The League of Bearded Catholics

Nature and Nature's God

Long story short: I've been overwhelmed with work the last several weeks and so apologize yet again for the appalling lack of beardful bloggage. All this apologizing is doing wonders for my humilty, though. I'm getting humbler and humbler, and am now probably more humble than most people I know.

I offer, then, this mediatation on our experience of God in nature, and how I think that may be different from natural science. This is lifted from an ongoing thread at the Christian Pipe Smokers forum;

 

Nature moves one toward belief in God and is reasonably used to support belief in God, but seen narrowly as a strictly scientific question, it lacks the kind of certainty that science seeks. The finite things of the world can not adequately prove the existence of an infinite God, as if you could write it down in an equation... "X+YxZ = God"

Philosophically, one can work out that an unmoved mover must exist, but that is more like pure reason, not a matter of testable scientific hypotheses, because there is no scientific proof even that reason means anything. Science is again, too small to address such questions. Science is contingent on reason and on the relaibility of our sense experiences.

Of course, the tragedy of the modern age is that science has been divorced from the kind of philosophical/metaphysical grounding that would make it really fruitful for the happiness and betterment of mankind. We "progress" scientifically, but are no better for it, and no happier.
I think that when St. Paul said "...since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." it's pretty unlikely he was thinking about science . The presence and glory of God are manifest in nature, even for those (perhaps especially for those) with little or no scientific understanding of what they are seeing.

I look at the universe and see it less as a mechanism and much more as a work of art. Science can tell us nothing about the meaning of the Pieta , or of Beethoven's Ode to Joy , or whether The Lord of the Rings movies do justice to the books. These are human experiences that are simply opaque to science.

I think the experience of the presence of God in nature is of this kind of character, and is beyond the (comparatively) narrow, dull certainties of a laboratory or supercomputer.

Discoveries of natural science can certainly multiply these opportunities to see God in nature (look at the photos from the Hubble telescope, or from electron microscopes), but I don't believe a scientist has any advantage in that regard over an aborigine watching the sun set.

Mars, Everest and the Call of the Sea

This started as a combox response, so pardon me if it is a little off-the-cuff.

Responding to this post on a possible manned Mars landing, esteemed reader Shmikey comments;

I guess that I see things a little differently. I watched a documentary a few years back about a climb up Everest that ended with the loss of a couple of climbers, one who had a family at home, and I decided that the pursuit of some thing is not necessarily a good thing. I think that these pursuits can get to the point of looking like the Tower of Babel, and we are trying to prove that we don't need God, as long as we can rely on technology to fill our needs. I will change my opinion when the mission takes on the attitude of Christopher Columbus, and we intend to spread the Gospel through these endeavors.

I can see your point, Shmikey, but in my opinion the original trip to Mars would parallel Sir Edmund Hillary's original ascent of Mt. Everest much more than it would the current tourist trade that has been built up around the mountain.

The slopes of Everest are now covered with the litter (food packets, abandoned gear, oxygen bottles) left behind by numerous climbing parties, many of whom are near novices lured there by commercial guide services who imply that climbing Everest is no longer the very dangerous and maybe deadly an undertaking it is.

To me, the closest parallel to that would be Richard Branson's nascent effort to create a space tourism business in low Earth orbit, catering to those who have more money than they know how to spend... a carnival ride for bored billionaires. The first efforts at flight - say Orville and Wilbur Wright - had a different character. There was something driving them that I think God put there... this human hunger to find out about the created world, to travel to far away places and attempt impossible things. This impulse can, of course, be perverted in any number of ways.

I think there was spiritual value in the initial Moon shots, if only in the fact that they took us self-absorbed moderns out of ourselves and for a moment awakened Wonder in a cynical world.

It may be because I'm an artist that I balk a little at the idea that a thing must be demonstrably necessary to be worthwhile. The whole brilliant thing about art - almost the definition of art - is that it isn't necessary, and is yet worthwhile. To the extent that it is necessary, it is less like art. Art also (hopefully) awakens Wonder and a sense of mystery, which maybe leaves the door open a crack for people to encounter God.

This reflects the ongoing discussion about just what Christian artists should be doing with their talents, whether every worthy work of art must have an explicitly Christian/Gospel narrative element, or not. Can looking at a painting of a bowl of fruit be a spiritual experience that brings a person closer to the mind of God? I believe so.

On Going To Mars

Mars has just been all over the place in popular culture, ours and everyone's, since people first looked up at the wandering red star. Speculation, and fascination, about life on Mars mushroomed in the 19th century and somewhat surprisingly has not abated at all since. Mark Shea points out that rather desperate scientific theorizing regarding evidence of Martian life has only intensified since President Obama made it clear that he's just not that into Mars. "B--b-b-b-ut!..." blurt the scientists, "If we don't go to Mars, we'll never know if we might have missed out on the Greatest Scientific Discovery Ever, which we swear is right around the corner! We might find some new mineral or element that would cure Cancer/AIDS/The Common Cold (though very unlikely) or uncover proof of extra-terrestrial life (though - okay - that's really, really unlikely), or invent some new and better... solar panel! Yeah! That's it! Just let us go up and root around and we practically guarantee we can dig up out of the Martian soil some new and promising source of funding that will last us all well into retirement."

