Prometheus Unbound

I think that these two questions, when answered with two yeses, represent the thrust of what Intelligent Design proponents are up to in their critiques of evolution, as William Dembski recently (and concisely) stated at his blog:

The theory [of evolution] purports to give a materialistic account of life’s development once life is already here, but it has a gaping hole at the start since matter gives no evidence of being able to organize itself from non-life into life. The fossil record, especially the sudden emergence of most animal body plans in the Cambrian explosion, sharply violates Darwinian expectations about the historical pattern of evolutionary change. The nano-engineering found in the DNA, RNA, and proteins of the cell far exceeds human engineering and remains completely unexplained in Darwinian terms. Darwin lovers are quick to reject such complaints.  After all, as novelist Barbara Kingsolver declares, Darwin’s idea of natural selection is “the greatest, simplest, most elegant logical construct ever to dawn across our curiosity about the workings of natural life. It is inarguable, and it explains everything.”

Dembski seems to be critiquing evolution on solid grounds here. I know he is an Evangelical, and that he is thus highly motivated to make such critiques, but my question is this: do these lines of critique, with regard to evolution, have at least some validity? I think that they have. If I’m wrong about this, what, as an agnostic, am I missing?

Dembski, in the same blog post, continues:

Any theory that explains everything and that can and must be true is either the greatest thing since sliced bread or the greatest swindle ever foisted on gullible intellectuals. The intelligent design community takes the latter view, siding here with Malcolm Muggeridge, who wrote: “I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially the extent to which it’s been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books in the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has.” Still, it’s easy to understand why so flimsily a supported theory garners such vast support. It provides the creation story for an atheistic worldview. If atheism is true, then something like Darwinian evolution must follow.

I’m not sure which side—the Intelligent Design side or the Darwinist side—will be laughed at, say, a century from now. I suspect that it will be the Intelligent Design hypothesis, at least in terms of its current critiques of evolutionary biology, but it’s hard for me, as a nonscientist, to say. My hunch is that the gaps in evolutionary theory that Intelligent Design currently exploit will be filled over the next century in ways that will make the evolutionary conclusion even more compelling than it appears to be now.

But notice that this is merely a prediction, a guess really. And whether you’re a scientist or not, when it comes to the future, that’s really all we have. In the meantime, a bit of humility might suit all of us—religionist, agnostic, and atheist alike. I think that Dembski often comes across as unduly arrogant and overconfident, as do, say, atheists like Jerry Coyne and Richard Dawkins. Everybody seems just so darn cocksure, as if the other side consisted of fools. But competing confidence poses should not be mistaken for anything other than that. Maybe at profound and fundamental levels, both sides have elements to their arguments that, a hundred years from now, will be shown to be not just wrong, but spectacularly so.

Let’s see what happens. And keep an open mind.

Decoupling religion from war is not an easy thing. The poet Stephen Spender, in reflecting upon World War II, wrote these lines (in his poem, “Rejoice in the Abyss”):

Against an acrid cloud of dust, I saw

The houses kneel, revealed each in its abject

Prayer, my prayer as well: ‘Oh, God,

Spare me the lot that is my neighbor’s.’

The impulse to pray for your own survival, and leave the fate of neighbors and enemies to God (as a matter of indifference) is natural, but it is not in accord with love. So in a secular age should love, in the name of Darwinian survival, be abandoned? Should the fate of neighbors and enemies be a matter of indifference to any sane person trying to survive in a competitive, unjust, absurd, and tragic world? Or should you wed your own fate to following love and an expansion of concern, even at the expense of your own life?

What matters? What should matter?

Just asking.

Not for human pleasure. Think Darwin. The Washington Post today on the subject:

There are two contending ideas. One is that the red pigments are somehow involved in a Dunkirk-like operation mounted each fall in which the tree salvages useful chemical compounds from the dying leaf and transports them back into the wood for future use. The alternative idea is that redness is a signal to leaf-sucking (and tree-damaging) insects called aphids, which are on the move in the fall and looking for places to lay their overwintering eggs. Aphids don’t like the color red, and the message is: Don’t lay them here; it’s not a good place to raise young aphids.

