Attack of the Effable

Scanning from East to West in the U.S. you get a sort of shorthand recapitulation of the country’s spiritual evolution, from Calvinist Plymouth Rock Pilgrims to California Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown whose girlfriend, rock warbler magnifique Linda Ronstadt, was known to roller skate around the swinging gubernatorial manse. We seemed to shed or modify certain doctrinaire beliefs as we headed west. Possibly the Donner Pass incident had a dampening effect on Faith in Things Unseen. Just a theory. 

Long before the church-going, buckle-crazed pilgrims, humans would tilt their little heads and puzzle nourishingly at the wheeling seasons, the depthless blue dome of midday, Tik Tok influencer income. Wonder suffused daily life. Then came the Age of Enlightenment, also known as The Reductionist Downer. The Answer People burst in clapping their hands like schoolmarms and began hollering explanations. Newton, Kant, Rousseau, Voltaire, Locke, laissez-faire liturgist Adam Smith, Hume; these overwrought smarty-pants knew it all, and they waved their remonstrative forefingers in our faces and scolded us for our centuries of childish attraction to the ineffable. Suddenly the self-impressed world was all about the Effable, excuse me. By the time Bohr and Schrödinger “figured out” the atom, the puzzling began anew. Something about cats? 

Know-it-Alls Bring the Party Down

Emboldened by the idea that a whole Age of Man would soon be named after their blabbermouth exploits, these Reason-crazed thugs began lustily dismantling supernature itself, turning a flower (for example) into a numbingly explicable machine with a pistil, a stamen, a peduncle, and a bunch of other utterly practical, obscene-sounding parts. Okay, guys, we get it! For about 150 years a steady and pressurized diet of Science, Logic, and Rational Self-Congratulation was pumped into the upturned yap of western civilization like boiled corn through a foie gras duck funnel. Scientific rigor became hip, religion became the fat, slow-moving target of the leering New Science Class, and lots of serious-looking guys in frankly pitiable wigs began the excited but joyless business of slapping away humankind’s distracted thousand-yard stare. 

From this distance we can now say this has not been completely helpful. The Age of Enlightenment was never more ruinous than when it infected the Star Wars franchise in the bet-hedging Phantom Menace episode, wherein the previously mystical Force, once reverently described by Obi-Wan as a kind of unifying field of positive energy, is awkwardly reimagined as a side-effect of swarming amoeboid midi-chlorians in the Jedi plumbing. I guess Lucas lost his nerve. Industrial Light and Magic? Try Industrial Light and Age of Reason Fraidy-Cats. Hey, science downers. Go talk in the garage or something! 

Complainants Please Take a Number 

But what’s to complain? These rationalists are on our side, right? We all want to get to the bottom of All This, right? Yeah, but the swagger. Something happened back there during the Age of Reason. Empiricism adopted a know-it-all smirk. The very idea of an unknowable Creator-Thing brought on rationalist giggling, so much so that even when the Creator-Thing could be shown to maybe be inanimate and unconscious but mechanically willful, the peeps got their Newtonian panties in a humanist bunch. Eye-rolling condescension increasingly colored the conversation.

Daydreaming was thrown out with the bathwater and mocked in televised debates. Wonder fell out of fashion, more or less for all time. It was a big bummer, especially if you were a kid who some decades before had productively spent most of his school day staring out the 3rd grade window at that one tree dancing in the breeze. 

These questing Academic types took a perfectly Spellbinding Search for Meaning and turned it into a Quantifiable Search for Meaning. If you’re working with gray flannel, your suit is going to be a drag, however masterful the stitchwork. Once waterboarding was legally defined as torture, some wanted the debate to include mortarboarding; the pedagogical pursuit of an Answer that is taken in like a particularly expensive communion wafer. 

Molecule-to-Manwich

Full disclosure; I Believe, more or less. How’s that for a bold confession? It is worth remembering that in the full flush of his Origin of Species triumph Darwin angrily waved away the deeper question about the origin of actual life, calling the very inquiry “rubbish.” He may have been concerned with book sales, but I speculate. Had he known about the today’s fealty to abiogenesis – the spill-and-spell madness of legible proteins assembling from free-floating amino acids in primordial gumbo – he would’ve been even more incensed. Was there a Maker? Maybe, and that’s final! But I’m both galled and amused by the condescension that typifies the Evolution Team’s demeanor in a discussion comparing the two world views. They are both faith-based, but only one of the teams knows this. 

The scientific case for All This having been flung out of literal Nothing (“ex nihilo” is the term drawled with difficulty by gin-soaked rationalists in the wee hours) is as sublimely fabulist as a giant bearded ghost in a terrycloth robe.

You don’t have to be a religious person to believe in miracles; you have to be a mathematician. If All This is an explosive accident, the math stacks up spectacularly against our most secular intuitions. The phenomenon has been called the Fine-Tuned Universe and comes with its own army of detractors and debaters; the usual clanging parade. The mathematical likelihood of Everything – from hydrogen to granite to ham sandwiches to Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River (*sigh!*) – having burst from a cosmic explosion has been calculated as that of a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and accidentally assembling a commercial jet. As living things, each of us is a philosophically implausible supernova. At the very very least.

Cosmological Wankel Rotary Engine 

Our race’s post Age of Enlightenment aversion to supernature and the Unknown has us clinging to a militant common sense that leaves little room for this sort of mathematical magic OR a Supreme Being, a So-So Being, or even a non-sentient machine whose cosmological Wankel Rotary Engine only means to let the gears guide our omniverse to a necessary and possibly anti-climactic Cosmic Self-Regard. 

Let the Rationalist gang chortle their way through as many televised debates as they want. It looks to me like the Theists and Rationalists aren’t all that far apart, really – two sides of a loaded coin tossed with finger crossed (not as hard as it sounds). It’s mostly nomenclature and ego. C’mon, Dawkins and Chopra. Can’t we just get along? Something is clearly happening Out There, and In Here. Wonder and Faith inform both arguments and we don’t know it. Or as the faux First Lady of California once memorably sang:

“You and I travel to the beat of a different drum…you can’t see the forest for the trees…”