Paired Cosmologies

The two cosmologies I want to look at both assume a complex Reality with a God. Representatives are Christianity and some forms of Gnosticism. The two appear to be quite different. In one the phenomenon of life in this our own reality is an intended outcome; in the other it is an aberration. The first suggests an order or arrangement in which God intended at least one category of living entities to populate some tiny portion of the vast emptiness of space. The second maintains that a community of life either erred or by some accident fell into a pocket of reality (i.e. the Universe) where life is not really at home.

Both of these cosmologies demand a certain view of the life-phenomenon and of the universe of matter-energy. To simplify it, for most people “life” simply equals “human life,” but it is interesting, at the graduate levels, to include all life. I’ll stay with 101. To have any kind of view at all, one must be a conscious agent, obviously, equipped with powers of reasoning, an agent for whom what it sees should be meaningful.

Those who’re satisfied with limited meanings, thus those that ordinary life produces (pleasing, displeasing outcomes) neither member of the pairing I propose is meaningful. Life is just a form of matter; nothing above it is required except motion; and matter-as-energy provides that.

All those who can entertain the pairing, above, as possibilities will see reality as a top-down structure. We know that we didn’t make ourselves—even if we can, more or less, chemically trace the making of our bodies. If we were “created” at our formation as embryos, therefore already in this realm—or if we were “created” in a higher sphere first and later, as agents, “descended” into the world of matter—in either case, we were created, and created with limited powers.

The first cosmology, “intended,” easily explains our ignorance at birth. We start as entirely undeveloped potentials; the potentials unfold as we live our lives. In the second, “aberration,” we originated somewhere else, being quite knowing there, but as we descended into the world of matter we were blinded in every possible way, not least by losing our memories. Sticking with the second now, bodies then become a kind of tooling that had to be developed over vast eons of time as a means by which, using matter to see by, we regained, to a limited extent, the power to orient ourselves again in this inhospitable setting to the nature of this reality. Then as we advance our powers gradually develop, we begin intuitively to see again that we are strangers in a strange land. We begin our trek toward the Borderzone—once again equipped, we hope, to make it all the way back again to where we came from.

One indication that this second position has merit is the strangely engineered character of bodies generally. They are systems quite analogous to advanced machines, but more sophisticated. They show a kind of design. Indeed we are still tinkering with them, as witness genetic technologies of healing. By contrast, our inner selves, which seem to have been created rather than fabricated, a kind of seamless perfection appears to be present.

Is this, the second position, incompatible with the first? I don’t think so. The great myth of the Fall, which begins in Paradise, argues for a convergence of these two models. We might take Paradise to be the intended place for souls, for life. And it seems located beyond the Borderzone. Our original home. The fall itself may be read as the “aberration” that caused us to be here. In Genesis we’re driven out of Paradise. But we might have left voluntarily. Sometimes what seems novel and intriguing—and the lower reaches may have opened to our view by a nearby happening, like the Big Bang—hides a lot of trouble and mayhem if carelessly explored. The Gnostics blame the demiurge for making that Big Bang mess—and thereby capturing the innocent. Genesis may be more on target by pointing at a certain overreach—or was it an underreach?—by fully conscious beings. In any case, great troubles cause great labors. And when they are finally over, we tend to be more sober and wiser. Thank God for Jacob’s ladder—and other help sent us from Above.