Wonder Rot

I was having a conversation with a meteorologist friend the other night, jabbering about the complexities of the sun-cycles. I will spare you the details – this time. But we both were caught up in wonder of cycles and epicycles, undulating magnetic fields, and solar sneezes knocking out power to the eastern seaboard, all while tee-heeing like a pair of teen girls getting their hair done for prom. Though we shared equally in the delight of the spectacular phenomena of heliology, we were approaching it from two different perspectives, he an atheist, me a Christian. It led to a few thoughts I wanted to hammer out.

Our experiences of wonder will treat us differently depending on how we view reality – whether we see creation as a result of a Designer, or a mindless, evolutionary process. Both my friend and I started with the same experience of wonder but they followed different tracks and have vastly different destinations.

Wonder has the tendency to only grow to the size of the container you keep it in. Lock wonder up in a cage as small as the known universe, as my friend has, and it will wine and dine you then leave you with the check. But in a world where there is an infinite God who is living and active, wonder will spill the banks of the cosmos, redounding into eternity. And take you with it.

What I would like to do is describe the hidden trap door of our current view of the wonderful and how it ends up clamping our own umbilical cord. Then I will show why the wonder God gives nourishes and proliferates.

First, let me identify the wonder I am not talking about. I am not talking about the dewey-eyed wonder where the whole world has a sparkle of Disney magic and there are no sorrows to dampen the mood. Neither am I talking about the word’s simple use in questions like, “I wonder what the weather will be like today?” There is no need to bring wonder into this, Alice, just use your weather app.

I’m talking about the wonder that gets its hands dirty – that strange alchemical mixture of beauty, mystery, surprise, with a pinch of the terrible and a dash of the otherworldly. The kind that funds all scientific endeavors, intrepid exploration, and artistic pursuits, and fills our lives with enjoyment. Wonder that, and this is it’s highest claim, can steal our eyes off of our own little lives for a few moments and interrupts our endless obsession with ourselves. 

Now, it is not necessary for a human to believe in God in order to experience wonder; in His wisdom, God built this capacity into the factory model human. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t impair our capacity for wonder by our beliefs or stop it dead in its tracks. The belief that there is no God and all we see are the products of millenia of chance and necessity, this is the condition in which wonder turns sour. It is not necessary to explicitly be a card carrying atheist. Enough of our scholastic curriculum is written with this godless assumption and it has moseyed unchecked into all our minds through government education or secular explanations of scientific phenomena. So we live in a world where even devout Christians have some of their knowledge of the universe informed by an atheistic worldview even though they are believers.

One may argue that I am only assuming that government education and scientific phenomena provide atheistic explanations, leaving ample room for a deity if one should see the need for such a hypothesis. I would invite them to look at those universities where professors have so much as even hinted at the idea of God as a possible explanatory cause. They are excommunicated swiftly. Even ambiguously religious explanations such as Intelligent Design causes schoolboards to start hammering fists on tables. I do not believe the modern understanding of the universe nor any of the sciences was left with a space for people to insert God, even if they cared to. 

G.K. Chesterton said, “there is a thought which stops thought, that is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” There is also a wonder which stops wonder, and this kind of wonder which has evicted God and therefore has an expiration date. It is the enjoyment of the fruit of a tree which has had an axe laid to its root. Let me explain with balloons.

Balloons are a source of wonder for children. They float when everything else in the child’s experience is trying to reach the ground. If released they will squiggle up to the heavens like some skyward sperm. They are colorful, round and disappear with a fantastic surprise. I ain’t never met a kid who wasn’t made merrier with a balloon in hand, and that’s a fact.

But if you find an adult who has retained the same childlike wonder at balloons, do not let him do your taxes or take out your appendix. Balloons are not rare, for one. Familiarity breeds boredom, just as the mountains of Colorado become no more provocative than wallpaper after a year, even for the Nebraskan transplant. But we grownups have also replaced the wonder of balloons with knowledge.

As an adult, I can explain balloons exhaustively. I can describe how the helium is less dense than the surrounding atmosphere, how the helium slips through tiny holes in the latex, how the long and weakly linked chains of latex molecules make balloons stretchy, how the red wavelengths of light are reflected back into my eye providing a cherry color for my cones. My childhood wonder of the sublime balloon is transformed into knowledge. In this case, wonder was the temporary and enjoyable experience of my knowledge deficit.

