Hazily ahead, Mount Humphreys emerged under a piercing sun whiter than any sun recalled from balmy Memphis. Though the peak was a hundred miles away, rising elevation and dry, chilled air made it imminently present. Flagstaff, which flanked its southern slope, was not yet a notion beneath the curvature of the Earth.
Lucien planned a side trip through The Painted Desert, and even before the entrance was reached, his Grandfather and their solemn Shiloh War Memorial visit came to mind. The way forward over these badlands was like stepping into a quarry for Chartres Cathedral. Each bend in the road placed the trekkers deeper in pigment.
Enoch got out during the frequent stops among the footpaths, yet did not speak of the fate of Triassic dinosaurs, or make mention of the ancient felled trees sculpted in silica. Instead, he faced into the wind and let his cape mimic the Aeolian furrows of shale and mudstone, and spoke of the heartiness of fungal spores in brackish puddles of desert rain, and of the wasting effects of Valley Fever.
Ravens staked out ground ahead of the pilgrims, scouting for alms and pizza crust among the pink and blue folding places. The very landscape under their talons was boardwalk taffy, but it was stuff similar to the indigestible opals sold near the interstate entrance. These winged sentient ride-alongs were perhaps Native-American spirits keeping tabs on The National Park Service.
The seraph read the trekker’s mind on their return to the car. “It takes an incredible amount of bad luck to bring an airliner out of the sky,” he sighed, “while the amount of bad luck needed to kill a hiker on a simple thirty-minute trail is so small as to be equally inconceivable to the imagination.”
The mortal left the park quieter than he came in, and was again pointed toward Mount Humphreys and a blinding ice sun. Holbrook, the next town, could only react with simpler imagination to the desolate beauty that surrounded it. One became a shaman here of necessary, and a pack rat. A motel made of cement teepees, and also dinosaurs of similar construction, sought to establish landmarks that ancient bedrock would be slow to remove.
Stopping at a Dairy Queen, the excuse of a bathroom break gave Lucien a chance to call his mother. She sounded in bright spirits, and spoke of fixing herself a pork chop sandwich, which was unusually ambitious dinnertime cuisine. The conversation concluded with words of love, whereupon the blinking diode again resumed its symbolic proportions.
Trudging clogs in gravel interrupted the son’s meditation; a squint placed his teenage hitchhiker yards away with a cherry-lime slush drink in her hand. Her hair color reminded him of his August sunbather. Arguably all young women look alike through chain-link fences, especially to an undiscriminating male eye: an eye first grounded to the critical optical nerve and then, less critically, to the reptilian stem.
The girl stopped halfway across the parking lot and tossed a wad of chewing gum in a trash receptacle. A clanging bracelet of pinchbeck and jade glass thumped the hinged lid and sent yellow jackets swarming over their opportunistic vespiary. The teenager showed no fear of them, even as they lit on her exposed arms and distended stomach beneath the halter-top. She lifted her arms, mimicking the membrane wings of a pterodactyl, and smiled at yet another male companion approaching her from the men’s room; the wasps reacted in unison by drawing off her skin like beads of oil on water. They dispersed—evaporated—in the dry desert air.
Returned to the road, Lucien was torn between the reverence he experienced in The Petrified Forest and his less reverential appreciation for the nubile teenager.
During church service, when his brother and he were coming of age, the pastor weekly fulminated over makeup on the deacons’ daughters, though it was the view from the back pews that compromised one’s virtue: A plethora of pantyhose shades was on display every time the congregation stood to sing, and the further back the brothers sat, the more legs of young parishioners they saw. An explosion of tints, thicknesses, and textures popular in the Nineteen Seventies made each shapely leg something out of a box of assorted caramels.
Honestly Lucien and his brother never fully grew up, so temptation, as well as the adolescent tendency to romanticize it, never found its proper place in the sorting out of things. Wanton recklessness was Nature’s booby-trap, but the unadventurous siblings failed to get close enough to trip the trigger and so be done with it. Though the older son came out on the other side of adolescence wiser, his inner teenager still wanted to have his day.
The traveling companions were soon gaining on a Prius covered with decals. Death leaned into the dashboard and stared sternly at the vehicle’s Darwin fish emblem, which was a parody of an original Christian design. He reliably returned to his expertise. “The humility engendered by the notion of an Omniscient God who orchestrates a myriad of causal links is very different from the humility expected of one where he or she realizes, jarringly, that nothing exceptional in the human condition was intended because everything had laughable accident as a parent.”
“Isn’t there humility in believing one evolved from a fish?” Lucien goaded.
“Is it humility—or pride—to believe one evolved from a fish?” countered the angel. “If one owes one’s cleverness only to mud, then isn’t this as much a display of vanity as any vanity the display purports to deflate? If one shows no deference to mud, then one shows no deference. A bastard born in the slum has only his bootstraps to praise in lifting himself out of it. In wishing to take humankind down a peg, by calling its parent a fish—this does not merit humility but a smirk. What luck to escape fins, and to inherit idle hands and all the mischief one might make with them!”
