Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Paradox — Our Primary Spiritual

Practice?

In the book I’ve touched a little on the paradoxes that result from consideration of the universe as the One and related matters of infinity and eternity. The ultimate questions about the universe seem to result in paradox no matter what method of truth-seeking is adopted.

It might be thought that the mere existence of things already points the universe to being positive — stuff is better that no stuff? Or, failing that, certainly life seems to be a positive — defying the second law of thermodynamics — working in opposition to everything running down through entropy. But, you say, this is a mere blip. The sun will turn nova and life will eventually be wiped out. But, I may contest, perhaps some small microbes that can survive for millennia in interstellar space have been swept off the Earth’s upper atmosphere and are, even now, drifting away into space. They will eventually reach another potentially viable world, land there, and spring back to life and start to multiply and evolve. Or perhaps it will be human space travel that will result in the spread of life elsewhere. So, life could go on and entropy still cheated. But, you may counter, eventually under our current cosmological understanding, no new galaxies will form and the stars will all burn out and there will be no more safe havens where life can flourish. However, I protest, given that there may be thousands, millions — even billions — of intelligent species throughout the universe, maybe one of them will devise a way to create

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