Woods Wanderer

Recreation. Making good use of a precious day off from work, I head for the hills to re-create myself. It’s a cool, sunny day in late autumn and everything I need is stuffed into the small rucksack on my back. I step into the woods, following a favorite stream deep into the Green Mountains. My dog Matika, wearing a blaze orange vest, bounds ahead of me all smiles. She’s just as happy as I am to be here.

It’s a hunter’s forest. A few brown and gold leaves still cling to branches but most of them are on the ground now. Slightly overdressed in thermals and wool shirt, I quickly break into a sweat. And yet I feel a chill in the air whenever I stop to catch my breath. Oh yeah, it’s that time of year.

It’s a hunter’s forest but I’m not hunting for anything in particular today – not game, not adventure, not deep thought. I have no agenda, really. I’m just out here to groove with the elements and forget about all that nonsense in the lowlands. It’s enough to simply move, to sweat, and occasionally rock-hop across the stream. And yet a moment comes when I start pondering the order and chaos of the natural world, wondering half consciously where the laws of nature come from. Then I stop and look around me in pantheistic ecstasy, convinced on the most visceral level that the universe is far from being random.

I recently read The God Delusion, a manifesto of atheism penned by a renowned biologist named Richard Dawson. I was deeply disappointed by it, as I am by most religious and anti-religious texts. Professed atheists do not take pantheism any more seriously than religious fundamentalists do. These two camps are too busy warring with each other to consider any other possibilities – namely that the laws of nature have to come from somewhere, that “god” and “nature” are different words for the same thing. A few pensive souls like myself speak up but we are quickly dismissed.  There is little room in most human minds for the obvious. Warring – the battle between good and evil – is so much more engaging.

“Let it go,” I tell myself, as I tramp through the woods. I didn’t come out here to think. I came out here today to leave all that nonsense behind. I came out here to groove with the wild, feel the truth of it, and reconnect with What-Is in a way that doesn’t translate into any kind of -Ism. So I whistle to Matika to follow as I change direction, rock-hopping across the stream one more time. By the end of the day, I will be re-created and ready to return to the lowlands.  But right now, I just want to worship nature in the simplest and most direct way possible.

Tags: nature, pantheism, reality, religion

A few weeks ago, I posted a rumination called “Evolution is Religion” at this site, drawing fire from those who don’t wholeheartedly agree with me.  My friend Andrew’s criticism of my take on evolution and religion, at his site: http://evolvingmind.info/blog/ , is as good as any.  Check it out.  For those of you more interested in the hard science of evolution, which speaks for itself, there’s a big spread on it in this month’s issue of Scientific American.  For those of you still interested in trying to figure out what the hell I was saying in last month’s blog, read on.

Where did the first living cell come from?  In a sense this question is rhetorical because there’s no possible way for us to reasonably answer it.  I emphasize the word “reasonable” here to dismiss all wild-eyed theories about how it could have emerged, as well as all assertions based upon sacred texts.  A similar question is: What existed before the Big Bang?  That question has the time-bound word “before” in it, thus making it patently absurd to any serious student of cosmology.  I trade in these paradoxes and absurdities on purpose to illustrate how little we really know about nature.  We’ve filled entire libraries with the particulars of the natural world, but the whole of it still confounds us.

Knowing what we do about the particulars of the natural world, I don’t see how anyone can reject the mechanics of evolution outright.  It appears to be written in DNA itself, not to mention the multitude of fossils we’ve collected over the past couple centuries.  But all this suggests that nature as a whole is organized – a concept which begs the existence of some kind of organizing force.  Call that force what you will.  I call it God.

I understand the scientist’s natural revulsion to any kind of Godtalk.  One only has to conjure up images of Copernican heretics burning at the stake to see why men of reason cringe at the mere mention of anything remotely religious.  I also cringe when folks whip out their sacred texts, knowing that there’s a noose and/or torture chamber somewhere waiting for the likes of me, as well.  But that doesn’t change what I see in wild nature.  I see order as well as chaos at work in it, and I can’t for the life of me explain this.

As many people have pointed out to me over the years, my version of God is weak indeed.  I doubt it would hold up in any court, be it religious or secular.  But the wild keeps telling me that I’m onto something here.  And for that reason, I will follow this line of thought to its logical conclusion.  I just hope there isn’t a cup of hemlock waiting for me at the end of this road.

Tags: evolution, nature, philosophy, religion, science