I enjoyed this article, from the Seattle PI, in July 1940, on some “unusual” behavior on the just-completed Tacoma Narrows bridge — the same bridge which collapsed spectacularly 4 months later. I especially appreciate this part:

Although the bridge is said to be utterly safe from an engineering standpoint, vertical movements along the center suspension span are proving “psychologically disturbing” to some users, the engineers admitted.

Of course the engineers and scientists were wrong — catastrophically wrong — and assurances based on the absolute certainty of their science and dismissal of terrified drivers as “psychologically disturbed” proved wildly and humorously foolish in retrospect. You’d have to be crazy to think this bridge might be unsafe …

Some things, it seems, never change: scientists never have doubts — and any who question their inerrant wisdom must be “psychologically disturbed.”

In a previous essay on the origin of the universe, I took to task an astronomer who, while presenting a most interesting but rather far-fetched (to my mind) explanation of the origin of the universe, took the opportunity to ridicule as foolish and ignorant anyone who rather postulates a divine Creator. He then lectured me for relying on “religious stories” to make myself feel better:

(Quoting me) “I have instead been transformed by a personal encounter and relationship with a Being far vaster than our paltry imagination and feeble intellects can begin to grasp.”

Skeptic: There’s no evidence for this encounter at all. And to consider the imagination ‘paltry’ is to have little understanding of how your imagined ‘relationship’ … is different from reality. This difference may well be so imperceptible to the believer that a psychologist might consider this to be a form of psychosis. Your understanding of the transcendent is also an uneducated one … I think you need to spend time with real scientists who gaze at wondrous things every day.

Aahh, the humility of our scientist-priests …

As is my wont, I was led to contest his modest assertions. To wit: regarding my personal transformative experience and personal encounter with God, my agnostic antagonist sought to educate me as follows:

There’s no evidence for this encounter at all.

This is a rather remarkable — yet not surprising — statement. Our scholarly skeptic knows nothing of my genetics; nothing of the blessings and banes of my family of origin; nothing of my life experiences in childhood or adulthood. He knows not my thoughts, my experiences, my successes and failures, nor the irrefutable, transformative effect of the power of the divine relationship in my life. Yet he, presumably a secular scientist steeped in evidence-based knowledge, blithely dismisses all such experiences and evidence, and without even a hint of irony, assures me that there is “no evidence for this encounter at all.”

What is evident, however, is that evidence has nothing whatsoever to do with his assertion: it is, pure and simple, a declaration of his worldview, or, more accurately, his religion.

But a religion, you ask? How can secular materialism and atheism be a religion, since its proponents don’t believe in God?

When we think of religion, it is generally within the framework of the great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with their belief in one God, albeit with different dogmas. But other religions abound: polytheism, animism, nature worship, ancestor worship, and so on. They all have absolutes they embrace, i.e. dogmas, and a central source for these truths held without ambivalence and in the highest regard. So what is their deity, the god of of secular materialism?

Knowledge.

Or more specifically, Man and his knowledge. Or more accurately: their own knowledge, and that of their fellow brethren.

The secularist’s creed, if you will, his dogma, is this: there is no God, nor any possibility of God. He is the fiction fabricated by the ignorant, superstitious, and uneducated. Man and his knowledge is the pinnacle of all existence, unlimited, the answer to every question. This is their a priori position, and ideas to the contrary must simply be dismissed, ridiculed, or ignored, and considered heretical. The scientific method has nothing to do with this verdict; there is no postulate to test, no experiments to evaluate, no revision of theory based on empirical outcome, no possibility of an answer other than that already predetermined. This is not science — it is doctrine — and is religion at its very worst: blind faith manifested by absolute certainty, intolerance, condescension, judgemental, unshaken by any evidence but that of their their own convictions. The very thing religious believers stand accused of — addiction to absolutes — is in fact their own greatest blind spot: the materialist is absolutely certain there is no God, and all facts, experiences, or contrary evidence must be bent, folded, and mutilated into this materialistic worldview. As Chesterton once observed, “Only madmen and materialists have no doubts.”

…to consider the imagination ‘paltry’ is to have little understanding of how your imagined ‘relationship’ … is different from reality. … a psychologist might consider this to be a form of psychosis.

