Aardvark's Adventures in Deep Time

Feb 4, '12 3:58 PM

Humanism is an approach in study, philosophy, world view or practice that focuses on human values and concerns, attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters'. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanism

Starting with our good friend Wikipedia's opening statement on humanism, it is the purpose of this blog to raise questions about the validity of such a belief and to briefly test the limits of the humanist creed.

I hope to show that whilst like other world views various versions of humanism may bring comfort to  believers, it is no more a universally valid notion than any of the religious beliefs it seeks to rationalise and in some cases to supplant.

Interestingly I think, both the religious belief and the humanist non-belief in God are subject to the same objections.

I have previously attempted to establish a blogospherical environment for these discussions of a way of viewing the world which I have now dubbed 'Archaeological Nihilism'.

In a blog posted on Multiply at the beginning of October 2008 called Cosmic Ancestry....is God a Virus? I asked a question about the evolutionary role of viruses from space and the theory known as panspermia which connects notions of the earth being seeded by extraterrestrial DNA bearing spores. In that post I make the point that:-

"Cosmic Ancestry is a new theory pertaining to evolution and the origin of life on Earth. It holds that life on Earth was seeded from space, and that life's evolution to higher forms depends on genetic programs that come from space. This theory has a very respectable scientific pedigree which begins in ancient Greece and it represents a separate evolutionary line to that of darwinian theory."

In that earlier blog I was attempting to simultaneously challenge both darwinian evolution theory and fundamentalism intelligent design by posing an alternative, versions of which are as new as the (then stalled) developments at CERN, but also as old as the writings of the 5th century BC Greek philosopher Anaxagoras.  

This post is intended to be complimentary to the earlier one, its purpose to show how Deep Time or Geological Time renders both religious creationist perspectives and humanist perspectives equally parochial and it could be said ultimately meaningless.

But first a little English history to establish the context for an extraordinary observation on humanity from the perspective of deep time.
It is said that King Henry I (c. 1068/1069 – 1 December 1135) the fourth son William the Conqueror who reigned  1106 – 1135 invented the measurement known as the English Yard. It was apparently the distance from the end of his nose to the tip of his outstretched middle finger
This measure takes on a metorphorical significance in the following early introduction to the notion of deep time.
 One of the first uses of "deep time" in a general interest publication may have been by John McPhee in his 1981 book, Basin and Range, parts of which originally appeared in The New Yorker magazine. One of the metaphors McPhee used in explaining the concept of deep time was cited in Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle by Stephen Jay Gould :

"Consider the Earth's history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the King's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history"

Deep time is inconceivably vast, it refers to the time that planet Earth has existed. According to contemporary thinking science has established, after a long and complex history of developments, the age of the Earth at around 4.54 billion years.
In Ian Vince's 2010 book The Lie of the Land about the geological history of the British Isles he represents the geological age of the Earth as an imaginary journey of 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) from London to Cape Wrath at the north-west tip of Scotland.http://www.guardianbookshop.co.uk/BerteShopWeb/viewProduct.do?ISBN=9780752227115
Vince chooses this figure because it means that every mile of that trip rather neatly represents roughly 4 million years of the 300 million year old history of British scenery. On that reduced scale of things an average human life would be the equivalent of no more than one inch (2.54 cms) in that 750 mile trip. On the same scale the Great Pyramid of Giza (built 2560–2540 BC) is 6 feet (1.82 meters) along the road and the origins of modern man, the evolution of homo sapiens occurred in Africa about 52 meters from the start of our journey, or 130,000 years ago.

So we have set out from London to walk to the furthest flung point of the British mainland at Cape Wrath but before we reach the end of our street, we have already passed beyond the origins of our own species, we still have 1,199. 948 kms of our 1,200 meter journey through Britain's geological history to go and humanity is already out of the picture.
So.....What (if Anything) Does it All Mean I Wonder?

Well, the first thing that it means is that literal translations of the Bible and the founding principles of Christian fundamentalism for example are obviously nonsensical.

The sort of neo-Calvinistic rhetoric of fundamentalist creationism, only serves to illustrate the lure of superstition to the easily influenced in my opinion, nevertheless, it is I think also a crime against rationality to believe in a literal translation of a Judaic creation myth.

Such beliefs include Young Earth creationism, proponents of which believe that the Earth is thousands rather than billions of years old, and typically believe that the days in chapter one of Genesis are 24 hours in length.

On the other hand Old Earth creationism accepts geological findings and other methods of dating the earth and believes that these findings do not contradict Genesis, but reject evolution.

The term theistic evolution has been coined to refer to beliefs in creationism which are more compatible with the scientific view of evolution and the age of the Earth.

The fact of the matter as I see it is, that God could not have existed without a human mind to conceptualise his/her/its existence in the first place and to communicate it. I realise we could argue for ever about that proposition, but to my mind there can be simply no way of knowing whether a thing existed before we developed the physiology (and subsequently the psychology) to know it in the first place. Or to put that differently, since the only reference point for all belief, scientific, religious, cultural or whatever is the human mind, no beliefs that predate the mind can be considered valid.

We know enough about the comparatively simple phenomenon of optical illusion to quickly realise that the mind can play tricks on us, even with regard to phenomena readily perceptible to our senses in our immediate physical environment.

How much more tricky then can our speculations about happenings on the end of the king's nose, when the entire history of humanity from caveman to cosmonaut - is at his outstretched middle fingernail and is shaved off from history, with just one pass of a nail file?

To me that image of the recentness of humanity is potentially life-changing, because it not only dispels what we have come to call "ancient" traditions, customs and beliefs about the origins of nature and within it ourselves, but also I think demonstrates the vainglorious arrogance of mankind and the belief that somehow we can by our actions destroy the planet, when in reality all we can ultimately destroy is ourselves and the sentient beings that live beside us.

One pass of a nail file across middle finger of Charles the First's outstretched arm and we're gone from the original yard arm that first gave us the measurement of 36 inches.

Just one yard, which on Ian Vince's 750 mile imaginary journey through 300,000 years of the geological time of the British landscape, would take us back on that scale to about 250 BC, to somewhere around the days when Hannibal and his elephants were crossing the Alps.

I don't think we as individuals or collectively as a species can truly contemplate the absurdity of placing human beings at the centre of the natural order until we imagine our entire genetic origin is the equivalent of a few microns of powdered fingernail on the long arm of this planet's deep time.

Humanism has to be understood in terms of this recent appearance of human consciousness on the thin mantle of the Earth's crust that has led us to the search for the Higgs boson (and maybe now to even glimpse it in the large hadron collider at CERN?).

The coldness and the darkness of deep time concurrent with the enormous pressures and fireballs of exploding nature upon which we cling like parasites in the turbulent enormity of space, where the shape shifting engine for evolution it turns out could be a virus - I think it helps put things in their proper perspective somehow.

Hence, I view a stripped down Archaeological Nihilism as being an essential prerequisite for a new discourse on morality where neither Darwin, nor Dharma has the final say, but where we build up a spiritual existence that is predicated upon the realisation that we may be merely a smear of matter on the shell-like cracked surface of the globe, but one which incidentally nature talks about itself through and therefore knows itself as it is manifested in reflexive self consciousness.

Without us to receive and transmit phenomena it seems to me, there is nothing but nothingness and that precisely is what is nihilistic about deep time archaeology, but that's alright I think.

We might be small, but at least we're electric!