 Okay, so who here is familiar with Criswellian epics or epics of evolution? Okay, small handful. So I'm going to cover all of them, obviously not in depth, otherwise we'd be here for several hours. And there's a risk at that, right? I'm not, I'm going to touch on things, kind of skip off the water and move on. So if you're new to this, this hopefully will be a good introduction for you. And if you are well aware of this, I'm going to bring aspects of emergentism and Mormonism together in this. Hopefully that'll add a new flavor, a new hue to this that you might not have seen before. So early in his career, Jason Silva produced a video where he went over the Criswellian epics of evolution. And his final statement kind of started my brain on this years ago. And so this has been ruminating for a while, but he said, talking about the final epic, a complete flourishing of nanotechnology and biotechnology, we impregnate the universe with intelligence. We merge with all matter in the universe and the universe essentially wakes up. And then he says, tell me that that is not an intoxicating idea. The kind of idea that inspired Alan Harrington to say, having created the gods, we can turn into them. So note this reference, this kind of ring at the end of self-referentiality. That's similar to the ring we have in Mormonism. And that couplet, as man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become. However, in Mormonism, rather than seeing this as an invention of gods, Mormonism teaches a co-evolution of gods through Christ that mankind can evolve into. I believe Mormonism, with its naturalistic ontology or cosmology and eschatology, provides a real novel and robust way to syncretize the often split apart world views of science and religion, something which I think may become increasingly important for religion to adapt and find relevant expression now and moving forward. Now, emergentism, where does that come in? I'm biased towards an emergentism world view. That forms some of the contours that I see here. I'm going to draw a lot from an essay from, it's titled, it's from Ursula Goodenough and Terence Deacon. It's titled The Sacred Emergence of Nature. It was published in the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, April 2008. I want to read a little excerpt here and then I'll start jumping in some of these epics. It says, talks about making the movie of science. In order to do that, it's interesting because we have to understand things from a kind of reductive perspective to find the characters that need to go into the movie. However, that's not the way things arose. Things arose temporarily in the opposite or rather than breaking these bits apart, things arose by combining and emerging traits out of different evolutionary processes. I think that goes well with Kurzwillian epics of evolution as well. I'll go to the next one. These different epics that we have here go across from atoms all the way to this transcendent utopia that Jason Silva described. I'll step through each one. The format of this is I decided, I say a picture is worth a thousand words. A video is worth maybe more. I don't know. Maybe add up the frames, but maybe it'll confuse things. I don't know. Rather than having stills up here as the images, I put little movies, obviously sound muted. I'm not going to try to talk over other people talking, but that kind of display these epics. So first one, epic one. Time scale we're dealing with here is billions of years. Primary driving engines, gravity, galaxies, stars, planets. Ultimately this is to culminate in DNA, but the feedback loops here often are stars. In that essay, good enough mentions a key concept, talking about the combination of atoms to make water, the water molecule, and how that's a reconfiguration of electron orbitals and it generates a trapezoidal shaped entity that is more electrically positive on one facet and more negative on the opposite facet. Now going on quoting here says, now we can consider what happens when water molecules interact with one another. The emergent outcomes are numerous. Ice displays buoyancy, crystalline organization and hardness. Water displays surface tension and viscosity. None of these properties is displayed by individual water molecules. What matters are the dynamical regularities in the ways in which large number of these molecules interact with one another. This is where some of my personal fascination with networks and the properties that emerge out of networks that you can see when you visualize them and analyze them at a system level really resonates with me personally. Now an irrelevant Mormon idea here is that matter and consciousness are co-eternal with God. Like a gardener, a creator could establish these early epics and tend them as they grow to provide an environment or substrate out of which this co-eternal consciousness can emerge in later stages, the fruit of creation. Perhaps a creator optimizing for authentic co-eternal diversity cannot force intelligence to emerge spontaneously, just as we cannot spontaneously force water to form into ice. The ice must emerge within the bounds of its chemistry interacting with the environment around it. So the next epic here, epic two, this is information traits in biological structures now, hundreds of millions of years. These are rough estimates obviously. Biological evolution through natural selection is very prominent. Excuse me, that was epic one, epic two, here we go. So in addition to information still being expressed in atoms and chemicals, information here can now be encoded and evolved in DNA. While biological structures are reducible to atomic structures, they are also capable of expressing and producing something very different from atoms or chemicals. This pattern continues between each epic where the sum, the culmination of the parts of one epic continues to generate something else entirely different in the next. I'll read it a little excerpt here from this good enough essay here. She says, one way to misread this account is that the genes rule. Not only is this misreading inherently depressing and religiously sterile, it also misses the point. Genomes are in fact the handmaidens of emergent properties, not the other way around. A successful life outcome is to promote the production of emergent outcomes called traits in biology that collectively make their own continuation more likely. It's traits that rule genes follow in their wake. Traits common to all organisms