Gratitude to Whom or What?

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We have a bird feeder outside our bedroom window. It gets empty often. I try to fill it promptly and when I do, the sparrows, blackbirds and woodpeckers return almost immediately.

There’s no evidence that they wonder how the feed got there. They just eat it.

Despite all the scientific progress of the last century or so, there are still a lot of things in our lives like that. We don’t have adequate explanations about how people and things got where they are or why, nor do we reflect much on the explanations we have. Sometimes when I drink a glass of water, or use “nature’s solvent” to clean something, I think of the wonders of H2O, but usually I just drink it or use it.

Occasionally, however, I ask myself, “Why does water, which happens to be so essential to life – including my own life – exist?”

According to the Hub Pages web site, “…There is no other substance or molecule in the universe capable of interacting with as many of the elements in the periodic table as water to produce hundreds or even thousands of chemicals for life to exist. This is why water is essential.”

A radical oversimplification on a Wikipedia entry on water’s origin: It exists “due to planetary cooling.”

Scientists can tell you a lot about the formation of water, in fact, and speculate about its origins in the universe. They may be able to tell you the “how” of water, however, but not the “why" (although they may believe they are the same). That’s true of the universe and all of reality. Why something? Why not nothing?

Many scientists undoubtedly reject such questions, attempting to limit speculation about reality to things and theories that can be measured and tested. And I’m all for science’s attempts to use these tools to learn more about reality. But skeptics who are sincere in a search for God still have to think, to speculate, to ask the “why” questions.

James Schall, S.J. in an essay called, “Why Do Things Exist,” reflecting on Josef Pieper’s “For Love of Wisdom,” (http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2007/schall_existence_sept07.asp) wrote:

“We have lively minds. They are, as Aristotle said, capable of knowing all that exists. Indeed, they seek to know all that exists and are uneasy if they do not. More especially, we want to know why all that exists does exist. …On the plain of existence, we arrive already having been given what we are. We wonder, ‘Why?’



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Some people, of course, are perfectly happy never wondering about such things. Schall wrote that his reflections on existence “were caused by an e-mail, which I received the other day. A young man, evidently a teacher … observed that ‘for the majority of my students the existence of things is almost irrelevant; for them everything is how you choose to think about it.’



“For me,” writes Schall, “the existence of things is the most relevant fact about the things we daily encounter. Then I began to notice that about half the people that I meet walking across campus have an i-Pod or some similar contraption in their ears. When you pass them, they do not hear you unless you are loud. You have to wave in front of their eyes.”

Indeed, reflecting on reality understandably isn’t at the top of the list of people wrapped up in their everyday lives of work and play and taking care of families. But Schall believes such reflection is the trademark of human beings and I believe it’s crucial in the search for God.

“… The existence of things bears all the marks of choice, abundance, and truth,” writes Schall. “And if this is so, what is the primary human reaction to the existence of things, one that must be there before all others? It can only be, I think, that of gratitude….”

I guess that’s what I conclude by observing the birds at the feeder. I reflect that everything that exists out there exists without me or my kind having anything to do with it. It makes it really hard for me to accept the view that there is no meaning to the universe, that what is has blindly followed a random scheme and that all the beauty in the world has no particular purpose apart from providing some evolutionary advantage.

Schall may be right that the only rational, honest reaction to this unexplained and gratuitous gift of existence is one of gratitude, but we may ask to whom or what to direct it. Should we thank the stars, the universe, life itself? If so, I believe we would be confusing the creator with the created.

We may find it hard to accept uncertainty and doubt as part of faith, but we should not shun the obvious. The gift of existence should animate us to continue in a sincere, dogged search for God, following our hearts as well as our minds and maintaining a certain independence from contemporary “wisdom.”  

That's a big advantage humans have over the birds at the feeder.