Our new “god of the gaps”

This morning I shared a FB post that stated that only better science refutes science—that science is not refuted by feelings, religion, our favorite politician, or half-baked opinions found on YouTube videos. Here’s more on the subject…

There’s an old phrase, “god of the gaps.” It describes how people attribute to a deity anything they cannot otherwise explain or understand. “God” resides in those “gaps” in human knowledge. So, if and when science provides a reasonable and consistent explanation of some previously-mysterious phenomenon, the “god of the gaps” is claimed to reside a little deeper into whatever remains unexplained, into the remaining gap. If and when a reasonable and consistent explanation of that new gap is proposed, then this “god” finds a new place to lodge in the remaining unknown.

During the past couple of centuries, the “god of the gaps” has been relegated to an ever-shrinking place in human understanding. I believe this is one important, though largely-ignored, reason for the decline of many religious institutions that have held science and the scientific method in high regard and as not antithetical to religious faith. We have taught our children to take science seriously, but have not articulated a faith that can co-exist with science.

Now the “god of the gaps” has been supplanted by what might be called “conspiracy in the crevices.” What is not known is like a crevice in which it is tempting to see a conspiracy. Many love conspiracies because they seem to explain things that are not otherwise fully understood and which may never be. 

It would be interesting to know if people who are adherents of religious institutions where suspicion of science is prevalent are more likely than the general population to see a conspiracy when something is not fully explainable. I am not saying they are, just wondering if there is a positive correlation.

Conspiracy theorists used to be on the fringes of modern society, but now they have an advocate in the White House, and evangelists on Facebook and YouTube to spread their news. One great American fantasy is that anyone with an opinion can be regarded as an expert. Carefully researched explanations of events and phenomena can be cavalierly discounted when they don't answer all questions. Someone in authority or just holding a bigger megaphone can suggest a completely different explanation that fills in the blanks, and millions are eager to lap it up.

To me, it’s a mighty dangerous shift in our culture, and a very real threat to our nation’s credibility and leadership in the world.

A recommendation and a couple of my FB policies (fyi)

Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” blog is worth checking out if you are looking for a clear, documented, and largely dispassionate analysis of the current president and his regime by a scholar who is deeply troubled by what’s going on in America. I recently began following it, and recommend it to you.

If, on the other hand, you are happy with the ongoing and growing assault on the fundamentals of our republic, you might not like to read her blog. It just might change your mind.

By the way, I work hard to resist any urge to share the many Facebook entries about politics that I get from friends and which which I agree. I try to limit my response to an occasional “like.” While I appreciate my friends' concerns, I know I get more of that sort of thing than I have time to read, even while sheltering-in-place.

Further, for the record and just so you will know, I never, ever “share” or “copy and post as my own” any Facebook post that bets only a few will post it, as in “only a few will say they love Jesus, hate cancer, have wonderful grandchildren, etc.”, even though I love Jesus, hate cancer, and have the most wonderful grandchildren in this whole, wide world.

Wondering in a World on Fire

PBS Masterpiece’s current series, World on Fire, is a riveting and disturbing story of the lives of European civilians during World War II. It opens with the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and quickly expands geographically to introduce viewers to civilians in France, England, and Germany itself. Those caught up in the war respond in various, sometimes conflicting, ways to the chaos around them. It is not difficult to feel the emotional anguish of ordinary people forced to make decisions they never dreamed they would have to make.

We have been watching World on Fire since it began, and we intend to continue. But it is not easy to watch, not only because of its unsettling storylines, but also because of our own COVID-19, pandemic-ignited, “world on fire.” Of course, the pandemic’s dislocation of so much that we thought was secure is nothing like the absolute destruction of everything at the hands of the German army. But as I watch I cannot help but wonder what lies ahead for me and for us all in the face of a virus’s invasion of our ordered lives and times. World on Fire touches and heightens my daily sense of unease.

The ruthless cruelty of the Nazi-driven German military and bureaucratic apparatus challenges all humane impulses. In one scene, the doctor in charge of tearing “unfit” children away from their parents to be killed justifies what he is doing in the name of science. I wince…how science can be misused to make evil look good! Yet how dependent upon science we are for our survival in this world.