Lucien mulled it over. “You would think that such a bleak prospect as base, pointless existence would inspire much hand wringing. Instead, one gets religious finger-wagging from unlikely corners.”
Enoch chuckled. “This is true, for the world is not so pointless as one insists. Jeremy Bentham called natural law ‘nonsense on stilts,’ yet dedicated his life to universal suffrage. Where did he find his moral sentiment? Where in venting thermals of mud are the quagmires of reason and feeling disentangled and set right? As G. K. Chesterton said of the ‘enlightened’ French Revolution: ‘They did not find their pity where they found their pagan liberty and law, but in the very churches they denounced and desecrated.’
No—the proverbial bath water did not follow baby Jesus out the window: Where there was no God left to judge Man, judgment nonetheless remained. Man took up the exalted seat without missing a step and judged and condemned himself in a vacuum; and, as with the lightning speed of the Jacobins’ guillotine, one can never be righteous enough where the children of fish rivet shiny epaulets to car bumpers. One marvels at their moral confidence!”
Enoch gazed over the mesa, pleased by his many clever turns of phrase, and drew in the parched, nutrient-poor soil into his barrel chest like an impatience (but resigned) hourglass. “From where does this judgment against God arises?” he wondered aloud. “This insistence that God has fallen short by His Own Measure, so must be eliminated?
The very idea of judging implies an orientation, and even an orientation that transcends the foibles and follies of personality. The pagan gods were rich in the personal vices of avarice and envy, so they were abandoned by both reasonable men of Faith as well as faithful men of Reason.
Where the Devil meddles in the lives of men, and his supernatural influence shakes the curtain folds, bystanders are left trembling to picture what horror lurks beneath them. Yet for all the Devil’s futz, one is compelled to see his power as merely borrowed.
Indeed, there can be no concept of a bad without a good, whereas the reverse is not true. One can easily imagine a transcendent good without ever forming a notion of its opposite. Even were we to invert our values in spite, we still use the good to aim at the bad. The cynic, like the skeptic, is a moralist whose schemes for judging routinely leave out the very transcendentalism in which he engages.”
The quiet interlude was another reset after the lengthy lecture. Lucien fought his midday drowsiness and wished to prolong the discussion. “Wasn’t this once the shore of a prehistoric ocean,” he asked, “where all the muddy trouble began?”
The passenger sighed, but his attempt at sudden disinterest was short-lived. “Are you asking: At what turn in this road did Man leave gasping, floundering fish on a sandy beach to forge an upright path? A path that led him to ponder fish with legs, fashion them into metal ornaments, and bolt them to the trunks of automobiles with the conviction of uncritical zealots?”
A nod cleared the way to the podium.
The angel qualified his declaration. “Darwinism is a mechanism of reasonable deduction, yet how and why questions are of different orders. Why does Man exist? How answers, ‘Because he was once a fish.’ Why does a fish exist? How answers, ‘Because it was once a microorganism.’ How is always inserting itself into why questions as a stopgap.”
“Still, there has to be a how in getting from one species to another,” proposed Lucien.
Enoch replied, “The problem of co-extension pops up everywhere where biology presupposes a host of necessary conditions be fortuitously in place so to converge with similar fortune: Life must have its origin in genetic code, but which came first? The molecular structures of DNA, where instructions are stored for making proteins, or the cell wall requiring protein in which DNA labor? One presupposes the other, and a good many lipids and enzymes besides.”
“DNA may not be the starting place for life,” inserted the devil’s advocate. “RNA chains emerged naturally from early volcano glasses, and required, so the science goes, only the inclusion of few key ingredients. This fortuitous convergence would have occurred at the first available opportunity.”
“Let use accept that intelligent life, somewhere out there, timed its arrival within its star’s main sequence, and also all the other fine-tuned parameters conducive to its formation. Fermi’s Paradox states that, even if intelligent life in the universe is rare, near infinite opportunity for it to arise is not. Even if only an infinitesimally small number of microbial creatures are able to crack this ceiling, there would still be thousands of civilizations vastly older and more advanced than our own. Non-exclusivity does not demand the same outcome for every possibility. There would still be countless civilizations out there in midcourse of fatal outcomes—and a fifteen billion year old universe favors every outcome, even civilizations where the inhabitants colonize entire galaxies. We see nothing like this. Is this ‘great filter’ the emergence of eukaryotic life? Did we win not one but multiple lotteries in getting past this hurdle?
Because C and D flow agreeably out of B, B must flow agreeably out of A. But what is there—to again visit our concept—to account for the agreeableness of A? Do we search planetary bombardment for this agreeableness? Or supernovas? If cosmic inflation prevented our Universe from devouring itself, did it begin here?
