Evolution and Eternity
Rupert Sheldrake
The twentieth-century revolution in cosmology threw science into a slow-moving crisis that is still unfolding. Before the Big Bang theory became orthodox after 1966, physicists used to think that they were studying an eternal universe, governed by timeless mathematical laws, consisting of a fixed amount of matter and energy that was preserved forever according to the principles of conservation of matter and energy. These fundamental realities of physics were not altered by anything that actually happened. The evolution of life on earth made no difference to them, nor would the extinction of all life on our planet. The laws of nature and the total amount of matter and energy would always be the same.
The idea that the universe was born very small and very hot less than 14 billion years ago has brought our two most fundamental models of reality into collision. The paradigm of eternity that used to dominate physics tells us that nothing really changes. The paradigm of evolution tells us that everything changes and evolves. In biology, the human sciences, politics, economics, and technology, evolution reigns supreme.
Until the 1960s, these theories were safely separated. Evolution was kept down to earth while the heavens were eternal. In the context of the eternal world-machine, evolution on earth merely a local fluctuation in an essentially repetitive universe going on forever; or, worse, a world-machine that was slowly running out of steam, heading towards a thermodynamic “heat death” when entropy or disorder would reach a maximum—in mythic terms, the dissolution of the cosmos into chaos, which would last forever. This cheerless prospect was accepted by many twentieth century intellectuals as an unavoidable truth, firmly established by science. It provided the scientific background for a torrent of books, plays and poems about existential anguish, the loss of meaning, and the ultimate futility of life. Optimistic ideas about the progressive development of humanity were offset by cosmic pessimism. Inevitably, everything would come to an end in an exhausted universe with nowhere to go.
Like the legendary Procrustes who placed his victims on an iron bed, cutting them down to size if they were longer than the bed and if shorter stretching them, Charles Darwin tried to fit the evolution of life onto the Procrustean bed of the deterministic, mechanistic universe then prevalent in nineteenth-century physics. His twentieth-century followers still tried to force the evolution of life into an eternal mechanical universe. The “modern synthesis” that laid the foundations of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution took place in the 1930s and 1940s, long before evolutionary cosmology became orthodox. It was an attempt to create a mechanistic theory of biological evolution consistent with the non-evolutionary physical sciences. All evolutionary phenomena were to be explained, in principle, in terms of the eternal laws of physics and chemistry. Random genetic mutations were supposed to be the ultimate source of all evolutionary novelty, allowing nature a kind of mindless creativity consistent with a blind, purposeless, unconscious universe.
Physics itself has now adopted an evolutionary cosmology. All nature is evolving, not just life on earth. This revolutionary change throws old certainties into question. If the entire cosmos is evolutionary, then what about the laws of nature? Were eternal laws imposed upon nature from the outset, like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic Code? Or have the laws of nature evolved along with nature herself, like a kind of common law? Or are the regularities of nature more like habits that have developed within the developing universe?
The newborn universe was filled with quanta of energy hurtling apart. As the cosmos grew and cooled, first subatomic particles, then atoms, galaxies, stars, molecules, crystals, planets, and biological life developed within it. We live in a universe that was born some 14 billion years ago, a world that has always been growing and is still growing today. On this planet, life has been developing for more than three billion years in an evolutionary process that continues in ourselves. The development of science is part of this very process.
This is the modern creation story. The Big Bang is the primal orgasm, the generative moment. Then it is the hatching of the cosmic egg. The universe is a growing organism, forming new structures within itself as it develops.
Part of the intuitive appeal of this story is that it tells us that everything is related. Everything has come from a common source: all galaxies, stars, and planets; all atoms, molecules, and crystals; all microbes, plants and animals; all people. We are related more or less closely to everyone else, to all living organisms, and ultimately to everything that is or that ever has been. One of the great themes of traditional creation myths is the division of the primal unity into many parts, the emergence of the many from the one. The modern theory of cosmic evolution fulfills this mythic role.
Comment
Fraser Watts
I am very interested in the way that Rupert Sheldrake points out the physics assumes constancy, whereas biology assumes change. Of course, it is possible to reconcile this divergence by saying that, at the very basic level, the laws of the universe are constant, but that at the higher levels of reality, where we have living organisms, things are constantly changing. Sheldrake is suggesting, as a biologist, and on scientific grounds, that we question the assumptions of constancy normally made in the physical sciences. However, there are also theological reasons for questioning it, and theological advantages in doing so.
The assumption of absolutely fixed laws of nature probably only dates back to the 17th century. It is not so much that earlier periods explicitly took a different view, as that they did not hold so firmly to the fixity of laws of nature in the way that modern science does. As is well known, that assumption has given rise to considerable theological problems about miracles, divine action, and answers to prayer. The also problems about the far future. Assumptions about fixed laws of nature seem to lead inexorably the predictions of a heat death of the universe, in a way that sits very uneasily with the hope for the future of which faith traditions speak.
If you make the assumption that reality is fundamentally spiritual, and that the physical universe emerges from that spiritual base, it is not unreasonable to assume that the laws of nature might change. This has been the explicit assumptions of some Christian evolutionists such as Teilhard de Chardin, who envisaged a gradual spiritualisation of matter.
