The Anomaly that is Man

[Jenny A]

Was having an exchange with someone recently about my de-conversion and among the things he asked was...

What do you make of the strange coincidence that man stands apart from creation, encompassing it and acting as a sub-creator? The idea that man can seemingly explain everything but will never fully explain himself and the bizarre correspondence between reality and his mind? ...what Walker Percy describes as being Lost in the Cosmos?

Aside from there being a bit of an argument from ignorance mixed up in there. Personally, I don't see man as standing apart from "creation" but rather continuous with and fully encompassed by nature. The bizarre correspondence between reality and his mind, I see as being sensibly explained by evolution both as a product of our adaptation to the environment in one sense (our brains accurately interpreting what we perceive) and also as a by product of our more developed brains (our capacity for beliefs, advanced abstraction and concept formation). The same goes for our acting as "sub-creator". Is it an strange coincidence that we are very much the only ones that ended up like this? Sure, but it hardly amounts to anything more than that.

Would be interested in other perspectives on this question.

I think the person quoted doesn't know what the word coincidence means. But setting that aside, I think what he or she meant is that humans are singular in that we can explain everything. But that's not right either. We do seek to explain everything, but we sure haven't managed to do it yet.

Religions sometimes purport to have explained everything, but since the explanations have no predictive power, it's obvious they have not. During the Age of Reason people thought they were close to putting together an encyclopedia explaining everything, but it's over 300 years later and the goal looks farther rather than closer.

I'd say the thing that really sets us apart from the rest of the animal world is how busy we are looking trying to nail down just what it is that sets us apart from the animal world. We may indeed be "lost in the cosmos" but I don't think it's a sign of anything other than having a highly developed brain. And there's no particular reason for thinking we are the singular owners of such a brain. It's a big universe.