Whatever we know about anything is approximate. What the human species knows about physics is approximate. What the human species knows about biology is approximate. The current state of knowledge in every discipline of learning is approximate. And our own personal knowledge about any of the disciplines of learning is approximate.

If English is our home language, our knowledge of that language is approximate. And if we also know Spanish, German, and a little Urdu, we still know only a sliver of the thousands and thousands of languages that have existed. And mathematics? Even if we have moved beyond arithmetic into algebra, solid geometry, the calculus, and differential equations, the world of mathematics is much bigger. The scope of mathematics compares with the scope of all languages. Mathematics, viewed as the ordering capacities of the human mind, is almost boundless. And art? Each of us knows only a sliver of the art produced so far by the human species.

In addition, recall yourself walking through your house in the dark of a night, when you cannot see your hand in front of your face. You still have a sense of space and of time. You can still feel your way. This is a form of intelligence, a form of vivid knowing that you share with the owls, the cats, the reptiles, the dinosaurs, birds, and fish. These pre-symbol-using imagination capacities have been and still are unbelievably vast. Our language-art-&-math formed sort of awareness has only begun to probe what consciousness can know in our pre-language ways. Our knowledge of Reality in its fullness is indeed approximate, open to better approximations, and never complete.

Nevertheless, the Profound Reality that we are approximating can happen to us, can encounter us in its Mysterious Wholeness as a calling to be open to ever-better approximations. This admitted uncertainty in our knowledge is both a negation and an affirmation. It is a negation, for we are all security addicts, who are especially committed to being secure in our current opinions. If, however, we trust Profound Reality enough to be curious about being more realistic in our living, we are volunteering to be insecure in all of our opinions.

In spite of this ultimate insecurity, Profound Reality is also supporting whatever degree of approximations of Reality that we currently enjoy. Herein is the positive side of approximate knowledge: it is an approximation of Profound Reality. This enigmatic awareness of having valid approximations of Reality is an affirmation of support for humanity’s disciplines of learning. Though these disciplines of learning are journeys toward truth, rather than the “end-of-the-road” of truth, they are “journeys toward truth.”

In other essays I have illustrated how even the rather exact nature of the discipline of physics remains approximate, open to further probings of Profound Reality. In this essay I am going to illustrate further what I mean by approximate knowledge within the discipline of learning we call “biology.”

Biological Approximation

I have held in my hand the breast bone of a chicken. Some of we humans call this a wish bone, referring to a game we play with it. But the chicken did not use this bone for wishing, but for breathing. It is an amazingly flexible construction of bone, as well as amazingly strong bone for its very light weight. This bone was well adapted for flying, which chickens gave up some time back.

This particular type of bone was being evolved, perhaps 100,000 years ago, in the lives of the dinosaurs. We can suppose that its light-weight-to-strength characteristics were useful for enabling some needed agileness in the lives of the gigantic members of the dinosaur development.

To me, one of the most amazing facts about this bone is that it is a dead structure that was once part of a living being. It was at one time surrounded inside with living marrow and outside with living muscle. By these living cells it was grown to its current size. It is a wonder to me that such functionally dead devices (along with others like finger nails) are right now parts of our own living bodies. Tree trunks and tree barks are a similar dead construction. The living part of the tree is in the leaves and that thin layer of activity going on between the outer bark and inner wood. The living and the un-living exist together intimately.

So what is it that makes those living parts of our bodies so different from the non-living parts. What is it that makes a beetle so different from a rock? A living cat can tell the difference between a beetle and a rock. So can we humans. A beetle presents to cats and humans an initiative for action not found in a rock. We living creatures recognize that initiative, because we can directly experience that initiative of consciousness within our own beings. This capacity for awareness and aware initiative we commonly call “consciousness.” Let us call the aware-initiative aspect of consciousness “freedom.” In so far as an alive being has a level of consciousness, that being also has a level of freedom. This freedom, I am guessing, evolved in living beings because it enhanced their survival and quality of aliveness.

We humans recognize this freedom in the lives of other animals. We command our cats not to jump up on the table, presuming that these companions in aliveness are free to choose not to do this. We may identify closely with most forms of mammalian life, for we share with these species a wondrous capacity for what I will call “feeling intelligence” or “a capacity for emotional bonding.” Such a powerful extent of feeling intelligence is not found in the turtles, snakes, lizards and other reptiles that we experience. But with these living reptile beings, we also share a quality of consciousness that is described in reflections that arose in India under a heading they called “chakra three,” the gut chakra, a swirl of consciousness that seems to be located in the soar plexus of the human body. This basic quality of conscious assertiveness, however we describe it, we share with the reptiles.

So what is life? What is this aliveness in which consciousness is such an important feature? And what is consciousness? How is it that we are able to build our bones unconsciously and then consciously command our muscles to move those bones?

The scientific approach to truth has taught us much about about living beings; their biochemical constructions, their living processes, their evolution on planet Earth, the interactions of the various species of life to form an eco-system. This knowledge has become amazingly extensive. No one human being can know all the knowledge that the scientific communities of biology have assembled. Yet all of that scientific knowledge does not tell us what we can each know by merely looking inside our own beings. Indeed, we only know aliveness directly through our contemplative inquires into our own inner beings of being alive.

A biology that limits its explorations to the type of inquiry for truth that we apply to physics produces an incomplete grasp of aliveness. Our cat or dog is not merely a chemical and mechanical wonder work, but an aliveness that the scientific approach to truth cannot fathom, Our contemplative approach to the truth cannot fathom aliveness either, but with the contemplative approach to biological reality, we do know aspects of biological reality that our strictly scientific inquiries do not reach.