At last, the diagnosis I have long feared: psychosis — that’s the answer. I’m nuts! Well, I can assure you I am quite sane — even my psychiatrist friends agree. And as a physician, I know something of psychosis: its clinical manifestation and symptoms are well-understood, having seen many patients suffering with this mental health disorder. But for the secular materialist, such standards of diagnosis are moot; from the proclamations of their psychic soothsayers, psychology and psychiatry function as both savior and sword. When your secular scientific theories fail to explain human nature, or the problem of evil, or religious experience, it’s time to send in the clowns, wrapping your befuddlement and disdain in psychological terms like “psychosis.” That which scientists are unable to explain in human behavior, they delegate to the psychologists. But psychology and psychiatry have another significant utility for the atheist: a weapon to attack and neutralize those who reject their orthodoxy. It is no accident that psychiatry became a potent weapon in the hands of secular totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union. If you are not loyal and enthusiastic about the state and the party, you may well find yourself in a mental hospital, where you will be “treated” until you see the light. A similar fate awaits you for religious impulses as well. What you cannot explain, you must explain away; what you cannot explain away, you must persecute. Mental health services in the gulags were freely available, for all who disagreed.

I have great respect for mental health professionals. But they make far better physicians than metaphysicians. When they are ordained to postmodern priesthood, tasked with diagnosing and healing the soul and spirit of man while dismissing the reality and centrality of both, they begin looking quite as foolish as engineers dismissing bridge ripples.

Your understanding of the transcendent is an uneducated one … I think you need to spend time with real scientists who gaze at wondrous things every day.

Our modern Gnostics do love to “educate” us until we see things their way, don’t they? I must plead guilty to the charge of ignorance; there are vast swaths of knowledge which I do not possess, vast expanses of information and experience of which I know little. I have far more questions than answers about this life, its origins and its meaning. And I find myself entirely comfortable — excited even — in this very uncertainty.

But as far as “gazing at wondrous things,” well, let’s see: I have viewed images generated by flipping nuclear protons in high-power magnetic fields, revealing extraordinary detail of human anatomy and pathology. I have marveled at the complex interaction of pharmacological chemicals with cellular physiology, as medications interact with human illness to provide relief and cure. I have sat and listened to the agony of a wife whose husband has Alzheimer’s, who has shared her agony of losing her partner of 60 years, her exhaustion at his care, her frustration with his bizarre behavior, yet heard her irrational but inspirational love and devotion to the man whose life she has shared. I have restored a man’s lost fertility, whose youngest child died at 3 months of age from SIDS — one month after his vasectomy — operating on structures the size of the human hair, using sutures invisible to the eye.

I have sat in utter frustration, as every treatment and medication, the very best science has to offer, has failed to stem the progression of an aggressive bladder cancer, as I watch, helplessly, the agonizing hourglass of imminent cancer spread and ultimate death. I have marveled at the irreducible complexity of the human cell; at the infinite number of variables which influence medical treatment, response to surgery or therapy, and clinical outcomes; I have carefully dissected, removed, and cured an aggressive cancer of the prostate, while watching another whose treatment failed die slowly and painfully from the same disease. I have seen men die both with and without God — seen the peace and serenity in the eyes of one, despite almost unbearable agony, and the hopelessness and terror in the eyes of others with no such hope. I get to watch and participate daily in the complexity of life and death, health and disease, the richness of human experience, and the miracles of science applied to making lives better. I live daily with body, with soul, and with spirit — and engage each in its place. I happen to find all these things rather wondrous, humbling, and yes, transcendent — silly me.

But perhaps my esteemed secular scientist is right: maybe I should hang out with a “real scientists” who look through telescopes, and with their tunnel vision star-gaze their way to meaning and purpose in cosmic clouds and multiple universes, caressing their theoretical physics in orgasmic intellectual onanism. Perhaps then I will learn the real meaning of life, discovering thereby their secret to transcendence without God, with mysteries hidden deep within their superstrings or dark matter or tachyons. That such things are fascinating is doubtless true; that they may be true is doubtless fascinating; that they seek to explain why we love, or are sentient, or are evil — or to what purpose we exist in space and time — is both futile and fascinating.

Or perhaps instead I will remain at the vortex of a unified field of truth, with God both sovereign and merciful at its center, immense as the universe and intimate as the heart. For from where I stand, the universe, and my place in it, really does look quite wondrous, indeed.