Waiting for the Paint to Dry
Waiting for the Paint to Dry
Convergence and Creativity in the Cosmos
Once upon a timeless time, 13.7 billion years ago, a quantum energy fluctuation arising from a spacetime vacuum energy state produced an eruption into the universe of hydrogen atoms. An almost inconceivably large number of hydrogen atoms: 10 followed by about 85 zeros. No suns or planets or heaps of dirt or drops of water or dust or bacteria or any sort of thing larger than a hydrogen atom existed. 1085 hydrogen atoms.
Just a hair short of 13.7 billion years later, little human hands began to differentiate from a bean shaped embryo in the womb of a young Italian woman named Francesca di Neri del Miniato di Siena. Twenty-odd years later, those fully grown hands, pulsing with blood and connected by neural pathways to one of the most magnificent brains in the history of human creativity—Michelangelo—chipped millions of flakes from a block of Carrara marble and produced the Pietá.
Just what God’s role in Creation was is hard to say. Many early Christians believe that God shaped primordial matter into the cosmos that we know and live in. Later Christians—and many today—believe that God summoned that cosmos into existence by the power of his Word. I think the more interesting question is how we got from those hydrogen atoms to the Pietá.
The great physicist J. S. D. Haldane opined that “If our planet was created a few thousand years ago to end a few years or a few thousand years hence, it is conceivable that the main purpose to be worked out on it is the salvation and perfection of individual human beings.” Curiously, he believed the age of the earth was an argument against any divine involvement. “On a planet more than a thousand million years old, however, it is hard to believe—as do Christians . . . that the most important event has occurred within the last few thousand years.”1
Apparently, a God of instantaneous creation is easier for some people (and many Christians) to believe in than a God of infinite patience. The God I believe in is an artist. And Makoto Fujimura reminds us, “There is no art if we are unwilling to wait for paint to dry.”2 Whatever the mechanism or meaning of creation—it took a lot of time to get from hydrogen atoms to Michelangelo. Whatever the precise role of God in designing and guiding the growing beauty, complexity, and intelligence in the cosmos, something is going on that is garnering new attention and new explanations.
For many years, the idea was dominant in evolutionary biology that humans and every living thing are the product of countless random variations generated by mutation. Re-wind the tape to the beginning of earth’s history and start again, in Stephen Jay Gould’s metaphor, and the story line would change completely, along with the result. Randomness, chance, accidents, molecular mishaps and genetic aberrations constitute a wild free-for-all of the unpredictable, the unforeseen and the unexpected. Life finds a way, negotiates its tortuous paths, and we end up with the delightful but utterly contingent world we see—but it could all have been otherwise.
Except that story of utter randomness is no longer persuasive. Life is a perpetual, unremitting, infinitely creative struggle to solve problems—and time and time again those solutions converge. Life takes different paths, but the results are the same. “It matters little what our starting points may have been: the different routes will not prevent a convergence to similar ends.” Life manifests a “recurrent tendency of biological organization to arrive at the same 'solution' to a particular ‘need.’”3 Life explores all possibilities, but freedom always operates within parameters of the possible.
The irrepressible drive of all that lives to engage the world, to see, to taste, to hear, to feel, extends beyond human examples and imagination. The nose of the star-nosed mole is a centimeter in width. It contains 25,000 sensory receptors and five times as many nerves as the human hand. It does not smell its environment; it “sees” it with a level of mapping detail more accurate than our eye. In some fish (mormyrids), their bodies respond so sensitively to electrical currents that they have an effectual picture of their environment. Mammals and mosquitos independently evolved hearing systems based on similar mechanics. The asymmetrical ears that give owls such exquisite targeting ability evolved independently five to seven times in evolutionary history. The impulse to be aware, to interact, to multiply the means of moral and physical agency, will not be thwarted. Evolution isn’t linear or unidirectional—except in the long run. Life is relentlessly surging toward an end. “What we call language,” writes Morris, “is an evolutionary inevitability.” More to the point: “our sentience was effectively inevitable.” His mapping of convergence upon convergence points him to one conclusion with enormous theological implications (though he is a paleobiologist): “Something like ourselves is an evolutionary inevitability.”4
More is implied in these patterns of adaptation and development of sensory mechanisms, communication, and social organization. Darwin insisted only survivability was the principle of change. For Morris, “larger and more complex brains, sophisticated vocalizations, echolocation, electrical perception, advanced social systems including eusociality, viviparity, warm-bloodedness, agriculture—all of which are convergent—. . . to me that sounds like progress.” In fact, he hypothesizes, if we ever discover alien life, the chances are overwhelming that we will encounter a species that solved the challenges of olfaction, vision, dexterity, respiration and oxygenation the same way we did. We will, effectively, be "looking at ourselves."5
How did we get from hydrogen atoms to the Pietá? To Mozart and Mother Teresa and your best friend’s love and laughter? Maybe there are yet to be discovered, universal laws of self-organization that pertain to the material. Even secular philosophers are beginning to consider that “there may be powerful principles of self-organization at work . . ., principles that Darwin knew nothing about and might well have delighted in.”6 Atheist thinker Thomas Nagel is also persuaded of a deeply rooted “teleology” driven by apparent “principles of self-organization or of the development of complexity over time that are not explained by [the known] elemental laws.”7
Some theologians believe that God is this "living process of interaction," an "impersonal infinity.”8 I don’t. I think only a person who is a center of consciousness and personality can love us as God does. But I do think matter is majestic and marvelous—and that whatever animates it moves beautifully and relentlessly in the direction of abundance and creativity.
Terryl Givens is Senior Research Fellow at the Maxwell Institute and author and coauthor of many books, including Wrestling the Angel and The God Who Weeps and All Things New.
J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1927), 17.
Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), xiii.
Simon Conway Morris, Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13, xii.
Morris, Life’s Solution, 253, xv.
Morris, Life’s Solution, 307, 332.
Stuart Kaufmann, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 32.
Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 56.
Catherine Keller, On the Mystery: Discerning Divinity in Process (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008), 23.