By T.W. Burger
I had this thought long ago that I needed to figure out what I believed. Often in conversation or writing, I would find myself saying something about who we are, what we are, if all “this” means anything. And then, sometimes in the same conversation or text, I would contradict myself.
I thought it would be a good idea to write things down. I believe this, I believe that. I figured I would break things down into two categories, Science and Faith. That has not worked out so well, because what passes in me for Faith is tempered and interwoven with whatever I know or think I know about Science and much of my Science is based on what I frankly have to admit is my faith in it. I am myself no scientist. In any case, most of the serious things I spend time thinking about seem to relate to or teeter between those two topics.
I wrote the first sentence many years ago. It is hard, I discover, to find time to sit quietly and think. For years I wrote full time for a newspaper, and had an hour commute each way to the office, and the normal things to take care of around the house. In short, to write about what I believe I have learned through 75 years of living; I’ve got to take a break from living to do it. There is something Zen at work here.
It would be helpful to win one of the large lotteries, which means I would have to remember to buy tickets and check the numbers. It would also mean I would have to try not to think about the incredible odds of winning.
Not to mention the idea of sitting down and DOING the project is scary. Most of the things I write take from 20 minutes to a few hours, and they are in print within a day or two. This project is both a frustration and a pleasure because it’s taking periods of intense work interspersed with either reading and thinking about it or reading and thinking about anything else because I’m sick to death of the subject.
The form I chose is a holdover from my days of writing poetry, with an incantatory quality. It helps me focus, and it feels right.
My thought at first was not to share this work with anyone, but my life for nearly a half century has been all about saying any damn-foolish thing that came to mind and then showing it to people. So, I guess I’m stuck. Besides, I couldn’t find a hair shirt that fit.
The daunting thing is how little I know. As I wrote, I kept waiting for fascinating tidbits of information, pithy quotations, scintillating trivia to come glimmering out of my brain.
Apparently, I don’t have any of that stuff. I KNEW I should have paid more attention in school. My time in the Groves of Academe was spent working at several jobs to pay my way and indulging in a sort of slothful priapism. It’s payback time.
And so, let me tell you what I believe.
Science
I believe that we are biological. Period.
I believe we evolved to what we are the same way everything else on the planet has. Genetic discoveries in recent decades have provided maps of the human genome telling us that the entire 8-billion-member human species goes back 7,000 generations to an original population of about 60,000. That is roughly the number of, say, orangutans remaining in the world today, or the population of Bayonne, NJ. (I don’t know how many orangutans there are in Bayonne.) The DNA of any two humans is 99.9 percent identical. This means that people the world over are much more similar than they are different. Most of the differences are cultural.
For that matter, the DNA of any given chimpanzee matches that of any of us by about 98 percent, so there’s that.
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
Marie Curie, quoted in The Times of India
I believe that those who argue that the Bible is literal and who reject scientific knowledge are simply afraid of the dark and are clinging to superstition to deal with that fear. It is true that science does not have all the answers, but it does have all the really good questions.
I believe that good science always discovers more questions in the process of finding answers. Fundamentalism has only dogma and discourages questions. It is easier to believe that we humans are part of a special creation, a deficient and irascible relative of God, than it is to believe that we arose from the same reek and ruckus as everything else. Too bad.
"[Nature] knows the people are a tide That swells and in time will ebb, and all Their works dissolve ... As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves; We must dehumanize our views a little and become confident as the rock and ocean that we were made from."
Robinson Jeffers, quoted in the Jan. 10, 2008, edition of Writer’s Almanac
I believe that Life is the mystery, the one great joke that flouts itself in the face of the vast and stony cosmos. Speak if you will of water into wine and conversations with burning shrubbery; I say look around; every square foot of our own back yards bears enough miracle to keep us staring and breathless every waking moment, if only we would shake of the blinders of familiarity. Look at you. Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, a little sulfur, if I remember my biology right, a wizard's brew conjured into a spell of action, thought, poetry, baseball scores and budget crises.
"Theology made no provision for evolution. The biblical authors had missed the most important revelation of all! Could it be that they were not privy to the thoughts of God?
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
I believe that we take in energy, grow, stand, stride about the world making a great noise and commotion. Then, one day, the strange vortex subsides, or goes on to other business, and all the clever pulleys and wires fall away to nothing, vacant and bare, clattering into the darkness like discarded toys.
