MM03.
Copyright © 2000 by Kevin Sharpe. All rights reserved.
Unpursued book proposal.
Book Proposal
by
Kevin Sharpe and Jonathan
Walgate
"The quest for a simplest, clearest overall pattern…is not to be distinguished from a quest for ultimate categories, a [weaving] of the most general traits of reality."
Willard V.O. Quine
This book joins the quest for patterns.
Our time has seen a specialization of knowledge with the most important discoveries remaining obscure to those outside. We thus too easily lose track of the most elegant and powerful explanatory intuition of all: that the whole of reality, all our experience, expands from one universal, creative principle.
This book pursues that dream along the boundaries of modern science. We explore cosmology, evolution, complexity theory, chaos, and quantum physics in a manner suitable for lay people as well as for scholars. The focus always lies upon fundamentals: what do these discoveries mean? The laws guiding our universe tell us more than simply what happens; they provide the framework for us to consider our hidden as well as our explicit assumptions about the world. Ideas don’t stand alone, but lie embedded within a web of interrelated concepts. Metaphysical truths stand at the center of our webs of belief, and seismic consequences accompany their alteration.
"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility." Albert Einstein captures our fascination with the laws of nature, but hints at a deeper project: the study of the laws themselves. Our challenge is to understand our understanding and hence more adequately appreciate the significance of our discoveries. Only then can we embed them into our experience of the world and touch the meaning of reality.
SYNOPSIS
The Meaning of Life...Chapters One to Three
Why are we here? The question encapsulates our desire for understanding. Cosmologists have recently discovered harmonies in the universe’s guiding principles and many commentators think that these mark the existence of a designer. Such judgments are premature. Rather, fulfilling and fruitful answers exist if we have the discipline to look for them. This search leads us naturally in from the infinities of the big bang to the biosphere of earth, to a single living cell. The closer we look, the more we find.
Searching for the Divine...Chapters Four & Five
Can we find the Divine rooted in the natural? Scholars often invoke God where science has yet to tread. Such fancies collapse as science progresses. Despite this, interest in this type of reasoning surges because twentieth century physics developed theories that permanently limit what we can discover about the world. Chaos theory, a cornerstone of the physics of life, isolates space for human uncertainty, and theologians rush to find divine action within this territory. However, God’s relationship with creation must exceed these human uncertainties to be worthwhile. More hope lays with the discovery of emergence – the driving force behind universal creativity.
A New Metaphysics...Chapters Six & Seven
Ours is a quantum world. The discoveries of quantum physics rock our metaphysics. Scientists invent mysterious fields and multiple universes to explain the odd behavior of fundamental particles. Yet an answer simpler than their reductionism avoids their reductionist orthodoxy. The alternative says that everything connects to everything else. Flexible quantum physics inherently provides a more spiritual backdrop to reality.
Holistic Reality...Chapters Eight & Nine
Common sense notions about the passing of time, the openness of the future, and human free will survive only in philosophy and religion. Science now embraces and elucidates our deepest intuitions of reality. The divide is deep between science and religion. Reality in itself lies beyond our reach, but the human sphere of understanding can overcome many obstacles, even this divide. The quantum universe-as-a-whole – an idea that science suggests – provides fertile ground for the reunion of mathematical and spiritual explanations. The outlook is good. In a holistic universe, life can achieve its goal: enlightenment.
CHAPTER OUTLINE
One: Cosmology
We look up at the stars with wonder. Our attempts at understanding and encompassing the vast whole of reality have evolved from primitive superstitions to complex theologies and sciences. Our sheer intuitive wonderment at the cosmos has driven every step. As each new discovery arrives, we pose new questions and new inspiration dawns. The twentieth century marks a watershed in our intellectual progress. We have harnessed fantastically microscopic particles and discovered the stuff of life itself – DNA. Last but not least, that grandest of pursuits – cosmology – the science of the universe, has become a reality.
The heavens always offer the quintessence of the other, untouchable, beyond; they form a metaphor for the Divine. We have patiently watched and recorded their motions, unable to do more than observe – until now. The relativistic and quantum revolutions of our time transform space into a laboratory for our enlightenment. Stars explode in supernovae of information and the Hubble telescope looks across time as well as space, back billions of years into the past.