You may give a red maple leaf to someone for their pleasure, but the maple leaf itself is in it for the tree’s pleasure alone. Not a terribly poetic thought, and it somehow makes it more difficult to pray (were I so inclined). Here’s a poem by James Wright (“Trying to Pray”, 1963):

This time, I have left my body behind me, crying

In its dark thorns.

Still,

There are good things in this world.

It is dusk.

It is the good darkness

Of women’s hands that touch loaves.

The spirit of a tree begins to move.

I touch leaves.

I close my eyes, and think of water.

—————

The above poem can be found in Jay Parini’s anthology of poems titled The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry (p. 1316). It’s an exceptionally good anthology of poetry, by the way, and creative in its arrangement (by genres and themes as opposed to chronology).

Those who follow this blog know what I think about this (strict evolutionary naturalism is primarily a philosophical position), but Phillip Johnson and William Provine debated the issue back in 1994 at Stanford University, and I think the exchange is worth viewing. Here’s part 1 of 11:

And the original Tiny Tim:

Hattip: CCM104

Oh, and the original, original Tiny Tim:

It’s okay to be different.

Sometimes we think that if we could just have a stunning visual demonstration of something we believe in, that it would convince the nonbelievers in our midst. So it is that alien enthusiasts fantasize about UFOs on the White House lawn, and Evangelical enthusiasts fantasize about Jesus coming in the clouds (“See, we told you so!”).

But what, then, do atheist evolutionary biologists, whose beliefs about evolution are resisted by large majorities of the human population, fantasize about? Well, if you are Richard Dawkins, you fantasize about the recovery of prehuman primate species as an example of something that would “change everything.” 

But would the recovery of, say, a Neanderthal from recovered genetic material, or the creation of a genetic hybrid between chimps and humans really “change everything”?

Though Richard Dawkins thinks it might, I’m not so sure. Most persuadable and reasonably educated people already know that the Earth is old, that evolution occurred (and is occuring), and that we share a common ancestor with other hominids. They’ve seen artist reconstructions of these creatures. They’ve seen images of their bones. And they have read what science writers have to say about them. I think it would be a shock and novelty to see, for example, a real Neanderthal baby in a human crib, and it would be a fascinating story following its birth—and it would have a Truman Show quality to it—but I just doubt that it would cause an earthquake in the psyche of most people.

I think that Dawkins is being a bit naive about how a piece of evidence functions in the minds of the determined-to-be unconvinced. I would guess, for example, that most fundamentalists, though rocked backward a bit by news of the birth of a baby Neanderthal, would ultimately be unswayed to believe in evolution by such an event. Fundamentalists are very, very good at ad hoc  reasoning, and would quickly come up with some bullshit to explain the cute little baby Neanderthal.

I can think of a quick rationalization that would preserve their worldview already: “See—the book of Revelation is full of monsters—and scientists are creating the very monsters that will mark the last days!”

See how easy that was?

Happy Halloween!

Right-wing radio host and Evangelical, Hugh Hewitt, interviewed atheist Richard Dawkins on Tuesday. I thought this part of the exchange was telling:

HH: I’m talking about the whole cosmos. Where did that come from, 13 billion years ago?

RD: It came from the big bang, which is not a complex process. It’s a simple process.

HH: And what preceded the big bang?

RD: Well, physicists won’t answer that question. They will say that time itself began in the big bang, and so the question what preceded it is illegitimate.

HH: What do you think?

RD: I’m not enough of a physicist to understand what I’m saying, but I have to say that that’s what physicists say.

HH: So when you consider before the big bang, what does Richard Dawkins think was there?

RD: I don’t consider the question, because I recognize that it’s an intuitively appealing question. I recognize that I, along with everybody else, wants to ask that question. Then I talk to physicists who say you can no more ask what came before the big bang than you can ask what’s north of the North Pole.

Dawkins answer really doesn’t impress me because, for quite a while now, physicists have speculated that there is indeed something before the big bang: multiverses (and one of them may have spawned our local big bang). But if there are no multiverses prior to our own big bang universe, then you can’t simply say it’s not a meaningful question to ask what is prior to the big bang. Something has to account for the event itself. If you posit, for example, virtual quantum fluctuations in the “nothingness” for why the big bang occurred at all, why should that nothingness “prior” to the big bang have ever quantum fluctuated at all?

