Life Carriers - Gaia
Dear xxxx,
Introductory & Scope
Your written communication, and the one I am responding to, concluded that the Gaia hypothesis “…make[s] it very difficult for me to react in ways that are entirely dispassionate” due to the “atheistic implications [that] seem to permeate the theory.” I can easily discount lampooning in public when one exhibits passion related to an idea or concept which one believes is wrongheaded. With this written approach I can rationally assess your analysis subsequently taken as well as the personal conclusions arrived at related to the Wikipedia article which includes a few of the primary actors involved in Lovelock’s hypothesis development. Considering all that, I arrive at a very different intellectual and philosophical location than you do.
From what I read, your objections to the Gaia hypothesis rest on twin pillars: 1) atheistic implications permeate the theory, and 2) by using “Gaia” a Greek goddess to symbolize the hypothesis (and maintains this with the subsequent ascent to a theory), is an “additional disadvantage” to having a tangential relationship to nature worship.
I puzzled over this duality; it surfaces a cognitive dissonance I totally missed that I believe is rectified by a deep study of the history of life in the Papers. I sense this dichotomy is endemic to the hypothesis and has been from the beginning. In my opinion, it is this duality that the cosmology of the revelation provides – at least for me – a way to coordinate indirect religious and direct scientific aspects with a cosmic philosophy that is spiritually satisfying.
Nevertheless, the analysis you provide has constructed a platform to check my own personal "universe frame" at the door of truth.[ref] Owing to the fact that both our personal universe frames are “erroneous to a greater or lesser degree” the discussion is a worthwhile one to reflect upon. I am always open to modifying my values glide path simply because I take the Mighty Messenger’s declaration as truth. The three verbs you offer for consideration (commemorate, congratulate, and celebrate) are good starting points to begin checking. I took these three levels of assignment to the hypothesis – you didn’t make a distinction between hypothesis and theory - these two appear conflated in the commentary as I made the assumption the idea that the earth is living (of which I do support) was a result of Lovelock’s observations as a scientist and the idea he formulated from those observations. Both idea and observation logically precede any hypothesis.
Leveling the issue at hand: The philosophy of science
With the scientific process, “hypothesis,” “theory,” and “law” have very specific definitions. A hypothesis is a reasonable guess based on something that you observe in the natural world that poses itself as an idea worth pursuing; a hypothesis is constructed before any applicable research has been done. A theory consists of one or more hypotheses that have been supported by repeated testing. Scientific laws are short, sweet, and always true; scientific laws (also called “laws of nature”) include the laws of thermodynamics, Boyle’s law of gasses, and the laws of gravitation.[ref] Jesus obeyed what the revelation calls “natural laws.” [ref]
I bring this process into the dialogue to make note that the type of objections you make might be different considering the theory or the idea that informs the hypothesis. Ostensibly, I believe you are not objecting to Lovelock’s original idea as the “living” part of the hypothesis was not a driver for Lovelock’s foray into the analysis of his imaginative question “how is the earth’s atmosphere maintained as a dynamic equilibrium”? The Wikipedia article doesn’t pick up this origin of Lovelock’s thoughts, but it should be obvious as his idea of an Earth system science, a self-regulating Earth with the community of living organisms in control, “… came into my mind at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California in September 1965. The first paper to mention it was published in the Proceedings of the American Astronautical Society in 1968. The title of the paper was “Planetary Atmospheres: Compositional and other changes associated with the presence of Life.” [ref] The Wikipedia article did pick up on this initial public display of Lovelock’s thinking.
Maybe I err on this assumption because you wrote that “… certain environmental matters are quite problematic, perhaps because they seem to verge on ancient superstitions associated with nature worship.” I submit the idea wasn’t associated with nature worship, but I could see an objection to it being secular as aerodynamics is. You would have to flesh out for me where certain environmental matters associate with nature worship. With the multiple books I’ve read about Lovelock I don’t see him as a nature worshipper. Maybe the association came later as fringe groups saw the hypothesis as an idea to leverage new age thinking – which they certainly did.
