(Ir)religiosity

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Expanding our definition of life (and our theology)

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I ran across this quote last night while reading Bill Bryson‘s hefty A Short History of Nearly Everything and found it really thought provoking.

“Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug, or blob you look at, if it is alive, will use the same dictionary and know the same code.  All life is one,” says Matt Ridely.  We are all the result of a single genetic trick handed down generation to generation nearly 4 billion years, to such an extent that you can take a fragment of human genetic instruction, patch it into a faulty yeast cell, and the yeast cell will put it to work as if it were its own.  In a very real sense, it is its own.” (294)

To me, this is intriguing not only scientifically, but also theologically.  I’ve brought up the notion interdependence and mutuality before, but only in terms of humanity.  Yet I wonder, what does that mean in broader, more cosmic terms?  Knowing that all of life — to the most intelligent of sentient beings, to the smallest of cells — is one?

I guess there’s really not a logical conclusion to this short post.  I just thought it a good exercise to think about how this interdependence might force us to rethink and expand our theology.

Question: Is our theology big enough to include all life?  In that sense, is it cosmic?

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Written by Blake Huggins

August 18th, 2008 at 8:00 am

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  • Andrew M.

    I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately. (“Lately” probably actually means it’s been cooking in the back of my brain since I was 16 and came to the fore in the last couple of months.) One of my dearest convictions is that all things, from the dust of my feet to the abstractness of my mind, are manifestations of God. One of my most recent realizations is that I cannot coherently act with this kind of mentality unless I couple it with the concept of change.
    If I devour a turkey sandwich, can I morally justify ending the turkey’s life? Well, probably not, if I see it as fundamentally like me. I don’t think I can morally justify consuming the turkey, but I also don’t really see it as a moral issue. I’ve taken the turkey’s substance and made it my own. The same can be said of the lettuce, the bread, and whatever else I ingested along with it. More importantly, the same can be said of me when I am devoured by a bear, a virus, or whatever else might want my substance.
    Of course, the turkey and I, both being divine manifestations, are justified in defending the integrity of our own entelechies, but to what end? Life itself is probably sacred, as per the whole divine manifestation bit above, but I don’t think the ultimate good is to maximize the quantity of life. If it were, we would do well to engineer a bacteria to cover the planet in a solid blanket of organisms. That would certainly be a lot of life, but I don’t think anyone would view it and think, “Ah! Telos realized!”
    Okay, so that was a bit of a straw man. Thank you for indulging it. At the moment, I think that it is the quality of life rather than the quantity that matters most. I eat my turkey sandwich because, in a small but important way, it helps me be a better person. Because I eat it, I get to survive and fulfill whatever telos pertains either personally to me or to to me as a human entity. Because the bear eats me, it gets to live on and fulfill whatever teloses pertain to it.
    I do not begrudge the bear its need for my delicious nutrients. In the contest for my substance the victor, I hope, would matter less to me than that at least one of us live to achieve some kind of fulfillment. I like to think that I would fight my hardest to survive but that I would also be a good sport about losing.

    Are there humans and turkeys and bears and viruses in Heaven?

  • http://www.blakehuggins.com blake

    andrew – i had to take a couple of days and chew on what you said. thanks for being patient.

    i agree with your prioritizing quality of life above its mere quantity. allow me to use a somewhat polemical and complicated example that has been on my mind as of late (i use it because i’m fairly you and i aren’t interested in polemics).

    i heard a prominent clergyman declare recently that 40 million abortions have been executed in the US since roe v. wade. of course, he went on to characterize the issue in terms of 40 million americans (they’re always americans) being murdered and deprived of the right to live. he appealed to the popular christian notion of the sanctity of life and even used some biblical prooftexts.

    here’s my thought. i don’t dispute that 40 million persons are not alive today. however, i do dispute our collective capacity to sustain 40 million more people and afford them the proper quality of life we ourselves hold so dear. we now know that many of these 40 million had they been born, would have been born into poverty — hardly a good quality of life — and forced to turn to crime for the simple sustenance we take for granted. 40 million more people would surely increase the quantity of life, but i am convinced as to its quality.

    now, i’ve probably overstated most of this in order to make my point. obviously the issue of abortion is much more complex and nuanced than this. indeed, i myself am not particularly satisfied with the popular options. perhaps i just concocted a longhand way of agreeing with your example of global blanket of bacteria. at any rate, i agree.

    i do believe there is a certain degree of humility actualized when one realizes upon eat her lunch that she is ingesting the substance of life of and making that her own in order to become, as you say, a better person and fulfill her various teloes.

    as to you final question concerning heaven and whether various mammals, birds, and bacteria will be there.

    there is so much packed into that single query! i suppose it all depends on what you mean by “heaven.” if you mean, as many do, some sort of magical wonderland up in the clouds someplace where the streets are paved with gold and various saints lounge all day eating grapes, i’m not sure. as person informed by modernity and the enlightenment i find it hard believe in such a place. but — as humble (for the most part!) post-modern who is sure that he is not sure, i cannot simply declare that such a place does not exist either physically or metaphysically; indeed, i cannot remember the last time i was dead.

    i do feel comfortable with an idea similar to paul tillich’s (i really have no business bringing this up at all because i know so very little about it, but i will take the risk) that god, or ultimate reality, or whatever is the ground of all being (or life, for our discussion) and the source of being-itself. thus, when living things end their pursuit of telos and entelechy — when they die — their being again becomes one with being-itself, that is the source and ground of all being and ready to once again be poured out into other forms of life.

    that’s my latest thought on it anyway, ask me next week and i may have a different answer. :)

    what is heaven?

  • Andrew M.

    Oh! I’m glad you responded. Thank you.

    I believe you’ve hit the nail on the head when you mention humility. What else could we call it when we realize the equality of all life? I’m not sure there is another word.

    It gives me a giggle to read your response to my closing question. Honestly, I had meant it half rhetorically. I know that you are not the kind of Christian to seriously consider the dancing of angels on pins, but as you’ve responded, I would love to also.

    I do remember Tillich’s description of the Ground of Being. One of the most frustrating things about his Systematic Theology for me was that he goes on and on about the Ground of Being and then, in passing, discounts Buddhism as an incomplete philsophical religion. To me, when he talks about the Ground of Being, he is describing most of Buddhist metaphysics almost exactly. I’m sure you can imagine how frustrated I was.
    (Of course, I don’t mean to imply that you are excersizing syncretism. Though you certainly seem to be a very Buddhist kind of Christian, I’m sure that your convictions are firmly grounded in Christian ideology.)

    As for Heaven, I am unsure. At this point, I am certain that the Heavens of our great mythologies are unlikely. For a long time, I have been a proponent of the Heaven on Earth idea. That is, our current conditions can be heavenly or hellish, depending primarily on how we choose to view them. Heaven, then, is a state of mind rather than a location or way of being. My apologies for not having anything more refined. Perhaps I will come upon something more elaborate in the future.