I’ve been trying over the last year or so to find a good format for occasional- bi-monthly would be appropriate I think- miscellanies- musings that I’m not ready to develop at full-length, updates on personal matters of interest to my readers, and short reviews of books and music I’ve enjoyed or found useful in recent weeks.
In this edition:
i) thoughts on the James Webb Telescope and the experience (or lack thereof) of the night sky; ii) meditations on evolution, exegesis, and Divine providence; iii) books read and noted; iv) news and announcements; and v) a handpicked album of music for your reading soundtrack.
i. On the Night Sky (Again) and the James Webb Telescope
I’ve written about this before in relation to the night sky but on a broader level I think it’s true across many areas of human experience: that the scientific revolution(s), industrialization, and general expansion of knowledge and knowledge transmission have meant a general deepening and broadening of human experience and knowledge on some levels, allowing us to live in a larger, deeper, more polycentric universe of truly vast expanse—cosmologically, chronologically, biologically, historically, culturally, etc. On the other hand, the parallel and often interrelated developments of industrialization and capitalism and related processes have pushed humans in the reverse direction: once regular contact with important aspects of depth and breadth were human commonplaces globally but, whether through observing on a regular basis the night sky—filled with thousands of visible stars instead of the literally dozens to which the night sky is often reduced for many Americans and Europeans—or through meaningful sustained contact with biological dynamics and ecosystems or through ritual participation in liturgical practices stretching back not just centuries but millennia.
Like not a few others, I’ve been thinking intermittently about the cultural impact—or lack thereof—of the recent release of innagural images from the James Webb deep space telescope, and what I keep coming back to is the incongruity between the images themselves and what they reveal about the nature and history of our universe, on the one hand, and the rather thin gruel in terms of responses (including, I suppose, what I am writing right now!). Certainly part of what is at issue is the lack of larger metaphysical meaning generally brought to such knowledge, or, rather, a poorly developed and malign metaphysics in which the vastness of the universe becomes an impetus to sophomoric nihilism, meditations on human insignificance, and the like. Such nihilism can be easily enough answered with the (seemingly) simple enough fact that we as humans are driven to produce and interpret such knowledge and that at some level we can think about and understand—if not truly comprehend—the vast time and space scales of the universe in a way that no other creatures on our planet, and quite possibly anywhere in the universe, can do. As such there is arguably meaning accessible to anyone in human knowledge of the heavens, but it is still many steps below what is possible when the starry heights and their deep history are seen through theological and, even more importantly, a doxological lens, when they become sites of mystical reflection and noetic prayer.
The work of integrating prayerful theology with modern cosmology has not yet been done, to put it mildly, though I think it is very much within the realm of possiblity (and see below for a sort of an attempt in that direction!). But more mundanely, it is not clear to me that our expanded knowledge has had much effect on the more temporal arts such as poetry or visual art or any other number of human cultural pursuits. There are many reasons for this defecit—and perhaps it will be corrected in the future—but surely one of the most important is the reality of that lived disconnect between what science can tell us and what our senses actually perceive in ‘real life’ and can integrate into our inner states, can comprehend and delve with the human spirit—itself a vast cosmos within which God ‘has set eternity.’
To give a more concrete example: as I’ve discussed some time back here, thinking about deep time did not really ‘click’ with me until I was able to combine a degree of ‘reading knowledge’ with immersive exploration of evidence in the field. Specifically, walking and ‘reading’ but with a different sort of sight and process the beautifully and monumentally preserved remains of middle Miocene marine life along the Chesapeake Bay was a truly eye-opening process for me. The rather abstract and all but impossible to mentally register spans of deep time felt realer and closer and more meaningful when right in front of my eyes and in my hands. It’s similar for any other areas of inquiry: knowledge obtained through reading and images really needs to be accompanied by experential knowledge, by plunging one’s hands into the soil, accompanying nature up close and with attention and care, whether in the guise of ‘citizen science’ or in ordinary exploration and participation. For astronomical knowledge this has simply become much more difficult for the majority of living humans: the celestial bodies are, the moon excepted, pretty dim to us, and basically static, as we no longer track from day to day their motions. The gap between our lived experience and the datum of contemporary science—not aided by the sheer difficulty of following modern cosmology—will probably limit the cultural and personal resonances of things like the James Webb Telescope, despite the scientific utility of such technologies.
ii. Evolution and Exegesis
Shortly after moving to the Chattanooga area we made a renewed acquaintance with McKay’s Books, a small mostly Tennessee chain of used bookstores known for both a high rate of turnover as well as a tendency towards quality material. While browsing in the biology section I discovered that some earnest soul had distributed anti-evolution literature within the pages of books
he or she appraised to be pro-evolution; the majority of the clandestine literature was derived from a book of daily young earth creationist meditations, not precisely devotions though each was tagged with a Scripture verse. The scientific arguments presented in the samples I perused were low-quality and highly unlikely to convince anyone picking up a textbook on evolutionary ecology for some light reading, but what stood out to me was the Scripture ‘tag’ upon which the exegetical and evangelical arguments of the first of these mini-tracts hinged. It was Psalm 139:14, the first half of which has become quite culturally ubiquitious, not just in creationist literature but across the evangelical and wider Christian landscape: ‘I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.’
