness of the idea of "the sacred" is to deny an experiential human reality.
The reality is that it is a human universal that people have "special" kinds of experiences--experiences that give rise to a sense of sacredness. We need some such concept, because it refers to an experiential reality that people talk about in such terms--in terms of its breaking through into a deeper, more illuminated, bigger dimension of reality.
"The sacred" -- the capacity for this kind of experience -- seems to be an inherent part of our humanity. Just as music and laughter -- which are also found everywhere human beings are to be found -- are part of what we humans are by nature. Evolution, evidently, put it there.
To deny the reality of "the sacred" because it is grounded in experience makes as much sense as denying the reality of excruciating pain.
Not every human being, it seems, has such "Wow" "way out there" "blown away" "deeply illuminated" kinds of experience of value. But I gather it's a substantial portion. (Not every human is musical, or has a sense of humor either.)
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