"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Dr. Harold Raley

In his uneven but fascinating book The Everlasting Man G. K. Chesterton remarks that "there runs through all the rationalistic treatment of history this curious and confused idea that difficulty is avoided, or even mystery eliminated, by dwelling on mere delay or on something dilatory in the processes of things."

But we need not stop with history. In fact, this dilatory or, as I prefer to call it, eonian perspective is even more evident in modern evolutionary science. Consider some of its premises. Billions of years ago, we are told, a hypothetical pinhead of unimaginably dense primordial matter exploded for no discernible reason into our immeasurably extended universe. Then as billions of years rolled by, randomly vibrating atoms danced around statistical impossibilities and evolved into butterflies, and whales, and human kind.

Throughout the eons there was law and order in the apparent randomness. Beethoven's 9^th was already implicit in the gaseous soup and swill of proto-earth. Indeed, according to physicist Stephen Hawking, the very notes of Beethoven's music could have been precisely predicted — along with everything else — had we but known all the possible pathways of happening in quantum mechanics and had we possessed a mammoth computer to process them. This is an inkling of the elusive "theory of everything" that Hawking and others are pursuing, apparently indifferent to the oft-proven principle that theories that explain everything finally explain nothing.

According to this general evolutionary theory, in the vastness of eonian time nothing somehow nudged itself into something, and then with the passing of more eons, this something turned into everything. And if along the way we should encounter a problem, or a contradiction, or an outright impossibility, there is an easy solution: just wait a few billion years and all will be resolved. For in evolutionary theory, time is the real author and finisher of our being. This appears all the more remarkable when we learn that throughout this long alchemical transmutation there was never a Creator to guide the process. Nevertheless, the creation engendered in this unchaperoned atomic dance is intricate and complex beyond the understanding of our greatest minds. If true, then it means that mindless matter turns out to be far smarter than any of us, for we cannot even begin to duplicate its doings. Given enough time, the very dirt and pavement under our feet will probably outthink us all. If this were to happen overnight we would call it magic; spread out over the eons, we label it evolution. In either case, it sounds more like hocus-pocus.

But if eonian evolution is an insult to our intelligence, the vastness of the universe looms as an affront to our spirit. Once we thought that mankind was a special creation residing at the very center of the cosmos. But since Galileo, astronomers have preached that our world is not the middle of anything. On the contrary, we discover that our sun is but an insignificant star and Earth its mite-sized satellite at the tail end of one of the outer spiral bands of the Milky Way, itself an inconspicuous galaxy matched and overmatched by billions of others. We are dwarfed by size and intimidated by distance and in the grand scheme of things nothing we are and nothing we do seems to have any final relevance. Puny, insignificant, a speck of cosmic dust, these are the common descriptions of our world and our human condition.

Is there no valid rebuttal to Galileo and his scientific descendants who have taken delight in deconstructing human centrality and uniqueness? As Believers, of course, we can answer first that by faith we believe in a higher destiny beyond this inconsequential world and, second, that if the universe is so wonderfully made it makes sense to believe it to be the work of a Wonderful Maker, and third, that He shaped our understanding in such compatible likeness to His own that we can comprehend in our imperfect way the splendor of the divine creation.

But it may be that we do not have to skip this present world in order to understand our earthly life in a totally different and centralizing way. It is true that you, and I, and everyone else, live in a virtually limitless physical universe, but in a certain radical sense the universe also is encompassed within my life, else I could not encounter and comprehend it at all. My life is where I encounter all forms of reality. Life, therefore is not another "thing" but the "where" and "wherein" of things, and in this special sense it is what Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset called "radical reality" in which all other realities, from the remotest galaxy to the beloved person standing before me, are encountered and experienced. There is more.

The realities I encounter appear as "my circumstance"; they assume a posture circum me, around me. From this we come to a startling conclusion: my life, and your life, and the life of each person — is the real organizing principle of reality inasmuch as everything appears circumstantially, i.e., spatially, temporally, and historically within it. Nearness and farness, here and there, then and now, in time and space are referential functions of my life and my perspective. Contrary to what we have been taught in modern times, this humanized, circumstantial point of view is the only authentic standpoint from which to interpret and understand all reality, whereas the false perspective is the abstract, objective point of view, the view seen from nowhere, the view of human life from an unreal point unrelated to my life and my world.

And where do I — and everyone else — stand to contemplate the universe and all that is in it? Here, of course, as always in the center of my circumstance. God has, or so it seems, so marvelously made the universe that the life of each person is a unique circumstantial center of reality. What I see and understand no one else can see in exactly the same way. It is a splendid privilege given us, worthy of a splendid Creator. Philosopher Julián Marías calls "my life" — the life of each person — the real organization of reality, which means among other things, that in order to understand things we must begin by telling a human story.

But what about cosmic time in this equation? What about the awesome billions of years that supposedly passed before I lived and the undetermined number that will elapse after I am gone? I offer only two concluding thoughts. First, time also appears in dutiful circumstantial relationship to my life. The billions of foregone or future years are just so in relation to me and in this sense — as well as others too lengthy to go into here — they are contained and ordered in my life. In other words, they are a part of my reality because they form part of my circumstance. In this sense, at least, "my life" is an open reality that suggests immortality. But it is a story too long to tell in this short essay.

Second, I offer only this unsupported intuition. It seems curious to me that science considers this imputed numerical and temporal dimension of things, which I sense is thoroughly subjective and personal at bottom, to be an objective and impersonal standard by which to measure reality. For the queer way time behaves in relativity theory — and in the lives of persons — makes me doubt its "objective" character.

Finally, therefore, can we not reply to Galileo and his intimidating descendants that from our standpoint — the only authentic one from which to understand things — the sun still rises and sets, the stars still shine in circumstantial relation to our life, and that as far as we know and see this world still remains uniquely central — to God and to us?

Dr. Harold Raley, former Dean of Fine Arts and Humanities at Houston Baptist University and presently Professor of Foreign Languages and Scholar-in-Residence; former Head of Foreign Languages at the University of Houston and Oklahoma State University. Author of seven books and over a hundred articles and studies on philosophy, language, and literature.

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