MARILYNNE ROBINSON: What we know now about reality includes any number of things that are hard to conceive of: quantum indeterminacy, quantum entanglement, dark energy. It has not been proved or disproved, but our universe is a hologram—three-dimensional information encoded on a two-dimensional surface, but the thought is eminently respectable, scientifically speaking. In other words, the small model of tangible, testable reality that is invoked by the atheists of the moment is an understandable error, like the geocentric universe. In absolute terms, metaphysically, no issue is resolved by the fact that reality is infinitely stranger than our senses can tell us—far more volatile and complex, startlingly aloof from our expectations. But the claim to sophistication and enlightenment that is so much of the power of the anti-theistic argument is shown by contemporary science to be unpinnable. That argument is itself unscientific, therefore unsophisticated. Because the conversation on both sides—the religious and science sides—is fundamentally naïve (these terms are imprecisely used), our creationists and atheists are fighting endlessly over the same ground. This is true because they share a cultural legend of disillusionment which tells us the heavens can be or have been emptied by science and reason. This legend defines the world for both of them. Religion is rejected on one side, science on the other. These words have for the partisans the meanings their opposites give them. All religion is to be understood as the defensive recoil from the Scopes trial, plaster dinosaurs and apocalyptic dread. All science is earnest about itself, still capitalizing on the high-ground won for it by the Scopes trial. These supposed adversaries are shackled together by shared assumptions, and their struggles are fierce and noisy, but of little moment to the rest of us.

We are, however, sharers in the dominant cultural myth even if we feel no reason to join in an angry faction in response to it. What we have long been educated to call modern culture has been based on the notion that, at last, we have the means to understand and explain the phenomena that awed and bewildered our ancestors. We have supposedly learned that the world is essentially simple—its apparent complexity only the compound of simplicities—and a construct that could be disassembled and read back to its origins. In fact, simplicity is nowhere to be found: not even in the smallest particles to which science has given inquiry any degree of access. Be that as it may, for some reason, the assumption of this unlimited capacity in humankind for understanding reality was to be felt, by us, as disillusionment and loss. The Renaissance gave us grounds for celebration in this voracious capacity for knowing. And yet the modernist interpretation was not, by any means, inevitable. Oddly, yet inevitably, when these same reductionist models that made our knowledge of reality a dull curse were brought to bear, they exposed an inner primitive with a snake’s brain.

This declension is often treated as the consequence of the great modern wars, but it predated them by decades and might, therefore, be more reasonably seen as cause than as effect. In any case, something dreadful has always been afoot among humankind, and something magnificent, as well. Of course, the same is true for us. But we have added an element of dullness and shrunken expectations, and in the face of all this, somehow, a posture of heroism was settled on—a heroism better dressed than most, but ready to bear the full weight of emptiness on its elegant shoulders. Of course, the whole construct is wrong. If there is one thing science has not done, it is dispel mystery. It has shown our thinking to be startlingly parochial, precisely in its assuming that by mere extrapolation—by leveraging what we thought we knew against what remained to be known—we would achieve an exhaustive understanding. We could have learned better—from Descartes, or Newton, or Locke—but the metaphysical elements in their thought are purged away in our reading of them, as if this most prescient and pregnant aspect of it were merely an odd convention. In fact, deep reality is of another mind than ours, just as these thinkers assumed it was. And we have known this for more than a hundred years—that is, for almost as long as we have been modern.

If there were a genuine interest, on the part of the new missionaries of atheism, in enhancing the public understanding of science, they would say that there is a deep, vast, fluent complexity in reality that precludes nothing at all—neither unexpressed dimensions nor multiple or parallel universes. It is by no means a closed system, nor can it be recruited to the support of any final statement about the nature of things. My own faith is inductive and intuitive, I suppose; in any case, it has been consistent through the whole of my life, poured into the cultural vessel of a particular religious and intellectual tradition which has engaged me for years and satisfied me very deeply. And this is no proof of anything. I do not recommend that anyone do more than follow whatever inkling she or he might have that existence would be a better experience minus this curious nostalgia for an old, illusory disillusionment. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Cioran, the schoolroom poets of disillusion, should be left to retire into their centuries as Pope and Dryden did into theirs.

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