Chapter 2: On Gods of the Gaps

Chapter Two

About the gods of the gaps

The experience of learning a new truth should be exciting and exhilarating, and it usually is. But there are strange exceptions. Perhaps most biology teachers are accustomed to finding that few of their students bother to explain and explain some of what they considered to be the “secrets” of nature. These students see the decline of these secrets as a threat to the security of their beliefs.  For these students, there must be gaps between natural events that harbor divine intervention. On the other hand, crude forms of anti-religious propaganda in Russia and elsewhere claim that science has explained almost everything, and thus there is no longer room for divine intervention and presence, which they see only as a hotbed of mystery and miracles.

Newton was able to explain the movement of the planets around the sun with physical laws, but he nevertheless believed that “the daily rotation of the planets cannot be derived from gravity, but rather requires divine power to cause it.”   A century later, Emperor Napoleon asked the cosmologist and mathematician Laplace why the name of God was absent in his famous work on the mechanics of celestial bodies.  The Emperor may have meant it as a joke, but Laplace answered in all seriousness that he “did not need the God hypothesis” in his work.  Many have believed that, if Laplace did not say this, if there is no need for God in heavenly affairs, then there is less need for Him in earthly affairs.  Countless articles and books were published in many languages ​​about the steady decline of the usefulness of the “hypothesis” of God in the scientific interpretation of the tangible world.  White's book (The War of Science and Religion, 1895[1]) is considered a classic reference on this subject.

The French Revolutionary Tribunal, which ruled the death of the scientist Lavoisier, declared that the Republic had no need of scientists.  “If almost everything in the world became known and understood, perhaps this unenlightened opinion would not be far from the truth. Scientific research would then become a cause for boredom and the presence of a professional group of scientists would not be necessary. But this is completely far from the truth, because the project of science is still in its elementary stages. In reality, only a partial understanding of some natural phenomena has been achieved, and the field awaiting scientific explanation is still much larger than that. It is the unknown that inspires scientists to truly strive for knowledge. However, some people find pleasure in the gaps in our knowledge of nature for a different reason. These people hope that these gaps will last, and that the unknown will become unknowable. Then, with a strange twist of logic, they assume that the unknown will remain a field for divine intervention. All historical odds are against the “gods of the gaps” continuing to seek refuge in them, but nothing can lead to the conviction of such minds that refuse to accept the testimony of historical experience.

According to Durkheim (1915)[2] “All religious beliefs, simple and complex, share a distinctive characteristic: they presuppose a classification of all things that people think about, real and ideal, into two opposing classes, the ordinary and the sacred.” This does not quite mean that the ordinary is the domain of natural forces and the sacred is the domain of unseen forces.” Such a classification would be meaningless to primitive man, who sees manifestations of forces that we consider illusory or unseen everywhere. Taylor and other pioneers of cultural anthropology saw animism as the origin of religion. It is assumed that primitive man did not distinguish between material and spiritual forces, and for him animals, plants, rocks, rivers, as well as the weather, not only other people, were theirs. Incoming spirits that can benefit or harm a person.

These reflections on the origin of religion are in complete agreement with the philosophical doctrines of Comte and Spencer, who assumed the existence of three stages in the intellectual development of the human race, from religion to science, through metaphysics. However, subsequent studies considered this simplification excessive. Malinowski et al. (1931) [3] emphasized that religious and scientific ideas have different functions in people’s social lives. Malinowski asserted that “once man tightened his grip on the environment by using tools Once language appeared, there was knowledge of a scientific nature, and no culture could survive if its arts, crafts, weapons, and economy were based on hidden, non-empirical concepts and doctrines. Spiritualism is related to magic, and the function of magic is different but complementary to primitive “science.”   Human knowledge is considered incomplete;   Much of it depends on luck, coincidence, and incomprehensible forces. Man, Malinowski says, tries to control those forces through magic.  “Magic is used as something additional to human tools and power, to control chance and to catch luck.”  Psychoanalytically oriented writers have also reached different concepts. For Freud, God is not only an unnecessary hypothesis, but rather an illusory idea resulting from unresolved conflicts in childhood. As for Jung, he was the opposite, believing that there is a collective non-consciousness of the human species that lies behind the experience of each individual, expressing itself in symbolic images (see Moreau 1955 and Kardiner 1963)[4].