At any rate the hypothesis is the level I will focus on. This is where teleology emerges from the idea because I believe there is no way around that. The Wikipedia article reports that “The Gaia hypothesis was initially criticized for being teleological and against the principles of natural selection, but later refinements aligned the Gaia hypothesis with ideas from fields such as Earth system science, biogeochemistry and systems ecology.” On face value, the Wikipedia statement claims that the natural selection folks, like professed atheist Richard Dawkins and secularist Ford Doolittle criticized the hypothesis as “pseudoscience” specifically due to the implied teleology that pushes the concept into the theistic domain.[ref]
I submit, going beyond the level of the hypothesis, that the Gaia theory is different in degree from the hypothesis. In Lovelock’s book The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2010), he admits that the hypothesis could not stand up rationally to the acrimony started in 1979 by Canadian biologist Ford Doolittle who wrote a quite well-written critique of Gaia. Lovelock admits “… the Gaia hypothesis was wrong. We had said that organisms, or the biosphere, regulated the Earth’s climate and composition. Somewhat later, in his book The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins (Dawkins 1982) showed that this was impossible. He said it so well and clearly that the subject was then regarded by the scientific community as closed.”
The value of a theory is judged by the accuracy of its predictions and its capacity to resist falsification. And frankly an idea that is right will not go away if data keeps pointing in its direction. After the early 1980’s hypothesis debacle, evidence continued to surface that disproved Dawkins and was exculpatory of the hypothesis. Lovelock writes: “… new evidence was available from the Earth that confirmed several of Gaia theory’s predictions. To me it was obvious that Richard Dawkins’s pure biology and the geochemists’ pure chemistry were unable to explain the Earth. And then I wondered, what if the whole system of life and its environment tightly coupled did the job?” (Lovelock 2010).
The theory emerged that the whole Earth system, made up from all of life, including the air, the oceans and the surface rocks, not just organisms alone was the controlling mechanism. Nevertheless, the proof that the Earth self-regulates carbon dioxide abundance and temperature had to wait until in 2008, when the American scientists Richard Zeebe and Ken Caldeira published a paper in Nature Geosciences showing that the long-term record of the Earth’s temperature and carbon dioxide abundance, deduced from measurements of gases in Antarctic ice cores, revealed self-regulation of both carbon dioxide and temperature for hundreds of thousands of years. This evidence, now confirmed, provides scientific support for the Gaia theory. It appears this is what pushed the hypothesis into an acceptable theoretical stage.
Lovelock writes that “…the regulator could be shown to be the whole Earth system, made up from all of life, including the air, the oceans and the surface rocks, not just organisms alone” (Lovelock 2010).
But here is the problem with Gaia in my mind: goal and purpose. And goal plus purpose implies teleology. Engineers and physiologists know that self-regulation without a goal is nonsense - imagine an autopilot on an aircraft that had no idea what height to keep or where to go. The elephant in the secularists room is enlivened by the question ‘who sets the goal and for what purpose?’
Apparently the midwayers have been working at this effort with some due diligence also. The member of the Urantia Life Carrier Corps now resident on the planet writes in the rather comprehensive Paper on Life Establishment on Urantia that the “less imaginative mechanists” couldn’t fathom the fact that “The Urantia midwayers have assembled over fifty thousand facts of physics and chemistry which they deem to be incompatible with the laws of accidental chance, and which they contend unmistakably demonstrate the presence of intelligent purpose in the material creation.” [ref]
Teleology in the mind of a secular scientist is anathema to the maintenance of his/her profession. Secular materialists claim that natural processes can produce all cases of “apparent design” exhibited by nature. Richard Dawkins is certainly a minimally imaginative scientist while he is an extraordinary logician and defender of the secularist “faith.”
I believe that you and I agree that the midwayer commission’s Paper 195 is written strongly enough for students of The Urantia Book to pay attention that secular totalitarianism has the capability to unsuspectingly “blight spiritual experience” and in turn lead to “world-wide disaster.” The human mechanisms to detect when secularism is active and then how to deal with it is where I believe we differ. To me this divergence is apparent with respect to the Gaia theory.
I suspect and offer for consideration that we kindredly trust the revelation regarding the fact and truth of the processes for the establishment of life on this Nebadonian experimental planet. We have no way of knowing how it is performed on other planets, but that is not germane to the Gaia theory. What the depiction of the roles and responsibilities of at least the collaboration between minimally the Master Physical Controllers and the Life Carriers reveals to us is that these agents of the panoply of celestial ministers the revelation portrays are carrying out the goals, purposes, and plans of the I AM as His/Its teleology of the Father-Infinite.
