Because My Moon Sign is Pisces: the final demise of my scientific worldview (April 30, 2022)
The Final Demise of My Scientific Worldview (originally published in the severed branch)
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I grew weary of the non-denominational Protestant megachurches and their electrical guitars. Of their determination to turn spirituality into a hip and high-tech entity that would appeal to tattooed Goths from the local high school. Sitting there during Easter, I thought about all the money they spent on the state-of-the-art special effects surrounding the drummers and bassists who played religious rock music.
On the big screen, a man explained how finding Jesus had helped him stop smoking joints. He never knew church could be so meaningful. What saved him, I wondered? I thought that, before joining this church, he might have been one of those people who think being Christian means sitting in some boring building with stained-glass windows, wooden pews, and elaborate altars. Listening to some boring sermon. There, he’d have to listen to a diligently trained choir singing in Latin. Or he’d have to sing songs from the 1500s out of a dusty hymn collection. And what if the pastor or priest tried to make him stop listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd and Limp Bizkit?
But then he went to the local “non-denominational” Protestant megachurch. There he discovered that the Christians make rock music too. “Who ever knew church could be this cool?” asked the pastor. The man saw how they invest thousands of dollars in cinematic Easter services involving professional actors, musicians, dancers, advanced effects of sound and light, experienced costume designers. And no, the characters on stage aren’t dressed up like the filthy uneducated peasants from first-century Judaea.
They are dressed as modern humans, donning designer jeans and flowery dresses and even underwear. They serve some of the poor, but they only open their churches in wealthy areas, enticing membership from the upper middle classes. This pays for various theatrical events, transforming the church into a center for the performing arts. Generous donations from satisfied customers fund the pastors’ large homes.
And here, surrounded by respectable society, the once lost soul found God. He started listening to Christian rock music like DC Talk. He gave up Limp Bizkit. He replaced Eminem with Mercy Me. He left behind the darkness of marijuana and cocaine.
He didn’t miss the modern world, the drugs and rock and roll. Because the church provided him with a fabricated knock-off version. Drinking of the Holy Spirit became his drug. Perhaps a better version. Since at least here in the Lord’s bosom, he could find a tightly woven community, offering art classes to children and social enrichment.
“This isn’t a religion,” the Christians at the megachurch insist. “It’s a relationship.” A personal relationship with your best friend Jesus Christ, who is always there with you.
He could feel Jesus with him, filling him with a joy unlike anything he could ever get from listening to Limp Bizkit or commissioning tattoos. He was serving God, and this gave his life meaning. It spurred him to drive around on Thanksgiving morning donating large meals to the poor. It fueled in him a tenderness for his fellow humans.
At least that’s how it used to be. Lately, I like to think he is finally discovering that there is something wrong here. No one seems to have real faith. He sends his children to youth group. There they are warned against the scientific and sociological teachings which the schools will soon force upon them. Evolution, the Big Bang, Climate Change, Gender as a Social Construct, Sexuality as a Social Construct. They are constantly steeling themselves with arguments against these developments. They sign up for field trips to the Creation Museum. They can walk the halls learning about the dinosaurs that lived on Earth with humans.
He identifies the problem. The Evangelicals around him are too scientific. They are incapable of simply accepting the mystery of creation; they need to reassure themselves that they have a complete blueprint and history of existence. It is not enough for them to simply feel the love of Christ and spread it to their neighbors, like he did back when he last got high. It all came so easily when he was in touch with his animalistic side. But here, these sober Christians act so threatened by science. As if its findings could send the faith of their children crumbling to the ground.
Evangelicals are corrupted by science. It’s why they rid their churches of incense and icons; they have forsaken the spiritual illumination which comes only by embracing the sensual side of the human, by breaking free of the logical mind’s constrictions. They worship Reason now, and that’s why they built a life-size replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky. That’s why they built models of humans riding triceratops. They did these things out of a need to present themselves as rational, reasonable people.
They are too scientific. There is no mystery to the modern Evangelical apologist, who insists that every aspect of reality is easily explained by biblical mythologies like the Flood or the Garden of Eden. These, they say, are supported by scientific evidence. Thus they seek to win converts not by appealing to the inner certainty most humans seem to have that yes, we have souls, and that yes, there is a higher power, and that yes, there exists independently of our minds some kind of Good and some kind of Evil and something far more complicated than that simplistic dichotomy.
