While watching the news today, the commentator was reporting on a tragic event in the U.S. A fire had claimed the lives of 9 firefighters. These firemen had wives, children, siblings, parents and other loved ones. The loss and the grief that surrounds this event is immeasurable.
The news commentator said something interesting and telling. She referred to the event as something incomprehensible. My ears perked up. Incomprehensible? Why incomprehensible? The fire was sad, tragic, heart-rending, but it is totally comprehensible. It’s pure physics. Everything about the fire and the deaths of these men is indeed comprehensible.
“Ahh, but wait a minute,” you say. She is not talking about physics. She is talking about the ‘why’ question. Why did this have to happen? The assumption behind it is that there is some purpose to the lives of these men, the fulfillment of which lies in some transcendent being’s control.
We cannot escape it, can we? No matter how hard we purge our secular institutions of religion, we smuggle the terms in anyway. An event like this can ONLY be incomprehensible if there is a transcendent purpose to life. If life is nothing more than a long chain of genetic accidents and only the strong survive, and if that belief comes naturally, then the last thing you might say about this horrific accident is that it is incomprehensible.
It is very telling that it’s incomprehensibility is one of the first things that naturally occurs to us. Dawkins would say it’s the result of a meme; a kind of virus of the mind. I say that if it’s genetic, God created it. Who knows? Maybe atheism is the meme?
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