An Introduction, Of Sorts
This past fall, I packed up the wife and kiddies and visited my family in New Hampshire to see how we were all aging. As it turns out, my older brother looks a decade younger than I, with his thick tuft of hair and bag-less eyes, perhaps a satisfying vengeance for his late onset puberty. But I compensate for this by being stodgy and making less money.
As for old New Hampshire, she gave a lesson in primary colors. Maples the color of a cheery sauvignon, oaks a blushing rose, and sumac besting both with the deep red of an old wound, overflowed from the forests. Birch leaves silently clapped their hands in the spiced autumn wind that carried such, such a yellow up into the vivid blue heaven that glowed even when sewed into the foliage under the confetti canopy.
My mother was very kind to let my wife and I have her room in her small apartment, while the kids were strewn about the living room on the flotsam of couch cushions and throw pillows. As we were packing to leave, I told her that I was sorry, but I peed a little bit in her bed, and asked if she would like me to change the sheets. To what I thought was an obvious attempt at humor, she responded with a discouraging amount of credulity. When I told her I did not actually pee in her bed, she chuckled sheepishly and remarked, “I’ll believe anything nowadays.” Not only am I not aging well, apparently I have lost my wit.
The 21st century shares my mother’s sentiments. We all seem ready and willing to believe anything. Two thirds of millennials are skeptical about the shape of the earth, millions think the moon landing happened in an Ohio warehouse, and nearly the entire county believes themselves to be exhaling the toxin directly responsible for the destruction of the planet. In addition to these, the past three years of viral madness has left us all with whiplash from the vacillations of experts changing opinions and positions. What has become clear is that the quickest way to polarize the nation to either petulantly rebel or obsequiously obey a mandate is to appeal to the authority of “scientific experts.”
Though there is an emotional and spiritual component to these strange beliefs, it also belies a growing mistrust in the God-given tool we use to understand the physical world around us – science.
What can account for these strange intellectual misgivings, suspicions and credulities? At its core, this is the result of a mistaking of what is fruit and what is root. Science is a fruit of a tree whose root is faith, and when an axe is taken to tree, the fruit rots. That sweet, tart and crisp fruit of science that was once a tool of unveiling divine wisdom and creativity in creation, has wormed and rotted, its fermentation making us all sorts of drunk.
the fruit’s root
Remember back when science was just science? Plain, old chemistry, physics, biology – happy and safe in the uncalloused hands of nerds? Those good old days of Newton and Clark, Copernicus and Linnaeus, where these great minds expected to find order in the universe because they believed it was made by an orderly God. “He is a God of order and not confusion,” wrote Newton. This belief in the orderliness of the Creator led to the expectation to find order when we peered into the heavens or under a microscope. Certainty of God and His character gave scientific progress the concrete foundation it needed to begin building the house of reason. But it was faith, not scientific knowledge, that this house was built on, for only faith can bring certainty.
By faith we believe that the universe exists, that the past is real and is not merely a product of the mind, that an intelligible universe matches up quite nicely with intelligent creatures, that the observations of our senses correspond to what is observed – all of these are propositions not verifiable through science nor provable through mathematics. It is only the robust, immovable axioms of faith that can provide the foundation science needs to spire towards heaven. Without this faith science would not be possible. This is not faith in Jesus Christ, of course, but is the humble faith of natural revelation; a faith that knows its place and isn’t balancing the known universe on the pointy part of our eggheads. In other words, the impetus of the scientific revolution was we believed God, therefore we believed science.
Prior to the grand opening of the scientific revolution, ideas and understanding of the world was abstract and disconnected. The Aristotelian view of of the world predominated, which approached the world as something to be deduced with the mind; one does not get his hands dirty with manual experimentation – that’s slave work. In addition, nature and gods were inextricably linked; one could not dissect a bit of moss without teasing apart Gaia. Experimentation is an attempt to manipulate nature, which could be seen as the brazen and impious attempt to manipulate the gods. This pantheistic subtext inhibited scientific progress even well into the 12th century. And though there was some experimentation in the ancient world, they seemed more interested in ways of thinking rather than ways of doing. It was the Christian belief that God was separate from nature and bequeathed earth to man to steward, and the firm conviction in a rational God in whose image we were made, that fueled the scientific revolution.
