Life: A Reductionist’s Illusion of Complexity

Propositions

1. We are animals. Of them, we are apes.

That is where I want to begin, because everything that follows becomes more peculiar if we remember it.

We are not creatures who arrived already knowing what we are.

We had to tell ourselves.

Humans and chimpanzees share a remarkably large proportion of their genetic inheritance; in comparable protein-coding regions, the similarity is about 98.8 percent. The precise percentage depends upon what is being compared, but the larger point survives every calculation: biologically, we are deeply embedded in the animal world.

And yet here we are discussing biology.

That is the strange part.

2. Without language, there is no civilization as we understand it.

An intelligent ape can learn.

A linguistic ape can preserve what it learns.

Language allows information to escape the individual brain. We can communicate it, correct it, store it, translate it, argue about it and give it to people who have not yet been born.

Writing intensified this ability enormously.

I do not have to rediscover calculus.

I do not have to personally establish that Earth orbits the Sun.

I do not have to repeat every experiment that produced modern medicine before swallowing a tablet.

Most of what I call knowledge is actually trust placed in accumulated human knowledge.

Education is civilization’s memory.

3. Much of reality as we experience it is given to us by other people.

I cannot remember my own birth.

My birthday is information I inherited.

April 16 means something because human beings constructed calendars, named months, numbered years and agreed to keep count.

Monday does not grow from the soil every seven days.

Christmas is not embedded in Earth’s orbit.

A year has an astronomical basis, but calendars are human systems imposed upon recurring natural events.

We built an extraordinarily sophisticated answer to the question:

When?

Then we forgot how strange that accomplishment was.

4. Language does not merely describe the human world. It helps construct it.

Money. Borders. Corporations. Universities. Laws. Citizenship. Marriage. Elections. Property. Debt.

None is imaginary in the trivial sense. Their consequences can determine whether someone eats, travels, marries, goes to prison or owns a house.

But their power depends enormously upon shared human agreement expressed through symbols and language.

Religion belongs somewhere in this extraordinary category—but with an additional claim.

Religion says its symbols do not originate solely with us.

Religion says something spoke back.

5. Religion therefore presents the intelligent ape with an unusual problem.

God is communicated through language.

So is atheism.

So is physics.

So is the sentence you are reading.

A person may believe in God, reject God, remain agnostic, change religions, abandon religion entirely or regard the question as meaningless.

But we cannot pretend religion is an insignificant human phenomenon simply because we personally disbelieve its supernatural claims.

As of 2020, roughly three-quarters of humanity still identified with a religion.

Christianity and Islam alone accounted for more than half of the world’s population.

Whatever religion ultimately is—revelation, cultural inheritance, metaphysics, mythology, social technology, encounter with the divine, or some mixture of these—it is one of the largest experiments in meaning our species has ever conducted.

6. Religion is also inherited information.

A Christian child is introduced to Jesus.

A Muslim child hears the Qur’an.

A Jewish child inherits a tradition reaching backward through generations.

A Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Baháʼí, Jain, Zoroastrian—or an atheist—may likewise inherit a vocabulary through which reality is first interpreted.

This does not prove any of those systems true or false.

It tells us something more basic:

Human beings encounter ultimate questions through human culture.

We inherit the question before we choose our answer.

7. Faith begins where demonstration becomes difficult.

If God were as empirically obvious as gravity, religious faith would be a different phenomenon.

Religion makes claims involving realities that cannot ordinarily be placed on a laboratory bench: revelation, miracles, resurrection, prophecy, divine purpose, souls, transcendence, judgment, an afterlife.

Science operates differently. Its great strength is that its explanations must remain vulnerable to evidence.

That distinction matters.

But distinction does not automatically mean war.

8. Science and religion did not begin as the clean enemies we sometimes imagine them to be.

What we now call science emerged partly from traditions of natural philosophy in cultures saturated with religious thought.

Many major figures in the history of science were religious, although their beliefs varied enormously and sometimes brought them into conflict with religious institutions.

Even the Royal Society’s seventeenth-century charter described the study of nature as serving both humanity and “the glory of God the Creator.”

This does not make science Christian.

It makes history complicated.

Science did not simply awaken one morning, kill religion and inherit the Earth.

For centuries, investigation of nature and questions about God occupied many of the same minds.

9. Eventually, science became powerful enough to challenge explanations once assigned to gods.

Lightning acquired physics.

Disease acquired biology.

The heavens acquired mechanics.

Species acquired evolutionary histories.

The age and scale of the universe became measurable.

None of this logically disproved God.

But it steadily reduced the number of natural phenomena for which “God did it” was required as a scientific explanation.

That distinction is crucial.

Science became extraordinarily good at answering how.

Religion continued asking why—and sometimes made claims about how as well.

Where those claims collided with evidence, something had to give.

