Our mind is wired to adapt through an inference into causes and effects. This is - almost certainly - the evolutionary requirement fulfilled by the phenomenon we know as "memory" (yes, I am indeed skeptical that the existence of memory has anything to do with spirituality - although it may be the mechanism that creates the illusion of "spirit" from which people extrapolate preorigin; or, if you prefer - "divine origin"). I can make no promises that this post follows an organizational pattern to any meaningful degree.
Interpersonal relationships, learned first through our family members, consist of dynamics that follow predictable patterns. When we experience things we do not like in these dynamics, our first instincts are to cry. Slowly, we learn to compromise - inside or out - behavioral change, a change in our beliefs, or both. In these relationships, we achieve an inherent perception of ethical behavior, which society will later attempt to encourage us to follow in our actions.
The imposition of rules is a tricky business - not because rules cannot be implemented (they clearly can), but because complex systems inherently invite contradiction. Simple systems, then, must achieve their goals through fewer rules, which must necessarily be more general, encompassing, universal. Far from the conclusion that simple systems are easier, they often require an order of magnitude more thought to design properly. Why? Because it is easier if you are allowed to band-aid over each of the rough edges.
Many people argue about politics. Candidate A, candidate B. Perhaps we can draw certain conclusions about whole groups of candidates by some criteria. Left, right, populist, centrist, minority, lobbyist. Indeed, maybe we can draw conclusions about the actions of politicians in general. Is it right to complain that Candidate A is a "damn crook"? Well, it may be true, and I wouldn't suggest that it is not worth discussion. But perhaps the crime is that the system of politics invites corruption, and thus selects citizens adversely (the crooks become politicians). In as much as these crooks operate in politics as crooks, the architects of the political system enable them. Now, I am not suggesting that the founding fathers - in their roles as political architects - were either crooks OR unsuccessful (our system has worked well enough for long enough to debunk any case I could attempt to build, assuming I wanted to try), but as human beings, they were fallible. Perhaps a better way to say it is that their foresight - although great - was not perfect.
One could argue that interpersonal relationships, politics, society - all rest on larger and larger systems that must operate under more and more elegant, simplistic rules in order to be effective. I like to look at the nature of existence as the largest such system. Setting aside the question of whether an architect was present in any sense is beside the point - the system is exposed to the same Darwinian qualities as all these other systems. In other words, it is obvious, if you have an appreciation for physics, chemistry, biology - the universe didn't have to produce "life". You could have an educated conversation where you invoke the modern understandings of those various disciplines and come to some guess as to how likely "life" was to occur in this blindingly vast (and strangely peculiar) expanse we know as the universe.
The part of the universe that I find the most extraordinarily peculiar is the illusion of free choice. Of course, there is no rational argument that can be made in the context of mathematics (as the language of the universe) to support the theory of true free choice. But, the universe possesses an extraordinary quality that does the next best thing - which is, it provides the illusion of free choice. How does it do that? Of the dimensions of the universe - all ten or eleven (my reference is a trust in the basis of string theory as the most legitimate "theory of everything" that our society has come up with), it decided that one - no more, no less - would act so peculiarly that we can only travel one direction through it. Three others, of course, are bidirectional. The others are "wrapped up at the Planck scale", whatever that means.
When you start talking about the physics of the universe, you have to keep in mind how predisposed human minds are to perceiving certain things in a certain way. But, ten/eleven dimensions is an arbitrary number, which in my mind, is highly suspect. If a dimension is a dynamic of two directions, even the innocuous number one is an arbitrary value. So, we have two suspect occurrences of the number one - one dimension of them all, which is locked into unidirectional travel.
It amazes me that people believe that the argument for God is whether he designed the illusion that things older than six thousand years exist in the world as a test for nonbelievers. The evidence of God, of a predisposition for arbitrary decisions and whatever that means - is in the fabric of existence. The universe could have been one-dimensional. At least it would have one fewer arbitrary element in its architecture. Suffice to say, I would not be writing this now. Thus, all of the peculiarity might just be a sort of randomness that is solved through the idea that we will never know the nature of universes not suited to our existence because we can never visit them. There is a term for this that eludes me. We have some sort of negative-selection criteria at work that colors the conclusions we can draw about whether the architecture of the universe is representative of other universes, which I believe almost certainly have to exist.
Since I constantly need to quote Jorge Luis Borges, and since he was both familiar with these issues and wrote eloquently about them, we're getting that quote, which to a thinking man might be a better starting point than MY rambling:
"We (the indivisible divinity that works in us) have dreamed the world. We have dreamed it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time, but we have allowed slight, and eternal bits of the irrational to form its architecture, so as to know that it is false."
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