I believe that the growing movement among fundamentalists and “know-nothings” of every ilk may be the most terrible danger our civilization has faced. Attacks by terror and disease destroy our bodies. Shunning real, demonstrable science, rational thinking, and a sense of history, indeed, turning away knowledge for what is more comfortable, will destroy our souls more surely than could any mythical host of fallen angels.
Law of Logical Argument, a corollary of Murphy’s Law: Anything is possible if you don't know what you are talking about.
(Author unknown)
“God gave us minds so that we would eventually figure out that he doesn’t exist.”
(TWB)
I believe that life is miraculous, though not conjured by the action of any outside force. It may be, however, that life is as common as beans, out there in the scattered worlds of the cosmos. If matter is energy, which physicists insist it is, then life is a strange dance of energy dreaming through time. Whether that dream is “about” anything or has any meaning outside of what we give it is a debate for philosophy and theology. I do not believe it is a question that science can or should answer.
“Carl Sagan persuaded NASA engineers to turn the Voyager I spacecraft around on Valentine's Day in 1990, so that it could take a picture of Earth from the very edge of our solar system, about 4 billion miles away. In the photograph, Earth appears as a tiny bluish speck. Sagan later wrote of the photograph, "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives... [On] a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
(Writers’ Almanac, Nov. 10, 2007)
I believe that our minds are products of our bodies, and I believe scientific research shows this clearly. II believe both are the products of chemical and physical properties. I believe that when I die the entity “I” is dead, gone, a match burned out, though the energy that bound all I am physically and mentally together moves on, because, as physicists say, energy can neither be created nor destroyed.
I believe as well that I will always act and think as though “I” am separate from, though inextricably linked, to all this bumping, jiggling, wheezing gear in which I travel. If for some reason I lose a limb, or even when I have my hair cut, have I lost any of “me?” If so, how? I am acutely aware that I am a community of specialized cells and electrical impulses. I don’t feel like a democracy, nor, when I look at my present physical body, does evidence suggest I am a benevolent dictator, but more like Mad Ludwig of Bavaria, who bankrupted his nation because of his passion for building fanciful castles all over the place.
At 75, I look like a blighted neighborhood, and my doctors’ comments are not as cheerful as they once were. I function as though I expect to live forever, all evidence to the contrary. I will probably be really surprised if I do not.
I accept that my means of viewing and dealing with the universe consists of contradictions and errors. After, my senses can detect only a narrow slice of the information that comes to me. A bee can see further into the infrared than I can. Many animals can hear vibrations that I cannot. I am half deaf and dumb. Who knows what else I am missing?
I believe that this galaxy of errors and contradictions is a basic human condition, a balance of opposition necessary to keep us from tipping over in our inner tug-of-war between our rational and irrational selves.
I believe that a human who believes truly that he is nothing but less than a century of chemical fizz may also be a heartless biological automaton, possibly lacking any moral compass, and a fool demonstrably capable of any madness or cruelty.
I believe that a human who thinks he is the earthly utterance of God, a thing essentially spirit placed here to have dominion over all things, is a dangerous fool, and demonstrably capable of any madness or cruelty.
“The honest and humble scientist, the mystic, the simple faithful, and the nature poet seem to arrive at the same slack jawed awe. And it seems to me that both true believers and fanatical scientific types have wrought equal amounts of evil in the world - some with deliberate malice, others out of stupidity. Who cares whether it is the Inquisition or National Socialism that has you boiling in oil?
(Liz Frazer, June 13, 2007, personal correspondence.)
I believe that my physical form evolved from an earlier form, no better or worse, just less lucky, or as lucky as always, but the game changed. I believe this constant hop-scotch-through-a-minefield of genetic mutation and a mutable physical world goes back to the beginnings of life itself, perhaps even further back. That begs the question of where all the stuff came from that evolved into the stuff of today. Could it be that the Big Bang is an event which repeats, a terribly slow drumming in a cosmic march, the beat of the heart of hearts? Or is it one-show-per-customer? If so, what was there before? If nothing, then where did all this something come from? Is that a question that a finite mind can even answer? Don’t look at me…I just got here myself.
I believe that for every curtain we pull back in search for answers, we will always find more curtains, not because the truth is purposefully hidden, but because the universe is infinite, as are its questions.
I believe that we are finite and young as a species and are still unable to wrap our minds around curtains without end, amen. So, we are always looking for a wizard, somewhere behind the next curtain, and for the keys to the Emerald City.
