Column by George Sibley
Geology – December 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Gunnison’s greatest blessing might be Hartman Rocks. This wonderful in-our-face uprearing of bare brown rock visible from most places in town is only five minutes away by car, or twenty or thirty by bike unless the wind is blowing, which it usually is. And once there, you are in a random wealth of semi-secret places where you can depend on being pretty much alone for the hour or three it takes to defragment the mind around whatever.
The Rocks is a good setting for thinking about this resurgent debate about The Creation of Everything. It is a good place for thinking about order. Because that is really what the whole debate is about, isn’t it? Order, for which the human mind longs, lusts.
It’s hard to discern any real order in the Rocks. A lot of scrabbly little trees and sagebrush and grasses breaking an apparently meager sustenance out of the rearing great rocks, and all of it sitting on the edge of a vast roll of monotonous brown to the south and–the other direction, Gunnison. The town is very orderly–everything built on a foursquare grid, and all the buildings on that grid (with a few exceptions) built foursquare. It looks extremely orderly, but the general state of things in my mind, even in the secured order of those buildings, is such that I feel at home in the Rocks in ways I never manage in town.
The great debate about creation and order seems to come down to whether we are a product of some already complete and purposefully designed order, or whether we are actual protagonists in an ongoing process of working toward order under impossible conditions–the impossible conditions being the way the environments in which order attempts to emerge are constantly changing.
The Biblical view is tempting–to believe that some force or entity is in charge and we are either just carrying out or resisting its revealed will. This would of course be more difficult if there were any consistency or coherence to the Biblical account of God’s revealed will. But the fact that it is such an elaborated mishmash of conflicting commands, visions and examples makes it possible, as we’ve always said, for the devil to quote Scripture to his own purposes. The devil, or the saintly Pat Robertson calling for the assassination of Venezuela’s president–which is not the least bit inconsistent with the Biblical sense of order. “Thou shalt not kill” almost certainly refers only to thine own brethren, The (Chosen) People, but the merciless smiting of thine enemies, no quarter given, is vigorously encouraged throughout most of the Good Book. Although if you don’t like violence, you can also find chapter and verse for turning your other cheek to your enemy’s blows. A complicated kind of order,
AT THE OTHER extreme is Darwin’s random nature, a place where everything just sort of happens. Cosmic rays zap through the universe, occasionally frying some minuscule part of a cell, which causes genetic changes in some individual plant or animal that might or might not help the plant or animal in its efforts to procreate itself. Meaningless changes get passed along through generations until, one day a millennium or five hence, the environment of the plant or animal changes significantly–meteorites, volcanoes, idiots punching buttons, major warming or cooling–and suddenly the plant or animal might survive just because those random cosmic interventions work out better under the new circumstances.
Our scientists vouch for this evolutionist thesis with a vigor that is, itself, almost Biblical; that vigor, and its reliance on “nine doctors out of ten” arguments, combined with the way science is taught in most schools–as though some empirical Moses had carved its discovered laws on stone–all go together to make the cajoling and threatening similar in structure if not content for both sides of the “creation or evolution” debate.
But evolution resonates with me, for reasons I suspect are more genetic than cultural or rational. Despite being brought up in a moderately Christian home in a somewhat vigorously Christian town, creationism just didn’t take with me. It is easy for me to believe in evolution, and impossible for me to believe in a clockwork creation where everything that happens–good luck to hurricanes–is the Great Scorekeeper’s pay or punishment for something we’ve done.
Viewed charitably, “intelligent design” tries to be a bridge between those two extremes, but to the extent that design implies a designer, it fails for me. There are just too many moving parts, with too many of them moving against each other, for it all to be considered an intelligent design. Maybe a committee at work, a committee of egomaniacs maybe, maybe all of them working in different rooms because they’ve become terminally mad at each other, or maybe a truly mad inventor, a total schizoid madly at work inventing today something to undo what was done yesterday, and tomorrow who knows. Madness usually has an intelligence of its own, and that’s the only kind of intelligence I can discern in the mad rush and flush of life on earth.
Is there another possibility? Is it possible that “design” is emerging through the evolution of everything? I remember reading something by one of the Huxleys–Aldous, I think–in which he notes a kind of speeding up in the universe’s evolution: geological evolution in which it takes billions of years for the universe to sort itself out into semi-stable galaxies of borning and dying stars and their orbital junk; then biological evolution as life emerges on this particular planet on a scale of hundreds of millions of years; then human evolution occurring over mere millions of years–and now cultural evolution evolving complex civilizations in just thousands of years.
But more important, Huxley thought, through humans and their cultures, the universe is “becoming aware of itself.” I cannot remember the book, even the author for sure, but that clause burned itself into my mind: with us, the universe is becoming aware of itself.
It might be a little presumptuous, actually. All I think we can say for sure is that life on earth is becoming aware of itself. We are capable of analyzing and evaluating the impacts of our acts and changing how we act as a result; occasionally we have even started to do that. We do Environmental Impact Statements about things we used to just blithely do. Is this the beginning of “intelligent design” on earth? Or just intelligence? (Is “intelligent design” a redundancy?)
MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE ROCKS (if only in the mind’s eye), I think of a tree. All life growing out at the Rocks looks like it is enjoying a hard life, reaching roots into cracks, spreading out over loose azonal soil, with a lot of the color in the place being the oranges and greens of lichens which are barely life at all.
But there is one tree–a warpedy ponderosa–which tried to grow in a shallow pan of soil on a base of solid rock, with a big rock rearing behind it. The tree outgrew the ability of the shallow pan of loose soil to support it, and the wind tried to blow it over. But the big rock behind it stopped its fall before all of its roots broke out of the sandy soil. And that’s the way they stand today: the big rock supporting a still-green tree, half of whose roots are hanging in the air while the other half still sort through the dirt picking up what the tree needs. A kind of natural Pieta.
And in that tree, those rocks, the blank sky above and the prowl of breeze that always seems to wander the rocks–I imagine an emergent, potential order that calms me. And what shall I do with it, besides admire and love it?
George Sibley writes, teaches, and ponders in and near Gunnison.
