Water

photo by Marlon Felippe

After a number of diversions, getting back to talking about animism now. :)

An old friend from out of town came by the other day, and in our varied discussions (which are usually pretty philosophical) he mentioned that it is difficult for him to believe in a God that doesn't show himself. We are both formerly Christians. I said that the beings I encounter, I encounter in actual experience. Gods and goddesses being one level of abstraction removed from actual experience, I don't have too much to do with them. A single monotheistic god is, as it were, two levels removed from actual experience, as such a god has nothing in the world which in any particular way is "his" any more than any other thing. Indeed monotheistic religions have tended to regard the actual world as something completely separate from god, which god may nevertheless "observe". The world is an object and the monotheistic god is a subject.

I told him that there was at least one exception to my agnosticism concerning goddesses: I believe in a Goddess of Water. I said that nevertheless, I do not regard that goddess as something completely apart from my experience of actual water. Mother Water, I call her, wonderful and fearful in equal proportions.

He looked at me rather incredulously and said something like, "two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen." ;)

And here I think that we are getting to something important. To him, water was composed of molecules of one atom of oxygen, two of hydrogen, period. 

To me, water was rainwater and swamp water, the power of flash floods and the gentle dew. Cool pool water, hot bath water, the water that makes up most of my body and yours, the water that makes up most of the mass of plants. Storm surge, hurricanes and tsunamis. Lakes, rivers, streams, a cold drink on a hot day, stinging winter rain, fog, fluffy white clouds. Icicles, snow, sleet. Fresh spring water. And yet here he was saying that the "real" water was one part oxygen and two of hydrogen, and that this in some sense was the "real" water. And in fact most people if asked would agree with him, which strikes me as rather strange. When asked to explain the disconnect between this abstract water and all the things I mentioned, probably most people would say that all these other things are either effects or states of water or my subjective experience of them, or water in connection with other things. Effects of water in certain circumstances.

What we are doing is taking some of our observations of something, scientific observations in this case, and saying that this is the real "something", whatever it is, rather than some of our other observations of something, which we call the subjective observations. All of this is dependent on our being able to completely objectify the "real world," which we aren't actually able to do. Nobody knows ultimately what "the world is made of," and some of the more honest scientists will admit this. We have words for what it is made of, and we therefore imagine that therefore we know what it is made of, but when you start getting down to the nitty gritty you realize we know very little. 

We speak of atoms, and that the atoms are made of fundamental particles like protons and neutrons and electrons, but much below that (and above that, even,) we are talking about "nodes of observabability". Neutrons, protons and electrons are made of quarks, which are the observable bits inside the particles - quarks which are essentially only tiny points in relation to the overall space of the neutron or whatever. What is the space between the quarks?

All sorts of brilliant scientific experiments have gone to show that the "empty space" between the quarks is simply another name for our inability to see what is going on there. We call it empty not because it does not exist, it in fact has a mass even, but because we don't have a clue what it is. We can't observe it. Atoms are in fact mostly composed of this "nothing", and hence you are mostly composed of this "nothing," but the nothing is not a nothing. It's just our inability to see.

For hundreds of years, Western science has been captivated by the idea that it is possible to have a complete understanding of the workings of everything - that you can put down the mechanics of everything on paper and then at some point you can say, "we're finished, we now understand everything." What we are beginning to realize now is that this will never happen. We will never understand everything, the universe is still mysterious. If there is no "bedrock" we can dig down to and say, "Now we can say conclusively what is and isn't," this also undermines privileged frames of reference. We can no longer say that science arrives at the "truth", but only at a truth which is more or less useful in certain frames of reference. If I were building a rocket to the Moon, I would use Newtonian physics because that is more likely to work than using woodworking techniques. It doesn't make Newtonian physics a description of the ultimately true reality, because there isn't such a thing and will never be such. If I were building an end table, I would probably focus more on the woodworking and less on the Newtonian physics. We can engage the world in various ways for various ends, but "truth" is pretty much out the window. Things are true only in narrow relative senses, as particular engagements with particular things for particular ends.

And so you say water is "one of oxygen and two of hydrogen" and I say she is a powerful goddess, two parts a benevolent, life-giving force and one part destructive and terrible. I don't say you are wrong. I certainly don't say I am wrong either.