19th
Natural Questions
We have questions about the origin of life. We have questions about our own creation as a species. We seek sleek reasoning to explain our own cellular differentiation from a zygote into a fully operational touching smelling tasting hearing seeing being. We have the maps to our genetic dictionary, studied the properties of the genetic alphabet. We have proposed recipes to build single celled organisms from scratch. We have concocted corn that resists disease and arthropods and towers at an ungodly height. Ungodly because everything that is manifest is perfectly deliberate. We look out unto the world’s form, and we wonder at its craft, at its beautiful symmetry. The arches canyons mountains valleys in an imperceptible dynamism, all the work of God(1). God is emergence. God is a billion neurons in network. God is a thousand ants at work. God is birds effortlessly sliding into formation. Yet God is beyond form, behind it. Form is God’s cloak, worn like a laughing wizard in the English countryside. We all, unknowingly, are bowing to the creator. Scientists bow to complexity, to emergence. Where does emergence emerge? From whence did Reason come? Many mathematicians believe that mathematics was not invented but discovered. That the fruition of Reason, mathematics, is autonomous from human contemplation reveals our faculty of reasoning as a Gift. I encourage my fellow humans to point to the Giver. I encourage them to go behind the veil and engage in the most revered of scientific rituals: Discover!
(1) Here natural language suggests that the modifier “of God” signifies emanating from God, or separate from God. And it is probably this notion of God being separate from the world that causes the most confusion among both believers and non-believers alike (undoubtedly the reasoning that visualizes God as “a white dude with a beard”. That God is beyond a delimited subject, that one cannot discriminate between creation and creator is befuddling and magical.