Rather, they appeal to science and reason. They write textbooks about an Intelligent Designer. They publish studies trying to prove scientifically that Genesis should be taken literally. Which in the end only makes them faithless. Faith is a valid feeling fueled by internal intuition and spiritual perception; it needs no evidence to be credible. Yet they persist in their determination to reconcile their faith with the external findings of science, lest those findings turn their children into animals.
And yet what’s wrong with their kids being animals, really? Do the little kitties not have souls, too? Do the little doggies not have spiritual experiences? Why can these people not just say that Creation is a mystery which no human being can ever hope to truly understand? Because they have given into the Scientific Worldview, which suggests we can understand it, which suggests we can fully comprehend the fabric of the universe. Their faith is only valid if it can be proven with scientific evidence. If only they could love God like a little doggy does when it’s running through the woods.
Their religion is not about a spiritual relationship with Christ. It is about providing them with an answer to what they view as a scientific question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” They submit God as a hypothesis to be tested. Not just God Himself, but the mysterious stories presented in the Scriptures. Then they assert in their books and museums that all these hypotheses prove true.
As a sixteen-year-old, I was once with my family at the Cave of the Apocalypse on the Greek island of Patmos. This is where St. John the Divine had his visions of how the world will end. It’s where he dutifully recorded what he saw, passing it down as the book of Revelation. I watched the hordes of people streaming into the cave, seeming to worship not God but the location itself, the rocks and icons, the incense and sensuality. They prayed to graven images and behaved as if animistic spirits inhabited these surroundings. “This is idolatry!” I exclaimed to my mother. Not to mention, it was entirely irrational, a celebration of rocks divorced from reason and logic.
It was the animalism that disturbed me most. These people seemed to embrace religion like a stereotypical Neanderthal might - not thinking about it, not analyzing it, not questioning the content of their methods of worship. They were like pagans. They had accomplished the wicked task of dehumanizing themselves, descending into nature, flesh, sin. Simply feeling it, perceiving it. They gave their bodies and souls over to the vilest sensual aspects of Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholicism, to all the most heathen rituals adapted from pre-Christian Europe and Asia Minor. And in the end, they fell down prostrated not before God but before inanimate objects. This, I thought, is sinfulness. This is a giving into the flesh rather than the spirit.
In contrast, I supported my own faith with thoughtful science and diligently crafted reason. This is why I stayed up late into the night listening to recordings on the Internet of people screaming in Hell. Scientific proof that there were souls being tortured by demons deep inside the Earth. It is why I read so many articles about the Nephilim. These were the human-demon hybrids who non-Christian scientists now foolishly claim to be our supposed cousins the Neanderthals. But I knew that the human eye is like a machine, a piece of technology far too complicated not to have a designer. The mere existence of the eye is scientific evidence of His Being. Like Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, I relished how the banana fit so perfectly into my mouth.
God was a scientific entity, belief in whom did not require any faith. Just look at the banana, which He designed to slide so easily right into my mouth. Proof of a Creator if ever there was any. God could now be explained logically and rationally. All thanks to the combination of a well-designed fruit’s perfect fit, the scholarly analysis of Scripture, the mountains of geological evidence that the Flood really happened, and the complete rejection of the absurd lie that is radiometric dating (except of course when it is used to prove events in the life of Christ).
A “faith” based on “evidence” like this is no faith at all. Faith is belief without evidence, and the modern Evangelical Christians hardly have any faith. The money they invest in their pseudo-scientific museums and Creationist degree programs testifies that their faith is weak enough to be quickly unsettled by science’s most basic findings. Thus they are constantly seeking to guard themselves against scientific advance. They are determined to prove to themselves that their beliefs are grounded in reason and logic. They lack the faith to simply believe. The closest thing they have to faith is a confidence that scientific evidence ultimately proves there is a God. But this is more of a dogma fueled by a deep fear of leaving science unchallenged.
Faith embraces unexplainable mystery, and the fundamentalist megachurches are seemingly incapable of doing this. As of a 2019 Gallup poll, 40% of Americans believe humans were created by God in their present form without evolution. I met one at work. I was shocked at first, but then I reminded myself I am only in a flimsy majority.
The scientific assertion that God created man in his present form, and that this is the correct basis for human biology, seems as vital to their religion as their relationship with God. They do not have faith so much in God as they have a confidence that there is no mystery to reality, since everything is explained rationally by a combination of Creationist science and the infallibility of Scripture. With the most dogmatic atheists, they share a fundamental confidence in rational explanations. Alas, the Evangelicals have been so polluted by their obsession with science that they have mistaken the whole purpose of spiritual belief, relying on it as the basis for biology class.