The bald assertion of “that’s just the way it is” and “existence exists” is no answer. It’s a statement of the problem. And it’s telling that Dawkins claims that he doesn’t “consider the question” at all—as if it is a mark of intellectual discipline and clarity to bypass the question. What Dawkins said gets very close to Daniel Dennett’s notion of avoiding “deepities.” Dawkins clearly considers the question, “What happened prior to the big bang?”, to be a deepity akin to “What’s north of the North Pole?”

Mathematician David Berlinski (from his new book of collected essays, The Deniable Darwin, p. 422):

At some time in the history of the universe, there were no human minds, and at some time later, there were. Within the blink of a cosmic eye, a universe in which all was chaos and void came to include hunches, beliefs sentiments, raw sensations, pains, emotions, wishes, ideas, images, inferences, the feel of rubber, Schadenfreude, and the taste of banana ice cream. A sense of surprise is surely in order. How did that get here?

The list is a bit Freudian at the end (rubber, echoes of Freud in Schadenfreude, and banana ice cream), but his point is well taken (pun intended, I suppose). How, exactly, did the mind get here from matter? Strange alchemy! Base matter turned to mental gold!

In other words, how is strict atheist materialism different from 16th century alchemy? What if mind can’t, in fact, be reduced to base matter or derived from base matter? Maybe the ontological mystery (the mystery of being) extends not just to matter but to mind. Maybe there are two irreducible things in the universe (matter and mind). At the very least (and given our current state of knowledge), the inference that mind might not derive from matter is not unreasonable, is it?

Is it?

I mean think about it. Who would have predicted (if anyone had been there) that the young and hot matter at the Big Bang would cool and congeal over time into, well, us? Isn’t that absurd? It’s like being told that hot water, on the way to cooling down and turning to ice, passes through a stage in which it loves the Beatles and the smell of coffee, and can talk about the plays of William Shakespeare with you at your kitchen table! Like the roiling water in a pot on your stove top, that hot thing at the Big Bang doesn’t appear that it would eventually do such ridiculous things. Matter isn’t like that. But here we are. Base metal turned to gold is a fancy that has nothing on what actually did happen. The cooling carbon “steam” from the stove tops of the stars cooled into us.

Ab. Surd.

This looks good, and it’s hosted by a British scientist (Lord Robert Winston). Winston wrote a children’s book on evolution, and also claims to believe in God (whatever that means). In any case, here’s part 1 of 18:

Most American conservatives (presumably) follow the expert advice of their family physicians when they are told that, say, they need to see a specialist with regard to a symptom, or need surgery. And they might well go under the knife on the advice of no more than one doctor. But when politics or religion enter the equation, suddenly the consensus of highly trained experts is set under extreme suspicion. Here are just three examples:

• Evolution. Scientists are as certain as they can reasonably be that the Earth is very old and that plants and animals have changed over time. But lots of conservatives make it a point of pride to simply ignore what geologists and biologists say about such matters, and continue to read Genesis as if it were, well, a science book (and not poetry).
• The Greenhouse Effect. Professional climatologists are certain that the amount of energy in the earth’s atmosphere is increasing, and over the course of the next century this fact will have serious, if not catastrophic, effects upon the Earth’s climate. Most conservatives yawn.
• Swine flu vaccination. Again, experts in virology are universally agreed on this. Get your flu shot. The benefits far outweigh the risks. (Therefore, Rush Limbaugh won’t be getting his.)

Shouldn’t expert advice on the Large Hadron Collider also be in this category of things that conservatives ignore? Isn’t it evil socialist and secular Europe and Ivy League elites delivering these soothing “expert” pronouncements?

Still, it’s curious to me how little attention is being paid to this among American conservatives. Perhaps it is because there is no obvious way to score political points against Barack Obama by doing so. Or maybe conservative are, subconsciously, death worshipers (akin to the mid-20th century Spanish fascists who infamously used as a slogan, “Viva la morte!”) and kind of want the end of the world (so that they can go to heaven). 

Below is what Wikipedia says about the Large Hadron Collider’s safety. If conservatives were consistent intellectually, they would express wild alarm about the safety of the collider for exactly the same reasons that they doubt evolution, the greenhouse effect, and the need for vaccination against the swine flu:

• experts have motives other than pure science;
• experts cannot be trusted to tell the truth; and
• people, including scientists, are foolish to express themselves too confidently with regard to complex matters (unless there is a verse in the Bible that explicitly supports their expressions of confidence, in which case they can then engage in whatever wild speculation that they want).

