More interesting than a watchmaker
It is always nice to get up to date, even it takes some time. In my case, the process seems to be proceeding apace. I’m not up to date yet, but I have at least caught up with the 13th century.
Let me explain how I discovered this. In my last column I made the point that what is called creation is not something that took place several billion years ago, but something that is taking place now.
Well, the very day after that column was posted I happened to be reading D.T. Suzuki’s Mysticism: Christan and Buddhist and I came upon this quote from the 13th-century mystic known as Meister Eckhart:
To talk about the world as being made by God tomorrow, yesterday, would be talking nonsense. God makes the world and all things in this present now.
Finding myself in agreement with someone writing 800 years earlier, I was reminded of something C. S. Lewis said: “We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
This makes me wonder if I’m not more up-to-date than I thought, especially when you put it together with something Suzuki says later on in Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist:
We generally think that philosophy is a matter of pure intellect … that the best philosophy comes out of a mind most richly endowed with intellectual acumen and dialectical subtleties. But this is not the case. It is true that those who are poorly equipped with intellectual powers cannot be good philosophers. Intellect, however, is not the whole thing. There must be a deep power of imagination …a strong inflexible will-power … a keen insight into the nature of man, and … an actual seeing of the truth as synthesized in the whole being of the man himself. … Knowledge unless it is accompanied by a personal experience is superficial and no kind of philosophy can be built upon such a shaky foundation.
The problem with philosophy has always been its tendency to elevate one faculty of human consciousness — namely, reason — above all the other faculties. Often, when one listens to debates between those who believe in God and those who don’t, one gets the impression that God for both sides simply is the terminus ad quem of a reasoning process, one more idea, whether true or false, among all the other ideas.
But while ideas are among the things we experience, experience itself is not merely an idea. It is a complex process of emotion and sensation, memory and desire. It is these — and the things and persons that prompt them — that we think about. And it is imagination, as Suzuki suggests, that enables us to integrate them into an understanding of reality.
I recently read that Richard Dawkins, at age 9, was so intrigued by the argument from design (presumably Paley’s watchmaker analogy) that he became deeply religious. But then, at age 16, he became convinced that Darwinism was a better explanation of the design apparent in nature and became an atheist.
This strikes me as evidence of a woeful lack of imagination, to say nothing of rather feeble reasoning. It is one thing to conclude that nature is not made the way a watch is. It is quite another to conclude that, because it not made that way, it is not made at all — especially if you are going to continue using the term design.
Nature may, for example, be made the way music is made. After all, the whole notion of God is not of some super being among other lesser beings cobbling those other beings into existence. It is of some absolute other thinking what we call being — and beings — into being.
There certainly have been some pretty sharp cookies — the philosopher Henri Bergson and the paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, to name just two — who have thought of evolution in purposeful, personalist terms, and it certainly seems reasonable that God, understood in the aforementioned manner, would be able to imagine a world that could run on its own.
That would certainly be more interesting and convenient than one he would have to keep winding up and repairing.
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I’ve always liked this Bergson quote:
“The universe is a machine for the making of Gods.”
Dawkins is crabby in a funny British way. When he signed my copy of his most recent book at a speaking engagement here in Oregon, I introduced myself and thought perhaps he might write “To Mike…Richard Dawkins.”
Instead, he shot me a faint smile, signed a simple-and-quick “Richard Dawkins” and that was that.
I suspect that Dawkins is in love with himself even more than most of us are (though I confess I’m in love with myself a good deal less than I used to be). That quote from Bergson, by the way, which I did not know, is wonderful.
Isn’t it good? I think I mined that quote out of this book: http://bit.ly/cKMGAR