Advent reappraisal, Part 2: The God Hypothesis in a time of spiritual warfare
What difference has it made to our lives that someone else has been to the moon — if he has? Are our hearts’ questions answered by this knowledge? If not, what might be happening, what might it mean?
One Small Step for (a) Man
Imagine a man walking through the wilderness for many months, years, a lifetime. In a certain sense, all of us have made this journey: through the existences of our ancestors we have walked through the jungle to be here. The man, then, is each, any of us.
He has never met another living human being, speaks no languages except the one in his head, and has managed to survive by eating wild berries and leaves. He walks along, plucking fruit from the bushes, seeking nourishment where he can, taking shelter under rocks and trees. He stops along the way and sets up camp. He learns to grow things and is constantly astonished by the capacity of the world to provide for his needs. With this comes a sense of dependency, expectation. He becomes aware that things are given to him, which leads to the development of an intuition that there’s a force in reality that provides and protects. He is moved by this, and give thanks. He begins to see things like this, more and more. For the most part he is able to fulfil his needs by mooching around — picking, plucking, ambushing. Sometimes his faith is tested — austerity rears its head — but something in his past experience tells him to persevere, to try harder, and eventually something changes and the good times roll again. On other occasions, beaten, he asks for help, and he finds on these occasions that something always turns up.
But then, imagine that this man, one day decides to embark on a journey, though he knows not whither. He points his face towards the horizon, with the sun at his back, and starts walking. Along the way, he continues to pluck and pick, and notes that the established pattern continues, more or less. He walks and walks, day after day. During the night, he sleeps under a bush or a rock.
Then, one night, with sundown approaching, he notices a light on the horizon. He keeps walking and the light grows more distinct. As he reaches it, he notes a structure, primarily made of a transparent material. Not that he knows the words ‘structure’ or ‘transparent’, or even ‘material’ — these thoughts occur to him, wordlessly in his head. Nor does he know the word ‘glass’, though in fact what he is approaching is a large glass building.
Actually it’s an airport, although he has never seen anything like it and has no way of knowing what it is. The idea of human flight is inconceivable to him, although he has occasionally wondered about those white streaking lines, like thin, orderly clouds, he would occasionally see in the sky overhead, remaining straight for a time and then unravelling and dissolving like a line he has made in the desert sand becoming dishevelled in the wind.
He walks through the doors of the airport, into what is really a machine that transports people from the entrance to the aircraft and, later at the other end of each journey, back again to the entrance of another similar construction. For those who designed and those who requisitioned this machine, it is clear that the people who come here are something like commodities — units of air travel consumption, their lives measurable in air miles, baggage allowances and footfall. Here, everything is dominated by the schedule, by the comings and goings.
He cannot get over the shininess of it, the cleanliness of everything, the efficiency of the way it moves people from one place to another, the way people collaborate in their own transportation, and, in a certain sense, also in their own commodification, and what we might term dehumanisation. He does not understand the things he sees, but finds them endlessly fascinating. He watches the people take off their belts and shoes to go from one section to another, and stretch out their arms to be searched, like prisoners rehearsing their own crucifixions. He watches people come down the escalator and tries to imitate them, walking up the wrong one, against the grain of its movement. He stumbles and rolls inelegantly back to the bottom.
The man likes the warmth of his new location. In the beginning, he feels a little out of place, on account of his disordered appearance, unkempt dress (he wears an old suit he took from the dead body of a wayfarer he came across several years before in the wilderness) and strange hopping manner of perambulation. At first he feels that he is the only stranger in the place, but soon he notices that most of the faces he encounters change every day, indeed every hour. Soon, he starts to feel that the airport is his home — that he belongs here as much as anyone, perhaps even more than most. He makes friends with some of the airport personnel, who turn blind eyes to the fact that his continual presence in the airport is in breach of regulations. He rifles the refuse bins for discarded food, discovering the joys of hamburgers, doughnuts and cold chips. He finds a broom cupboard beside the lost property department, where he puts his head down to sleep at night.