include such non-depressing and religiously fertile capacities as endoreticness and identity maintenance. Traits common to all animals include awareness and the capacity for pleasure and suffering. Traits common to social beings include cooperation and meaning making. Traits common to birds and mammals include bonding and nurturing. Traits common to humans include language and its capacity to share subjective experience and thus to know love. Transmission of genomes is the steady background drum beat. Emergence is the music. I love that, that phrase at the end there. From a more in perspective, this can be seen as culminating in a neurobiological substrate out of which our present mind or consciousness emerges. A creative God's goal here is to have a substrate arise in which moral and intellectual traits capable of human expression, including religious expression, can emerge. A creative God is looking for the emergence of a co-eternal mind capable of imbibing and transmitting godly traits. All right, epic three. Traits and information in brains. That hundreds of thousands of years development here, culture, music, language, religions or these primary driving engines. This can culminate in technological revolution and the feedbacks here are creative mimetic life cycles. Might be some of those feedback loops. So now information is stored in neural patterns. So while DNA provided a large leap forward from emergence of traits in chemical or atomic substrates, neural organs jump light years past that. Again from that essay, Sacred Emergence of Nature. Understanding that mature of a million brain may contain 100 billion neurons. Each synaptic communication with some 1000 other neurons connection, the connections all put together under the watch of a genome with some 20,000 genes clarifies why it is so inaccurate to speak of a gene as being for a particular mental capacity. There's that irreducibility of some of the traits that emerged. So Deacon, the co-author in that essay with Ursula good enough, he makes this bold claim in his book, it's symbolic species. It says biologically we are just another ape. Mentally we are a whole new phylum of organism. Our whole new traits, symbolic language, cultural transmission of ideas via languages and an autobiographical self are the central importance to our lives and religious selves. What is a particularly interesting about the course of human evolution is that it has entailed the co-evolution of three emergent modalities, brain, symbolic language and culture, each feeding into and responding to the other two and hence generating particularly complex patterns and outcomes. Importantly, while reductionist understandings of how minds work are fascinating, they are also irrelevant to what it means to what it's like to be minded. A Mormon narrative here, the archetypes of Adam or Eve enter the picture late in this epic and it's here that the language about mankind is given the status of having the image of God. Mankind is made out of the dust of the earth and exists in the context of biological and atomic expressions from the previous epics, but it is an entirely new creature that shares traits with God. Notably, God gives the commandment to subdue the earth. In the context of epics of evolution, this is a commandment and challenge to move from this third epic, from this third primitive epic into the epics that follow. This is a mandate to do science and to no longer be entirely at the mercy of natural selection as we transcend it and become creators of our own environments, thus having that image or trait of God. This will ultimately allow us to look at the world around us, imagine how things might be different, and then pull the present forward to that vision. A creative God looks for the traits of novel creativity. Moving on to the next epic four, traits and information extends to tools and technology. Timescale a few thousand years, now technology is a lot older than that, but talking about this particular uptick in the exponential increase in technology. Primary drivers and engines, philosophy, science, agriculture, economics, government, things like that. Ultimately culminating in merger of biology and technology in that next epic, and the feedbacks loop here is really advanced tools used to exponentially create more advanced tools. An important pause here is to reflect on what it means to be human in this age. Again from that essay Sacred Emergence of Nature, they say human consciousness is not merely an emergent phenomenon, it epitomizes the logic of emergence in its very form. Human minds deeply entangled in symbolic culture have an effective causal locus that extends across continents and millennia, growing out of the experiences of countless individuals. Consciousness emerges as an incessant creation of something from nothing, of process continually transcending itself to be human is to know what it feels like to be evolution happening. I think there's some echoes of Mormon doctrine of co-eternality there, which we so often don't talk about or really dive in too much. All right again, some of the primary drivers here don't replace the drivers of the previous epic. Things such as culture, music, language, religion still play a powerful role in what it means to be human, as do biological and atomic processes, but this epic is where technology becomes powerful driver at sharply accelerating rates affecting us as a species and the traits that emerge in the environments we create. In this epic, Mormonism has a notion of many dispensations, distinct periods of time and locations where new modalities of religion are expressed and recontextualized in the framework of prophecy, scripture, and culture so forth. With the dispensation, the fullness of times being what we describe as presently being this dispensation. So Mormonism does not require casting religion into static creeds. In fact, it calls for continuous revelation and the adaptation of religion to greater and greater understandings of reality and science and technology expands the realities, faith takes root in those new realities and seeks to transcend them. That's another feedback loop. Faith needs proof to stand on and as it reaches and proof cries out for faith to stand on it. This is similar to how BH Roberts framed discipleship in Mormonism. The disciples of Mormonism will take yet profounder and broader views of the great command doctrines committed to the church and departing from mere repetition