Translators are now opening to us the message of these discoveries, but
already some thinkers draw spiritual inspiration. The word "design"
slips back into the science of these circles. Though a cold and desolate place,
the cosmos is arranged specifically to provide a chance for biology – so some
astrophysicists increasingly say. The fundamental constants of the universe,
the masses of the fundamental particles and the relative strengths of the
forces between them, seem arranged to foster life on earth. Lee Smolin
calculates the likelihood that the universe would develop the long-lived stars
that life requires, given a random set of basic constants. The answer: one
chance in
What does this mean? Some commentators consider it meaningless because we don’t know how the fundamental constants were chosen. Rather, a mystery awaits investigation. In Smolin’s words: "a probability this tiny is not something we can let go unexplained. Luck will certainly not do here; we need a rational explanation of how something this unlikely turned out to be the case."
We enter the territory of the anthropic principle: life must exist in
the universe. Numerous scholars cling to this idea to promote their own
intuitions about reality. Some hold that many "possible" universes
exist (a popular concept in science fiction). The existence of our own world
doesn’t surprise as long as more than
We should wonder why these life-
The unexplained harmonies and mysteries of the world provide tempting targets for those religious thinkers who seek to impose their conceptions of God upon the universe. They only prove that the universe is a mysterious and wonderful place. The worthwhile response studies the "design" rather than shouts "Designer."
Spiritual concerns are human concerns – such intuitions and sensations form a fact of daily life for billions. We seek to understand all our experiences and should draw upon all the insights of human endeavor. As the spiritual beliefs of scientists down the ages have shaped their work, so their discoveries should mold and inform our spiritual appreciation of the cosmos. We all play the same game of understanding.
[Note that Chapter One appears as a separate paper, ‘Cosmology and Design.’]
Two: Evolution
Cosmology isn’t the first discipline beset by anthropic reasoning. Biology
faced the same dilemma
Eighteenth century naturalists thought that the immense yet delicately balanced diversity of the natural world evidenced a divine designer. William Paley famously argued that a "blind watchmaker," working at random, could never produce a timepiece. Other alternatives to design than randomness, however, exist. Darwin disturbed designer reasoning when he uncovered a process – natural selection – that could "unconsciously" guide organisms toward complex and wonderful designs.
We cannot overestimate Darwin’s contribution. The intellectual community of his time reeled from the perceived negativity of thermodynamics. The physical world under this theory had become the epitome of randomness, growing ever more disordered as it careered toward "heat death." Paley’s assumption that the only alternative to randomness was interventionist design seemed well founded (and has survived to mislead modern cosmologists). Darwin discovered a "third way," a process where randomness fuels a drive toward order and where tiny steps can cover giant distances. Evolution represents the genesis of the idea of self-organization or autopoiesis, one of the most important properties of the universe.
Few people stopped reading purpose into the arrangement of life, though. "Those of us whose minds are imbued with a proper amount of religious conviction will detect in this apparent selection the intervention and assistance of a power higher than ourselves…whose control has shaped our destiny." So wrote Charles R. Knight, the American naturalist. Nowadays, John Bonner of Princeton views evolution as a directed process. He sees a trend toward increasing complexity, from single celled organisms upward. The public stamps "progress" on its understanding of Darwinism.
Leading proponents of evolution disagree. Richard Dawkins writes that natural selection "has no mind and no mind’s eye." Stephen Jay Gould insists that our world’s frequent mass extinctions reset it to a less complex state. Moreover, after three billion years, the simplest organisms are by far the most common. Complexity may form an important evolutionary adaptation, but it isn’t the unique direction for life as Bonner suggests.
To place complexity or intelligence at the forefront of evolution tempts us because we cherish these characteristics more than most others. This represents a second form of biological anthropic reasoning: we exist here, so the universe must have been designed to insure our presence. The arrogant mistake imposes a scientifically arbitrary direction upon the theory. Bonner’s hypothesis of "space at the top" presupposes his conclusion because it treats complexity as an evolutionary niche.
We should still wonder, though, why life and evolution exist. Darwin couldn’t attack this root of the mystery. He explained why life had transformed the earth in a complicated and competitively harmonious biosphere. He failed to explain why the simplest life – a complicated phenomenon – exists at all in a universe that entropy rules.
Three: Complex Life
Aristotle thought that living material differs fundamentally from inanimate matter; only life could initiate motion and action. We now know that the same particles and elements make up all matter, organic or otherwise. So, what is the difference between the animate and inanimate? Biology textbooks provide an inadequate checklist of the properties of living matter: respiration, excretion, sensitivity, and so on. Only one word on the list is crucial: reproduction. Life is the business of replicating DNA sequences called genes. The rest of biology is a by-product of this process. Our genes cause their surroundings, namely us, to produce copies of them – which is no mean feat.
