Reason and passion are the next steps

To the editor:

I grew up with a religious belief that God has a good plan that make sense, but after years of experience with the vicissitudes of life, I lost faith and decided to find my own explanation about the scheme of things.

After finally addressing my personal shortcomings, I came to see that everything in the world makes sense after all — because the laws of physics are based on intelligent principles that govern the universe. Later, I ascertained that life is a separate expression of emotional fears and desires, and much later it occurred to me that the intelligence of the universe and the emotions of life are the basic “ingredients” of our existence, but their origin is likely to remain a mystery.

My quest for understanding continued, and after retirement I developed a personal religion of my own by assuming that, “In the beginning,” the principles of intelligence had a vague awareness of being in existence, and those principles were frustrated by a growing need for emotional experience. In time, the increasing awareness of intelligence and the emerging need for emotional experience joined together as a form of primordial logic.

The synergistic result of their union caused a Big Bang explosion that required the intelligent nature of primordial logic to establish the laws of physics — which were needed to govern the energy of the Big Bang. The laws of physics formed matter and established the physical universe, where certain chemical reactions enable certain elements of carbon to be activated by the fears and desires of emotion. Simply put, the intelligent nature of a primordial form of logic is outwardly expressed as matter by the laws of physics, while the emotional nature of logic is outwardly expressed as a natural will to live in the physical realm of life.

Matter and life came to be as they are because the Big Bang initiated a contingent series of causes and effects that enabled life to become established in the physical world, where the action of physical laws are a constant source of environmental change. Adapting to physical change required life to struggle for survival, which brought about the process of evolution. Evolution led to the survival of many different species of life, as well as the achievement of man’s self-consciousness and the use of reason and passion. Reason and passion are the next step forward in developing a higher means of expressing the nature of logic. Reason and passion enable human individuals to be the masters of their own destiny through their ability to make choices in the pursuit of their own best interests.

Although there are no guarantees of happiness in human life, a worthwhile existence is possible to achieve through the use of reason and passion toward the development of a higher application of intelligence and a more intimate way to experience emotion. The practice of tolerance comes to mind.

Art Carney

Wasilla