Descartes also investigated, three centuries before our time, the full depth of the application of scientific knowledge to the understanding of nature, and the Cartesian solution was a radical dualism. The world is a machine: “I neither accept nor desire any other principle in nature other than geometry and abstract mathematics, because all the phenomena of life can be explained by them and proven by them.” Living bodies are machines, and so is the human body. But man is not just a machine;   He  has a soul that is not mechanical.  What is the evidence that prompted Descartes to make this concession to dualism?   A person expresses his thoughts through speech;   Descartes (1637) imagined a predictive vision of creating a machine that spoke words, and then argued that this machine could not “organize its words in different ways so that it responds appropriately to everything said in its existence in the way that the lowest human beings can.”   However, it is clear that this Cartesian dualism is not convincing, which is why it has not been proven, and Lamettrie (1748), De Holbach (1770), and Helvetz (1772) did not see a reason, a century after Descartes, to attribute to man something called the soul.  For them, a human being can be understood as a machine, just like any other animal, and he does not differ much in his structure except in that this structure allows him to perform complex mental operations.

The modern world marvels at the courage, or rather the recklessness, of those “philosophers” of the Enlightenment who made such sweeping assertions based on evidence that seems miserable compared to the information that became available to us later, and which still seems ambiguous and open to various interpretations.  Perhaps vitality, not mechanism, was the hypothesis that was appropriate to the state of biology in the eighteenth century, if we recall that state today.

To clarify this, let us look at one issue, which is the issue of the development of the fetus. Hamm, a student of the pioneer microscopist Leeuwenhoek, discovered the spermatozoa (male human sperm) in the year 1678. In the year 1694, another microscope added a false discovery that he combined with the real discovery, so he was convinced that he saw in the head of the male sperm a very miniature form of a “homunculus,” and then he published a drawing Imagine that alleged discovery.

This discovery made the problem of fetal development deceptively simple. If the body was pre-formed in the sex cells, then growth only requires an increase in the size of the fetus until it reaches adulthood. Thus, the issue of forming a new body was solved magically. But this solution conceals an extreme difficulty: Where do the next generation and the generations that follow come from?  Therefore, the embottlement theory came up with a radical solution to this puzzle: Homuncules contain small sperms, and small sperms contain smaller sperms, and so on. All humans were already formed in the first man (or in the first woman if the homuncules were deposited in the eggs). If anyone had tried to estimate a smaller size for the homuncules, modesty must have prevented him from publishing the results of that research. This is The origin of the theory of preformati.

The proponents of the epigenesis theory clashed with the advocates of presynthesis. They explained that sex cells do not contain homonuclears, and this is a fact. They also confirmed that the body grows from uncreated matter, and this fact is not without exaggeration.  In 1759 and 1786, Wolff demonstrated the complete absence of adult body parts in early animal embryos or plant seeds. What then are the reasons for synthesis? Wolf's answer was not convincing. It is easy to mock, with the benefit of a posteriori wisdom, the misconceptions of our ancestors. Wolff and others believed in the existence of a vital force “via essentials” that directs embryonic development and preserves the life of the adult body later on.  Many of the biologists of the eighteenth century were vital, such as Wolff, John Hunter, Stahl, and Bichat, but at the same time, successive generations of embryologists, with their ever-improving anatomical tools and microscopes, worked hard to achieve a clear picture of embryonic development, and they persevered in developing accurate illustrations to describe the method of forming embryonic models representing the various animal and plant groups. Starting with the fertilized egg, passing through the various stages of the life cycle, and ending with the birth of new generations.

Von Baer (1828-1837) developed the theory of germ layers in animals, and made the proponents of the cell principle Schleiden (1838) and Schwann (1839) describe development accurately and easily, and Haeckel (1866) formulated the law of biogenesis, which says that ontogeny is a short restoration of evolutionary development, i.e., the history of the species. phylogony of the group to which that individual belongs. This theory became a theoretical model in that it contained only a partial truth, but it played a very important role as it stimulated tremendous interest and activity among researchers that led to the development of embryology.

Hartwig (1879) and Fol (1879) described the sperm entering the egg and the fusion of their nuclei.  Then, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, a brilliant group of scientists analyzed the behavior of chromosomes and their role in cell division (mitosis), in the maturation of sex cells (meiosis), and in the processes of fertilization and division of fertilized eggs.