And so it is completely unsurprising that the first inductive scientists were Franciscan monks. Robert Grossetest (1168 AD) first proposed the inductive method and experimental study. Several decades later, Roger Bacon asserted that “all things must be verified by experience.” Leaping forward a couple of centuries, another Bacon, Francis, maintained that scientific knowledge must come through repeated observation. This is why, and I believe this is well documented, bacon is so delicious. In Bacon’s spare time, he wrote treatises on Psalms, theology and prayer.
Nascent science was a slow grower until the time came for Nicholas Copernicus to get the ball rolling with his heliocentric assertions, one motivation for his studies being the honing of a more accurate liturgical calendar for the church. Science accelerated, inspired by faith in God, and gained momentum until we get to the starting line up of the scientific revolution we are familiar with.
But in typical fallen human fashion, after we got a good running head start, we told God we would take it from here, thanked him for his time, and we would call him if we get in a bind, meanwhile planning to abandon Him at the earliest humane opportunity. After all, the cog works of the solar system were marvelously well oiled. So regular, in fact, that the clockwork movements of planetary motion funded the Deists idea that God is a fix-it-and-forget-it kind of supreme being. Maybe God is more of an entrepreneur than a Father, setting up whirring enterprises and then scurrying off to the next. As mechanistic causes of origin and function were discovered, God became superfluous; Ockham’s razor cut a close shave. It wasn’t long before God was consigned to an “unnecessary hypothesis”, as LaPlace yawned to Napoleon. Darwin explained away creation. Lyell imagined an earth forged in impersonal, Vulcan fires. Freud needlepointed sin into banal Oedipal and Electra complexes. Foucault supplanted definitions of words with power plays. Marx identified us as tribal cows fighting over the greener pastures. And Hawking told us something can come from a very specific definition of nothing.
Faith’s root brought sweet fruit, a fruit that gave us near god-like powers of predictability and control over our environment and lives. But given the choice between humble acknowledgment of God and being masters of our own fate, we looked for the nearest woods we could ditch his body in, reasoning we could keep all the fruit for ourselves if we sever the root. Not realizing, however, that in doing so we cut much deeper than intended, and with horrific consequences.
severing the root
But you know what is easier than faith? Not faith. “Knowledge puffs up,” the Apostle said. Faith is that hatter’s tape we use to measure our heads to make sure they stay the appropriate size. Instead of bringing our hearts into the heavens, we tried to fit the heavens into our heads and swell it with knowledge. Omitting God from our understanding as Creator and revealer of truths, we cut ourselves off from the standard by which we can understand anything.
“The greatest peril,” quipped GK Chesterton, is that “the human intellect is free to destroy itself.” When faith is abandoned, reason is next to follow, for reason itself is a matter of faith. If humanity arose to the surface of chaos buoyed by random chance, as the materialists would have us believe, what right have we to think our observations have any bearing on reality? “Indeed, what right have we to think at all?”
The death knell was struck when we abandoned the Word, the Logos, the Being around which all reason and rationality in the universe revolve. In our fevered rationality, we spoke the deplorable word and introduced the thought that stops all thought. Chesterton continues, “You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought…You cannot think if there are no things to think about.” There can be no objective truth if a human is simply another object in a sea of objects. Materialism, then, in an attempt to destroy religion actually destroyed rationalism. Logicide always precedes suicide of thought.
The pedigree of modern man is thoroughbred chaos. We have spat into our 23andMe test tube and it has resulted as 100% starstuff, with close relations to tardigrades and slime molds. And when all of existence is made from an infinite ether-colored playdough, the only thing holding the lines of marriage, gender, arithmetic, morality and reason are only as solid as the sandcastle culture that holds them. When chaos is your origin, there are no boundaries to what may legitimately be believed. This includes believing that a boy can become a girl, and the intricacies of cellular mechanics can come about through a succession of fantastically impossible Yahtzee rolls.