He learns a little of the language, enough to be able to ask directions or find out what time it is. One day, he walks into the café, and, seeing some croissants on the counter, picks one up and eats it, in the way he would have picked berries from a bush in the wilderness a short time before. The attendant objects to this behaviour and he responds, in the pidgin English he has been accumulating, that he used to pick fruit like this where he comes from. ‘Fruit?’ comes the reply. ‘You buy fruit In the shop, over there. They sell smoothies as well!’
Another day, he buys an apple in the shop in Arrivals, in front of some of his new friends, and, before taking a bite, he blesses himself, looking upwards, another manoeuvre he has learned, but which makes sense to him, though he never used to do it like that before, but merely made a friendly wave to the sky when he found something edible or useful, though sometimes falling to his knees, in instinctual gratitude. The others look at him strangely. ‘What are you doing’, asks the attendant behind the counter. ‘I am giving thanks for the apple’, he replies. ‘No, no,’ the attendant replies, ‘You have to give me money for the apple, and say thanks to me. Who do you think is up there? Are you crazy?’
In a short time, he begins to understand that the rules are different here. He needs to pay for things, with something called money. To obtain money, he needs to work, so he gets a job shining shoes. Now he can buy croissants, instead of ‘picking’ them. He buys some shoes of his own, and practices his polishing on them at night, crouched in his broom cupboard. He saves up and buys a suit in the Hugo Boss store in Departures.
His grasp of the language increases. He enjoys talking to people about this amazing place, how it came about and how much he likes it. He talks to everyone and asks about everything: about this thing called an aeroplane, and this thing called a croissant, which is something of a mystery to him. They look at him strangely. ‘Where have you been?’, they ask him, or they look at him as though they suspect he’s having them on. But gradually he comes to know all about aeroplanes and air traffic control.
At first he gazed upwards open-mouthed at the planes landing and taking off, but now he hardly notices. As it all starts to make more sense, he works on not looking so wonderstruck. He doesn’t want people to think him stupid.
Soon, he learns not to ask any more daft questions, or to speak about his past life. He learns to act as unsurprised and as bored as everyone else. He learns that there is no need to say thanks in the old way, because all this is made by men. So, you just hand over your money, say, ‘Cheers!’ and the attendant replies, ‘Have a nice day!’
Gradually the man from the wilderness comes to feel blasé about the airport, and to accept that everything is different here. He even learns the meaning of the word ‘blasé’. He begins to forget about his old life, deciding, ‘I like it here! I feel safe. Maybe one day I’ll even catch a plane!’ Slowly, inexorably, he finds himself joining in with the new thinking he has found here. He no longer asks for help, or kneels down in thanks. He loses his astonishment and his gratitude. He no longer feels dependent (with the exception of the day when he eventually takes his first flight, when he finds himself again pleading with God to bring him back to earth safely!)
But what has changed, really, about this man’s life? He is still the same man. He has not learned anything that is fundamentally new. He is having new experiences – for him –but these in themselves are not responsible for transforming him in any dramatic way. The big change is in his thinking: His mind has been changed about everything because he feels safe in this place that other men have built, which he has stumbled into in his flight from the wilderness. He has copied the self-assurance and even tedium of the people he has encountered, and acquired an ironic grin with which he greets anything that he has not yet figured out.
It does not strike him that all the materials these other men used to build this place were given to them in the same way as the berries and the other fruit were once given to himself in the wild. They found them already in the world. So, in truth, nothing fundamental had been changed about their lives either, apart from being able to put together in a new way things they found lying around.
And yet their thinking had completely changed. Something in the shapes of their new constructions has made them more self-confident, even cocky, though this self-possessive qualities appeared to be insulated by a think layer of humour, as though to deaden the blow of the unexpected for long enough to formulate a reaction.
The lives of these men and women, no more than the life of the man from the wilderness, had not changed in their essence. They had come to see differently both reality and their lives within it, but this had to do with developments outside of themselves. The changes in outlook they had undergone were based not on the acquisition of a new potency, but on the discovery of things that were already there. In their essential selves, they were no different — no more powerful, no less dependent than before. The fact that they felt so much closer to omnipotence was illusory. There was no reason for them to stop saying thanks and yet, without thinking very much about it, they had forgotten all about this prior impulse to be grateful for what they received. They lived in a more advanced, self-constructed world, but they were also living in a self-constructed illusion.