The universe is an entropic, chaotic place in which energy flows unstoppably from order to disorder. When it produces a good copy of itself, a gene bucks a trend identified with the arrow of time itself.
The lowest biological level of this behavior is astonishing. Lee Smolin says, "There is no reason to believe either a galaxy or the universe as a whole remotely approaches the complexity and intricacy of the organization of a single living cell." The initial challenges facing life itself dwarf the forces required to drive Bonner’s trend towards complexity.
Yet life will grow to fill the niche available wherever it can find the
tiniest foothold. We can observe this on the earth, where even the most
inhospitable environments such as the sulfurous vents of undersea volcanoes
The problem so impressed physicist Erwin Schrodinger, a founder of quantum
theory, that he departed from his field of expertise to write a book about it.
In What Is Life?, he observes that life must somehow obtain what he
calls, "negative entropy." Only recently have researchers into
self-organizing systems discovered what negative entropy is. The core notion of
autopoiesis emerges to describe the process by which living systems regulate
and renew themselves. Ilya Prigogine and others developed a theory of
dissipative structures that build complex and stable patterns in a chaotic
environment. They describe not just life but other structures, like the spiral
arms of galaxies and the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. Chaotic entropy is
essential to the process because such randomness allows dramatic results to
arise from seemingly inconsequential causes. Theologian and scientist
This science of autopoiesis is young and promising.
Four: Chaos
The Universe is a remarkable place, more so than anthropic proponents admit. The fingerprints of the Divine, if they exist, will reveal themselves inside the creative processes that operate in our universe. Many thinkers turn their attention to that paradoxically life-giving phenomenon, chaos.
Niels Henrik Gregersen, for example, suggests that God acts in the
"gaps" of autopoietic processes. God guides inconsequential events –
the beat of a butterfly’s wings, perhaps – and so controls the direction of
evolution, orienting it towards a goal. The discovery of chaos shifts modern
metaphysics. The future seems open and unbounded by the past – for the first
time in hundreds of years. This change inspires Gregersen’s kind of suggestion,
to which science lends no
The classical world of Newtonian mechanics enters its golden age in the nineteenth century, and its model of the clockwork universe enjoys unparalleled success. Pierre Simon Laplace captures the spirit of the age as he speaks of a world where "nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to [our]…eyes." Determinism raises its head. Newton’s theory prescribes everything: the development of the future only needs the physical world of the present. Predicting the future proves hard, however, because it requires precise information about the present. Classical scientists expected to improve their predictions with improvements in measuring techniques, but in many cases that failed to help. Chaos is at work. The functions that power deterministic physics turn out to be, in John Polkinghorne’s words, "intrinsically unpredictable" because we can never know their initial states with sufficient accuracy.
Classical physics causes theologians problems because it leaves no space for God’s action. Standing alongside classical science confronts theology with the awkward problem of determinism. The theology of the reign of classical physics, together with its solutions to the problem of determinism, now falls apart, however. The advent of chaos theory throws doubt across nineteenth century certainties. Scholars often invoke God where scientists reach their limits, and their invocations always falter before the ever-expanding boundaries of discovery.
The same type of challenge faces Polkinghorne’s theology. He concludes from nature’s intrinsic unpredictability that the world must be ontologically open. This leads him to a "God of the gaps" argument that places God in the space between practical and perfect knowledge of the present. A "space" exists for divine providence or human will to forge the precise future. No gap exists, though, because a practical simulation of the universe calculates the future with absolute accuracy: the universe itself. We may not know the precise weight of Venus, but such a weight exists, with precise effects on the planet’s orbit. Polkinghorne mistakes a real epistemological problem for a dubious ontological uncertainty.
Consider this picture as Immanuel Kant saw it. Determinism troubled him, but not because he couldn’t predict the future. Hindsight offers the best way to study physical systems. Kant thus thought he could always find a law to explain why a particular event that happens is the only thing that could happen. We will understand when we read the next chapter of reality why it must follow from what went before, even if we can’t anticipate it. Polkinghorne’s reality appears open to divine influence, but that openness is illusory.
