Consider the difference between a living organism and any
other form of matter. Unlike inorganic
matter, organisms move, grow and reproduce.
Nothing else in the material world behaves this way. A completely different realm of existence
came into being when life first began.
In the beginning, each living thing consisted of one
cell. Over time, lifeforms reproduced,
evolved and expanded to every corner of the planet. But how did they begin? Animal life, which came later, can be
described as a form of combustion, but photosynthetic bacteria is most
difficult to explain, absorbing energy from the sun and using it to chemically
transform air and water into hydrocarbons - advanced technology of sorts,
within a single cell.
In time, some of these organisms evolved into lifeforms
consisting of colonies of cells, working together for a common purpose, but
with specialization for locomotion, feeding, fighting, etc. Yet, each cell in the colony is very much like
the simplest bacteria and algae, a world unto itself. Even today, after several centuries of
scientific investigation, humans know very little about how cells in higher
order lifeforms behave internally and when interacting with one another.
Gradually, biology and medical science are revealing these
secrets. Each new revelation opens up
even more mysteries, similar to the ongoing exploration of sub-atomic
particles. The ultimate mystery of how
life began on our planet still evades us.
Scientists, with their materialist perspectives, would like to think it
began spontaneously, when the right combination of heat, water and raw
materials are present.
I prefer a simpler proposition – life came from outer space,
riding on comets that impacted the Earth after it cooled to the point where
these lifeforms could thrive. Its possible
these infected comets came from a previous warm, wet planet that was destroyed
in a sudden, cataclysmic event, perhaps a massive collision. The planet is broken up and the pieces
scattered at high speed, its oceans instantly turned into ice by the cold of
outer space. Most of the lifeforms are
extinguished, but some of the simplest forms are preserved in ice or salt. How can living things remain dormant for
millions of years while these balls of ice travel from their cataclysmic origin
to our own solar system? Consider the
documented phenomenon of bacteria trapped in salt beds on Earth for hundreds of
millions of years, yet still viable in a Petri dish.
Imagine these frozen balls of ice and dust, impregnated with
a soup of single-celled organisms hurled out of this previous planet’s ocean at
high-speed, fast-frozen in space. Their
life force is suspended but not extinguished by the extreme cold. At this primitive level of life, heat kills,
cold preserves.
These infected balls of ice are mixed in with a huge cloud
of other balls of ice surrounding our solar system. Occasionally they fall out of the cloud and
rush around the Sun as comets, sometimes crashing into our solar system’s planets. A big enough comet, crashing into a warm
ocean, would not burn up all the little passengers. Some of them would survive, float to the
surface and start reproducing in the hot sunlight and rich atmosphere of
CO2. In this scenario, both Mars and
Earth were seeded with life, Mars perhaps at an earlier date. We are not sure yet how far life evolved on
Mars, but I predict we will find out soon enough, now that our robots have
begun roaming the red planet.
But this explanation is incomplete. Even if you accept my layman’s theory of how
life got here from somewhere else, the question remains, how did it begin
originally? Who or what created it? We don’t know and will never know for sure,
but I prefer the intelligent design explanation. The human race is collectively never
satisfied with not knowing, they will invariably substitute an explanation of
some kind, rational or otherwise.
For my part, I believe the same divine creator who initiated
the big bang and all that came before it, also created the seeds of life and impregnated
the material of the new universe with them.
The uniqueness of life and its ability to evolve into higher forms is
too clever, too purposeful to have been an accidental happening like
spontaneous combustion or crystal growth.
No other explanation seems rational. Once you accept the big bang and all that
followed in the material universe as probably the creation of a divine being,
it’s an easy mental step to accept the spark of life as intentionally created
to make the universe complete. Life adds
the next dimension to the material universe - higher order organisms with
ability to appreciate it and ponder these fundamental questions.
Since this divine being is obviously alive, it
makes sense they would want to create mortal lifeforms “in his own image”
to inhabit the universe. What began as a single-cell bacteria already contained the potential for intelligent life. George Hegel referred to this spark of life as the world spirit, Welt Geist. Single cell life includes a brilliant, built-in facility for evolution. Once H. sapiens arrived on the scene in Africa, with our language skills, the Welt Geist became aware of itself. Intelligent design.
Here on Earth, humans are the crown of creation. Clearly, we evolved from animals, but in the
course of evolving and adapting to our surroundings, we took certain animal
faculties to a new higher level. We can think, dream, imagine, speculate and perceive the
universe through our ever more sophisticated instruments. Humans have evolved to the point where we
have an elaborate mental life, far beyond what is necessary to sustain our
physical existence. What is the nature
of this mental life? Is it purely a
manifestation of the physical organism that sustains it, or is there more going
on inside our minds?
As the philosopher
GWF Hegel expressed it - What is the Phenomenology of the Spirit? If the nature of life is mysterious and
controversial, the nature of mental life is even more so. I prefer to think of mind as another
category of being, beyond matter and lifeforms, and a suitable topic
for my next post.
