I've been reading in Karl Keating’s Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on ‘Romanism’ by ‘Bible Christians,’ and concurrently reading Saved In Hope, Pope Benedict XVI’s second encyclical, the latter of which led me to the following passage in Paul’s letter to the Hebrews: “Let us then stop discussing the rudiments of Christianity. We ought not to be laying over again the foundations of faith in God and of repentance from the deadness of our former ways, about cleansing rites and laying-on of hands, about the resurrection of the dead and eternal judgement. Instead let us advance toward maturity, and so we shall, if God permits.” (Heb. 6, 1-3)
This brought to mind nothing more powerfully than the fundamentalist “prayer parties” that my sister Carla used to drag me to when I was in high school. She was hellbent to save my soul in those days. But I was having none of it, and now I can clearly see why. These “Bible Christians” were people who couldn’t get their religion beyond the kindergarten level, and didn’t want to. They thought they were all the more blessed for it. It was all about creating an emotional atmosphere and not much else, which explains why so many of the “Jesus freaks” at my school turned right around and dropped their “Christian” pretensions the moment the party wound down.
That in turn got me to thinking about some of the other reading I’ve done recently, Francis S. Collins’ The Language of God in particular. More than 80 years after the Scopes Trial, Darwin is still a flashpoint between believers and non-, and Richard Dawkins, the Al Franken of the “new atheism,” has only made matters worse by going around squawking that Darwin definitively proves the truths of atheism, that anyone who questions any part of Darwin’s theory is a science-hating moron, and by god, that’s that! Well, no, that’s not “that.” Scientists and philosophers who write about God are split on the subject of Darwin; some, like Michael Behe, think Darwin’s theory is on pretty weak ground. Others, like Collins, see the evidence for it as undeniably strong, but admonish evangelicals who reflexively scream “blasphemy!” at the very mention of Darwin’s name that they shouldn’t be so afraid of him. The Catholic Church wisely stays out of it, the last two popes having simply said that even if natural selection becomes a given, it’s all part of God’s plan.
Which leads me to these thoughts, which I jotted down last Wednesday:
It seems to me that religious fundamentalism is profoundly insulting to God. Its adherents claim strict fealty to the word as it appears on the printed page and assume that they are expressing their devotion to God and His word by clapping on horse-blinders, believing the Garden of Eden had a geographic location and telling themselves, “God loves me, and therefore I don’t have to think.” Setting aside the obvious absurdity of insisting on a word-for-word literal interpretation of a translation, since the Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, while American fundamentalists are reading it in English, what they do is to impose the limits of their puny imaginations on God Himself. Fundamentalism denies God one, no, three aspects of His glory, namely, that he is the greatest architect, philosopher and poet in all the universe. Jimmy Swaggart doesn’t deny metaphor to Robert Frost, but he denies it to God. Fundamentalists, with the rejection of form, history and metaphor which they mistake for devotion, actually belittle God’s majesty. They think they’re honoring God with their narrow little minds. Actually, they are dishonoring Him by assuming that the scope of His vision, and the depth of his capability of expression, is no broader than theirs. Why did God give us the imagination and cognitive abilities that he denied even our closest relatives among the higher vertebrates, if He didn’t want us to glimpse and appreciate, if possibly never fully understand, the majesty of His creation better than they do?
And yet fundamentalists want to burn copies of The Origin of Species for the same reason Dawkins would like to remove Bibles from the public library and replace them with Darwin. Dawkins puts as much faith in Darwin as Swaggart does in Genesis, and for the same reason, only turned on its head. Darwin is a sacred text to Dawkins (and much of the “new atheist” crowd) because he sees in it (as do they) the definitive proof of of the truths of atheism, which is his religion. The Swaggarts of the world fear Darwin for the same reason. In truth, Dawkins is unjustifiably smug and Swaggart needlessly hostile. The evidence for natural selection is extremely strong, although in fairness to the churchy crowd, there are phenomena that don’t quite square with Darwin’s baby-step vision of the development of species, such as the Cambrian explosion 530 million years ago, which the fossil evidence supports and which even Darwin admitted gave his theory some problems. But at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter all that much I think. Human beings are in fact closely related to the higher apes. There is no getting around that fact; Jimmy Swaggart might just as well try to argue that Fred and Wilma Flintstone were real people. (and there are some fundamentalists who come close to this level of risibility: the so-called Young Earth Creationism crowd, which insists that the planet can’t be more than a few thousand years old, thinks dinosaurs and people coexisted at some point, like they do in the Flintstones' city of Bedrock.)
