“Nature has no particular goal in view, and final causes are only human fictions.”
~ Baruch Spinoza
A few days ago, I was scrolling through my social media feed and came across a post shared by an friend. It was one of those viral, breathless manifestos that regularly circulates online, designed to evoke wholesome awe and package it as an open-and-shut case for a creator.
The post read:
How can you not believe in God when octopuses DREAM and otters have a favorite rock they carry around in a little SKIN POCKET and cows have BEST FRIENDS and bees are out there communicating the coordinates of flowers through INTERPRETIVE DANCE and they have REGIONAL DIALECTS?
Cats are PURRING at frequencies associated with bone healing??? Forests get absolutely incinerated and respond by growing FLOWERS??? Dolphins literally invent NAMES for themselves and yell them across the ocean??? Penguins are waddling around Antarctica looking for the PERFECT LITTLE ROCK to give their beloved?
CROWS REMEMBER YOUR FACE. THEY TELL OTHER CROWS ABOUT YOU. THEY TELL THEIR CHILDREN ABOUT YOU. YOU CAN HAVE GENERATIONAL BEEF WITH A BIRD.
Goats have ACCENTS. Rats GIGGLE when you tickle them. Elephants mourn their dead. Whales make SONGS and then OTHER WHALES LEARN THE SONG and suddenly everybody across the ocean is singing the new hit single.
Monarch butterflies are born knowing how to fly thousands of miles to a place THEY HAVE NEVER BEEN. Sea turtles hatch out of an egg, immediately sprint toward an OCEAN they have never seen, disappear into it for like THIRTY YEARS and then somehow come back to THE SAME BEACH?
Birds can see COLORS THAT WE CANNOT SEE. There are colors happening RIGHT NOW that we don’t even get to know about.
There are sea slugs that eat algae and STEAL ITS CHLOROPLASTS and then are just like great thanks I’ll be PHOTOSYNTHESIZING NOW. There are mushrooms communicating underground. There are seeds sitting in the dirt for DECADES like no actually I will wait.
Squirrels plant MILLIONS OF TREES because they simply cannot remember where they put their snacks.
A CATERPILLAR GOES INTO A LITTLE BAG, DISSOLVES MOST OF ITS BODY INTO ORGANIC SOUP, REARRANGES ITSELF, GROWS WINGS AND THEN LEAVES.
And you’re telling me a tiny acorn knows how to become a 70-foot oak tree? Nobody tells it what to do?!
It just has TREE INSTRUCTIONS INSIDE IT?
Your body started as ONE CELL. ONE. And that cell divided itself into a brain that can think about its own existence and eyes that can look at stars and hands that can hold somebody else’s hands and a heart that runs on ELECTRICITY without you even asking it to?
The iron in your BLOOD was made inside a STAR.
We are walking around on a wet rock covered in bioluminescent oceans and singing whales and laughing rats and birds holding lifelong grudges and flowers exploding out of FIRE and somehow we’re supposed to act like this is a normal place to live?
The Cataclysmic Scale of Nature and the Myth of a Gentle Creator
The post marvels that monarch butterflies navigate thousands of miles or that sea turtles return to their natal beach, but it completely ignores the grim arithmetic behind those journeys. Upwards of ninety-nine percent of sea turtle hatchlings and monarch eggs are devoured, desiccated, or destroyed before they ever reproduce. Nature does not design with bespoke affection. It operates through brute-force casualty rates and relentless attrition.
“What a book a Devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low and horridly cruel works of nature!”
~ Charles Darwin
More than ninety-nine percent of every species that ever walked, swam, or flew on this planet is already extinct. Life is not an idyllic garden tended for human amusement. It is a precarious, intermittent survivor of asteroid impacts, Siberian flood basalts, snowball Earth epochs, and sterilizing radiation bursts. Zooming out from the razor-thin crust of Earth, the broader cosmos is almost entirely lethal: a frozen, hard vacuum raked by cosmic rays, dominated by supermassive black holes, colliding neutron stars, and incinerating supernovas. Framing this unfathomable, hostile expanse as a custom-tailored terrarium built so humans could giggle at ticklish rats requires deliberate astronomical blindness.
