Beyond Nature

I wish to dispel the notion that natural equates good.  Head toward any hospital for a clear indication that we live in a world where nature is broken.  Even discounting the limitations of human effort and flaws/evils of human will (producing accidents, abuse, neglect, and violence), we spend billions on health and research to stave off nature's onslaught of disease, decay, and disaster.  We take antibiotics against infection, injections for hormones, and i.v.'s for electrolyte and fluid imbalances.  We supplement nutrition, filter blood, rearrange digestion, reroute vessels, transplant organs, implant synthetics, excise cancers.  We do not "let nature take its course," but instead we work continually to counter the course of nature.  Eventually such efforts fail us.  I'm not trying to be nihilistic but point out that our practice does not embody a trust in the natural.

Consider the hostile elements associated with foods we might consider natural.  Aflatoxin produced by fungal growth on organic peanuts causes liver cancer as does patulin from fungus that grow on apples.  The carcinogen ptaquiloside found naturally in the bracken genus of large ferns has been attributed to gastrointestinal cancers; yet certain ferns are used in our dishes.  Many of our common household plants are, in fact, poisonous.  We've needed training or expert guides to distinguish what is suitable for food or not.  The current market capitalizing around designations of "local," "organic," "free range," "vegetarian fed," speaks to sustainability but also what is considered safe, natural, good but it's not all good.

We shelter and shield ourselves to survive; build barriers and HEPA filter, air condition, moisture-wick, humidify, reverse osmosis, sleep number, gore-tex, terraform our environment.  Living does not come naturally nor easily.  We've long concluded the universe is not centered around man, but is likely indifferent and hostile even.  Is that it?  There must be more.
Celebrated science fiction author, Philip K. Dick once wrote:

• We do not have an ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.
  
• Even if all life on our planet is destroyed, there must be other life somewhere which we know nothing of. It is impossible that ours is the only world; there must be world after world unseen by us, in some region or dimension that we simply do not perceive. Even though I can't prove that, even though it isn't logical—I believe it.

What is this idea, this yearning for something else?   What is this longing for an unseen world.  Based on his writings, Philip K. Dick was likely speaking towards other dimensions or alien life.  These aren't the only possible answers.  His comments seems driven by humanity's survival instinct or desires beyond what this life may offer; echoing a yearning for something better, something which this physical nature apparently fall short on delivering.  We may even rage against this nature: human nature, the nature around us.

This life must mean something, no?  Some atheists offer that, "You create your own meaning" because none is offered.  The purer atheists state, "There is no 'meaning.'  All things are dictated by chance and time, ascribing any value to anything is futile."  But theists believe (there's that word again) that there is something more.  PKD identified himself as a panentheist (belief that the universe and God were one and the same).  Therein lies a potential answer, a consciousness that is beyond our fragile, finite, mortal existence with the ability to impart meaning, purpose and value.  Atheists respond by mockingly propping a strawman of the great spaghetti monster—a response which provides a smokescreen but does not offer an alternative answer beyond nature.