The Serious Question

The serious question is why we are here. To think that some agency of transcendent power put us here seems reasonable—reasonable simply because we are incapable, even with our current vast knowledge, of producing living bodies as intricate as ours—never mind producing all the rest—from bacteria to rain forests. The modern explanation—which amounts to saying that the pure, chance-driven collocation of the right atoms produced life (echoing Bertrand Russell)—is just a very elaborate punt of desperation. That desperation, however, is understandable. It is indeed problematical to imagine that nature is the deliberate creation of a Being of Divine Perfection. My own conviction is that God would not have need to fashion fantastically complex machines in order to make living creatures; God would simply say “Be!”—and we would be there. My conviction, further, is that that’s how it happened. But the beings thus made were souls; and they are simple, in the Platonic sense; they don’t have parts; they don’t corrupt. Complex bodies, metabolism, ecosystems, and so on—that’s some kind of second order creation the evident purpose of which is—what exactly? My own conviction is that it is an adaptation to some kind of challenging event, usually dubbed The Fall. That which we call “life” was created by the divine “Be!” It’s not the artful churn of chemicals that we call bodies. We need bodies for some purpose other than to live; they’re probably vehicles we gradually fashioned after sinking into depths we should have avoided. That work happened so long ago we’ve altogether forgotten how we managed it; or it was done by souls of much higher accomplishment than ours—but well below the Divine; the Divine does not need engineering; maybe the angelic levels thought they’d throw us a rope by means of which to climb out of the pit. Never a dull moment in this life—not even as the departure draws near. This by way of formulating some questions I plan to ask when I’ve passed the border.