This is an odd little story about a sort of an epiphany I had over a year ago–“metaphysical experience” is probably a better phrase. I don’t know if it’s of interest to anyone, but it felt significant at the time, and has been reverberating around in my head ever since.
The setting for this story is when I went on a road trip to see the 2024 solar eclipse. I went to Terre Haute, Indiana, because my oldest daughter lives there and it was going to have a good view of the totality. I brought the family and got there a couple days in advance, just to hang out and spend time together. The story begins with the trip itself.
Silence
I was more silent and thoughtful on this trip even than is usual for me; I had recently had several serious conversations. Coincidentally, just before the trip I had spoken with two separate people who had decided to tell me about how and why they left the Catholic Faith. At the same time, there was someone I knew very well whom I was also worried about; he had stopped going to Communion recently, and because of some things he let slip in conversations with me, I was worried he was losing his faith.
When these things happen, I get very reflective, and so thoughts were running through my head the entire drive up. Every one of these people I just mentioned were extremely intelligent individuals; did they know something I didn’t? What were their reasons for leaving the Faith, and was I too self-blinded to give credit to those reasons? Did I really believe in God? The arguments against God’s existence that I have found most compelling were rattling around in my head for many long hours.
Of those arguments, the ones I typically find hardest to dismiss are about God’s silence. Why, if God were both All-Knowing and All-Powerful, does He not make his existence clearer to us? It’s not hard to imagine some things you could do if you were God, to simply make Your existence and Your will known. You could cause the stars to realign and spell out the Nicean Creed, for example. Why would you not do that? What’s the purpose of this skulking secrecy? Most easy reasons one could give–and many that have been given–for such silence, have always struck me as lame excuses, not convincing.
And so–silent in worried thought–I drove to Indiana. No easy answers were coming: God, if He exists, was silent in His turn.
Just a Place
The first place we went in Terre Haute was Fairbanks Park: an unimpressive little city park on the bank of the Wabash River, containing a small playground and a short walk along the river. We let the little kids play in the playground while we met and talked with my oldest daughter and her boyfriend. Aside from the happiness of seeing my daughter after several months apart, this was an absolutely mundane occasion–it was just some place. So it is odd that it would be the occasion for a metaphysical experience–but so it turned out to be.
Odder still, it began with the mulch. You can’t really tell from the Google Street View photo below, but the mulch they used for this playground was slightly unusual, and for some reason caught my eye. I noticed it wasn’t shredded; rather, it was chopped and the pieces were rather large, as pieces of mulch go. I don’t know exactly how they produce the mulch, but I imagine it might be a similar process to a diamond cut paper shredder, which produces rhombus shapes (more secure because harder to recombine) by combining strip cutting with a periodic diagonal slash.
Anyway, however the pieces of mulch were produced, the result was not a mess of wood shreds so much as a disorderly pile of almost Lego-like pieces of wood, each one being a similar rhomboid with corners that were rounded due to wear and tear. It was the shape of these things that next caught my mind. The shape reminded me of calculus.
A Small Thing, Understood
I love math; there’s almost always a small part of my brain thinking about something mathematical. So maybe it was something peculiar to me that made me think “Calculus!” when all I was looking at was just a piece of mulch? Maybe so. But I don’t think I’m entirely weird here; I think a lot of math enthusiasts could follow along with my thinking.
In most calculus textbooks, there’s a part where they start having you calculate volumes for odd shapes. A common approach for these problems is that you start looking at volumes as spaces that cut out by a moving two-dimensional shape. So, for example, a cylinder is just a circle that’s been moved in a straight line–but it can get a lot more complicated than that because the shape can be anything that you can make an equation for, and the shape can change across the path of travel, as long as you can come up with an equation for the changing area over that path. If you have those formulae, you can just integrate to come up with the volume. It’s a classic math problem, and the rounded-off rhomboid shape of the mulch was reminding me of the sorts of shapes they ask you about in those problems. You might approximate the blunt ends with the tip of a sphere on the left of the x-axis, then model the wedge-shaped body as a rhombus that grows in size from left to right.
In the playground, sitting on some play equipment, I thought: “I could estimate a volume for that piece of mulch, without too much difficulty.”
