FRAILTY OF THE LESSER GODS

My Dear Trill,

First I want to thank you, Trill, for the gift of a model of NASA’s Space Shuttle. It is a nice addition to my small collection of space memorabilia. You might be interested to know that at one time I was invited to participate in the design of the Shuttle, but I thought the concept was a bad idea and turned down the opportunity. As it developed, it was indeed a bad idea and cost taxpayers an enormous amount of money for little return. In the end, the system was shut down, not because it was worn out, but because it cost a billion dollars every time it was launched. However you look at it, launching into space is a costly business.

But enough about rockets. It’s a subject I might take up in another letter. It is such a pleasure to read the informative, long letters you send to me. Friends seldom write letters anymore. The postman leaves sheaves of ads and runs. It seems that text messaging has taken the place of letter writing, but to me it appears to be a slippery slope to illiteracy. Imagine what is lost when someone asks for a date with: R u bz 2nite?

I want instead to write about something that has been churning in my mind for some years and finally coming into focus. I hope these thoughts do not offend you, as I’m deeply aware of your unwavering, unquestioning lifelong faith. Still, what I have to say adds to the spiritual aspects of self, rather than subtract from it.

The general idea is that insofar as humans are concerned, whether or not there is an omnipresent GOD doesn’t matter, despite all the learned and prophetic voices across human history, from Shiva to Confucius, to Abraham, Jacob and Isaac, to Jesus Christ, to apostles Peter and Paul, to Mohammed, to Martin Luther, to Joseph Smith, to Hegel, to Spinoza, to Schopenhuer, to Niebuhr, to Schweitzer, to the Pope and all the Cardinals and Bishops of the Catholic Church, to American Evangelistic pastors of mega churches, to anti-deists Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris. to the Dalai Lama, to......

It doesn’t matter. GOD is detached. GOD is not involved. GOD is not attentive to human needs. Long, long ago, the GOD job was farmed out to lesser gods.

Indeed, some among them came close to the theme of this letter. Spinoza’s philosophy bears on it. Albert Schweitzer was alive when James Watson and Francis Crick, building on the work of Rosalind Franklin, Raymond Gosling and others, modeled the DNA strand as a double helix, containing everything needed to define a living being. But during those last years before his passing Schweitzer was wholly involved with the problem of eliminating nuclear weapons. His concepts of “Will to Live, ethics, and mutual dependence all have relevance. Watson’s and Crick’s discovery was instrumental in kicking off the fields of biochemistry and nano-engineering that are leading to ability to grow replacement organs and tissue, and adjust and reconfigure DNA so even generational diseases may be eliminated. The perfect physical human can be engineered, taking over where GOD left off. The perfected human being is just around the corner.

That the concept of a detached GOD is reasonable emerges from the logic that gifts of conscience, reasoning ability, inquisitiveness, an urge to communicate, inventiveness, intuition, compassion, sense of reverence, a spirit of adventure, are all attributes common to one degree or another to those accorded to Gods across the ages, Even including ability to evaluate, make tradeoffs and choose (which quarterback to favor in the Superbowl?).

These are not original thoughts. A few lines from the poem , “God’s Sadness,” by Uraguayan poet Jules Supervielle, translated by Geoffrey Gardner (July-August 1991 American Poetry Review), reveals that others have reached similar conclusions. The poem begins:

“I see you coming and going over the trembling of the Earth

As in the first days of the world, but the difference is huge.

My work is no longer in me, I have given it all to you....”

An additional quote:

“......I can no more speak to you than the potter can speak to his pot.

Of the two of them one is deaf, the other mute before his work.

With no power to point it out,

I see you rushing towards a blinding precipice,

And I cannot breathe a word to you to help you get around it,

You must get clear of it all alone like orphans in the snow.

And each day I say to myself across the huge silence:

Here is another one going awry over what he could do right,

There is another one taking a false step, not looking where he should

and this one is leaning too far over the balcony,

Forgetting about gravity,

And that one did not check his engine,

Good-bye airplane, good-bye pilot!”