To get to the truth about myself, I need to go back, back, back though time and space, to imagine — no, remember — myself out in the middle of the desert or the wilderness, standing alone with no map, no direction, no compass. Standing there, I need to ask myself these questions: Who am I, really? What, stripped of illusion, do I amount to? What is the essential arc of my journeying? What makes me? I need to do this, incidentally, not by way of honouring my ‘creator’ for the sake of his celestial ego — if such a being can be presumed to exist — but because I cannot be myself unless I acquire some notional understanding of this unknown dimension of myself. If I fall on my knees in the desert, I do it not for God’s sake, but my own.
In the wilderness, devoid of my props and protections, I have a chance of encountering myself as I truly am. This is where I come from, this is where I belong, and this is where I will always end up. This is why the question is so relevant, so pressing, so urgent. In my aloneness, I can see and feel more truly. Even Jesus, it is said, came to this place near the end, and felt in it as any man might feel.
In the desert, there are no buildings, no road, no path, no lights or signs to tell me when to walk or where to go. I’m alone, and so I have to face the question: Who am I? What is this that is happening? What does it mean to say ‘happening’? Who do I ask these questions of? Myself? What, then, am I? Why do I ask questions of myself, if I need to ask them and therefore do not appear to know the answers? Why do I presume that the answers exist?
I ask, and yet by virtue of asking, I imply that I do not believe I know the answer. And yet, on the evidence of the simple act of asking, it seems I believe that the answer is to be found, perhaps somewhere deep in myself. But I seek and seek within myself and cannot seem to find it. I may experience this as a pratfall reminder of my inadequacy, and retreat into a hurt cynicism, or I may be struck by the paradox that it may be more than a trick played by words, that it has something fundamental to do with my very being. And, becoming conscious of something that doesn’t add up, I may begin delving deeper into the mystery of myself, fumbling to touch something that the constructed, prefabricated world doesn’t allow me to see, that the bunker blocks from my vision.
How do I deal with — i.e. process in my thinking, feeling and intuiting — the meaning of reality for me? How do I deal with this question of what propels me, what gets me up in the morning, what impels me to open my eyes, what persuades me to stand up straight, what prompts me to look hopefully towards the horizon? What is it? The answer is anything but obvious, but it’s a pressing question, which seems to be in me already. I am a walking question mark looking upon reality, my curved back to the bunker wall. And the question asked by my existence seems to radiate from every fibre of reality, including the wall at my back. In this moment of awakening, In such a moment, were it possible, I would become aware of my being, alive in it and it immanent in me.
Being, I sense, is something incapable of being articulated. To seek words for it is to have lost it already. For the same reason, being is not simply thought, or perhaps is not in the least to do with thought. So, another paradox: Ehat which is most essential about me exists beyond the reach of the tools I use for apprehending.
But we can say what being is not: It is not the person I imagine to be me, who engages in a series of functions, who runs for a plane, eats an apple or polishes his shoes. My being is something behind, underneath all this, something constant that belongs to me, the richest property I have, but which I, for the most part, remain oblivious of. Being is what makes me something in the world, something capable of coherence and therefore intensity. Absent this quality, I would be as a machine capable of performing tasks, with or without enthusiasm, with no point to either the tasks or myself. I can become aware of my being in brief interludes, and even feel close to understanding what it is. These episodes of near-clarity tend to happen by accident, in unwary moments when the defences installed in me by the bunker relax their vigilance. I may feel it for a time, a strange peace that has no immediate explanation. This can persist for some time, provided I do not seek to name it. But at the merest twitch of an impulse towards closer inspection it disappears from clear sight, but remains flitting, like a daddy-long-legs caught in a spider’s web, at the fringe of my field of vision.
Soon I am returned to the place where I live. Now I turn around, back to the prefabricated reality and, still warm form the reverie that is departed, briefly see it for what it is. Its shapes and materials appear strange. What an odd shape for a building designed to keep the rain off! Why does a car look so ‘modern’ but only for a short time? For a moment, having crossed between the states of bunker and being and back again, I am in a position to make brief, wordless comparisons. My dominant feeling is of loss, like someone I have loved has died, but there is also a strange sense of merriment. I laugh at the silliness of everything around me. In this moment, I feel a certain paradoxical constancy, as though there is a continuous me, not through chronological time but across some invisible firmament into which I have momentarily blundered as though for the first time wearing metaphysical spectacles.