This happened to coincide with the rediscovery of the laws of inheritance that Mendel published in 1865, but they were ignored until 1955 AD. Then came the era of rapid growth of genetics, one of whose branches studies how to achieve the hereditary endowment of an individual during his individual (ontological) development.  Here the old contrast between the theories of presynthesis and successive synthesis dissolved and disappeared, or at least it turned into another issue. There are no homonucleates in the sex cells, but there are sets of genes that include, if we borrow cybernetic expressions, “information” or “commands” for growth. The issue became knowing how to “encode” this information and orders in the genes, and hypotheses with a flavor were initially formulated. Presynthesis, such as assuming a one-to-one relationship between each gene and each part or “trait” of the adult organism, or between the gene and the enzyme it encodes to produce, and as we see it now, the issue seems much simpler.  The Watson-Crick hypothesis, fully supported by facts, says that heredity is a code inscribed in the chain of the DNA molecule. Different genes are like words or paragraphs in sentences on a printed page. -They are different sequences of four nuclei, which are the four “genetic letters.” The genetic messages encoded in the DNA of the chromosome are “copied” to another code in the DNA, RNA, and carried from the nucleus to the ribosomes, where they are translated into a sequence of amino acids from which protein molecules are formed.  Proteins are the building blocks of the body, including enzymes, which are the catalysts that carry out the processes of destruction and construction.

Indeed, all this did not lead to the Cartesian reduction of embryology and genetics to mechanics, geometry, and mathematics, but on the other hand, nothing was discovered that would require, or even suggest, the assumption of the existence of some form of vital force.  The doctrine of vitalism in the sciences of embryology and genetics has gradually faded;  The vital force whose existence began to be confirmed to the pioneers studying growth has no trace of its existence found anywhere. Driesch (1867-1941), perhaps the last prominent embryologist to profess vitalism, conducted ingenious experiments on sea urchin development at the end of the last century. The embryos of these animals have a distinct ability to regenerate their lost organs;  The individual cells that are isolated from them can develop into very small but complete larvae. This, as we see now, is caused by the presence of a complete set of egg genes in each sea urchin cell. But Dresch had another idea. He estimated that any machine could not be designed to create the missing pieces of the structure. Therefore, for the sea urchin to grow, there must be a force guiding it, for which he borrowed the expression “dispersed” from Aristotle. But what is antalshe?  Dresch believed that the antenchis are not positioned mechanically or anatomically;  It is not a special substance and it is not new energy;  It is “the first teleological factor of nature” but most biologists appreciate that it is just a word that does not mean anything.

The situation in the rest of the branches of biology is similar to this general scheme. Digestion, respiration, the action of hormones, muscle contraction, nerve conduction, and finally the structure and operation of the brain, all raise innumerable questions which have been studied by successive generations of biologists. The mechanism hypothesis has triumphed in every field in absentia, so to speak. There is no biological process that has been analyzed and understood that has not been shown to represent a pattern of physical and chemical components that is often very complex.  It is this wonderful complexity, not the existence of a mysterious vital force, that is the essence of the biological question. As for the mechanism/vitality dispute, it has been a dead topic for nearly half a century.

Every student who takes the introductory biology course is now expected to know that mechanism is a correct scientific theory and that vitality is a wrong theory.  But not every student, not even every professor, clearly understands this reason that biology is very far from achieving the Cartesian project that reduces all biological phenomena to chemistry, physics, and mathematics. The enlightened advocates of this doctrine do not expect this because it would be tantamount to proof of absolute denial; There is an enormous number of living organisms with countless structures and functions, and it is always possible to imagine a vital force lurking somewhere that research has not reached.  The doctrine of vitalism is rejected for another reason.  There is something like a consensus that vitality is a useless procedural hypothesis for research in biology.  It has lost its usefulness even as a spur to motivate its opponents to justify their theories. So what's the reason?

The challenge facing science when Wohler synthesized urea in 1828 AD was to prove that a substance that is only found inside living organisms could be synthesized outside of them.  Now, the synthesis of a new organic substance is not considered news, unless this compound is of special importance for some reason. Conducting biological or biological scientific experiments for the purpose of obtaining additional evidence that refutes vitality has become nothing more than fighting windmills. We have recently made great strides in the fields of molecular biology and biochemistry.  Molecular biology is Cartesian in suggestion, but its main goal is no longer to test the human-machine theory.  Discovering the structure of nucleic acids, deciphering the genetic code, and revealing the mechanism of replication of molecules carrying genetic information are among the greatest achievements of modern science.  They are important because they help us understand the mechanism of inheritance;  But we do not need them to convince biologists that genes perform their function not by the effort of some vital force, but by chemical correspondence.  The existence of some chemical correspondence was almost certain for Morgan, Goldschmidt, and other geneticists a few decades before the DNA era.  It has been very difficult to visualize the activity of genes without the mediation of chemical messengers.

