What does Reductionism do to the sense of our human dignity and uniqueness?
And lay all complexity at her feet,
Darwinians seek truth in the simplest component.¹
Ultimate reductionists claim less ground than most
For chance to illuminate with its mutating glare
New species not at roll-call, even potentially there,
For they know that mutation yielded up its ghost
With two raps for replicase and only a prayer
For the diversifying principle in the workings of nature
By genetic reassembly of the monolithic legislature
To proceed from primeval protozoa to Ayer.²
So the question of finding hereditary potential
Enough in our earliest beginnings to fill
The place of chance in the evolutionary mill
They answer by reduction to the atomic level,
To the atoms themselves.³ (Yet should they grill
What seem to have nothing in their heads but space,
Energy without substance, the more they’ll face
A sea of universal energy, and thrill.)*
¹i.e. The gene, the unit of inheritance.
² The double-checking (2 raps) by replicase of the ribosomes’ transcription of DNA buries the simplistic idea of mutation as the driver of evolution. (A.J.Ayer was a 20th c philosopher.
³ So they address the question of origins by changing their discipline from Biology to Physics.
* Quantum physics shows that the cosmos is an energy field and energy is at the core of our being. This energy is pure, ultimate and indefinable, except when it coales-ces into a quantum actuality (the now moment).So the universe came not come from nothing, as the Big Bang suggests, but from an energy fluctuation. Is this energy God? When I wrote this I thought it could be. I had lost faith and was finding mysticism attractive. I should have asked, “Is the energy, that some worship as God, a real Person?”