Here’s what Wikipedia says about the CERN collider: 

The upcoming experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have sparked fears among the public that the LHC particle collisions might produce doomsday phenomena, involving the production of stable microscopic black holes or the creation of hypothetical particles called strangelets.^[44] Two CERN-commissioned safety reviews have examined these concerns and concluded that the experiments at the LHC present no danger and that there is no reason for concern,^[45][46][47] a conclusion expressly endorsed by the American Physical Society, the world’s second largest organization of physicists.^[48]  

In our future, at least according to this video (see the 4:00 minute mark):

In the preface to Richard Dawkins’s book, Unweaving the Rainbow  (1998, xi), he writes:

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc  magic.

Too late. The universe starts with the tricked out, the ad hoc, the capricious. As the poet Charles Wright put it in his poem, “Sitting Outside at the End of Autumn” (1995):

Everything comes from something,

                                                  only something comes from nothing.

And read Dawkins’s quote again, this time very carefully. Don’t you detect the whiff of, well, the argument of the theologian concerning suffering?:

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc  magic.

In other words, notice that the quote, with very little tinkering, is in the form of a theological argument! Indeed, it is essentially the conclusion to the Book of Job! Watch again (with my two little additions in italics):

I believe that an orderly universe created by God, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc  magic (such as a universe that arrives by contingency, without purpose, out of nothing, then cobbles itself together blindly, by chance and natural selection).

Richard Dawkins imagines himself an atheist, but in the form of his argumentation here, he displays all the marks of someone who can’t quite let go of certain religious scaffoldings and ideas. Like the theist,

• Dawkins longs for an aesthetically “beautiful” and “wonderful” relation to the cosmos.
• Dawkins does not want a universe that is “capricious”, “ad hoc“, or “magical”, but one that is lawful and underlaid by an ultimately comprehensible order.
• Dawkins looks forward to a time when the existing appearances of incomprehensibility in the world will yield to the eschaton  of full comprehensibility.

Oh, and might I add that Dawkins writes his books for the purposes of persuasion and because he thinks that they serve to advance a moral position. That is, he treats human freedom and morality as if they are things of real value that actually exist (even as his materialist position insists that freedom and morality are illusory and contingent artifacts of more fundamental determinate processes, and without any objective content or ultimate warrant).

Can we say that the way Richard Dawkins has cobbled together his worldview (a bit of atheism here, a bit of theism there, and a whole lot of cognitive dissonance holding these divergent ideas together along the way) is just a bit, well, capricious?

Here’s Dawkin’s quote one more time:

I believe that an orderly universe, one indifferent to human preoccupations, in which everything has an explanation even if we still have a long way to go before we find it, is a more beautiful, more wonderful place than a universe tricked out with capricious, ad hoc  magic.

And Job said, Amen!

The poem below by Walt Whitman expresses emotions akin to my own after I had recently spent a full day, and most of an evening, attending lectures by Richard Dawkins and other scientists at an atheist conference in Burbank, Ca.:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before

    me,

When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,

    and measure them,

When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with

    much applause in the lecture-room,

How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,

Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Is this reaction to science on the part of Whitman, and my sympathy for it, a sign that an irrational spirit grips us? Or is this a proper and sane reaction to an excess of reductionism? Was William Wordsworth right—or merely hysterical—when he said, “We murder to dissect?”

Are the poets at war with the scientists?

Nope.

Canto 56 is part of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam, a long poem of 131 cantos, and it was written in 1850, fully nine years prior to the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species  (1859). Why, then, is Canto 56 linked in the public mind with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution? Richard Dawkins, for example, writes at the beginning of his brilliant and disturbing classic, The Selfish Gene (1976), and with his characteristic sharpness,

I think ”nature red in tooth and claw” sums up our modern understanding of natural selection admirably. (2)

But Tennyson, as I say, wrote his phrase before Darwin’s great book.

So what gives?

Might it be that Tennyson, being a poet, felt, ahead of others, in his muse’s bones, the philosophical (and therefore, emotional) implications of what the new biological and geological sciences were discovering about the Earth, and anticipated the sublime horror and terror to which they were beginning to testify?

