God in the Hubble

The Hubble swivels its big glassy eye at the stars; it zeros in on a previously unexplored pocket of deep space where a particularly bright and mysterious object hangs in the infinite zenith. Scientists, you read on the NASA website, hope to observe the fabled “Great Attractor” – the phenomenon that holds our cosmic splatter together.

Yet, when the lenses focus, it is not some super massive black hole located at the core of the known universe…but a magnificent throne, enveloped in brilliant light, set in a golden cloudscape far too fantastic to be described.

On the golden throne sits a bearded king type dude, also bathed in extraterrestrial radiance, with a benevolent but stern expression on his wise, ancient face. To make matters worse, seated on the Right Hand of the Big Guy is a dour looking, rather Aryan fellow in his early thirties with a beard and a robe and blond hair and blue eyes. On the Uber-Man’s other hand is something that can only be described of as a “ghost” (no Linus under a bed-sheet with holes cut for eyes, but something extraordinary & mystical & dynamically sublime).

Behind this startling Trinity, a diamond encrusted gate stands light-years into the void. At its foot, a lesser but still Biblically brilliant bureaucrat stands before a podium that dwarfs the Empire State Building and reading from a tome more massive than Niagara Falls. A throng of dim little beings in human form (some unbearably smug despite their nakedness, others a little worried and ragged around the edges, hands shielding their privates) are lined up before the blazing Three, apparently like some celestial People’s Court. The brilliant minds at NASA surmise that some are getting in and some are not (what happens to the ones that don’t get in? we wonder).

That same afternoon, back here on terra firma, a deep sea oil drilling platform punches clean through the crust of the Earth, but rather than inert magma and volcanic plumes pushing plate tectonics, the drilling team discovers a great void filled with a legion of voices howling in pain and woe…of course, the picture falls into place.

Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Dr. D. James Kennedy & Coral Ridge Ministries, Jack Chick – these people (who you, with your liberal, elitist mentality, have always thought of as irrational religious zealots) were right all along! Science – that rubric which once simplified moral being by complicating the nature of existence through empirical observation – has now proven that everything you believed, every guiding principle you thought, has been incorrect all along! You secular shmuck!!

In other words – what if all the inventions, discoveries, theories, and advances of the industrial / scientific revolution prove beyond a reasonable doubt that everything you’ve believed in to this point was wrong – I mean, we can actually see God on the telescope! We waved at us! Hell is a real place and it’s going to roast your uglies while some badass devil is going to stab you right up the sweet bibby unless you repent, sinner, repent, before it is too late! etc.

And it had better be right now, because death could come anytime – seriously, you could be reaching for the remote to check the latest about the God project on FOX News and an engine could drop off a DC-10 and land square on your coffee table and you could find yourself naked, naked, naked before the Almighty, trying to explain that you had actually penciled in “Repentance” into your date book for the next morning…

Now just imagine that you have been a hardcore atheist – that is, God does not exist, not then, not now, not ever. The very idea of God is ridiculous and offensive; to paraphrase the estimable David Cross: Garden of Eden? Talking snakes? Where’s the unicorn, baby?

Imagine that your world revolves around a “positivist” mindset, or – as one actual brain-scientist once explained it to me – you believe in the power of scientific evidence, verifiable fact, to provide a rational and unambiguous answer to complex questions regarding the nature of existence. Nothing more and nothing less.

Up till this point, all available evidence suggests that we, and in fact the world and the cosmos with its visible & invisible laws, is the result of physical and chemical interactions that mindlessly obey a set of mechanical rules, a.k.a. natural laws, a.k.a. time & space, a.k.a. the-crap-you-don’t-really-understand-but-they-can-build-an-atomic-bomb-so-they-are-probably-right-about-all-that-other-stuff-anyway.

In other words, before Hubble saw that Heavenly region up there, there was no question in your mind as to the nature of the universe - no intelligent design, no creative super-genius, no pantheon, no God, no Jesus H. and his Merry Men.

This belief system has fueled your world, given your life meaning, and, most importantly, provided you with a basis for rational, moral, ethical action (what is the difference between morals and ethics, anyway?).

You are a person whose world is given boundaries by the existence of a known system – in this case, science – that provides you with answers to those most fundamentally unanswerable questions –

Why are we here? (because, you reply, we are an accumulation of molecules that self-adhere and in said process construct complex multi-cellular, self-aware organisms from the precise rules of physics)

What is the meaning of life? (to be kind to each other, you answer, because the universe is not here to either help or hinder, but it is a tough, cold place composed of ineffable forces that dwarf our tiny comprehension, so as much snuggly-wuggly free luv as we can generate guarantees not only our happiness but our survival).

How did we get here? (simple: it’s science! Accumulation of molecules obeying laws – yadda, yadda, yadda).
Where can we seek answers? (take a course on biology, read “Discovery” magazine, watch National Geographic on the Discovery Channel, then read the “God Delusion” by Richard Dawson).

Okay, so just imagine that you are one of these people – a positivist in a world defined by the non-religion ideology of the late Carl Sagan, whose metaphor about Renaissance science lighting a candle in the darkness of Medieval irrationality represents all you ascertain about the world, its morality, its existence, and the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow based on the laws of gravity and the effects that super-massive bodies have on the fabric of space & time. No reincarnation, no afterlife, no laws meted by God, do not pass Go.

And now God is in the telescope and there is no hope of denying His existence and His purpose for us.

I asked a colleague of mine, someone whose intellect I admire very much and who is also a die-heard atheist, if she could accept scientific proof-positive for the existence of God.

No, she said unequivocally, even if there were no scientific doubt about the presence of the Big Guy, she could not, would not, admit to His existence. “I would be one of those crazy flat Earth people,” she said, “denying the fact of the perfectly obvious.”

Even, I asked, if this meant an eternity in Hell?

Hell, she responded, would not be enough of an inducement for her to change her mindset about God and Christianity – nope, not even Hell, not even eternity.

For the past seven years I have lived in the corn-fed Midwest. I’ve been a teacher here, and I have seen firsthand how the belief in a fundamentalist Christian God powers a lot of thinking. Mind you, these are some of the nicest, most civil, most moral, most country music-y, most boy-howdy-est people on the planet – and the Hoosiers and Buckeyes and Kansas City cowboys are also some of the most defensive, most easily offended, most reactionary registered voters north of Kentucky. Hell, one student actually wrote a paper about the benefits of censorship (won’t someone please think about the little children?!). And a great many believe steadfastly in the Word and all its attendant implications.

Into this Fundamentalist worldview comes evolution, atomic chemistry, paleontology, geological history, cosmology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and a host of other scientific, historical, and philosophic systems that ardently bring into question, if not outright disprove the literalism of the Bible. Are God and science really at odds? We are perennially arguing this point, yet is there any real doubt?

What we as a literate technocracy forget, I believe, is that we are not just telling the Fundamentalists to smoke less, eat better, watch less TV, avoid asbestos – we are telling them that they are wrong. The message that science brings to the masses is that brainiacs driving engines of knowledge guided by supercomputers have proven faith a form of mythology.

We, the technocratic culture of America, are telling the Fundamental culture of America that the guiding principles of their worldview are fundamentally unsound, even non-existent. We are telling them that their beliefs, their morals, their clothing, their music, their Sunday mornings, their Bibles are all a farce based on inflated folklore. Everything they believe and everything they do is a façade. God is not just dead, he was never there in the first place.

Is it so hard to understand the fundamental antagonism of the Fundamentalists?