In the Beginning

• What drives evolution on? What is it about atoms that wants to form molecules, molecules to form long chains of inorganic and then organic structures, organic molecules to give rise to life, and life to consciousness? Putting aside the question of why anything exists at all, the forms that existence takes, and the steps, leaps actually, that existence/evolution takes, are deeply mysterious and completely unexplained. The stages that I list, matter to life to consciousness, don't display anything that we can discern as explanations for their existence. Unless, possibly (and this is a Teilhardian idea), life and consciousness are inherent in a potential, virtual state from the very beginning (whatever that is) in the simplest, most basic particles of matter. Unless, in other words, consciousness itself is drawing matter on, leading it to create ever more complex structures in which consciousness can manifest itself. This is called the "law of complexity consciousness." This leading, drawing force can be called "the good" or "spirit" or any like term, to indicate that there is agency at work, inherent in the universe itself and not separate from it.
• 
  

  "There is no arrow.....there is no goal." Maybe. But this is mere assertion, unproven and unprovable. Physicists (or at least Stephen Hawking) say (and Everything I Know About Physics I Learned From Television) that before the Big Bang there is no time, that the BB began at a singularity, where time stops. So there is no cause outside the universe to start it off. This is an old idea, a Deist one I think, the notion that God put all the parts together and set the universe running, but has no part in its operations.
•  
• All the dark things, all the evils we can imagine, aren't the whole story of evolution, even human evolution. If they were, there would be no good to which we could compare them, by which we could judge them. We strive after goods which we can't even name. That doesn't make them unreal, or unreachable, or powerless. Why should not the good be the most powerful force in the universe? Why should evolution not be, ultimately, good? Why should it not be, perhaps, ultimately, divine?

  
  
•