Imagine you live in Florida and are at a midwinter neighborhood cookout. (That you can have a mid-winter cookout is arguable the best thing about my state.) You overhear a new resident, Charlie, disagree with another man. Charlie says, “You are incorrect. It is possible to grow apple trees here in the Sunshine State. In fact, I’ve got one fruiting in my backyard.”
This surprises you, because you had heard on good authority that apple trees won’t grow in Florida. Not really. And if they did, they certainly wouldn’t fruit in December, as orange trees do.
You are curious. You ask Charlie if you can see his tree. He says, “Sure, it’s across the road and through the side gate.” You follow him. When in his backyard he points and says, “Aren’t those apples beautiful?!”
“Those are oranges,” you say. “And that’s an orange tree.”
A bit irritated by your seeming quibbling with words, your new neighbor tells you to call it what you want. But he calls it an apple tree.
What can you do about a person like that? Maybe nothing more than shrugging your shoulders. As I shrug my shoulders when contemplating those who proudly refer to themselves as agnostics.
Okay, I admit it. People who label themselves as “agnostic” bug me. Why? In part due to their philosophically-holier-than-thou attitude. But it also bugs me because agnostics know what that fancy agnostic word means. They tend to be educated.
Is it a mere quibble or a more serious case of anti-equivocation to ask a person if, by “god” they mean Yahweh, the god who gave laws to Moses? Is it then quibbling to conclude that a non-affirmative answer means the person does not believe in the god of the Jews?
Does asking if, by using the word “god,” the person means the god who sent his son Jesus into the world to be crucified and resurrected to pay for mankind’s sins, make you a theological hair-splitter?
Would responding, “Then you do not believe in the god of the Christians,” make you a person who can’t see the forest for the trees?
Would it be a form of religious incorrectness to further press the issue and inquire whether the person meant by “god” a deity who sent Mohammed to be his final, true prophet?
To conclude that the person does not believe in the Muslim god and that billions of people around the globe use the word differently than he or she does … would make you what? A semantic nit-picker?
It is no small matter to ask people to clarify not only what god they believe in, but also what god they claim is either unknown to them or unknowable. In fact, this is an essential issue, one that when glossed over legitimizes a whole slew of bogus suppositions and concepts.
I think evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins perfectly sums up the atheist position with these words: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
By refusing to define “god” — in any way deserving to be called a definition — we put a huge hurdle in front of the possibility of going that last god further.
Some may argue that their idea of god is by nature indefinable. To them I say, “Then stick a sock in it already, for either you are committing blasphemy-by-default or talking complete nonsense, or both.”
Many other people may define the god they are unsure whether or not they believe in as “a great mystery.” But what is meant by “great”? Does the person simply mean “big”? Mystery is basically a dramatic way of referring to something unknown. Which could also be called ignorance. Is your god simply a state of tantalizing ignorance?
Here’s a mundane mystery to solve: How did that pile of dog stuff get on the living room carpet, considering the dogs were in the yard all day? That is a mystery. But few people would classify this type of mystery as a religious experience. What type of ignorance belongs in the class of “special mystery” that is used as a bogus synonym for “god”?
Some times it can be difficult to go that one last god, seeing all edges of it have been so thoroughly buffed that only a faint shimmering je ne sais quoi remains.
As I see it, the agnostic has the best of both worlds. He or she can claim to be sophisticated enough to not believe in the existence of well-defined deities such as the Navajo “Black Body,” god of fire. They can also claim to be not so close-minded as to be able to offer a definite answer to the presumably weighty question, “Do you believe God exists — you know God God?”
Call me close-minded. I believe all of humanity’s gods are equally mythical.
Presented with a coherent definition of a god and even remotely compelling evidence, I’d change my tune. But for now, I have no belief in a god. And I can’t help but feel that those who answer the question in the affirmative, or believe the question is unanswerable, have slapped a fancy yet misleading name onto a steaming pile of fully hypothetical poo.
In the now nearly infamous concluding passage to his book, The First Three Minutes, physicist Steven Weinberg wrote,
“The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
These words bring to mind Shakespeare’s line about life being a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. You could say that cosmologists study the electromagnetic, nuclear and gravitational sound and fury of “the heavens” — something anthropocentrically-inclined folk consider to be but majestic props under which the human drama unfolds.