The failure of Polkinghorne’s account of divine action demonstrates the constant need to weave spiritual ideas onto reality. Polkinghorne and Gregersen, though they invoke chaos theory, glue God onto the side of physics – a position that is both unenlightening and vulnerable. Their "classical" Christian theology maintains a clean distinction between God and the physical world. This belief defends God from the tangibility of the physical world, its finitude, and its mundane nature. Those who framed this belief needed such separation because they understood the physical world as a disordered, uncreative soup of isolated particles slavishly following some preordained plan. This theological tradition urgently needs updating.
We know the world differently today: it is of itself an infinite, fertile, and creative place, with a future we can’t predict. God could feel proud to be involved with this world.
Five: Emergence
The dualist God-world position may represent theological orthodoxy, but some scholars rightly shy away from the perils it courts with gods of the gaps. Panentheistic thought searches for the divine qualities of the universe. A focus that might particularly interest it lies with a phenomenon that springs autopoietically into being: emergence.
Emergent properties refute the reductionism that infected science during its classical "golden age." All knowledge, it hoped, boils down to an understanding of the basic laws of particle physics. But nature behaves differently. Cells within organs cohere, acting in unison to produce a macroscopic effect like the beating of our hearts. The best understanding of this behavior lies at an organic, rather than a cellular, level. Whether or not we can describe a beating heart in terms of the motions and interaction of its countless constituent atoms, to understand the phenomenon is to appreciate it at the level of its simplest pattern. That simplicity emerges – some say, mysteriously – from the complexity beneath.
Many scientists have hangovers from the days of classical physics, when the success of physics’ reductionist program peaked. Others fear reductionism, falsely perceiving in it a materialist evaporation of the mysteries of existence. (Mysteries never vanish, Karl Popper points out, but become more profound with age.) While we can and will learn much through reductive reasoning, we can’t justify its exclusive use. Emergent phenomena present a fact of life. Emergent phenomena present the fact that is life.
Per Bak and Kan Chen write about self-organized criticality – the name they give to the mechanism of emergence: "Self-organized criticality is a holistic theory: the global features…do not depend on the microscopic mechanisms. Consequently, global features of the system cannot be understood by analyzing the parts separately. To our knowledge, self-organized criticality is the only model or mathematical description that has led to a holistic theory for dynamical systems."
Theologians appreciate the importance of emergence as a phenomenon that encompasses wholes. Peacocke and others advocate downward causation as a way to understand the action of the Divine. Downward causation occurs when whole systems act down upon their parts, perhaps like a heart "causing" its cells to contract and pump in rhythm. Now consider the universe-as-a-whole as the ultimate emergent system. It could act "down" upon its parts. We could equate this with the Divine. This proposal sits better with our spiritual intuitions than those mentioned previously. The "classical" God acting only in those microscopic events we can’t predict seems impotent and subsidiary in comparison.
Is our proposal right? Emergent phenomena are unquestionably real, and their explanations don’t exist at the lower levels of reality. Do such phenomena "act" upon their parts, though, in a meaningful sense? Peacocke’s ideas of downward causation depend on a collective contribution to behavior, yet, despite the emergent phenomenon of life, physicists understand the behavior of carbon atoms without reference to higher scales. Bak and others simulate the mechanism of emergence on computers and discover no sign of a downward direction to causation.
Six: Quantum Laws
We began our considerations of reality with the biggest picture available – cosmology – and rapidly focused in upon the business of life. Now, our investigations are posing some awkward questions about the kind of universe we live in. How does it work? Can wholes meaningfully affect their parts? We can only answer these fundamental problems with our most fundamental science – quantum physics. We must focus in yet further, to the smallest objects yet measured.
Quantum physics is a remarkable theory. Physicists have investigated and experimented for seventy years, and have found no counterexamples to its predictions. Quantum physics, for most physicists, is our best stab at the truth of the universe. This is what is really out there. Nevertheless, debate still rages seventy years after its inception over what it means, for its predictions are strange indeed.
Heisenberg’s famous uncertainty principle states that we can never know with accuracy both the position and the momentum of an object, but early quantum theorists went further. There is no such thing, they claimed, as the momentum of an accurately positioned particle. Only a spread of potential momenta exist. We can’t know, before we perform a quantum measurement, what will happen. We can’t know this, even if we know everything there is to know about what we’re measuring.
