The Signature of the Gardener

[Max™]

...or why I believe science points to God in a way that Religion seems to overlook.


Picture a wildflower growing wild in a field.

It is free to express itself in a way decided only by the elements and the simple rules of its own structure.

Now take a wildflower and free it from the hard logic of fighting to survive, so it can instead focus on exploring the rules of it's own structure fully.

The wildflower has an inherent crazy beauty, but it is also locked in by certain restrictions, it has to balance the energy spent in expressing itself, with the energy spent to survive.

The flower in a garden no longer has to strive against those restrictions, survival becomes easy, so all of it's energy is devoted to expression.


Where am I going with this line of thought?

This universe does not seem like a wildflower to me.


There are certain simple rules of logic which can describe a universe that is akin to a wildflower. Think of a universe with a highly curved spatial expression, and relatively low energy.

It would only have a brief period to unfold, before it was forced to collapse back on itself, and almost none of the energy expressed by it can be used to vary the shapes it takes. Instead it fights against it's own hard logic of collapse. The options to spend energy are duration, or variation.

A universe that is forced to collapse will generally produce a single daughter that is very much like itself.

Now think of a universe that exchanges some of that duration for variety of structure.

You can get a universe with matter and energy and a more interesting story, but it suffers with a shorter life for it.

The interesting possibility is considering the universes where in that short lifetime, they produce a black hole.

Now, in the simplest expressions of these universes, any attempt to collapse back in on that black hole would alter the shape they took, in fact the very existence of a black hole would alter that closed spherical shape which was doomed to fold up again.

It would put a hole in it, this would prevent it from folding back up smoothly, or in fact at all. A universe that produces a black hole is one that is doomed to die a heat death. As the hole works its logic, the very fabric of that universe unravels over time, and then... the universe dies.

The difference in expression is that by sacrificing effort spent on resisting it's own collapse and rebirth, it spent effort to produce a new form of birth, at the expense of its own rebirth.

This new daughter would have new options available to her, perhaps in the new shapes opened up to her, she could produce more than one daughter.

They would still suffer against the simple logic of gravity and time though, and it is hard to imagine a reason for such great variation from that form of a universe, to the one we find ourselves in.

Why?

This universe looks to have been nurtured, encouraged to produce order, to express itself in more complex ways. To write a more varied story than the simple beauty of the single birth single death cycle.

This universe has produced many daughters, an enormous amount of them, it is literally fecund with possibilities, and the stories written by the process of preparing these births are intricate and exquisitely beautiful.

This universe is a flower that was given free reign to express itself, to stop worrying about preserving its own form, and instead produce many offspring, all with that same freedom of expression.

No matter how I try to explain this, I cannot get around the impression of a gardener, of something motive, something outside of these cycles of universal life and death which is watching these stories unfold.

As I find more signs of this complexity and order for free, I think of our simple impression of love, giving without any reason other than the act of sharing itself.

There are impressions of God as an infinite being who knows all and sees all, and those impressions would suggest a question. If God knows how everything will turn out, and all of these possible shapes, why do they need to produce them at all? Why does it seem like I am implying that God doesn't know how things will turn out?

That reasoning doesn't really fit though, it doesn't seem to me that God is doing this to explore the various ways these flowers will bloom. A gardener gardens for the simple aesthetic beauty of it, and to share that beauty with others.

A complex universe that tended to produce order and structure and feedback loops would also be able to produce life, and mind.

So now the view becomes one of God creating a garden for the sheer joy of the act, and to share it with the minds within the flowers themselves.

This is why I refer to science, and mind, as the signature of the gardener.

[labelwench]

As I find more signs of this complexity and order for free, I think of our simple impression of love, giving without any reason other than the act of sharing itself.

There are impressions of God as an infinite being who knows all and sees all, and those impressions would suggest a question. If God knows how everything will turn out, and all of these possible shapes, why do they need to produce them at all? Why does it seem like I am implying that God doesn't know how things will turn out?

That reasoning doesn't really fit though, it doesn't seem to me that God is doing this to explore the various ways these flowers will bloom. A gardener gardens for the simple aesthetic beauty of it, and to share that beauty with others.

A complex universe that tended to produce order and structure and feedback loops would also be able to produce life, and mind.

So now the view becomes one of God creating a garden for the sheer joy of the act, and to share it with the minds within the flowers themselves.

This is why I refer to science, and mind, as the signature of the gardener.

Originally posted by Max

Beautifully expressed, Max.

As a gardener myself, I am ever amazed that the most complex of flowers usually have the finest of seeds, right down to plants that seldom, if ever produce seeds, and reproduce by means of cloning, with change arising through chimera effect.

What 'seed', based on the hypothesis of more complexity from smaller seed form, produced the universe(s), with the thought in mind that where there is one seed, there frequently are more?