Three Big Bangs
— College of Idaho: Carter-Chalker
Lectureship, 2013

Three Big Bangs. College of Idaho. The Carter-Chalker Lectureship on Faith and Contemporary Issues, The College of Idaho, November 7, 2013.
Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/89539

Scientific natural history discovers "three big bangs," each marking a serendipitous singularity. (1) At the primordial big bang, matter-energy appears, initially in simpler forms, but with the remarkable capacity to generate heavier elements, without which life would not be possible. (2) Life explodes on Earth with DNA discovering, storing, and transferring information. Across a singular natural history, life persists in the midst of its perpetual perishing, generating and regenerating billions of species. These increase in biodiversity, with trajectories escalating biocomplexity. (3) The human genius, a massive singularity, crosses a trans-genetic threshold, generating language and making possible cumulative transmissible cultures, radically novel in kind and in scale. Life becomes ideational; ideas pass from mind to mind. Ideas generate ideals. The nature of matter-energy, the nature of genes and their genesis, invites those at the center of complex caring intelligence to wonder where they are, who they are, and what they ought to do. Human uniqueness on a wonderland Earth generates intense responsibilities. Is there sacred Logos in, with, and under a cybernetic system with such breakthrough creativity?