For a long time, now, when people of the Modern West speculate about alien life, they naturally think first of Mars. Chesterton's friend and loyal opponent H.G. Wells famously wrote about Martians (as we have noted), and C.S. Lewis wrote an entire trilogy of novels about Mars.

That Mars occupies this sort of default position is only reasonable. Of all the planets in the Solar system, it is most like ours. Forbidding and toxic, of course, but for all that, more cozy and comfortable than any other of the spinning spheres, by far.

Mars is also our next door neighboor, and it should not be at all strange if we would like to drop in and pay a social call. There may be nobody home, but we might at least try the doorbell and (like we did with the old abandoned house down the block where I grew up) step inside, hear the floorboards creak and see if the ghost stories might be true. Maybe we just need someone to Triple-Dog-Dare us... someone like China, maybe (hey, it worked for the Moon!).

I don't disagree with Mark Shea's thesis that NASA scientists are highly motivated by a potential loss of income and position, but I would have to disagree with the idea that we have no good reason to go to Mars. Let's just admit that all the Russians did in the 1960's was to give us a really plausible excuse to go to the Moon. Heck, we pretty well knew there was nothing much there. Buzz Aldrin called the lunar landscape a "magnificent desolation", which was no great surprise, no more a surprise than finding the top of Mt. Everest to be on the chilly side.

But by galactic standards, the Moon is, let's face it, a little like tent camping in your own back yard. It doesn't come near exhausting the idea of going "where no man has gone before". A great start, but shoot!... from the moon mankind can collectively say "I can see my house from here!".

We've always been a little obsessed with Mars. We've dreamed of going there since long before it looked remotely possible. Does everything have to have a scientific justification? Must every endeavour add up to a positive number on someone's balance sheet? We should go, but we should do so just for the poetry and adventure of the thing, and hang the sense of it.

When we went to the Moon, people around the world watched and many cried and prayed. Those who did so in India and Africa and elsewhere were not crying and praying that we would beat the Russians. They did not get a lump in the throat hoping that we would bring back some good moon rocks. They didn't get all misty eyed over the science. When we went to the Moon, the whole world in a real sense went with us. WE - mankind - were going to touch the Heavens.

Not that I think there will be much real manned exploration to do past Mars. The universe is, well, a big place and odds are very heavy that no human being will ever walk outside the Solar system. But until we go to Mars, we just haven't checked off all the items on our To-Do list, I don't think.

To me the question is, why not go? Because it's expensive? I would bet we've sunk enough money into the Wall Street bail-outs to go to Mars and back. Maybe more than once. What does "expensive" mean anymore to a nation that uses play money? What's a dollar really worth? One can find of a lot of brain-warpingly expensive items on the national budget that are not only far more useless than a trip to Mars, but that are positively harmful.

Then there is the danger. Okay, it's a dangerous undertaking. There you go. It is not unlikely that we will lose some people. Still, just as with project Mercury and the entire early space program, there will be astronaut wannabes lining up around the block for the chance to go. Some things are worth the risk (and I don't mean a few scoops of Mars dirt).

I've been leaning heavily on Chesterton here at TLBC, lately, but he's a big guy and can hold me up with no problem. This passage is from Heretics and for me sums up the difference between our great, vigorous leap for the Moon just a few decades ago, and the current hand-wringing about Mars following an extended period of dithering about in low Earth orbit;

When everything about a people is for the time growing weak and ineffective, it begins to talk about efficiency.  So it is that when a man's body is a wreck he begins, for the first time, to talk about health. Vigorous organisms talk not about their processes, but about their aims. There cannot be any better proof of the physical efficiency of a man than that he talks cheerfully of a journey to the end of the world. And there cannot be any better proof of the practical efficiency of a nation than that it talks constantly of a journey to the end of the world, a journey to the Judgment Day and the New Jerusalem. There can be no stronger sign of a coarse material health than the tendency to run after high and wild ideals; it is in the first exuberance of infancy that we cry for the moon.

None of the strong men in the strong ages would have understood what you meant by working for efficiency.  Hildebrand would have said that he was working not for efficiency, but for the Catholic Church. Danton would have said that he was working not for efficiency, but for liberty, equality, and fraternity.  Even if the ideal of such men were simply the ideal of kicking a man downstairs, they thought of the end like men, not of the process like paralytics. They did not say, "Efficiently elevating my right leg, using, you will notice, the muscles of the thigh and calf, which are in excellent order, I--" Their feeling was quite different. They were so filled with the beautiful vision of the man lying flat at the foot of the staircase that in that ecstasy the rest followed in a flash.