Small Things, Grapsed At
Then I looked at two pieces of mulch, one leaning on another. And this brought to mind the physics classes I took at about the same time as my calculus. In physics, they have you use similar integration techniques to figure out the center of mass of oddly shaped objects. Looking at the two pieces of mulch, I started reformulating the scene into a physics problem in my mind. Suppose you had the one piece suspended over the other and you dropped it on top of the other, could you predict where that piece would end up? Could I do that now, given my small residual knowledge of the relevant physics?
And I thought I probably remembered enough where I could just about figure it out, with difficulty. I’d need to calculate the center of mass of the top piece, so that when it impacted the bottom piece you could calculate a moment arm at the time of impact. Then depending on the angle of the two pieces at the point of impact, the piece would swivel in a predictable direction. The kinetic energy would be calculable (I think) given a known starting location, and then at the point of impact after swiveling, there would or would not be enough energy for the top piece to overcome static friction and start sliding, depending on the coefficient of friction of the wood.
It would not be an easy problem for me, and it would involve a lot of tedious working out, but there was nothing super complicated in the math or the physics–this is all essentially what physics simulators in game engines do all the time. I felt that, with effort and a little more information, I could explain the relative position of those two pieces of mulch. At least it was something that could be figured out.
Realizing this, I felt a connection to reality. And that connection felt both small and yet somehow, momentous. This feeling is hard to explain . . . but let me try, as follows:
Reality and Illusion
Later on, in that same trip, we went to see “Dune 2” in the theater. Good cinema can be awe-inspiring, and “Dune 2” was very good cinema. Breathtaking, gorgeous, amazing–the visual cinematic feast was all there and very enthralling, and well representative of art at its best. However, even with the very best art, you have to let yourself be enthralled by the illusion in order to appreciate it. The willing suspension of disbelief always has to be present, or nothing works. And this is different from reality, which is the thing that exists whether you want it to or not.
You can experience the gulf between art and reality yourself, if you are ever interrupted by an important reality mid-appreciation of a work of art. Imagine being right in the middle of a movie–and suddenly getting a text that says “There’s been a horrible accident. Come to the hospital NOW; your daughter is in critical condition.” It doesn’t matter how brilliant and captivating the movie was, right at that moment, it will lose any appeal: it fades away immediately into mere sounds and pictures on a stage. I’ve had that happen to me; I’ve had enough bad news in my life that I’ve been in that situation. And I can tell you that, right at such a moment, you can appreciate the vast difference between even good art and the real world.
My appreciation of those pieces of mulch was small, because it was, after all, just a couple of pieces of wood. And yet it was momentous because it was of the order of reality, rather than just a product of my imagination. It was real, and it was true. More than true: it was truth, a small piece of objective reality that existed and was true whether I wanted it to be or not. And I genuinely had a grasp on that real thing.
Scholastic philosophers have a word for this: intelligibility. This term refers to that aspect of reality that is capable of being understood, or (perhaps more accurately), reality itself as an object of the mind. I think that’s what I was appreciating, in that moment: I was (in a sense) feeling intelligibility.
Anyway, that’s the best explanation I can come up with for how it felt to me. What happened next was, still thinking about this, I leaned back and looked around, my eyes now taking in the whole of the playground scene.
That’s when my mind blew up.
A Whole World of Things
Two little pieces of wood together had turned into an abstract problem: something that I knew had an answer that I could get to if I wanted. But now? I saw hundreds of thousands pieces of mulch on the ground. And I imagined the scene when they were poured out on the ground, thousands at a time, all falling and jostling each other and eventually settling where the laws of physics (and the prudent application of rakes, one assumes) dictated.
And that would be just the same problem that I had been focusing on: the same, but multiplied a million times over as every little piece interacted with every other pieces, over and over until everything settled into a stable local potential energy level minima.
Seeing as I had just been thinking about how I could barely manage to fully grasp the case with two pieces of wood, the sudden apprehension of the larger picture was dizzying.
You may have felt the same sort of thing if you’ve ever had the experience of hiking on a mountain trail and suddenly coming to a section that runs along the top of a cliff. It’s not that you have changed elevation suddenly; it’s just that suddenly you are acutely aware of the height at which you have been walking the whole time. Likewise, it’s not necessarily the case that the cliff is particularly dramatic; the fact that you are right there at the brink of the drop suddenly makes you appreciate the height.
