Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part nine.

 

I wondered why I kept writing in my journal every day. Was it just a “demented polygraphia”? Polygraphia is a mental disorder in which a person must continually write everything down. I admit I fit the description of this very well. But as for my journal, back in 2005, I answered, “It is an act of faith that somebody will want to reconstruct this framework of thought…” The world is like a comet, “which swings close to God’s sun then vanishes again into deep space. The fact that I bother to think and write at all is my fundamental…faith.

“I benefit now from all the soul-building work of the past. If I look upon the world and see only dirt, I am dead and unhappy. I must continue open to inspiration. I turn in disgust from most organized religion…But I remember the powerful inspiration I felt in a field of wildflowers 37 years ago [now 54 years ago]. I reaffirmed it this spring and will keep it alive, as if there is a God, which there probably is.” I was referring to the Sonoran Desert spring wildflowers.

 

But I also wrote, on 29 March, “It is clear to me that in this world, God is not in control. He has permitted a world of natural law, with cruel consequences, a world in which His love penetrates and contradicts, in which His love is of infinite value, and in which our purpose is to oppose all that is not love, all selfishness, even indifference. It is an artificial, contrived cosmos in which God makes us see how desirable love and beauty are, because of its stark contrast with crustal movements which grind all human life as if it were not there, with chromosomal breakages, and with forces of evolution, which have produce a species both intelligent and evil. To angels, goodness is ordinary. To us, goodness is sacrificial. And even if there is not life beyond, we have been permitted to taste and glimpse what is truly beautiful.”

The next day I wrote, “I stride into the future not knowing if God will even keep me alive, but ready in case he does (and, each second, each day, people live more often than they die).” I wrote this even as my illness returned. But even then, I wrote, because of my love for the creation, I was happier than Donald Trump. Yes, I wrote that in 2005, because even back then Trump was in the news as the perfect example of total furious selfishness.

At the same time, I was reluctant to leave religion which was, I thought, a human adaptation. “Religion is our warm hut of order, agnostic freedom is the cold swirling storm.”

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part eight

I will post, with minimal editing, what I wrote on 15 March 2005, during my trip to see desert wildflowers. This was, as close as it is possible to determine, the exact date on which I became an agnostic.

“How can I begin to describe the beauty of the spring desert I beheld yesterday? And the greatest blessings came when I took the time to look closely, to slow down and immerse myself in it, to open myself to the Spirit.” While most people do not look closely at nature, out of a nation of 300 million, there must be a few million who do. “I must keep this in mind to counterbalance my cynicism, even though it is realistic and true…For the moment, I feel good not just about nature but even about the species of which I am a part.” I was reading a book, Evil and the God of Love, by John Hick. Hick “openly admitted ‘the fact of evil [which] constitutes the most serious objection there is to the Christian belief in a God of love.’ He calls it a fact; it is not, as Buddhists might say, an illusion, nor is it merely a form of human behavior. It is evil…Hick rejects an ‘inoffensive but unhelpful agnosticism,’ which provides ‘a perpetual burden of doubt’ to all believers, and has always done so, even back in the so-called Age of Faith. And Job’s answer, to be tremblingly quiet before God’s incomprehensible majesty, is not a solution…If God is intentionally involved in the world (and this may be his entire action), then we cannot expect God to see or manipulate the world from a cosmic viewpoint. Perhaps—I am speculating now—the Spirit Himself struggles to understand this? If so, then the Spirit’s answer is not an explanation but a delicate desert spring wildflower.”

I can remember where I was when I wrote this. I was eating breakfast in a restaurant in Yuma, Arizona. The trip I took out into the desert was spiritual as well as scientific.

The next day I wrote the following. To explore the wildflowers “was like walking in heaven. I also relived the beautiful part of my childhood,” when I walked amidst the spring wildflowers in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

But I continued reading and thinking about the problem of evil. The irrepressibly optimistic Harry Emerson Fosdick posed the opposite question to the problem of evil: “why is there so much inexplicable good in the world? Since the time of Fosdick, and of C. S. Lewis’s similar argument, altruism has been discovered. But it does not explain all of the goodness, greatness, our capacity for wisdom, love, science, and (what I now experience) biophilia.” This does not answer the problem of evil, “but what else can I do but stumble amidst flowers and rejoice while I can? I can rejoice in the flow of the Spirit, and say that this is the entirety of God’s work here and now. The Spirit also cleanses away the scabs of anger and the rot of selfishness.

“It does no good, Hick claims, to blame Satan, for now we just have to explain why God permitted Satan to exist, nor does it do any good to appeal to the finitude of creatureliness [only a theologian could come up with this], because even within our limits we could be good but are not. Sorry, John, but we will not reason out a solution. Our only response can be like a visitor to the desert spring, seeing a brief symphony of joy in a hard land, or a visitor to the desert summer, who can see nothing good but who must force himself to admit that life persists dormant.”

I continued to think about my deteriorating health. “There will be no miracles for me. But in the event that I survive, I will be an imperfect conduit of the Spirit, and enjoy it. God “allowed at least one species to evolve the intelligence to appreciate…that though most organisms simply decay, a few re-emerge as fossils, as objects of beauty…”