Planet Bahá'í

On September 3, 2004, I gave a presentation at the Association for Bahá'í Studies Conference in Calgary, Alberta, Canada for the Science and Religion Special Interest Group. Several people have asked that I write up the presentation as an article for Planet Bahá'í, so here it is. The actual presentation utilized Microsoft PowerPoint slides as illustrations. I have altered some of the text here to compensate for the lack of visual aids.

The Universe That Didn't Know We Were Coming and the God Who Did

We typically think of evolution as a biological principle, but in modern science evolution is viewed as an organizing principle on a number of levels:

• On the cosmological level, the universe has an evolutionary history beginning some fifteen billion years ago in conditions of unimaginable temperature and pressure when the familiar matter of our present-day world could not exist.
• On the astronomical level, as the universe expanded and cooled it became a place where galaxies and stars could form. Moreover, these stars and galaxies themselves go through evolutionary changes over billions of years.
• On the geological level, we know today that the formation of stars often leads also to the formation of planets. Discoveries of extra-solar planets are being announced on a regular basis. Moreover, our studies of the Earth and the other planets in our solar system have taught us that planets are subjected to a wide variety of evolutionary forces over their lifetimes.
• On the biological level, we know that life appeared on at least one planet--our Earth--and has evolved over the course of a billion or more years, giving rise to an incredible diversity of forms.
• Finally, on the social level, once advanced intelligence arose on Earth the process of social evolution was inaugurated, which over tens of thousands of years has brought us to the present moment and which promises a future we can as yet only dimly foresee.

So evolution is a universal theme, and although its details vary depending upon the subject under investigation, there are some high-level principles that apply across the board. I would like to call attention to just three of them right now.

First, energy must be available to power evolution. Systems cannot evolve without an influx of energy.

Second, the universe is in essence one big conglomeration of energy (matter being just one form of energy). In any given volume of space at any given time the number of possible configurations of energy is so enormous that we are justified in regarding them as essentially random.

Third, the laws of nature constrain what can happen in any given interaction. Sometimes these laws have a deterministic nature, as with Newton's laws of motion, and sometimes they have a statistical nature, as with the laws of quantum mechanics. Moreover, even deterministic laws can, when applied to large enough systems, take on a statistical nature. We could never determine the behavior of a volume gas, for example, by calculating the outcomes of all of the collisions taking place between the molecules of the gas. Instead, we apply statistical laws to predict the overall behavior of the gas. In the quantum realm it becomes impossible to predict with absolute certainty the outcome of even a single interaction between two particles. Here statistical laws tell us how such interactions behave. Yet statistical does not mean random. In any set of interactions, some outcomes are more likely than others. Nature's favoritism for some outcomes over others is a key factor in evolution.

For example, we are all familiar with grade school experiments in which salt crystals are grown. The student is asked to combine certain ingredients in a container and set it aside. Over the course of several days, crystals grow in the container. How does this happen? Within the mixture, the random motions of the molecules sometimes results in a collision in which a particular molecule is guided by electromagnetic forces into a position that locks it into the growing crystal structure. These molecules are "selected" for addition to the growing crystal structure while others are not. This selection process is a deterministic one (the laws of electromagnetism), but it operates within the context of a huge number of random collisions.

Over time, predictable crystal structures will evolve. That is, if we know how the experiment was set up, we can tell ahead of time what the crystals will be composed of and what kinds of shapes they will have. However, the random nature of the collisions means that we cannot predict exactly how many crystals might grow, how large each of them might be, or what will be their exact arrangement within the container. The resulting crystalline landscape, although it is composed of predictable structures, is a random one.