Below is Tennyson’s Canto 56 in full. Notice that it begins with Nature giving witness, by the fossils buried in her rocks, of vast ages of birth, death, and extinction:

‘So careful of the type?’ but no.

        From scarped cliff and quarried stone

        She cries, ‘A thousand types are gone:

I care for nothing, all shall go.

 

‘Thou makest thine appeal to me:

        I bring to life, I bring to death:

        The spirit does but mean the breath:

I know no more.’ And he, shall he,

 

Man, her last work, who seem’d so fair,

        Such splendid purpose in his eyes,

        Who roll’d the psalm to wintry skies,

Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,

 

Who trusted God was love indeed

        And love Creation’s final law—

        Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed—

 

Who loved, who suffer’d countless ills,

        Who battled for the True, the Just,

        Be blown about the desert dust,

Or seal’d within the iron hills?

 

No more? A monster then, a dream,

        A discord. Dragons of the prime,

        That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music match’d with him.

 

Of life as futile, then, as frail!

        O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

        What hope of answer, or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil.

I hear in this poem a kind of Western version of Nature anthropomorphized into a Hindu god, a Shiva, indifferent to the shrew of the self, dancing upon it, and creating and uncreating worlds over vast eons. Tennyson saw, via hints from the new discoveries of science, what Darwin’s book would make explicit a few years hence, and what the continental Indian poets intuited long before: a very old universe had arranged and unarranged worlds and multitudes long before us, and would unarrange us as well anon.   

I sometimes participate in threads at Jerry Coyne’s blog, and have dialogued in threads that Russell Blackford has also been in, so when I saw them sitting together at this weekend’s big atheist conference in Burbank, California, I introduced myself to them. They were friendly and gracious, and I asked if I could take their picture for my blog, and they said yes. I didn’t use a flash, so it’s a bit blurry, but here it is (Coyne is on the left):

Your own. From a long time ago. Here.

Biologist Richard Dawkins, the author of the God Delusion, will be coming to speak (in early October) in my neck of the woods (Southern California), and his soon visit prompts me to ask a simple question:

• What might it actually be like to live in a world that is completely disillusioned?

In other words, what might it be like to live in a time where everybody lives in high irony and sees the wires behind all of the Great Oz’s curtains? When Richard Dawkins’s “disillusionment movement” succeeds, what then? Personally, I don’t think we would find ourselves in anything like a utopia. I suspect that, rather than humans collectively facing existence in this disillusioned mode, and living with it happily ever after, that we would instead put up different kinds of curtains against reality. Maybe they wouldn’t be religious curtains, but they would still be curtains of concealment from the full implications of the meaninglessness of human existence in a universe devoid of telos. 

Put simply, a world of atheists might well be a world in collective performance of Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot. Godot in this case is not God, but death. What does one do while waiting for death? Well, you have a meal, and then talk a bit, and perhaps have children, or start a war, or a blog, or maybe pursue a career, or jerk off. In short, you get entangled in diversions (as the characters in Beckett’s play do). And this, ladies and gentleman, is what Nietzsche called “the last man”—the kind of person that he believed the God-disillusioned West would culminate in producing. Comfy. And pathetic.

In short, diversion and delusion share a lot in common, and in an atheist world scrubbed of religion, there will be a good deal of neurotic deck chair shuffling on that Titanic, accompanied by the popping of a lot of anxiety reducing pills. Religion just won’t be in the mix of anxiety reducing agents. The God delusion will be replaced by the Huxlian SOMA illusion. Further, I suspect that most people in the atheist future (it’s coming, right?) will not be able to tolerate this entirely disillusioned world for too many decades, and will start getting out of line—creating new religions, returning to old religions, and starting eccentric mass movements—to overcome their outrage at being sensitive consciousnesses condemned (by no one in particular) to the limitations of life in a body, and to mortality. In other words, the atheist world of the future will probably start to look basically like the predominantly religious world of today. If you could buy stock in book futures, here’s a tip: Franz Kafka will sell well in our collective atheist future.

In sum, I don’t think that whatever atheist utopia some of us think that we are aiming for is inherently stable, or even all that much more desirable than the situation we’re in now. Our existence is a flungness into we-know-not-what. How do you ever get used to that, and acclimate and normalize that, without illusions, repressions, dissociations, and, yes, even delusions? So welcome, Richard Dawkins, you great slayer of delusions, you! Welcome to Southern California, the home of, well, Hollywood!

