The Open Source God at the End of Time

Richard Dawkins is correct in his pointing out that ‘intelligent design’ fails because it does not account for the design of the designer. I.D. and Creationist accounts of the development of (human) life are obviously nonsense, but the less radical theis postulation that evolution is somehow facilitated or even overseen by some kind of intelligent creator is also doomed to failure. It is obvious that intelligence, particularly the kind of super-intelligence we might be in such awe of as to call ‘divine’, can only reasonably be considered as produced by an evolutionary process, not be its producer. If there is a God, He/She/It exists at the end of the life, not at the beginning. (If there are processes by which highly complex structures such as organisms can be produced other than evolution we have yet to discover any.)

Let us imagine that biological evolution has not yet reached any kind of end point (how could it?). Let us also imagine that such biological evolution also includes the evolution of consciousness and the kind of extended phenotypic evolution again put forward by Dawkins. As (human) evolution continues into the future, more and more cognitive faculties are ratcheted into place and the definition of a human being starts to extend beyond the skin to include cultural artifacts and tools, and also to overlap such that the boundary between one ‘individual’ and another becomes less clear. It is likely that in 1000 years time, assuming our species lives that long, our consciousness of, and ability to control, vast areas of experience will be greatly developed. We may routinely imagine the world in radically different ways than we are currently able to countenance, and will be able to live in that imagination as successfully as we now live in our imagination of a spherical world orbiting a class 2 star. Maybe we will be able to see matter and energy as Einstein saw it, or space as Minkowski. Maybe our understanding of time will owe more to Kant than to Eddington. That we will feel the entirety of time as a single extended specious moment with ourselves both as active participants in it and as its constructors and organisers. I am using the term ‘we’ because at this point in the narrative of the future maybe we will regard each other as phenotypical extensions of a single self, and we will indentify not with the parcels of flesh that we do now, but with the tissue culture that unites us as one. Maybe this identification will even embrace other entities: animals, plants, inanimate matter. Maybe I, you, everyone and everything will be a single all-embracing ‘we’ that is experienced with the same ontological certainty with which we now hold ourselves to be self-evident. In the distance of time the mechanisms of evolution may incrementally lead to the development of an entity, call it and captitalise it as ‘We’, that lives in all time and all space and sees no separation between itself and everything. We see the fall of the sparrow and desire in the hearts of men. We is the Omega with the power to also be the Alpha. Maybe the future will be the past and when we are truly We and We is everything, everywhere, everywhen, then we may be of a mind to recapitulate. Finnegan begin again. A tongue returning to a broken tooth. A fish going back to its spawning ground. A bird settling on a branch.

Atheist Sacraments

One of the traditions within the Christian church is the idea of ‘sacraments’; actions and rituals associated with particular moments in one’s life which have spiritual significance (usually moments of transition). The seven Christian sacraments; baptism, confirmation, ordination, marriage, confession, the Eucharist, and the last rites, are supposed to have been introduced into the church by Jesus Christ himself (although there is no good evidence for this). What is known is that these actions have been carried out by generations of Christians for many centuries and have been largely unchanged over that time. This historical and symbolic continuity gives the sacraments an enormous feeling of connection, from which some of this significance springs. When a Christian is experiencing the ceremony of confirmation, or even more emotionally, the last rites, the sense is that the person in joining in with a host of others who have all passed that way before; have said the same words and made the same moves. Not only is there an atemporal echoing of what Jesus did, but of what countless other humans all across the world have done and continue to do.

For non-Christians or those without religious affiliation of any kind there is little opportunity to experience this continuity, this binding. The closest any of us may get to this experience is the visiting of historical sites and places of personal significance. Many of us will have stood within the walls of Rome’s Colliseum, or by Jim Morrison’s grave in Pere La Chaise cemetery, or in Deeley Plaza, and felt a frisson of connectedness. This is where it happened, and that thought is not the cold thought of detached and alienated information, we feel it as personal and present. Standing near to these special places and knowing what took place allows these events to seep into us and join with us in a way that no amount of reading or television viewing can achieve.

Christian sacraments do not mobilise the binding effects of place; these would be found in other Christian practices; in the logic of pilgrimages, churchyards, eastward-facing church architecture and the stations of the cross. They do however produce something of the same effect. In accepting the Eucharist we stand alongside millions of others, not in the same place but in the same action, and this chorus of action rings through history and across the world, including even the carpenter breaking bread with his friends. Here is the binding across time and space of ourselves to other beings, and possibly even the cleaving to that near-abstract sense of ‘being’ itself which Christianity embodies within the figure of Christ.

We atheists will have none of this. We question the need for gods and the historical significance, and even the existence, of Jesus of Nazareth. This is a good thing. There is good reason for doubt and better ideas on which to exercise belief and practice commitment. But in the healthy rejection of Bronze-age myths are we in danger of forgetting something important and vital? Are there precious techniques for human living buried within the historical dross and corruption of Christianity? I think there are and I think we need look no further than the sacraments for confirmation of this.

The end of Christianity (and it really is time for it to come to an end, along with all of the other established churches) need not, and should not, mean the end of sacraments and the end of sacramental thinking and practice. But these need not be the seven sacraments of the old faith. It is time for a new form of engagement and a new application of the sacramental. Not one which joins us in separate and contested faith communities around this prophet or that scripture, but one which echoes the best faith that our thinking can provide. Not the faith of frightened, desert-dwellers clinging together against the unpredictable onslaughts of a terrifying and hostile world, but the faithful thinking, and thoughtful faith, of modern humans who have not only seen the promised land but have lived within it. We are all human beings and we are all in this together, and the only thing which prevents us entering paradise is our own separation from one another; a separation aided by the parochial observances of the old rites. More than that, we are all animals and we are life itself, ultimately composed of the stuff of life itself, the dust from exploding stars. We have faith in the true being of the universe and of ourselves, and our sacraments should reflect this faith. As indeed they do.

Each day of our lives we perform these sacraments unwittingly and without reverence, missing the opportunity to feel ourselves part of the pattern which connects. What are these sacraments? They are laughably obvious and trivially self-evident, but this obviousness does not diminish their significance if we choose to think about them and of them and with them. These are the sacraments of walking and breathing, of feeling the cold on our skin and flush of desire.


We feel that we are joined together, outside of the confines of time, or rather, that the dimension of time has lost is importance. As the action repeats without change, the breathing continues untransformed across the generations, so time, the ultimate arbiter and measurement of change, drops away and all time collapses to the point of this sacramental moment, and as for time so also for distance and human difference. You are at one side of the world and I’m at the other. Our backgrounds and circumstances place us at very different points on the maps of culture, politics and lifestyle, but in the logic of the sacrament we are indistinguishable; our steps and gestures rhyme and echo, and we all sing from the same biology.