There's this.
It is hard to realize that this all [i.e., life on Earth] is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more is also seems pointless
Was it a big bang, an immensely huge enormous explosion from which came randomly, haphazardly and by chance the earth and everything on it and us here today?
Or did the origin of the universe have more of the character of a flower rapidly unfolding from a densely packed bud?
What if the Big Bang was really a Big Bloom?
Benjamin Wiker's The Meaning-Full Universe explores the Universe from a bio-centric perspective not a physical, chemical one.
[the] physics can only be properly understood in light of biology because the material parts studied by physics and chemistry can only be properly understood in light of the complex, biological wholes for which they are so supremely well-fitted.
And with startling imagery.
Near the end of this phase, we would see our own solar system form. In the last three minutes of the tape, we would witness a dizzyingly rapid crescendo of creation on Earth, with the most intricate, spiraling integration of biologic complexity in the last half-minute, as species after species of living being arose, bursting forth with staccato regularity in every imaginable form occupying every imaginable nook. In the last fraction of a fraction of a second, human beings would arrive, the most complex and curious of all biological beings, somehow the crown and glory of the Bloom, the only one capable of a science of biology.
This is an intelligent case for intelligent design. HT to Happy Catholic.
Via one of my favorite bloggers, AmbivaBlog who introduces us to a Kindred Soul, Jack Whelan who writes at After the Future and says
He sounds like so many of the "nice" people I know here in Seattle, who always think there are two sides to every issue. That's a fallacy of course. There are not two sides to every issue, but multiple sides and multiple levels. Every issue of importance these days is unfathomably complex, and more often than not it's impossible to know enough to form a certain opinion.
While he was speaking of politics and the need to take a stand on matters of importance, what he wrote holds true across many other divides, political, cultural and cosmological. How the universe was formed and came to be is immeasurably complex and mysterious with multiple sides and multiple levels.
You can not reduce these primal questions to a political litmus test: evolution = smart; intelligent design = stupid.
If you are one that thinks any argument for intelligent design has to be stupid, read Wiker's piece. Can you go to a higher, more integral level where both evolution and intelligent design are true?
It's easier for me because I believe in Truth, Beauty and the Good are a Trinity of Eternal Sources from where all science, art and culture comes. Evolution for me is only a partial explanation and ultimately unsatisfying as it lacks beauty and goodness or love.
I cast my lot some time ago with the Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, "Truth, and Goodness, and Beauty are but different faces for the same All."