I have no idea how Macfarlane would feel about this basic matter of fact, but his works have been greatly influential for the way I understand my faith in God. As far as I know Macfarlane would categorize as a naturalist, albeit one who flirts with the appearance of a kind of pantheism (he has never said as much, but it often sounds as though he is). And, truth be told, he is generally made to be exclusive to the common household atheist.
And yet, I find two things to become incredibly aware in his writings- his books act as a welcome and I think astute critique of the common atheists allegiance to rationalism, and second, if nothing else, what he tends to underscore is the need for a more coherent foundation if we are to attend for both the natural world and our place in it.
As he writes in the introduction to his newest work, Is a River Alive?, a book that hits at one of my great loves (rivers),
“This book is a journey into an idea that changes the world- the idea that a river is alive.”
Changes the world. Not by adding another idea, another data point, into the mix, but by necessarily recasting it through a different lens. A different worldview. A different way of seeing and explaining and making sense of the world we observe and experience. He wants to “daylight long-buried ways of feeling about water, both in history and in us- and to see what transformations occur when rivers are recognized as both alive and killable.” (p18) Meaning, how we see rivers is deeply connected to how we see the shape of the world. Indeed, how we relate to the world we believe to be true.
The first important point- this is how lenses work. A fact that I find gets lost in appeals to rationalism. Rationalism is a product of a reductionist point of view, the act of reducing the world and its constructs to the same basic material properties. To reduce the world is, in this view, to know the world in a way we can rationalize, And yet appealing to knowledge in this way, as Macfarlane helpfully brings to light, can only ever have one aim and result- manipultation and control. As he calls it, “the conquest of nature…” (p18) Which ironically, doesn’t actually require us to know the world at all. In fact, manipulation and control often disguises ignorance. In this sense, a “hard boundary” (p19) has been established between life and non-life, precisely in order to reframe the world as resource without losing ourselves in the process.
“For those who, like me, have been largely raised on rationalism, to imagine that a river is alive in a way that exceeds the sum of the lives it contains is difficult, counter-intuitive work. It requires unlearning, a process much harder than learning.”
He fruther describes the problem in the following way:
“We might say that the fate of the rivers under rationalism has been to become one-dimensional water. Rivers have been systematically stripped of their spirits and reduced to what Isaac Newton called “inanimate brute matter.” (p19)
He uses blunt phrases like “entrap nature as a calculable coherence,” pointing out that in this approach “nothing is good in and of itself; everything must be good FOR something.” Meaning: knowledge reduced to date points that can be manipulated and controlled as resource.
Which of course brings up the question: what do we do with ourselves, the knowers in this equation? Where do we situate ourselves in a world that has been reduced to resource?
“Meaning, as well as water, can be impounded: can still and settle behind dam walls of thought… WE have become increasingly waterproofed…. One of modernity’s many vanishing tricks is to disappear the provisionality of its own conclusions.” (p20)
I love that line. “Disappear the provisionality of its own conclusions.” In other words, the justification for modernity’s appeal to rationalisim, the conditionalism that its conclusions rest upon, are made immune to critique, unable to get beyond the basic fabric of its own reductionism. Here he uses words like homogenization and disenchantment to define the ultimate outcome of such an approach, relating this distancing rationalism creates between meaning and facts directly to the truthfulness of our language. The language we use to define and describe the world we inhabit.
Here he finds the act of applying a different lens, one that he feels is more coherent with the world he observes and experiences, to be a liberating process. As he puts it, “Hope is a thing with rivers.” So it is with rediscovering our own place within the natural world. “I began these river-journeys in doubt and uncertainty. I knew the question to which I wanted a response to be a formidably hard one, even as I wished it to be simple.” (p31)
Indeed. One of the most difficult processes for me personally was learning how knowledge of the world was deeply dependent on my lens. When you feel like the lens you were handed no longer makes sense, its not just a matter of letting go of a world you once thought you knew, its a matter of losing your place in that world. And yet this also leads to rediscovery. To greater knowledge. To, in Macfarlane’s words, transformation. This is why, as he puts it, “how we answer this question matters deeply.” Yes, I do come to slightly different conclusions than Macfarlane. I question whether the natural world has the ability lay claim to its own worth and identity. And yet I have been deeply appreciative, especially as he explores one of my great loves, of his approach and his critiques of the worldview (rationalism) that once held me in its grip. As I said at the top, although atheists tend to claim him as their own, his work remains a deeply rooted critique of the coherency of that position and its often blind dependency on rationalism. The invitation to breathe life back into the very world it has deconstructed is a powerful one. One that continues to awaken me personally to the existence of God.
The Stories of my Life 