Break*Break. Let me throw out another out-of-the-box thought here for potential dialogue in the future: Is the totality of Urantia Book revelation centered on the teleology of God the Father-Infinite? In other words is the entire arc from the original I AM to a personality’s potential subinfinite penetration of the absolute – qualified completeness in eternity/existential infinite unification – as revealed specifically in Paper 106, potentially supportive of a positive response to the question? Or is there some qualification to my premise in the question of implied centerdness of the Papers on the original-cause teleology of the Father-Infinite as related to the I AM? End*Break.
The Gaia theory places a burr under the saddle of the secular materialists that drives them to label anything hinting at teleology as pseudoscience. It is a powerful label that those in control of a narrative can maintain power and authority over belief systems. There is often some perceived overlap between religion (and perhaps philosophy) and pseudoscience, and it can be difficult to distinguish the two - especially when a theory offers more than a hint of teleology, of purpose. In a sense, religion is not really competing with professional science, whereas pseudoscience is.
My responses to your concerns
My intention with this follow-up is to address as many of your concerns, comments, and objections as my limited time permits. First I provide an overall context on why I support this theory in its current state.
I believe we’ve discussed the subject of “human sources” before. Nevertheless it bears repeating for the record in relation to this topic. It concerns the midwayers employment of concepts that have appeared in human thought and the revelatory mandate to “… give preference to the highest existing human concepts” as described by the Orvonton Divine Counselor in his acknowledgement to the Foreword. When I realized this was a primary process by which the conceptual content of the Papers was allowed, developed, and augmented, it occurred to me that human concepts don’t stand still. They continue to evolve according to God’s plans for, and Michael’s implementation of, what the Papers describe as “natural law.” [ref] I concluded there must certainly be contemporary humans that have progressed beyond those that the revelators found to be able to “present enlarged concepts and advanced truth, in [our] endeavor to expand cosmic consciousness and enhance spiritual perception” [ref]
Edmund Noble’s 1926 treatise entitled Purposive Evolution The Link Between Science and Religion has been purported by Matthew Block that Noble provided the grist for the revelator’s to reveal that the grand universe is a “living organism.” Block says: “Noble’s theory of cosmic self-maintenance (the universe as purposive) is referred to in The Urantia Book at 42:11.7 (482.5); his chapter “Is the Universe an Organism?” (in which he gives a negative answer) seems to be responded to by the revelator in Section 7: “The Living Organism of the Grand Universe.” 116:7 (1276) The specific language a Mighty Messenger uses in the first paragraph is: “The grand universe is not only a material creation of physical grandeur, spirit sublimity, and intellectual magnitude, it is also a magnificent and responsive living organism . There is actual life pulsating throughout the mechanism of the vast creation of the vibrant cosmos. The physical reality of the universes is symbolic of the perceivable reality of the Almighty Supreme; and this material and living organism is penetrated by intelligence circuits , even as the human body is traversed by a network of neural sensation paths.” I agree with Block that Noble is a human conceptual source the Mighty Messenger most likely pulled from to meet the superuniverse ruler’s mandate.
I reference the paragraph by the Mighty Messenger with emphasized text to point out that the revelation posits two kinds of life: one with mind (vitalistic) and one without (mechanistic). Life without mind contains “intelligence circuits” to be visualized by students of the revelation as an analogy made with the human body. It is the latter type of life that I envision is pure revelation as an add-on to the human concept of a purposive universe. We are revealed by a Universal Censor acting by authority of the Ancients of Days on Uversa that the grand universe is teeming with “intelligent and living mechanisms (entities)” [ref] And this is different in kind from that which has "vitalistic" life. [ref]
What is minimally ambiguous with the revelation are the definitions of life and living. This is my take: Living machines, living mechanisms, are in fact alive, but in truth without life. They lack three components of life: 1) living vitality (the vital spirit spark from the Creative Daughter - animation), 2) powers of reproduction, and 3) mind. What living machines - living organisms - have that classify them living is the capability to maintain an "unbalanced equilibrium" [ref]. Prokaryotes (bacteria, cyanobacteria, archaebacteria, mitochondria, and chloroplasts) are living machines, single-celled power plants; so their association with the power beings (viz., the Master Physical Controllers) is only natural (Halvorson date unknown).
