Personhood

 

April 3.

While I was preparing my hot drink this morning (I quit drinking coffee well over a year ago, so I drink a non-caffeinated beverage with oat milk in the morning) I had a thought about personhood.

Now, we live in an extremely mysterious universe, with an incredible and complicated number of things going on. To give just two examples, extracellular vesicles and the behavior of honeybees.

In the first case, extracellular vesicles were long thought to be “junk” from cells with no specific purpose; but it turns out that they are message capsules containing molecular information cells use to speak with one another. In other words, they’re communication vehicles; and the trillions upon trillions of pieces of information that cells in, for example, bacteria and plants, are circulating perpetually around us is a staggering amount of information. Considering that science still doesn't even understand some of the most simple and basic functions inside cells, imagine trying to untangle the language they use to speak to one another in real time. 

Add to this the fact that we now know (due to some studies at Cornell over the last few years) that honeybees visit foreign hives on a regular basis and are admitted freely, without conflict, to circulate in them. The behavior is routine. This means that bees are actively communicating between hives within their flight range; and it means, once again, that there is a network of information connecting all the honeybee hives in a particular area, with inferences about honeybee communities that show us we don't know hardly anything about how their community actually functions. Remember that this is an insect that has been studied probably more than almost any other insect because of its importance to our agricultural community.

Multiply this by billions of different organisms, all of which are communicating with one another in trillions of different ways at all times – including all the plants, fungus, algae, lichens, nematodes, and bacteria in the soil — and you get a living planet that has a character and an identity we don't even bother acknowledging. We just tear it apart and dump chemicals on it.

In the midst of this immensely complex environment, the chances that science will ultimately understand how everything works are exactly this — zero. The amount of information being exchanged and the number of organisms exchanging it at any moment probably exceed, at this single moment in time, a trillion times all the computing capacity available on the planet; and that's a very conservative estimate. Because of the complexity of the information being exchanged, one would need to build a supercomputer for every single organism currently alive on the planet to effectively reproduce the entire picture of what is going on. Interpreting it would take that many more supercomputers.

Confronted by this mystery, which science purports to “know“ things about —and there’s no doubt that it is effective, within the tiny limited range that it operates — we purport to “know” what a person is; and, as my atheist, agnostic, and more science-minded friends insist, God cannot be a person.

Of course this argument won't fly very well with Christians or other religious peoples; but who listens to them, anyway?

Let me explain something fundamental about the universe and how it works that doesn't take a supercomputer to figure out. Unless, of course, you want to count the human brain as a supercomputer — it is one — an organ that goes sadly underutilized by the vast majority of operators who have one.

Each and every phenomenon you see around you is a fundamental property of the universe. That is to say, the consequences of creation, the nature of quantum and classical physics, and the atomic and chemical interactions of molecular substances are inevitable. Everything that takes place is not only replicable (the ground floor test of the scientific method) but replicates itself over and over ad infinitum. Even evolution, that supposedly uniquely creative mechanism that gives rise to different species and organisms, is remarkably and even extraordinarily repetitive. It solves the same problems over and over again in exactly the same way, often separated by hundreds of millions of years. Take, for example, the ichthyosaur and the dolphin, which are nearly identical in form, even though one is a reptile 250 million years old and the other one is a contemporary mammal.

Evolution solves the same problems over and over again in the exact same way because that's what works. Its actions are inevitably constrained by physical and chemical law; and it exactly conforms to them.

Personhood is exactly like this. It’s built into the nature of the universe and of reality as we know it. The universe always forms personhoods in varying degrees according to level. This is because they reflect the underlying nature of God and of law. You couldn’t have a universe if God did not have universes in Him; and you can't have people if God isn't a person. 

Another way of understanding this, if you wish, is the dharma, the Buddhist concept of truth, which is (loosely put) the absolute truth that contains everything. Because the nature of the dharma is internally reflective, all things are connected to all other things. Of course modern Buddhism views this, somehow, as a strange vehicle for the negation of everything, but that's a long philosophical discussion I won't engage in here. The point is that the universe is a whole thing reflecting a higher truth that is contained in the body of God, and personhood is a fundamental property of that body.

There's nothing particularly unique about life on earth. Life exists all across the universe; and so do people. It is only the insolence and vanity of human beings that leads them to believe we can't say that’s true until we "prove" it. Simple logic reveals the facts without the extraneous operations of the scientific method, which demands external proofs through replication. This is where science makes its self stupid; it trips over the feet of its own fundamental dogma on its way out of the starting gate. Don't get me wrong here; I am a strong supporter of science, but from both physical and metaphysical point of view one must strictly acknowledge its limitations in order to use it effectively. It is impossible to use science to understand the greater metaphysical questions behind the universe.

In examining the question of personhood, remember that our personhood is a precious thing and connected, at the root of its arising, to the nature of divinity and to the sacred purpose for which all creatures were originally created. This means that both our personhood and the personhood of everyone around us should be deeply respected as a sacred universal quality that needs to be honored, nurtured, and loved.

Science won't tell you that. But if we let them, our bodies can sense it.

Hoping that you find yourself in good relationship today,

warmly,

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.