I had a conversation with someone earlier today. We started discussing masculinity and femininity. We somehow got to talk about Native American beliefs that some tribes would believe everything has spirits. I said my only problem with that is that they are polytheistic. I believe God does permeate the universe as it were. He is not the universe of course, but his presence is everywhere.
I then told them that we do see love everywhere. We’ve just mechanized it. Let us consider gravity for instance. What is gravity? It is simply attraction. We cannot explain why the heavenly bodies are attracted to one another, but they are. We look at all that happens and because we think we know the mechanistic reason for why it happens, that we understand it all.
This got into talk about sexuality and seeing it in nature and how we don’t see it because we have a naturalistic view of the world. The ancients had nouns as masculine and feminine. We tend to think they read their thoughts into the creation. What if they read them out of the creation though?
What if this was a world of life that they saw and so many things embodied to them the qualities of masculinity and femininity? What if we returned to the ancient name for outer space? They did not call it space. They called it the Heavens. Could we not say space is filled with the presence of God? Then why speak of it as lifeless? Whether you are here or on the moon or on Alpha Centuari, God is there.
Let us consider how much something is reduced though if you give just the mechanics. Consider again sexual intercourse. Now I am a virgin, but I would have no problem telling a young man how the system works. Suppose though that I had to explain it to a young man and this young man is not in puberty yet and he has no desire or interest in girls.
Suppose I describe the whole system to him and I do it without any emotion. I just describe the mechanics. There is no talk in there about feelings and desires. I just say “This is how the system works and when it does its purpose, there is a baby that is born later on.”
I can easily imagine such a kid looking at me when I’m done. I can picture that he’d say “But everyone make such a big deal about it. From the way you described it, I just don’t see what the appeal is.” For all I know, he might even think it sounded gross like a necessary evil. If I just described the mechanics also, who could blame him?
What did we leave out? It’s not enough to know the mechanics. You have to talk about passion and desire and pleasure. You have to talk about how these two people want this more than anything else at the time and they just can’t contain it. Only then can you really understand it. It has to be more than mechanics.
Are we treating the universe the same way? The universe is the way it is. Why? God made it that way for a reason. This is where Christianity and science do intersect. It’s not just about how it works. It’s about why it works and to what end it works. Take away a designer and you leave out those steps. There is no final cause, as Aristotle would say.
And is it any wonder some of us lose wonder? If this is all the universe is, why bother? What’s so amazing about the sunrise? We know it happens and how it happens. Ah! But why did God make it that way? Could we learn something about him from it? Could he be revealing his nature?
Yes. I believe the universe works according to laws. The sexual system has rules that are to be followed if the result is to come about, but let us not think these laws are all there is. They are the way they are for a reason and you will not see that reason if all you have is just the mechanics.
Support Deeper Waters on Patreon!