Long before I came in contact with the Gaia hypothesis I harbored dim but emerging thoughts that Urantia could logically be substituted for “the grand universe.” I don’t see that as an unreasonable leap of insight. Intelligence circuits are not mind as this distinction is obvious when juxtaposed against Supreme Mind. Intelligence circuits may enable Supreme mind, but they are not that. Clearly that is not a hypothesis that has atheistic overtones. To me it appears cosmic in substance.
By the middle of the 1980’s, somewhere around 1985 to 1987, I felt I had finally found a prominent individual who fit my definition of displaying an evolved concept beyond anything the original sources had produced. (I consider that Block and others have not exhausted the list). The insight for the first of potential contemporary “sources” presented itself to me in heavy traffic on the beltway one day while reading a short biography about Rupert Sheldrake (yes I used to read in traffic!). I’d call it an epiphany of sorts; I actually pulled off on the shoulder to finish the vignette on Sheldrake. I still feel that the adjutant mind-spirits constitute a pure revelation of knowledge. [ref] A subsequent study and reading of Sheldrake’s hypotheses and theories about morphic fields and associated resonance assured my instincts were reasonable that the adjutants were impending knowledge in the 1930’s that was about to be known.
I concluded that the facts of Sheldrake’s morphic fields were not in complete alignment with the revelation, but the truth of the cosmic function was on a correct glide path. I was more interested in who moves the conceptual needle that would allow me to open a portal for discussion with a seeker of truth who was not a student of the revelation. In my assessment, Sheldrake’s facts may be limited, and his conclusions primitive, but truth will eventually shine through potentially crowding out error. In Sheldrake’s case I sense his science is on the philosophic borderland of coordinating the science of fields with the meanings and values found in the faith-acceptance of mind as a constituent reality not rooted in matter since mind is a living reality (Waldrop 2016, p. 192)
Two other concept “needle-movers” for my way of thinking turned out to be James Lovelock (organic/inorganic life) and Dr. Arthur Diekman (personality).
I’m not exactly sure when I came across Lovelock’s work, but I believe it was through Elisabet Sahtouris. By 1997 she self-published an impending book on the World Wide Web (www) entitled Earthdance: Living Systems in Evolution (Sahtouris 2000) . I had spent the previous decade researching and studying what was known at the time by science regarding the definition, composition, and evolution of living organisms. I wanted to know where science was in relation to what the revelators – most prominently the Life Carriers and Mighty Messenger - reveal about life, which is substantial. Some preliminary questions were: How does science believe the organic domain arises? Does the revelation provide cosmic insights to this question? What does the revelation say about the definition of life? How does the concept/theory of self-organization fit into these questions? How does science perceive cybernetic feedback systems in relation to life? Does the relatively new concept of autopoiesis play a role in the current scientific definition of life and does it meet the revelation with any credibility? Where do prokaryotes and eukaryotes fit into the revelatory scaffolding?
The revelation of course provides a cosmology that secular science can’t and won’t reach in its apparent state of obvious materialism and secularism, but I felt Sahtouris and subsequently Lovelock (in my sequence) moved the conceptual base of knowledge forward positively with unconventional insights in a similar manner as Sheldrake. I deduced then, as I do now, that the four individuals I have mentioned so far maintain patterns of thinking that have facets of truth that I have imputed from the revelation. I will get to Margulis later since you brought her up as a protagonist in this Gaian drama. She is a recent addition to the mix that I hadn’t processed very well until recently. She is certainly a significant contributor to recent times - aside from the insights Dr. Diekman has postulated, but of all the protagonists I have considered (there are others such as Mark McMenamin and Kerry Mullis) Margulis is the most secular to my way of thinking.
This desire to connect the revelation to contemporary thought didn’t come out of thin air. I was reading a very dense book on the subject of Earth cosmology that I came across in the George Mason library stacks during the early 1980’s: The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution by Dr. Erich Jantsch (Jantsch 1980). paradigm that incorporates cosmology, biology, sociology, psychology, and consciousness. The more I dig into this tome, the more I felt Jantsch was way ahead of where science was and his tome provided a plethora of clues that an inquiring cosmic-minded individual would find stimulating.