I believe that there is much we do not understand. I do not believe in ghosts and the ‘spirit’ world so popular these days. I do not believe in the “supernatural,” simply because I believe that there is nothing that is outside of nature just because it is outside of our understanding.
I believe that much that has been reported as ghosts, UFOs, mental telepathy, and predictions uttered by your Aunt Hattie’s tea leaves, whatever else they may be, are events arising from a natural universe explainable by Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics, their interpretation by humans individually tainted by quantities of gullibility and coincidence and a desire to graft them each to our individual cosmologies.
I believe that when the mysteries behind so-called supernatural phenomena are explained, it will be science and reason that explain them, not some reedy whisper from beyond the pale.
I believe that if there is indeed some cosmic consciousness “out there,” whether Jehovah or Allah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, it exists within Nature, not outside of Nature. And by “Nature,” lest there be any confusion, I mean by that word the whole shebang, stars, frogs, peep shows, black holes, white sox, and blue-ribbon beer. Everything. Infinity, which, of course, none of us finite types can really contemplate for exceptionally long without feeling like somebody left the lid off the terrarium.
I believe Nature is improvident and spends itself like a drunken sailor. Profligacy is the rule of thumb. Creatures at the bottom of the food chain rapid-fire their progeny willy-nilly into the world’s myriad appetites. We are here, the product of millions of years of Darwinian evolution. The fundamentalists say, “not so.” Nature seems to say, “so what?”
I confess that I am, strangely, both envious and contemptuous of those who are absolutely convinced with certain knowledge of their beliefs in absolutes, that is, those who can recite their beliefs upon command and summarize them on the back of a napkin while you wait. I am envious because I wish I had the confidence and inner peace that would come from knowing for sure. But I find I have also become contemptuous because I cannot imagine being so blind to reality as to be able to ignore what they must ignore to hold fast to such a narrow and rigid creed.”
(Bruce Caster, June 6, 2007, personal correspondence.)
I believe we are not alone in the universe. I believe life was probably a chance stirring under natural circumstances, an accident, if you will, but a more inevitable accident than Darwin’s opponents would like to think. I also believe that it is an accident that has happened time and again across the galaxies. Statistically speaking, given that the universe as far as we can tell consists of the same elements everywhere, the occurrence of life would almost seem to be inevitable. On the other hand, …
I believe that we are effectively alone in the universe. Time and Space being what they are (or IT is, as I am not sure that the two are separate), the chances of us getting together for some interstellar pow-wow are right next door to zero. Sorry, Mr. Spock. In interstellar terms, even a near-miss is a long way off.
Faith
I believe that we are biological, but I have trouble believing that is ALL we are. It seems a waste. Everything we become in our lives, famous poets, scientists, artists, thinkers, flickers out to nothing? The most ordinary human is a wealth of experience and even wisdom. Does that blink out? Is all that mere data stored in three pounds of gray Jell-O under the dome of skull? My mind tells me yes. My “heart” (to use a poetic device for that part of my brain that resists linear thinking and cannot fathom “forever.”) tells me no. But my heart has always feared the dark. It cannot imagine non-being without quailing in terror, though it ponders its plain non-being before birth without the least tremor…been there, done that. I find this mysterious. As though a man, used to poverty, finds a dime and then lives in terror of the day he will lose it.
“No one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”
(Charles Darwin, “The Voyage of The Beagle.”)
I believe that Nature wastes nothing. Matter and energy are really the same things uttered in a different idiom. Death and life, decay and growth, chemicals rise to a fevered tango only to fall back to dust, all is energy jumping in and out of the shadows. It may mean nothing. It may mean everything.
If there is a God, I expect They are both playful and extravagant. Even if evolution explains how living things change and diversify, who can explain what started the entire process off? And even if you could explain how life developed out of non-living stuff, where did all the stuff come from in the first place? Look behind the curtain and there is another curtain…
Liz Frazer, July 30, 2007, personal correspondence.
I believe, or want to believe, that there is something beyond the obvious, beyond organic compounds getting frisky, beyond suns firing up and dying in the vast spinning of space. But the God I hear speaking through the fundamentalists of religions is a quarrelsome old thing who seems to have created everything but never got it right because he is always interfering and tinkering, blessing, smiting and whatnot. If that God were real, the universe would gleam with duct tape.