But having said that, and even admitting that certain behaviors are common between humans and higher vertebrates, there is still that quantum leap that separates man from even his closest ape relatives, and no, it isn’t simply his higher intelligence. It’s a little mystery called imagination.
Animals simply do not possess it. No animal, even the most clever, can imagine itself out of its current frame of reference and into another. For animals there may be a vague “yesterday” in the sense that they remember having supper last night and expect to have it again tonight, but there is no “yesterday” or “tomorrow” in their cognition. By the same token, as I think John Updike pointed out somewhere, animals, even when they seem to be behaving in a perfectly beastly manner, (no pun intended) as when a cat plays with a mouse or a lion devours a baby zebra, are not being “cruel” as humans understand it. They can’t be. “Cruelty” is beyond their capabilities. Cruelty is the enjoyment of your victim's suffering. To enjoy your victim’s suffering requires the capability to imagine yourself in your victim’s position. Animals can’t do that. A lion isn’t being cruel when it eats a baby zebra, it’s only being hungry. It sees the baby zebra as food, not a victim. Anyone who has ever watched a cat play with a mouse has probably also watched a cat play with a ball. To the cat there’s no difference: mouse, ball, both are just things that move and cats like to play with things that move. That the mouse is frightened and suffering doesn’t – can’t – occur to a cat. He doesn’t have the imagination.
Our imaginations get sent on some strange errands in the name of an agenda. Take the cliché about an infinite number of monkeys jumping up and down on an infinite number of typewriters for an infinite amount of time eventually producing the complete works of Shakespeare. This came up Friday night in the Voice of America newsroom. One of my young newswriting colleagues invoked those monkeys one more time, and objected when I dismissed the notion. Well, it is, actually, rhetorical hogwash, a bit of locker-room sophistry on the level of "If God can do anything, can he make a rock so heavy he can't pick it up?"
“Infinite number of monkeys,” “infinite number of typewriters” and “infinite amount of time” are all impossible concepts. The universe itself is finite: it’s roughly 14.5 billion years old, and even if you had a trillion monkeys and a trillion typewriters, probability still dictates that the universe would have to be much older than it is before they even came up with “To be or not to be.” Don’t take my word for it, ask a mathematician. But setting that argument aside, those infernal typing monkeys we’re always hearing about would be performing nothing more than the act of jumping up and down. Not one would imagine – could imagine – that he or she was doing anything else. We, on the other hand, can imagine an infinite number of typing monkeys. Think that doesn’t make us somehow quantitatively different from the monkeys, and on a more important level than the fact that they can swing from trees better than we can, and we both have opposable thumbs? Chimps and people can share the same space, eat much of the same food, watch the same TV shows and even enjoy each other’s company. Bond in friendship. But no chimpanzee is ever going to build a TV set, write a novel or fly a Boeing 757 from Minneapolis to Atlanta.
Clearly, there is a wide gap between chimps and people, despite all of our similarities. Dawkins and his crowd say it’s all an accident, and when mathematical probabilities introduce problems for that idea, they resort to a concept even more far-fetched in a lot of people’s eyes than the idea of God: the so-called “Landscape” or multiverse, the idea that our universe is just one of many, perhaps an infinity of universes. That allows them to believe that even if our universe appears to be “fine-tuned” to support our form of life, (which it does) that nevertheless such an idea can be dismissed as mere chance: in an infinite number of universes, one simply had to “get it right.”
Cool. Dawkins, as has been pointed out, prefers many universes to one God. Fine and dandy. But how does the same guy who claims that the idea of God should be subjected to the same scientific analysis as any other idea, put forth as an alternative an idea that’s every bit as unprovable? Stephen Hawking has come up with an elegant little piece of mathematical legerdemain that makes such a notion theoretically possible, but when the sun sets and the bar opens, it’s the cosmological equivalent of “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Now the medieval scholastics may have been wasting their time debating such questions, but stop and think about what’s implicit in the idea that they were able to imagine such a thing. It’s mind-boggling.
The poet William Blake actually considered the world of the imagination more valid and more real, because having more symbolic value than the world around him. And he wasn’t crazy, either. He was perfectly sane, as are most Hindus who speak of the “veil of Maya,” essentially the same idea Blake was putting forth in his own version of Christian mysticism.
Some years ago I wrote a little poem about Blake, which I think is as suitable a way as any to conclude this rant:
Blake
Challenged to sketch
The soul of a flea,
He jumped at the chance:
“That’s it! Can’t you see?”
Then he glanced, unimpressed
At London’s gray streets.
“Reality’s nothing
But a chain of defeats.”
1/30/96
No comments:
Post a Comment