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So, where am I on my “spiritual journey”?

What do I believe about Life, the Universe and Everything?

Do I believe in God? The Devil? Do I believe in spooks?

My standard evasive answer is to reply that all those things have, at the very least, precisely the same sort of existence as money, freedom, love, and justice. Of course, this is just a clever way of saying that they may not have any objective existence. They may not exist independently of our perceptions, and may not be real in the same way that the Sun and Moon are (presumably!) real. Love, in fact, has more demonstrable reality than God, because love is a verb. It exists in the same way that “running” and “sleeping” exist. It obviously happens, and I suspect is measurable in terms of brain chemistry and neuron activity.

God does not obviously “happen,” unless you subscribe to some very slightly tricky definitions of “God,” like, “that which was the cause for everything” or “that which is everything.” And, I fear I do at least partly subscribe to those tricky definitions. I sometimes think I should just declare myself a Classical Stoic. I certainly don’t believe in the literal existence of an enormous bearded fellow living in the clouds. Though, I also realize that most thinking religious folks have also moved past that concept.

Short answer is that I'm still thinking about it all. That's the truth, and I hope it does not unduly worry members of my family who sometimes check my blog.

So, why do I think we're here?

I have a vague and possibly old-fashioned view of Progress, as a great driving arrow or engine pointing us upward and onward, though the path forward is not smooth. I put a lot of stock in the idea of an emergent order arising from the larger chaos of population growth and even environmental destruction. As there are more of us, we are driven to ever increasing efficiencies and subtleties of production and provision. Sometimes we hit a wall of localized Malthusian collapse and everything falls apart, but the survivors don’t start from scratch. They build from a baseline, and that baseline gets higher with every generation.

The collective upward Progress is most often sabotaged by individual instinct, an innate lust for resources and power and land and mating partners that is part of every one. Ideally, however, we are progressing to a sustainable future where every person is able to satisfy their individual wants without taking from the collective good. Bizarrely, I think we are seeing some of this in modern social democracies, though it is tainted by consumerism and capitalism. The detrimental effects of these still outweigh the beneficial efficiencies of scale offered by technological collectivism.

Population growth rates in Japan and several European countries have hit a plateau or are in actual decline. Population growth in Britain and Canada is driven largely by immigration from poorer countries. Well-fed, well-cared for populations have fewer children. Urban populations consume tremendous amounts of resources, but do so much more efficiently than rural populations of the same size. In Canada, forests are growing back, endangered species are returning, and energy production becomes ever more efficient. We require less to make more.

More than this, urban populations drive advances in science, as well as culture. Rural or nomadic societies stagnate or stratify, at least insofar as I know history. I am willing to accept correction!

Unfortunately, the intensely consumerist nature of modern countries is built on the back of third-world misfortune. They suffer our Malthusian collapses by proxy, and we just keep eating burgers. Yet, even this is changing, gradually. And while we may yet fall off a cliff and suffer another collapse, the baseline of knowledge for the survivors will be higher than ever.

Our speaker in church on Sunday spoke about the unnaturalness of cities, and the hubris of man. She said the universe didn’t care if man existed, yet also seemed to think we as a species were uppity and didn’t know our place.

I disagree strongly with her. Everything Humanity does is natural. It is not always conducive to our long-term health as a species, but then, humanity is the only species with the capacity to realize this. Certain types of Geese in northern Canada are successful and breed fantastically, and then suffer population collapse because they’ve poisoned their environment for themselves and everything else. Nothing grows where they nested. Humanity can see these collapses coming, and can prepare for them, and mitigate them.

As for the universe’s interest in Mankind, I believe that Intelligence is what invests the university with meaning. The universe may wipe us all out with an asteroid or a supervolcano, but it’ll do that whether we’re living in agricultural carbon-sink communes, or coal-powered slave pits.

Where are we headed? Perhaps to the Technological Singularity, though I am skeptical of it. We are headed someplace, though. The end is unknowable, but the journey involves a constant re-evaluation and refinement of what we know as a species, and the description of ever finer grades of truth.

I strongly suspect that no single human life is long enough to unravel it all, nor any ten generations of humans. But, then, no single human, no matter how remarkable, could encompass the entirely of human learning as it existed in 1000 CE, never mind as it stands now. Our evolution has moved from biology (at least partly) into the realm of ever more efficient tools for processing information, which in turn allows us to be ever more subtle in the way we harness energy and distribute food and look for finer grades of truth.

My only current certainty is realizing that I will never know everything, yet it behooves me to keep learning. Truth is a process, Faith is a process.