The Creationist scientists treat the Bible less like a mysterious mystical Scripture and more like a biology or geology textbook. They believe they can understand it as clearly as if they were reading a bestselling pop sci book. In so doing, they demean it, eliminating the power of its poetry by lowering it into a nonsensical contest with The Origin of Species. Terrified to leave anything about reality unexplained, their faith would crumble in the face of any uncertainty about the precise origins of mankind. So they transform the Bible’s spirituality into a guide for resolving their scientific anxieties, rather than as an answer to questions having nothing to do with science.
That is why my Evangelical faith collapsed into atheism as soon as I read Richard Dawkins. A “faith” based on reason and logic is a weak one indeed, requiring both constant reinforcement and the relentless suppression of contrary evidence. Real faith is not shaken by contrary scientific findings, nor does it need to muster up any evidence to support itself. It simply perceives and senses the truth of what it believes. It experiences that truth as a reality. It feels the presence of the soul, so it believes in the soul; it feels the presence of God, so it believes in God. Content with mystery, it sits aloof from the confident ravings of Creation Museum curators, whose life project is to twist scientific evidence into a tool for reassuring themselves.
This week I started listening to religious choral music while reading Mary Oliver’s poems about the serene beauty and living souls of nature. I realized I’d still be a Christian today if only they had given me what my soul really needed. Not a watered down modern world but something feral and wild, something sacred, something that activated my most primitive spiritual instincts rather than attempting to tame them with reasoned apologetics. Something I couldn’t understand and couldn’t explain and couldn’t defend, but believed anyway. If only I could have gone down into the Cave of the Apocalypse. If only I could have fallen to my knees before the incense and the idols and the spirits of the saints. If only I could have revered the great mystery like an animal might, never daring to think a mortal like me could truly understand Creation.
Instead, my Scientific Worldview was always ultimately rooted in my Evangelical Christianity. The whole project of my atheism was a way of rejecting Evangelical pseudoscience. All I accomplished was to trade a lesser science for a higher science. What stayed the same was a lack of faith. All because I had refused to descend into the animalism of the flesh, fancying myself a rational human. Now I do descend.
Now I want to go into an Evangelical Christian man’s backyard. I want to draw a sacred circle on his patio and summon up a spirit. I want that rich suburban homeowner to come outside. “Hey you!” he will shout. “Get the Hell out of my yard!” Then I want to lure him into my rituals. “Give into the animal within you,” I will say. “Come with me, be naked with me in my sacred circle.” I will take his hand, gently guiding him onto his back in the grass. There I will collect his elixirs. “But what is the evidence for this?” he might ask me. “You will see,” I will tell him. He will watch me labeling the various test tubes, preparing them for storage in my refrigerator. The one in my basement, where I strive every night to achieve my alchemical projects. There I study the stars and the planets, awaiting the right time to achieve my magical ends.
“How can people possibly believe in astrology?” For a long time I asked myself this. It’s a question that sometimes seems to get many scientifically-minded people quite worked up, even angry. They are struggling to comprehend how an educated person could think that the relative position of the planets and the stars at the moment of their birth has some kind of causal impact on their personality.
But what I always loved most about people who believe in astrology is how completely indifferent they are to these interrogations. In contrast to the siege-mentality of Evangelical Christians, who live in such terror of science that they build their own science museums, the astrology people seem to feel no need to argue with anyone. They hear the scientists’ objections and they simply embrace their own perceptions. They believe it without any shame, because they feel it, experience it, know it.
Suppose my scientist friend comes over to my house. Assuming I own one someday.
“How could the position of stars cause anything to happen here?” he asks.
“It’s not necessarily a causal relationship,” I say to him. “It’s the principle of ‘as above, so below.’ Everything in the universe is a whole. Everything is a part of one thing. Everything is connected, so it matters where planets are at any time. It’s a system of correspondences. And the planets and stars exert enormous force and energy. ”
He hesitates, startled I am not joining him in our age-old arrogant habits of mocking astrology. “I know you’re just playing devil’s advocate,” he says, reassuring himself of my rationality. “But that still makes absolutely no sense at all. Those stars and planets are so far away. The gravity is minimal.”
“But they are still connected to me, aren’t they?” I ask him. “And there is a correspondence. Besides, the Moon isn’t so far away, is it?”
“Dude,” he says. “You can’t be serious.”
I shrug. “Is it not a fact that the Moon was in Pisces the moment I was born?”
“Dude,” he says. “What?”
“It’s a system of correspondences. It corresponds to certain forms of energy.”
“Energy?” he asks. “Spiritual people are always talking about energy. What is energy?”
