The moon and Oakley the wonder dog

So before sitting down to write this evening (for day three for those of you keeping score at home) I had to take our dog, Oakley, out for a walk.  Oakley is a year and a half old beagle mix who is a remarkable little dog.  He has developed this “cue” for us when he is ready to go out where he will walk over to the TV stand in the living room and will tap on the glass door on the left side.  He will then turn to look at us to ensure that we picked up on his sign and then he will either wait for our reaction or will begin to tap again.  We have no idea where he learned this, why he thought it would work, why that spot to tap rather than, I don’t know, the actual door.  He just started doing it one day and has continued ever since. 

So as I sat down to write I was summoned by Oakley to take him for a walk.  It is one of those crisp February evenings here in North Carolina that reminds you that it is indeed winter but also that you don’t live in a place where it is all that bad.  There was a light bit of fog with wisps of clouds shrouding the moon and planets just enough to soften their light but not enough to cover them completely.  And around the moon shimmered a perfect, albeit faint halo.  I have always found the sight to be one of wonder ever since the first time I saw it as a boy visiting Lake Geneva in Wisconsin during a wintery “outdoor education” trip in sixth grade.  I can remember little of the trip as vividly as I can that moon.  A harbinger of worsening weather we were told (a wives’ tail that, like most, has more than a bit of science backing it up.)  That natural beauty of it burning the image into my brain.

I have never been an overly religious person.  While being born, and raised Catholic I always found myself enchanted by the questions that my inherited faith attempted to solve for but could never find myself accepting the answers.  An affection for science in my youth doomed my acceptance of the doctrine of Rome.  Later, I went on to study philosophy in college.  I found the elegance of the great arguments compelling but yet not enough to tip my proverbial scales.  I particularly liked the Ontological Argument which simply stated that it was inconsistent for a “perfect God” to not include existence in her list of traits.  While I may have conceded the central point, I did point out that there were several other traits that would, by their inclusion, limit the perfect nature of God (not the least of which was the ability to invoke a will on the rest of us that involved God making choices.)  I also enjoyed Pascal’s Wager for believing in God (If you believe and there is no God you are none the worse off but if you don’t believe and you end up wrong…well.)  A compelling argument where you can’t escape feeling more than a little coerced.

In the end, however, I have so far chosen to simply believe in the questions.  There is so much more that we don’t know than we do.  I have always had a soft spot for theoretical physics (which is many times closer to philosophy than to science.)  I was reading the summary of a new book out that was talking about a new area of physics where the answers are likely not knowable by us.  The answers are not inaccessible to us because of who or what we are but rather that the ability to comprehend the answers is inconsistent with the world in which we live.  It is roughly akin to spending your life’s work studying how to smell blue.  In some ways, however that is how we all are.  Where did we come from, what happens when we die, what is our purpose (if any,) why is there evil, tragedy, war, famine, the Kardashians? All those profound questions that we search for answers to through both science and religion are likely always going to be outside our reach.  That doesn’t mean we should not continue to search for answers, we should.  We should however also allow others to conduct their own search.  And we need to realize that if it is all unknowable, then the “answers” that others have arrived at may be just as valid as yours.

I love the questions, I really do.  And on a cool winter night while walking Oakley the wonder dog under a haloed moon I can take comfort in that whatever the right answer is, be it some incarnation of God or complex scientific constructs, it will be elegant, profound and…. Beautiful.