God & The Universe

I saw this on my Facebook newsfeed and was intrigued. There is truth in this. But I think the most vital truth is missed. There is a connection between the biological and the cosmic. We see certain patterns in ourselves, and indeed in all life, that are repeated at the cosmic and even at the atomic level. The universe looks much more like a living thing than a machine. This was really the great philosophical contribution of the advances in theoretical physics made in the 20th century. Most people make this strict distinction between the biological and the purely material...between matter and life. But more and more people are realizing that these lines are blurry. I believe it was the (ironically atheist) Bertron Russell who said "either life is matterlike or matter is lifelike."

But Alfred N Whitehead said, wisely I think, that the great religions of the world had already prepared us for just such a discovery. Yahweh is a God of life, life as Ultimate Reality. It should not have surprised theists, then, to find a universe that reflected a grounding in life itself. Whitehead went further, though. He suggested that just as the line between life and non-life is blurry, so is the line between mind and mindless. In point of fact, mind is just a quality of matter, for Whitehead. The discovery of the biotic nature of the universe proceeded not long after we finally started to get to the heart of the life sciences through the theory of evolution. Biology was invented as a genuine field of science and not long after our model of reality itself started to mirror what we found there. I suspect that as a genuine science of mind is developed, we will find the universe is not only life like but mindlike.

Might there not be a character or soul behind reality itself? If our bodies mirror the universe, might our minds not mirror the Mind of the Universe. And what would God be, but Ultimate, Universal mind. Just as Whitehead suggested that the theist should not have been surprised by the biometaphors discovered by 20th century physics, he thought that religion itself was the first, primal encounter with the mind that he suspected physics would find in the next century.

I agree with this sentiment, and so I think that the awe that the above meme expresses at the connection between our physical bodies and the universe will be replaced by a greater awe, long held by the great religions of the world, at the true nature of mind itself. We will find that Mind was with us all along. When scientists get there, us theologians will be waiting for them, hopefully ready to welcome them in to add their own no doubt valuable insights to that discovery.