I’m proposing this principle:
A Creation meeting the plausible criteria of unity, coherence, and completeness, would most likely behave in a manner consistent with the manner in which it was created.
In other words, if the evidence strongly tells us that the world and the entities within it develop at the level of individuals and evolve (a different sort of ‘develop’ in this context) at the level of classes of individuals (stars or homo sapiens) is likely the work of a Creator who can be plausibly regarded in this context as a story-teller and not an engineer with bureaucratic inclinations. Modern empirical knowledge indicates strongly we live in a world in which developmental processes dominate and few, if any entities, come to existence in their final state. The specific conversations and acts of God recorded in the Bible also show that He is a story-teller, even a coach for His characters.
I’ve addressed some of the underlying issues in my writings on this blog and in my first book To See a World in a Grain of Sand as well as a book on the nature of knowledge which can be downloaded from this website, Four Kinds of Knowledge. For now, I’ll avoid further discussion and simply note that, in this world, types of entities, such as species of living creatures, evolve and individual entities develop by way of internally developed responses to their environments. Even stars develop by processes more closely analogous to character development in a human novel than to the design of a bridge. In the Bible, the Israelites were shaped and molded by God over a period of centuries and the pilgrim Church on earth, however defined, is also being shaped and molded in similar ways.
The erector-set paradigm of engineering design is breaking down even when applied to technology, but that paradigm was never fully accepted by the best of engineers nor by talented tinkerers such as Ford who was aware in his eccentric way of the social effects of not only automobiles and roads but also of the factory system. Electronic circuitry, and certainly such facilities as particle accelerators, have become so complex that no one human being could have much more than a superficial understanding of the totality of the structure. We’ve come far. In ancient times, trial-and-error construction techniques resulted in unstable pyramids that killed workers and supervisors. A king or one of his officials could more or less organize an entire kingdom, as Joseph the Hebrew did for Pharaoh, but that was also a trial-and-error process that didn’t produce results that allowed for both freedom and a well-ordered society.
A movement towards design techniques solved some of those problems, on relatively ‘small’ or ‘simple’ projects but now has started to fail when applied to complex technology and certainly fails spectacularly when applied to any society more complex than a simple feudal society.
Recently, we’ve heard of ‘design’ processes, such as those for the Boeing 787, so complex that no one could even know if the darned thing could even be assembled properly until the major sections were flown in from the factories in various parts of the world. Apparently, the engineers at Boeing headquarters demanded that they be allowed to assemble one plane by hand before moving on to regular production. It’s perhaps more interesting to consider the social aspects of the construction of a bridge. The best bridge in the world can destroy nearby communities, perhaps because of a conscious concern on the part of designers with larger communities or perhaps because engineers haven’t always been aware of the consequences of building ramps and entrances in established residential neighborhoods or in commercial neighborhoods frequented by those who would find repugnant even occasional visits to regions dominated by masses of concrete and steel. In general, those sorts of depopulated areas tend to also be crime-ridden or at least frequented by drug-addicts, alcoholics, and others who give at least some sign of being dangerous. If bridge construction projects can be so destructive of human communities, then imagine what havoc can be wreaked when such limited engineering design techniques are applied directly to human communities.
We should act in ways consistent with the underlying processes of our world. This world is one of developmental processes where each entity has to respond properly to what its environment offers it, or throws at it. Moreover, as biochemical stews became cells of some sort which then absorbed self-replicating chemicals (DNA, etc.) to become cells as we know them and as cells combined into mold slimes and then into more advanced and specialized colonies such as jellyfishes and…
The responses which an entity makes, shaping itself in the process, must come from inside that entity, animal or family-line of animals or religious community or nation. This isn’t a pessimistic claim that “The world is too complex to anticipate all possibilities,” though there are such concerns allied to my main point which is simply:
The world operates in the way of a developing story and nearly all entities in this world also develop or evolve as if characters in a narrative rather than being raw stuff to be machined.
I’m making a positive claim we should operate according to reality as best described by our historians and physicists and many others.
We don’t know where the world is heading. We don’t even know what will happen to our families or countries, though we who are Christians are bound to believe that the end result will be the incorporation of those who belong to Christ in the Body of Christ without loss of individuality. In fact, that individuality will be enhanced so that we can be truly Christ-like. Before I can further explore this idea of the Body of Christ — not to be done in this article, I have to say what should be obvious from the Bible, especially the letters of St. Paul. Individuals are unique and don’t even all fit in the same general categories. The same is true of nations and other natural groupings of human beings. We won’t fill the same role in the Body of Christ and we don’t fill the same role in this mortal realm. Not every human being is suited for life as a rocket engineer at NASA and not every human community is suited to be a part of a high-tech society that sends rockets to the moon. Moreover, some individuals capable of living such a life, some communities capable of so forming themselves, have no desire to do so.