I have been again to the wilderness. I have made the journey in reverse, from the glass building to the forest, or the desert. I have become aware of an element of myself in which nothing is changed by the fact that there is a concrete floor under me or a roof over my head or a central heating system that keeps me warm. I remain as I was, of my essence. I have more comfort here, more security, more self-assurance, and all these make me peaceful in a different way to the way I felt a moment ago. But suddenly this ‘me’ is no longer all of me. I have glimpsed a larger ‘me’ and cannot forget it.
For a moment, it seems to me that I can never again be duped by the shapes and schedules of the bunker. I think that henceforth all this will always make me laugh. But this moment quickly passes also. For an instant I had been returned to the state of consciousness that imbued the forked human being as whom I entered the world. Now, again, it is gone and I am returned to my bunker state.
It is possible to live a lifetime in the wilderness and be completely unaware that any other kind of place exists. It is equally possible to live a lifetime in the bunker and never see the wild or experience what its effects can be. It is possible to visit the wilderness and view it with an unwavering bunker eye, which sees only scenery or primitiveness. And it is possible to reach the bunker after a time in the wilderness and be changed by this experience. Is is possible for a man to be a man in either context. But the bunker makes it harder, because it makes things so easy. Being, as the last weeks of the earthly life of Jesus remind us, is more readily accessible in the wilderness, which becomes not so much a place apart as a place within. Jesus went to there to escape from the world of man, to enter into himself at the deepest level, and to confront the most fundamental aspects of himself. The wilderness is not necessarily a place with wildlife, trees, mountains and lakes. It could be that too, of course, but it is more likely that such places would nowadays simply manifest in our consciousnesses as places of ‘recreation’ to which to escape briefly to ‘recharge the batteries' for a new assault on the bunker. Even the wild has been tamed by man, in his ravenous determination to own and dominate everything.
But the true wilderness is an interior location, expanding in two directions: outwards towards infinity, through the dizzying vastness of the universe, and inwards to the very heart of the human being — these two ‘pathways’ being, in a sense, mirror images of one another, together indicating the awesome breadth of human be-ing. The wilderness is the mysterious reality we usually try to avoid — in ourselves and in creation (and one of the ways we avoid it is to steer clear of the word ‘creation’). It is the reality whose encroachment we try to distract ourselves from — with all kinds of diversions, sensations and amusements. It is the aloneness we fear might strike us as our most essential condition, if we took the time to look into things. In the wilderness, we look our demons in the face, and realise that the only power they have over us is that which we give them by virtue of our refusal to confront them.
Each of us is more than we have come to acknowledge. Each of us is himself/herself, plus the Spirit of creation, however we may choose to name, or not name, this entity or force. In the wilderness, having confronted what may suddenly strike us as our emptiness, we discover instead this ever-present companion. Hence the most powerful paradox of human reality: In order to discover that we are accompanied, we need to take steps to be alone.
And this is where we may find ourselves if we can contrive for the bunker to recede in us, if we enable our protections to collapse and the illusions dissolve. It is easy to be waylaid into the add-ons we have accumulated in the course of a life, and come to see as the ‘thing itself’ of life. But these are not the essential dimensions of our humanity, which derives from the essence of the life being lived in us.
This is what Pope Benedict was talking about in his speech to the Bundestag. This is what he meant about creating the conditions in the bunker to shut out the mystery — not merely so that we can claim mastery over mystery, but so that we can create the illusion of total knowing because such conditions could contain no element of mystery.
There is, then, this profound issue concerning the capacity of modern cultures to sustain human beings in any kind of essential connection with being. We have built our cultures and societies as bunkers, insulating them from the immensity of reality, and claiming these reduced and stifling spaces as the totality of the real.
