Ifs, Ands, or Butts
In last week’s post, I skipped the profound, heartfelt, armchair philosophy and instead, offered a few amusing thoughts about that day’s cartoon. A good number of Jazz Pickles said they enjoyed my occasional pontifications and hoped they would continue, so I’ll happily comply today. This one is about no less than the meaning of life and the existence of God. In spite of my best efforts, it’s kind of a long one.
To summarize my path thus far: Seemingly, I was born wondering what I was, where I came from, and why I was here. My earliest memories of these kinds of thoughts along are from when I was four. (I also had a powerful feeling that I’d been somewhere before and that I was here for a purpose, though at that age I couldn’t begin to understand what that meant.)
My family was Catholic, attended mass weekly, and sent me to Catholic school. As a teen, traditional Christianity began to fall flat for me and so I spent the subsequent decades exploring, reading, studying, praying, meditating, traveling, scoffing, criticizing, and eventually falling into a fairly standard science-based atheism. I figured if science can find no evidence of a god or a soul, spirituality of any kind must all be primitive superstitions still working their way out of our species. And, as science tends to encourage one to do, I eventually began to fervently disbelieve in anything that could not be measured, studied, and repeated in a double-blind experiment.
And that last piece—not believing what couldn’t be demonstrated scientifically—is what has changed for me.
My new path: I still believe in science as the best way humans have of understanding the physical universe. But I no longer believe that something cannot exist simply because it cannot be observed scientifically; after all, not so long ago, that included aspects of light not visible to the naked human eye, and the entire microscopic world.
What I’ve come to see recently is that science—by definition—can not recognize what it cannot observe in some way. Accordingly, you can’t apply science to spirituality any more successfully than you can apply economics to songwriting.
To disbelieve things science has proven—colds are caused by viruses, not demons—is foolish, but to dismiss outright anything that science doesn’t already have a folder for can be equally foolish. Among the things science can’t explain is consciousness, yet I’m reasonably certain I am conscious.
So realizing that not-being-visible-to-science isn’t necessarily synonymous with non-existence was step one. Here’s step two:
Even though since early childhood I’d felt I came from somewhere and was here for a purpose, science had gradually convinced me that feelings were less reliable than facts, so I relented and for several decades was satisfied with the fairly common scientific notion that life on this planet is an accident. But how does science know that?
True, science clearly has a pretty good model of how evolution works in the long run, and what we are learning about genetics confirms that species actually do evolve and split off. But how it got started—how life started on this planet in the first place—is still as big a scientific mystery and as wild a crapshoot as any culture’s or religion’s fairytales about gods and creation.
We learn about the “primordial soup” theory in school, but there is no known combination of inert elements that you can throw together in any kind of “soup” and get life. By the very rules of what is scientifically known about biology, this can’t happen. So the story of primordial soup is no more convincing or logical (or scientific!) than the idea that some God snapped his/her/its fingers to make it so. In the end, both science and religion come down to saying the same thing—“something magical happened.”
This realization changed my perspective on everything. I love science, but expecting a field of study designed to observe the physical world to answer a spiritual question is ridiculous. Science has no better idea of where we came from or why we’re here than any myth. In fact, primordial soup is basically a fundamental myth of science, isn’t it? But the reason science can’t give me an answer for the Meaning of Life is simple: science tells us how things work, not why they’re here. That’s just not what science is for.
From there, I took a simple step: If the notion that my life is intentional and has a higher purpose rings true for me on some level, and science cannot prove to me that this is not true, why should I not believe it?
Various types of studies seem to show that each person experiences a somewhat different reality that is based more on what they believe to be true than what is demonstrably true. (And apparently, that’s true regardless of how careful you think you are about facts.) So all I’ve done, really, is given myself permission to experience a reality that cannot be proven. It sounds simple, but for decades my intellectual arrogance has prevented me from doing that. Somehow, the above concepts enabled me to free myself from that particular ego-based yoke.
So have I gone back to believing in an omnipotent, immortal character somewhere out there who created the universe and cares how we live? Not at all. I still see the myths that grew into the world’s religions as stories to guide people, not histories to be believed. At present, I am much more intrigued by the idea that Life Itself—of which we are a tiny, integral part—has intelligence, meaning, and intention. I strongly suspect that, in a sense, life “knows” what it is doing.
Which brings us to planet earth. This enormous (to us), majestic juggernaut of life is insanely powerful and utterly inexplicable. It generates life on every surface and in every crevice of itself, relentlessly and without help. Humans have spent thousands of years trying to tame and control it and though we’ve done some real damage, in the end, we are helpless against it. We’ve always known that if it wants us out of the way, we’re like dust on a tabletop.
And despite all the damage we’ve done to it, were our entire species to die off tomorrow, all evidence of our having been here would be covered with new life and obscured from view within a geological blink of an eye.
What’s more, as far as we can see or detect, there’s nothing else like it for billions of miles. We’re all integral parts of the most dynamic and powerful thing between here and God-only-knows how far out into eternity; maybe in the entire universe. We are part of a system larger, older, more powerful, more diverse, and impossibly more creative than any single species could possibly build or destroy, no matter how many billions of dollars it spent or “likes” it engendered.
Maybe divinity is not out there, but right here: you, me, mammals, birds, fish, insects, plants, bacteria, viruses, molecules, DNA, the whole thing. We are all divinity because life is divine.
We humans didn’t ask to be born but we’re here now and we’ve somehow been gifted with being the most creative cells in this profoundly creative organism, Earth. What have we done with that gift? More importantly, what will we do with it tomorrow?
(FYI: Many of these thoughts were inspired by The Ascent of Humanity by Charles Eisenstein. The combination of this book and the experience I had in writing my graphic novel has changed my worldview profoundly. I’ll get more into the writing experience in a later post.)
Okay! If you’re not too exhausted from contemplating the meaning of life, let’s discover together the meaning of Wayno’s Bizarro cartoons from this week…
The good news is if you can reach the counter, the shot of whiskey will last you a week. (If you’re confused by this one, google “Claes Oldenburg,” or visit Wayno’s weekly blog post in which he gives more direct clues.)
I suffer from earworms quite a lot and it seems to me that they favor music that I detest.
What is the point of the hand-cut ice if you’re going to drink it out of a plastic beer-pong cup? C’MON!
Damn, that’s cold blooded. Actually, I guess they both are.
I’m relieved. In their world, a “meet-cute” could be significantly more disgusting.
That concludes this week’s pile of freshly laundered and tumble-dried comedy, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for sticking around to help us fold them. If you like the way they smell and appreciate that we do this for free, please consider poking at one of the links below. Every peso is much appreciated here at Rancho Bizarro and helps to keep the fabric softener flowing.
Until next week, be kind, be grateful, and share a laugh with a stranger.
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