This summer I battled the elements to finish the exterior of my “doomstead”, an underground house that Crystal and I are building. We needed to wrap the thing in several layers of plastic and Styrofoam. Unfortunately, both of those can blow away in the wind rather easily, and you can’t tape them together when they are wet.
After a month of constant setbacks, storms and destruction, on the very last day my sister and brother-in-law came (yet again) to help us. The plan was to bury the “roof” under dirt the next morning. We worked 10 hours straight, and got it mostly done. Then the rain came.
My sister said, “God, please don’t let wind blow away all our work.” The very instant she finished her prayer, the wind started blowing.
I turned to her and said, “Looks like He didn’t listen to you.”
“It’s still working its way down through the bureaucracy.”
They drove away. Then a big storm came up, the kind that can spawn toradoes. The loose ends of our work started peeling off the roof. Crystal screamed “No!!” and threw herself onto the plastic to hold it down. Justin and I did the same. Whenever there was a break in the wind, I ran and got heavy things to put on the roof. For almost an hour we battled to save the work.
Later that evening, after things were somewhat secure, we went to my parents’ house. My dad asked, “Why don’t you pray?”
There is an interesting thing about how the human mind works. We are built to predict the world immediately around us, and we are built to understand and interact with fellow humans. Our success as a species is due to both skills. The world is unfathomably complex, and we can only sense a tiny fraction of it at any time. It seems mysterious. We become tempted to fall back on our powerful social faculty to help interpret the world.
Is the Universe a person? Does it care about me? Does my attitude toward it make any difference in what it does?
I suspect most people of the “personal” persuasion would accept that at least some of the operation of Nature is purely mechanistic, that its dynamics can be described by highly simplified rules we call “natural laws”. This is due to the success of science and technology. On a very fine scale we apply natural laws to do amazing things, like make a tiny tablet that can communicate with someone on the other side of the planet.
The more we apply ourselves to understand the world in a mechanistic way, the more it yields. One example is weather prediction. When I was a child, they could barely predict today’s weather. Now we can predict almost a week out with fairly good accuracy. Why? Because we started using computers to simulate, in ever increasing detail, all those mechanistic processes. Along the way we refined our models, adding details as we discovered them.
God causes it to “rain on the just and unjust,” but the size of the levers God is willing to pull on our behalf are growing either very tiny or very large. Either God adjusts things at the quantum level, or the answers to our prayers were baked into the Universe at the dawn of time.
The further God is from the details of our daily life, the more impersonal the Universe seems. At some point the distinction no longer matters. Trying to interpret the Universe as a personal being leads to some rather absurd conclusions. Why do bad things happen to good people or vice versa (the “problem of evil”)? Why doesn’t God answer prayers? Why don’t miracles happen? Maybe all those heart-wrenching issues arise from thinking about the world the wrong way.
My dad’s question made me angry. He was hoping that in a moment of emotional weakness I would cave back in to superstition. Then hopefully the complex of ideas he gave me as a child would retake my mind.
My parents have dedicated their whole lives to convincing others to change their religion. As an impressionable child, I learned from them that the highest goal was to find truth, to understand the world correctly. For of course that is the reason why someone would change their religion. So I dedicated my life to finding the truth, based on reason and facts. It led me down a long painful road, in which I learned that the Universe is not personal. I do not want to travel that road again.