And so I started thinking about the implications of that verse to the author’s argument, and the extent to which it does not really seem to fit well with young earth creationist arguments at all. Such arguments depend upon interpreting God’s creative activity as being foremost ex nihilo in almost all major instances and as not having much to do with natural observable processes over time (though on this last point contemporary creationism has certainly expanded its ambit from even a decade or two ago and is slowly becoming comfortable with aspects of evolutionary theory, albeit reconfigured within a young earth frame). The Psalmist summons up a magnificent picture of his own personal formation in the womb, depicted in decidedly cosmological terms: ‘intricately woven in the depths of the earth.’ This trajectory of creative activity is shown as being a process—not a single action—stretched out chronologically, both from the past and into the future, the Psalmist looking over his entire life, including days yet to come: ‘in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.’
Now, while I hesitate to speak in universal terms, I doubt very much that young earth creationists of any sort are likely to deny the normal biological method of making babies, which quite clearly involves natural observable processes. Yet for most creationists, and indeed most Christians, the conjunction of the two statements—that God creates and that biology works in a predictable and rule-drive way—are not incommensurate. To be sure, some readers have felt a tension, which tends to result in exegesis that reworks the words of the Psalmist into referring to the immaterial soul specially created by God—but this is not the sense in which our tract-writer above understood the verse. What happens if we consider this passage and the many, many others like it from an evolutionary creationist perspective, one that sees God’s creative power at work not just in the initial (from our temporal view of things) creation of the universe but also in the ongoing ‘natural’ processes such as (among many others!) biological evolution?
One important take-away is that God’s creative power and work is, in the first instance, revealed in the basic make-up and operations of the universe, an almost infinite progression of creative unfoldings and processes which, from our temporal perspective, stretch from the moment of the ‘Big Bang’ right up to our present, but which from God’s perspective are all simultaneous and equally present and existent. From stellar evolution to the evolution of micro-organisms the cosmos is filled with creative power and potency, fulfilling the divine command in every moment, in every particle, proceeding from the divine utterance in the beginning. Yet at the same time God’s providential power and care are also equally present in an active, if mysterious sense, in all of these processes, at every scale: that is the message of Scripture, and it does not gainsay what we perceive as ‘natural’ processes, be they biological evolution, stellar evolution, human history, the water cycle, or particle physics. God creates with and through the outworkings and operations of His creatures, in an inseperable synergy.1
The ultimate upshot of a theology of evolutionary creationism ought to be an understanding of the world in all its complexity and depth as being exactly what the Psalmist shows it to be: the good gift of God’s creative power and care, His providence at work in everything, whether we as humans place cultural value on it or not:
These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season. That thou givest them they gather: thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good. Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth. The glory of the Lord shall endure for ever: the Lord shall rejoice in his works.
What is often labeled ‘nature red with tooth and claw’ is laid out in this passage as God’s good providential activity; we might hear intimations of not just predator-prey interactions but of the vast cycles of organisms and ecosystems that have come and gone upon the earth, its face renewed again and again at scales small and great. If there has often been a tendency among theistic believers to try and point to particular elements of ‘design’ in nature, the Psalmist points in quite a different direction, drawing our attention in this passage and elsewhere not so much to particular organisms and their remarkable morphologies and features but to what we would probably call processes and patterns: life and death, reproduction and population expansion and contraction, ecosystem operations, geological and hydrological systems and events. These are all part of God’s work, of His creative power and providential care. To try and distinguish where God’s activity ends and natural processes begin is to miss the point entirely: the point is that God is present in the whole, sustaining and directing it all. Our response should be one of thanksgiving and praise, receiving and re-offering the created world as gift, as eucharist in fact, and this should deeply inform how we relate to the natural world and to our place in it.
iii. Books Read and Noted:
I’ve actually got a stack of books to mention and recommend, which is not always true—it’s not that the books I usually read for both work and pleasure are bad, just that I’m hesitant to recommend purely academic tomes which are both very specialized and, more onerously, very expensive and usually only available via an academic library, something to which not all of my readers will have recourse. I’ll limit it to a couple, with more reviews in the next edition.
