When I was a kid, one of my favorite bedtime books was Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book," now known to most through the Disney cartoons. Just as Disney had distorted the spooky magic of Mary Poppins, so I think he had taken out the depth that was hidden in The Jungle Book, but that is not the point I wish to make here. Rather, the book my mother read from was an anthology, and in it was another set of short stories by Kipling called "Just So Stories." They were titled "How the Leopard Got Its Spots," and "How the Crocodile Got Its Smile" (I think), and so on - clever little myths about the nature of Indian wildlife, taken in whole or in part from Indian folklore, and similar to, but more fun than, Aesop's Fables. They are "just so" because the leopard does, indeed, have spots - and the blanks are filled in from there as to why, as happy as we please. It is a form of purely speculative reasoning - we take the facts and work back from them to find the cause. In this case, serious scientific considerations were not used. The stories are, for the most part, for children, and for fun.
Going not so far back in time, to the college years, I had a professor who would often call anthropological theories "just so" stories, because they did not have solid facts behind them. For instance, it was theorized that Jewish circumcision was really done not as a mark of Jehovah on his chosen people, as the people themselves state, but for health reasons. Looked into, one can see that the author just assumed that such customs must have a practical reason, and health is what he chose to focus on. Looked at more closely, however, the idea loses it clout; the health advantages as we know today are minimal at best, and would have been too small to have been noticed. In fact, given the lack of antibiotics in those days, the health risk may have been fairly large. But it fit into the author's mind set - it must be! But really, it was just-so, no more real than a leopard getting its spots from - mud? A bird's feet? I forget now, but something silly and fun.
So it occurred to me this morning while thinking of Hans Kuhn's paradigm shifts in science at the sound of a woodpecker going away at our roof fascia. I chased him away, but then recalled the article I had read about how woodpeckers can survive the impact of their pecking. They have a liquid cushion in the brain. And that led to the marvel of the near-perfection of species in their environment, and this led to thoughts of evolution. How could it be that such interlocking perfection could have happened by blind chance? Could evolution, then, merely be another scientific paradigm? As Kuhn said, science doesn't "progress" as we think it does, but only changes paradigms. These paradigms remake the world for us conceptually, and actually seem to make the world more intelligible - but they don't. They are only more "just so" stories that form and are formed by the social gestalt that SEEM to make more sense, but ultimately do not.
I have taught anthropology and have happily taught evolution. To me, it seems like the perfect mechanism for God to shape the world, even if the scientists can't find an intelligently guided direction in it. In other words, I have no purist cause against it. But also none for it. Considered again, it seems to me that Darwinian evolutionary theory forms the perfect bridge between religion and science of the 19th century, where one was built on the other, even as it refuted it. Before the age of science, there was humanly- understandable order to the cosmos but it had come from the mind of God. Reason, it was seen, was God's reason in us, and by following it through, we could come close to grasping the mind of God. In evolution, however, there was humanly understandable order to the universe, but it was Not made by a god. So it was that, just as humans of the time in Europe were beginning to think of the world in terms of blind cause and effect, the billiard ball model, so, too, it was found that the universe was run by this same logic.
Just- so convenience or coincidence? From Kuhn, we are forced to consider the former - that the universe does not act as we think, but that we only think it does; until, that is, we change the way we think for another that is BETTER. But it may not be better. If history has any basis to it, the new theory may not be better, but rather just another story that we choose, for some reason or reasons, to believe.
In the literature of mystics, the mind of God - and the definition here is necessarily lose - is not knowable in a human sense. Given the great unanswerables in our own modern thought - where does it all come from and what does it all mean? (all thought systems have their unanswerables), this would seem to make the most sense, even in a world beyond our senses. In this case, humility and openness to wonder make the most sense. We are not the end all - not ourselves, and not our civilization. We may count the spots on the leopard, but the rest is just a story. In the muted excitement of the colors of fall, I am more than willing to accept this, that beauty and being are just so, in and of themselves - at least for now. FK
Going not so far back in time, to the college years, I had a professor who would often call anthropological theories "just so" stories, because they did not have solid facts behind them. For instance, it was theorized that Jewish circumcision was really done not as a mark of Jehovah on his chosen people, as the people themselves state, but for health reasons. Looked into, one can see that the author just assumed that such customs must have a practical reason, and health is what he chose to focus on. Looked at more closely, however, the idea loses it clout; the health advantages as we know today are minimal at best, and would have been too small to have been noticed. In fact, given the lack of antibiotics in those days, the health risk may have been fairly large. But it fit into the author's mind set - it must be! But really, it was just-so, no more real than a leopard getting its spots from - mud? A bird's feet? I forget now, but something silly and fun.
So it occurred to me this morning while thinking of Hans Kuhn's paradigm shifts in science at the sound of a woodpecker going away at our roof fascia. I chased him away, but then recalled the article I had read about how woodpeckers can survive the impact of their pecking. They have a liquid cushion in the brain. And that led to the marvel of the near-perfection of species in their environment, and this led to thoughts of evolution. How could it be that such interlocking perfection could have happened by blind chance? Could evolution, then, merely be another scientific paradigm? As Kuhn said, science doesn't "progress" as we think it does, but only changes paradigms. These paradigms remake the world for us conceptually, and actually seem to make the world more intelligible - but they don't. They are only more "just so" stories that form and are formed by the social gestalt that SEEM to make more sense, but ultimately do not.
I have taught anthropology and have happily taught evolution. To me, it seems like the perfect mechanism for God to shape the world, even if the scientists can't find an intelligently guided direction in it. In other words, I have no purist cause against it. But also none for it. Considered again, it seems to me that Darwinian evolutionary theory forms the perfect bridge between religion and science of the 19th century, where one was built on the other, even as it refuted it. Before the age of science, there was humanly- understandable order to the cosmos but it had come from the mind of God. Reason, it was seen, was God's reason in us, and by following it through, we could come close to grasping the mind of God. In evolution, however, there was humanly understandable order to the universe, but it was Not made by a god. So it was that, just as humans of the time in Europe were beginning to think of the world in terms of blind cause and effect, the billiard ball model, so, too, it was found that the universe was run by this same logic.
Just- so convenience or coincidence? From Kuhn, we are forced to consider the former - that the universe does not act as we think, but that we only think it does; until, that is, we change the way we think for another that is BETTER. But it may not be better. If history has any basis to it, the new theory may not be better, but rather just another story that we choose, for some reason or reasons, to believe.
In the literature of mystics, the mind of God - and the definition here is necessarily lose - is not knowable in a human sense. Given the great unanswerables in our own modern thought - where does it all come from and what does it all mean? (all thought systems have their unanswerables), this would seem to make the most sense, even in a world beyond our senses. In this case, humility and openness to wonder make the most sense. We are not the end all - not ourselves, and not our civilization. We may count the spots on the leopard, but the rest is just a story. In the muted excitement of the colors of fall, I am more than willing to accept this, that beauty and being are just so, in and of themselves - at least for now. FK
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