I am overwhelmed into awe by scientists’ descriptions of earthly phenomena—awed to the core of my being. One such is the geologist’s description of the Snowy Range in Wyoming:
The Medicine Bow Mountains have a core of Precambrian rocks. They contain the boundary, the Cheyenne Belt, between the Wyoming Province to the NW and the accreted Proterozoic continental crust to the SE (Karlstrom and Houston 1984). The Wyoming Province consists of Archean rocks that are locally intruded and (or) overlain by rocks of Proterozoic age, including the lithologies present in the West Glacier Lake drainage basin. (1)
Among the “certainties” (see yesterday) most present in Texas, (2) is the certainty that the Earth is "young," between 6,000 and 10,000 years old. Enough said. I’m not entering a debate that should have ended in Appalachia in Tennessee in 1927 along with Prohibition. What a time of certainty that was: the state said the Bible was literally true and federal law told Americans what [not] to drink. The backwoods folk of Tennessee demanded strict adherence to one legal certainty while freely and proudly flouting the Constitution regarding the other. Creationism and moonshine. What a combination!
If people want to be stupid and drunk, that’s not my concern. They need a seizure or two.
Back to the Precambrian: it comprises most of the history of our little planet.
Nearly 4 thousand million years passed after the Earth's inception before the first animals left their traces. . . . the Precambrian. . . makes up roughly seven-eighths of the Earth's history. . . .the most important events in biological history took place. . . Earth formed, life arose, the first tectonic plates arose and began to move, eukaryotic cells evolved, the atmosphere became enriched in oxygen—and. . . .multicellular organisms, including the first animals, evolved. (3)
Overwhelming! Life didn’t come along, apparently, until the planet was four thousand million years old. How old is that, anyway?
ROSENCRANTZ: It could go on for ever. Well, not for ever, I suppose… I wouldn't think about it, if I were you. You'd only get depressed. (Pause.) Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end? (4)
I like to think about the Precambrian core of rocks overlain by rocks of Proterozoic age (part of the rising and movement of those tectonic plates) of the Medicine Bow Mountains of Wyoming. It is not a terrible thought (perhaps because it’s not eternity; even Psalm 46 seems to think that's possible: "Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea."). Rudolf Otto helps me think about the phenomenon. He recalls Abraham’s saying to God in Genesis, 'Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes.' This, Otto says is
a self-confessed 'feeling of dependence', which is yet at the same time far more than, and something other than, merely a feeling of dependence. Desiring to give it a name of its own, I propose to call it 'creature-consciousness' or creature-feeling. It is the emotion of a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures. (5)
When I am in mountains (any mountains), I have a kind of “creature-consciousness” that I don’t have elsewhere. I was born in Douglas, Wyoming—about 100 miles from the Medicine Bow Mountains. For sixty years, those “rocks of Proterozoic age, including the lithologies present in the West Glacier Lake drainage basin” have had a primordial attraction for me. My creature-consciousness is never far away from them. I don’t feel dependence when I am conscious of the Medicine Bow; I do, however, feel a sense of awesome “nothingness” in contrast to the awesome force (call it God or whatever you want to) that put this all together. And the tiny millisecond of my life compared with four thousand million years. . . .
I’m going to spend a few days in the Medicine Bow this summer. I’m hoping to experience once again the awesome sense of nothingness. Or, perhaps it’s an overwhelming sense of belonging that not even epilepsy can negate:
Feeling Earth’s sacredness involves the kind of knowledge that philosophers call knowing by acquaintance—the way that we know and love a close friend or a familiar place. That kind of knowledge is grounded in compelling personal experience of a person or place, and, unfortunately, many of us in the developed world are so isolated from Earth and its creatures by the trappings of civilization that we have little real experience of Earth as it really is. (6)
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(1) Rochette, E.A. " The Glacier Lakes Ecosystem Experiments Site: Geology." In: Musselman, R. C., technical coordinator. 1994. The Glacier Lakes Ecosystem Experiments Site. Gen. Tech. Rep. RM-249. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station. p. 20-22. This article was written and prepared by U.S. Government employees on official time, and is therefore in the public domain. http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/7477(2) "At its March 25-27, 2009, meeting, the Texas state board of education voted to adopt a flawed set of state science standards. . . .creationists on the board. . . .eventually prevailed with a requirement that students examine 'all sides of scientific evidence.' Additionally, the board voted to add or amend various standards in a way that encourages the presentation of creationist claims. . . ."
The National Center for Science Education April 1st, 2009.
http://ncseweb.org/news/2009/04/setback-science-education-texas-004710
(3) Waggoner, Ben. University of California Museum of Paleontology
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/precambrian/precambrian.html
(4) Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. (Act II)
(5) Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Chapter III. 2nd. ed. New York: Oxford University Press (1958).
(6) Fisher, George W. “Placing Ourselves.” Zygon 39.4 (December 2004).
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