Yesterday, I tossed a comment onto a post by Brian Hines about intelligent design, and it reminds me that, at some point, I wanted to adapt something I once posted to a different site of mine into a post here.
Hines’ post specifically is about the obvious motives behind the pushers of intelligent design, but my response was a more general statement about my own ragingly-devout agnosticism. The same will hold true here.
(Incidentally, this also gives me the parenthetical opportunity to mention that if you weren’t reading Mike Argento’s blogging about the recently-concluded, but not-yet-decided Dover Panda Trial, you really missed out.)
As I said, much of what follows is adapted by something I once posted elsewhere, so it might take some doing before I circle back around to the argument I made in my comment over at Hines’ site, but we’ll get there eventually.
While there have been many books which I have read but once, there has only ever been one book which, upon its completion, I knew I would never read again.
Not long after reading Richard Powers’ Operation Wandering Soul a decade ago (has it been that long?), I emailed the author — something I had done only once before, and that instance also had been to Powers.
Those emails are long lost to my personal history and years of moving on to new computers without bothering with the hassle of backing up the accumulated detritus of the old, but they can be nearly approximated.
The first time I had sent him email, it was in the wake of my having finished reading his Galatea 2.2, which I said had left me feeling exquisitely lost.
As near as recollection can serve, what I told the author about Operation Wandering Soul was something along the lines of the fact that I would never read it again.
It was a remark fully intended to be a great compliment — one I trusted the author would recognize as such, as indeed he did. He added to that recognition, not incidentally, that when it came to that particular book he frankly always was surprised that anyone could ever manage to bring themselves to read the entire thing even once.
All of which is the requisite background to the fact that last June reneged on my oath to the author and in fact starting reading this book for a second time.
There is a brutishness and a barrenness to the world in this book, mostly for the simple reason that the world is our world, and in the end existence is not an especially timid or clean one.
An oddity here is that whatever it is that made me so certain that I never again would read this book likely is the same thing that in the end caused me to pick it up again. Much in the way that I once opted to live New York City precisely because I swore I never would.
Further oddity can be found in a strange parallel I find with Joss Whedon’s audio commentary track to the final episode of his aborted-by-network television series, Firefly. In that track, Whedon simple and clearly enunciates what invariably has been the philosophy to which I have myself regularly returned.
At one point during that commentary (one of the finest such tracks on any DVD), Whedon references an observation made by a character in another of his shows: That if nothing we do means anything, then the only thing that means anything is what we do — and this, Whedon says, is the moral implication of a universe that has no meaning.
I used to urge people to try a thought experiment wherein they were to pretend that we lived in a world in which everyone gets into Heaven.
To drive the point home in a particularly stark way, I made it clear that in that imagined world even Adolf Hitler gets into Heaven. The point of this experiment was to get people to ponder a world in which the only meaning which could arise is one which we derived and created from our own sheer and deliberate force of will.
(There are countless other ways in which this has been expressed, and while I’m quite certain that the many grand spheres of intellectualism likely have produced any number of those ways, and just as certain that there are names for the premise, my only real points of reference — in case the above Whedon doesn’t make it clear — tend towards the pop cultural. To wit, think of the end of Heathers, wherein J.D. offers this advice to Veronica: “Pretend I did blow up the school. All the schools. Now that you’re dead, what are you gonna do with your life?” Ultimately, this also is what the movie version of Fight Club seemed to me to be saying as well, although I can’t speak for the book because I’ve never read it.)
Once upon a time, I went through a Hakim Bey phase, although I’ve long since lost track of the whys and hows of it. But there’s a quote from T.A.Z. which makes clear for just what perception I was testing when I made people engage in that thought experiment.
“Existence itself may be considered an abyss possessed of no meaning,” Bey wrote. “I do not read this as a pessimistic statement. If it be true, then I can see in it nothing else but a declaration of autonomy for my imagination & will — & for the most beautiful act they can conceive with which to bestow meaning upon existence.”
All of which does (I swear) circle back into what I started with: Operation Wandering Soul, which as I said takes place in the same brutish and barren world as do our own lives.
If our own world possesses only whatever meaning we ascribe to it, and that world is the very one inhabited by the characters in that book, the very fact that those characters manage somehow to write their own way through that world is the meaning they give it. Which in the end more or less precisely mirrors the reasons I once swore to its author that I would never read the book again.
Which of course also are more or less precisely the reasons I finally went back on that promise and picked it up for a second time.
That brings things back around to the comment I posted over on Hines’ site, which I’ll regurgitate more or less verbatim here.
Hines referenced one Nancy Pearcey as saying the following: “If life on earth is a product of blind, purposeless natural causes, then our own lives are cosmic accidents. There’s no source of transcendent moral guidelines, no unique dignity for human life.”
This really is my favorite sort of statement, because it helps reveal what I find so much more compelling about being a devout agnostic who prefers something at least akin to rationalism.
Personally, I find the potential for “unique dignity” to be strengthened, not weakened, if that dignity comes about by sheer force of our own determined will to make life function well for ourselves and each other.
Choosing “dignity” (or whatever) in a world where you’re perfectly free to choose something more debasing is a far more powerful idea to me than the notion that “dignity” is somehow inherent because higher power made us that way and insists we behave.
What bothers me, I think, about those such as the pushers of intelligent design, who would attempt to wield (abuse, really) other people’s personal faith as a weapon to gain themselves power is that their belief structure denigrates the human capacity to make intelligent choices about what sort of world we want.
I don’t say that, in turn, to denigrate people’s personal faith. If I’m a ragingly-devout agnostic, then I must abide by the reality of not being able to prove a negative. I can neither prove there is no God, nor that people’s personal faith isn’t something real.
My real position, ultimately, is simple: On the practical level of everyone trying to make sense out of, and properly navigate, day-to-day existence, I don’t give a rat’s ass about anyone’s beliefs. What I care about are their actions. (That’s precisely why I spring at people the thought experiment I mention above.)
I won’t pretend there aren’t aspects of the tendency to try to impose a given faith (or, more usually, a given abuse of a given faith) upon other people which offend me profoundly.
As I said in my comment on Hines’ post (and restated here), I think freely choosing to live a life in which you are respectful, considerate, and aware is more powerful (more beautiful, really) than doing so because some higher power told you it was the right way to be — let alone doing so because you fear being punished by that higher power.
Personally (and that’s what all of this comes down to, in the end, for all parties), I find the capacity for choice, and not hopes or fears about what might or might not come after this life, to be a motivator more worthy of the notion of “dignity.”
Intelligent design, of course, is only about a Christian notion (by which I don’t mean all Christians push the concept, but that those who do are Christians) that the natural world could not have happened entirely by accident or happenstance. It’s a thinly-disguised religious doctrine they’re trying to foist into the pubic schools.
That doesn’t bother me merely on a “separation of church and state” level — it offends me that so-called intelligent design ultimately ties back to a religious notion that we aren’t capable of creating a decent world, or even a decent day-to-day life, of our own free will.
Rather than pushing the idea that the world was designed by some intelligence, I’d rather argue for the premise that our lives can be intelligent by choice.
Well said.