“And I was successful,” said Dr. McCullough quietly. “I found wave oscillations within the Sun, the echoes of the initial compression God used to initiate the gravitational collapse responsible for its heat and light.”
“It was like finding God’s fingerprints on our world,” said Mrs. McCullough. “At the time, it provided all the reassurance we could have asked for.”
“But now I wonder if it proves anything,” he said. “All stars must have wave oscillations within them; there’s nothing that sets us apart. Nothing science has discovered carries any meaning.”
I told him that science can be a salve to our wounds, but that shouldn’t be the only reason we pursue it. I said we have a duty to search for the truth.
“Science is not just the search for the truth,” he said. “It’s the search for purpose.”
And I had no response. I had always assumed those were one and the same, but what if they aren’t?
I don’t know what to think now. It frightens me to imagine that you have never been listening at all.
Dear Rosemary,
The last few weeks have been very difficult for me, more so than I expected. I am writing to let you know that I have temporarily left the Arisona dig.
As I told you in my last letter, I thought I would be able to participate in the dig because, even with all that had happened, I believed my affinity for the physical work of archaeology would carry me through. As it turned out, it wasn’t as easy to carry on as I expected. The doubts sown by Lawson’s discovery have been gnawing at my mind like rodents. A few days ago it reached the point that, as I was removing a spearpoint from the soil matrix, I thought, What does this matter? Everything we’re doing here is irrelevant. I had to stop working for fear that I might smash an ancient artifact with a hammer out of frustration. That was when I knew I had to leave the dig. I don’t know if there was a real risk of me doing that, but the mere fact of it crossing my mind told me I was not in a fit state of mind to work there.
I have taken residence in a rental cabin about an hour away from the dig. I couldn’t explain to anyone why I was leaving, since I feel it would be inappropriate for me to talk publicly about Lawson’s paper before it’s published. Perhaps that contributed to my feeling of isolation while I was there, but I think the greater cause was that I feel estranged from God. I need time to decide what I should do next.
You asked whether the Church oughtn’t be disturbed by the discovery just as much as the secular scientific community, and to that I would say yes, they ought to be. But the Church as an institution has always been able to derive strength from the evidence when it’s useful and ignore it when it’s not. Take the story of Adam and Eve. The Church was willing to admit it could not be literally true after skeletons of primordial humans were found around the world, but they insisted the story retained foundational importance as an allegory. And you and I and every other woman continue to live in Eve’s shadow, for no reason except custom. So I expect that they will be able to explain away this discovery in a similar fashion and use it to advocate for the same values they always have.
I suppose one could argue that the idea of polygenism has been around for centuries, so it didn’t come as a surprise when archaeological findings confirmed it. Which is true. Church scientists have long struggled to explain how a single couple could populate the Earth so quickly, so they must have privately contemplated alternative theories before they were forced to change their official stance. By contrast, I have never heard a serious argument that humanity was not the purpose of creation before Lawson’s paper. So perhaps Church scientists will be just as taken aback as I was, before their loyalty to doctrine reasserts itself.
The problem for me as a secular scientist is that my faith has always been, first and foremost, shaped by the evidence. I admit that I didn’t previously appreciate the importance of astronomy in understanding our station, but now I do. And if we take as our premise that humanity was the reason for creation, then that should be reflected in the skies above just as much as in the earth beneath our feet. If humanity is the central fact of the universe, if our species is the omphalos, then a close examination of the celestial sphere should confirm that privileged status. Our solar system should be the fixed point against which all else is moving; our Sun should be at absolute rest. If the evidence doesn’t support that premise, then we must ask where our commitment truly lies.
I understand, Rosemary, if this doesn’t disturb you or Alfred the way it does me. I don’t know how most people will react when Lawson’s discovery becomes widely known. Wilhelmina McCullough anticipated that others would respond the way her father did, and in my case she was correct. I wish this didn’t affect me so deeply. Would that we could choose the things that trouble us, but we can’t.
But if you find that this does disturb you, know that you can discuss your apprehensions with me, whatever form they take. While each of us must find our own way forward through this forest of doubt, it is only with the support of others that we’ll be able to do so.
Lord, perhaps you don’t hear my prayers. But I’ve never prayed with the expectation that it would affect your actions; I prayed with the expectation that it would affect mine. So I pray now, for the first time in two months, because even if you’re not listening, I need the clarity of thought that prayer provides.
I left the dig because I feared that Lawson’s discovery rendered the whole enterprise meaningless. The reason the spearpoints that Dr. Janssen discovered were so exciting was that enough of the shafts remain that we thought we might be able to use growth rings to precisely identify the years in which they were fashioned. If we could identify trends in stone-knapping technique, we hoped to learn if knappers’ expertise grew or waned in the first generations after creation, and from there draw deductions about what your intentions were regarding human knowledge, Lord. But that was based on the assumption that the primordial humans were the most direct expression of your will. If humanity’s creation wasn’t deliberate on your part, then whatever skills primordial humans possessed tell us nothing about your intentions. Their endowments would have been purely accidental.
Since I’ve been here at the cabin, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how much the primordial humans knew. They couldn’t have come into being with minds as blank as newborn infants, because they’d have rapidly starved to death in such a scenario. Even tiger cubs must be taught how to hunt by their mothers. There’s no way that humans could have, from first principles, learned how to hunt for food before they perished. The primordial humans must have possessed some knowledge of hunting and constructing shelters. Was that one of the experiments you conducted, Lord? Determining the minimum set of skills necessary for the species to survive? Or perhaps it was just another unintended side effect, a faint echo of whatever information you imbued the primordial inhabitants of 58 Eridani with.
There is another piece of information, just as vital as survival skills, that I’ve assumed the primordial humans knew from the moment they drew breath: that they were created for a reason. The possibility that they didn’t know this is something I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. Rather than being filled with pride and ambition, they must have been afraid and confused during their first few days. I’ve tried to imagine what it must have been like to awaken fully formed, possessing certain skills but without a past to remember, lost in a world of amnesiacs. It seems terrifying to me, even more terrifying than what I’ve experienced these last few weeks.