Poem by Heschel

God Follows Me Everywhere


God follows me everywhere-
spins a net of glances around me
shines upon my sightless back like a sun.

God follows me like a forest everywhere.
My lip, always amazed, are truly numb, dumb,
like a child who blunders upon an ancient holy place.

God follows me like a shiver everyewhere.
My desire is for rest; the demand within me is: Rise up,
See how prophetic visions are scattered in the streets.
I go with my reveries as with a secret
in a long corridor thought the world-
and sometimes I glimpse high above me, the faceless face of God.

God follows me in tramways, in cafes.
Oh, it is only with the back of the pupils of one’s eyes that
one can see
how secrets ripen, how visions come to be.

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Dawkins vs. Gould

I just finished reading “Dawkins vs. Gould” by Kim Sterelny. I picked it up because it had been awhile since I read anything about evolutionary biology and I thought that this book, which outlines points of contention between Charles Dawkins and Stephen J. Gould, would be a good way to get up to date on the current understanding on how evolution functions.

The subject of the book is supposed to be about disagreements on the workings of natural selection, but there is a larger underlying agenda that reveals itself toward the end of the book. Sterelny has a point to make about science and in the last few chapters he finally gets around to it. Sterelny admits to believing as Dawkins does that “the natural sciences are our one great engine for producing objective knowledge” and that science is not just a light in the darkness it is “perhaps our only light.” Sterelny goes on to say that theisms of all types are just bad ideas about how the world works and that science can prove these ideas are bad. Finally, in a crescendo worthy of Bach, he states that “an evolutionary perspective on human life might even help us escape the poisoned chalice of religion.”

Sterelny thus proves two things. Self-righteousness is hardly the exclusive province of the religious. One does not need have a belief in God in order to be bloated with arrogance about how much he thinks he understands about the nature of reality. Second, even an atheist is provoked to poetry (“poisoned chalice” indeed) when speaking about religion.

Sterelny is allying himself with a modern belief that we can explain all aspects of the natural world including all of human experience through science. So I have a question in response.
It is currently believed that human ability to see in color evolved in a primate ancestor about 55 million years ago. This is based on studies of genetic materials from a variety of extinct and living species in our ancient lineage. (For an explanation on how this conclusion was reached see “Your Inner Fish” by Neil Shobin, a book that is far more interesting and useful than “Dawkins vs. Gould.”) Color sight, rare in the animal kingdom, is a parallel development to flowers, fruits, and vegetables that began to differentiate by color due to competition for pollination. As the flora around us evolved we evolved a new way to see the world.

So we know the ‘when’ and the ‘why’ of how our sight came into its current form. But does this bit of science explain what happens when our eyes see a work of art and we are overwhelmed by its beauty? Does a change in DNA explain why we feel a sense of wonder when we see the ocean for the first time? Knowing the genetics of eye construction and thinking we can understand human experience is like reading a menu and thinking we’ve eaten the meal.

Stephen J. Gould, the foil for Dawkins in this unfortunate book, believed that science is not complete. “The humanities, history, and religion” Gould contended, “offer insight into the realm of value, independent of any scientific discovery.” Dawkins and Gould were (Gould passed away in 2002) the leading scientists in the field of evolutionary biology and yet even with the “great engine for producing objective knowledge”, as Sterelny would have it, they could not agree on the boundaries of science and to what extent science can help us understand ourselves. That, in itself, should give us pause.