Arising from this, something has happened to our minds that is deceptive and peculiar, and we have mistaken this change for a change in the fabric of reality. By burying the most essential questions about ourselves, we have secretly come to imagine that our lives are, in a certain way, generated by ourselves, by humans — in culture, politics, economics, psychotherapy, medicine. It is as though all of these disciplines might have erupted from the genius of mankind, without anything of their basis having existed in the reality that was given. It is as though nothing absolute or antecedent — or absolutely antecedent — can be acknowledged. We have shut out the mysteries of the universe and convinced ourselves that mystery is not important — at least not here, in what we are addressing in reality right now. And it is important to say that the word ‘mystery’ does not necessarily imply something unknowable, but may be something real, accessible or ineluctable that cannot be captured in words or thoughts, which nevertheless exercise a power over our existence, no matter how mush we ignore its existence. What we exclude is not just things that are or may be unknowable, but also even aspects of reality, and even the very essence of being, which exist but cannot be captured.
If mystery has any place in the bunker, it is as something that simply remains to be understood, something we can deal with some other time. In a sense, then, there is no mystery, only as yet undiscovered triumphs of man’s genius. Modestly, we acknowledge, there are things we don’t know yet, but it’s only a matter of time. One by one, we will dispose of all the mysteries and one day will wake up knowing everything. Meanwhile, we remain in relative control of everything that matters. Our ancestors were mistaken in the notions they had about being ‘created’, ‘blessed’, ‘dependent’ on something called ‘Providence’, to say nothing of ‘God’. In the same way as we have borrowed money from our descendants to pay for the false correspondences dangled before our desires in the modern marketplace, we also take out a mortgage on all future knowledge, and give it to ourselves in the present. We are as close to omniscience, and therefore omnipotence, as is hardly worth talking about.
A couple of weeks after Pope Benedict’s September 2011 speech in the Bundestag, I was called on to give a talk in Dublin to a local literary society. My subject was the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh — one of the great Christian poets of twentieth century Europe. For Kavanagh, poetry was not literature, but theology. For him, the important thing about a poem was ‘The Flash’ — the Other World alerting us to Its existence. A poem, he believed, is really a prayer. Kavanagh always called himself a ‘Catholic’ poet, which he construed as meaning that, when he looked upon a bird or a tree or a flower, he saw the created entity, and was reminded that he too was a creature, and ordained to write poems out of that understanding.
But, speaking of these things to a ‘de-absolutised’ middle-class audience in a leafy suburb of Dublin, I could tell that some among my listeners were unhappy with this characterisation of either Kavanagh or the function of poetry. In Ireland, it was already unfashionable for writers, poets and musicians to speak about ‘the flash’.
At the end an elderly man stood up and declared: ‘This kind of thing is hopelessly out of date’. He looked around for support, but the other audience members were not for committing themselves one way or the other. ‘I came for a talk about Kavanagh,’ he complained, ‘not a lecture about Catholicism’. I responded that Kavanagh saw himself as I described him — that to overlook this was to miss his essential meanings and sense of mission. The man became increasingly belligerent and ranted on for a minute or two about how ‘most of us’ had left ‘all this stuff’ behind. Then he delivered his punchline.
‘We’re tired of all this,’ he said. ‘Don’t you realise that man has been to the moon?’
There followed one of those moments in which everything seems to slow down and you realise that something crucial is occurring, something you will have cause to look back upon in time to come. The entire exchange between us lasted no more than a couple of minutes, and yet, in the midst of it, I had the sensation of watching something unfold in slow motion before my consciousness that might have been the encapsulation of my entire life’s experience.
In the immediate aftermath of that punchline, time stood still. I knew — though I didn’t right there put it in such terms to myself — that I had just received a postcard from the bunker. For in this single sentence/question, the man had encapsulated everything that Pope Benedict had been talking about: ‘Don’t you realise that man has been to the moon?’ In this sentence, he was expressing the certainty offered by hermetically-sealed culture based on positivism, with an air of certainty, gifted him by the bunker, that there was no longer any need to consider the idea of a creator, or the mystery of himself or his life, or of his family’s lives, or indeed of reality. And in this moment, I understood that I had to answer him — not necessarily for his benefit, because I did not expect him to be interested, but for anyone there who might be on the precipice of a similar leap of reason/unreason and have a hope of being pulled back. And, even more than that, for myself, because if I could not answer this, I would have to reconsider everything. Was my searching for something beyond the immediate and obvious simply a reflex movement arising from a childhood of piety? Was this man speaking a more evolved truth, or something else? Was the bunker a real phenomenon? If it was, I should be able to answer the man’s question, because the existence of the bunker must, by definition, place him on the soggier ground.