Scientific issues cannot be resolved by voting.  The heresy of the minority that sees the current state of biology as crude and unpalatable materialism should be heard fairly. In view of the current remarkable achievements of robotics, they believe that biology is in need of a vital reorientation.  What distinguishes the situation more than anything else is that modern advocates of vitalism wish to avoid calling themselves vital.  This objectionable word rarely appears in Sinnott's (1955, 1957) and eloquent arguments.  The following quote gives us a fair picture of Sinnott's basic biological convictions: “An organized system, governed by the control of its activities, suggests that there is something within it to which these activities tend to conform, a standard, a level, a goal or goal, what the philosopher Telos would call, latent in the totality of the living mass.” Sinnott, the eminent biologist, is entirely attuned to the present state of biology and its history. But his biological argument is not fundamentally different from Drisch's argument, which took place many years ago. Sinnott's arguments can be summarized in two assertions: First: The development of an organism is directed to a goal, and this goal is the attainment of maturity. Second: The organism’s physiology and behavior are also directed towards a goal, and this goal is the continuation of life.

It is possible to accept Sinnott's facts, but not his conclusions.  Although some extremists disagree with the statement that organized systems have goals or objectives, I see no need to quibble over the words. The processes that take place inside the growing fetus have no meaning until we know what emerges from that fetus. Almost everything that an organism performs, physiologically and behaviorally, serves its continued survival and resistance to extinction (see Simpson 1964 for a fine discussion of this topic) [5].

The real problem is, does this prove the validity of the assumption of “something” called the “telos” or vital force, or make that assumption reasonable?  It doesn't, in my estimation.  The unquestioned fact that living organisms adapt to the environments in which they live is completely understood in light of evolutionary theory. “The organized pattern governed by the control of its “activities” does not suggest a “telos,” but rather a history of evolutionary control.

We will necessarily discuss this matter briefly in the next chapter, focusing here on the function that evolutionary explanations should play in biology in general. In my opinion, underestimating the importance of the evolutionary origin of living organisms is the reason behind the misconceptions of neovitalism.

We can say, at the risk of simplification that might be misleading to an issue that is far from simple, that there are two ways to study the living world, including humans.  The two methods are legitimate and necessary, but they ask somewhat different questions, and it is natural that they come with different answers, even if they are complementary to each other. The first method is the reductionist method, that is, the Cartesian method. In this method, the components of the living body are examined and analysed, which are ultimately the chemicals from which these bodies are built. In general, from this approach we obtain explanations of the object-machine type. In the words of Wald (1963), “organisms are highly anthropomorphic expressions of the molecules of which they are composed.”   The second approach is Darwinian. It applies to a large extent to biology, but it is not limited to it.  We ask how living organisms were built and became the way they are. With this approach, life and living organisms can become understood in the light of their origins and evolutionary development, that is, in the light of evolution. Simpson (1964) expressed this as follows:

In biology, then, it is necessary to add a second form of explanation to the first approach, i.e., the reductionist approach to explanation, which is based on physical, chemical, and mechanical principles. The second form of explanation, which we can call composisionist, as opposed to reductionist, its criteria is the benefit that adaptive structures and processes bring to the organism as a whole, to the species of which it is a part, and beyond that, the ecological function of those structures and adaptive processes that they perform. In the ecological communities in which the species exists.

In general, the closer the researcher works to the chemical level, the closer to completion the Cartesian interpretations are.  The closer the researcher approaches the total level of the organism, the greater the need for Darwinian explanations.  To be sure, there is no sharp branching. Both Cartesian and Darwinian interpretations make sense at all biological levels, despite the fact that they look at the issue from different angles. They are neither competing nor competing, but complementary to each other.