As with the unpredictability of chaos, so with the uncertainty of quantum physics. Theologians like Nancey Murphy and Robert Russell hurry to place God in this theoretical gap. They and others defend their ideas from the ravages of scientific progress with the absolute limits that Heisenberg’s theory places on what we can discover. New interpretations of quantum physics, which rival the traditional Copenhagen approach, evaporate this illusory security. David Bohm’s deterministic interpretation, in particular, leaves no room for God to collapse wave functions. His work, while not widely accepted as gospel, proves that the "space" that quantum uncertainty supposedly provides for God’s action is smaller than it looks.
How much can we know about the world?
Physical theory tells us more than what might happen. It tells us the likely
of future possibilities and these possibilities are random. This fatally
restricts any God of the gaps because the absolutely random behavior
following the probabilities limits God. The slightest betrayal of a pattern
would conflict with the physical theory that theologians claim as their
A pattern emerges from this randomness. Scholars again search for God instead of the answers to reality’s mysteries rather than search within them. Many physicists share this failing and see in quantum physics a theory that fundamentally limits our understanding of the universe. The reverse is true. The discoveries amaze because they show the depths to which our understanding can travel.
A feature of quantum physics intimately related to uncertainty is entanglement. Particles can jointly enter superposition states where they share information about themselves. The superposed system at a measurement releases information in a way that distances in space or time fail to inhibit. The separated particles are entangled.
Imagine arranging with a friend that, whatever yes/no questions you are asked, you will always agree with each other. Then you are led away into separate rooms. "Is red your favorite color?" you are asked. How do you respond? You might have arranged that you’ll both always say, "yes," to every question regardless. But what if your colleague is asked, "Is blue your favorite color?" Can you work out a better method? No strategy will allow you and your friend to succeed unless you know the questions in advance; your interrogators will always somehow cause you to disagree. In comparison, the basic particles of the universe agree all the time without apparent communication. They are entangled.
The universe is an entangled web of invisible connections. In
Seven: Quantum Meaning
The universe in a classical framework lies within our reach. It might stretch infinitely in size and it might contain an infinite number of things (Newton advocated this scientific belief as early as the seventeenth century), but it would still functionally equal its subsets – it would be "the sum of its parts." Nothing limits the extent to which we can understand, measure, or model such a world.
The metaphysics of our time is changing. The substitution of quantum physics for a classical picture shapes thought beyond subatomic physics. Theologians like Murphy and Tracy locate space for divine action within this new arena, but their work fails to appreciate the full metaphysical implications of quantum theory: at its heart, reality is holistic.
We best understand a heart as a whole organ, but we might in principle describe the motions of all its cells from basic principles. This convoluted calculation would yield solutions with a rhythmic pattern and we would discover simpler, collective rules governing these patterns. It would force us to describe the heart naturally, as a united organ, but we would reveal only the shadow of holistic behavior. Real holism emerges from systems that we can’t describe, however inefficiently, as the sum of their parts.
The superpositions of quantum theory led Bohr to deny objective reality, and deWitt to postulate the multiverse of possible universes. Only one reality exists, of course, and Bohr’s and deWitt’s confusions arise from the difficulty of our perspective: we cannot see the whole universe act from within. Studies of nonlocality and nonseperability create, in the laboratory, systems that we can only appreciate from "outside." We can entangle single electrons with opposite spins so they behave as a "joint" system wherever they travel and actions on one affect the other. Pure randomness appears, however, when we look at a part of the system behaving on its own. We would never guess it is part of a greater, twinned system unless we knew it already.
The universe is full of such connections, just as quantum physics is full of probabilistic behavior. The two go together hand in hand, in one universal entangled system. We can, from our mortal perspective, glimpse the fact of this infinity in our most careful observations and introspections. We can never, even in theory, glimpse its form. Our physical inquiries meet with pure quantum mechanical randomness.
The spiritual agenda for a holistic universe is clear. The majority of traditions recognize an essential unity to creation. We cannot identify the transcendent God of Christian belief, in whole or in part, pantheistically or panentheistically, with a universe that lies within our limitless reach. A holistic world, in contrast, is quite other than its parts and far greater than their sum. Christian infinity is "other" than our material reality – and a holistic universe is infinite in this sense.
Quantum theory steps scientifically toward an intuitively spiritual metaphysics. The answer to our earlier question now emerges: wholes exceed the sum of their parts. The downward causation that Peacocke speaks of does exist in the fundamental laws of reality.