Why can’t we just help the Haitians after their natural disaster without trying to rebuild Haiti so that it has an American-style or European-style infrastructure? Why don’t we let them find their own way by responding to their own environment? Why don’t we let them develop according to what they can find inside themselves and in their relationships to each other and to those who go to help them without the goal of turning them into Americans or Spaniards? We like to burden others with American or European technology which leaves them confused at best and certainly unable to respond to their environments in their own ways. We like to burden other countries by educating some of the natives to be Western-style bureaucrats and academics of a sort who are no longer ‘natives’ and, because of that, aren’t capable of developing native responses to the new possibilities they learned about when they were at MIT or Oxford or Heidelberg. We in the West have also erred against the individual, trying to channel our children into paths of development suited for forming more bureaucrats. Nor have we respected local cultures.
I’ll pass on to make one last point, though it’s not something I can yet write about with any clarity. Development of an organism, or the evolution of a family-line of organisms, isn’t really something that works bottom-up. The development of complex organisms is ongoing at multiple levels and perhaps at all levels of development currently available to that organism. One of the best examples involves only two levels — individual organisms develop over their lifetimes even as species evolve over longer periods of time. But individual development and special evolution overlap. As we develop as individuals reflecting one temporal stage of evolution of the human species, we remain part of the greater evolutionary flow, though there is reason to believe evolution might itself have evolved over time and has now changed dramatically with the appearance of a rational and self-aware race. Moreover, we have other forms of evolution or development which overlap with biological evolution and the development of an organism. Life on earth engages in complex and recursive relationships with the atmosphere of the earth. There is also interaction at the level of DNA and soma between different species — such as that between viruses and their hosts. Viruses can implant their genetic coding inside the genetic code of other species. Viruses can also transport pieces of genetic coding from one species to another. Bacteria form a superorganism of sorts, being able to shed some genes and pick up others from a pool of bacterial genes flowing through the earth’s biosphere and including genes for resistance to various antibiotics. An interested reader can download my dark comedy, A Man for Every Purpose, which plays off some of these confusions caused by our willful misunderstandings of our human selves and our situation in this world.
A human communities is one very complex entity. We should fear those who try to guide this development because they will deform the organism, just as if a child were to be fitted at birth with a brace to straighten the natural and necessary curve in his spine or to force his skull into the shape found in a different ethnic group.
We should help those who are in need of food, shelter, medical care, and clothing but we should think long and hard before imposing Western style infrastructure upon the peoples of Africa or Haiti or other regions. Centuries ago, the Japanese and Chinese had already developed to a level where they could adapt Western technology and even some social forms to their own needs and desires. The Chinese needed only to get back on their feet after a period of weakness which was the result of Western dominance established during the later stages of political decay of a particular imperial government. The Haitians aren’t in that sort of a position. They’re descendants of Africans torn out of their tribal environments and thrown into a brutal system of slavery where they didn’t really have even the limited opportunities to learn the skills and forms of self-discipline which were necessary to slaves on a tobacco plantation. The Haitians have no part in the West other than as victims of brutal exploitation and then as welfare dependents of various Western states and charitable organizations. They don’t need the U.S. Marine Corps building roads and modern housing for them. They probably need help in increasing the output of their many small farms and crafts shops and they need that help in the form of simple technology they can sustain while moving into the future their own way, even if their way turns out to be a recreation of African tribal life in the middle of the western hemisphere.
Of all human beings, those who call themselves Christians should realize that not all parts of the Body of Christ are the same. The heart should not be trying to force the liver to pump blood. The power-plant engineer should not be trying to help the Amish blacksmith who’d suffered a fire by installing a modern, factory-built natural-gas forge and erecting a steel-framed building around it.
I write not so much to criticize Haiti aid efforts as to make the general point that we modern human beings haven’t yet come close to integrating modern understandings of our world into our ways of thinking. Now that we’re learning, or should be learning, about the complexities of evolution and development in this world, we have some who expand a critique against centralized, or top-down, control into an argument that we’re just so many social atoms and will never be anything different but at the loss of our individuality and we have others who plow forward to stimulate economies or to rebuild foreign countries as if they were constructing a 1880 textile-mill according to a blueprint which can be drawn on a single, large sheet of paper.