Sunday, October 10, 2004
Ultimacy: Mystery
If you would say “God created the universe,” then the more you know about what is known about the universe, the more you should have to conclude that God doesn’t know we exist, let alone affects what happens on Earth.
The more you know about life as such (on Earth), the more you should have to conclude that Earth isn’t the only locus of intellligent life—more than that: Earth is a relatively late planet (around a relatively new star). The evidence clearly (for science) indicates that stars of our generation (a lineage including the complex elements) have been around for billions of years prior to the Sun. If anything can really be the angels, it is the stars, for real. Yet, the stars know nothing; they just are—and are in a space-time that is incomprehensibly far away from its Beginning.
To pray is to belong anewly to what a star has made eonically possible as our incubator Earth that is unknown beyond us. To pray is to belong to the intelligence of the Earth and what the days have granted us.
Dear Earth, dear Sun, I am thankful to our being, for my lifeworld that is flourishing (or may flourish again).
Yes, I presume that we’re not the only intelligent planet in the galaxy, though we’re epistemically alone in the universe so far—probably because we’re not really ready to meet any intelligent “angels”—not ready for Prime Time, haven’t come of age, can’t yet recognize how it is that the Contact Constellation gains new members (though our fantasy life about their presumed existence helps us write our own futurity).
Will the Contact be terrifying (“War of the Worlds”) or wondrous (“Close Encounter of the Third Kind”)? Well, it won’t be a visitation.
Anyway, such mystery of the absolute others is our penultimate one (while the ultimate one is the universe ipso facto).
We are the humans of the universe, the humans in the universe, nervously whistling in the dark via pop culture, where the Other is recognizable, appreciable—almost a peer (even when presumed to be more powerful).
Though there’s a few million years between us and monkeys, there’s only a few thousand between us and, say, Amazon tribes (before prospectors brought them running shoes, etc.). Where will We be in a thousand years? At our rate, what becomes of intelligent life in 10,000 years? Only lame fantasy can venture. But it’s quite clear that intelligent life becomes what it can imagine which becomes realistic. Fly? We are the leading birds. Govern our own evolution? We scold our kind for striving to become gods.
What becomes of geometrically evolving intelligent life in a million years? As we don’t try to communicate with monkeys (rather, preserve their “self-determination” in preserves of which we stay out), is it any wonder that “gods” of other stars aren’t heard?
The ultimate problem in philosophy of language is there, Silent. Yet, our mathematics maps accurately to the entirety of the known universe (except at the “level” of quantum cosmology, which, some theoretical physicists speculate, may be too complex for our current intelligence). Thus, there ultimately is an available framework (call it the Newtonian-chemical level of mathematical realism—and define “universal realism” as clearly being at least that), thus a basis for creating a way to read the gods.
Anyway, there will always be questions of ultimacy, and that is why there will always be philosophy, distinguishable from all other discursive formations: Logic of humanity (under quantum constraints) in The Universe. Epistemology belonging to humanity. Moral psychology as phenomenon of intelligent life. Solar-systemic, “water-windowed” life on a right-sized planet among the stars, billions of them in our galaxy, among at least thousands of galaxies in the Local Region, among innumerable “strings” of Regions in the cosmic web of strings speeding apart from each other in a universe that is to fade out trillions of years hence.
Intelligent life is a blink in the christmas tree of cosmic time—a million years there, then gone—a million years here (long after there), then gone. And the tree grows, as the blinks take longer to reach another future, all to be ultimately Archive “to” darkness.
Such may be our destiny: to meet the Archive of long gone “neighbors” in our galaxy.
So, all we can do is love the life we are, for its own sake of what it may become for those who have our works, remembering us, reading us, living in light of what we built or channeled or sang.
So, what’s a history, what’s a life but a way for all there is so far.
It’s enough. There’s enough mystery to keep me in love with the living (which a god might say of us, too, and so stay away).
