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featured essay: june 2002 TEACHING KIDS TO YAWN AT COUNTERFEIT WONDER by Dale McGowan We don't experience wonder, you know, we secular types. Ask a Christian in case you thought we did. Our lives are coldly mathematical, devoid of wonder, sterile, lifeless, yada yada. Wonder requires religious faith. Funny, though, how often I've experienced something that seemed peculiarly similar to the dictionary definition of wonder. I wonder what it could have been? Whatever it was, I'm assured, it couldn't have been actual wonder. Real wonder is derived only from contemplation of God and a knowledge that he created all that is. He is, after all, wonderful...no, REALLY wonderful, really especially great and powerful, super special and eternal and large and clean and... Oh, I'm sorry, was I boring you? Me too. And therein lies my point. I have always found the platitudinous wonder of the Bible flat, hollow, close to meaningless. It has never moved me even as metaphor, rendered pale by its vague and colorless hyperbole. Now try these on for size: -If you condense the history of the universe to a single year, humans would appear on December 31st at 10:30 pm. -Look at the ring on your finger. As the core collapses in a dying star, the inrushing gravitational wave slams into the outrushing sound wave from the collapse. In that moment only, as a star dies, gold is formed. -We are starstuff that knows it exists. -All life on Earth is directly related by descent. You are a cousin not just of apes, but of the sequoia and the amoeba, of mosses and butterflies and blue whales. Now THAT'S wonder. I was first introduced to jaw-dropping, mind-buzzing wonder by Carl Sagan. Author of the Cosmic Calendar concept above, Sagan was a master of making conceivable the otherwise inconceivable realities of the universe, usually by brilliant analogy, taking me step by step into a true appreciation of honest-to-goodness wonder. Merely knowing that the universe is really really really really big is one thing. But that only rated a two on the wow-meter for me as a child, as it did for my son, as it will for my daughters. A few more specifics, though, can snap it into focus, and up the meter goes. Knowing that a car goes about 60 mph gave me an appreciation of how incredibly fast light travels --- 186,000 miles per SECOND --- which turned me to imagining myself riding a beam of light to the moon in two seconds or to the sun in eight minutes. Then I was wrapping my mind around a light-YEAR, the incredible distance light travels in 31,536,000 of those seconds. One light year = nearly six trillion miles. I'd take my bearings, remembering that six trillion is six million millions. Then on to the realization that the very nearest star to our sun is 4.3 of those light years away. Then to the fact that there are 200 billion such stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone --- and that there are roughly as many galaxies in the universe as there are stars in OUR galaxy, arrayed through 13 billion of those light years in every direction, a universe made of a curved fabric woven of space and time in which hydrogen, given the proper conditions, eventually evolves into Yo Yo Ma. And we, remember --- we the inhabitants of the third planet from an average star in one of those 200 billion galaxies --- we are the Main Attraction, the central concern of the Creator of it all. Many Christians will smile that Smile, you know the one, and say "Yes, that's just how wonderful it all is! All this vast universe is there only for us to gaze at and wonder about." But anyone whose grey matter was engaged for the whole process above will still be blank-eyed and buzzing at the contemplation of all we have learned about ourselves and our context in the past 150 years. (If not, read Voltaire's short story "Micromegas" to drive the final nail into the coffin of the age-old contention that our centrality is anything but the naturally infantile perspective of a prescientific culture.) Christian wonder --- the wonder we're supposedly missing out on by being rationalists --- is counterfeit wonder, and not an especially imaginative counterfeit at that. As each complex and awe-inspiring explanation of reality takes the place of "God did it," the flush of real awe quickly overwhelms the memory of whatever it was we considered so wondrous in Christian mythology. There is no surer way to strip religion of its ability to entice our children into fantasy than to show them the way, step by step, into the far more intoxicating wonders of the real world. And the key to those wonders is precisely the skill that is so often miscast as the death of wonder: skepticism. Nothing will wrinkle the noses of the faithful faster than a skeptical attitude --- "why do you have to be so negative, why do you have to tear down everything?" --- yet there is nothing as essential to experiencing true wonder in its greatest depth. It is the filter that screens out the fool's gold, leaving nothing behind but precious nuggets of the real thing. Tell me something amazing and I'll doubt it until it's proven, why? Because fantasies, while charming, are a dime a dozen. I can tell you my dreams of purple unicorns all day, spinning wilder and wilder variations for your amusement. You'll enjoy it, but you won't believe --- until I show you one, take you for a ride on its back, prove it's more than just a product of my imagination. Your skepticism up to that point will have served you well; it fended off counterfeit wonder so you could feel the depth of the real thing. I doubt and doubt and doubt not to "tear down everything" but to pull cheap facades away to see and delight in those things that are legitimately wonderful. How do I recognize them? Easily. They're the ones left standing after the hail of critical thinking has flattened everything else. Magnificent, those standing stones. We are often accused, mindlessly, of having "faith" in scientific ideas such as evolution and therefore practicing a sort of religion. The less you know, the more reasonable that assertion is. Evolution by natural selection was positively barraged with skepticism throughout the end of the 19th century and well into the 20th. Darwin and Huxley spent the remainder of their lives answering doubts about the theory with airtight proofs and countless examples of any claimed lacuna. And, when the dust cleared, the theory remained, intact, beautiful in its inevitability, awe-inspiring not because it drew no fire but because it drew the fire and survived spectacularly. That is what is known as the truth, or our best approximation of that elusive concept. It is so precious to get a glimpse of real knowledge, so breathtaking, that no lesser standard than trial by skepticism will do. It leaves behind only those things wonderful enough to make us weep at the pure beauty of their reality and at the equally awesome idea that we could find our way to them at all. A theologian friend of mine once suggested to me that the metaphors of religion are beautiful "responses to mystery." If, each time a mystery is dispelled by real understanding, the metaphor stepped aside, ceding the ground of wonder to its successor, I'd have no problem with such metaphors. The problem of course --- as illustrated by the creation/evolution "controversy" --- is that people fall so deeply in love with their metaphors that they are unable and unwilling to let go when the time comes and mystery is replaced with knowledge. And it is this, more than anything, that represents a challenge for parents wishing to raise independent thinkers: the magnetic power of the lovely metaphor, standing in the doorway, impeding progress toward real answers. The most compelling cases for preferring reality to metaphor are the most practical. All the prayer and animal sacrifice and chanting in the world couldn't cure polio; the Salk vaccine did. And how did we find it? Through rigorous, skeptical, critical thinking and testing and doubting of every proposed solution to the problem of polio until only one solution was left standing. Let others find uncritical acceptance of pretty notions a wondrous thing. I'm more awestruck by the idea of not having polio because someone cared enough to find more wonder in testable reality than in wishful fantasy. It's easy to get a child addicted to real wonders if you start early enough. Simply point them out --- they are all around us --- and include a few references to what was once thought to be true. Take thunder. Explain that lightning removes the air from a long column, sky to ground. For just a second that space is empty. The crack of thunder is the sound of trillions of air molecules smashing into each other as they fill that emptiness. Forgive me if I find that completely wonder-full. Then explain that people once thought is was a sound made by an angry god in the sky, and enjoy your child's face as she registers how much less interesting that counterfeit is. Repeat steps one and two ad infinitum until college. |
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