The Devil Wears Nada

Science: The Alternate Mythology

Narrator: It absolutely was true.

Some time ago I wrote about my experience coming of age within the Millennial Religious Homebrew Movement. MRHM for short. I won’t rehash it here but, suffice to say, it was all a very mixed bag. Lot of nonsense floating around the space you understand. You know, things like a youth pastor carrying around a rain-stick in the name of Jesus, inexplicably convinced that his role necessitated him to LARP as a Lakota medicine man. There were calls to “give up Atheism for Lent” and, oddly, a somewhat dogged insistence on fasting. All very strange. The movement sat somewhere in the overlap between Southern Baptist, New Age Crystal Magic, and proto-Woke Progressivism if you can imagine such a thing. In certain spheres it got very large indeed. “Solomon’s Porch” in Minneapolis with Tony Jones, Peter Rollins and his “Pyro Theology”, some other guy whose name escapes me that talked to the “Great Spirit” in the sky. These folks drew crowds. And not just online, like, in real life. They would host events and sell tickets! Go on tour!

“Officially”, I think, in the annals of American anthropology all this will go down as part of the “emerging church” movement, a documented religious movement within academia. To me though, MRHM is more accurate. The “Millennial” is apt because it was purely a movement for Millennials, with next to no interested by either Gen Z or Gen X, and the “homebrew” is also a better descriptor because we were all just making it up as we went along. In my opinion “Emerging Church” makes it all sound a bit more legit than it really was.

Anyway, in hindsight I suppose all the silliness is hardly surprising. The MRHM was a last ditch effort by a lot of young people who’d been raised in the Christian Faith to cling to their religion amidst the increasingly irreligious culture all around them. One in which every single traditional value was under attack and in which The New Atheist Movement was ascendant. It was a battle. A spiritual war. The conflict between Faith and Science, long brewing in the background of people’s minds, had at last come to a definitive head. Before then, in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and so on, you could convince yourself that maybe, somehow or another, things like Evolution and The Big Bang and even modern Astronomy could fit like a missing jigsaw piece into The Book of Genesis. You could tell yourself that a real, actual global flood, with a guy on a boat and all the animals wasn’t strictly necessary, and that the whole business of the sun standing still in the book of Joshua could be ignored. Giants!? What giants? Ssshhhh! Sweep them under the rug. Also let’s… hey… Hey can anyone get a blanket or something to cover the Tower of Babel? It’s embarrassing. All the languages of the world stemming from a single event on a tower trying to reach heaven? Come on… Really?

Suddenly, about the year 2004 or so… it was all very in your face.

Science and Faith were at odds and everybody knew it.

Oh Richard Dawkins. The memories we made. I still remember you telling that black man, “I am and African ape… and so are you” to his face.

Sigh.

A different time.

It was a stunning defeat. For our side I mean. Christianity lost and now it’s basically over. Those of us trying to fight for it waited on a miracle that never came. Of course, people are still nominally Christian. Sure. It doesn’t mean anything though. Their lives are not any different from anybody else’s, they don’t actually, believe in anything. I know. I’ve asked. Christianity is just a cultural artifact for most people, and maybe that’s all it ever was. Maybe since Theodosius made it the official religion of Rome that’s all it’s ever been. A way to fit in. A way to get by.

Of course, I may be biased. I saw a lot of people fall. I can count on one hand those within the MRHM who are still, to this day, “Christian” in any real sense of the word. I would like to say that those of us who survived the war came out stronger for it on the other side but, honestly, that would just be cope. As it turns out, none of us are an island and you need a culture that helps you believe your religion. Otherwise? Well… at minimum everything in life will be an uphill battle. You think you can hold off things like greed and adultery and divorce and war mongering and so on… but you can’t. Not if all the rest of the world chooses to go down those roads. It will infect your community too. There’s no escape. For a moment in time though, however brief, it really felt like we might win. We were trying new stuff, experimenting, “rethinking” church, and so on. It seemed we stood on the a precipice… A battle to decide if America would sink into Atheistic Nihilism or if we would see, in our lifetimes, the next Great Awakening?

We got our answer.

Some of us are still around. In my own way I never gave up the fight but I admit that sometimes I feel like that Japanese sailor on Gilligan’s Island who never got the memo that the war had ended. My criticism of people like Father Matthew here is simply that he never got in on the fight. In fact he’s still trying to pretend there never was one. “Don’t worry everybody! It’s fine. Yes. Yes! Yes you did evolve from some sort of proto-monkey. But also you inherited Original Sin from Adam and Eve. Yes!”

It doesn’t work.

It just does not work.