I pecked away at Jantsch for at least a decade as I was developing my understanding of the revelation in relation to these matters; Jantsch had so many new terms for me (such as autopoiesis) that side bar research had to be done quite frequently. To this day, Jantsch displays a mind that is still many years ahead of his time. He too, as has Lovelock and Sheldrake, been mostly vilified by his contemporaries. The Wikipedia article on Jantsch says: “For the last few years of his life, Jantsch was without a job and lived in an "apartment in Berkeley: dark and depressing room, with massage parlors above and below; a typewriter, a plant, and scattered copies of his favorite newspaper, Neue Zurcher Zeitung". It was here that he finished his last book, The Self-Organizing Universe. He made a living and supported his mother "by giving lectures ail over the world, through writing, and by relying on a few friends" (Zeleny 2018). I have attached the obituary that supports this information.
One parenthetical note: Neal Kendall has a well-thought-out article on Urantia Foundation’s web site Is There Design in Nature? In it he makes a distinction between “self-ordering” and “self-organization.” He didn’t mention Jantsch, but he does make note of the idea that self-organization is a different in kind step above the materialist claim that self-ordering drives the evolution of life. Kendall writes:
But there is a distinction between self-ordering and self-organization. Self-ordering implies that the molecular components, guided by the laws of physics and chemistry, can assemble complex structures.
Self-organization theories claim that biologic form is epigenetic, meaning that the DNA does not determine the form of an organism. But these theories are short on specifics and long on hope as they are less clear about how complex molecular arrangements, such as those we see in living systems, arise. The hope of any materialist of course, is to uncover laws that can lead to these complex structures but for now, it is a mystery. For that reason the term self-organization can be a term used to imply that teleological or even vitalistic forces are at work (Kendall 2016).
I googled across Kendall’s work recently; he appears to have the same inclination I had years ago when I came across Jantsch that the aspects that self-organization has for teleology require a design agent. I encourage you to take a look at his article. It is replete to say the least; I am merely overviewing in this response.
I pause for a moment here to describe what I have gleaned from the revelation regarding life and living organisms.
My view of the Fifth Epochal Revelation’s portrayal of life to Urantians
The revelation provides at least six salient data points I consider necessary to understanding the aspects of life with respect to Urantia and the grand universe:
1) In the grand universe life exists on two levels: a) evolutionary material life, aka “premind life” that is not yet activated by the Creative Mother Spirit,[ref] and b) life that is activated by the local Universe Mother Spirit. [ref]
2) The grand universe is described as a “living organism.”
3) The Master Physical Controllers' role in the growth and maintenance of the grand universe
4) The Life Carriers role in the growth and maintenance of the grand universe
5) The revelation that life is inherent in the process of unbalanced equilibrium of processes. It is also the revelation’s definition of life.
6) The Creative Daughter provides an “energy spark” which enlivens the body and presages the mind; it is the Universe Mother Spirit who supplies the essential factor of the living plasm for true life to exist. [ref]
Urantia has an interesting history related to life. For approximately 3.5 billion years after the Angona system passed by the sun and initiated the formation of our solar system, Urantia progressed through its establishment as a planet. Up until about 1.5 billion years ago, when the earth was two thirds its present size and the moon was nearly complete, Urantia was totally inert and without life. There must have been something going on with the plans of Michael and his creative consort because about 1.0 billion years ago, having nearly reached its current size, the earth “was placed upon the physical registries of Nebadon and given its name.” This marks the last phase of the Azoic era (without life) that continues for one-half billion years until life is instantiated by the Master Physical Controllers. [ref]
Conventional science has traced life in the fossil record to commence at approximately 4 billion years ago, with the planet being 4.5 billion. The 4.5 is spot-on with the revelation, but the 4 needs revision – assuming the revelation is accurate. The revelation dates this initial life period as 1 billion years ago. Chris Halvorson has speculated this time differential as a result of the “…Master Physical Controllers, specifically, the energy transformers[ref], have regulated radioactivity[ref] over the span of geologic time, according to the evolution plan of the Life Carriers.” This makes sense to me, especially as he relates it to the proportionality of subelectronic activity over time.
