How Science Can Help Us Live In Peace. Markolf H. Niemz

sketch of evolution

      Darwin does not express any kind of special role that mankind might have in his theory of evolution. So it is immediately clear that even mankind evolved from animal life and can’t have any claim to be a special creation of a divine being. Animal and man are not two—we are one. This caused tremendous outrage with the church at that time. The church had fervently believed that mankind was the crown of creation and that God created man “to make the earth subservient to him”.31 But meanwhile molecular genetics had clearly proven that mankind and the great ape were of common ancestry: 99 percent of all hereditary factors of human beings and chimpanzees are identical.32 Moreover, the genes of humanity are encoded precisely the same as with most living things on this planet.33 Other genetic codes might best be explained by the fact that evolution always seeks new attempts and avenues into forming life.

      Nonetheless, other groups of people surface all the time like the creationists who firmly believe that God created every species individually, one at a time. Supporters of the so-called Intelligent Design, a pseudo-scientific variant of creationism, think that living things are far too complex to be able to develop from natural selection. The dramatic increase of varieties of species about 540 million years ago can be explained only with the intervention from a divine source—an “intelligent designer”.34

      The truth is, life on earth excels at producing very great varieties of species. How could this come about? Essentially, in addition to Evolution Theory and Intelligent Design, there is even a third answer. Let’s compare all of these and see how everything stacks up. 1) Evolution Theory states that life produces new species again and again by chance. These species must then prove themselves during a process of natural selection in order to survive. Evolution Theory doesn’t need any God who plans, nor does it need an intelligent designer. But this theory runs into trouble because the estimated age of four billion years of life on this planet isn’t really sufficient enough to produce its forms of life in sufficient complexity. 2) Intelligent Design maintains that some God or intelligent designer established well defined rules by which the variety of life would have to be created. So the process of creation would be pre-determined. But this line of thinking runs into trouble, too, because God could spare his creation anyway if all future is fixed in stone. 3) There’s still a third answer to go which will emerge more and more throughout this book: The variety of life is based on a creative mix of both chance and rules.

      Let us take a close look at this third answer. There can be no doubt that life always happens spontaneously: Dead matter springs to life. There is no half-way point—matter is either alive or not alive.35 In the chapter Temporal Degrees of Freedom we will learn that spontaneity and chance are precisely the same thing. The rules in this third answer are the true and balanced laws of nature. These laws make sure that complex living things evolve gradually from matter which had suddenly come to life. I can’t think of anything that would interfere with this third answer. It even explains the existence of life on our planet. The conditions on earth that are well suited for life are only by chance: The earth’s distance to the sun, thereby favoring temperatures, and sufficient water for supporting life—are all by chance. And the earth also provides all the other chemical elements necessary for life—again by chance. Considering that precisely under such conditions life developed on earth, however, was not by chance, but the consequence of best thought-out laws of nature. Someone or something has been at work here and has established these life-giving natural laws.

      Darwin’s theory of evolution plays a key role if we try to get closer to the truth. Chance and rules—we are familiar with this combination, but from where? From any game! Chance and rules turn life into a kind of “game”—not like monopoly which is about material values, but a game about spiritual values that we will talk about in more detail in the final chapter. Every good game consists of both chance and rules. Just think about your favorite game: Without chance it would be boring; without rules it would just be random chaos. Chance in the game of life is temporal freedom; its rules are the laws of nature. Chance and rules—both taken together—make life worth living (see figure 14).

      Fig. 14: Life is interplay of chance and rules

      Darwin’s theory of evolution is accepted today by most scientists. So it really is a great mystery to me that—being familiar with Darwin’s revelations—we haven’t been questioning the individuality of every human being. Let me be more specific: Why should a God—if he/she/it does exist— choose not to create individual species on the one hand, but create a human being as an individual on the other? Darwin teaches us that life is one big picture. Shutting yourself off is unsexy. It retards the mixing of genotypes and counteracts evolution. Life prospers through mating! And yet, people seek individuality and they do that for religious reasons— they hope to play an individual role in life and try to preserve it even beyond the course of their lives. But nature is pursuing a different goal: Whoever reads her clues will be deeply compelled to abandon the desire for individuality and take the path of a far greater adventure—the adventure of a cosmic consciousness. Well, this is Brahman whom Adi Shankara had spoken about.

      New insights don’t just fall from the sky every day. They need time—a lot of time. After Darwin’s sensational revelation that animals and mankind are related to each other, nearly half of a century went by before another falsehood was dispelled: the absoluteness of space and time.

Einstein’s Spacetime

      The theory of relativity, a mathematical work of formulas, was published by Albert Einstein in 1905 and 1915. But the cornerstone of this theory can also be expressed completely without formulas—with pictures instead. This is what I am inviting you to: Welcome to Einstein’s spacetime!

      Einstein assumed only two things:36 The speed of light is a natural constant—a number that never changes—and the laws of nature have the same mathematical form for all non-accelerating37 observers. From these assumptions alone, he concluded that neither time nor space are absolute which means that they can’t be the same for all observers in the universe. Temporal (time like) and spatial (space like) distances also depend on how fast an object or an activity is moving relative to me. For example, when a watch moves relative to me, it is going from my perspective slower than a watch that I am wearing on my arm—even if both watches are identical!