It's a mystery.

So last night, I was watching the Daily Show and Morgan Freeman was on, shilling his new "Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman." I guess it's another of those documentaries that are the average person's tour guide through high fallutin' theoretical physics and the latest and greatest from the final frontier--string theory, describing the first few seconds of the big bang, astrobiology, etc.

One of the subjects Stewart and Freeman talked about was dark matter and dark energy. Nobody knows what it is--but there sure is a lot of it. I think there is something like five times more dark matter and energy than the regular kinds. And all of that is a total effin' mystery.

And so, here we go--we're all going to label the mystery as "God."

I don't know why this gets my dander up, being atheist and all, but I hate it when people decide to equate God with mystery.

For one, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment, since one day crazy-ass physicists will figure one of these mystery bits of the universe (I hope so, since that's their whole crazy-ass raison d'etre). I mean, look at the Victorians. So many of them clung mightily to their William Paley Natural Theology view of the universe, where God is the direct, first-hand designer of each little thing. So when Darwin came along and said that nature is perfectly capable of designing itself, they took a collective shit. God would have to abandon his post altogether, or at least inhabit a much smaller space in the universe. And then you get tragic cases like Matthew Arnold, who lamented (to his wife, on his honeymoon, no less) the "Sea of Faith" receding "down the vast edges drear/And naked shingles of the world." Nobody wants to have an existential crisis every time somebody figures out something major about how the world works--I'm sure Mrs. Arnold didn't appreciate it, either.

And anyway, I don't understand why explaining something makes it less an object awe and wonder. For example, my knowing something more about genetics and embryology does not diminish my wonder that anything alive manages to reproduce itself. It rather seems all the more fragile (so many things can go so wrong at any moment!) and weird (did you know the cells that initiate the formation of your eyes pick up and move to start your heart? did you know we start forming ass first, and the ass forms in the dimple where the sperm went into the egg?) and, actually sublime (the complexity so vast not even the brightest biologist can hold all the pieces in his or her head--it's straight-up Kantian mathematical sublime). You can say the awe and wonder is about how such amazing order grew up willy-nilly out of chaos, or you can say it's about the vast imagination of the divine creator. It doesn't really matter which it is--both are just a decision you make about what the world is. But at least, in either case, at least the world doesn't disappoint you just because you know a little about it.

And also, let's talk about scientific knowledge and the average person. Yes, somebody out there knows something about the first nanoseconds of the universe or has a bunch of mathematical equations that say all of existence is composed of harmonic wiggly strings. But it took them a decade of two of post-high school education to be qualified to understand it. And some of them will say that though they've got the chops to do the equations and apply them to physics, they don't really apprehend what they mean--they can't quite fit their brain around it in the same way you could fit your brain around things like how airplanes stay aloft, how rainbows form, or why sometimes humans are born with little tails . (Unless you're on the same level as the Insane Clown Posse--then all these things are beyond your grasp.) But the point is--you don't actually know any of this stuff about how the universe came to be. For you (and me), it is still profoundly a mystery.

And anyway, wringing your hands about God's exact role in creating the universe misses the main point about having faith: if you have to willfully choose to be as ignorant and plain stupid as the Insane Clown Posse to see God in the universe, your faith is a sham.

And most to the point--why wring your hands about exactly how the world came about, and how hands-on God was about it? None of us were there, so none of us will ever know for sure. And the main point of religion is not coming up with theories about how the world came about--isn't it about how you behave towards yourself and others? I don't believe there's anything in the New Testament that talks about Genesis. I was under the general impression Jesus was all about mustard seed faith, lunching with the dispossessed, not throwing the first stone, and "God is Love" and whatnot. You can spend your time on all of the Jesus-y things without dropping a single tear about having to see the "naked shingles of the world." The naked shingles aren't really so bad--quite nice, actually. And really, if you're Jesus-y, however nice they are, they're beside the point.

The atheist has said her piece on true religion. Everybody can ignore her now.