Letter #95: The Very Thought of Woo

In defense of the googly-eyed among us.

In our discussion last week about how God talk can go stale, one thing kept coming back to me: the strange appeal of New Age balderdash. As we were talking about how hard it is to bring Christian truth into vivid alignment with contemporary reality, I thought, Peyote bros and crystal girls don’t have this problem. They may have other problems, like stringing a sentence together. But when it comes to commanding the credulous awe of the madding crowd, Vision Questers have it locked in.

Consider the brilliant astronomer Fred Hoyle, who coined the term “big bang” in a derisive huff. “The reason why scientists like the ‘big bang’ is because they are overshadowed by the Book of Genesis,” he said in one interview. Mysteries like cosmology were too sublime for Biblical crudities, he thought. Sophisticates like Hoyle could only believe in smart guy theories like—and I am not making this up—alien life-seeds from outer space.

It’s a sign of Hoyle’s first-rate mind that he did concede there was ample reason to believe in a “superintellect” overseeing the cosmos. But it’s actually kind of fascinating to me that he was so determined not to call that “superintellect” by His readily available name. I guess he thought it sounded cooler to believe in—again, not making this up—“panspermia.”

As they say online: many such cases. Last week I mentioned Joe Rogan’s lengthy interviews with the whack job Terrence Howard, to which Rogan’s contributions were mainly “huh” and “wow.” Compare this with the detailed scrutiny he brought to his conversation with our friend Steve Meyer, who argues in cogent detail for a creationist reading of scientific fact. It’s not actually that our culture isn’t spiritual. It’s that we’re misty-eyed over outlandish quackery one minute, and minutely skeptical of conventional theology the next.

Part of it might just be the advantage of novelty. When you’re literally making stuff up as you go along, you can always pull some shiny new bauble from the hat you’re already using to talk out of. But entertaining as it is to make fun of kooks and cranks, what if we take them seriously just long enough to wonder where they’re getting their appeal? 

One answer might lie in their sense of wonder. Something Googly-Eyed Persons actually share with the best Christian mystics is a daring imagination. What’s striking about, say, Dante or C.S. Lewis is the limitless originality of their ideas: interdimensional angels. Flaming eagles of pure justice. That’s the same artistic fertility that spangled the ceilings of medieval chapels and peopled the heavens with headless saints. These days, that kind of wild-eyed speculation is monopolized by neo-pagans and tech fantasists. But it wasn’t always so. 

Ironically, one reason we’re so timid might be that we’re too sure of ourselves, too locked into our certainties—and consequently too fearful to venture beyond them. Yet surely we of all people should know that God’s reality will be more fantastical and surprising than any science fiction novelist would dare to dream. I wonder if that’s one thing the kooks and cranks have gotten right.

Love
Spencer