And before you say anything, yes, of course I’m familiar with the numerous volumes published trying to reconcile the Tenants of Science with the Tenants of Faith. Of course. If you’re about to recommend to me your favorite one, stop… I’ve probably already read it. All of them, every one without exception, requires you to torture the text of the Bible and the faith as understood by the Church Fathers beyond recognition. Because listen guys… I’ve got news for you… Most of the Church Fathers were probably Flat Earthers. The Apostles were too. That’s the level of deviation we’re trying to reconcile here… that’s the level of mismatch Father Matthew is trying to hand-wave away. Make no mistake, far from being “compatible with your scientific beliefs”, the cosmology under-girding the narratives of Genesis involves an actual, literal, man in the sky, who made humanity, fully formed, out of the dust of the ground, and spoke the cosmos into existence over a period of six days roughly six thousand years ago.

That’s what the writers of the Old Testament believed.

That’s what the writers of the New Testament believed.

That’s what Jesus himself believed. Heck, he talks about such explicitly, referencing a literal Adam, a literal Beginning, and a literal, worldwide Flood.

All of this millions and billions of years is totally absent. If you’d come up and told the Early Church Fathers that, actually, God fashioned them slowly, over eons, from proto-chimpanzees, they’d have A) asked you what a chimpanzee was, and then B) stoned you for blasphemy. Heck… even suggesting that the Earth goes around the Sun does not work. As mentioned, Biblical cosmology suggests that you can stop the sun, in its tracks… and then just… set it going again. How’s that working in a solar system where everything is in constant motion revolving around each other all the time?

It’s not.

It’s not working.

Science and Faith do conflict. Father Matthew is wrong.

I know because I fought this war already. We tried every single avenue to reconcile the two.

And we lost.

May have been the losing side. Still not convinced it was the wrong one. (Only cool people will get this reference).

And look, I get why people want to pretend there’s no problem. It’s the same impulse that a lot of men have where they enjoy fantasizing about being able to beat other men up or being an action hero… without ever actually trying boxing, or MMA. It’s super comforting to think that you can defend yourself and your loved ones from any and all threats and it’s cool to imagine yourself as a latent action movie hero, just waiting for the proper crises to arise so that your heroic potential will finally be revealed.

But… as the American Scholar Mike Tyson once said, “Everybody got a plan till they get punched in the mouth.”

A lot of you people ain’t been punched in the mouth.

Metaphorically anyway.

I’ve been punched in the mouth metaphorically and physically and honestly it’s a toss up for which is worse.

The only way anybody could think that Christianity, as most practice it, can be reconciled with Science, is if they’re living in Fantasy Land. If they’ve never tried to put that idea into practice. The only guy that has is Ken Ham, that fellow who built a replica of the Ark in Kentucky. Respect to him. At least he’s out in the fight.

This fits in the Bible. Tell me where it fits in the Science textbook?

As I said, the MRHM was a total failure, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t little gems to come out of it. You know, little idea diamonds in all that rough that I still go back to now and again all these years later. One of those diamonds came from this book right here:

No relation to the movie bearing the same name. Nor to the other movie bearing almost the same name. No relation to any movies at all really.

And this is the author now:

As I said, we lost a lot of good men.

The basic premise of the book went as follows: In the modern world, it is increasingly apparent that our Scientific worldview cannot accommodate God but some of use would certainly like to keep Him around. Unfortunately, proofs for God’s existence are dubious at best. Aquinas made the best stab at it but, even if we accept his proofs as logically sound, on the rhetorical level they just aren’t very convincing. What if then, instead of trying to prove that God exists, I (the author Tripp York), try to prove that Satan does?

Fun right?

I mean, that would be the next best thing, wouldn’t it? After all it would be the rare (and weird) individual who could believe The Devil existed but not God. If, therefore, we could prove the existence of Satan, we would, in a round about way, prove that God existed too. Here of course every philosophy professor screams in horror at the myriad of logical fallacies embedded in such a proposal, which we must grant. Even so though, the notion has a certain appeal. If demons exist, angels probably do too. Right? And anyway, such a thing would be rhetorically a lot more convincing for the claims of Christianity than anything the apologists have thus far mustered.

So, he did.

Tripp I mean.

The Devil Wears Nada is a chronicle of Tripp’s quest to find the Devil.

I obviously don’t recommend such a thing but I do admire the outside the box thinking. Religious people are always trying to “find God”, and that’s difficult. Maybe finding Satan is easier. Now, it’s been some time since I read the book but as I recall Tripp tried all sorts of things. Joining up with satanists, doing some occult rituals, seances, maybe even committing some small sins. Please don’t hold me to any of that specifically though. I haven’t read the book in over a decade and I don’t want to slander the man claiming he did things he didn’t explicitly do. I would check the source material but I can’t find my copy anywhere… it is maybe in the storage unit. Or did I buy it as a epub? On my old computer? Anyhow, suffice it to say that Tripp wanted to get in touch with The Dark Side… and he gave it the old college try.