Likewise, I don’t think my “revelation” that the entirety of the mulch in the park was capable of understanding along the same lines of thought as I could use to understand a single piece was particularly shocking or revolutionary. It’s just that my mind, in that peculiar state of appreciating a connection with reality, instantly wanted to keep on interpolating. Because if it was possible to consider jumping from one piece of wood to a large collection, where did that line stop? What else could I also understand? At what point in such a train of thought does the world cease to be understandable?
And I think it is pretty clear, from just a logical perspective–and it certainly felt to me in that moment–that it doesn’t stop. Why should it? There’s no reason for it to. The whole world, and everything in it, can be grasped if you keep going in such a way. Not by me, of course! I could barely really appreciate the intelligibility of a pile of mulch. But in principle, this connection to reality I had through one piece of wood lead to truth as vast and as varied as the universe itself. And I felt that.
Reality Breaks Its Silence
I got up and took a walk on a footpath by the river, in a very strange state of mind. One of my daughters was with me, but I barely saw her. Everything I looked at, now, I saw with eyes looking for that intelligibility–and I saw it everywhere. Little bits of science that I had learned over the year were all peeking out from behind the physical objects in almost every direction I looked. I looked at the Wabash River and I realized I could identify areas of laminar flow versus turbulent flow by looking at the relative movement of the bits of debris floating on the surface. Then I saw birds gliding through the air and realized that I knew why atmosphere on any planet must by peppered through with turbulence and vortices (there’s a theorem in topology that shows this). I looked at the bark of a massive tree, and wondered at how different the DNA of the tree must be from that of the grass. I didn’t know, but I knew that other people did.
I looked at the grass, and realized for the first time that blades of grass are designed with a shape that moves in a gradient from negative Gaussian curvature to neutral curvature, with the effect that they have just the right amount of internal structure to grow vertically in dense fields, but then curve horizontally at the top to take in as much sunlight as possible. I had never heard that particular fact before; I just instantly had a flash of intuition combining various bits of math and biology I did know. I’ve since looked and other people have had that same realization, but I had not seen it myself until that point.
All along my brief walk, I saw my surroundings as with luminous eyes: everything was brighter, everything more real. It sounds extremely odd (I do realize that), but this brief walk along the Wabash River was one of the most vivid and powerful experiences of my life so far.
Here’s one way I know this: When I was gathering material for this story, I went on Google Maps in order to get a screenshot of a Google Street View picture of Fairbanks Park. I only had to go to a very high-up, bird’s eye view of the whole city when I was able to pinpoint exactly on the map where the park was, without even yet being able to read the name of the park on the map. This was because, even now, the exact visual appearance of that walking path in the park is seared into my memory. I remember the exact curve of the river, I remember exactly how the path winds along, approaching and then angling away from the river, I remember the exact angle and length of the overpass that is at the end of the walking path, where I turned back. It’s a year later, as I write this, but it still feels as if it happened yesterday.
I walked back to the playground and sat down next to my kids playing. I felt a certain amount of awe, but also a lot of vindication. Why vindication? Well . . . that feeling needs a bit more explanation, because it has to do with connections obvious to me at the time, but probably not obvious to everyone. For me, it had to do with the history of science.
I Reflect on Science Triumphant
The feeling of vindication was not for myself, but for humanity. What instantly came to me, with all of these flashes of intelligibility before my mind’s eye, was how much I owed to people who came before me for all of the bits of answers that I did know. Furthermore, as I appreciated that, I could see how much trust humanity has had–from many centuries ago–that these answers were present. The first example that came to my mind, at that moment, was Newton and his conservation laws.
A lot of people think of Newton as having discovered or invented his laws of conservation. This is not really true, and it isn’t even true that he proved that these laws held. He didn’t even do experiments in the modern form, but rather developed his ideas based on observations, thought experiments, and the ideas of previous thinkers.
Further, it wasn’t until well after Newton was dead that enough was understand about friction to really understand how energy and momentum is conserved even in a non-relativistic sense–and then, of course, relativity and the convertibility of mass and energy put another major dimension on conservation entirely. Our modern understanding of the mechanics of conservation is much more detailed and can account for pretty much all of the phenomena a normal person would experience in day-to-day life, as well as all sorts of exotic things normal people don’t experience at all. But that wasn’t the case in Newton’s own time; he didn’t really have the tools necessary to explain all normal physical experiences in terms of his own laws.