If we look closely, we can see that even science-emphasizing biologists tend to use their contemplative awarenesses about being living beings into their scientific-theory designing. They then attempt to prove these contemplative-wrought theories with their objective data derived from external observations. This can produce interesting associations, but no explanation of what life is. Nor can we know using physics methods whether life can be derived from physical realities or whether life is in an additional natural reality, as real a gravity, but not in any way accessible with a use of the outward or physical methods of observation.

The above discussion means to me that biology requires two approaches to truth: the “It-approach” of the scientific method and the “I-approach” of contemplative inquiry. Such an awareness has not always been fully applied to our classical theories of evolution. We have been led to think that the process of biological evolution is limited to the cause-and-effect dynamics of environmental adaption and to the accidental probabilities of genetic mutations. We tend to ignore the truth that each of these living beings is making choices all day long, every day of their lives, we are leaving out of consideration how this huge numbers of choices have also been causal factors in the story of evolution.

For example, the birds of a specific species, in choosing a specific habitat and what to eat in that habitat, have thereby added causes to the evolutionary story that resulted over time in the shape of those bird’s beaks. Recognizing these choosing factors does not deny the role of environmental survival factors or accidental mutation factors, but the choices made by living animals add additional causal factors to the course of evolution. There is an objective truth in Thomas Berry’s quip that the gene pool of pre-horses become horses, rather than bison, from their love of galloping.

Denying the power of free choices in all animal life results in a demeaning of the nature of our once-living fossils and of our now-living ameba, worms, fish, turtles, birds, cats, dogs, horses, whales, and so much more. We tend to view these now-living creatures and their evolutionary origins in a too mechanical manner—a manner that omits the conscious awareness and freedom of our choice-making companions in aliveness. Ancient societies of humans, in spite of the superstitious qualities found in their sciences, did do better than we modern cultures do with their seeing and respecting the aware and choosing essence of their animal companions.

Aware humans can also notice that their unique form of consciousness has some extended powers beyond the other mammals due to the advent in our species of language, art, and mathematics. These “symbol-using” means of intelligence have given humans an enhanced predictive power, intuitive awareness, and expanded freedom to manage the circumstances of their lives. This power can be and has been used by we humans to serve our companion creatures, and this power can be and has been used by we humans to oppressively control and disrespect other forms of life and also of the planetary systems of life in which we share. These significant choices made by we humans is an operation of our freedom and thus of both our compassion and our guilt.

When in classical times, religious documents like the Bible took note of this power of humans to dominate the other forms of life, this was taking note of something that was already known for thousands of years. We must not blame the Jewish and Christian scripture writers for inventing human dominance over the other forms of life or for the misuses of that power. Humans have been driving other species into extinction with a reckless use of their advanced powers for at least the last 30 thousand years. Also, when modern Bible lovers use verses about humans dominating other forms of life to justify our vast contemporary misuse of nature, they are not reading the whole Bible. There are many passages in the Psalms and elsewhere that express an awe and respect for the natural world.

And if those verses that refer to this human domination of other forms of life are viewed as simply speaking of the natural power of the human form of consciousness, then Profound Reality has indeed given humans a dominating power over the other forms of life. This plain truth can be used to call our attention to our responsibility for using this “God-given” power to care for this planet, rather than permission to devastate it.

Thomas Berry in his many beautifully written essays has emphasized our need for meaningful narratives that illuminate those huge scopes of facts that make up our physical and biological sciences as well as our human history. For example, instead of using the word “cosmos” suggesting a static reality, Berry has coined the word “cosmogenesis,” thereby suggesting that we see the truth that the natural world has been and still is a progression of eras of emergence quite different than the eras that precede each new era of the natural world.

Within this viewpoint Berry sees the dawn of life on planet Earth as an entirely new form of emergence—“evolution” as compared with the formation of galaxies of stars and planets and the structures of molecular and atomic constituencies. The dawn of the human form of awareness and humanity’s deeper potential for freedom belong to a third new form of cosmic emergence—the cultural, economic, and political history of human social formations. Though the time spans and physical scopes of these three eras of emergence differ greatly, the quality of these shifts is so vast that these three eras compose a meaningful narrative for understanding ourselves as response-able members within this vast cosmogenesis.

Within the story of evolution, Berry also sees some sub-eras of emergence. He claims that in our current time of Earth history, we are experiencing huge changes larger in scope than anything that has happened since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The humans of industrial civilization have made such a huge footprint on this planet that we have bought to an end the Cenozoic Era in which birds, mammals, and finally, humans flourished. We humans are now response-able to choose between two basic qualities for the next era for living forms on this planet. Berry describes this fork in the road of “history” as a choice between creating: (1) a Technozoic Era is which the current trends of industrial civilization continue to destroy the once-flourishing liveliness of this planet or (2) an Ecozoic Era in which we create human societies composed of cultural, economic, and political processes that honor first of all the maintenance of a flourishing planet Earth that provides optimal possibilities for the survival and flourishing of humanity and many other animal companions. Our free devotion to Profound Reality also includes a creative obedience toward maintaining the physical and biological wonders of our Earth.

Approximate Knowledge Perfection

This freedom to have approximate knowledge and only approximate knowledge of Profound Reality applies to all the disciplines of learning. Our learning never arrives at perfection. This is a witness to the limitation of our finite mind and to the finite time we have to educate ourselves. But our approximations of Profound Reality are also our gifts and our glory. There is no use longing for perfect knowledge or for a perfect life. This is it. So let us do our best, however approximate that may be. Living fully this imperfect life is our only perfection.