Enlarge this example to the size of the universe, and we find exactly the same thing. Even if we were to start with a complete description of the universe at its birth (an impossibility in any case) and a complete understanding of the laws under which it operates, we would still not have been able to predict that some fifteen billion years later there would be a galaxy exactly like ours containing a star exactly like ours orbited by nine planets and millions of smaller objects in the exact arrangement we see today. We would not have been able to foresee that the third planet of such a solar system would harbor an incredible diversity of life, nor that some of these creatures would have become intelligent and built up civilizations. In brief, we would not have known that Homo sapiens was "in the cards."

Or, as materialists sometimes say, "The universe didn't know we were coming." In the view of many, this fact flatly contradicts the typical religious notion that God created the universe as a home for humanity and that humanity is the highest aspect of God's creation. But does it? Let's consider more closely how complexity evolves in our universe.

We have just seen that the laws of nature constrain what can happen, and they do so in a way that favors some outcomes over others. We can broadly apply the term "natural selection" to any process that displays such favoritism. Selective processes act on what can be regarded as essentially random configurations of energy. This combination of chance plus constraint equals a natural creative process that brings complex order into being.

Creating order, however, takes more than just a selective process and some kind of input upon which it can act. It also requires energy. In fact, it requires an excess of energy. The reason is that in natural processes there must be an overall increase in entropy, which is sometimes described as disorder. (Although the meaning of "disorder" is often misunderstood, for our purposes we will use our intuitive sense of disorder, since we are talking about processes that build up complex order.) It is entirely "legal" according to nature to create a bit of order here and there, but the mechanism doing the work to create the order is going to have to pay a hefty tax in waste energy discharged into the surrounding environment. The energy that is available to do work, and thus create order, is called free energy, and the place where the waste energy is dumped is called a heat sink. Both an input of free energy and the presence of a heat sink are required for evolutionary processes to occur. Free energy powers these processes, while the heat sink provides a place for waste energy to go so that the system doesn't overheat and destroy the very structures being created.

For example, a refrigerator utilizes free energy in the form of electricity to power a mechanism that cools down an enclosed space. But the mechanism that does the cooling (a decrease in disorder) also generates heat (an increase in disorder) which is dumped into the room containing the refrigerator. It turns out that the increase in entropy in the room is greater than the decrease in entropy inside the refrigerator. Order is created locally (inside the refrigerator) but at the expense of greater disorder globally (the system consisting of the refrigerator plus the room).

Enlarge this example to the size of the Earth, and we find the same thing. The sun floods the Earth with massive quantities of free energy. Living systems utilize this energy to grow, reproduce, and evolve. Waste energy is dumped into the environment as heat, which is ultimately radiated away into the ultimate heat sink, outer space, increasing the entropy of the solar system. The availability of massive quantities of free energy and the presence of a heat sink (which, again, prevents the Earth from overheating and destroying the very structures being built up by the process) are fundamental to the evolution of life on our planet.

Now when we look at the history of the universe as a whole, we discover that these kinds of processes have been happening all over and all along. It is a history of increasing complexity fueled by increasingly large localized energy flows. This history is described by Eric Chaisson in his book Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, in which he presents a series of graphs that illustrate the point. Chaisson plots the times at which different forms of complexity appeared (galaxies, stars, planets, plant life, animal life, human intelligence, and artifacts of human civilization) against the size of the local energy flows through these systems. The result is a curve that starts life fairly flat but rises ever more sharply as time passes. This relationship makes it clear that over time systems have evolved by channeling more and more energy through smaller and smaller quantities of matter.

Yet this raises another question. If entropy is always increasing, must there not come a time when this upward march of complexity comes to a halt? Do we not at some point reach a time when all free energy has been exhausted (having been dissipated into forms that can no longer be used to do work)? In other words, must not the universe suffer what has classically been called a "heat death"?

It turns out that the answer is no. As the universe expands, its maximum possible entropy increases faster than its actual entropy. As a result, the older the universe gets, the larger is the gap between its actual entropy and the maximum entropy it could have. In turn, this increasing gap means that the potential information content of the universe (which, roughly speaking, is a measure of the amount of order that the universe could contain) is always on the rise. So long as it continues to expand, the universe can continue to generate more and more complex order! Thus, the expansion of the universe itself is what makes possible the evolution of ever-increasing levels of complexity.