Let us look at this daily miracle that does not amaze anyone, the coming of a new human life. A human egg weighs one twenty millionth of an ounce. An adult weighs fifty million times the weight of an egg. Where does this growth material come from? It is clearly derived from the environment, from the food that is consumed and assimilated. Man is literally a mixture of converted groceries. But this mixture is alive, feels joy and suffering, possesses consciousness and self-awareness, and is capable of actions ranging from tenderness to chivalry and from heroism to selfishness. The idea that a mixture of grocery stores, no matter how transformed, can produce any of these actions is shocking. Some people think that they are complete nonsense in the truest sense of the word. When this idea seems inevitable, it becomes a cause for despair. Thus, according to Barzun (1964)[6]:

All of this only reinforces the feeling that life is not worth living in any way. The larger a person’s heart and mind are, the more intense the burden of these fears, obsessions, and urgent motives becomes. He does not desire anything but the early end of life: It is clear that there is no meaning in the struggle to save a world in which the survivors find life hell.

According to Mattson (1964), science turns man into an “alienated machine.”

Sinnott's vitalism is his attempt to escape this despair. “Or is it not possible?” Sinnott (1957) asks, “And this is the alternative proposed here - that there is a natural tendency inherent in living matter, which expresses itself in what the individual does, thinks, and is, and is subject to modification by factors inside and outside the body? Is not life itself, at least to some degree, creative?” .  And also:

“If the assumption proposed here is correct, then this characteristic would be part of the cosmic, creative, organizing force of nature, which can be thought of as one of the characteristics of the Divine Self.” Clearly Sinnot felt the need for gaps between natural events to house gods.”

I would suggest that there is a third way that avoids both Barzun's despair and Sinnott's anachronistic vitality. The description of man as a mixture of transformed groceries is true and realistic, to certain limits. The limits of this description are set by its reductionist nature. What we need in addition to it is the synthetic counterpart. Man is certainly composed of molecules and atoms, but he is not created by the random meeting of these molecules and atoms. The fact that we must never lose sight of is that every living organism of any species that exists today has descended directly ancestrally from an elementary life form that is estimated to have arisen more than two billion years ago.

In every generation there is a process of formation and decomposition that includes individuals of every species, who, from the reductionist point of view, are types of molecules and atoms, all of which come from “groceries,” that is, from food.  But the history of life is not an eternal Nietzschean repetition. The patterns that build in successive generations are not strictly repetitive. Nor are successive generations completely different from each other.  Heredity makes successive generations similar, but it does not impose complete identicalness. Similarities and differences are equally important. Genetics makes organisms have biological clocks;  Adaptations achieved in the past are not easily dissipated. Variation also allows the accumulation of new information about the environment in which the species currently lives. This information is organized and stored in genes through natural selection;  Natural selection is an automatic, cybernetic adjustment process that responds to environmental challenges and transmits that response to the genetic makeup of the species.

The organism begins its existence as a fertilized egg, and continues to develop through a complex series of ingenious maneuvers. The body's structures and functions do not fit together because there is a lurking guidance tool called the tylus, but rather because the development of the individual is part of the cyclical (or more correctly spiral) succession of development of his ancestors. It seems that individual development is drawn from its end rather than driven from its beginning;  Organs in the growing individual are formed for future use because they were formed evolutionarily for a present benefit. Individual development is understood as part of the evolutionary development of the species, and not the other way around. The history of the living world is not wasted and wasted; The atoms, molecules, and “groceries” in living organisms achieve extraordinary ingenuity because natural selection is the process that makes possible what would otherwise be extremely improbable.

The rejection of vitalism in no way contradicts what Albert Schweitzer called “the reverence for life.”  Man's conscience, the existence of life, and the universe itself are all parts of the greatest mystery. Finding gaps in scientific knowledge, which is of course very easy, does not seem to be the wisest way to approach that secret. According to Coulson (1955)[7],

It seems that there is only one way out of our crisis. If we cannot include God at the end of science, then He must be there, from the beginning and all the way.  The theologian Heim (1953)[8] was no less clear:

Faith does not give us the strength we need in our daily lives when it is supported

Miracles that violate the law of nature occur... but only when the event appears to us

The same event, the natural causes of which we fully understand...seems to us to be a real reality that we accept

Upside down.

