The One Religious Insight that Science and Philosophy Support

How nature is objectively and divinely strange to intelligent social animals

Nature used to be a society of spirits. Then it became the handiwork of an all-powerful God who created it to test the fidelity of his favourite creatures. Finally, the natural universe turned into the stomping ground of the human intellect, an intelligible domain we could understand and progressively exploit.

Our conception of nature has shifted dramatically from prehistoric animism to civilizational polytheism and monotheism, to the godless naturalism of modern science and philosophy. But that shift is largely an illusion. The change has been one of emphasis rather than implication.

I’m not saying the scientific or secular philosophical view of nature entails that God exists or that religions have been right all along.

That would be a foolhardy point to make in any case because the mainstream interpretations of especially Western theologies have always been superficial. If most religious worshippers have been confused about God, what would be the point of trying to show that scientific theories, for example, entail that “God” is real? If we don’t know what we’re talking about, why trust that our confused notions are adequate reflections of reality?

Scientific disenchantment of nature

But it’s possible that, by naïvely venting our elementary sense of being in the world and by having a properly mythic, phenomenological reading, the world’s religious myths testify indirectly to what nature really is. Just as children often can’t help but tell the truth even if they’re trying to lie, because children are indifferent to social conventions and aren’t practiced at restraining their impulses, ancient religions capture a dimension of the world that hyper-intellectual theories and philosophies miss.

To be sure, just as we lose that childish sense of mystery and magic and of right and wrong, religious insights are quickly diverted to political and economic agendas. The sense of divinity is anthropomorphized and simplified to rationalize the prevailing social and economic inequalities. Polytheism, for example, perfectly reflected the caste systems of various kingdoms. Religions were like soiled mirrors that tantalized us with an impression of what lay beyond our self-indulgent preconceptions, but which mostly reflected the latter back at us.

What shone through religious creeds and theologies, from those of Zoroastrianism and Christianity to those of Hinduism and Taoism was the sense of something’s sacredness, of its profound mystery and importance. Religions gave voice to the wonder that anything should exist at all, that somehow the natural order came to be and is still ongoing.

Of course, science explains how the effects follow from their causes, by testing rational models of how those systems and processes work. But what science ignores is the fittingness of the childlike awe that there should be any such regularities. On the contrary, science has been in the business of disenchanting nature, of clearing the field for our species to dominate the planet and perhaps, one day, the solar system and beyond. Just as businesses are preoccupied with earning a profit, scientists pursue the humanistic aim of earning our species’ right to exist, by empowering us with knowledge so that the Fates can’t so easily dispose of us with “acts of God.”

Yet just as the patriarchal, racist, and other tribal diversions of religion would have no bearing on God’s identity or plan, science’s humanistic role doesn’t prove that nature is nothing more than what fits into the intellectual method that empowers us and that drives secular liberal progress.

What science ignores are the implications of modern atheism for the overall character of the natural universe. If science refutes animism and theism, that means nature creates itself or is timeless, there being no transition from nonbeing to being. It means that matter and energy aren’t designed or deliberately constructed by any conscious mind or intelligence, but that matter and energy and space and time simulate that purposefulness by forming the universe of ordered systems, from molecules to galaxies.

Bizarrely, the universe would create itself or be uncreated, and it would evolve into the systems and processes we understand and take for granted. Obviously, then, given the rise of secular sensibilities, if anything’s divine, it’s nature. But what’s just as clear is that, in so far as it’s scientifically explained, nature would also have to be divine, as in awesome and sacred.

Nature’s sacred strangeness

What’s the essence of sacredness? It’s the opposite of being profane and mundane. Something that’s sacred is of ultimate importance, but more precisely, this is the apocalyptic power to humiliate anyone for fixating, rather, on mundanities. Sacredness thus becomes taboo, as Georges Bataille explained, because a sacred wonder threatens to undo the delusions and vices that sustain the social order.

Notice that sacredness isn’t necessarily an ultimate good or wish-fulfilling benevolence. In so far as morality is mundane and mainstream, something sacred that comes on the scene will be beyond good and evil.

Now, scientists may defend their slanted presentations by saying that values are subjective and thus not identical with any fact in nature. Scientists present the causal structure and thus ignore not any real aspect of nature, but human impositions on the facts. According to scientists and deflationary naturalists, the childlike awe and sense of mystery and enchantment in nature would be human mental projections, not discoveries.