“It’s a vibration,” I say. “You can feel it. There are many vibrations in the universe.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because you can feel it.”
“No I can’t.”
“That’s sad,” I say calmly. “Most people can. Although like you, they use science to suppress it. But that’s just a delusion of modern ideologies.”
Baffled, he stands up in frustration. “A delusion,” he repeats. Then he laughs, reassuring himself that I’m still the same rational man. “I don’t believe you. You’re fucking with me. You’ve always been an atheist and now you’re fucking with me.”
“Not always,” I correct him. “I was an Evangelical, remember?”
“That was so long ago,” he says.
“Don’t use science to suppress your perception of the energy running through you.”
“It’s a delusion,” he says. “Andrew, please stop this. You’re freaking me out.”
“Like there isn’t a charge in the air this very moment. Look at you. You feel it!”
“It. Is. A. Delusion. You are living in a delusion dude.”
“One which must be suppressed by scientific reasoning, I suppose.”
“Yes! Or do you want to live like a fucking caveman?”
Indeed I do, I think to myself. I want to look at lightning and know it is the work of a god. I want to bow down in worship of the sun. I want to take it as self-evident that my soul is intimately connected to the Moon, the planets, and the stars. I want to know that each and every plant is a ripple of the whole entire universe, with a soul that transcends the spiritual and the physical. I am at last indifferent to the findings of science, indifferent to any need for experimental evidence emerging from well-designed research. It doesn’t matter to me now. The Moon was in Pisces the moment I was born, and this is a correspondence which no one can deny.
“I would love to be a caveman,” I tell him.
He sighs. “Alright,” he says. “I’m done with your games. You don’t believe this stuff.”
Should I tell him, I wonder, about my special relationship with the planet Neptune? Should I tell him what I really think about the Moon?
“It matters,” I tell him, “that the Moon was in Pisces at the moment I was born. It governs my internal emotional life. It’s why I spend hours walking around in the park listening to Phoebe Bridgers and being all internally emotional, daydreaming while looking at the trees and the lake. That soft sad music is like the sound of my internal self. It’s a correspondence. It’s why I am always dreaming about a spiritual reality. ”
“You sound like a moron,” he says. “What evidence do you have for this crap?”
“It’s a correspondence,” I say again, more seriously. “Please, come with me down into the basement. Let me show you how I embrace the mysteries of the world.”
He looks at me with trepidation. But then he follows me down into the basement. There, a large table plays host to my many alchemical pursuits. I’ve been working on them for months, in the hopes that I will finally create a powerful elixir. “I mix these ingredients every day,” I say, “testing my theories with resilience and persistence.”
“But why?” he asks. “Holy shit. Dude. Is that mercury?”
“It is,” I say, shrugging as I open up a mysterious book from the thirteenth century. I have been studying this for over a year now, struggling to interpret the instructions. They are shrouded in the complexities of medieval symbolism. “I am still trying to decipher the meaning of these images.” I flip through a few pages, showing him these drawings stretching back to the 1200s. “I need you to test one more theory.”
“Have you lost your mind?” he asks “How can you seriously do this every day?”
I look at him with bemusement in the dark. “Because I am a Capricorn,” I say. “We are renowned for our self-discipline.”
He starts to cautiously back away toward the stairs.
“Wait,” I say. “I just need one thing from you. So I can create my elixir.”
“Andrew,” he says, “if this is some kind of joke, please stop now.”
“Shh, shh… it’s okay,” I whisper to him. “Hush now, friend. Just drink this potion and we can proceed.” I pour a steaming, hot-pink liquid into a vile and hold it out for him. “Drink it. I have been experimenting with hot pink for days. Just drink it. Trust me.”
But he backs away, looking even more frightened than before.
“Look,” I whisper. And I show him the glow of my laptop screen. The charts, graphs, and tables where I have recorded my alchemical observations, where I have plotted out my magic, where I track the planets in the sky. “Hush now. Don’t worry.”
“You’re really scaring me,” he says, slightly accelerating his backward motion.
“Shhh, shhh,” I say, following him with the vile. “There there. Just drink. It’ll be okay.”
He runs up the stairs and leaves the house.
I turn to my table with a calm smile. I take a deep breath. I will have to find another subject for my tests. In the meantime, I stay up late into the night. Mixing my potions. Preparing for the moment when the planets will align for my spells. Eagerly awaiting the day when the right person will come down with me into the basement. At last, I think for a moment, I have liberated myself from the shackles of reason and logic. But there is still something wrong here. Something about this feels far too scientific.