Now something for which I’m sure you are exhaustively ready—some concluding thoughts.

What Shall We Say About Meaning and Purpose—or the Lack Thereof?

            We’ve tiptoed around this issue as the previous posts have been “peppered” with comments or questions about the role, if any, of religion and teleology in the “model(s)” of nature offered by science, most of them tagged with “we’ll return to/more about that later.” Well, it’s later!  So here is the question:

Is it possible to understand and accept this strange world which science has constructed for us and out of which we are said to have emerged by evolutionary processes, and still see the hand of God in it?

• Many cannot—and have turned their backs on science, seeing that as the only choice they have if they are to preserve their faith.
• Others cannot—and, choosing science, they stand on Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” mourning a lost faith, hearing only “It’s melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating, to the breath of the night-wind . . . .”
• Others also cannot—and choose to stand with confidence in the long and fruitful path that scientific method has traveled and continues to forge into the known and the unknown, while seeing the loss of belief in a divine presence as an inevitable and acceptable consequence.
• Others, too, cannot—because they either never possessed a faith in a Supreme Being or had abandoned that faith before becoming acquainted with the scientific theories concerning nature and the emergence of life.
• And finally, there are some who can—who have found a way to accept the current scientific consensus concerning the natural world, as well as its ever developing theories and discoveries, while still finding possibilities for the presence of “something more”—God, a Supreme Being, the Great Mystery—that leaves room for a sense of purpose in nature. It should be said, however, that since science proceeds on the basis of empirical methods and evidence which is never assumed to offer absolute, unchanging truth, those persons in this group are unlikely to say they “know” that this Being-by-whatever-name exists, but rather that they choose to “believe” it to be so.

And so, perhaps we can find our place in one of these sets of responses to the question posed, or in yet another response that I have not identified—if so, I hope you will let me know what I have missed!

A Brief Word About the Uses of Science

            As this unending series of posts has, I hope, demonstrated, science has taught us a great deal, but you’ll be happy to know that I’m not going to attempt some sort of summary—what has been said stands or falls on its own merits. I would like to note, however, the obvious: the more we know—or think we know based on the empirically determined conclusions of science, the more we are able to do. The uses of scientific knowledge and its applications for both good and evil are, perhaps, more massive now than ever before. 

Let me first say a few things about its uses for good. While history could provide mountains of scientific accomplishments from which humankind and nature itself have profited, I want to be relatively brief and focus on what is happening globally but especially and tragically in our own country—the Covid-19 pandemic. Scientists of many specialties—Biophysicists, Biochemists, Geneticists, Immunologists, Epidemiologists, Infectious Disease Medical Specialists, Pharmacologists, to name a few—have and are offering their expertise in an effort to understand the nature of this virus, how to defeat it, how to protect against its spread, how to treat those infected by it, and how to immunize against it.

Happily, more people than not are listening to, trusting, and benefiting from what scientists are offering as they learn more about this insidious virus. The tragedy is the number of people—everyday citizens, religious groups, people illegitimately using their claims of personal liberty to endanger others, and leaders who should know better—who resist and distrust the evidence and advice science is offering. My friend, Guy Sayles said it better than I can­­—although he is speaking primarily about religious groups, his observation is more broadly applicable:

 “I’m struck by how some of the most dysfunctional and irresponsible responses to the pandemic are  made by people who reflect a decades-long devaluing and denigration of “science” in parts of American Christianity. There has been a false and destructive pitting of science and faith against each other; and, now, some demagogic political leaders ask their followers to have faith in them rather than to heed the clear evidence of science.”

Enough said.

The uses of scientific discoveries and resulting technologies for potentially harmful or destructive purposes have always been a possibility. Its use for war and human atrocities was the occasion for this quote from T. S. Eliot:

“Where is the Life we have lost in the living?

Where is the wisdom that is lost in knowledge?”

Where is the knowledge that is lost in information? (from “The Rock”)

Eliot wrote that in 1934.  In 1964, Albert Einstein said:

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything

save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward

unparalleled catastrophes.”

What can keep us from such “unparalleled catastrophes” that science, beyond and apart from “the unleashed power of the atom,” makes possible? Maybe it could be the phrase attributed, perhaps spuriously, to Thomas Jefferson called “eternal vigilance”:

• • to public conversation about the ethical uses of science and technology;
  • to drawing circles that take people in instead of circles that shut people out;
  • to the potential deadening of people’s moral imaginations (Rabindranath Tagore in Nationalism, referenced in Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit);
  • to the crucial importance of both the individual and the community, as powerfully and beautifully stated in these two quotations:

“. . .although each individual is the pilot of their own destiny, when we come together, we change the world. We are stronger as a woven rope than as unbound threads” (Alexander Vindman, op ed, Washington Post, 7/31/2020).

” . . . . we flourish together: all of us are affected by all of us.” (Guy Sayles, “Interlocking Crises and Getting in Good Trouble.” Blog, From the Intersection, July 26, 2020.)

If we need some perspective—and we certainly might—ironically, science has provided it: Soviet astronaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, said:

“Looking at our earth from space, what strikes me is not only the beauty of the continents . . . but their closeness to one another . . . their essential unity.”

Maybe pop artist Brian Andreas has the key:

            “I like Geography best, he said,

            Because your mountains and rivers know the secret.

            Pay no attention to boundaries.”

Technology might be inhibited or protected by boundaries, but science, I am convinced, is not. Perhaps, then, neither should we.

