The Genesis of Now

The John Templeton Foundation asks "Does the Universe have purpose?" Several answers are given, but the whole project suffers because everyone has a different understanding of purpose.

On one hand, there is transcendent purpose: that there some benevolent being or force standing outside of the universe (and sometimes reaching in) which created it and guides it; a larger something in which our own consciousness is reflected. On the other hand, there is immanent purpose: that there are features of human experience which are profoundly important and positive which we can get behind.

One thing you notice about transcendent meaning is that people never get around to telling us what God's purpose or plan actually is. In fact, many people say we will never truly understand God's purpose, even while they insist that there definitely is one and we just need to have faith. Our inability to know the plan is taken as a reason to engage in spiritual or religious practice, with the understanding that by submitting ourselves to God's will, he will align us with his purposes.

There's something very unusual about this move. The problem with the modern, scientific, disenchanted world is supposed to be the absence of purpose, but purpose is also absent in the religious worldview! It has to be absent, because if we could discover it on our own, what need would there be for God?

If religion doesn't provide purpose, what does it provide? What need in humanity is met when we are told there is a Plan which we are all part of? It uplifts us, fills our lives with cosmic significance, and provides the possibility of ennobling some of everyday actions. But perhaps this problem of purpose only comes up because of certain assumptions about our relationship to God. If we assume that we were created by God in the Garden of Eden thousands of years in the past, we are left struggling to account for the future. What was God's intention in creating us, in those ancient times?

I want to claim that the anxiety over the "meaningless" scientific worldview is not as it is advertised. We are not anxious because we feel no purpose, but because we believe that there is purpose, but science seems to cut us off from it. This is an outcome of our belief that the sacredness in our lives comes from our genesis, but we are cut off from its true significance, so we turn to God the author.

The interesting thing about evolution is that it is understood to mean that our existence is an accident, and that means God could not exist, but these two things are not connected. We could easily take the fact of evolution to imply that God created the universe without knowing in advance what would happen -- we might say that the universe exists because God wants to find out what happens next. This seems reasonable to me, but there seems to be something deeply unsettling about this idea from the religious perspective. What is the point of a God who doesn't have a Plan?

But this objection seems to come from not truly understanding that evolution does not imply that our creation was accidental, but that creation (as a single event) didn't happen at all! There was no sacred genesis that demands a sacred Plan to give it meaning. Or to put it a different way, we find instead an uncountable number of tiny Creations that have occured in every moment, from the universe's first to this one right now. In grasping this idea, we become aware that we are witnessing our own sacred birth in every moment. The creation of the universe occurs in us and all around us, so we are unavoidably implicated in the numinous of the now, rather than cut off from an ancient Genesis whose significance we struggle to recover.