Decades ago the French theologian Teilhard de Chardin attempted to infuse a human point into the universe, and not a modest one, for his point to it all was humanity. A god is customarily what pulls our kind out of the big pot of cosmological insignificance and sets it into a manageable soup of local events and aspirations.
I read de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man during my college years. One evening, after closing the book and shelving it, I had dinner with a friend. Chris and I worked at the same facility for the mentally handicapped. He had also recently read the book and was high on the idea that the purpose of evolution is consciousness, and the purpose of human consciousness is . . . to “know God.”
Does evolution have a purpose? Or does “what works” simply persist and manifest change? To a giraffe, would the purpose of evolution be a long neck? To the lion, would the purpose of evolution be to become the universe’s best predator?
According to some humans, the purpose of evolution is increased knowledge — to know their god and/or to understand the universe.
But rather than as a stairway to purpose-in-life, perhaps the lump of gray matter balanced atop our neck, encased in a crockery-hard bone, should be viewed as a Swiss Army knife. It has been used very successfully to facilitate survival whatever the environment. Additional uses are daily found and invented.
Some continue to insist that our cognitive can-opening capacities aren’t for removing the top from a tin of beans, but for opening Campbell’s Creamy Mind of God. Of course, these people are free to use their multi-blade minds as they desire. I guess I’m just more pragmatic in my outlook. Although it may be dramatic to conjecture about it, we can’t really claim evolution has a purpose. The forms of biological life that successfully feed themselves, avoid predators and parasites, and procreate, endure. Period.
It was not purpose that dragged the progressively less fish-like precursors of reptiles out of the oceans. It was hunger. Or maybe hot pursuit by a set of teeth. Does the reptile represent progress over the fish? Likewise it wasn’t purpose that drove the mammalian precursors of the whale into the oceans. It was hunger, or predators, or perhaps a number of environmental pressures. And if evolution does have a progressive purpose, someone please inform the horseshoe crab, a species virtually unchanged for millions upon millions of years. “Get with the program, crab. Climb a tree, or something. Sprout feathers!”
Because the human life-span is short, it is difficult to recognize that evolution is not a race already won. The super slow-motion dash continues. Will human beings remain in the penthouse suite of intelligent life-forms for centuries, for millennia, for millions of years? It depends on how well they fit the environment they operate in and, to a great degree, create for themselves. Even if our kind does persist for millions of years, do we deserve a blue ribbon for it? Does it mean we have reached some goal or made progress toward a most grand of goals? What is the goal? Is there a goal?
It may be a blow to our self-important worldview, but finding meaning in evolution requires a mind to inject that element into an otherwise fully mundane mix.
Prior to moving to Florida and learning how to surf, had someone instructed me to close my eyes and imagine I was surfing, the mental pictures I generated would have consisted of flying along the face of wave. And that’s it. The “flying along a wave,” however, is but the final phase of three key phases of surfing. It might be the most exciting, showy, and joyful part of surfing. But it isn’t what surfing is all about.
The second of the three phases of surfing consists of sitting on a board in the water and waiting for waves. You scan the horizon and appraise what is coming your way. You watch single waves, sets of waves, hours of waves. It takes experience and a good eye to know which ocean undulations are on course to breaking oh so beautifully. This phase also includes paddling into position and, once your mind pulls out its green flag, taking off. Typically, surfers spend much more time in phase two than they do in phase three. You could make a very good case that phase two is primarily what surfing is about. In my opinion, those surfers who really enjoy this part are true surfers. They’re not simply athletes looking for a way to impress themselves — as some surfers seem to be.
The first phase of surfing consists of getting out there. When beginning a surfing session, this means moving from on shore out into position. You must go over and through waves heading in the opposite direction. Crucially, you must get past the beak zone. It means using your arms to paddle, paddle, and paddle some more. It also means using your brain to time your effort so as not to experience a goliath of a wave do a cannonball on your sorry skull. Once you catch a wave and ride it as it rolls over the zone where the ocean fizzes like an uncapped beer, you hop off, turn around, and grunt your way, in a briefer version, out again.
