Darwin 2.0: "God is back"!

For a scientific elaboration of this blog check Applied Physics Research Journal: "Negotiating Darwin's Barrier (here)

With data, erudition and articulation Charles Robert Darwin "killed God" and offered the role of creator to a series of specific survival threats shaping up our biological evolutionary track. The flip side of this stunning revelation is that any part of reality that did not pose a survival threat -- did not do any "creation". The familiar evolving living entities developed sensors to detect their creating threats, and evolved a brain fit to consider them. According to Darwin, the evolving creatures disregarded all other parts of reality, much as an inanimate rock does. Darwin's asserted that the sole and exclusive mechanism for biological evolution is a series of threats that was not too weak, and not too strong, just well calibrated to take out the less developed specimen, and allow for the next generation to be a bit more evolved. These creating-threats had to be present over countless generations for something elaborate like the human eye to come to pass. All other threats and all parts of reality that posed no threat did not trigger the emergence of biological detectors, and did not wire the evolving brain to consider them.

Humans, ostensibly at the top of the evolutionary ladder, also are as insensitive to these non-threatening parts of reality just like a grain of sand, or a rolling wave.

So here we are, equipped with eyes, ears, nose, palate, and haptics because they helped us survive. We think with a brain wired purposefully to give us a better chance vis-à-vis the threats before us. We are not sensitive, for example, to gamma radiation because at the levels prevailing in our living space this radiation did not qualify as a "creating threat". How many more factors are roaming around without triggering our slightest suspicion that they are there?

Our power to reason (which is the tool we use to build science) was also strictly tailored to guide us to make decisions for withstanding threats. It was not developed as a tool to comprehend reality as a whole. Any abstract concepts needed to grasp reality in its entirety are not present in our Darwinian brain. We think per what we detect, we reason to survive, not to philosophize. Anything we call philosophy is strictly in service of survival.

It was hard for humanity to accept Darwin's original idea, and very smart and powerful people fought against it tooth and nail. Some still do. But it is even more daunting to come to terms with Darwin 2.0 claiming that our brain is incapable by its construction to consider and regard reality in its full expanse.

We wake up to realize that we live in Darwin's cage! We rattle this cage, we deny that it is a cage; we claim that there is nothing outside this cage. But then we calm down, reconcile ourselves with our situation, and no sooner do we come to terms with the limited parcel of reality we call 'everything' than we realize that it is unreasonable for a survival-limited brain to claim with any credibility that outside our cage, in the vast unknown and unimaginable territory there are no bicycles, or no trees. And even more baseless is for us to assert that in the completely unknown without, there is no shred of something called divinity.

To the contrary, realizing that our reach and understanding are limited to Darwin's cage, we should become supplicant and prayerful to the One who runs the universe as a whole, the parts we see and regard, and the parts invisible to us.

Before Darwin 2.0 (a good name for this cage idea) we gushed with the arrogance of being so, so close to the "Theory of Everything". When hit by Darwin 2.0 we should be knocked down to "Doubt of Everything", or at least to "Theory of Darwin's everything".

We may never get out of the cage, doomed by a life sentence, but we will surely try. Our survival history implanted in us as the fundamental trait the attitude of "Try, try again!"  Recently the prestigious journal "Applied Physics Research" has published an article entitled "Negotiating Darwin's Barrier: Evolution Limits Our View of Reality, AI Breaks Through" where a cage-busting strategy is proposed. We may or may not succeed, but while in this cage we are led to some impactful conclusions:

First: any conclusion, and decision, any opinion we may hold is at best consistent with what we find in the cage, and has no bearing on reality without. In light of all there is, any opinion -- even the most strongly held -- are subject for modification or to reversal. A very bitter pill to swallow, but swallow we must. "In Doubt We Trust, to reach God at last."

Second: all our stubborn philosophical difficulties around an omnipotent God, are recategorized as waiting for us to breach the cage before realizing an answer. So "Can God create a stone so heavy that He himself cannot lift?" and "how come good people suffer, and bad people rejoice?" as well as several other unresolved dilemmas, are to be shelved until we understand reality in full.

The question of self, even the enigma of life and death can now claim with good reason: our relevant knowledge for coming up with an answer is woefully limited. A police detective cannot determine 'who done it' if he only interviewed one witness. A very poignant analogy to our state is the Indian fable of the seven blind men checking out an elephant. One grabs the tusk, the other the trunk, the third the leg. Each man concludes differently what an elephant really is.

Imagine a faraway planet built differently from earth where different threats prevail and these different threats give rise to a different evolutionary track. That other evolution ends up with an evolutionary ladder topped by 'other humans': they don't have eyes, ears, nose, etc. they sense other elements of reality. Their brain thinks differently. Or may be they evolved so differently that we are at a loss of our Darwinian words to describe them. Them and us share the same large reality but we are mutually blind. Sad answers to our question of where are the extraterrestrial.

If a cage is there, where are its walls? We need to find the walls in order to crack them. This is a critical question. One visible wall is what we call randomness. Human science evolved into an edge marked by randomness. Randomness, come to think about it, reflects the knowledge position of its observer. It is not an innate attribute. No binary string that is consistent with any number of randomness tests can be declared as random. A deterministic algorithm unknown to us could have produced it. When Alice stretches her two fists in front of Bob, telling him that one fist hides a coin, then Bob will conclude that the chance for the coin to be in either fist is 50%, but Alice will know with 100% certainty where the coin is. In other words, randomness is the edge of our knowledge -- it is the border of Darwin's cage (or a good proposition for it). The above-cited article in the Physics journal elaborates on specific efforts to scratch these walls.

Perhaps the biggest practical impact is on the notion of religion. Darwin "killed God". Many noted scientists declared that their equations run the universe, and they are written without the presence of God. Some religious people cornered by this assault responded with blind fanaticism, asserted opinions that are immunized to contrary evidence, and resorted to violence to safeguard their existence. But now that Darwin 2.0 has enclosed all these glowing scientific equations in the Darwin's cage, we can safely believe in a powerful God consistent with everything brought up by the major religions, His domain is reality as a whole. God may be likened to the elephant in the Indian fable, any sense of Him is quite misleading, and what is left is the recognition that reality as a whole is run by a totally unknown agent. We cannot describe it, we can do nothing more than name it: God. A new interpretation of religion known as Religion21.net is based on this regressive thought.

We know little and what we know is not representative of the whole, so humble we must be. The cage that locks us imparts on us commonality that should translate into fraternity. We should all be recruited as soldiers in the war against our prevailing world ignorance. We don't know if the land of less ignorance is promised to us, but there we aim. Darwin 2.0 has called us back to God, gave meaning of our lives, and marked a path for happiness: innovating our way to the territory with less ignorance, cracking the walls of our cage, and hanging on to each other while doing so.

I don’t expect the premise of this article to sweep my readers off their feet. We lived too long in Darwin 1.0 Godless arrogance, and we humans are inertia-bound. Say, I even brace myself for furious denouncement on one made-up ground or another. Indeed, after all, this article itself is written by a Darwinian (caged) brain, so it too is not immunized from the 'elephant' syndrome. Alas, we should try, and try again.