Shattering the crystal sphere - Forum

Make no mistake, the Universe is an amazing, utterly marvelous place. So what a shame to spoil all that marvel by populating it with our little gods, spirits, dreams, all that fact-free supernatural, paranormal garbage and pretend our Meccano-Universe was hammered together and bolted on for our pleasure and benefit, and so all our questions are answered right from the start, almost before they're asked, and nothing is left out and everything is accounted for, in this cute little cosmos we construct, neatly ordered and arranged and put in its own little place, proper and tidy, like cups and saucers in the cupboard.

I suppose we do this, commit this sad sacrilege against existence, because we've decided we can't figure existence out any other way. A shame. All that march of marvels that reality offers us counts for nothing, which is a terrible waste of the truly and totally wondrous. But we have decided we haven't the ability to cope with it. Or the imagination. We must have gods to do all the donkey work.

So, what can we put in the place of gods? And should we worship it?

It occurs to me (and has occurred to others) that evolution might well be at work all the way down, not just in biology but in chemistry and physics, so that it's not just life that must complexify (for some as yet unknown reason) but everything else must do so too (for an as-yet even more unknown reason), right down to the Universe itself. If we're to believe the Big Bangers, the Universe started out simple, as simple as existence can be, and then grew and developed and transmogrified into a phantasmagoria of complication and inexplicable (to us) detail. Natural selection would then be ubiquitous, quite literally a universal phenomenon, an unplanned, unpurposed but inescapable built-in process within existence. And then we would have to find out why. Not philosophically or metaphysically why, but scientifically and logically why. Really why. Assuming the question, Why?, makes sense.

It's easy to get mystical and New Agey about this sort of thing, for there's nothing easier than creating mysticism where there is mystery. But mystery is only lack of knowledge, lack of understanding, which is the norm, the natural state of man. There's nothing special, nothing remarkable or noteworthy about mystery.

Quite often, in order to come to a working arrangement with mysteries, scientists create vast metaphors and vibrant analogies and call these "wave functions" or "multiple worlds" or "force fields"--"quantum fields," "electromagnetic fields," "magnetic fields," "gravitational fields," "axion fields," "Higgs fields," and so forth, to populate their empty ignorance and give to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. But if the/re good physicists, honest ones, they know that all this naming of parts is just a veneer, a finish, to be painted over the real, underlying, and, so far, unfathomable mystery beneath. (I have a vision at this point of Quantum Fields staggering back and, hand to brow, muttering "Godfrey Daniel, I've been hornswoggled!")

Well, we can have mystery, unknowingness, and still not need gods. But we're greedy for Certainty and will stuff ourselves full of it, even when we know in our hearts it is a lie. Of course, being gentlemen and ladies, we don't call it a lie, we call it a mystery, a myth, a story, religion, poetry, a dream. But it is a lie, whatever we call it, and how furious we become when someone brings this to our attention and shatters the crystal sphere we have so carefully and with such meticulousness constructed around us, so that now that the crystal is smashed to pieces, reality pours in and engulfs us.

Oh, I can see why we must have gods. But it's a shame. For reality is marvelous beyond all the gods man has ever created or will create. The trouble is, of course, reality owes nothing to us.

Is it a comedy or a tragedy that we have composed for ourselves? I'm not sure, for the production has large and liberal dollops of both. Perhaps then it's just as well to laugh at the human condition, the man-made human condition, for otherwise we wouldn't be able to breathe for the tears and hiccups.

Convictions, said Nietzsche, are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. But another great enemy of the truth is just the opposite of conviction: indifference. The Roman Catholic Church, which, like Nietzsche, knows something about conviction, has a name for this apathy: acedia (or accidie), which is laziness of spirit, idleness of soul. Between mindless conviction and spiritual uncaring, truth plods a perilous path.

And yet, it moves. Slowly and unsurely, often enough at the pace of an arthritic sloth, it moves. Never mind the postmoderns, the relativists, the neo-Kuhnians, it moves. There is a progress, real, not imagined, and there is beauty in this. Anyone who bothers to learn something about the history of ideas knows this. Our knowledge (though not necessarily our wisdom) advances and improves over time. There are setbacks, calamities, disasters, letters to the editor, but the overall direction is, amazingly enough, forward, just as the course of natural selection dictates, whatever some biologists may say as they condemn us in their righteous wrath for what they call our hubris, our conviction that life is part of a greater game called "Evolution of Novelties of Increasing Complexity by Means of Natural Selection at Least in the Long Run." Those who deny this, whether scientist or non-scientist, are the Disillusioned, those who have lost their little gods and as a result hate everything. Having thrived and thrille d on illusions that promised the devout the gift of Knowing for Sure, if only they worshipped them, with no questions asked, or even contemplated (for thought is treason), the Believers came at long last to realize their folly (as Believers sometimes do) and, like children who wake up on Christmas Eve night and see that Santa Claus is merely their father and mother tiptoeing and giggling around the tree, decide to hate their parents the rest of their lives for having deceived them. Truth as trauma.