Both Augustine and Aquinas saw God behind every event, as a universal "first cause." The conviction that God acts in everything underpinned the Protestant reformation. We in this modern era can retain this belief while brushing aside classical dualism. Creative energy fills the universe. Our connections with an implicit and universal pattern guide our futures yet remain locally open. This universe sounds divine in and of itself, satisfying many of Christianity’s criteria for God. The panentheistic position unites our wonder at the cosmos and our spiritual yearning for the Divine. God acts down upon every part of creation through the whole quantum universe – and every corner of reality contains an echo of the whole.
Eight: The Human Perspective
This talk of quantum physics sounds very well, but what relevance does it have for us? We are macroscopic entities, after all, for whom superposition states and entanglements incite the stuff of fantasies (usually involving cats).
Not true. The world doesn’t divide into levels so easily. To read this page your eyes detect the impact of tiny photons upon the retina. The optic nerve translates these quantum events into macroscopic electric pulses. Real life and quantum physics intimately relate. Still, what metaphysical relevance does this suggest?
We humans keenly notice the passing of time. We live our lives in this framework more than in any other structure. Time founds our sense of individuality – we define ourselves both by our memories of the past and by the time-based processes we undergo: our thoughts and our deeds. Yet no one could explain time before quantum theory.
Previous theories invoke time as a dimension in which to understand causal behavior, but they could never explain why time flows. They usually choose to ignore flow, considering it a psychological illusion. The passing of time is, however, as real and natural as it feels.
Holistic quantum theory understands time as the constant passing of a nonlocal pattern into a local structure. The universe-as-a-whole, wrapped up into an implicit and interconnected pattern, unweaves itself as it evolves. The unweaving does not happen in a time frame; the unweaving is the time frame. This provides the framework for explaining those most troublesome of physical laws, thermodynamics.
Time is the "direction" of our holism. It forms the axis along which universal patterns reveal themselves, becoming apparent as they unravel into local structure. Objects possess structure when they distinguish themselves from their surroundings: structure equals identity. All systems, including humans, must deal with the issue of their identity as a part within a unified whole. We must understand human being as a process that the constant unraveling of God’s nonlocal tapestry fuels. Every object, at every level of organization, constantly "corresponds" with the whole. The whole communicates to every object how it should be, how it should exist.
We can, then, understand human freedom as an ongoing act of giving of autonomy from the whole, granting its human parts the ability to determine their future locally. The whole constantly pushes us away from the apparent randomness of quantum systems, a randomness destructive to our freedom of choice. We exercise control over our own destinies in our local pocket of reality, within the realm of those patterns already unraveled.
Rudolf Brun believes that this freedom implicit in the cosmos shows God’s love: "The reason that without freedom ‘neither God nor nature can be conceived’ is that without freedom there cannot be love.…To give oneself away, one first has to become oneself. This becoming required the freedom to create oneself through one’s own history. I have to be free to become me!"
Nine: Understanding
We all play the same game: understanding. A great ape progresses to wonder about the fundamental constants of its universe and discover the invisible entanglements that bind the cosmos together. These great apes, we, now learn to bend these connections to their will.
This revolution is the field of quantum information. Quantum physics holds
the ultimate "cure" for universal chaos and, through this, becomes
the hope for universal understanding. The universe at the classical level poses
intractable problems and barriers to our knowledge. A quantum universe
possesses the flexibility to solve such problems. David Deutch describes a
quantum computer as simultaneously performing calculations in many parallel
universes. The computer taps the potential of its connection with the
universe-as-a-whole to perform algorithms involving
This links back to life itself. DNA must encode knowledge about the world to reproduce successfully. This includes the biochemistry of amino acids, the viscosity of water, and, in some sequences of genes, the knowledge of how to build computers (us) that can build their own computers. DNA models and understands the world, each generation preserving the most successful methods. The phase, "the purpose of life is DNA replication," rings barren and unfeeling, but close lies, "The purpose of life is the pursuit of enlightenment." We all play the same game. Enlightenment leads to naught, however, unless the universe is comprehensible not just in principle, but also in practice. Holistic reality guarantees that tractability to the cosmos.
The holistic universe is a miraculous place, alive with possibility and teeming with novelty. A nonlocal harmony connects all things in a pattern that is simultaneously immanent and transcendent. This whole empowers its creation with a freedom: the potential for creativity. We don’t sit alone in a sterile void; we can belong to this world. Perhaps this represents the greatest miracle of all. We can touch the truth with our thoughts in which our scientific and our spiritual yearnings fuse. Our wonder will never know bounds.
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