The Grandeur Gap Between Cosmic Reality and Tribal Religion
Even for the sake of argument, if we entertain the possibility of a vague, philosophical prime mover, (some deistic force) that set the initial physical constants in motion, such a concession would not advance the argument a single inch toward any world religion. There is an unbridgeable canyon between an intelligence capable of configuring quantum fields across two trillion galaxies and the petty, insecure heavenly monarchs who populate ancient scriptures through the world history of thousands of different religions.
Revealed religions present a jarring contradiction: an omnipotent force capable of configuring the fundamental constants of astrophysics across two trillion galaxies, reduced to an insecure celestial tyrant obsessing over human trivia. Instead of governing a vast and indifferent cosmos, this supposed prime mover spends eternity policing foreskins, eavesdropping on private bedrooms, banning the consumption of bottom-feeding shellfish, and demanding that Bronze Age nomads slit the throats of goats over smoking altars so the scent might appease its ego.
The post trades on wholesome warmth and cozy emotional resonance, mirroring the exact psychological trick ancient theologians relied upon when they projected their own tribal politics, sexual anxieties, and kinship vendettas onto the cosmos. Where the true scale of the universe reveals an infinite, unguided furnace, dogma shrinks reality down to the vindictive insecurities and fragile temperament of an ancient misogynistic desert warlord.
The Predictive Failure of Holy Books Versus the Discoveries of Science
The scriptures of the world also suffer from a complete predictive void. Not a single sacred text, whether from the Abrahamic lineage, the Vedic traditions, or ancient Eastern canons, contains a solitary sentence of novel, testable, predictive scientific fact. If these books were actually dictated by the architect of the decentralized nervous system of the octopus or the genetic code of the acorn, they contain zero evidence of it. There is no mention of DNA, no understanding of germ theory, no periodic table, and no awareness of photosynthesis, plate tectonics, deep time, or the electromagnetic spectrum. None of them show the slightest inkling that our planet is an ordinary rocky sphere orbiting an average yellow star in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way.
Instead of anticipating the natural wonders celebrated in the post, ancient scripture consistently reflects the provincial ignorance of its human authors. It offers flat-earth cosmologies resting on pillars, a solid dome holding back celestial waters, the sun miraculously halting in the sky, strict geocentrism, and demon possession as the explanation for neurological disease. The profound irony of the meme is that every breathtaking fact it cites, from chloroplast theft in sea slugs to stellar iron forged in dying stars, was dragged into the light exclusively by methodological science. These truths were uncovered not through ancient revelation, but through rigorous natural inquiry, frequently in direct opposition to religious orthodoxies that fought every single step of biological and cosmic discovery.
The Real Wonder Needs No Myth
The author of the meme was right about one thing: this is not a normal place to live. It is astonishing, strange, and endlessly fascinating.
Where the sentiment fails is in assuming that wonder requires a cosmic puppeteer to validate it, or that natural phenomena are only meaningful if they were pre-packaged for human delight. When we trade the reality of billions of years of trial, error, adaptation, and survival for a childish bedtime story, we diminish the very majesty we claim to admire.
An acorn does not contain magic; it contains four billion years of iterative, molecular code that survived countless planetary cataclysms. That the iron in our blood was forged in the thermonuclear cores of dying stars is not evidence of an ancient tribal deity who demands blood sacrifice or worries about our diet. It is evidence that over some 13.8 billion years, matter, energy, and physical laws are capable of organizing into creatures that can eventually look back up at the sky and understand where they came from.
Reality does not need to be sanitized to be magnificent. The blind, unguided, violent, and beautiful machinery of the universe is already more than enough.
“I had thought to look at the universe as a shark looks through his own eyes, or as a butterfly does—somehow to see them from outside their own worlds. But the universe was one, and it was a slaughterhouse.”
~ Annie Dillard; Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Chapter 14, “Northing” (Harper & Row, 1974)
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