Cosmos, Planet Earth, and Life, among other fantastic documentaries, have evolutionary biology and materialistic views of the universe as a foundation of understanding the world as a rule. At the same time, it is clear that the narrators are positively effervescing with wonder at the strange quirkiness of the world and vastness of the cosmos. Evolution is personified as calculating a beautiful and clever solution after puzzling over a problem. Solar systems are seen as inevitabilities, galaxies are taken for granted, and of course that tiny spider would evolve to make a lasso which snag moths in mid flap – it was only a matter of time. But, of course, evolution is blind and if it has solved any problems, has done so in a fumbling manner than would make a vaudeville play look like a deftly executed chess game.

Not only evolution, but the laws of physics which the universe is conducted by are revered as having almost godlike qualities. And so when physicists like Neil Degrasse Tyson, also an atheist, gazes through the Hubble telescope at a giant magellanic cloud a plimpty million light years away, he is truly having an experience of profound wonder. The mystery, majesty, beauty and scale of the thing has its effect, arguably more so on those minds who have greater scholastic knowledge of the impossibility of what they are observing. But the fatal mistake in this is that the magellanic cloud will suffer the same fate as the balloon: it will deflate with the transformation of wonder into knowledge. 

With the assumption of a closed universe, that there is no God above us, comes the impending and inevitable transformation of all wonder into mere knowledge. Even if we may not discover that knowledge for a few millennia, there exists the certainty that the cause can be nothing but mechanical. Given enough time and study, the wonder of the magellanic cloud becomes the drab, boring math equations you can write down on the back of a napkin; the beauty of a Rembrandt becomes the complex chemical interaction of neurotransmitters and hormone swapping of the brain; the wholesomeness of a family Thanksgiving meal is the statistically beneficial returns of survival rates proffered by Darwinian social structures.

What this means is that this rapturous and universal experience of the human race, which provides much of the source of our meaning and delight in existence, when experienced through atheistic understanding, is merely the temporary enjoyment of our own stupidity. Wonder is then the nanny for the simple, who the schoolmaster puts out of a job. 

This is the end result of wonder in a closed universe. Even though there are many phenomena left to discover, they will suffer the same fate as the balloon. Since we have zipped up wonder into a closed system, just skip to the end and move past this pesky remnant of evolutionary impediments which we call wonder, the awe of the unknown, where our chimpish ancestors got the archaic idea of God from in the first place. Where it all ends is ultimately an unsatisfying answer, one more phenomena which we can check off the list of crap to explain, until we amble off to dry up the next wonderful phenomena into knowledge. If this titillation is what we have invited into our lives and trusted to provide meaning and delight, then we will start to smell the rotting of wonder everywhere it was pursued. Postmodernity is the reaction, in part, to unsatisfying explanations to the wonder of human experience, explanations which filled up the head but emptied the chest. Perhaps the boredom most children suffer in schools may be because they can see farther than the adults instructing them? 

So what, is wonder even real? Yes, and the Christian uses the same mechanistic explanation of magellanic clouds and paintings and the flight patterns of arctic terns as the modern scientific establishment, but for this exception: wonder doesn’t transform into cold, dark knowledge, it transfers. Let me explain using magic.

Eric Chien is the world’s best close up magician. Youtube him. What he does easily falls into the category of wonder. Now, I know that he is not materializing cards or coins from the ether. They are coming from a hidden pocket or are fed through some device. The surest way to wreck the wonder of watching this man is to have him show me how the trick is done. But here is the difference. In this circumstance our wonder would not transform into the mere mechanistic knowledge of how the trick was done, but transfer to the magician who invented the trick, practiced endlessly, and perfected the stagemanship. In this case, the wonder is preserved, and even grows, to admire and appreciate both the trick and its purveyor. It makes the trick more, not less wonderful.

The difference here is not a small one. The atheistic view of wonder, which is the silent assumption of most of our academic knowledge of scientific phenomena, is a placeholder for knowledge, a stepping stone of faith, at which point the erudite no longer needs the magic. Wonder is subjected to entropic decay ending in a nihilistic sputter and takes the meaning of life along with it. Thankfully this is not the truth. 

The truth is, wonder is a very real experience and God intends for humans to enjoy and draw their minds and hearts to Himself. It is the echo of His creative handiwork written in caps lock in the heavens and tiny fonts of DNA.

So both my friend and I observing fabulous sun cycles are both experiencing real, God given wonder. But because his universe is closed, there is no place for the wonder to transfer when knowledge shines it steely light into the mystery, and it necessarily doomed to die. When we use the tools of science and the mind to explore these phenomena, we do so to open the hood and gaze at the genius and glory of the Inventor who inhabits eternity, the wonder pulling us along with it over the bank of the temporal and finite.