When we abandon faith in God as the foundation of understanding and swap it for a universe of chaos where anything can legitimately happen, then why are we surprised when we believe anything does happen, where we will believe anything? And if all that matters is the fitness level of our survivability, then this includes science, and who says it can’t be picked up by the largest, hairiest ape in congress and used as a cudgel to secure his watering hole dominance or she-ape humping rights?
In the wake of our Logicide, sweet, geeky science is now hanging out with the politicians and philosophers, doing keg stands and taking hits with nihilistic mushrooms. He forgot his roots in faith and wonder, in the discovery of the mechanics of God. What has happened is a slow but steady descent over the centuries to replace a God of order, purpose and intention with impersonal forces of necessity, chance and randomness. Ours is an infinite universe of empty space with quarks popping in and out of existence, a taxonomic mud pie where anything can become anything else with enough time and chance. And by abandoning faith, we subsequently abandoned our hold on rationality. By a fantastically misplaced opportunity for self-reflection, we have destroyed any source of reason with tools reason purchased.
A castrated horse cannot be made to be fruitful and a mind severed from the roots of reason cannot bear the fruits of reason. Or to riff off of Jesus, if “a house divided against itself cannot stand”, then a mind divided cannot stand to reason. And so the crux of our predicament comes to this: what should we find truly unbelievable anymore, since we have ceased to live in a rational universe?
the fruit’s rot
Science had a historical track record of being fairly awesome. Antibiotics, a man or two on the moon, and the warm comfort of heliocentrism, are a few of the bushels of boons harvested. It has had the net effect of making lives better; it has solved problems, extended lives and saved them. Because science has repeatedly conquered and subdued our world, it was assumed science will continue to check off one-by-one the list of beefs we have with nature, like cancer, Lyme disease, and seeded watermelons, all while pulling back the shroud of mysteries so we can see her whirling intricacies. It was a blessed time of safe naïveté.
But as science carried us to new, vertiginous heights, our wonder at its potentialities intrigued, but also frighten us. As knowledge increased exponentially, it was not long before science soared past the ability of the collective to keep up. Here a skepticism crept into our minds. Being unable to understand high, scientific concepts, we lost the ability to scrutinize plausibility, and when you cannot determine what is plausible, you can no longer discriminate between what is true and false for yourself. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – you can’t know everything, but what resulted from this was the need to cling to the pant leg of the ones who are smart enough to abstract these in their heads. Trust was required in the lab-coated mediator to commune with the gods on our behalf and tell us what the sacred scriptures of nature revealed. The trade off was increased wonder and life improvements, but at the expense of trusting in man – which is to say, trusting in the worldview of a man.
Rotting further, science began to rewrite the tale of humanity; the world once filled with meaning, purpose, and design, was all an illusion. Secret quantum particles, accessible only to the lucky individuals with large hadron colliders in their backyards, whispered into the ears of the erudite the origins of the universe. God was replaced with the ‘god particle’. Beauty, truth and goodness as transcendent longings were swapped for the immanent needs of sex, survival and shelter, robbing our lives of meaning as we evolved a skeptical carapace over or hearts.
This latent skepticism soured into cynicism when the layperson gets the sneaking suspicion the scientific intercessors hold us in intellectual disdain, have dubious motivations, and whose scientific process is red penned by political narratives.
It’s the 21st century peeps; science has sponsors; it is for sale. There is money to be had, power to be consolidated, agendas to be engendered. Knowledge is power, and that power is being used as an intellectual cudgel to batter the plebeians into conformity. Therefore, we are cynical, having grown spurious of science, suspicious that it can and will “prove” anything those who wield it want it to prove. And when science is in cahoots with the politicians who have their fingers on the “shut-up” button, who is anyone to talk back? How many times have you heard the phrase “the science says” in the past two years? We are left to believe or not believe based upon deep suspicion of motives rather than a rational assent to what can be observed with the senses.