Without phase one, there is no phase two or three. In phase one, waves are not your friends, they are a series of blitzing linebackers. Before tangling with a wave standing up, you must to beat a few lying down.
The surfers who relish the first phase of surfing — and not just for that first cold-water-wakeup, howdy-do plunge — are nuts. Or maybe they’ve got ingots in their trunks. They have the solid gold gonads of surfers past, present, and future. To these males and females, any day spent in the water with a surfboard under their belly, their butt, and sometimes, their feet, is a damn good day. If given the opportunity to be effortlessly taxied out to the line-up, they would look at you as if you had asked them, “Would you like your hamburger with or without the meat?”
Lazy-Boy philosophers and pseudo-skeptics — intellectual tinkerers, really — rush to a conclusion without giving phase one and phase two of what you might call “the three phases of critical thinking” so much as a sideways glance. If phase three is forming a conclusion and expressing it, phase two consists of gathering information. It requires patience, perseverance, and good judgment. You don’t just commit to any old material that comes your way.
And phase one? Phase one entails clarifying and clearly expressing exactly what your inquiry is. It consists of defining terms, eliminating or in the least disclosing assumptions, and in expressing the issue so false short-cuts can’t be taken, intentionally or not.
If you want to genuinely carve your signature into some weighty issue, you’ve got to do the grunt work first. Otherwise, what you’re doing is the equivalent of tossing a skim-board on a half inch of water next to the toddlers and their sandcastles. Whee! Look at me! I have an opinion!
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to use my browser “favorites” to see what local the surf forecast is. I’d like go tussle with some waves. And maybe ride a few.
Yesterday, while strolling in Muir Woods National Monument, this thought came to me: I have been humbled by a tree.
Sure, when thinking and speaking in an abstract, poetic fashion it is possible to be humbled by a tree. But could I really be?
Well, excuse me while I mull it over.
First, the “humbled” part. The Online Etymology Dictionary provides this history for the use of the word:
mid-13c., from O.Fr. humble, earlier humele, from L. humilis “lowly, humble,” lit. “on the ground,” from humus “earth.” Senses of “not self-asserting” and “of low birth or rank” were both in M.E. The verb is late 14c. in the intransitive sense of “to render oneself humble;” late 15c. in the transitive sense of “to lower (someone) in dignity.”
As for the lowly, closer to the ground part, sure, a massive redwood tree could make me feel that. At roughly 300 ft tall, the trees are approximately 50 times “bigger” than me. And at over 1000 tons, they are something like 20,000 times more massive. In other words, were you to place one mature redwood on a teeter-totter, you would need an entire town of Andrews on the other end to balance it.
A large redwood is also more “senior” than me, having started its life before my parents were born, before this nation was born. In fact, I walked among many trees that likely began growing centuries before the invention of the mechanical clock (circa 1200s). You might say that before human beings divided a day into 24 hours, these individual trees were alive. That’s old. My lifespan dwarfs in comparison.
But then there is the social aspect, the “humbled by” part. Could a tree humble me? No, not really. Could a tree, then, evoke in me some ancient instinct to extend thoughts of agency and to anthropomorphize all sorts of things? In this case, what I anthropomorphized is the tree. Is it a being? Did this being do anything to me? No. The tree was there. The humbling, it seems, was “all me.”
How about this: The tree provided the opportunity for me to feel humbled? But no. The tree did no such “providing.”
Okay, last try: My being in proximity to the tree allowed feelings we describe as “humility” to be evoked in me. Hmm. Not perfect. But better. At least outside the realm of poetry. Within it, not so good.
[click photo to view larger]
How do I love birds? Let me quantify the ways . . . .
Hmm. Are an empirical attitude and a loving one incompatible? Must we switch between them, as one toggles between separate computer programs? I wonder.
Photo: Tree swallow above its nesting box at the Broadmoor Wildlife Sanctuary in Massachusetts. Very beautiful place. Watching tree swallows swoop, glide and weave over the fields brought to mind the aquatic “flight” of dolphins: extremely agile and graceful.
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