The Final Words

            If you have read the previous posts, it will no doubt have become clear that I have found in Loren Eiseley something of a “hero” in the world of science—a pedestal that I have no doubt he would have modestly declined. Nevertheless, I want to leave you with his words—both in prose and in poetry, each of which he wrote with mastery—as a man of science, with a reverence for nature as an entity, and himself as related to it, that sometimes approaches the mystical and an acknowledgment of the divine. I believe as you read, you will find that he speaks, in his own way, to each of the three elements in our relationship with nature that were addressed in the previous two posts.

            The first selection is drawn from the fourth chapter of The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature (pp 48-52).

They fell out of the trees,” he said. “Like rain. And into the boat.”

“Uh?” I said, noncommittally.

“They did so,” he protested, “and they were hard to catch.”

“Really—” I said.

 “We were pushing a dugout up one of the tidal creeks in northern Australia and going fast when smacko we jam this mangrove bush and the things come tumbling down.

“What were they doing sitting up there in bunches? I ask you. It’s no place for a fish. Besides that they had a way of sidling off with those popeyes trained on you. I never liked it. Somebody ought to keep an eye on them.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I don’t know why,” he said impatiently, running a rough, square hand through his hair and wrinkling his forehead. “I just mean they make you feel that way, is all. A fish belongs in the water. It ought to stay there—just as we live on land in houses. Things ought to know their place and stay in it, but those fish have got a way of sidling off. As though they had mental reservations and weren’t keeping any contracts. See what I mean?”

“I see what you mean,” I said gravely. “They ought to be watched. My wife thinks so, too. About a lot of things.”

“She does?” He brightened. “Then that’s two of us. I don’t know why, but they give you that feeling.”

He didn’t know why, but I thought that I did.

   It began as such things always begin—in the ooze of unnoticed swamps, in the darkness of eclipsed moons. It began with a strangled gasping for air.

   The pond was a place of reek and corruption, of fetid smells and of oxygen-starved fish breathing through laboring gills. . . . It was a place of low life. In it the human brain began.

   There were strange snouts in those waters, strange barbels nuzzling the bottom ooze, and there was time—three hundred million years of it—but mostly, I think, it was the ooze. By day the temperature in the world outside the pond rose to a frightful intensity; at night the sun went down in smoking red. . . . Winds howled, dust clouds rolled, and brief erratic torrents choked with silt ran down to the sea. It was a time of dizzying contrasts, a time of change.

   On the oily surface of the pond, from time to time a snout thrust upward, took in air with a queer grunting inspiration, and swirled back to the bottom. The pond was doomed, the water was foul, and the oxygen almost gone, but the creature would not die. It could breathe air direct through a little accessory lung, and it could walk. In all that weird and lifeless landscape, it was the only thing that could. It walked rarely and under protest, but that was not surprising. The creature was a fish.

   In the passage of days the pond became a puddle, but the Snout survived. . . . He breathed air for a few hours and hobbled slowly along on the stumps of heavy fins.

   It was an uncanny business if there had been anyone there to see. . . . It was a monstrous penetration of a forbidden element, and the Snout kept his face from the light. It was just as well, though the face should not be mocked. In three hundred million years it would be our own.

   There was something fermenting in the brain of the Snout. He was no longer entirely a fish. . . . Though he breathed and walked primarily in order to stay in the water, he was coming ashore. . . .cumbersome and plodding though he was, something had happened back of his eyes.

   It is interesting to consider what sort of creatures we, the remote descendants of the Snout, might be, except for that green quagmire out of which he came. Mammalian insects perhaps we should have been. . . .More likely we should never have existed at all. It was the Snout and the ooze that did it. Perhaps there also, among rotting fish heads and blue, night-burning bog lights, moved the eternal mystery, the careful finger of God. The increase was not much. . . . two thin-walled little balloons at the end of the Snout’s small brain. The cerebral hemispheres had appeared. . . . .

   The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists . . . . There are things still coming ashore.

            And the second, final, selection from Eiseley’s book of poetry, The Innocent Assassins (pp. 25-26), is entitled “Desperate I Walked.”

In the November light on the drab thoroughfare it passed me,

silvering the grey day with its tiny shimmering perfection,

a small planet,

life seed, thistledown,

journeying the wrong way toward the city’s heart.

It was all alone on a slight wind, had come

many miles perhaps

                                      And it brought memories

to me who could bear none.

I took it gently from the air, walking

onward for blocks, seeking

a place where it could bed for the winter and be given

a chance to grow.

I had a home once where such things

happened by nature without human intervention.

Here I walked by car lots, highways,

I walked by pruned hedges, by formal gardens.

I knew if I dropped the seed its life would perish

either at once or be quickly weeded

from all the delicate, suburban gardens.

I tramped so long fear took me;

                                 My hand was cramped from carrying the seed,

where could I put it?

                    I was like the last knowing man

carrying the last vital thing,

                 The last feral seed nursed in his hand,

the last wild chance in the universe.

                Desperate I walked,

                a mad anxiety heightening my pulse.

In the curve of an old wall where the leaves

                              were obviously never gathered

                                                  I buried it

                                                  hoping for a resurrection.

The snows will come and the rains, but what have we done,

                                                   how have we come to this:

that someone, even I, must think, and not nature,

         thoughts for the winter sleep of the last thistledown?

“How have we come to this,” indeed. With all that is left unsaid, we are done!  Thanks to Loren Eiseley and thanks to you for following along on this journey—the preparation and the posts have been important and personal for me.  I hope you gained something along the way.