The Profound Mystery of a Godless Natural Order
Why there are no viable scientific or religious answers
Probably the most profound mystery is why there’s any such thing as a godless order.
The reason the natural order is so mysterious after God’s death in the Nietzschean sense is that our most intuitive form of reasoning personifies and socializes with our subject matter.
We prefer to think in the terms that come most naturally to us when we’re dealing with fellow minds. Likewise, we think intuitively when, if we’re not sure that what’s in front of us is alive, mindful, and able to interact with us socially, we nevertheless take the imaginative leap and posit a “spirit,” “intelligent designer,” “divine power,” or “absolute ground of being” behind the unknown thing to reassure our egoism.
Whether we’re thinking naively and literally about gods, angels, demons, miracles, or scriptures, or we’re retreating to more intellectually respectable abstractions that act as halfway houses between atheism and exoteric theology, we overextend our evolved intuitions and cognitive limits. Those natural ways of thinking that favour theistic religion evolved to enable us to live with fellow minds in nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes in prehistoric Africa, not to contemplate the universe.
Science’s calamitous undermining of our cultures’ parochial mitigations of nature’s inhuman wildness was offset by the early modern scientific obfuscations that conflated the natural and social orders.
René Descartes, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, for instance, all thought of the so-called “laws of nature” as divine commandments. In other words, they extended the social concept of law that applies to living, willful agents who can potentially misbehave, to lifeless, mindless, physical things like atoms, stars, and planets.
