A Childish Wonder

Having watched four of my children encounter reality for the first time, I know that to the uninitiated, existence is a strange and magical thing. Even in the operations of one’s own body, there is mystery, for it is not clear at first how consciousness and one’s appendages are meant to cooperate. At some point in the first few months, the wonder of human personality grows to momentous import and the child is awestruck at the hilarious and unpredictable antics of faces, which, through an inscrutable and almost indescribable autocatalytic process, grow in animation in response to the child’s own degree of expression.

The world of nature, too, is full of wonders. Some things are fuzzy, some scratchy, and some smooth, hard and cold and the child spends hours feeling with her hand and mouth and ears and head. Some things fly around the room and some slink along the ground and there is at first no rule which says that the things which slink may not, in a metamorphosis, spring into the air and soar – they sometimes do . To a young child, the exquisite marvel of existence itself is perfect and unmitigated. The sharp edges of reality have not been rubbed smooth. Her sense of wonder is utter and complete and cannot be increased or enhanced. The dog which lies at her feet may sprout wings and fly or the faces smiling down at her may begin to glow and speak with the heavenly and musical language of the archangel and still the child will see these things as the seamless and unexceptional progression of an endlessly magical fabric.

Of course, we grow out of this wide-eyed and infantile wonderment. Over time, we begin to understand, through endless repetition, which types of phenomena are remarkable and which are ordinary. We cannot be surprised by everything forever. The first time we notice the sunrise, it may be unspeakable and mystical, but what of the thousandth?

And a good thing, too, else how would we know real wonders when we saw them? If we were still awestruck by our mother’s voice, we might not appreciate Pavarotti’s.

It is, furthermore, the rolling back of these mysteries which has been the hallmark of natural science. Just as an adult has come to understand which occurrences are commonplace and which extraordinary, the mature culture of the modern west has illuminated whole realms of previously mysterious events and cycles, showing them to operate predictably in compliance with fixed physical laws. We have made such progress in this domination of the extraordinary by the prosaic that it looks as though our last childish vestiges of credulity may soon be dismantled – replaced at last by a hard, mature, and sober realism which understands everything, and is, therefore, shocked by nothing.

Critically, this realistic perspective must do away with the idea of God entirely or at the very least relegate him to the amusing but subjective realm of unicorns, goblins, and heavenward-growing beanstalks. It is understandable that primitive peoples (our ancestors, amazonian tribesmen, and perhaps even children) might transpose the existence of God over matter as if to create a focal point for their wonder and ignorance, but beliefs that are harmless and amusing among children and natives threaten to inhibit a modern adult’s cognitive development.

A Mature Amazement

However, a reexamination of our basis for incredulity reveals that even the most solid of our knowledge about the predictability of the natural world is constructed not from a sterile empiricism, but through a childlike and fertile imagination working in concert with the cultural awareness and rational conventions of a given historical period.

As physicist, philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn points out in The Structure of Scientific Revolution:

Effective research scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks it has acquired firm answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions? At least in the mature sciences, answers (or full substitutes for answers) to questions like these are firmly embedded in the educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice.

Put another way, the elemental mysteries of existence must be accounted for one way or another before the process of scientific inquiry even begins. Usually, these mysteries are accounted for through culturally-embedded assumptions (however valid or invalid) these assumptions thereby limiting the scientist’s evaluation to a mere modicum of available data and limiting his conclusions within a culturally-acceptable range.

And this is merely how inquiry begins. Once it is well underway, the process is even less inerrant and inexorable. Former Harvard professor of geology, biology, and history of science Stephen Jay Gould explains:

Science, since people must do it, is a socially embedded activity. It progresses by hunch, vision, and intuition. Much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alteration of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly. Facts are not pure and unsullied bits of information; culture also influences what we see and how we see it. Theories, moreover, are not inexorable inductions from facts. The most creative theories are often imaginative visions imposed upon facts; the source of imagination is also strongly cultural.

It is in this way, Gould explains later, that rational and objective scientists were incapable of “discovering” that africans were the equals of europeans in intellect until it was culturally permissible to do so.

If, as Gould and Kuhn suggest, the projection of culture on the outcome of scientific inquiry is equally as strong as the projection of scientific findings on culture (if the two are interlaced and often indistinguishable) then science, far from offering a final elucidation of the mystery of humankind’s existence, only adds to the mystery.

Why, one might ask, are we the only creature in the entire known universe who seeks to know the universe or even has a conception of the universe as a universe? The universe is not an empirical fact; your dog cannot smell the universe and you cannot see it. To get to the conception of a universe, one must follow an almost tortuous path of discursive reasoning, and then what has one really gained? Out of thirteen billion light years of space, one would assume that only a microscopic sliver would or even could be interesting to a terrestrial mammal. And yet we find the whole thing fascinating – from edge to theoretical edge and from star to cell to quark – and many of us spend our whole lives dedicated to finding one more method of displaying the shape of the universe through our instruments.

Wonderful indeed.