I made a note the other day on the need to have a
meta-theory of some sort before any thought is expended on the possible meaning
of the life phenomenon on earth. Herewith a brief exploration of that notion.
Modern science begins with an inherently monistic assumption
that only tangible or at least measurable physical phenomena may be consulted
in seeking an answer. Such phenomena, however, only yield limited meanings,
thus answers to questions beginning with when, where, and how. The what
question is a matter of experience. The why question is never answered although
it is unavoidable when comparing living with non-living nature.
It is unavoidable because living nature has a purposive
character. Its ultimate purpose is invisible, but its reproductive behavior is
clearly teleological. Its undeniable intent is to maintain very complex
physical forms despite the fact that all individual instances of it die and
return to the inorganic state. We find no parallels to this behavior in the
inorganic realm. Yes. Crystals are formed (and deformed) as particular external
conditions change—but no crystal ever produces another crystal, and that one
yet another, in a continuous chain. Matter at great scales forms spherical
aggregates, but these do no reproduce. Nor do such forms actively struggle to “stay
alive” by flight or fight behavior. Life therefore displays a discontinuity
with the order from which it seemingly arises. The science-based explanation of
this discontinuity is that complexity, as such, produces radically new behavior
in matter. But why it should be that linking many different structures made of
the same fairly limited number of elemental components should suddenly produce
purposive behavior has never been explained. These structures, moreover, are
unquestionably purposive themselves, providing “tools” for locomotion,
oxygenation, nutrition, digestion, etc., etc. To say that something changes
magically is also to say that something, matter, has a tropism toward
complexity.
The religious view solves the problem of meaning by
supplying it in such a potent form that the actual question of what life is
becomes trivial. God made it. But God is too high an explanation because God
can do anything. This view produces a problem of another kind.
The problem is that while life exhibits a designed—or
perhaps better put a quasi-designed—character, thus revealing purposes, the
design also clearly arose in answer to stimuli and has an “any which way so
long as it works” appearance—as if a half-blind drive, urge, or intention had
been present behind it, nothing even close to waking consciousness, much less
omniscience. Life is purposive but is also evolving and evolved. It suggests
some agency light-years lower in status than divinity. A popular symbol of this
quasi-engineered but catch-as-catch-can process is the panda’s thumb, made
famous by Stephen Jay Gould. It’s not a thumb but functions as one. The panda
has five fingers; the thumb is a wrist-bone promoted to thumb-status by
evolutionary pressures.
If living bodies appear to be purposive structures built by
some agency operating intelligently (meaning purposefully) but largely in the
dark—rather than divine creations, the why of life would seem to require
something more than complexity and something less than divine creation as their
explanation. Materialism founders on the undeniable teleology of life,
creationism on the quasi-engineering of all living bodies.
This in turn demands, even to start looking at life
properly, a new meta-theory. It must accept both meaning in the universe and
the presence in it of a secondary agency. So far such a theory is notable for
its absence—although some elements of forgotten Gnosticism point in the right
direction.