When I hear and see reports of people carrying hateful signs about Jews and others, or displaying swastikas, I wonder if they really know what demons they unleashing upon the world, what suffering they are inflicting. Maybe, I think, they just don’t understand, or perhaps they don’t intend to be that cruel or heartless…surely they would stop short of a 21st century “final solution.”

I would like to think they do not know what they are doing, but I know better. I wonder what it is like to live by hate.

Further thoughts on yesterday's subject...

A single daffodil is in full bloom outside our back windows. A sign of spring, and call to hope. Fragile and vulnerable, yes. But also persistent.

I understand the desire of many to hear stats about how many have survived COVID-19. I think the problem is that we don’t know that number. For starters, we don’t know how many have had it or have it now. For another, someone may have survived it and not really known what they had. For a third, what is a survivor? How long do you have to live after being exposed to it and/or having been diagnosed with it to be counted as a survivor? Sadly, one real stat we can have is how many have died whose death certificates state COVID-19 as the cause of (or perhaps as contributing to) their death. In the meantime, we can take comfort from and find hope in knowing that the vast majority of those diagnosed with COVID-19 do survive it. Is that not enough?

Every morning I watch a semi whose sides are brightly painted with Sysco Food Service graphics back up to the loading dock of the Health Center less than a hundred yards outside my window. Its driver is delivering food to people who are eating it by themselves, alone in their rooms, all these weeks. It reminds me of all the people risking everything to keep us fed, warm, safe, as healthy as possible, and all the rest. This morning we watched teachers in Breckenridge’s on-site day-care center (now limited to the children of employees, I believe) march their charges around the circle in front of our house. These all give me hope for us as a nation and as human beings. Thanks to each one of them!

My regular practice of reading the Psalms daily is really paying off during this pandemic. The Psalms are so honest, so truth-filled, and so encouraging even when their authors are discouraged. They give me hope.

A single daffodil is in full bloom outside our back windows. A sign of spring, and call to hope. Fragile and vulnerable, yes. But also persistent.

Thank you, Lord. Thank you.

COVID-19, etc.

Like everyone else, I have been paying lots of attention to the COVID-19 crisis, but in addition to not having time to comment on it, I’ve also felt there’s little need for more commentary than we are already being subjected to. But for the record, here are a few of my random personal thoughts related to it.

“The elderly should stay home and keep safe, yet at the same time accept the fact they are expendable.” Maybe because I am 17 years on the far side of the threshold to elderly-ness but don’t often feel that old, I am having a hard time accepting either proposition, much less holding them simultaneously in my mind. But I am/we are doing as we’ve been advised to do, and our children have not had to hound us about it, too much.

We moved to our new home at Breckenridge Village (a community for people of a certain age) looking forward to a promised and enticing array of exciting activities and new friendships. Within three weeks we were pretty much grounded. Probably won’t get a refund, however: they/we are paying security folks to take our temperatures every time we come back from a thrilling shopping expedition to buy toilet paper or get prescriptions filled.

FOUR PERSONAL RESPONSES TO AMERICA’S LONG-STANDING DISTRUST OF SCIENCE, MUCH OF WHICH IS GROUNDED IN FUZZY AMERICAN POP RELIGION, WITH NO SMALL DOSE OF FUNDAMENTALISM THROWN IN:

1. It is okay with me if you don’t believe the science of evolution. You even have my permission to think the earth is flat, although I rather you not pilot my next flight to Europe because we might end up headed toward the moon.

2. It’s not nearly as okay with me if you do not believe the science of climate change, but maybe there’s yet time to change your mind — maybe.

3. It’s not at all okay with me if you do not believe the sciences of infectious disease and epidemics and pandemics and your ignorance supports decisions that result in COVID-19 being even more deadly than it already is on the way to being. I am expendable, and am willing to be so, but won’t be happy if pollyanna politics is the reason I get expended. (Thank you, President Trump, for abandoning your plan to set some of us free by Easter.)

