Gospel & Universe 🔬 Science & Mystery
Two Sides of the Fence
Life on the Fence - ✝️ Belief - 🔬 Disbelief
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In 1860 Huxley wrote, “Give me such evidence as would justify me in believing in anything else, and I will believe that.” In 1863 he said this about Christian doctrines: “Give me a scintilla of evidence, and I am ready to jump at them.”
Agnostics aren’t wedded to doubt; it’s simply the default position they occupy. They’re ready to jump ship, cross the floor, get down off the fence if and when they find reasons or experiences that convince them to do so.
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Life on the Fence
They call me a fence-sitter because I can’t believe in belief or disbelief.
✝️ Belief
On one side of the fence I see a wide field through which passes an ancient road stubbled with bibles and stones, dhammapadas and bhagavad-gitas, broken tablets of cuneiform and the fine dust of philosophic masterpieces all dissolved in time.
White tattered pages, yellowing in the sun, fragments of ten broken laws, and slivers of papyrus reed shoot from the margins.
India dreams of zeros and decimal points
and Arabic numerals
superimposed
like an
X
on history
sunya, the void, zero
decimal places, base 10 and 60
like the Sumerian sundials of the mind.
The Arab world digests Aristotle and sends him back to the West, amid earthquakes of rediscovered Greek that shake the clerics of Arles and Rome with equations and echoing books of song.
The songs and ages past and places beyond must give us pause.
The incense is lit and the priest reads verses from the 10th mandala of the 129th chapter of the Rg Veda: Only the God in the Highest Heavens knows — which seems like a fine way to start, way back in the middle of the second millennium B.C., but then the priest adds, or perhaps He knows not.
Verses sacred or broken, verses about the broken, the fallen world buried deep beneath the smouldering ruins of Mohenjo-Daro and Knossos,
and a million other places that may yet be found here or in the songs of the far-off worlds,
The sirens of Titan inaudible, invisible, as-of-yet indecipherable.
The ziggurats of Babylon crack, and the waves of the tsunami tower above Fuji.
In Rome the southern earthquakes strike terror into the heart of the ardent cardinal, who scours the revolving sky for omens. Surely some revelation is at hand.
Luther rushes to the church door, theses in hand, to fix the fracturing moment of the 16th Century into a single Truth: five old books and four new ones:
the same old Good News, unchanging, uncompromising.
The cardinal tells us it’s good for us to etch the ages with Gospel,
with four cardinal points on a flat, unspinning world.
But like the wedges of cuneiform (so certain for three thousand years and then forgotten),
the peril of our scattered selves, the magic of our chaos, can’t be etched in Certainty.
🔬 Disbelief
On the other side of the fence I see a wide field, flooded with strange new trees,
sprouting legs and eggs, as if this human life were only one way of living,
and life forms were recombinant, like RNA,
and aliens wrote sonnets.
Hieronymus Bosch on steroids: the hellish and the heavenly rolled into one,
as if cosmic order were nothing but fantasy.
Humans with fish heads and cherry-driven planes ride the waves of the deep sky on a flying sardine.
A man walks on water. A man commands the seas to part. Gandalf. Luke Skywalker.
The flight to Heaven, the forbidden fruit, the dice-game of Hell. Mere stories.
Beneath the discarded heaps snakes slither beneath the soil,
rising like black arms and fingers through the cracks to at last grasp that tempting breast,
and all those body parts denied for two thousand years
in the old storybook about the snake and the apple tree.
The fingers shoot upward, like dark eager branches,
pushing the sap into every corner of our selves, from the base of the sacrum to the brain stem.
The lines of black coil uncoil. The feared weeds take over the garden. Surely some revelation is at hand.
Transatlantic cables, fibre optics, and satellites lift their signals, invisible, to the sky.
This is the new resurrection, from the visible to the invisible. This is the new transubstantial gospel, without a capital g. It soars at the speed of light, along the controlled firing of electrons over the monk's death valley desert into the astronomer’s desert of vast eternity. It sends a message to all the aliens out there about the Federation's elusive ideal
the prime directive
about minding our own business, about live and let live, about do unto others, and about a method of dealing with matter and matters secular, calling out to outer space,
like a space-ship, unmoored from its docking port, a one-way call flowing in morse code, from the ALMA Observatory high on a mountain top, sixteen thousand four hundred and four feet above Chile’s Atacama Desert;
and from all the alma mater deserts, a straight line of code sent outward to Andromeda and Canis Major, the top dog, 8.6 million light years away.
This call to the aliens out there may never be recalled, or answered. It will stretch into space long after the body of the sender has turned to sand. It will still be floating, beaming, in complete isolation, for millions of years floating between this galaxy and the next.
From the other end, the keen aliens will read it, and then indulge their collective urge for the trajectory of a single line and beam back a line of code in amethyst light, encoded with the meaning of Everything: the DNA of the stars.
Yet by the time this Light reaches us, the source will have been extinguished for ten million years and the descendants of the code-senders, having sprouted different eyes, won’t be able to read what they sent.
Everything we are is a blip in a cosmos undesigned, lost in the widest field we’ll never know.
✝️ / 🔬
They call me a fence-sitter because I believe in doubt.
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Next: 🔬 The Crystal Ball of Science
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