Thank GOD for EVOLUTION Network

Yes, I “Thank God for Evolution” and also thank God for inspiring Michael Dowd to author his magnificent contribution to reconciling Darwinism to Deism and all religions on earth and beyond. Since I began my engineering career, freshly graduated from college, with a twenty-five year family background of Congregational Church upbringing, I have longed for this “day-language” (Dowd’s term for factual based speech) story of how my scientific career and my church traditions could be made compatible. Michael Dowd has done that for me.

In my recent years of retirement I have maintained and intensified my adult lifelong practice of reading about the great advances our global scientific community has made in cosmology, astrophysics, evolutionary anthropology and archaeology, paleontology, and related fields. Let me term this post-Albert Einstein period the Stephen Hawking-era, when mankind confirmed the Big Bang theory and its refinements, learned the age and origins of the Universe and Earth, uncovered the origins of humanity, and proved the evolutionary path of modern mankind. My lay reading has not made me an expert in those fields. My reading was only an academic avocation beyond my career concentration on solid state electronics research and development. But it has provided me with a sharpened viewpoint on the arguments laid out by Dowd.

By the time I had reached about the 30% point in the book (my Kindle book gives no page numbers!) it occurred to me that Dowd might be heading for hypothesizing a physical definition of God, but soon thereafter I realized that was unlikely: it would have been so earth shaking as to have overpowered his basic task of merging science and religion. Having just finished the book and viewed the extensive bibliography of his sources, it seems highly unlikely that anyone else has proposed a physical God definition, or Dowd would certainly have cited it.

Let me now introduce the bare bones outline of what I found missing in the Dowd definition of the role of God in our origins. Using some of the terminology of Dowd, the nested, evolutionary structure he hypothesizes apparently has defined the outer “holon” as being the “radiant energy” from which the Big Bang started our 13.7 Billion year course of continuing evolution (for example see the Loyal Rue excerpt quoted at the beginning of Chapter 5, “The Nested Emergent Nature of Divine Creativity”). That chapter title is perfect for introducing the possible nature of that outer holon:

It is… God!

Now why would that crazy idea occur to me? My non-expert reading of the Hawking-era scientific literature has much to say about extending our understanding of the detailed behavior of the very early (sub-micro-second) Big Bang physics, and of improving or creating a new Standard Model for sub-atomic particles (String theory, etc.), and of better understanding Black Holes, but says nothing about the origins of all that high entropy, infinite energy source from which our entire universe (and perhaps others, a multi-verse has been postulated) were created. It is my hypothesis that despite our recent large leaps of scientific advancement, projected into the future, we will never discover the origins of this original energy from which everything in our multi-verse is constructed, (including our stardust ladened bodies). That outer holon can only be God, and this is likely all we can learn about him physically (but not spiritually).

The principal starting point for the current era of scientific advancement was a gift from Einstein, in the form of his well proved and most famous law:

                    e = mc²

This is a typical two-way equation: “e” stands for “energy” and “m” stands for “mass”, while the “c-squared” is a multiplying constant needed to balance the equation. The equation shows that energy can be converted to mass, and also that mass can be converted back to energy. Thus, God used a bit of His unlimited energy to create “mass” (subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, proteins, and humans). Going the other way in the equation, we each use this law every day when we eat food: our bodies convert the food mass, “m”, to another mass in the form of blood glucose, which our muscles, brains, etc. then convert to energy, “e”, so we can walk around, think, talk, work, and live our lives. Also, God has taught us innumerable ways to use His other earthly “mass” resources (wood, oil, iron, etc.) to convert them to energy and then back to different forms of “mass” (steel, plastic, paper, gasoline, etc.) so as to increase our chances of survival and enhance our quality of life.

We are literally God’s children because everything we are made of and everything we eat, make, and use in our lives is made from the energy of God, on loan to us. I suggest we supplement Einstein’s equation in this way to better express God’s presence and role in our lives:

                    God = E = mc²

With this understanding, we now know that when “God is still speaking”, he is speaking from within us, very close by. Also, this brings new meaning to the phrases “we are God’s people” and “we are the children of God”.

Amen,

Malcolm A. Young