4. Once this crisis is over, we need to get back to changing minds on climate change, based on peer-reviewed and generally-accepted science.

Yes, we have moved. So why have I been too busy to share my profundities about COVID-19? For one thing, there’s always another box to unpack or picture to hang. For another, I trust I am in the final stages of getting Ghosts and Gold: My Story of Ghost Ranch off to the printer. Maybe it will be published (will “drop”) and Ghost Ranch will reopen about the same time. That would be so cool!

I wondered as I packed several big old books for our move to a much smaller home — as I packed my Hebrew and Greek texts and language tools, Calvin’s Institutes, and the like—I wondered why? Why keep them at all? I hardly ever refer to them, and doubt I will do so very often in our exciting new life here. Yet, they remind me of the most intense time of learning and growth and change in my life. They recall me to what has really mattered to me all my life. From their shelf behind me, they say far more to and about me than the diploma I long ago took off my study walls: It’s really not the destination; it is the journey.

Be safe, stay safe, and keep others safe.

Our old stereoscope: entertainment and education

Sometimes we come across something that reminds us how fast things have changed in the relatively short period of time that we call "modern." In preparing to move to our new home (moving day is two weeks away), I came across the old stereoscope pictured here. I had forgotten I had it.

It was in my paternal grandparents' home from my earliest memories of that place. Then it was in my parents' home. It is from around the turn of the 20th century, and I remember viewing the cards that are with it and being quite impressed by the 3-D pictures. Of course, we had "ViewMasters" by then, which represented a large upgrade in 3-D capability, so this device was way out-of-date when I was a child in the 1950s. We were more drawn to the latest thing.

Most of the pictures in the collection that survives with it are of places and people from around the world. But nearly two dozen of them are of the construction of the Panama Canal, and they are quite spectacular. I can imagine Myerses sitting around in a small living room, more or less Victorian style, being awed by that engineering marvel, studying the pictures carefully to try to figure out just how people could build something like that, no doubt doubting they'd ever be so lucky as to travel to see it for themselves.

It takes a lot more to entertain us these days, and we are much more entertained, and I suspect that the vast amount of entertainment we do ingest is far less likely to educate us about things that matter.

I checked online for asking prices for these devices, thinking I'd sell it. And it looks as if I could get pretty good money for it, particularly for all the Panama Canal pictures. But I am going to keep it. It has a value beyond money, the value of happy memories of time spent at my grandparents' farm, learning about wonders near and far.

Random Observations

The impeachment trial feels a lot like a worship service in which the preacher says things everyone expects to hear from the pulpit and no one expects any of what they hear actually to change them.

Regarding whether the charges against our current president “rise to the level of impeachment”: shouldn’t the phrase be, “fall to the level of impeachment”? Impeachment is about as low as you can go, isn’t? (Yes, “rise” is probably legalize.)

Speaking of legalize: Alan Dershowitz’s argument yesterday for why a president cannot be impeached simply does not pass constitutional muster, not to mention the requirements of Logic 101. I fear that Ruth Dodd, who taught me high school civics (remember civics?), is surely rolling over in her grave.

I am really, really, REALLY tired of being accused of hating our current president. I would not enjoy having a beer with him, and think his policies threaten disaster for our country and the world, so I have to admit to liking him very little. But that’s as far as I will go. I thank you for respecting my boundaries.

Just read that the Secretary of Commerce thinks the coronavirus—not to be confused with the beer—could be good for our economy. Let’s hear it for uncontrollable viruses! Yea! And raise a glass to the stock market!

“Strong winds blow over new section of U.S. border wall with Mexico”: I will huff and I will puff and I will blow your house down, as the old story goes.

Our current president decried climate "prophets of doom" in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where sustainability was the main theme. A good many of scripture’s prophets of doom proved to be right. Such folks may be worth a listen, don’t you think?

Our local paper often headlines that a “dead body” has been found somewhere. Isn’t it enough just to call it a “body” unless, perhaps, you are referring to “the world’s greatest deliberative body”?