Adam Blatner

Why or how does the innate tendency towards complexity emerge in the cosmos? Teilhard de Chardin has hypothesized this tendency but it doesn’t coordinate with any present principles in physics. Still, I am not satisfied by most purely materialist theories. So I just had this idea, a wild speculation:

What’s with Dark Energy, anyway? In its aggregate, converting estimates of what it would take to speed up rather than slow down the expansion of the galaxies away from each other, converting that energy into mass via E = mc² law, folks have figured that dark energy accounts for the equivalent of 80% or more of what is the universe! Whoa! So my idea is that what we call Dark Energy is just the shadow of God’s inflow of Grace, positivity, creativity, love, into this 3-D plus T universe.

If there were such a flow, “a still, small voice,” an astonishingly subtle nudge towards the positive, with lots of room for “free will” and veering off into extinction, perhaps that would account for why humans have evolved in spite of our species evident cosmic stupidity.

Dark Energy has that quality of incredible subtlety that, nevertheless, in its aggregate, is stupendously powerful That is to say, the evidence for Dark Energy is so subtle that it can’t be detected within our galaxy. But intra-galactically, wow. And we didn’t know it was there until only a few decades ago. That “force” works not to make the galaxies fly apart faster—that’s only a side effect—but it drives evolution towards complexity. It’s the Cosmic Yes. Another way to think of this force is that it operates a step below what David Bohm called the implicate order. This force is part of God as much as every particle in the cosmos, but in a different way. It’s the force of Love, Love, Love.

It’s a kind of steady background love that doesn’t get put off by the profound ingratitude and thoughtlessness of its most “advanced” species. It’s just part of humanity’s collective “childhood.”

Humans think they know what’s good for them, and want what’s best, but a young child is likely to demand candy, concentrated sucrose, which is slightly addicting, and if momma refuses it, she’s perceived as withholding, mean! The young child has nothing to compare the fine home that is given her, nor can she know the work and dedication that went into it, nor the patience and forbearance of dealing a kid a little inclined to be spoiled if she can get away with it.

So too, humanity hardly appreciates the downpour of Grace, because, like germs, it is invisible. And Grace doesn’t respond positively to all our desires, so it can’t be there, then, can it? This most limited consciousness is deeply stupid, of course, but part of the parent’s love is not to demean it. It’s young and we cut slack for the limited understanding of a child.

Note I am not talking about a rule-declaring tribal patriarchal god that has become the foundation of much of religion, but a more mystical, “feminine” (?) divinity that reminds us from within that we’re all part of the unfolding, we are not the core, but the periphery—the metaphor I use is that we are a cell on the fingertip of an embryo god—one who doesn’t know enough and doesn’t control the way a king does, but rather one whose intelligence (so to speak) is innate. It knows how to grow without knowing how it knows or knowing how it grows.

In another related myth we are brain cells awakening. Since this whole thing is many-dimensional, we can be both fingertip cell and brain cell in different dimensions. But in this myth, we are part of the awakening. 99.9% of the cosmos is not going to awake into reflective consciousness, so we are very special. Not that there may be yet a million other sentient beings in the cosmos, and ten million more yet to come. It’s all very glorious and really, we don’t need to know how it all works.

But it is good to hold to a workable mythic foundation, in this case an ever-grace-providing god force—that gives some coherence to the unfolding processes.