Mundane Paradise?

While we were living in Egypt, to escape the heat and dirt of the slum, and to find help for my son, who was very ill, we, with our three young sons, took a flight to Switzerland and lived in the mountains in a two-person pup tent for over a month. The campground, nestled high in the Alps beside a rocky river, was like paradise. We didn’t need to find a doctor for our son, which was our intention, as just being out of the heat and dirt, he got better.

One morning, we decided to climb straight up the mountain beside our camp, where there were no trails. It wasn’t easy with three little boys, the youngest, Tyler, who had taken his first steps just the day before, riding on our backs. As we approached the timberline, hand over hand up the very steep mountainside, where the pine trees were becoming twisted dwarfs before disappearing, we suddenly came over a rock to a beautiful grassy meadow. It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen, and I had seen a lot of beautiful places. I heard the chiming of cow bells, a familiar sound in the high Alps. Thinking we were in the remote wilderness, I turned and, to my shock, I saw not only cows grazing, but a chalet and barn sitting there, beneath the towering, ice-clad peaks. Unbelievable! If you have watched the old movie, Heidi, you’re familiar with the scene.

I imagined being born there and growing up working on that farm, would your appreciation for the beauty be lost? Your surroundings seen as just rocks, dirt, and cow manure of an old farm?

When I first moved to our valley twenty-two years ago, it was like a dream. My commute to work on the mainland was met each clear morning with a wall of snow-capped mountains and, often, fields of flowers. It took my breath away, so much so that often, after work, I would drive the fifty miles into the heart of those mountains.

Eight years ago, we moved from our original Pacific Northwest home in the woods to our lake house. The first morning I drove down our driveway, seeing our modest little farmhouse, our new home, sitting on the shores of a lake, across from a mountain, equally, my breath was taken away. Can I be this lucky?

So, I ask myself, like the Heidi family, have I gotten used to the surrounding beauty? In some ways, I have. I only drive into the big mountains now, three or four times a year, often with out-of-town guests. But it still takes my breath away, even standing in my kitchen each morning, looking out across our lake as I eat my toast. I feel so lucky. I still feel the same way when I see my wife as I did when I saw her for the first time, forty-two years ago.

Since my near-death and arduous battle to stay alive, over the past seven years, the beauty around me seems sharper, more real. It is like C. S. Lewis’ book, The Great Divorce, about a mythological bus trip from Hell to Heaven, he describes arriving in Heaven as a place like Earth, but more real. Even the grass was as hard as diamonds and the colors of a far deeper tone. Similarly, one of my favorite Robin Williams movies after Popeye was What Dreams May Come. In that movie, Chris Neilson (Robin) goes to Hell to rescue his wife and brings her to Heaven, which is so brilliant that it’s like living in a Monet painting.

Earth Dwellers

I am going to try to make a case for why we search for an irrational, mysterious God… which I think is no, not sin, but unhealthy, so focus and follow me as I make this one point.

In 1990, when I left evangelicalism, I knew I had been lied to, but I wasn’t sure where the lies ended and the truth began. I wanted to find the truth at all costs and, like in science, I knew that the greatest enemy of truth is confirmation bias, from my cultural orientation. So, I tried hard to remove my biases, as any good scientist would. In those days, I tried to imagine myself as an alien from a distant galaxy, experiencing human culture for the first time.

Two years later, when I moved from studying history and natural sciences as an agnostic and back to theism and studying the Bible, I did the same thing. It profoundly changed my perspective, realizing that most of the things I had been taught by the evangelicalism I was in, as Biblical dogma, came from our culture, being projected into the words of the Bible by our cultural confirmation bias. Through a serious study of its history, you can trace the breadcrumbs of these Biblical claims back to their man-made origins.

As Earth dwellers, being born into this incredible cosmos and planet, it is mundane to us. Dirt and rocks, weeds, and trees. Therefore, we imagine, to know the creator of the rational cosmos, we must experience something other—an irrational, “supra-natural” experience, what we call mystery. This is the internal argument we see Peter Enns have in my last post. Once again, I will be clear, I have tremendous respect for Peter, and he is not the one off, I am. The Christian culture in 2026 is overwhelmingly in the Enns direction, me, a simple salmon swimming upstream.

I do think, even after fifteen hundred years, we are still living in the shadow of the early Christian Gnostics. They gave a formidable battle to the emerging church, with their beliefs that this physical world is dirty and created by the devil, and only the “other worldly” or what we call “spiritual” is good.

I wish you knew how incredible and mysterious this cosmos really is. Most people take it for granted. I’m not only referring to the aesthetics discussed earlier.  I wish you knew how complex, ingenious, and mysterious the real world is. I could write book after book on this topic and still not scratch the surface. The way a single cell works is more complex than the International Space Station. The way the material world is engineered is mind-blowing. If you have just the taste of the bizarre (from our perspective, but not irrational) and intricate cosmos, you would never need to go into the imaginary experience to find God or meaning.

If you are interested, I will leave you with a video and a discussion between Neil deGrasse Tyson (cosmologist and science educator), Chuck Nice (a stand-up comedian who puts things in layman’s terms), and Brian Greene (particle physicist and mathematician) talking about what we know about our subatomic world, or what you may know as Quantum Mechanics.

I heard a Christian speaker, who knew little about science, say that “Quantum Physics proves that God lives in the irrational and mysterious.” I will correct him by saying that it is NOT irrational. Even the quantum world, as mysterious as it is, is profoundly rational. If it were irrational, a proton would be made up of two up quarks and one down quark one minute, and be made up of two down quarks and a banana, the second minute. But the rationality is that every proton in the cosmos has the precise makeup of two up and one down quark and has a very predictable nature. The God I know is a mathematician and a magician, as simple things like gravity are truly magical. No one has a clue how it works. But the magic of the cosmos, once it is perceived as mundane, is called “natural,” and thus, for most Christians, inferior.