The Gut of God
“Look, here is a tree in the garden and every summer it produces apples, and we call it an apple tree because the tree "apples." That's what it does. Alright, now here is a solar system inside a galaxy, and one of the peculiarities of this solar system is that at least on the planet earth, the thing peoples! In just the same way that an apple tree apples!” - Alan Watts
I begin with a quote today because I have been thinking all week about the process of life in the universe. I can't help it, but these are the thoughts that occupy my mind in between my mundane daily activities and my only way of making sense of them is to process them out here in my blog.
We often think of life as something special and precious that sets living things apart from the inanimate matter. It's like something magical that is bestowed on a specific class of of systems, even though both living and inanimate things are built using the same materials--the 118 chemical elements in the periodic table. This gives rise to words like 'soul' or 'spirit', which is an attempt to put a label to that extra 'something' that differentiates living from non-living things.
Genesis 2:7, Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
As what the famous verse says, we are moulded from clumps of dirt and the X ingredient is injected into us to make us alive. But when it comes to 'organisms' like viruses, are they considered alive? Biologists argue about it because a virus is nothing more than a protein sheath around strands of DNA or RNA but it reproduces itself like any other lifeform, albeit by taking advantage of its host. Viruses can be crystalized and remain inert forever like chemicals and spring back to 'life' again when conditions are right.
We are also getting close to having robots and AI systems that passes the Turing Test flawlessly and its behaviour would be indistinguishable from an average intelligent human being. Will they be considered as living beings and be accorded the same rights in the eyes of the law as us?
We even see ourselves as above other indisputably living things like animal and plants. But how many of us would have wished that our loved ones display the kind of unconditional love that a dog has towards its owner?
Even plants are not unlike us. According to scientists and those who work in managing forests, trees are also social beings and they struggle against yet cooperate with each other for survival. They communicate with chemicals over an 'internet' of roots and fungi with each other.
If we look closely at our own living human body which we are so proud of, we find that in terms of cells, more than half of us consists of the community of bacteria living in our guts. It is this symbiotic relationship with our microbiome that makes us healthy and living. We simply cannot survive without them. We have 2 sets of genome: the human one and those carried by our gut microbes. Based on the number of genetic instructions that determine the functioning of our living body, we are more microbe than human.
What does that say about the process of life in nature? Isn't nature itself like a big gigantic living thing? Through the concept of Gaia, we already know that the Earth is like an organism.
Nature is life. It is what existence is. There is no clear separation between living and non-living things: it is a continuum. The Earth is 'peopling'' because it is part of a natural process that happens when the conditions are right.
The photons, atoms, molecules, stars and planets and galaxies are undergoing an evolutionary process because existence itself is a process. Process means change, according to the laws that it is subjected to. Every step of change is natural and inevitable, based on its condition and environment.
If we want to be romantic about it, we can call this living universe,God. God is us and we are God. But I think a more picturesque description would be: we are like microbes in the gut of God.