But that defense would be specious. The question isn’t whether nature feels its strangeness but whether the godless mode of creation or evolution is objectively strange. Is strangeness, like beauty, solely in the eye of the beholder? Is it a matter of taste whether anyone ought to find the modern atheistic account of a perfectly natural universe bizarre? Is this sense of nature’s sacredness — as in the inhuman power of its creativity to confound all human intuitions and sense of security — like the whimsical preference for an item on a restaurant’s menu?

Certainly, we can choose to ignore what’s right in front of us. But the humanistic preoccupations that are responsible for that denial would themselves be subjective. These centrist secularists, for example, would be busy with their scientistic denigration of philosophy, religion, and the humanities to lend any credit to the sense that something odd is afoot throughout the natural order.

Religions speak of miracles and science shows there’s no such thing since every event has a natural cause. At least, that’s the pragmatic basis of scientific progress. But that misses the forest for the trees. Indeed, if human intuition is inescapably social, if we evolved to live in social groups and thus to understand things in social terms, every causal relation in nature must be bizarre in so far as it’s perfectly “objective,” that is, asocial. If the cosmos is freestanding, having no input from any mind or society, if the universe’s unfolding is incommensurable with human social and psychological concepts, natural processes can’t help but be strange, as in alien because of their inhumanness.

Science’s counter-intuitiveness and nature’s objective inhumanity

Again, we can ignore that alienness — and we typically do because it’s horrifying to intelligent social animals like us. But nature’s alienness is obvious because it follows from science’s discoveries and from its naturalistic philosophy. Atheism takes consciousness, intelligence, spirit, mind, and intelligent design out of the cosmic wilderness. The universe becomes “objective,” as in physical and material. Of course, life evidently evolves but it derives from nonlife.

Fundamentally, science is therefore in the business of showing how nonliving things give rise to other nonliving things. Nebulas develop into stars, and stars condense into stellar systems. Or quantum processes settle into atomic forms which arrange themselves into molecules. And black holes are the giant Archimedean points that hold stars and their planets together into galaxies.

Every scientifically explained process is one in which that which we find most intuitive plays no central role. Scientific theories are therefore paradigmatically counterintuitive. Yet that’s not just an arbitrary bias on scientists’ part. On the contrary, the falseness of theism and of Aristotelian teleology is a scientific discovery. Nature is objective, as far as we can tell by our intellects.

But what that means is that scientists have shown that nature is objectively counterintuitive. Our social preconceptions apply to our miniscule corner of the universe. The rest of the universe is inherently alien to those preconceptions and pastimes.

Therefore, science shows that the universe is strange to our species.

The awful reality of godless nature

Nature’s sacredness is an awful reality. The ultimate importance of nature is that its truth is alien to the human mentality. We prefer to impose social and mental conceptions, whereas nature is having none of it. Natural events happen mindlessly, pointlessly, for no moral or intelligent reason at all. The apparent intelligence, purposefulness, and moralizing are entirely in our minds. But that doesn’t mean nature is objectively boring or neutral or that there’s no enlightened appreciation of nature’s character or overall quality.

What is nature overall? It’s not just a series of causes and effects. Rather, it’s such a series in which our intuitions turn out to be parochial embarrassments. That’s nature’s majesty, its imperious divinity that lays us low.

And the scientist’s humanistic enterprise is one more strategy of existential rebellion against that inhuman reality. First, we humanized the wilderness with our imaginations, projecting our social intuitions and inventing gods and boogeymen. Then we grew out of such childish play and naïvety, and we built artificial refuges to blot out and to displace that wilderness. We found we could dwell in sophisticated self-referential civilizations, cultures, and nations so we could ignore the monstrosity that lies outside our city walls (and that lies in the physicality of even living and artificial things).

Thusly does both the content and the medium of science’s picture of nature serve the “will” of this natural divinity, by reminding us that our condescension towards nature’s monstrous power is a ruse and a feeble defense mechanism that can be spoiled even by impudent philosophers like me.

Hear nature’s call, the “music of the spheres,” and go mad with horror.

Das tote Ding bewegt sich und es gibt kein Entrinnen.