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I am a politician (though frustrated and disgusted by so much of
the corruption of modern politics), but my mother wanted me to
be a priest. I never felt the call of that vocation, never had
an experience which suddenly or profoundly changed the course of
my life, and grew into adulthood in a quizzical or sceptical
frame of mind. I planned to become a social worker, burned
over the social injustices which hammered at my conscience,
railed against the class system, hated the elite which kept
power to themselves and kept others in bondage.
But politics didn’t satisfy either. Conviction, vision, the
sense of purpose, the ideology of transformation were all
drained out of it by careerism and personal ambition, spin and
manipulation. I began to wonder what ultimates there were in
which one could truly believe. I became deeply interested in
science on which I had missed out at Oxford, and in all my spare
moments began to read avidly and widely across the scientific
canon – physics, biology, chemistry, cosmology.
But how did they all fit together – the religion of my youth,
the philosophy of my degree, the politics of my occupation, the
science of the universe around me, the threat to the environment
and our survival on Earth? Did it all make sense, as somehow
it has to in one single indivisible reality? But how could
those disciplines be stitched together, discarding whatever did
not meet the canons of evidential truth, but producing a single
unity as the narrative of existence? That’s why for the last
10 years I have wrestled with writing, amid many setbacks and
puzzlements, Destination of the Species.
First, several caveats. Very deliberately it is not parti pris:
it is not written from the preconceived propagandistic viewpoint
either of religion, science, philosophy, or environmental dogma,
to the exclusion or discounting of the others. It simply tries
to answer the central question: in the light of all we know,
drawing it together from every channel of human experience, what
does it all mean? What is the message that the whole
story is telling us?
Is there a coherent thread running through all the mountains of
evidence that makes sense of it all?
It does not provide any final answer on the mystery of human
existence – that is beyond human comprehension and always will
be. But it does assemble sufficient empirical evidence from
the natural world to provide a plausible answer to the age-old
conundrum: is the universe driven by pitiless, directionless
chance as the Dawkins and neo-Darwinian view would have it, or
is there verifiable evidence of purpose detectable within it?
The book comprehensively analyses the scientific data from the
origin and evolution of the universe, the formation of the Earth
and the possible origins of life four billion years ago, the
enormous subsequent proliferation of exotic life forms leading
improbably but perhaps inevitably to the human species, and the
intellectual, cultural and spiritual uniqueness of human
beings. The totality of this evidence reveals certain clear,
distinct patterns.
Science has uncovered a mind-bogglingly precise fine-tuning
in the construction of the universe. It has also shown that
early life was driven for billions of years by symbiotic and
co-operative networking, not blindly by purposeless mutations.
And most recently evidence is accumulating of how matter and
energy spontaneously transpose into new higher organisational
states at certain thresholds of complexity both in biological
and cosmological systems. We are seeing the development of
models of the universe which are subjective, holistic and
purposeful, not analytic, reductionist or arbitrary.
The evidence of a designed universe is very strong, but that
does not automatically equate with a personal God. For that, a
different set of criteria is necessary. Religious experience
is validated, not by scientific verification, but by the awesome
sense of numinous power almost universally present in human
societies, the revelation of the founders and prophets of the
world’s great religions, the ineffable witness of the mystics,
and the authenticity of overpowering personal experience which
transforms lives.
The view that the huge advance of science since the
Enlightenment has somehow ‘disproved’ religion is still widely
held today, even though that is a category error. It cannot in
fact do so when logically science
and religion reflect entirely distinct,
non-overlapping strands of human experience. But what is
exciting and fruitful is the uncovering of more and more
scientific evidence which indicates that, far from being
incompatible, they are in fact mutually complementary.
What then is our destination? For three centuries science has
progressively narrowed the significance of humans against the
almost infinite backdrop of the universe, and maybe an almost
endless series of universes. Yet it is pointing now to an
ultimate reality, certainly not of the human race as the summit
of evolution, but of an overarching cosmic plan of which we may
well be a key part.
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