Much is made of Chaos Theory, and how complex patterns self generate entropically. Order arise naturally from doubling simple inputs, and repeating these chaotic processes until something substantial emerges. No designer is required. No intention directs these elaborate patterns.
Because pretty patterns of the order of a Mandelbrot set inspire us; and because these patterns can be seen throughout the realms of microorganisms and distant galaxies, we come to believe that beauty must always override destruction given enough time. Out of a murky self-assembling latticework, computer hardware and its operating system, like a hand finding its pre-made glove, emerge simultaneously before separating themselves to cooperate.
And yet—lattices may be dead ends precisely because of their tendency to form patterns. The intricacies of snowflake patterns do not make ice age glaciers procreative. Most chains of volcanic glass may be better suited to be stain glass windows than prebiotic chemistry.
Moreover, native positions are postulated for folding proteins to get around randomness, as randomness produces more potential folding combinations for proteins than there are astronomical objects in the known universe. It is ‘reasonable’ to suppose these cheats since we need to wind up with one folding protein that produces life.
A scientist may insist on reasonableness, and repeat this assertion at reasonable intervals in a scientific paper. But rationalism and empiricism are not the same thing. An idea is not demonstrated experimentally by its reasonableness. Special pleading is evidence of nothing.”
Lucien surmised, “Then God loads the dice?”
Enoch returned to his larger point. “Imagine you awake in a room with no memory of a before. There is a door (too small for you to pass), and seawater beyond it. You could not have entered this way, so you imagine a pivotal watery ancestor confronting the conundrum of the doorknob, turning it, and entering into a place where it did not meet with a completely inhospitable environment. Presumably this chimera was closer to a lunged fish than to a gilled man, and with a passable ability to breathe air and crawl on land. Yet we arrive at this apocryphal event quite mysteriously, where something of significance transpired in the intermission between acts of a play, and behind disrupted curtains. Suddenly an actor appears on stage sporting a moustache who did not have a moustache in the scene before. The eager narrator does not dwell on the aberration, and tells us, with a dismissive wave of his hand, ‘You must imagine a great deal of time has lapsed, and that many failed mutations preceded this moment.’
Mutated genes, of no intrinsic value, were exploited, along with circumstances of no apparent inevitability—and both complemented one another with something approaching genius. However, every failure must be a dead end where a biological process has no willful intelligence to learn from experience. An advantageous marriage of talents must have, to some necessary degree, developed in watery darkness on the other side of a door that could not be known as a door, and before any talent had a reason to exist or be paired with another. Blind biology can no more form foreknowledge or intent for what awaits it in passing through a door than a fly can presume benefit from flying into the blades of a blowing fan.”
The listener imposed. “Epigenetics has supplied a partial answer to this dilemma, although the prospect of genetic blueprints willing themselves does not bolsters Darwin’s central precept of random adaptation. This new business smacks of intelligence—or, at least, it has the appearance of intelligence. However, the evolutionist would dismiss your single door analogy as faulty, as there may be natural mechanisms that intervene, of which we cannot yet envision.”
The angel needled the point. “Whether there is one door or a thousand, or whether stopgaps (or native positions) emerged advantageously to optimize the foot traffic, there are many more bottlenecks and razor-thin escapes than there are spacious shopping malls with multiple fire exits in early Earth.
If Evolution is driven by necessity and circumstance, and ‘selects for’ or ‘co-opts’ features for which it cannot envision an end use, is it not extraordinary that Natural Selection should abandon the logic of its theorists by not jettisoning what is not immediately essential to it? A useless feature, or one of little or diminishing use, is held onto like a piece of flotsam: like a sorority pin in the keepsake box. One day, inexplicably, this pin becomes a pick to unlock a door. How settles for luck in allowing for it, but why requires Fate. Evolution can explain how a fin is like a leg more readily than why one or the other should appear on cue.
The world does not come down to one or two impossible events, but incalculable chains of them—all with the right timing, opportunity, and characteristics: Rocks thrown in mud puddles occasionally align to form cornerstones, and on days when the weather is agreeable to build shelters, and on days where shelters are sought. It is the house that Jack built, only beginning with accident and ending with purpose. The impossible odds in these half-measures are formidable, especially as the operation requires the luck of a limber drunk falling backwards through doors. Here the players reliably win over the house, even though the math, on paper, always favors the house. Luck is too anemic to explain it.”
Lucien ruminated on it. “Dinosaurs ruled the Earth for millions of years and were destroyed by an asteroid striking the Yucatan Peninsula. Had that asteroid struck a minute before, or later, it would have landed in either the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean. The dinosaurs, though reduced in number, may have survived, never to relinquish their dominance over the Earth, never to allow apes to inherit it.”
“Fate?” sounded Enoch.
Lucien passed the electric car with the fish emblem and spotted the teenage girl riding in the passenger seat. “Fate,” he repeated.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.