You’re not against Hollywood, too, are you? I didn’t think so.

Well, not exactly. But according to Harvard scientist Dan Lieberman, it was a big factor in making  you smart in the first place. Here’s his syllogism:

• Starting about two million years ago, our ancestors’s ever increasing ability to run long distances gave them broader access to high quality sources of protein (that is, game meat); and
• meat eating accelerates a species’s brain growth; therefore
• all this high quality meat-eating helped to “big brain” us (assisted the evolution of our large brains)

Got it? Good! 

Oh, and does this mean that vegetarianism (like, say, frequenting art museums) is a luxury—a boutique lifestyle born of advancing civilization—and that vegetarian practice in our earliest ancestors would have, in fact, consigned our species to the status of fruit-eating chimpanzees (in terms of brain power)?

It appears so.

This fact strikes me as a rather curious (and even stunning) illustration of contingency. You can’t possibly know, in the long run (pun intended), and often not even in the short run, what the consequences of your actions, however moral you imagine them, are likely to be. Dostoevsky’s novel, The Idiot, plays on this truth. The lead character acts like Jesus and at every turn messes up people’s lives in his “do-goodery.” And Kant said that since we cannot know the consequences of our actions, we may as well just do the “right thing” as opposed to the “wrong thing.”

But in terms of today, and with regard to vegetarianism, what’s the right thing? Welcome to the dilemmas and fogs of our human existence. What should we eat now, Mr. Long Distance Running Smarty Man?

If you’re an atheist, what’s wonderful about the universe? I know it’s pretty in places, and really big and hard to comprehend in detail, but if you’ve concluded that the universe consists, ultimately, of chance matter shuffling in the void, without any mind behind it, what’s to be in awe of or to feel wonder about? In other words, does atheist wonder amount to a tepid substitute for religious wonder in which the mind of God is replaced with blind mechanisms that just happen to build wonderous things? 

Let me offer an analogy. Let’s say I encounter a book written entirely by the chance landings of hail upon an electric typewriter, and I read this sentence from it:

He halted in the wind, and—what was that

Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?

Is there anything to wonder about it? It was made by accident. It means nothing, right? It might be nice to know the blind mechanism that made it, but it has no intelligence behind it. It’s pretty and intricate, like a leaf in autumn, but to give it additional meaning you would have to treat it as if  it were made by intention. Absent intention, the meaning, wonder, interest, and admiration that you might have brought to it loses its salience. If it is a product of chance, then the human imagination either must make meaning of it, or else it is nothing.

And isn’t that also true of nature, if atheism is correct? Nature is a book without an author. It happens to be beautiful and complex despite itself, and that makes for wonder, for it appears designed by an author. It is the appearance of design in the absence of design that makes for atheist wonder, is that right? It’s the sheer power of chance and natural selection that holds the atheist’s awe. If the Christian says—”Jesus is awesome!”—the atheist says—”Darwin is awesome!”

Now if I discover that Robert Frost wrote the above lines of poetry (which he did), and not the hail, suddenly my interest returns to the text itself. The meaning no longer resides in me, it now resides outside of me also, in the mind of the author, and what the author has written. I’m curious about each word, and why it’s there, and what the author is up to. I want to know what he means by putting the words in the order that he has. I want to know what he chose to leave out, and what he means to imply. But words absent an author are akin to a material universe absent mind. An ontological mystery becomes a machine, a function, and nothing more than this. Perhaps it is interesting to discover the undirected mechanisms responsible for the machine, but ultimately a blind material universe belongs to (in Paul Tillich’s phrase) the “ontology of death.” 

This is one reason I’m an agnostic, and not an atheist. Agnosticism (for me) inhabits a middle position between two dubious certainties. I don’t know if the universe has an author. But the very possibility makes for an interest that atheism prohibits. Being an agnostic is like encountering a book where you don’t know whether it was written by hail or Frost (pun intended, I suppose). But so long as there is the possibility that Frost wrote it, there is something to consider outside yourself, and to speculate about some meaning out there, beyond you. Yet once you know the book is written by hail, then it loses it’s exterior meaning and wonder (unless you bring the meaning and wonder from within yourself, from your own imagination). You can’t, afterall, derive wonder or meaning outside yourself from one damn thing after another, can you?