In any case, the entelchi or telos represents a false solution to questions of biology. Let us consider how a “primary teleological, immaterial factor,” as Dresch called it, might have a role in directing the development of the embryo, or in the adaptive mutation of the adult organism. As we mentioned, Dresch insisted that enthalpy is neither a special substance nor a new type of energy. Sinnott maintains a similar opinion, despite his deliberate ambiguity. But the body or brain is a material system - this is certain even for vitalists. The immaterial or unseen telos must eventually descend to the material and natural levels in order to have a noticeable impact on these levels. Is enthalpy ultimately a highly effective enzyme or a unique type of radiation?  But enzymes and radiation are either matter or energy.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that parapsychologists have arrived at unquestionable proof of the reality of telepathy or of the phenomena of mediation between spirits. Does this justify vital biological theory?   These are the phenomena that most people see as a model of non-physical and unseen phenomena.  Is it really like that?  Whatever the unknown force responsible for transmitting telepathy is, it must be able to influence the recipient's nerve cells. This new form of energy must have a physiological or biochemical effect on these cells that is eventually translated physiologically into spoken, written, or imagined words and messages. Unless one embraces some of the ideas of Leibnizian psycho-material parallelism, the non-material must descend to the physiological level and thus the material, sooner or later.

Attempts have been made to circumvent this insurmountable necessity by resorting, as might be expected, to the uncertainty principle and to subatomic forces and phenomena. These attempts included errors in judgment and assessment that Rensch (1960), Nagel (1963), and others completely exposed. It may be quite difficult to imagine what is going on at the subatomic levels using the concepts we usually use in dealing with macroscopic phenomena. But there is nothing inherently non-causal in subatomic phenomena at all.

The great neurophysiologist Eccles (1953) emphasized the infinitesimality of some biological structures in which the connection between mind and matter is supposed to take place. These are the synapses in which the dendrites, that is, the branches of the different nerve cells, meet, and whose weight is estimated at 12 to 13 grams. Excitation through a mass this small can cause hundreds of thousands of neurons to fire in less than a millisecond. Does the efficiency of this amplifying mechanism allow us to assume that a “non-physical” force can exert a strong influence on the body’s macroscopic processes and movements? Here also the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is called for. But this argument has no basis; No matter how small the size of the synapses, the thing that triggers them must be another material substance or energy. Some people's fondness for uncertainty principles involves a great deal of misunderstanding. What we should be looking for here in particular are the factors of guiding certainty, not the factors of uncertainty.

Attempts have been made to turn this argument in another way.   Instead of assuming that non-material factors influence matter in some way, it assumes that matter - all matter - contains the beginnings of life, feeling, and will. These theories, which are called by different names, such as pantheism and pantheism, were advanced by prominent modern philosophers such as Whitehead and Hartshorne, and biologists such as Rensch, Teilhard de Chardin, Birch, Wright, and others. Wrench's (1960) reasoning goes as follows: There are no gaps in the evolutionary ascension of man and the higher animals from the lower ones;  Therefore, there is no basis to deny that all animals, including single-celled animals, have feelings and feelings emanating from them; There is no basis for denying sensation in plants, “although these sensations are not related to each other, so they constitute basic units that differ fundamentally from our sensations buried in the flowing river of consciousness.”  The evolutionary continuum extends to the inorganic world; Therefore, atoms and molecules should “have parallel components of some kind attributed to them.”  While Rensch rejects all forms of vitalism, he concludes that “Since all phenomena are psychological, there is no difference between subject and object or matter and spirit, and the natural world does not need to search for an abstract world of reduced matter beyond the world of general consciousness.”

Wright's (1964) argument differs from Wrench's, which Wright does not appear to have been familiar with, in some important details, although it is generally parallel to it. In Wright’s opinion, “The philosophical biologist cannot avoid the issue of the relationship of mind to matter,” because “if the non-living world were completely devoid of mind, and if a time had passed in which the existence of life was not possible, as is clear, then how did mind appear?” Although Wright is considered one of the founders of the theory of evolution, he believes that “the emergence of mind from no mind at all is nothing but pure magic.” Wright concluded that to avoid this “pure magic...it seems that the only convincing way out is for the mind to be universal, present not only in all living organisms and their cells, but also in molecules and atoms, even in elementary particles.”

As for Hartshorne (1937, 1962), he generalized the principle of psychology and universal divinity in a philosophical system. For him, all “individual units of nature,” that is, biological individuals, molecules, atoms, and elementary particles, are alive and have a form of experience or sensation. However, this does not mean that compounds such as rocks and clouds,...  etc., also alive,  they are vehicles, not individuals.  The apparent contradiction here is resolved based on the “societal” saying, which goes back to Whitehead and to Leibniz before that, that the individual who possesses feeling can be an organized society, or a group of sensitive individuals. Accordingly, God is a collective whole, and all individuals become its partial components. Since God is the “universal being,” then “since our enjoyment of health is our participation in the health of other cells, the happiness of the universe is the integration of the happiness of its parts, and God’s mercy is the only way to conceptualize the psychological nature of the universal being.”

