The other day I was struck by all the layers of mystery lurking in the fact of human existence. In the evolution of our existence, I count three major steps, three epochs of emergence: physical, biological, and mental. Well, the first mystery to be solved is how the physical universe came into being. Nobody knows. Granted that there is a physical universe, the next leap forward is that the dead physical universe comes to life. Creatures of physics and chemistry emerge on the surface of Earth that know how to replicate themselves and have the capacity for self-directed movement. A living thing becomes an independent source of its own actions. Life is the second great mystery. Next we come to the third mystery: consciousness. Each of us is a center of awareness: sensory, rational, reflective, impassioned, inspired, et cetera. So these are the three steps we had to go through in the course of our cosmic evolution: material existence, life, and consciousness.
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Let’s look a bit more closely. So there’s a question, Why should there be something rather than nothing? Science has found that our universe is about 13.7 billion years old. Many astronomers and scientists, Einstein, for example, had assumed ours to be a steady-state universe. If so, our universe should be eternal, but it’s not. It looks like the universe had a beginning. And there is further bad news for the steady-state believers. Scientists have discovered that the universe is expanding and evolving from the original explosion into being 13.7 billion years ago. Question, what caused the explosion? Nobody knows.
Next we come to the origin of life on Earth. Biological science has revealed the wonders of living matter; but it has failed to explain the origin of life. Try explaining the origins of even a single-cell animal like a paramecium. We are forced to agree that life itself is a mystery. The next example is going to lead to the same failure of explanation. We are not only alive; we are conscious beings, endowed with mind and soul. This too is a mystery that even devoted materialists are forced admit. Consciousness, it is said, is the hard problem. Hard indeed! Think about your feelings, your memories, your last beautiful or scary dream, your loves of family and romance, your fantasies and loneliness, listening to music, planning for the future. All these are part of your interior life. How on earth can you translate the above and reduce it all to brain tissues and electro-chemical processes?
So, we exist; and we are alive; but we are also conscious beings; rooted in life, this evolutionary leap opens us to a multiverse of possibilities, cognitive, social, aesthetic, and activist. It certainly is worth noting that the three levels of existence, physical, biological, and conscious are all inexplicable by scientific materialism. ce. Behind the three stages of our evolution, I would suggest is a single unknown agency and cause. My main point, I thought it worth reminding us that our very existence is buoyed up on a triple-leveled layer cake of mysteries.
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