Thank Goodness

    A friend who professes to atheism uses the phrase "thank physics", as, I suppose, a parallel construction to an offensive 'thank god".
    The impulse to thank persists, even without positing a personalized recipient of the thanks. Surely, the health benefits of thankfulness have been amply demonstrated. Gratitude not only arises, we cultivate it for our own benefit and well-being. I conjecture that it is largely this impulse to give thanks that gives rise to a belief in deities. We are simply unaccustomed to non-dualism, to gratitude having no personal object.
    And yet "thank physics" rings false to my ear. Physics reified as a recipient of thanks? Ouch. I stick to an older formulation.
    Thank goodness.
    After all, what is goodness? It is a marker of appropriate reciprocity. It shows that we belong here in our world, in our life, that we are part of this fullness containing that which we find good.
    Goodness inheres in the interplay between what we are and what the world is from which we arise. It shows up in contact between organisms, between an organism and an ecosystem, an organism and a product or creation or aspect of another organism or ecosystem.
    Our perceptual systems are necessary for us to know goodness, but they are not sufficient. The sense of taste detects goodness in the apple, in the sashimi, in the chocolate custard. Are they there? No, they're in the encounter. There's no goodness in an apple for a housecat, nor in sashimi for a giraffe.
    The things and individuals, creations and complex systems we encounter are necessary for us to know goodness, but they are not sufficient. A warm bed provides no goodness when we are ready to go play. Nor a lovely sunset when we are in a dark room. There can be great goodness in music if it is neither so loud as to be painful no so soft as to be inaudible. There can likewise be great irritation or plain old boredom. Our senses need to encounter and be ready for these things in order for goodness to happen. The tree that falls unheard in the forest may exist, but whether it has goodness depends on whether your nest full of eggs was at its top or you were waiting for a sunny patch on the ground to open up so that you can sprout and grow.
     At root, goodness occurs in biological systems encountering and recognizing what they need. Goodness is a result of coevolution, of survival of the fittest. Not the fittest in the sense of having big muscles and not smoking. The fittest in the sense that my environment fits me like a glove. I can eat and breathe and shelter myself with what it provides, It can incorporate my CO2 and my dung and the erosion my footfalls create back into its dynamic equilibrium so that we sustain each other. That's fitness.
    Goodness is the experience of recognizing fitness. It is the communication of that perceptive recognition to the ongoing narrative that is our sense of self. Our senses respond to our encounters, and our mind constructs a world containing goodness.
    So goodness is the gauge of our congruence with what we encounter; of whether it is appropriate and nourishing for us as organisms. Goodness marks the reciprocity of biology, the life we are part of, which cannot occur without give and take, perceive and respond. Thank biology.
    Thank goodness.