We have seen that the appeal of Wrench and Wright's psycho-cosmological theory lies in avoiding the assumption that completely new properties will emerge in evolution. Rensch says, “In any case, the fundamental issue is the formation of the soul from the non-soul.” Although we should not underestimate the philosophical difficulty facing us, I am confident that we can confront it and even overcome it.  This situation is parallel to the problem of explaining growth with the theories of presynthesis and successive synthesis. The simple apparent view was that the embryo was there, hidden in the sex cells, and all it had to do was grow and increase in size to reach maturity. Upon closer examination, it became clear that the apparent simplicity was deceptive. Although the instructions for the development process are “pre-configured” in the genes, similar to the prior presence of computer instructions in the holes in its tapes, the development of the fetus is sequential, meaning the formation of a new body that did not exist in a unique way before.

The possibility of life, if we look at it evolutionarily, certainly existed in the inorganic world. The evidence for this is simply that we know that life appeared later. To the same extent, the possibility of reason must have been present in the matter of living protocells, because we truly know that rational beings arose later. Wright (1964) rightly says, “Although the fertilized egg is a living cell, it always suggests to the mind a purely physico-chemical explanation.” But he continues: “If we do not want the human mind to appear magically, then it must have developed from the brain of the egg, and apparently before that, from the DNA molecules in the nucleus of the egg and the sperm, which   constitute its genetic staff.”  However, this conclusion does not seem to be consistent with the premises. Of course, the potential for reason must be present in the egg, the sperm, and the DNA molecules. But it does not follow that the eggs and sperm themselves have minds. The stone has the potential to become a statue, but it does not follow that there is a statue hidden inside every stone.

It must be recognized that the child’s potential exists, or was present, in his parents. But let us note that even the genetic makeup of this particular child was not achieved until these two sex cells united. Since the parents had hundreds of eggs and billions of sperm, they also had the potential to give birth to countless other children. The possibility of realizing some of these infinite genetic combinations was not determined until fertilization (unless this was in the sense of Laplace's determinism, which we will refer to later). Even after fertilization, the fetus became a newborn, and the newborn became a person, with regular progression, and without interruption in the continuous development that does not allow us any room to imagine the entry of a “mind” or “spirit” into it. I do not see any benefit such as assuming the existence of minds in eggs and sperm, no matter how diluted the degree of those minds. There is also no point in saying that the food wrappers on grocery shelves are alive and that they contain my personal germs, although some of their contents may become so after they are absorbed into my body.

The assumption of the prior existence of minds and the idea of their immortality, or at least their long-term survival, represents a strong temptation for many people. Theosophist Annie Besant was absolutely certain that nineteen of the last thirty-six reincarnations of her soul had occurred in India, and she was also certain that her soul would be subjected to more reincarnations. But, fortunately or unfortunately, there is nothing that can provide evidence of the validity or plausibility of these assumptions. External appearances at least suggest that minds arise, grow, and then disappear. The mind that is me arose in degrees, beginning about sixty-six years ago, clearly from no mind at all, but only from chromosomes, cytoplasm, and mindless foodstuffs. Seventy years before that, for example, this mind did not exist. Even if this is “pure magic,” it is magic that fills the world. There is no doubt that this mind of mine will disappear from existence in a few years. The alternative to this is to follow in the footsteps of those people who believe that minds do not disappear but are stored in places of permanent bliss or inevitable eternal damnation. However, this is difficult to believe, and it is even more difficult to believe that my mind was lurking somewhere outside the stage seventy years ago, waiting for a cycle to enter the chromosome or cell that suits it.

Hartshon removes his theory from the field of science with a stroke of his pen when he writes that “any unit of nature that is such, and is not defined as a compound, has, to the extent anyone can perceive it, forms of feelings and psychological characteristics of its own.”  This is because such an irrefutable assumption has no room in science. While recognizing that there is no convincing official definition of life, we know the distinctive characteristics of the life phenomenon that exist in every living organism, and one of these characteristics is the ability to self-replicate (see the next chapter). Talking about such “individual units” as atoms and electrons as being somehow alive may be a poetic metaphor, but it is completely devoid of any meaning as a scientific hypothesis.

