A continual flight from wonder

In his Critique of Practical Reason, the philosopher Immanuel Kant named the two things that filled him with wonder and awe: the “starry heaven” above and the “moral law within”. The latter, however, this did not inexorably lead him to believe in God. The closest he came was when he thought that the idea of a divine cause could not be separated from the relation of happiness with morality as the ideal of the supreme good. That is, in order to have an intelligible moral dimension God was necessary from the practical point of view. Something like what the French philosopher Voltaire had in mind when he said “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

The starry heaven has evoked in many famous scientists too a similar sense of wonder and awe and, indeed, some of them have often been believers to begin with or have felt the need to capitulate later. Among them are such luminaries as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton and, yes, Max Planck the founder of quantum mechanics — that bizarre and counterintuitive theory of the subatomic world which is based on chance, probability and the uncertainty principle. In spite of this he remained a church warden from 1920 until his death, and believed in an almighty, all-knowing, beneficent God — though not necessarily a personal one.

But to the everlasting chagrin of both sides who try to rope him into their corral, Einstein, arguably the greatest of them all, unfortunately waffled in his views throughout his space-time. His wonder, though, was so great sometimes that on one occasion he famously proclaimed “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind” yet later reinvented himself with “I am a deeply religious nonbeliever”. Whatever that means.

Shakespeare on the other hand had adifferent take altogether on this thing called wonder. A well known sonnet ends with the lines, ...for they look'd but with divining eyes,They had not skill enough your worth to sing: For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise. Even though it was written in a different context it could easily be construed as a believer's idea of an atheist's anthem. Here lies the fine line they would say; no skills to sing, no tongues to praise. Cross that supposedly impregnable fortification of Maginot's mind and, who knows, perhaps you're home.