Welcome to a fundamental node of the Pandeism index!!
Religions that give some
attention to the
place of
man in the
Universe seem to see man as a finished thing, a final
version,
perfected for its
purpose. This characterization is not
unique to the
Abrahamic faiths and their
depiction of man being made '
in God's image.' Many ancient
myths depict man as the ultimate
achievement of their
god or
gods, a
work of art, a special thing of
beauty both
physically and
philosophically. Such a
conception would have made
sense, and indeed might have been the only thing that made sense, to
primitives who knew nothing of
evolution and believed the
sun and
planets
orbited the
Earth, which sat at the
center of the Universe.
Because
theists (and
Creationists in particular) take it for granted that we are at the
pinnacle of Creation, God's final and completed
intent, no evolution can logically be necessary for us to get to any more useful point for the Creator -- whatever our Creator wants of us, we must be perfectly suited to provide, as we must have been since the very moment that we were set down on Earth. Man morphing into a new and superior
species would be
anathema. And yet it is apparent that
human evolution continues, now in ways never
imagined before the last
century. But now we have begun to accelerate our
advance with the
twist that we
supplement our natural biological process with
externalities, and with
technology in particular.
This advance now occurs from two directions. One is the supplementation of human ability with technological achievements ranging from the
lever and
wheel to the handheld
computer,
Internet, and
GPS. Today, a man standing almost anywhere on the
planet can access vast stores of
information useful for the processing of all the sorts of
data that we encounter from
moment to moment, and for communicating with others in the same technological (but physically distant) place. These
devices are steadily growing smaller and more intricate in their
connection with the
human body, and leaps are already being made in further
connectivity between
mind and
machine, approaching the direct
interface of controlling the machine with a thought, and gaining information directly into the
brain.
The machines that we
build are themselves becoming
smarter, and true
artificial intelligence is now not only conceivable, but inevitable, an end built into the same potentials of our Universe as allowed for life at all. And if
computers can be made to think and feel and be
self-aware, it is hard to imagine how we could fail to eventually recognize them as a new form of life. And if thinking machines can be
integrated into our own minds and brains, would we not ourselves then become a new
form of life? The other
direction of
advance is more direct --
mankind is at the edge of
learning to
tinker directly with the
genetic code, to take out the parts that harm us and hold us back, and to add all manner of
improvements.
Both of these advances lead us in the direction of
transhumanism -- man becoming something far greater than man through his own efforts -- something far greater than the being said to have been created by the mythic gods.
Pandeism determines that a
Creator seeking to fulfill its
knowledge by fully sharing in the experience the
Universe created a Universe with certain necessary
experiences (the ones the Creator requires) are bound to come about. In such a Universe, the very laws of
physics and
state of matter set forth at the beginning would assure that
complexity -- life -- will arise from the suitable physical and
chemical conditions, that this life will
logically evolve by a
process of
natural selection, and that one
result of this
evolution will be
intelligence of the self-
reflective kind that we happen to
possess.
The evolution of intellect in creatures with the appropriate
physiological architecture for
toolmaking makes
technology seem
inevitable. Maybe not for, say,
whales (which appear to be intelligent but lack the
opposable thumb which allows for use of
tools as simple as
pencils), but certainly for such a thing as man. Just as our existence may have been the inevitable result of laws made before time, so might the next species of
hominid be destined to arise out of our power of invention, intellects that dwarf our own and perhaps a
spirituality that does so as well. It seems
arrogant of us to
presume, with such
potential for advancement before us, that we are at this moment any closer to being a Creator's goal than were the proto-men who scrawled
pictures on cave walls 40,000 years ago, or their own ancestors among upright
lemur-like
apes scurrying around the plains of
Africa. So are we there yet? Have we hit the end of our intended evolutionary road? Logically, it could hardly be so!!