The difficulty with the “mind” of the cell or atom is more severe. The great physiologist Sherrington (1953) puts the situation as follows:

(Although life can be analyzed and described by means of natural science, its counterpart, thought, remains stubborn and broken in relation to natural science, which excludes it and considers it outside its scope. As a result, a radical distinction has arisen between the phenomena of life and mind, the first being within the scope of chemistry and physics, and the second being outside their scope. This does not mean that Sherrington was an advocate of some type of vitalist doctrine.)

The simple truth is that the mind and its activity, thought, are experienced by man and are not observed. I am directly aware of my own mind only and I am directly aware of only my own thoughts. I assume that others also experience something like my thoughts because their outward behavior shows features that are similar to my features, and I know in my insides that they accompany my thinking. But,” Schreinakhton quoted again, “we know nothing about the relationship between thoughts and the brain other than their overall proportionality in time and space.”  Does this amount of knowledge give us license to assume the existence of minds and ideas in molecules and atoms everywhere?  We cannot easily prove or conclusively refute the assumption that some animals, such as dogs and the hippocampus, have some kind of mind, and when dealing with them we assume that they do. But the further we move away from man, the weaker the analogy becomes, and therefore radical biological and philosophical animism becomes less convincing.

The evolutionary origin of the mind does not seem to require any “magic.” Every one of us certainly knows that our mind was not always in the state it is in now. The first thoughts of our minds flashed when we were in childhood; It has grown and taken its present form gradually in stages during the process of life. I see nothing preventing a similar process during evolutionary development. The ability to form the mind arose in the human species, or in its close ancestors to a certain degree, and then it grew and became known to its strength. As for the extent of the gradual process of growth and formation, it is a question that is difficult to answer. The evolutionary process is not like the flow of a calm river that always flows at the same speed. It may sometimes have periods of relative calm, and other times periods of intense creativity.

The origin of life and the origin of man were the product of evolutionary crises, moments of irreversible change, moments that achieved creative forms of existence. These radical innovations can be described as emanations, or transgressions in the evolutionary process. None of these expressions are devoid of unwanted connotations. But  “transcendence” seems a better expression, so we continue to use it in the coming chapters. The human mind did not arise from some form of rudimentary “mind” of molecules and atoms. Evolution is not simply a process of emptying what was hidden from the beginning. It is a source of creativity for forms of existence that have never occurred before in previous situations.

There is no escape from the thorny question: Was the emergence of these forms of existence inevitable?  If that were the case, would it really be creative? Laplace said in his famous statement about mechanical determinism:

(The mind that knows all the forces active in nature at a specific moment in time, and the fleeting conditions of all things in the universe, will be able to perceive the movement of the largest bodies and the smallest atoms in the world with a single equation, provided that it is so powerful that it submits all the data to analysis; then nothing will be ambiguous for it, and the past and the future will be present before its eyes.)

For such thought, there is no creativity in the world, and time is no obstacle to it. Of course, such thought must be divine. The finite, abstract and limited human mind cannot speak of the Eternal except through poetic symbols; Tilardi Chardin tried to speak in such symbols about the ontological, not the phenomenological, aspects of evolution.  Regardless of the success or failure of this attempt, it is completely different from the desire to find gaps in the scientific picture of the world, especially evolution, and use these gaps to prove the existence of God. Birch (1965) was absolutely right when he said, “Reconciliation between religious fundamentalism and modern science is impossible.” The gods of the gaps are dead; They were killed by those who were attached to them and wanted to protect them. Tillich, a theologian rather than a scientific specialist, put it very clearly:

(The one that took the first step toward the non-religiousness of the West was religion itself. This happened when it defended the great symbols that were its means of interpreting the world and life, not as symbols, but literally as real stories. I lost that battle as soon as I did that.) But still, as Tillich added:

(What happens in time and space, in the smallest particles and in the largest personalities, is important to eternal life. Since eternal life is participation in divine life, any limited event is important to God) (Tillich).

This is close to the aphorism of Sehleiermacher (1963), the nineteenth century theologian: “A miracle is the religious name for an event. Every event, even the most frequent and familiar natural event, becomes a miracle as soon as the religious view of it takes hold.”