Sunday, April 1, 2012

Apologetics

Some people break with Christianity because they resent the restrictions it (often) imposes -- they don't want to give their money to the poor or stop having sex or get married (or give up the person they love because that person is the wrong gender, which, again, "gay" was not a thing in antiquity, Rick). For me, the deal-breaker cropped up back in those few years in high school and college when I really, really wanted to be a scientist.

I love science, and the closest thing I have to a regret in my life is that, back in college, my need to obliterate who I was -- in a million all-you-can-eat dining halls, in the scuzzy dorm rooms of a series of scuzzy boys -- distracted me, made me believe that I couldn't do it, that it wasn't worth trying, that getting smart boys to want to sleep with me was as good as being smart, myself.

I'm over all that now; in a serendipitous turn of events, my marriage to a non-edgy, politically moderate Southern frat boy  turned out to be the instrument of my liberation from the "sexual liberation" that required me to starve, puke, and drink dangerous amounts of hard liquor in order to live in my skin. And within the structure of my marriage and motherhood, rather than chafing, I've started to dream again, in a way I stopped dreaming almost ten years ago.

From my bed now, all clean sheets and familiarity, I dream of going back and finishing a science degree one day, once I've got a career that doesn't wrench away time I want with my family, faith, self, community for things like commuting to Manhattan and revising spreadsheets. In the meantime, I don't want scientists to stop doing their science; it's what allows us to not die of cancer as frequently and allows me, in particular, to still have teeth. And, like many people who like science, I'm troubled by "Intelligent Design". While no science can be completely divorced from a historical or political agenda, it seems to me that a reasonable person has to reject a science that is so clearly developed to support a specific conclusion, whatever that conclusion is, and however convinced of it we feel.

But I'm equally unconvinced by other laypeople's efforts to compel science to serve functions commonly -- and better -- served by faith.In evaluating scientific explanations for what we once attributed to the supernatural, I'm essentially pushed back into the realm of faith, anyway. I can't interpret the numbers behind string theory with any more sophistication than I can explain the Incarnation. But the first proposal comes to be within a rhetoric that explicitly limits itself to the rational and discrete, whereas the second locates itself precisely beyond my understanding, in the infinite. One contradicts itself; the other points elsewhere, to a space where contradiction is meaningless. To deny the existence of such a space -- one that is visible to me at the interstices of so much of everyday life -- seems as wishful a way of thinking as trying to force it into the language of the material and prove-able, as saying, Here's how we prove God made the world or, Here's how I know I'll be kicking it with my friends, playing bass for Lord up in Heaven.

For the most part, the scientists actually doing the research seem to recognize what the bloggers appropriating their work seem not to: that science is a paradigm, and that, as such, it exists inside the limits of modernity, of History. It functions best (and, possibly, only) when it recognizes those limits. While the material to which it attends is objective, the language on which it depends never is -- because language never is.

The terrible (dangerous and potentially devastating, as well as personally annoying) Achilles heel of "rationality" is its assumption of objectivity as a defining characteristic of its own rhetoric. This leads to bad science -- such as intelligent design. Such as eugenics, social Darwinism, and the over a century of bullshit about women, black people, and disabled people being genetically inferior, about intelligence being static, and et cetera.

Ultimately, no evidence or argument for a God has been able to convince me He exists; in this, I can relate to atheists. But -- and this is also like them -- my personal experience has convinced me that one way of understanding the world is more reasonable than the other. In my case, seeing the limits of every scientific explanation I've encountered, and seeing around me so much that seems to gesture beyond these limits, I make sense of that world by understanding that beyond as God: something organized, but Whose organization is larger than what I can comprehend. There are other people who don't see a reason to believe this -- who, I think, believe that beyond their limited understanding of the world is something that either can be understood, eventually, or that cannot be understood, but is essentially more of the same: rational, systemic, material.

That's not a bad conclusion. But it's one for which we have no more "real proof" than we do for a God. And it's one that is largely contradicted by current scientific models of the universe, in which gravity and time and matter don't mean the same things anymore and proof, as we understand it, is elusive. To believe that that model of a universe is more likely than a theistic one takes its own leap of faith, one that ultimately comes down to: this unprovable thing fits better with the world as I have experienced it than does that other unprovable thing.

My experience -- however personal, however unverifiable or unscientific -- indicates to me that there is a God. Beyond the arena in which science can possibly be useful, I find semantics, and I find my experience. The first is easier to talk about, but the second is more convincing -- so much so that I find myself with very little to say about it, with very little that needs to be said.

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