Kristor writes at VFR:

It seems to me that when Darwinians express awe or reverence for nature, they are not so much dishonest as inconsistent. Honestly and straightforwardly carried through to their logical conclusions, their principles make a mockery of such feelings. Yet they cannot help having these feelings that they do have. They have these feelings because it is bliss to be alive, bliss to exist; it is bliss to know, and so to know is to love, to adore, and willy nilly to worship. Existence is essentially beautiful, and holy. Whitehead has a wonderful passage somewhere, I think in Process and Reality, where he talks about the “massive enjoyment of mere existence.” His point is that we don’t customarily notice how profoundly gorgeous it is merely to be. We take that for granted, and grow absorbed in our worry about money or work other superficial things. When we have been sick, and begin to feel well and normal again, the pleasure and beauty of it can be exhilarating. Then we grow accustomed to it again, and forget about how wonderful we still feel. So also with merely living.

When I was 17 and hiking along the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, I slipped on wet granite and slid down a slippery rock slope into a flume that poured over the edge only 10 feet away. I hit the water–only about 8 inches deep, but really cooking along over slick smooth rock–and it shot me toward the lip of the waterfall. Desperately I tried to stop myself, but it was no good. I was going over. I would fall 300 feet, and die. So I resigned myself to that–there was nothing else to do–and over I went. I landed 15 feet below in a pool that poured over the real edge 10 feet away. I bounced out of the pool and up onto the bank, about 12 feet in a single bound, and shook myself, incredulous. My life had been given back. I laughed and laughed. Not because it was funny, but because it was impossibly beautiful.

Every part of the world, every rock and mote of dust, is, just is, an instance of joy, and of pulseless longing. And this enjoyment, this pleasure in mere existence, is so incredibly vast, that the super-added pleasures of beer or wealth or success are like a thin veneer upon its glorious weighty depth. We experience more joy than do rocks, more complex and interesting pleasures; but only by a little. For to be at all is to have been created by God, and is also in some degree to worship and adore him, and to enjoy him (even if one is unconscious that one is doing so).

Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ, said it beautifully, perhaps best:

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. 

So when Darwinists or atheists go on about the beauty and majesty of nature, they are expressing the truth of the General Revelation of God in all his works, that cannot but be expressed by every being. They sing the Benedicite Omnia Opera Domini; they know not what they do, nor reck his rod.

                                                                      —- Comments —

Laura writes:

Kristor is right: There is a radical inconsistency in the atheist’s worship of nature that cannot withstand scrutiny. The atheist is susceptible to idolatry and the depressing realization that, as Thoreau said, “Nature cannot satisfy the expectations it arouses.” This brings to mind Guy Waterman, whom I wrote about here. How could a man who loved the mountains kill himself at the top of one of the most beautful peaks in America, a mountain he had defended from desecration by less sensitive hikers?

Not everyone is capable of rapture in nature and for those who are, it can be a curse if they demand from rocks and trees answers rocks and trees cannot provide. My sense is that Waterman ultimately became enraged at the mountains he loved.

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