And still another:

“You have a brain and fingers to make the world as you would like it.

You have the ability to make reason live and lock up madness in a cage.

You have all the animals that make up the Creation,

You can run like a dog, swim like a fish

and plunge ahead like a tiger or like a week-old lamb.

You can make yourself a gift of death, like the reindeer or the scorpion.”

Contradictions within the idea of an involved GOD are manifold and lamely explained. Just as an example, let me cite the plausible instance of a planeload of well-to-do Evangelical Christians undertaking a vacation trip to a luxury Safari in Africa, the better to view GOD’s creations. Upon arriving, the senior pastor in the group leads a prayer of thanks to GOD for a safe trip and landing, with special blessings for the competent pilots. But in getting there, the airplane has overflown millions of square miles of territory, where humans originated, where humans are made just like the tourists, millions of them, on the edge of starvation, or who have already starved to death, and who live amidst constant misery. Preferential attentiveness on the part of GOD is difficult to accept.

Persons of faith are taught early to give GOD a pass on bad things that happen and to heap praise for good things. Or an explanation at highest levels within the clergy for a catastrophic event might be GOD’s punishment for errant ways, even to the original sin, for which punishment is eternal.

Fortunately, we now have only one GOD to deal with. The Egyptians had one hundred fourteen Gods. The Greeks had twelve and many minor ones. Religions of the Far East however still involve multiple Gods. Somehow, for the West and Mid-East everything got distilled down to one GOD, which simplifies matters greatly. But paradoxically that devolves into my argument that there are billions of lesser gods.

Suppose, Trill, that sometime in your formative years you are brought into awareness of a vast, orderly civilization, members of which perform manifold functions with astonishing precision and reliability. It has a population of around ten trillion intelligent beings....... about 10,000 times Earth’s population.

You are then told: “It’s all yours. You run it.”

That would be enough to frighten away even the most self centered egoist, but as it turns out, it is not all that complicated. All one needs to do is to keep it warm and dry and assure it a supply of food and water. The civilization is real and comprises the ten trillion or so unschooled, programmed, intelligent cells that are driven to, and perform a single task throughout their lifetimes. They are the substance of your skin, everything inside it, and everything growing out of it. Ten trillion living beings. Each is by any measure a thermo-chemical wonder - entropy seemingly working in the wrong direction. Scientists will tell you this isn’t so. The apparent entropy decrease in living things is at the expense of an increase somewhere else, and they have the calculations to prove it. The true nature of the driving force, which may be ubiquitous throughout the universe, is however elusive. Schweitzer calls it “Will to Live.”

Think about it, Trill. You are the overseer of ten trillion living beings. Quite an assignment for even a lesser god. But as it happens, there is much more involved, because there are seven billion lesser gods with the same general makeup, and the future of humanity, its very existence, is dependent upon how together they learn to put complex cultural issues aside and work toward the common good.

The human body with its astonishingly capable brain is an awesome phenomenon. More so because it provides the means to understand itself. Discoveries about how it works are on the par with revelations about the nature of the universe as provided by Hubble, Spitzer and other modern day terrestrial and orbital telescopes. Progress in knowledge is recent but is now moving rapidly and accelerating. It is hard to believe that concepts like Immaculate Conception were plausible within our grandparents’ lifetimes. Myths are falling by the wayside one after another.

