Reality as Future

There is ample consensus in the scientific community that the universe and all beings originated from an evolutionary process which began some 15,000 million years from the quantum void and the first entity, the Big Bang, of millions of degrees. Then it began to get colder and expand, causing energy fields, top quarks, atoms, galaxies and planets such as ours to arise. About 3,800 million years ago primitive forms of life emerged in the primordial swamps of Earth. These grew into more complex forms — plants, reptiles, birds and mammals. One of them, the human being, was endowed in the last 4-5 million years with self-awareness and subjectivity. The global process was not hurried nor was it linearly progressive. It experienced ruptures, devastation and much waste. In spite of this, looking from a global perspective, one can identify an ascending line in the cosmogenic process that goes from the simple to the complex, from physical matter to life, and from life to consciousness. Astrophysics has affirmed for a while that there were necessary preconditions for the first micromovements of matter and primordial energy to lead to the apparition of life. Without them there would not have been enough densification and therefore matter, stars, life, conscience and ourselves, who are present here, would not have been formed.

From the story one can infer that the universe had and has a future ahead. Everything is being born and is pregnant with promises. From this viewpoint (let's call this "metaphysical") the future is more important and decisive than the past and present. The past and present were once the future. But how should this future be understood?

From the static point of viewpoint, the future as producing something new doesn't exist. What exists is the past which contains the seeds of everything. Present and future are just an unfolding of the past. The classic Western philosophy and the official theology of the Church think within the framework of this matephysics of the past. Oddly, the modern neo-Darwinists, coming from evolutionary materialism, such as the influential zoologist Richard Dawkins (River Out of Eden, HarperColllins, 1996) and the American philosopher Daniel Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Simon & Schuster, 1996) also deny a future bearing something new. What is really happening, according to them, is a strictly physical determinism that reorganizes inanimate matter that has always existed. This matter has contained in a latent form what later unfolds. The evolutionary process just requires a long time to allow life and matter to emerge. And there are still other possibilities in reserve.

This viewpoint reduces everything to the physics and chemistry of matter and disregards things that can't be missed, such as how the different combinations take shape. For something to be real, information is required, that is to say, some level of form, order and structure such as the chain of DNA. This order is not something physical, but a way of being. It irrupts as the novel and unpredictable. It comes from the future yet to be, not the past that has already been made. The future is a limitless repository of possibilities. Therefore it is unpredictable. But looking at the past we can notice that although it is unpredictable, everything is oriented towards the future, towards the onward and upward. The Universe calls to life, life, and more life. Isn't this the design of the Creator, the absolute Future?

Free translation from the Spanish provided by AnneFullerton@mybluelight.com. Done in Arlington, VA in cooperation with Refugio del Rio Grande, Texas.