Concerning causes

The remarkable thing about the world is not that men have told stories about unicorns, but that, before he saw it, no man would have dreamed of inventing the narwhal. This fact struck me the other day, as I contemplated one of our society’s most pervasive myths. Some have deemed it Progress: it is the notion that for most of human history, we told ourselves silly fairy tales to explain natural phenomena, but only recently we have uncovered sensible explanations for why the world is the way it is. In fact, the march of science has actually produced far stranger accounts of how natural phenomena occur than the ancients ever could have, and we, perhaps more strangely, have accepted the notion that these wild “How” accounts actually cover the far more mysterious question of “Why.”

Twenty-five hundred years ago, most men thought that the earth was the center of the universe. The universe itself had existed from all eternity (albeit in a chaotic mess), and was composed of four elements. A few esoteric thinkers speculated about atoms composing all matter, but none would have dared divide those tiny bricks. The sun was a flaming chariot, driven by a god, and on the fringes of the human orbit lived some strange creatures: trolls, unicorns, dragons. To an ancient, the cosmos had a neighborhood feel: mostly it was organized around earth, and the parts worth seeing never ventured out of eyesight for more than a few hours.

Now, consider the modern, scientific account of the history of universe, beginning with some sort of cataclysmic event billions of years ago, during which not only form and order came into being, but matter and time itself. The resulting composition of this matter was into bits too small even for scientists to see (electrons and protons, not to mention quarks, gluons, and muons), and these bits combined into, not four, but 212 different varieties of atoms, or elements. Earth only comes on the scene after billions of years, a tiny planet circling one of millions of stars just in our own galaxy, which in turn was one of millions rushing through the universe, which some scientists now speculate may be one of many. There was a peculiar anthropomorphic comfort in the thought that the sun was a god, with his man-like shape; scientists have conceived of the infinitely more frightening notion that all the stars are in fact enormous balls of flaming gases whirling through space in some kind of cosmic juggling act. The ancients thought that a few odd dragons skulked about the neighborhood; scientists counter instead that, tens of millions of years ago, thousands of varieties of those monstrous reptiles ruled the earth, and the greatest among them they call a Tyrant Lizard King (Tyrannosaurus rex). Sure, the ancients believed in trolls and unicorns, but scientists believe in such fantastic creatures as the gorilla, the narwhal, and the platypus. Finally, scientists lately have begun preaching such paradoxes to perplex even the most mystical Hebrew prophet, such as the notion that light is both a particle and a wave.

A comparison of the two accounts shows plainly that the classical account of nature is in fact the commonsensical, precisely because men made it up. If men were to invent a cosmos, four elements, a single planet, and a few variations on some basic animal shapes is probably all they could manage. The scientific account of the universe reveals a place far beyond the human imagination, a place of such wild complexity and startling intricacy that every new discovery carries with it the thrill of the unknown.

Strangely, however, as science has offered ever-wilder explanations of how the universe works, its adherents have developed a sort of determined indifference to its accounts. The ancients trembled before their simple explanations: they worshipped their chariot sun, while we hardly spare a thought for a nuclear explosion, compared to which Nagasaki was a pinprick, happening continuously in the neighborhood for eons. Perhaps the ancient, with the simplicity of his thinking on nature, was able to grasp an obvious fact that eludes many moderns. If you had asked an ancient, “Why does the sun rise?” he would have replied, “The god wills it.” Ask a modern materialist the same question, and he will prattle off something about gravity and the earth’s rotation. However, such a response is as much a non-sequitur as if, asked why Billy went to the store, the scientist replied, “He drove down Elm, turned onto Park, and turned left at the BP.” The ancient knew that understanding how something worked was not the same as understanding why, and that the appropriate emotion to fill the gap between those two explanations was wonder. Ironically, science has offered us a world of impossibilities to explain, but a purely scientific worldview deprives us of any means of explaining it.

We must regain the skill of asking, Why. When we do so, we will find that the universe is a very exciting place, that the cosmos is busier than Herald Square at rush hour, that our every cell contains coded messages, that there seems to be some kind of Mind lurking behind every wild invention creation offers up, but one far more grand and imaginative that our own.