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Darwin was a theist, although one with more doubts than faith. Suffering, especially innocent suffering, fed his doubts. A particularly cruel wasp was theologically significant to him – a wasp that paralyzes grasshoppers and caterpillars and takes them away to its nest alive but immobilized for their larvae to eat.
It is hard for the human mind to imagine anything more cruel than a predator that paralyzes its victim and then lets its children eat the victim alive. Darwin considered it inconceivable that God would design such a creature. It is easier to accept such cruelty if it is senseless rather than planned.
It is easier to believe the cosmos is senseless than to believe it is designed. It is easier to believe the cosmos is indifferent than to believe it cares.
Most people, I believe, would rather not live in a senseless universe, but in modernity that is the way many of us see the universe. It is like we are living in a place where we just don’t belong, in a place we have been brought against our will.
I do hear some people saying that the senselessness of the universe does not matter because we can make this place better, we can make our own meaning, and we can care about suffering even if the cosmos does not. But I think another voice is more convincing – the one that says, “Why bother? Just live as well as you can while life lasts.”
Maybe there is mercy in being paralyzed by the predator. Maybe the mind is paralyzed too – so that suffering is easier. Maybe hard work, watching television, playing video games, shopping and immersion in a cause like politics or religion are a kind of paralysis – they keep us from fighting back. We don’t know how to fight the cosmos anyway.
I hate the wasp that brought me here. I hate the larvae gnawing me away.
At the beginning of The Last Neanderthal, Loren Eiseley quoted the Book of Job:
“For you shall be in league with the stones of the field, and the beasts of the field shall be at peace with you” (RSV.)
In agrarian days maybe that passage meant what a contemporary linguistic translation makes so explicit: “The fields you plow will be free of rocks; wild animals will never attack you” (TEV.)
Meanings are not static – they change over time. In our day, in the age of ecology, these words in the Book of Job can refer to the relatedness of all of life and the earth, rather than to a farmer’s hope. Still, the expression remains optimistic and hopeful, as it was in agrarian days, founded on trust in the benevolence of God, or in a kind of benevolence of the cosmos, of evolution, perhaps, if one no longer speaks of God.
At the end of The Last Neanderthal, Eiseley wrote about a piece of flint he carried in his pocket, one that he, a physical anthropologist, had found years ago while digging for bones. The flint, stone of the field, tool of a wild ancestor, connected him with the past, made him think about who he was and how he lived, gave him hope, contained wisdom – the old flint and the Book of Job.
In The Inner Galaxy, Loren Eiseley remembered how much he loved an old seagull who sat near to him on a beach. Reflecting on this memory he saw that his love for all wild creatures was meaningless in the context of evolution – it was love not concerned with survival.
In Eiseley’s view of life, formed as it was by Darwin’s view, all species are related to each other and to the earth itself through the great struggle for survival that drives evolution.
Many of us recognize Eiseley’s love for wild creatures as our own love for them. It is an ironic love – we do not easily associate an emotion like love with the great struggle to survive. Darwin wrote, “What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horribly cruel works of nature.” Our love for wild creatures seems to fight the urge that gave us life.
Love is bound up with hope in the human heart. Love wants to win. We don’t know where the struggle will lead, but we hope to win, to live. Loren Eiseley hoped that “we would win, … if not in human guise then in another.” We can only say that and mean it when we feel we are one with all the species and when we are in love.
The desert flowers are blooming now and Encilia has colored the land yellow.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “The earth laughs in flowers.” A friend of mine who loves flowers hangs a plaque in his garden that bears that short expression. In his vision, flowers are cheerful and they are the fruit of the garden he enjoys so much.
It was after I first saw that plaque that I read Emerson’s poem Hamatreya and learned that Emerson meant that the flowers are laughing at people for believing we own the land. In Emerson’s vision, the earth laughs because the earth knows that it owns us. In Hamatreya, the earth sings,
“They called me theirs,
Who so controlled me;
Yet every one
Wished to stay, and is gone.
How am I theirs,
If they cannot hold me,
But I hold them?”
Aldo Leopold wrote that we need to abandon the idea that we own the land. In his vision, believing we own the land we are killing the land. Aldo Leopold did not hear laughter in flowers. He heard crying.
In Darwin’s vision, the flowers are produced by the struggle to survive. In that vision, the force that made the flowers also made me. The flowers and me, we are the same. It is a beautiful vision.
Hiking through the flowers in Oswit Canyon this morning I saw that they are nearly finished blooming. Most of the buds have blossomed and the stems are starting to bend below the petals.
I like the idea that I am owned by the land. I like the idea that the land’s ownership of me moves the earth to laughter. I do wish to stay, it is true – held by the land, the land from which I came and to which I will return, the yellow flowers and me.
Some of the most beautiful places in the desert and mountains of Southern California have names that suggest bad things have happened there: Horsethief Creek, Dead Indian Canyon, Devil’s Slide and Tahquitz, a demon in Cahuilla mythology.
Other beautiful places have been named for the people who have exploited the land – names of miners, loggers, cattlemen and developers.
Yesterday my wife and I hiked past an abandoned nameless dolomite mine, past Horsethief Creek to a place with a beautiful name – Cactus Spring. When we arrived we found no evidence of a spring, no water, no lush vegetation, no cactus. Maybe there is or was a hidden spring in that area, or maybe the name is or was an ironic, devilish joke. Maybe the beautiful name was given to that area just because nothing bad ever happened there.
We need to make a new map and rename all the peaks and creeks and canyons and washes. We are born of the land and will return to the land. The land is good.
In Darwin’s Century, in the second chapter, titled “The Time Voyagers,” Loren Eiseley wrote that until humanity grasped the long history of the earth and the origin of the species through natural selection, humanity saw itself “as having emerged from an unknown darkness and as passing similarly into an unknown future.” He added that until we grasped the long history and origins of life humanity was trapped in the present and was “addicted to a naive supernaturalism” and imagined nature as the workings of “baleful or beneficent beings which were often, in reality, the projected shadows of our hopes and fears.”
In Loren Eiseley’s description here, the ability of humanity to see the past and the future liberates us from belief in God. It facilitates atheism.
And yet, when Darwin thought about this ability to see the past and future, he found himself believing in God, even if only tentatively. In his autobiography he wrote, “I feel compelled to look at a first cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a theist.” What compelled him to say this was “the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capability of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity.”
In Darwin’s thoughts, the ability of humanity to see the past and the future liberates us from disbelief and facilitates faith, which is the opposite of its effect in Eiseley’s thoughts.
Something other than the content of evolution, other than the ability to see the past and the future in the way we see it in evolution, must determine whether the ability to see the past and future supports faith or not.
Natural selection, the process of evolution that in Darwin’s writings account for the origin of the species, is indifferent to cruelty and kindness. The Bible, although it describes God as kind, describes not only acts of God that sound kind, but also some that sound cruel to our modern ears.
Why do some of us praise God and defend cruelties in the Bible and yet condemn the ethic of evolution for its indifference to cruelty and kindness, while others admire evolution and defend its cruelties and yet condemn the cruelties of God as described in the Bible?
I suspect that these inconsistencies occur because some of us gain more from professing a belief in evolution, and some of us gain more from professing faith in God. We do what we do to advance and defend our interests. We justify the cruelties of the one we love and condemn the cruelties of the one we hate for the sake ourselves.
But if we love or admire both, shall we justify cruelty or condemn it?
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