Darwin, The Map, The Model, The Mystery

I attempt to argue endlessly that if there was no God to reveal religion, human social culture could never have grown beyond the hunter gatherer.  Ideologies like modern "liberalism", Communism, Socialism, Capitalism, etc, simply will not do because they lack the enforcement of an eternal all knowing, all powerful God that is going to see when you cheat on the rules that are required for society to keep operating, let alone flourish.

I believe the social requirement that most believe in him even though he can't be proved is CRITICAL, because it lends credibility to the glue of society which is the promise that you believe in love, nation, friendship, truth, honesty, fidelity and a myriad of other things that demand shared belief. If society is to be more than a police state of constant spying, imprisonment and distrust, then people have to believe in MANY things about each other -- the idea that they all worship a God that knows their behavior is a better check on the veracity of those social beliefs than not having such a check.

The level of freedom that America once had could only exist for a people that were religious as stated by John Adams. "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other".

There is no greater modification for a human worldview than the issue of belief in God, It puts the root of our mental model in the realm of metaphysics, thus allowing a perspective where there is ALWAYS hope, there is ALWAYS another potential answer, and there is no ending for our souls. No matter our current state, we always have a better future -- PERSONALLY, not just for "society" in the progressive/marxist dream. 

Take away that perspective and man, then eventually raw power,  becomes the measure of all. The world can no longer be seen through the lens of a beautiful creation of God, infused with love, meaning and purpose. Trying to wrench some "truth" out of "data" is an obvious fools errand from the viewpoint of philosophy -- "truth" is reduced to endlessly running experiments knowing that the only "progress" is in simpler explanations of finding that what you thought was "scientific truth" has been significantly or entirely falsified.

I was struck by this section of Darwin's autobiography, page 46 that was quoted in "Darwin's Cathedral".

“On this tour I had a striking instance of how easy it is to overlook phenomena, however conspicuous, before they have been observed by any one. We spent many hours in Cwm Idwal, examining all the rocks with extreme care, as Sedgwick was anxious to find fossils in them; but neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines. Yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that, as I declared in a paper published many years afterwards in the Philosophical Magazine, a house burnt down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley. If it had still been filled by a glacier, the phenomena would have been less distinct than they now are.”

Once Darwin knew about glaciers, "everything in the valley made sense".

Thus we come to one of the strengths and grave weaknesses of humans. We are excellent pattern matching "answer finders", but when he have a "hammer" (a specific answer), everything starts to look like a "nail" (place to match the pattern that we have).

We also LOVE to have an answer that we at least believe "completely explains" what we see. Faced with a near infinitely complicated universe and a very severely finite brain in comparison, we tend to want to believe that our model of the world/universe is "reasonably complete". Without God, our tendency is to "decide it is complete enough".

The "mental magic" of belief in God is to be able to build a mental model of our universe, but to realize and remain OK with the knowledge that our model is grossly incomplete. Seeing God as far beyond what we can ever approach allows us to feel comfortable with there always being a remaining "gap of mystery" -- in the spiritual as well as the physical.

The natural tendency for us to desire "closure" pretty much insures that once we have that "model that fits", in this case "glacier", we are certain that the situation is explained and we move on. In most cases, that works well -- we are very good at coming up with models and matching them to specific cases. But not always.

Is there ANY chance that a valley could be sculpted that way by some sort of pyroclastic flow long ago and then maybe "tuned" by water? Could it have been formed that way for some reason and then uplifted? Something completely different that we have not thought of yet?

Believing in God allows asking the question "For THIS valley, how critical is it really that we are "certain" of how it formed?" This moves us into a realm of discomfort on the side of both the scientist and the theist. From the scientific POV, there is a sense that we MUST provide an explanation, otherwise people will fall back to the "lazy explanation" that "God did it".

The theist becomes uncomfortable because the scientist is intent on entirely removing God. The theist may say "but who created the elements that allow ice and rock to interact", or go to some of my conjectures above relative to volcanism, floods / high speed runoff or just "appearance of age".

I've been lucky enough to see a lot of beautiful mountain valleys including Yosemite with it's hanging valleys. Darwin's description of "wonderful glacial phenomena" strikes me as quite odd. Why would it be "adaptive" for us to find mountain valleys as "wonderful" at all if we are evolved? I can understand why a sea shore or many other items of nature would be attractive, but a glaciated mountain valley, often above the tree line where the oxygen is thin and no vegetation grows?

Something is built into us to find a whole host of things in nature "beautiful" that make no practical sense for our material bodies. A sunset? We have little nocturnal vision -- based on evolution one would think that we might feel a sense of fear at the coming of darkness. A need to retreat to safety where we were less vulnerable to our lack. But no, we feel a sense of wonder and enjoy the beauty.

Oh, I'm certain that more than one evolutionist has come up with SOME explanation of "how it may have evolved" -- a conjecture impossible to prove or disprove by actual experiment, so basically a religious statement. "It evolved" or "a glacier did it" having no real utilitarian advantage over "God created it" (and do we ALWAYS have to be thinking "mechanism"?).

Some scientist will exclaim, "it is natural curiosity". Possibly, in a few cases -- but I've certainly seen many an eye glaze over at some explanation of how computers do "x", how the TV works, what's the difference between fuel injection and carburetion, Quantum Physics etc. It seems our "natural curiosity" is far from universal. 

We all operate with a mental model, a worldview, and that model is either based on God or Materialism (it's all a big accident). Science has thrown in the towel on a concrete explanation of even HOW we happened, let alone WHY.  The Big Bang is too far in the past, and if we believe science, our inability to exceed. the speed of light prevents us from observing much of the remnants of the Big Bang, now to far away to get to before the 2nd law of thermodynamics entropies humanity and our universe out of existence. 

To some degree we get to pick our model, or from a Christian POV, "Knock and it will be opened unto you, seek and you will find" ... which assumes you believe there is a transcendent door to knock on or to seek. 

From the above it seems clear that in order to have a "good life" in this mortal coil, the choice is obvious. However there is always a snake in the garden that seeks to convince us otherwise. 

Choose your model wisely.