First off, in the field of environmental history, Paul S. Sutter’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South, which might well be the most interesting and just straight up pleasurable scholarly book I’ve read all year. With gathering middle age I am rarely in the youthful habit of staying up into the early morning hours devouring a book, but I made an exception with this one, truly engrossing, far more so than the subtitle would suggest (how exciting can a book about soil be?). Sutter covers a huge range of topics, many intersecting with those raised in my writings of late, from the interplay of deep time geological dynamics and modern (that is, over the last two hundred years) human culture to the ways in which humans perceive and value—or don’t—the physical landscape and the traces of human history and culture that help to constitute those landscapes, both literally and metaphorically.
While I’ve yet to visit Providence Canyon—despite now living in Georgia it remains a long ways away, requiring an overnight stay (Georgia is a surprisingly large state, and we’re almost in Tennessee as it is)—I’ve known about it since I was a kid, mainly as an example of the ruinious effects of poorly managed agriculture. Despite the strong negative moral long attached to it and other erosive features of its kin, I’ve also always found Providence Canyon and similar formations, some of which I have in fact visited, fascinating and rather beautiful, especially given that in the Coastal Plain South such sharp relief is otherwise hard to come by, limited to often inaccessible river bluffs. Sutter explores the emotional and interpretative complexities of this landscape and its past in a deft and detailed manner, and in so doing really genuinely changed the way I think about the Southern landscape and its human traces. Whether you have any strong commitments to that Southern landscape or not this book is very much worth your time—not only are the topics absolutely fascinating and rich with contemporary relevance, Sutter is a really good writer and a pleasure to read.
Second, a book that at first glance you might imagine to be totally dry and technically but which turned out to be one of the most delightful pieces of science writing I have come across, C. Kenneth Dodd’s North American Box Turtles: A Natural History.
Now to be fair I am not an unbiased observer; I have long loved turtles (though really who doesn’t?), as they are simply among the most remarkable organisms on this earth, with a genuinely unique morphology, in which their armor (not in itself especially unusual) is intimately welded into their skeletal structure and overall physiology. They’re also just generally beautiful creatures, and lend themselves to observation in a way that their generally faster reptile kin do not always do. Dodd’s detailed natural history of the genus Terrapene is absolutely fascinating, and frequently drolly humorous. I was particularly struck by how much I had not understood about these creatures, which I have encountered on a pretty regular basis since I was a small child, and how much remains unknown (something that is true in fact about the vast majority of organisms, including ones which we tend to think of as ‘common’).
iv. News and Announcements:
Not a lot to report here, other than that I am restarting the big history/deep time reading group (probably need to come up with a better name for it) this fall; we’ll be reading together the recent book by David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, a work that attracted a good deal of attention last year when it was released, both positive and negative, and which I think will be a good springboard for us to think through approaches to the deep human past and especially how we integrate our knowledge (or what we think we know anyway) about that past into present-day concerns, and vice versa. If you’d like to participate let me know via email (jallen22@umd.edu); we have not yet set times and dates but I imagine we’ll meet at least three or so times with this book given its length. I’d like to continue into next year as well, topic and material yet to be determined.
On the literal homefront, our mini-farm continues to do well, supporting a vast host of pollinators and other organisms, not to mention all of the human households who have had squash and zucchini and tomatoes and various other vegetables thrust upon them for consumption. It sounds cliché but it’s true that perhaps the most pleasurable part of having a sizeable garden has been having lots of healthy and tasty produce to give away, with the promise of more to come and bigger plans next year.
iv. Musical Offering:
Experimental offerings that draw upon folk and traditional music can range from the excellent to the cringey; this album is the former, mixing electronica with the Breton bagpipe (the veuze) and the Armenian duduk (among other instruments) in a way that is innovative but also a real pleasure to listen to, feeling both very fresh and very old, at times wild and at times contemplative. Not precisely within my usual range of listening material these days but a welcome discovery, and much recommended!
I think that Orthodox and Catholic devotion to the Theotokos makes a great deal more sense in light of such a theology of creation: while Our Lady is a creature to be sure with her life part of God’s providence and plan, it is simultaneously true that her actions and choices matter, that she operates with what is basically autonomy, not coercion or pre-determination, and thus plays an integral and necessary part in Salvation History. In a way she represents and sums up the nature of the cosmos itself, synergistically accepting God’s creative presence and cooperating with Him in the work of salvation and transformation, of in fact deification. Now, the evolution of stars or the emergence of distinct clades of organisms is obviously something other than the work of human volition, but there is a similarity in that such processes are the ‘work’ of autonomous real entities that operate in contingent ways while also being emmeshed in God’s providential care and direction. The universe ‘cooperates’ in a manner of speaking with God’s creative power—in the Genesis narrative, organisms obey the divine command to arise and to multiply. Creation is itself a synergistic work in motion in a manner of speaking.