(From my point of view (and that of Stephen Jay Gould, among other evolutionary biologists) the world DOES gleam with duct tape. Not as evidence of outside tinkering, but of life making do, applying an old toolkit to new problems. The hammer, anvil and stirrup in my ears helped hinge my ancestors' jaws.
Lila Ralston, July 29, 2007, personal correspondence
If God had a face
What would it look like?
And would you want to see
If seeing meant that you would have to believe
In things like heaven and in Jesus and the saints and all the prophets.
Lyrics from “What if God was One of Us,” by Eric Bazilian
I believe, or want to believe, both that we are the product of natural processes, and that it all somehow has meaning. I am no nihilist, who would argue that human existence cranks along with no objective meaning or essential value. We may, in fact, be an ongoing accident that started in some hot corner of an ancient sea, amino acids suffering from delusions of grandeur. But the idea that life has no intrinsic truth or morality leaves me feeling hollow and afraid. Dammit, I want to believe that there is somebody out there in charge, that this is all for something. And I have a whole list of people whom I would like the Almighty to smite.
“Faith eases that strain. Faith in most anything, but especially in religion, science, and love, because they’re so good at providing useful and pleasing patterns and rewards. Certainty feels sweet. Especially the certainty of knowing who and what goes where in a chaotic world.”
Diane Ackerman, “An Alchemy of Mind,” Scribner, 2004
“Faith, by definition, is impervious to fact. A belief that can be changed by new information was probably a scientific one, not a religious one, and science derives its value from its openness to revision.”
Barbara Kingsolver, from “High Tide in Tucson,” HarperCollins, 1995
I believe that if there is a deity, a central force, intelligence and purpose behind everything, and that entity understands all of space and time, then this is not a being or a state of being that I can comprehend, much less pass the time of day with or ask favors. Somehow, praying to this vast concept and asking it to help my team win the homecoming game seems to me a form of hubris that must have Him gasping with laughter. Picture God or Allah shaking pom-poms and giving a cheer: “I’ve got Right, I’ve got Might, I’m gonna give the (fill in the blank) a great big Smite! Yasay (fill in the blank.)
I believe Time and Space is/are a process and, if set in motion by an intellect, then that intellect has moved on. It does not forever butt into our affairs. I believe we are on our own, having evolved both hearts and minds to save ourselves or end up a footnote or less.
"God has become a Deus absconditus, hidden somewhere behind the silence of infinite spaces, and our literary symbols can only make the most distant allusions to him, or to the natural world which used to be his abiding place and home…… and can only be experienced negatively, as a terrifying absence……To marvel at the beauty and novelty of some natural habitats always gives rise to some fragile hope within me to see some other origin of beauty other than atoms, dust, wind, and ultimately evolution.”
Anonymous posting on the Internet
I believe people pray because they must, because the idea that in the entire flaring, hurling universe there is nothing out there that can help is just too appalling. But I do not believe there is an intervener, even if there is something out there. I believe people whose prayers are answered are just lucky. People whose prayers are still unanswered are not so lucky, but mostly believe that whatever happened is God’s will, and in any case do not get the attention in the press. Idiots who stayed behind during assorted hurricanes are found alive and say their prayers were answered. It is beyond belief to say that those washed out to sea forgot to call out to Jesus or whoever headed up their pantheon. Caught in incomprehensible circumstances, who can help calling out to the ineffable? In any case, to do so is vastly preferable to believing there was nobody else on the other end of the call, and it can’t hurt.
What if God was one of us?
Just a slob like one of us
Just a stranger on the bus
Trying to make his way home
Trying to make his way home
Back up to heaven all alone
Nobody callin' on the phone
'cept for the Pope maybe in Rome.
Lyrics from “What if God was One of Us,” by Eric Bazilian, a hit for Joan Osborne in November of 1995.
On the birthday of the often-quoted Irish writer Oscar Wilde, born in Dublin in 1854, I made note: He said, "I think that God in creating Man somewhat overestimated his ability." And he said, "The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any use to oneself." And he also said, "I can resist anything but temptation." He's the author of the plays Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).
William Blake, born in London in 1757 said: "For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life."
And,
"To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wildflower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour."
T.W. Burger grew up in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967. He worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks and concrete mixers, has been an apprentice mortician and ambulance attendant.
Semi-retired and residing in Pennsylvania,
T.W. still works as a contributing writer for Classic City News and various other publications while living on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg.
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