So his formulation of those laws was, to a substantial degree, an act of faith. He believed in the idea that nothing comes from nothing; everything has to have a cause. For Newton, there could be no such thing as magic, nothing could be truly inexplicable. And this is a principle far older than Newton. In Scholastic terms, the principle was stated as “nemo dat quod non habet” (“nothing can give what it does not have”), but they did not invent the principle either. It goes back at least as far as Aristotle.
I thought about that whole history sitting on a park bench, and marveled. How on earth had these people been so sure? In ancient times, so much of humanity was committed to weird, mythological explanations for the world–and who could blame them, based on how little they knew at the time? Yet even back then, there were people who knew that there was a rational explanation for everything–and they taught this as a principle of sure knowledge.
And they were right! Since then, we have, collectively, poured effort, time, and money into investigating every aspect of the world. It’s never wise to overestimate the extent of humanity’s knowledge . . . but at this stage of scientific knowledge, we can say that every time we have really, really tried, we have found reasons for everything that we see. Everywhere we’ve looked, we’ve found things that seemed inexplicable at first, but finally have yielded up explanations. Just then, by the riverside, I had had an overwhelming sense that everything that is, is intelligible. Now, thinking about the history of science, I felt that this intuition had been actually tested, again and again–and had always been found to be true.
A Conclusion
As I sat reflecting on the triumphant vindication of the scientific viewpoint, the next–almost immediate–thought that came to me was that question from my drive up: did I believe in God? And the instant answer back was: yes, I do believe in God. Or rather, no . . . that wasn’t quite the thought I actually had. More accurately, what I thought was: “I can’t not believe in God–not with this certainty about the rationality of everything.”
If you embark on a serious program of believing in atheism, once you think through what you believe about why the universe is the way that it is, and once you examine all of the consequences of various things you want to hold true, there always comes a moment when you must stop your attempt at explaining why things are the way they are with a negation: “no . . . there is no explanation for this.” The paths to this point differ, but in one way or another, a question will lead to an answer, which leads to further question–until finally there is a question that does not have an answer unless it is the answer to everything all at once. This is what we call in scholasticism, the “First Cause”.
And at some point, you have to decide whether you believe this is actually a thing or not.
And I realized that I could not believe in “no explanation”. How could all the rest of the universe–all over and in all cases and at all times–have reasons for why it was the way that it was, and yet everything together, at the deepest level, not have a reason? If you understand how one thing works, and you dig deeper into understanding how the parts of that thing work, and so on and so forth, and you finally come to the point where you say, “there is no reason why this thing works,” have you really understood anything at that point?
I’m OK with not knowing or understanding the root explanation, but I can’t accept a world in which it doesn’t exist. In such a world, everything turns back into the unscientific; everything reverts to the mythical. Why does the universe exist, and all the things inside work harmoniously together? Surprise! There is no reason: in the end–in the final analysis–it’s just arbitrary. In the end, there is nothing to understand.
And I just can’t believe in that; to me that is the equivalent of the annihilation of truth. I can’t deny my conviction that everything has a reason; I have to believe in the intelligible.
So there in the playground, I stood up–the whole experience lasted maybe ten minutes–knowing that I had reached a conclusion. I did believe in God; I am compelled to believe in a First Cause. And . . . I went on with the day. Nothing really had changed, though the whole world felt somehow new.
Afterwards
The rest of the trip happened. The eclipse itself was cool; the end of the totality (the “diamond ring”) was particularly spectacular–though for me, as an experience, it rather paled in comparison to the mulch.
I thought about the other challenges to my belief in God during the rest of that trip, and since then as well. I’d like to say I no longer found those difficult to explain–but that would not be true. For although my belief in God as the First Cause was strengthened on that day, it’s not a thing that immediately or obviously explains why God would act in a certain way. The silence of God in the world, when supposedly He wants a relationship with the people in it, is still as perplexing even if you should happen to feel certain that He is there.
It didn’t get better when, after the eclipse, I read various pious pieces by Christian authors talking about the eclipse as a sign of God’s love for mankind . . . making the poetic connection between the “diamond ring” portion of the eclipse and an engagement ring given to a young woman, for example. As I always have in the past, I found these sorts of poetic reinforcements of the belief in God very unsatisfying.