A Faustian enterprise, to be sure.

I don’t remember how the book ended but there was a strange aside about “The Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith and I recall something about a would-be magician trying to summon cockroaches. I don’t think he ever found the Devil. Unless he decided it was Capitalism… or something? I’m not sure. It was that sort of book. I bring all this up because, failure of the MRHM and lackluster impact of “The Devil Wears Nada” aside, I still think this is the one of the strongest arguments for God and one of the few actually effective means of breaking through the Scientific armor around people’s minds. For God can often seem quite distant. But Evil?

Evil’s always just a stone’s throw away.

One of the reasons I write so often about the devil is because nobody needs any convincing that things are bad. Disease, poverty, greed, hatred, oppression, war, lying, stealing, cheating… I mean… things are bad. The world is full of bad things. Writing about Transcendent Good is a lot harder because any audience you have is unlikely to accept the premise that such a thing exists without a lot of legwork. Humanity is exceedingly pessimistic after all. For example, it’s an objective fact that right now in the universe Life and Death are equally balanced. Every death has a life attached to it. They exist in a one-to-one ratio. You might therefore think that people would be predisposed to imagine things working out and going well just as often as they’d be predisposed to the reverse. They aren’t though. They remember pain a lot more than they remember pleasure. It takes five positive interactions to balance out one negative one. Keep that in mind in your relationships.

Evil is also a good theological starting point too because it’s so hard to account for. You know, I don’t think fish are swimming around mad at the universe for being the way it is or anything. I doubt seriously Zebras experience existential angst. But Human Beings are in the peculiar position of being aware that something is seriously wrong in the cosmos. We have awareness of not only how things are but a definite sense of how they should be. Children should not die. People should not go hungry. Wars should not happen. Cancer shouldn’t exist. Etc, etc. A lot of religions try to get rid of this. “Everything is as it should be”, claims the Jedi. The Force is all in balance. And that’s fine and good from a detached outsider perspective, but no one has ever believed that while they’re the one experiencing the Dark Side. No amount of Taoism is going to be a comfort to a grieving Mother. No, “death is just the flip side of birth” New Ageism helps a man on his hospital bed. No. Something is wrong.

There’s Evil.

Evil is so self-evident that a good portion of the New Atheists’ breath was spent trying to deny it. You know, Sam Harris trying to tell everyone that free will doesn’t exist and so nobody really does anything “wrong.” Or Daniel Dennett, that horrible man, waddling about on stage trying to convince his audience that even their own consciousness is an illusion. The old, we’re all just meat sacks full of chemicals shtick. Just nerve endings responding to stimuli. Nothing means anything. Good and Evil are just “social constructs” that have no meaning outside of what you give them. All that.

Bollocks isn’t it?

In all my battles with Science and Materialism that has been the one piece of ground I’ve never lost. The fact that Evil exists can’t be denied. Not for very long anyway. Sure, for a season or two, people can hand-wave it away but inevitably something happens in their lives that makes the reality of Evil once again apparent. In some ways I think this is a gift. Evil and the Suffering it brings I mean. I think we are so close to spiritually dead that we are effectively numb and sometimes we can’t feel anything to wake us up besides pain. Unfortunately I also think that means that we all probably have to fall a lot further before we start to rise up again. Our abandonment of God will have to start to really hurt us before we can even think of turning back.

For my part I will tell you where I landed. After the war I mean. My own suffering lead me to a place where I now see Science as little more than an alternative mythology for an alternative religion. I don’t mean of course the formula for the flow of electric current or F=ma. Not that kind of science. I mean all that stuff that supposedly happened millions and millions of years ago or that is supposedly currently happening billions and billions of miles away. There’s simply no way to know all that. It’s sort of the height of hubris to take a couple of deep space radiation measurements and infer backwards through time a detailed account of the origin of the universe. I think it’s silly. I think it’s a collective attempt to not have to worry about God so we don’t have to worry about sin.

That’s what I think.

And I think that a lot of other people will have to get on the same page before any sort of revival of Christianity is possible. That’s where my dealings with Evil have lead me.

But, I might just be a crazy person.

Always a possibility.

I might simply be yet another in the long line of easily impressionable people who’ve been deluded by an old book.

It’s possible.

But Evil exists.

I’m a lot more sure of that than The Big Bang.