Unintelligent Universe

I have a friend, a very enlightened woman, she's a Catholic convert, but a very enlightened

Catholic. And in her bathroom, she has on the pipe that connects the tank with the toilet

seat, a little framed picture of an eye. And underneath in Gothic letters is written, "Thou

God seest me." Everywhere is this eye watching, watching, watching, watching, watching, and

judging you. So that you always feel you're never really by yourself. But the old gentleman

is observing you and writing notes in his black book. And this became too much for the

West. It became oppressive. They had to get rid of it. And so instead, we got another

myth. The myth of the purely mechanical universe. This was invented at the end of the 18th century.

Became increasingly fashionable throughout the course of the 19th century, and well into

the 20th century, so that it is today's common sense. Very few people today really believe

in God, in the old sense. They say they do, but they really hope there is a God. They

don't really have faith in God. They fervently wish that there was one, and feel that they

ought to believe that there is. But the idea of the universe being ruled by that marvelous

old gentleman is no longer plausible. It isn't that anybody's disproved it, but it just somehow

doesn't go with the vast infinitude of galaxies, and the immense light-year distances between

them and so on. So instead, it has become fashionable, and it is nothing more than a

fashion, to believe that the universe is dumb. Stupid. That intelligence, values, love, and

fine feelings reside only within the bag of the human epidermis. And that outside that,

the thing is simply a kind of a chaotic, stupid interaction of blind forces. Blind, ruthless,

uncomprehending lust. That's the foundation of the human unconscious. And similarly, to

thinkers like of the 19th century, like Ernst Haeckel, even Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and so

on, there was this notion that at the root of being is an energy. And this energy is

blind. This energy is just energy, and it's utterly and totally stupid. And our intelligence

is an unfortunate accident. By some weird freak of evolution, we came to be these feeling

and rational beings, more or less rational. And this isn't ghastly mistake, because here

we are in a universe that has nothing in common with us, doesn't share our feelings, has no

real interest in us. We're just a sort of cosmic fluke. And therefore, the only hope

for mankind is to beat this irrational universe into submission, and conquer it, and master

it. Now, all this is perfectly idiotic. If you would think that the idea of the universe

as being the creation of a benevolent old gentleman, although he's not so benevolent,

he takes a sort of "this hurts me more than it's going to hurt you" sort of attitude to

things. You can have that on the one hand, and if that becomes uncomfortable, you can

exchange it for its opposite, the idea that the ultimate reality doesn't have any intelligence

at all. At least, that gets rid of the old bogey in the sky, in exchange for a picture

of the world that is completely stupid. Now, these ideas don't make any sense, especially

the last one. Because you cannot get an intelligent organism, such as a human being, out of an

unintelligent universe. The saying in the New Testament that "figs do not grow on thistles,

nor grapes on thorns" applies equally to the world. You do not find an intelligent

organism living in an unintelligent environment. 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. All right, 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. Now maybe, two million years ago, somebody came from

another galaxy in a flying saucer, and had a look at this solar system, and they looked

it over and shrugged their shoulders and said, "Just a bunch of rocks." And they went away.

Later on, maybe two million years later, they came around and they looked at it again, and

they said, "Excuse me, we thought it was a bunch of rocks, but it's peopling. And it's

alive, after all, it has done something intelligent." Because, you see, we grow out of this world

in exactly the same way that the apples grow on the apple tree. If evolution means anything,

it means that. But you see, we curiously twist it. We say, "Well, first of all, in the beginning,

there was nothing but gas and rock. And then intelligence happened to arise in it, you

know, like a sort of fungus or slime on the top of the whole thing. But we're thinking

in a way, you see, that disconnects the intelligence from the rocks. Where there are rocks, watch

out. Watch out, because the rocks are going eventually to come alive, and they're going

to have people crawling over them. It's only a matter of time. Just in the same way as

the seed, the acorn, is eventually going to turn into the oak, because it has the potentiality

of that within it. Rocks are not dead.