Nature and nature’s god, if there is one, and if there is a difference between the two concepts, cares nothing at all about the human concepts of good and evil, or good and evil at all, caring only for efficiency and its maximization but, lacking omniscience, seeks to find efficiency through trial and error, through experimentation which is frequently not only unsuccessful, but results in devastating failures, that is where infinity and eternity create the ideal laboratory. 

We humans refer to the foregoing as evolution, which may well not be a bio-centric concept but rather, applicable to every process in the cosmos, or better yet, the multiverse or best of all, the omniverse, at least for now.  That concept expands as the concept (or fiction) of time is filtered in.

Of course, evolution in a cosmic sense was probably most prominent during the early stages of cosmic evolution, during the first zeptoseconds after whatever first occurred, but continued experimenting with energy and with the smallest possible particulate units which we currently believe to involve quarks and leptons but probably involved a series of predecessors, most of them failed.

I wonder what it was like before the first zeptosecond.  A concept, at least in human terms, that needs light and hydrogen atoms but which obviously had precursors, smaller and shorter until they sought to merge with a time before infinity or eternity had been posited as divine hypotheses, assuming, of course, the improbable existence of divinity.

It must be incredibly comforting to be unconcerned with good or evil, merely enjoying the creative frustrations of the quest for efficiency, a road like, the road to Hell, littered with positive intentions but unconcerned with damnation.

We humans, of course, believe that we know better.  We have concepts of good and evil contradictory to nature’s quest for efficiency and contrary to the dictates of cruel evolution.  We believe ourselves more enlightened, which more than anything confuses us as we have, to date, been utterly unable to abide by the morality and ethics we invent to discredited nature’s cruel quest for efficiency.  But then, comforting hypocrisy is our hall mark. One with which we imbue the verisimilitudes of divinity we create in hopes that those illusions will provide us with answers to unfathomable and hence unanswerable queries, and the most foul among us use the myths we create, to maximize control and power and wealth and hubris.  And they find that efficient, at least in the short term, and hence divine.

We humans, and perhaps all forms of life, are apparently aberrations nature has yet to categorize as failed experiments, failures which, or perhaps who, like Mordred, aspire to supplement their parentage, or progenitor, nature itself, and force it into our own image, one where good and evil exist as relative concepts, useful tools as long as they’re ignored whenever inconvenient.

Observations which my deistic friends of Abrahamic persuasions will find heretical and anathema, at best, but which Elphaba apparently grasped as, exposed to water, she slowly started to melt and in her personal, last instant epiphany, exclaimed: “What a world, what a world!”
_____

© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.