Approximately 950 million years ago, “Urantia was assigned to the system of Satania for planetary administration and was placed on the life registry of Norlatiadek.” I find these two administrative revelations of Urantia significant in their incorporation in the Papers – especially as it informs students of not only the significance of the planet as experimental – important to Urantia’s unique place in the local system. For example, the Norlatiadek “life registry” event [ref] marks the initiation of the construction of the material organizations for life by the Master Physical Controllers, specifically, the primary associators,[ref] who were the first celestial beings to arrive on the planet.[ref]
For the next 50 million years until the first Life Carriers came to Urantia, the living mechanisms on the planet were prokaryotes. This is entirely the domain of the physical controllers who prepare the premind life on the planet for mind capacity evolution[ref].
As a result of the activation of prokaryotic life “[Urantia] was accorded full universe status. Soon thereafter it was registered in the records of the minor and the major sector headquarters planets of the superuniverse; and before this age was over, Urantia had found entry on the planetary-life registry of Uversa.”[ref]
I’ll pause here with this summary as the rest of the story is not relevant to the Gaia hypothesis.
What I find so relevant in the short description above, is the relationship between premind life and minded life, especially premind life that functions under “nonteachable” or "mechanical mind." [ref] There is a cosmic process that involves matter, mind, spirit, and personality that is all at play in the history of Urantian life. What is exciting to think about is that humanity will someday understand all of this as conventional wisdom. It may require revelation to inform human cosmology of the roles and responsibilities of the Master Physical Controllers, but the truths of the Life Carriers are no more than a few steps away from coordinating science and religion to agreeing both are correct in the truth of how life was established on this planet.
A brief foray into my views of the Gaia Theory’s relationship to secularism, secular totalitarianism, and atheism.
My views articulated in the sections above are but a thin summary of what is still bouncing around my mind. I respectively reserve the right to change them! The basis of my view of this controversial concept starts with a personal journey to find contemporary thinkers that begin to bridge the gap between science and religion by finding ideas, concepts, hypotheses, theories, or philosophies, that can be transitioned with the value-truth the cosmology and teachings the Fifth Epochal Revelation reveals. It was never an effort to dispel secularism as a dead end; I hadn’t processed Paper 195 deeply until the webinars. By adding atheism to the mix related to the Gaia hypothesis/theory you have poked me in the belly to examine my universe frame.
The exercise to check my personal universe frame has been a good one; I went at it with the best open mind I could muster, realizing that my beliefs could be limiting, but my faith in the cosmology in the Papers is the closest thing we have to cosmic truth yet in this planet. I am prodded into reflecting deeply on the potential progressive or retrogressive societal significance of the Gaia theory that I had subliminally accepted and supported as progressive. I realize I have only scratched the surface of a significant topic that has many tentacles – as most Urantia Book related topics have!
I’ll provide one more summary sweep of history to coalesce my thoughts.
Not long after the mechanical theory of evolution took hold on Western thinking in the nineteenth century, it was opposed by some philosophers in the twentieth century, including Henri Bergson, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Alfred North Whitehead. These philosophers worked with organic models or theories in which life is seen as inherent in the universe. Bergson opposed the idea of purpose in nature, but proposed the existence of a mysterious life force that is separate from yet struggling with matter in an attempt to organize it. Science rejected this thinking because there was no room for a ‘life force’ in their worldview. Teilhard de Chardin, though he explained life as the natural evolution of self-organizing matter. He described evolution as purposive, leading - by way of mankind - to a "God-Omega point." His work was also rejected by most scientists, and especially forbidden by the Catholic Church. Whitehead was ignored as too obscure for most scientists, but his talk of organics and God would have put them off in any case I assume.
Thus, at least a few scientists and philosophers during the early years of the mechanical worldview era saw the Earth as alive or close to it. Darwin’s Russian contemporary Vernadsky saw it as metabolically active; George Hutchinson of Yale University spread Vernadsky’s ideas in the U.S. and Lovelock and Margulis acknowledged geologist-physician James Hutton’s concept of a living earth as a forerunner to the Gaia hypothesis. Erich Jantsch’s self-organizing universe called attention to the interplay of the largest and smallest events of cosmic matter/energy in producing the ever more complex systems of an essentially living universe. None of these scientific models directly postulated the notions of purpose or life force or God, but they did provide the fodder for some of the philosophical ones to push these notions into the secular toothpaste tube.