But nothing came to me as a plausible response. Suddenly, my mind was blank, as though someone had thrown a switch and put the lights out.
I recognised what was happening. The man’s question had abruptly returned me to the bunker and its logic. For the previous hour or so, I had been on a journey outwards into the stratosphere of possibility, reaching forward towards infinity, backwards towards an imagined origin, stretching myself in reality and seeking to bring these people to the same kinds of places in themselves. With this man at least, I know I had failed. This didn’t surprise me: There are people in every audience who come determined not to be persuaded or changed by anything they hear.
For the previous hour I had been speaking Kavanagh’s language of creation and grandeur and dependence and wonder. Now I was being confronted in another language, the language of the everyday culture to which I also belonged. This is one of the problems with the bunker: When you are in it, it becomes very difficult to think and speak as though you are not in it; and if you can effect a temporary escape, it can be disorientating when someone jumps up with a bunker question or preoccupation and you find yourself unable to tune in or care less.
In my imagination, I stepped right back into the bunker, and there the man’s question made total sense to me. It belonged to a ‘rational’ way of thinking that I was familiar with, and was capable of succumbing to at any moment. I had for most of my adult life been immersed in this logic, and believed it to be the only reasonable way of seeing things.
The man was expressing something now widely professed at the very heart of public culture in my country and the wider world. The implication was obvious: that scientific progress had debunked the Christian view of humanity and reality, an idea rarely far from the subtext of public conversation. This, too, is an idea that, if we are honest, we will acknowledge invades also the minds of believers, whispering that loyalty to religious ideas is adhered to in the face of the apparent facts of existence — out of habit, fear, loyalty, doggedness, hope against hope, or an unwillingness to face the truth.
‘Don’t you realise that man has been to the Moon?’
I knew in the brief nanoseconds I had to absorb the man’s question that I had better make my answer good.
If it were now, given the things I have been brought to reconsider in the past three years, I might well — moving things in a different direction — say to him: ‘Are you really certain that man has been to the Moon?’ But the world of ‘conspiracy theory' was not yet on my radar.
Left to myself, I had no answer. My mind remained blank. I simply opened my mouth and out came a question: ‘Have you been to the moon?’ I believe I was as surprised by this response as anyone else present, including myself. At first it seemed, even to me, to be what my father would have deemed a ‘smart answer’ — not an intelligent answer but a clever-dick retort designed to win the argument at the level of ridicule.
The man, slightly taken aback, said: ‘No’.
I heard myself say: ‘So what difference has it made to your life that another man has been to the moon? Are your heart’s questions answered by this knowledge?’ I was as if in a dream. I watched myself engaging with the man, without knowing how the exchange was going to end. But I quickly realised that., whatever I might be doing, I wasn’t necessarily acting the smartarse for fear of having to confront the question the man was putting to me. Somehow, almost in spite of myself, I was acknowledging the validity of his question and attempting to answer it. Somehow, I had reentered the bunker to get my bearings, then left it again to recover an answer from some deep part of myself.
The man looked confused by my question, but also a little more angry, as though I was playing a trick on him. He parried with a riposte centre on the assertion that his children and grandchildren had put ‘all this thinking’ behind them. I understood why he would think that it must be obvious to any intelligent person that, because he had watched a man walking on the moon, everything was changed. It didn’t occur to him that this might be anything other than a reasonable, intelligent position before reality, and I, as a sometime fellow citizen of the bunker, had a certain sympathy with that. This is how our cultures teach us to think. Every day, we receive information that adds to our sense of humankind moving inexorably towards omniscience and omnipotence. A new frontier in science is announced, and the popular media extrapolate from this a judgment concerning the most fundamental nature and place of man. We receive this judgment and may feel changed or bound by it, and yet have almost no understanding of the nature of the advance that has been made, which is usually described in the most cursory and approximate fashion. Most of us are uninvolved in any of this human advancement. We are bystanders. Yet, each time, a warm glow of satisfaction contrives to suffuse us, on account of mankind essaying another giant leap forward. The idea that human progress changes mankind’s condition fundamentally is, for each of us, an illusion that comes to us by word-of-mouth, a rumour of approaching omniscience that really adds nothing to what we truly know. We gather that there are men elsewhere for whom such developments mean something existentially vital, and so we feel ‘reassured’. But even these men — were we to seek them out — are likely to be fundamentally unchanged by the isolated ‘progress events’ to which they have access. Neil Armstrong had to return to Earth and live a normal life. The moon, even for him, remained hanging in the sky. How it got there, no one could really say.