The whole “engagement ring” analogy in particular fell very flat for me.If I were a young woman, and a young man had been spending a lot of time with me recently while refusing to talk to me at all–and then one day suddenly produced what might or might not be an engagement ring without telling me plainly that he loved me and wanted to marry me . . . well, I would probably punch him in the face and move on to more reasonable young men. So I didn’t find any help in these sorts of things; I felt compelled to look for something better.
What I came up with is as follows, and is the most satisfying answer I have been able to give myself so far.
An Attempt to Interpret the Silence
Suppose God were to do what I suggested, and actually write into the stars that He exists and that He wants to be worshiped in a particular way. What would that actually prove?
Well, it would certainly prove the existence of the supernatural. And it would prove the existence of a particular, rational being of great power who wants to be worshiped by humanity: a god who has power over the stars of the sky–or at least the power of manipulating light at a planetary scale. This is not necessarily the same thing as proving the One God, though.
History is full of myths and religions populated by gods who have great power over the universe–many of which are said to be able to shape the constellations–and yet are not worth worshiping. They are venal, cruel, selfish. We forget, after centuries of Christianity, that many or even most religions worshiped their gods, not out of true love, but in order to placate their capriciousness. And, in fact, I’m pretty sure that if the stars did move to point to the Catholic Church as the One True Church, that there would be plenty of people claiming something like that about the power behind such a miraculous spectacle: that it was a devilish illusion meant to deceive the true believers. And there would be some rationality to that idea; a god of the stars might be nothing more than a bully, no matter what he might say to us, or want us to do for him.
But what about a god of the mulch? Or, more precisely, what about a god who is found to be at the root of the intelligibility of even mulch? I don’t think a God who is the First Cause, could also be evil. Because if He is the root explanation that explains everything . . . well, morality falls under the heading of “everything” also. If what you have certainty in is that the entire operation of the world, inasmuch as it is understandable, is explained by a supreme principle of intelligibility–then you have swept up the ideas of Good and Evil into your belief system as well. You may not understand right away how to move back up from the First Cause of all things to individual moral statements, but in principle, there has to be a connection.
I’ve always held to the certainty that right and wrong are real things, and that there must be rational, explainable truths behind our convictions that certain actions are morally correct and others are not. It’s harder to reason about these things than about the physical world, and I continue to be unsatisfied by my grasp on the exact “why” behind many things I hold to very firmly in ethics. But, much in the way I envision the physicists of old holding on to the belief that everything has an explanation, I also hold on to rationality of what we do know about morality, and hold on to the belief that there is a firm ground of truth somewhere down at the bottom of things, even for the hardest questions. And this puts me in the same place I went to when I started with the mulch: somewhere at the root, everything has an explanatary First Cause.
Proving God from a piece of mulch, then, proves much, much more about Him than what any miracle could prove. Whatever certainty you have that anything is truly good or right is transferable to such a God, as the source of the goodness of that thing.
And so this is the reason I am absolutely comfortable worshiping the First Cause. I do not see all of the connections emanating out from this First Cause clearly. Actually, I should be honest and say that I barely see any of the connections at all. But whatever it is that makes any understanding at all possible, be it of physical things or of moral actions: that is what I worship. And that cannot be a false or evil god, because it is at the very foundation of truth and goodness. Truth itself speaks truly, or there’s nothing true.
A Stopping Point
So is that a decent reason why God should remain (on the whole) silent? Well, I don’t know . . . but it’s enough for me, for now. One thing that appeals to me about this explanation is that, if it were true, then it would imply that God wants and expects humanity to be deep and careful thinkers in order to really appreciate His existence. (That or faith! I don’t mean to disparage faith.) The idea that God should leave a massive truth about Himself for us to puzzle out on our own through the hard work of intellectual diligence. . . I’m OK with that. The “hard work of intellectual diligence” is exactly what I personally find myself wanting from my fellow humans, frequently, so I can believe that it’s something God would want as well.
So this is where I stop this story. It’s not an end; just a point to halt. Inasmuch as I still constantly thirst for new knowledge, and inasmuch as I constantly want to learn more about what is true and what is good–to that extent, this story can’t end. I will continue to look to answer these hard questions for myself, hopefully to higher degrees and in better ways in the future.
And I will be content, for now, to let God speak to me in just a simple piece of wood.