Seeking Sun
What did they go out to the wilderness to see?
Have you had a chance to listen to last week’s Brief History of Power podcast with Colonel Grills and Doctor Koontz? The men continued their discussion of extra-terrestrials, UFOs and spiritual deception. In past episodes, Koontz and Grills explained that celestial phenomena in ancient times usually led people to fear the divine. When faced with something outside human control, something very hard to explain or believe, people were pressed to admit that behind creation must be an all-powerful One.
But now, we have credulity in all the wrong places. Tales of intervening deities have long been replaced by rational-sounding stories. For Westerners at least, we revert to natural explanations, not spiritual ones, as Grills and Koontz explained. We trust The Science. From the bottom of the sea, to the center of our cells, there’s no space for spiritual things to be hiding. The volume of data at our command (and at times, the hubris of scientists themselves) gives the impression that humanity collectively has figured out most everything and the sheer noisiness of the modern information age means mysteries are definitely out of style. If science doesn’t have an explanation for unsettling things, just give it time.
Theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss wrote about his experience watching the recent solar eclipse that passed over North American. In Quillette, Krauss writes of his joy in witnessing the eclipse, the fourth moonshadow he has seen. Pondering the benefits of stargazing in the countryside steers his thoughts toward ancient times, when there was less of a disconnect between land and sky than there is for us moderns. At the very least, the lack of light pollution and high-rises means the heavens must have been harder to ignore.
Kraus imagines the awe induced by signs in the sky would have been an unpleasant experience for the ancient mind: “Before the advent of science, every mystery appears like pure magic. One can only imagine the terror induced by the sudden vanishing of the sun without warning.” Krauss goes on to praise science as a wonderfully reassuring and unifying force in the world. He enjoyed the eclipse because it brought people together and reminded us of “how precious our brief moment in the sun really is.”
So, feeling small and experiencing some wonder that you exist. Is that it? Awe may just be a tiny portion of terror; wonder may be a step towards gratitude, but Mr Kraus appears to have trained his mind to thank science rather than Jesus for his life and breath. Does he question what induces those feelings or why he seeks such an experience in the first place? What assurance does he have, any more than ancients, that the sun will indeed return from the shadows? Perhaps his great learning is driving him mad! St Paul nailed it in Romans 1: they will not acknowledge God nor give thanks. Their foolish hearts are darkened.
One article at Nautilis I found illustrates the way science can become just another tool men use to worship the creation rather than the Creator. Editor, Brian Gallagher writes that “scientists have long attested to the cosmic feelings of significance science can spark in their lives.” (I assume he means that God’s creation sparks the feelings, not their study of it?) He quotes Carl Sagan: “When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.” (Pretty sure Vice President Harris said something similar a couple years back about the internet, but I digress..)
Gallagher points to humanist biologist Julian Huxley (1887-1975) for whom “rejecting the idea of the supernatural gave him enormous ‘spiritual relief’”. It appears that Huxley mistook wonder at nature, the appreciation of beauty and the desire to understand the world without any reference to a Creator, as a better religion. He described it as finding “holiness in reality.”
Yes, I like antibiotics and airplanes and wi-fi much as the next person – scientific endeavor has given us much to be thankful for. But the confession of men of science that they feel something spiritual inspired by the physical points to the fact that the material is not enough to satisfy a human soul. Our technology may place us less at the mercy of the elements than our forebear’s did, but pilgrimages to view the eclipse reveal that humans still understand that nature has things to teach us. Beyond empirical facts of the mechanics of organisms and measurements of light and space, we perceive some benefit from feeling insignificant, unnerved or bereft of purpose in the presence of something uncontrolled and magnificent. To peek into the unknown and remember we are cosmic dust is “life-changing”. At least for a hot three minutes.
At Mockingbird, Todd Brewer suggests that in a world all explained away by science, it takes quite the spectacle to get our attention: “When the extraordinary becomes quotidian, enchantment must come from the increasingly exotic…If there was any marvel on Monday [the solar eclipse], it was the way such a supposedly rational, scientific, post-enlightenment society gaped at a black sky and believed it briefly touched transcendence.”
Here’s the thing: like Sagan, Huxley, Mr Gallagher and Prof Krauss, when men convince themselves that the supernatural God is a fable, they can marvel at the natural world but they shut their ears to its preaching. They feel a feeling and that is enough for them, it is their version of worship. They see the forest, they see the trees, the leaves, even the chlorophyll, but they refuse to see the One who spoke it all into being. They wring some spiritual meaning out of an eclipse and then go back to their lives, marveling not at God’s power but at man’s achievement. It is an impoverished religion.
But this is not new. Brewer recalls the shadow that descended over Calvary as Jesus paid for the sins of the world:
“In the hours before Jesus gave up his spirit, we’re told that darkness covered the whole land for three hours…I wonder which spectacle that day more drew people’s eyes. Was it the inglorious death of Jesus or the enchantment of the sky? ..Those who seek enchantment will rarely gaze at a crucified Messiah.”
What was the greater wonder? The sun in the sky or the Son on the cross, to make the comparison that Mr Brewer was too classy to make. The less showy spectacle was the greater one; the quiet and cruel intensity of the miracle on the that day would break apart the barrier between Heaven and earth and reconcile men to God. But some could not see the reality of the actual Creator dying at the hand of his creation.
It is still possible to hear the speech pouring forth from the day and the knowledge revealed by the night, if men will look beyond their data and instruments and trust more than their own reason. If they will acknowledge that life and breath and every good thing is from our creator, the “holiness in reality” is not something conjured up inside our hearts and minds, but a concrete proof that our “brief moment in the sun” is not by accident, nor without meaning. From the daily sustaining gifts of providence to the regular miracle of God incarnate coming to us in water, word, bread and wine – these are small rays of heaven breaking through to this fallen world.