I hypothesize what if modern science and the Western view of human society had evolved from organic biology rather than from mechanical physics? If so, Galileo, might have experimented more with the microscope as opposed to the telescope, to seek evidence for Anaximander’s theory of biological evolution here on Earth, rather than looking to the skies for confirmation of Aristarchus’s celestial mechanics. But he didn’t. I suppose mainly due to the ecclesiastical totalitarianism he was subject to. Nevertheless, the mechanical worldview in my opinion is now giving way to an organic view. Ironically an organic view is made possible by the very technology born of the mechanical view.
This brief response paper has covered an overview of my understating of some of the origins of the mechanistic/secular/atheistic worldviews, a smattering of the history of mechanical and organic worldviews, and my attempts to balance them against the revelation in an effort to examine objective facts and subjective truth. The first of your twin concerns of the Gaia hypothesis posits Lovelock pursued an atheistic approach; the second that he compounded this error with associating them with the name of a Greek goddess that creates neo-pagan overtones at least as a distraction.
On balance it appears from the history of the hypothesis is that Lovelock and Margulis had entirely different agendas while cooperating in the development of, and the dissemination for, the hypothesis. Margulis was able to appropriate her “emergent” theories while Lovelock admits that “… Gaia starts to become more than just a science. It begins to veer into that area previously occupied by religion” (Ruse 2013, p. 182). It appears to me that that statement and others identified in the Ruse book lead me to believe that Lovelock had more than even mechanistic tendencies much less than atheistic. I have a hard time accepting that he pursued the original hypothesis out of atheistic predispositions.
While emergentism, specifically the autopoiesis version, is usually received as a mechanistic process, Margulis writes from a different perspective. She writes: “We compare this pervasive mechanistic belief of biologists, most of whom are smitten by physicomathematics envy, with a life-centered alternative worldview called autopoiesis, which rejects the concept of a mechanical universe known by an objective observer.” ((Margulis and Sagan 1997, p. 348 as reported in Ruse 2013). An overtone is defined as “an ulterior, usually implicit meaning or quality; an implication or a hint.” (American Heritage 2018). She is obviously selling the Gaia hypothesis with an overtone of something other than an atheistic slant.
What I can give credence to is that either or both may have totally secularist tendencies and I offered the speculative rationale in our original conversation about this topic that the outer limits of what was possible for him at the time according to the accepted canons of his profession constrained Lovelock to sticking with the science - almost. The definition of life that Lovelock used however necessitates the conclusion that the planet fits the description based upon the science. It’s as simple as that. As soon as he did that, he raised the hackles of his professional colleagues that persists today however much less.
This type of “premind mechanical life” (it may be very different on a nonbreather planet) is supported by the revelation under the rubrics of the Master Physical Controllers. (cf. Paper 29; cf. Paper 118). If we take the individuals, the concept initiators, out of the equation and focus on the concept (idea, hypothesis, theory, whatever) then this non-attributional approach allows for a philosophy to develop that is not constrained by the habiliments of the person. And maybe, just maybe the revelation can inch forward with a basis for coordinating evolution with revelation.
I haven’t given much ink to the concern raised about using the term “Gaia” that you suggest creates neo-pagan overtones. I can’t argue one way or another. I suspect I originally was agnostic about this choice of symbol Lovelock chose to use. Obviously to the secular scientist it is anathema; for the religionist in my opinion the jury is out if it creates a devolvement into either new age or pseudo-pagan thinking. I’ll table that one and reflect some more for future discussions should we have them.
In a recent email correspondence with George Park, he wrote: “There is no denying the current "world sway of mechanistic naturalism" and the subliminal corruption of thought patterns caused by "materialistic secularism." A "strong drift toward materialism, spiritual blindness" over the last few centuries is patently obvious. But I take very great comfort in the words of Andrew's midwayer: "At the time this writing the worst of the materialistic age is over; the day of a better understanding is already beginning to dawn. The higher minds of the scientific world are no longer wholly materialistic in their philosophy, but the rank and file of the people still lean in that direction as a result of former teachings." The outgoing spiritual tide has already turned and begins to come in, slowly lifting up all thought toward God.”
I need to rest my neurons and play with the grandkids.