We can conclude, then, that the universe is a veritable engine for the generation and evolution of complexity. Just as with the crystal landscape we considered earlier, we may not be able to predict the exact "landscape" of the universe, but we can predict that it will produce complex structures, including galaxies, stars, planets, life, intelligence, and advancing civilizations. These are not accidental features of the universe. Perhaps the universe didn't know that we--Homo sapiens--were coming, but it did know that complexity (including intelligent life) was coming. All of the features we see in our universe, if not their exact arrangements, were destined to appear.

Now we ask again: does this view of the universe contradict the idea that God created the universe as a home for humanity or that humanity is the highest aspect of God's creation? Given that we are still unable to say that the exact "landscape" of the universe was predestined, we certainly might have a hard time reconciling scientific understanding with the view that Homo sapiens is the predestined end-point of creation. However, the Bahá'í Writings offer a perspective that is startlingly in line with the foregoing discussion. Bahá'u'lláh wrote:

Having created the world and all that liveth and moveth therein, He, through the direct operation of His unconstrained and sovereign Will, chose to confer upon man the unique distinction and capacity to know Him and to love Him--a capacity that must needs be regarded as the generating impulse and the primary purpose underlying the whole of creation.

(Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, XXVII, p. 65)

In the Bahá'í view, Homo sapiens is not the center and purpose of creation. Rather, Bahá'u'lláh refines that traditional idea by identifying the appearance of creatures with the capacity to know and love God as the purpose of creation. Even if Homo sapiens had not evolved, similar beings would have evolved sooner or later on countless worlds scattered throughout the universe. Indeed, it is highly likely that there are many intelligent races in the universe, some perhaps less evolved than us, some perhaps more evolved than us, but all with this capacity to know and love God. Moreover, as we have seen complexity did not stop evolving on Earth with the human brain. It has continued to evolve in the forms of technology and social organization. Again this agrees with the Bahá'í teachings, for Bahá'u'lláh writes:

All men have been created to carry forward an ever-advancing civilization.

(Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, CIX, p. 214)

This is, in fact, exactly what we have seen on Earth. Human social evolution continues the progression of increasing complexity. We can well imagine that something similar will happen, although differing in many details, whenever advanced intelligence appears in the cosmos.

Finally, Bahá'u'lláh also alters the traditional view of God's act of creation. Most creation mythologies ascribe the existence of the universe to a series of explicitly divine acts. Genesis, for example, outlines a series of events over six days in which God creates the heavens and the Earth and everything therein. Bahá'u'lláh regards such stories as having symbolic rather than literal import and offers this vision of the divine process of creation:

A drop of the billowing ocean of His endless mercy hath adorned all creation with the ornament of existence, and a breath wafted from His peerless Paradise hath invested all beings with the robe of His sanctity and glory. A sprinkling from the unfathomed deep of His sovereign and all-pervasive Will hath, out of utter nothingness, called into being a creation which is infinite in its range and deathless in its duration. The wonders of His bounty can never cease, and the stream of His merciful grace can never be arrested. The process of His creation hath had no beginning, and can have no end.

(Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh, XXVI, p. 61)

In this and other passages, Bahá'u'lláh alludes to creation as an ongoing process rather than a one-time act. Indeed, His view of God's creation does not stop at the boundaries of this universe, which like this Earth had an origin and may conceivably have an end. He speaks, rather of a creation that transcends all boundaries of space and time and which is always and everywhere being created. The continual evolution of complexity in our universe is entirely consistent with that view.

Science and religion thus converge on a worldview that regards creation as an eternal process building up a universe populated by creatures who are our spiritual equals, capable of knowing and loving God, and whose societies are even more complex examples of the creative power latent within the cosmos.