So, I found myself saying, ‘Neil Armstrong went to the moon and walked on it. And then he returned to earth and went to his bed and slept. And next morning, he got up and walked into his bathroom, looked into the mirror and saw the face of Neil Armstrong looking back at him. And, despite having walked on the moon, he had the same questions as before he left the earth: Who is this man? Who generates the life inside this body? What is Neil Armstrong doing here?’
When you investigate the backgrounds of many of the scientists and adventurers who have been at the cutting edge of human progress, you discover that their religious inquiring has been increased rather than reduced by their experiences at the frontier of human discovery. Many astronauts, especially, appear to have had their faith enhanced as a result of closer encounters with the universe. Although Neil Armstrong did not speak publicly about his personal beliefs, he was known to believe strongly in a personal God. The last act of his fellow Apollo 11 astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, before the door of the spacecraft was opened, was to take out a Bible, chalice and sacramental bread and wine and, before making history, to celebrate Communion. John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, said afterwards: ‘To look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is to me impossible.’
All of these feelings of wonder and humility are spared us by the bunker. Warm and safe, we watch the heroes of human adventuring and come to the opposite conclusion to theirs: that human omnipotence is one step closer, the mystery of reality a little more amenable to total debunking, and God one step nearer to obsolescence.
Those who tend to state things in these terms will usually have themselves had no part in the project of human progress, or scientific innovation. They simply lay claim, for ideological purposes, to the advances made by others. They are bystanders, appropriators, not protagonists or participants.
It’s all a matter of perspective. Perhaps the most salutary image we received that hazy July day of the (putative) moon landings of 1969, was not of the magnificent desolation of the moonface, but the poignant perspective from that vantage-point showing Planet Earth, apparently suspended in space, humanity balanced perilously on its surface, a mere balloon suspended in the immensity of space, but teeming with intelligent life. No image has more beautifully captured the fragility of human hopes for omnipotence, or of man, imprisoned within his desires, doomed to sabotage his own efforts by misusing his freedom and his control over reality.
How do we think an anthropomorphised God might react to human beings arriving on the moon? I don’t think He would be so unkind as to laugh at man’s efforts. Nevertheless, surveying the extent of the heavens he has made, He might well be forgiven for smiling to Himself and thinking, ‘How nice that these people have at last managed to leave their own planet!’
Yes, it’s wonderful that man has been to the moon, if he has. I celebrate it now, just as I celebrated it then, as the dramatisation of a great longing. We didn’t have a television set in those days, but I marked the occasion, as a 14 year-old boy, by climbing the highest tree in the neighbourhood — an old sycamore tree at the end of the commonage into which all the back-gardens of our street had run. It was a big tree, perhaps 80 foot or more in height. I climbed carefully and with no sense of certainty that I would make it to the top. I timed it to coincide, as far as I could, with the moment when Neil Armstrong would walk out on to the surface of the moon. I saw him do it, but only in my heart. I was there, but only in my imagination. When I reached the topmost branches, I waved upwards, uncertain of as to who I was waving to.
I wasn’t looking for a way to remember. Fourteen-year-olds do not calculate in that way. Perhaps at some level I understood the Apollo 11 mission as a way of getting closer to God. Or, perhaps I was seeking to go someplace no man had gone before. Actually, as the philosopher, John Gray, has observed, both responses are ‘religious’ — the idea of faith in human progress as much as belief in a higher intelligence, both seeking to transcend what is ‘obvious’. We seem to hold the two perspectives within us, moving between them. Perhaps they represent not opposites, but a single complex mechanism for dealing with our situation, ostensibly improvable but essentially fixed, and ultimately mysterious.