A thermo-chemical wonder - so many complex systems, integrated to operate in unison and in equilibrium for a hundred years if all goes well. Something seemingly as simple as the healing of a wound is an astonishingly orderly and beautiful process, and barely indicative of far more complex processes that operate continuously throughout the body. When the body experiences a wound, an alert is sounded and the forces and materials necessary to cope with it are marshaled and directed to the location, wherever it is, to cope with it. Then follows a complex cascade of events that is something like building a house, each event dependent on completing or partially completing the one preceding. Chemicals are applied to form clots to stop the bleeding. Cleanup crews clean and sanitize to prevent infection. Blood vessels are formed to move in construction materials. Scaffolds are built which facilitate mounting of new tissue. Collagen fastens on the walls of the injury to draw them together. At the molecular and cellular level all is done in vast numbers and unbelievable precision. A hard cover is built to protect the healing wound and in due time its nutrients are cut off so it dies and falls away, revealing the newly healed spot with a tender pink skin. Meantime, continuous with the healing process, unneeded scaffolds, excess cells and construction debris are chewed up into miniscule bits so blood vessels can transport them to the body’s disposal system. This is just a trivial example of how the body handles an emergency. Far more complex things go on all the time, around the clock, year after year after year. (as an aside, I pause to wonder: what a busy time it must have been when men battled each other with swords!)

Still, by some measures, the body is imperfect and could stand improvement. The immune system doesn’t measure up to all threats and invasions. Lost teeth don’t get replaced. There are organs and parts of organs that are no longer needed. Genetic defects are often generational. For humans, evolution appears not to be a mechanism for further advancement except in the brain. Whereas in other species, newborns with defects simply don’t survive, and genetic lines are strengthened by genes from dominant males, in humans almost everyone survives, and the unfortunate handicapped ones are nursed through life. Everyone is considered to have value. As lesser gods, it is left to humans to solve the problem.

I mentioned that events are progressing in a direction where biologically perfect humans can already be envisioned. There are futurists among us who see that achievement as just the first step to an incredibly different future for humans. Prominent among them is inventor Ray KurzweiI, author of the book “The Singularity is Here,” who predicts that computers will be the equal of human brains by 2020. Subsequently there will be development of massive computer capability that will end up in a symbiosis between the biological body and an external computer world that has enormous capability, able to construct anything, provide for all human biological needs, as well as being self replicating.

I have mixed feelings about Kurzweil’s predictions. They leave open the problem of what will occur with the spiritual self. The benefits of controlled evolution must be weighed against what is lost. It may be inevitable. Yet, in the morning, when I sit at breakfast and twenty or more doves gather outside my kitchen door to feed at seeds that I scatter on the concrete pad, I marvel at a gathering of seemingly perfect creatures, evolved from dinosaurs that trod the planet long before humans appeared. Is there a practical end for biological evolution? It seems so to me.

So finally, I find myself ending on a somber note. The lesser gods have got to get their act together, or all is lost. GOD is not going to solve the problem of survival with an all-encompassing act of benevolence. The warnings are manifest. The mutant frogs of Minnesota, now appearing elsewhere, are the canaries in the coalmine. Humans have compelled other life forms to breed and live in polluted water. It should not be surprising that wildly mutant forms would appear. It brings to mind the Love Canal disaster in Niagara Falls, NY, where homes were built on a site where chemicals were buried, where over fifty percent of the children born there had at least one genetic defect. Rachel Carson (clearly a lesser god in my view) delivered powerful warnings in her book, Silent Spring, detailing how the proliferation of use of the insecticide DDT posed a death sentence to bird life. It is still in use in different parts of the world, but not in North America. It is environmentally persistent, however, and bio-accumulates, so its effects continue. The reckless side of industry and agriculture that results in tragic occurrences, at disturbing frequency, like Bophal, Exxon Valdez, the Gulf oil spill, and more insidious, long term damage like air and water pollution must somehow be brought to an end. The adverse effects are not just on humans, but upon all living things.

Dominion over the earth and all its living things could not possibly have meant pillaging, waste, poisoning and pollution, It must certainly have meant reverence for life and sensitive, compassionate husbandry of the environment and Earth’s resources.

My dear Trill, I fear this letter has gotten too long to hold your attention. Still, I have only walked the perimeter of this deep and compelling subject.

Until the next time, please know I think of you often and I count you as one who can’t wait for biological perfection. You have already taken the step, having visibly adopted a life style that identifies you too as one of the lesser gods who walk on our planet.

Affectionately yours,

Ed

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