One particular manifestation of this scientific rot is the effluence of facts which fill our inboxes and news feeds. The sheer glut of information made available to us daily is unnavigable. Not only in one news cycle can I find studies on the sexual habits of leopard slugs and the latest developments in cold fusion, two subjects that have not a thing to do with each other, but also a half a dozen studies that have conflicting results on the same subject matter. If I want to live longer, I am told to eat like a caveman from one study and a vegan from another. Coffee drinkers have a lower rate of heart problems but higher incidence of anxiety… which causes heart problems. Adequate sleep prevents Alzheimer’s, but too much napping is a risk factor. If I pick my nose I will get dementia, but if I eat it I will boost my immune response. How is anyone to combine this into any meaningful narrative?
This gordian knot of tangled knowledge is as useless as it is helpless, as Edna St Vincent-Millay wrote:
Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Upon This Age -Edna St. Vincent Millay
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun; but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric…
Mixing the superabundance of facts, the superciliousness of the scientific elite, and the superstupidity of sense defying claims makes for a watered down, meaningless kool-aid concoction that everybody is drinking. Scientific mediators and political hacks took what was precious and meaningful and revealed it to be meaningless, thrust us into a cold and dying universe, and handed us the tangled threads of knowledge with no loom to even make a blanket to comfort our entropic hearts. Foremost among the productions of our hijaked science is a dubious eye of science itself. In other words, we do not believe science anymore, because we do not believe in God.
In the past two years I have been told that The Science says men can menstruate and women can get testicular cancer. The Science has also told me that something comes from nothing and when a cow farts in Wisconsin it raises the oceans in Miami. I have heard rigorous mathematical arguments that 2+2 does not equal 4, and a virus’ virulence is dependent upon the subject of a political protest. In the name of science, billions of dollars will be spent to discover the possibility of life on Mars and the same amount of money to kill the certainty of life in the womb. And that if I avoid alcohol, sugar, deodorant, smoking, saturated fats, hot showers, stress, depression and sleeping on my back, I have a near guarantee I won’t get Alzheimer’s disease. Unless, of course, I have the gene for it, in which case, start picking my clothes out for me.
The last step in this descent is hitting the bedrock of whateverism – the grumbling sound of a culture confused into acceptance and resistless from a spiritual gutting. It is the resignation to believing scientist’s word on science’s word on itself – it, along with everything else, is a power scheme. Whateverism, the sometimes apathetic, sometimes jubilant catamite, is the passive mentality flogged to into intellectual submission. It is the waterboard baptism of a catechism of meaningless facts and selective studies administered by political elites and purchased experts until we make the good confession: We give up; we will believe anything.
Conclusion
Science is an incredible tool given to us by God, like Promethean fire but granted with a smile and given freely. Through it great things have been discovered and uncovered. But sinful man in his desire to make all things subject to himself twisted the tea and has made it an avenue of epistemological justification of our sinful proclivities. By explaining away God in the name of reason, we committed an act of Logicide, and thrust ourselves into a meaningless and inchoate universe where reason dies. This began reason’s rot which passed through skepticism, cynicism and finally an apathetic whateverism.
In a beautiful twist of irony, the quickest way back to trust in the offerings of science and fascination that it brings begins with returning to faith in God. Intelligence created the world and the world is therefore intelligible. And it was all done for us to stand in awe of our Maker and find ourselves as we seek our image in his face. The Creator is the loom in which all knowledge is woven into the tapestry of observable reality.
As for my mother, she is a godly woman. Her expression of believing anything is not an indictment against her faith in God but rather the usurpation of science by an atheistic mindset where anything can be “proved”, and the material world God made for wonder and worship be used to control other men. The only way to restore science to its useful and rightful place is to return to the belief of Newton and Clark, who believed in a rational and discoverable universe because it was made by a rational God who has made valiant efforts to be discovered by us. The great and omnipotent God always loses at hide and seek. He wants to be found.
Thought Butter 