An Overlooked Mess

Just for fun, let's play Martian anthropologist for a moment. You know the game, you have just arrived on Planet Earth for the first time. You know nothing and have no presumptions. Nothing can be taken for granted. You look around. What do you see?

Well, the dominant species on Planet Earth is clearly deranged. There are enormous quantities of violence, hatred, warfare, crime, callousness and general brutality everywhere humans are found. In most of America's cities, a murder a day is a minimum performance standard. Almost 2 million people are in prisons in America, and these are just the criminals who have been caught. Whole vast regions of the earth (e.g., the Balkans) are madhouses of war. Most humans are just an insult away from violent outbursts, or a single outrage away from mass rioting. Humans are so dumb they despoil their air and water and poison their food supply in search of higher short-term profits. In a single century, humans can fight two world wars. And the humans seem to take most all of it for granted. As if this is the way things have always been and therefore must always be. As if the whole universe is as perverse as this little backwater corner of nowhere.

To be fair, humans are sometimes also capable of beauty and poetry and music and generosity and kindness, and maybe even a scintilla of wisdom now and then. Which beggars some explanation, one would think. Here is the explanation:

If you look at the neuro-anatomy of a human being the long stalk of the spinal cord has a small bulbous end at the top. This is the base brain. It is the same brain structure which humans share with reptiles. Wrapped around the bulbous end is a kind of think covering. This is the mid-brain (or limbic system) and it is a structure we have in common with lower mammals. On top of the mid-brain is a thicker covering known as the neo-cortex. This is the part of our brain in which our unique humanity is encoded. So humans have a triune brain, in the words of neurologist Paul McLean. As we evolved from reptiles to mammals to Homo Sapiens Sapiens, we did not leave our older brain structures behind, we just added to them. Anatomically, this is the meaning of that old pretentious puzzler, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. In other words, as a human being develops embryonically they go through the same evolutionary sequence, from the development of the reptilian brain, to the mammalian brain, to the human brain. And all three structures are still present in a fully developed human. Which is why a single word (a well-aimed insult, for example) can trigger a red-faced violent outburst from a person who, seconds before, seemed to be a paragon of the rational. This is because those more primitive brain structures are still intact and functioning, and they can easily (too easily!) be tapped. This means, not to mince too many words, that we are just a few layers of brain cells away from our animal and lizard natures.

So, human beings are not a highly-evolved form of life. We are a partially-evolved life form. A life form with lots of heavy baggage. From the point of view of systems design, we are very defective mechanisms. As an objective Martian anthropologist, I would have to say that Planet Earth looks like nothing so much as a kind of junk yard for defective products. Which brings us to the problem of God.

There is a cloyingly insipid song, the lyric of which is: "I believe above the storm the smallest prayer will still be heard. I believe that someone in the great somewhere hears every word." This song is thought by those who enjoy it to be an expression of utmost piety. It is of course, precisely the opposite. What an insult to God to say that he/she/it knows all about this place and the defective units resident here. This attributes to God either an incredible callousness or an unbelievable incompetence. And all that stuff about God creating man in his own image. Talk about your insults!

There is a classic theological problem known as the problem of evil. It goes like this: if God created man, and God is good, how then do we explain the abundant evil in man's actions. It would seem we must conclude that God created evil. Which calls into question either his goodness, or his omnipotence (not to mention his judgment). The classical way out of this conundrum is to deploy the free-will move. Theologians like to say that God created man and endowed him with free will, and it is man who then creates evil. So God is off the hook. Of course, this is a superficial and inadequate maneuver which merely relocates the problem rather than solving it. The question then becomes: why did God create a creature with a free will which contains a disposition to evil? Surely, if God is responsible for all of creation then He is responsible for its evil manifestations whether He created them directly or indirectly. If you are stopped at a stop light and I rear-end the car behind you, knocking them into your car, it's me you sue not the middle-man; it is me you hold responsible even though I never hit your car directly. I think it is still God we should sue under the free will gambit.

The only way out of this classic philosophical bind is to conclude that God is unaware of what's going on here on Planet Earth. But of course, we might still want to say that God created man and God is perfect and all-knowing. So how to reconcile it all? Simple, it's about time, and about what type of creator God is.

If anything can be deduced about the nature of God from observing the nature of man, it is that God is an artist not an engineer. Consider the human body. It can sometimes be a thing of grace and beauty, but as a physical mechanism it leaves a lot to be desired. It is prone to a million maladies; it breaks down regularly, with increasing frequency as it ages; it assaults the sensibilities with its bilious and odoriferous bi-products; and it lasts only a few decades before it fails completely. Not really the work of a competent engineer. No God is an artist. He creates like an artist. The angelic hues in the face of the cherub in the oil painting is not splashed on the canvas in a single swirl of the brush. The artists first puts a small glob of muddy brown paint on the canvas, then mixes in a little yellow, then a little red, then some white, then scraps off some excess, then blurs it together with a broader brush, and, little by little, something of luminous beauty emerges. And the palette, and the paint-rag, and probably the floor under the artist's feet, are splotched with spilled and spoiled paint, with the rubbish generated by the process of creation. That's how artists create. And I suspect that's how God creates as well.

Then there's the matter of time. The time-horizon of human beings is not the same as God's. For us, our pitiful little lifetimes seem like huge chunks of time. But cosmic time is so vast, that the whole of human history is less than the blink of a cosmic eye.

So the way I figure it, God slapped a blob of ugly baby-shit green paint in some corner of his vast canvas, and that was, from our point of view, a million years ago, and from God's point of view, it just happened less than one eye-blink ago. Any moment now, God, who is perfect and all-knowing, will blink, and he will see the crap in the corner. When he does, he will scrap us off the canvas--like the cosmic poop we are.

In January 1999 astronomers saw the largest explosion ever observed. The distant gamma-ray burst briefly produced a pulse of light greater than that of all the rest of the observable universe. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology said, "It is probably something to do with massive stars. The real truth is, we don't know." Well, I know. Sounds like God woke up briefly, noticed another mess somewhere in a distant corner of the universe, and shook the shit off his shoe. To us, 9 billion light years distant, it looks like a burst of gamma-ray energy. And that's what it will look like to some other distant life forms when our turn comes.