The idea of reaching the moon was, for mankind, an exhilarating one. What’s ridiculous is what we have concluded from this achievement: that man is God, and therefore that no other God can exist. For all the spectacularity of man’s achievements from the human viewpoint, they amount to next to nothing from the viewpoint of creation. Man landing on the moon is, in terms of the vastness and mysteriousness of reality, no more impressive than a baby learning to crawl — a momentous moment for the watching parent, but utterly non-eventful for everyone else. And all this assumes that the story of the moon landings is true — a narrative from which the numbers of dissenters are swelling all the time.
This condition — Don’t-You-Know-that-Man-Has-Been-to-the-Moon?-Syndrome — afflicts our culture in every aspect of its contemplation of the human progress project. Implicitly, that project proceeds on the basis that what is being built is the independent self-consciousness of the human species, free from dependency and remote authority, a kind of retroactive installation of man as architect of himself and reality. But contemporary mankind’s generalised sense of impending omnipotence is a trick of false logic. ‘Progress’ is being made, but not necessarily by ‘us’. Even those involved in the advances of human knowledge and reaching may themselves feel no part of such a project. The idea of such a project is a culturally-transmitted chimera, in which most of us have but a vicarious involvement.
And, true or false of the official narrative, what a trick was played on us that July day in 1969, as though in a conspiracy between technology and the ether! Neil Armstrong afterwards insisted that the phrase he used was entirely his own concoction, but this has been disputed by others, who claimed that, for months beforehand, a special NASA sub-committee had been canvassing opinions with a view to formulating the first words to be uttered by the first human to walk on the moon. Presently, according to one telling, Neil Armstrong was given a piece of paper with the agreed phrase.
When the big moment arrived, Neil Armstrong drew a breath and began speaking. On Earth he was heard to say: ‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’. This is what the recordings testify that he said. But this sentence actually makes no sense, because the words ‘man’ and ‘mankind’, taken in context, mean exactly the same thing.
Thinking the words spontaneous, we glossed over the tautology. We knew what he meant. Afterwards, Armstrong claimed that the voice-activated transmission system must have cut out momentarily after the fourth word, tracelessly excising the indefinite article that would have made sense of the agreed phrase. ‘One small step for a man…’ To be frank, the recording doesn’t sound like that: there just doesn’t appear to be any time in there even for an ‘a’. Years later he conceded that, in the excitement of the moment, he may have fluffed the line.
When I still believe unequivocally in the official narrative, the phrase as delivered had about it a sense of something intended as an ironic commentary on what was occurring, as though added by some cosmic scriptwriter seeking to heighten every conceivable irony of the occasion. For, without the ‘a’, the phrase was rendered nonsensical, a circular platitude that unintentionally underlined, in its first clause, the relative insignificance of one human step, and then, in the second, associated this relative inconsequentiality with the entire mission.
There is one left-field possibility: That — the moon landing being a fake — Armstrong deliberately changed the line, with a view to sending a message down through the decades, to history, that he was — perhaps — going ahead with the ‘mission’ under protest. The idea of ‘one small step for man; could, in this context, be read as a truthful depiction of what was happening, whereas the ‘giant leap’ might be a giant leap of the human imagination, which was certainly happening willy nilly. Perhaps something deep in Armstrong’s religious sensibility revolted against the words he had been instructed to say, prompting him to drop that ‘a’ because he wanted no part in the future misappropriation of the moon landing by pseudo-rationalists and atheists whose ‘explanations’ themselves end up at a point in time and space beyond which they are unable to take us — especially if it was not real.
Or perhaps it was the ‘hand of God’ or some agency acting on His behalf, seeking to maintain such understandings. Perhaps, by neatly snipping out that fragile ‘a’ to emphasise the tautological nature of human ambition, some benevolent force was dropping a subtle hint concerning the folly of thinking that we can climb out of our essential condition, gently reminding us that we make more and better ‘progress’ if we think of it as getting closer to God.