10. The intelligent ape became capable of questioning its Creator.

Consider the ontological argument associated with Anselm.

Very roughly: if God is conceived as the greatest possible being, and existing in reality is greater than existing only in thought, then the greatest conceivable being cannot exist merely in thought.

Therefore, God exists.

People have debated versions of that argument for nearly a thousand years.

Whether it succeeds is almost secondary to what fascinates me here.

An ape developed language sufficiently sophisticated to formulate an argument about whether the ultimate being must exist by necessity.

That alone is astonishing.

11. Then another ape developed mathematics sophisticated enough to describe a universe that might not require such a being.

Stephen Hawking argued that if time itself began with the universe, asking what a creator was doing “before” the universe may be incoherent. He personally concluded that there was no need for a creator.

That is a cosmological argument, not a laboratory demonstration that God does not exist.

A theologian can answer that a creator of spacetime would not necessarily exist inside spacetime.

And now the argument moves again.

Physics meets metaphysics.

Neither side gets to win merely by changing vocabulary.

12. This may be the actual human condition: inherited knowledge confronting inherited meaning.

Science tells us astonishing things that virtually none of us personally discovered.

Trillions of neutrinos pass through us every second.

Earth moves beneath our feet while appearing still.

Matter is mostly empty space.

Time is not absolute.

We accept these ideas because generations of specialists constructed methods capable of testing them.

Religion asks for another kind of trust.

The mistake is pretending the two forms of trust are identical.

They are not.

But neither is the human being who accepts them—or rejects them—operating outside culture, language and inheritance.

13. We are meaning-producing animals.

We fill our lives with identities.

Nation.

Family.

Career.

Politics.

Religion.

Science.

Art.

Money.

Love.

Status.

Memory.

Even nihilism gives a name to the supposed absence of meaning.

We seem remarkably bad at leaving the hole empty.

Perhaps consciousness itself creates the demand.

The universe may not owe us meaning.

Nevertheless, humans manufacture, discover, inherit and fight over it continuously.

14. Civilization is accumulated information pretending to be ordinary life.

Look around.

Almost nothing about modern existence is biologically obvious.

An ape wakes because a computer makes a noise.

Checks an account containing abstract currency.

Drives according to coloured lights.

Works for an entity that legally exists but has no body.

Pays taxes to a nation represented by lines on a map.

Checks the date.

Reads news from another continent.

Argues about God with a stranger it will never meet.

Then complains that life is boring.

It is absurd.

And magnificent.

15. We may be living through another transformation as significant as writing.

For most of human history, information moved slowly.

Then printing accelerated it.

Telegraphy accelerated it.

Radio, television and computing accelerated it.

The internet detonated it.

Now artificial intelligence can reorganize enormous quantities of inherited human information in seconds.

For people old enough to remember records, cassettes, black-and-white television, paper maps and life before the internet, the transition is particularly visible.

One lifetime now touches worlds that would once have been separated by centuries.

We have entered an age not of information scarcity but information excess.

Our problem increasingly is not finding information.

It is determining what deserves attention.

16. We must be careful when we call ourselves advanced.

Technologically, we are astonishing.

Morally, the evidence is mixed.

Our species produced symphonies and concentration camps.

Vaccines and chemical weapons.

The telescope and the ballistic missile.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and industrialized genocide.

Auschwitz, Nuremberg and Stalingrad are not ancient history. They belong to the same technological civilization that eventually produced smartphones, social media and artificial intelligence.

Knowledge accumulates.

Wisdom does not necessarily accumulate with it.

17. Perhaps that is the reductionist’s illusion.

Break a human being into chemistry and you will find chemistry.

Break the brain into neurons and you will find neurons.

Break civilization into individuals and institutions and you will find individuals and institutions.

None of that is false.

But description at one level does not automatically exhaust what emerges at another.

A novel is ink.

A symphony is vibration.

Love is neurochemistry.

A religion is language.

A human being is atoms.

All true.

And obviously incomplete.

Reduction can explain the components while losing sight of the thing assembled from them.

18. We are still the animal attempting to understand the animal.

We created alphabets and then used them to describe ourselves.

We created mathematics and discovered that nature answered to it with uncanny precision.

We created—or received—religions and spent millennia arguing about whether their source lies within us or beyond us.

We developed science and turned it back upon our own origins.

We built computers.

Then we built machines capable of answering us in language.

And now, perhaps for the first time, the ape can hold a conversation with something it made from accumulated traces of its own knowledge.

That does not make us gods.

It makes the original problem stranger.

After calendars, religions, empires, laboratories, ideologies, telescopes, equations, nuclear weapons, satellites, genomes, smartphones and artificial intelligence, what exactly have we become?

Perhaps a new kind of human is emerging.

Perhaps not.

Before answering—

Reread #1.