will cast them in new formulas cooperating in the works of the spirit until they give and help to give the truths received a more forceful expression and carry it beyond the earlier more and cruder stages of development. We'll get through these next two here shortly. Epic five. Traits in information and as mind and technology merge. So centuries here I don't know we're starting now moving from where we you know many believe we are at the cusp of entering into this epic if not already started to enter into it. Biotech, virtual reality, environmental rejuvenation and biohacking those sorts of things will be these drivers and loops that drive this. This is much of what transhumanism focus on in you know with cybernetics, life extension, crannics, resource liberation so forth and the promises of humanity harnessing these technologies are huge as are the risks. An opening question is whether this will follow the you might have noticed the magnitude reduction in these epics right billions years of the atomic chemical hundreds of millions in this DNA hundreds of thousands in this neurological and so forth. So we have this sort of accelerating reduction in time. As we look to the future will that continue? I don't know that's an open question but what I want to discuss in this one in the limited time I have is some of the ideas about how the organism of religion can navigate this epic. Mormonism's vision doesn't stop here at epic previous epic four in fact it projects knowing self into future epics. John A. Woodso described Mormonist pathology as being coupled to evolution. He said under the law of evolution man's organization will become more and more complex that is he will increase in his power to use intelligence until in time he will develop so far than in comparison with his present state he will he will be a god. A key feature necessary for religion to carry its traits into future into the future with augmented or changed biologies is adaptability. Is adaptability need not threaten religious expression any more than technological advancement need with threaten artistic or cultural expression. The MTA as it stands for the ethical use of technology and religion to expand human abilities I think is well suited to do this work of promoting and adapting traits of religion that find meaningful expression into and through this epic. Mormonism itself is strongly adaptable even if some of its cultural expressions can be stubborn. Joseph Smith taught the LDS have no creed but they are ready to believe all true principles that exist as they are made manifest from time to time and elsewhere if there's anything virtuous lovely or good reporter praiseworthy we seek after these things. So just as the traits of atoms successfully persisted in later epics the emergence of chemicals and biology to neurology and so forth the ability to dynamically interoperate with other traits including traits originating from outside it will allow religion to successfully carry their traits into what emerges in this epic and beyond. Religions or the phylum of their interpretations which cannot do this or struggle or will struggle or even fade away as notions of mind, body, consciousness and reality bend and stretch into future epics. So this last one here epic six no video um I didn't have the time to animate that by hand or anything so um it's a beautiful picture uh traits and information is mind and creation merge so time scale I don't know does time even make sense here uh nanotech created environments infinite emergence of intelligence culminates in gods post humanity um created environments out of which new intelligences emerge could be this feedback loop here so here post humanity begins to wield the universe at atomic all the way through these other other scales possibly becoming one with it or transcending it all together um it's where a lot of science fiction gets drawn from uh consciousness begins to blur here as a level of interpersonal intimacy and unity previously unimaginable becomes possible unified minds wielding the universe or universes in unencumbered flourishing of created environments becomes a key driver of the traits that emerge in creative godhood creating environments from which infinitely diverse and entirely novel intelligences can emerge as co-eternal minds could become a final inexhaustible frontier as gods of these environments post human creators could experience that emergence on an entirely new level as they can enter or descend into these environments experiencing and guiding these new newly emergent minds through their own stages of evolution and emergence optimizing for emergent diversity Mormon narratives around God and the salve and salvation strongly orient towards this possibility however Mormonism doesn't see this epic as only being in our future it also sees it in our past as we are the beneficiaries of this type of environment created by gods in this view humanity's potential is nothing short of progressing through epics of evolution to become likewise gods ourselves as Joseph Smith said I think it's been quote another talks here you've got to learn how to be gods yourselves by going from one small degree to another from a small capacity to a great one from grace to grace exaltation to exaltation and I would add from epic to epic here until you attain to the resurrection of the dead and are able to dwell on everlasting burnings sit in glory and do and do as those who sit enthroned in enthroned in everlasting power so I agree with Jason Silva that this is an intoxicating idea both on the secular side of me as well as the religious side so just a final thought here so as we ponder where mankind's been where it's going now where it's moving in this evolutionary journey I think Mormonism has an important role to play with its strong emphasis on naturally emergent theology eschatology cosmology and so forth so this provides a novel and I think robust way to new approach newly approach syncretizing some of the traits of science and religion into something that might emerge that's entirely new so indeed religion's ability to do this I think in excel and in carrying traits forward into what emerges into future epics will be very critical in religion's ability to flourish in the coming future so as I personally seek to carry these traits that the best traits out of science the best traits out of religion and mix them in my life and in my faith I personally find a welcome home in Mormonism thanks