Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part six

Here is a little interlude, which I needed during my heavy thoughts, and which you, the reader (if any) also need. I wrote this on 2 March 2005.

“And, finally, isn’t it past all rational solution? As I have repeatedly pondered, do I not believe in God because Dvorak did? Nietzsche had penetrating questions, or so I who have never read him am told. How to answer him? Kierkegaard’s leap? A scientist resists it but what else is there? What Mahler did was to celebrate evolution in his Resurrection Symphony. The stages of life on Earth: vegetative (second movement), animated (third movement), then to set Nietzsche to music (fourth movement), angels in heaven (fifth movement) as if it were a progression. But really it was just to put atheism and heaven next to each other, then goes on (sixth movement) to celebrate love. He listened, out in his summerhouse in the mountain meadow: ‘What the flowers in the meadow tell me,’ ‘What the animals in the forest tell me,’ ‘What the night tells me,’ ‘What the morning bells tell me,” and ‘What love tells me.’ Maybe these things all contradict one another; all we can do is listen.

 

“It helps to have friends with which to share this. Mahler had gotten over his love for Johanna Richter in the 1880s. He had a friend in the 1890s, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, who traveled with him and wrote down his thoughts. She was the one who wrote down the titles above. What was he thinking, not to embrace her after Alma Schindler had betrayed him. Ah, friendship is better than romance, as Mahler found out too late.”

My Skepticism: The Early Days

Perhaps the first seedling of skepticism germinated in my brain long, long before I became a skeptical inquirer of Christianity. It happened back when I was still a fundamentalist.

The church of which I was a member insisted that everyone in the world who believed differently from us, or ever had, were going to burn in hell forever. This would include people who were members of other Christian churches. Even at the time, I simply could not believe this. I personally knew lots of people who were not in our church but whom a God of Love would simply not be able to send to hell, unless he was an evil God.

That was it. It took decades for the realization to emerge in my mind that the whole doctrinal infrastructure of who is going to heaven and who is going to hell was invented by humans. As I write these words, the climactic theme from Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is booming in my mind—at the climax of which, everyone is amazed to discover that the Resurrection is for everyone and not just for the doctrinally orthodox.

Resurrection

Last night (March 12, 2016) I went to the Tulsa Symphony production of Gustav Mahler's Second Symphony, the Resurrection Symphony. The Tulsa Symphony, together with the Tulsa Oratorio Chorus, performed magnificently. The conductor was Benjamin Zander, who is also the conductor of the Boston Philharmonic. I have carefully listened to this symphony for thirty years, but I still learned many new things when I actually saw the performance and listened to the conductor explain it.

Most people react to death by not thinking about it: by just going to the funeral and getting it over with. Mahler was not like this. The first movement of his symphony was not a funeral march; the inchoate march was always interrupted when Mahler stopped to agonize, or to appreciate the surprising beauty of life. With excruciating beauty, Mahler wrung out every last insight he could get from the fabric of life, death, and resurrection. Here was neither a facile atheism nor a shallow Christianity.

Mahler's music is not for everybody. I will admit that my writing, too, is not for everybody. I cannot write anything, not even a four-line poem, which does not somehow plumb the meaning of life, revealing both its agony and its beauty, sometimes simultaneously. I am trying to do for the written word what Mahler did for music.

I am not going to go into any musical details. I just wish to say that, as a scientist, I see resurrection all the time. You have to look for it and think about it, as Mahler did. Here is what I see.

On the cover of a vinyl edition of Bruno Walter's recording of this symphony, there is one simple image: a deep space nebula. A nebula is a resurrection. The old superstar explodes as a supernova and is dead, leaving behind a pregnant cloud of gas and dust. From this cloud, new stars and planets condense, and the second generation of stars ignite. This is where our solar system came from. Our sun is a resurrected sun. And there would be no planets were it not for the engine of creation inside the supernova, the only place in which there is enough temperature and pressure to create the larger kinds of atoms such as iron, phosphorus, and magnesium from which planets and soils are made, and uranium, a radioactive element the decay of which keeps the interior of our planet hot. Our planet is solid and warm-blooded because of the supernova, the death and resurrection, of an earlier generation of star. This is why our sun is only five billion years old, while the universe is over twice that age. Astrophysicists believe in resurrection. It is not the same star, resurrected back to life; it is a different star; but the star-life continues.

I am a botanist and I see resurrection all the time. I don't just mean the opening of tree buds each spring, a process that is in full swing right at this moment. Budburst is not really resurrection; the trees and flowers were just asleep for the winter, and are awakening. But every forest that I walk through is a resurrection. Every forest is one that grew in a place in which an earlier forest was destroyed. Longfellow wrote about "the forest primeval" in Evangeline; but there is no such thing as a primeval forest! Longfellow's "primeval" Acadian forest had not even been there a few thousand years earlier, when the land was covered with glaciers. The forest had grown back after the glaciers melted. A fire or mudslide destroys a forest, and then it goes through a slow process of what ecologists call succession: first weeds, then shrubs, then fast-growing trees such as cottonwood, and finally, after about a century, the slow-growing and long-lived trees such as oaks. This is a resurrection. The original trees are gone; perhaps the new forest is different from the previous forest; but a forest has grown back. It is not a miracle, any more than a nebula is a miracle; it is simply the natural laws of plant growth. To realize this, you have to look closely at the forest, and look at it in four dimensions.

These are the kinds of resurrection that, I think, Mahler believed in. He had a hard time accepting the death of the old, but his faith in the growth of the new was irrepressible.