We're Not Trying To Set a Survival Record Here.....

Why do we evolve?  Do we evolve merely to have a better chance for our species to survive as long as it can?  Yeah, probably, but I think there's more to it than that.  Much more.  We evolve to see and experience beauty.  Our desire to experience and understand beauty is more than a survival mechanism.  Much more.  Evolving is about more than survival.  It's about an attempt to become closer and closer to our imaginative ideal.  We want to be like God.  And God gives us a heck of an opportunity to explore his creation so that we can strive for that ideal.

Why Is The Goal Important?

A lot of times I see people working frantically to promote or denounce ideas like they're the most important thing in the world.

We need faster computers!  We need longer lifespans!  We need less pain!  We need more people to know the truth!  We need less people to disagree with us!  We need less manual labor!  We need our species to continue indefinitely!

All of these ideas are well and good.  But WHY are they good?  Ecclesiastes teaches us that despite all of our hard work, the universe is going to carry on regardless.  Did the universe NEED life to survive during its first however many billion years?  Nah.  So why does it need life now?

The list of needs I described above are actually really nothing more than preferences.  I know I certainly want a longer life for me and my friends where we aren't suffering crippling diseases.  And I would like to think that my life will have some small positive influence on humanity for generations to come.  And most sensible people would feel the same way.  But the cold hard fact is the universe doesn't need it.  It doesn't need us to have utilitarian laws that will be better for the prolonging of our species.  It doesn't need intelligent life or protozoa even.  I imagine it's fine just being floating rocks and gases.  Or even just a plain old big crunch singularity.

Once we recognize that all of these things we are being pressured to achieve are really just preferences more than necessities, the urgency behind them is no longer quite so urgent.  They're not really urgent at all on a universal scale.  Only a preference scale.  This revelation has some liberating properties but it is also accompanied by a lot of emptiness.  It's easy to feel worthless when you realize you aren't needed.

Some people accept that nothing we ever do has any inherent worth, but I think most do not.  I think most people either turn to religion or try to plan out how our species will continue to evolve into more complex lifeforms that will survive forever, perhaps even preventing a big crunch.  The latter seems sillier than the former to me, but that's just a personal preference.

I've often questioned the goal of evolution.  Why the drive to survive?  Why the drive to procreate?  Why adapt to anything when the universe doesn't need you to do it?  I believe these important questions are usually left unanswered.  They are certainly outside the realm of science because all science can do is draw conclusions from fossil records.  But why get so concerned about finding the truth if all it does is lead you to an unsolvable axiom?  Are you seriously not going to ponder that axiom at all?  You REALLY want to discover the exact details about how life formed over the centuries, but never get the least bit curious about why the universe set this evolution of more and more complex lifeforms in motion to begin with?

I study physics all the time and I still ponder over and over again why something can move indefinitely without energy unless a force stops it.  Granted it doesn't make me much money to do so.  Still, I can't help being curious..

Accused of Being Scientifically Lazy?

I have a feeling my belief in the supernatural will one day get someone to accuse me of being scientifically lazy.  It's true that I'm not near as intelligent as many physicists, but for a person who does not have a job in the scientific field I've put a lot of hours into scientific study.  I actually have a STEM degree.  If I were more gifted intellectually I might actually have a career in one of the STEM fields, but alas I'm not that gifted intellectually.  God did not bless me with the intelligence that he blessed many physicists with.  Even if I put in the same exact amount of hours of effort they did they're just flat out more gifted and I still couldn't match their success.

I looked up the CEO of Yahoo and it's not like that person devoted her whole life to computer science.  She had hobbies too.  Part of the difference between her success and mine is due to intellectual effort, but much of it is not.  Most of it is most likely due to natural God-given ability. 

So the next time I'm accused of being a scientific idiot, I will make the claim that I actually have put in a lot of effort into my studies long, long after that effort wore out its economic usefulness.  I did it for the love.  And the reason I lack understanding should be clear.  It is because God chose not to give it to me.  Is it MY fault that my intellect is not above a certain level despite all of my study?  Is it MY fault I can barely understand special relativity after years of pondering and consulting texts while others zoom through general relativity in their first semester?   Call me inferior to Stephen Hawking.  That's fine.  And of course it's true.  But then explain WHY.  Explain why.  Try explaining how something not outside of manmade effort blessed that man's mind.

Science and the Media

I really hate how the media puts WAY, WAY too much focus on two extremely specialized areas of science and not much else.  They put a ton of focus on global warming and on evolution.  Now you can still know mountains and mountains of information in the field of biology alone without even addressing evolution.  The same could be said of chemistry and global warming.  And we haven't even gone into addressing the fields of physics and astronomy.

Now evolution might do a good job of addressing WHY certain animals have similar skeletal structures and all of that, but you can spend years studying and memorizing the anatomy of thousands of different species without the idea of evolution impacting your study at all.  It's not like your quota on the number of muscle names you can memorize goes down because you refuse to believe that one species evolved into another no matter how much biological evidence is out there.

The media seems to imply if you don't have time to do your own research or your own experiments then just trust the formal experts.  I suppose that's sensible advice.  But arguing against such things is a part of the scientific process as well.  At one time space was believed to be filled with a substance that carried light waves and now formal scientists believe that's the case anymore.  Not to mention at one time it was considered more scientific to believe that heavier objects fell faster than lighter ones.  This was the result of people trusting formal recognized scientific experts like Aristotle, not religious figures like the Apostle Paul.

The biggest problem people have when they argue against evolution is they have zero alternative theories to explain the biological evidence.  But such people, although religiously stubborn, are not necessarily scientific dolts.  I've seen some people deny evolution that have MD degrees.  They spent years studying the different parts of the body and they know a lot about it.  They're very capable of understanding science when they want to.

I really don't get why there's such heated division on global warming.  It has zero impact on anyone's religion.  I think the best way to prevent further environmental damage is to simply produce less.

I'm wondering when scientific literature became an all-or-nothing philosophy like religion has been for the past several centuries.  Where if you don't have absolute faith in the current expert consensus then you don't belong in their group.  Neil deGrasse Tyson, who introduced me to such wonderful information as Faraday's electromagnetic studies and special relativity recently warned that if we persist in denying global warming and evolution we open the door to regressing into the world of complete superstition once more.  I think he was in North Carolina when he said that.

Oh well.  I don't plan to let such things deter me from self-study of the physics that I have an interest in.  I don't have to completely shut the door to the mystical in order to understand the rational.  In fact, I think the mystical is a great way of dealing with things like emotions and ethics.  Things that the scientific world can't really address.

But then again, the scientific world probably does have the tools to address global warming and evolution since those are not based on emotions or ethics.

Oh well, it doesn't matter to me.  I'd rather have a deeper understanding of gravity than biology or meteorology.  And I actually have learned a lot about it.  Like how Newton derived his equation for the conservation of angular momentum using a similar triangle argument and how that explains Kepler's second law.  That stuff is wonderful, whether you believe in or don't believe in Christianity, global warming, Freddy Krueger, the moon landing, or whatever.