Khader’s universal ethical test

Khader’s universal ethical test makes the universe’s movement from simplicity toward complexity the basis for judging good and evil. It connects that cosmic direction to practical choices, asking whether an action would help or hinder the movement if everyone adopted it. Khader presents the test not merely as a moral rule but as part of a paired challenge to anyone who claims to know the meaning of life: explain both the standard of good and evil and the relationship between consciousness and matter.

Cosmology and the moral criterion

In Khader’s account, the universe began about fifteen billion years ago in near-absolute simplicity and has grown increasingly complex. This tendency toward complexity is built into the universe’s structure and produces successive forms of organization, from birds, bees, trees, and stars to galaxies. Even if humanity were destroyed by a cosmic catastrophe, Khader argues, another expression of comparable complexity would emerge; the process is not dependent on human survival and may be occurring throughout the universe.

Khader identifies the direction of this process as ultimate complexity, which may be called God. The ethical distinction follows from that claim: whatever promotes, enhances, or accelerates the movement toward God is good, while whatever inhibits or prevents it is evil. The test therefore evaluates conduct by its relation to a continuing cosmic process rather than by intention alone.

Applying the test

The practical question is whether an action would help or hold back that movement if everyone in the relevant part of the universe did it. Khader uses war, killing, and smuggling guns to mujaheddin guerrillas as examples of conduct to examine. The universalizing question is meant to establish not only whether an act is good or evil, but why it merits that judgment.

This framework makes consequences central without reducing the test to immediate advantage: an action is assessed by whether its general adoption would advance or obstruct the universe’s movement toward ultimate complexity. Khader’s examples also place the abstract rule beside the violent and politically charged choices in which he is implicated, leaving the test applicable to his own conduct as well as to anyone else’s.

A test for teachers

When Lin recites the cosmological model back to him, Khader listens with his eyes closed and nods, then turns to Lin with evident pleasure. He tells Lin that he has expressed the idea as accurately as Khader himself could, and that hearing it in Lin’s own words makes him happy. The exchange presents the test as something that can be learned and restated, not merely as a pronouncement whose authority depends on Khader’s status.

Khader links the ethical criterion to a second question: what is the relationship between consciousness and matter? His explanation begins with the Big Bang’s singularity, described as nearly infinitely dense and hot yet occupying no space or time as humans know them. From a boiling concentration of light energy, particles, atoms, space, time, and the known forces came into existence; the characteristics given to particles by light become more evident as particles combine in increasingly complex forms.

Khader calls this account an explanation of the relationship between consciousness and matter and turns it into a test for every guru, teacher, prophet, and philosopher who claims to know life’s meaning. Such a claimant must offer both an objective, universally acceptable definition of good and evil and an account of consciousness and matter. In Khader’s formulation, failure to answer either question means the claimant has not passed.