When the “Lightning” Strikes

"Lightning, a kite, and an almanac by Dick."  It almost sounds like a Jeopardy clue under the category-heading of "Founding Fathers."  And the contestant who can hit their button first and say "Who was Benjamin Franklin?" gets the points.

So frequently repeated are the story of Franklin flying a kite in the lightning storm and the title of Poor Richard's Almanack that we rarely get a chance to learn about the other contributions of Franklin. (Whose face and build are also widely recognized from the many portraits of him, some with the illumination of a lightning strike.).  Some people in the general public might know a bit about his having lived in France for awhile as part of his public service for his countrymen back in America.  Or maybe know about his fiddling with science even beyond that kite.  But we hear little about his religious habits or his spirituality.

That omission is why I was struck by one page in the book Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries: The Founding Fathers in the Age of Enlightenment by Tom Shachtman. That author emphasizes that:

"The Founding Fathers' science was in no way opposite to their religion. 
The notion that science and religion were antithetical
is a nineteenth-century construct."

And in regard to Franklin, Shachtman writes:

"By the age of fifteen, Franklin wrote in his Autobiography, he had become
a doubter of organized religion...until he chanced upon printed lectures that
tried to debunk Deism: [Franklin wrote:] ' They wrought an effect on me quite contrary
to what was intended by them, for the arguments of the Deists...appeared to me
much stronger than the refutations; in short I soon became a thorough Deist.' 
In his twenties, he set out his religious beliefs
in a ten-page liturgy, complete with a hymn."

Benjamin Franklin's explanation of his newly found religious orientation continues:

"I think it seems required of me, and my Duty, as a Man,
to pay Divine Regards to SOMETHING....
When I stretch my Imagination thro' and beyond...the visible fix'd Stars themselves,
into that Space that is every Way infinite, and conceive it fill'd with Suns like ours...,
then this little Ball on which we move, seems, even in my narrow Imagination,
to be almost Nothing, and my self less than nothing."

There were two things I liked in these passages.  The first was Franklin's ability to remain sufficiently open to change his mind.  He had apparently began reading the arguments trying to refute the existence of God because they aligned with his doubts about organized religion; but he turned in a different direction when he found the refutations lacking.  That turn in direction put him on a course where, several years later, he could put to pen his own majestic expression of religious belief.

The second thing I liked was Franklin's expression of his need to feel reverence (the paying of "Divine Regards," as he interestingly put it). Our media today are so quickly drawn towards brash voices and dominating personalities that it is easy to forget that we are often better served by humility.  And in religious and spiritual lives, humility is cultivated through following a path of reverence.

~ ~ ~

How do you think we can find a good midpoint between the extremes of brashness and timidity?

(Quotations are taken from Shachtman's Gentlemen Scientists and Revolutionaries, © 2014, pp. xii-xiv.)
(Both pictures are details from the originals, both of which are in the public domain.)

Dead Stones and Fossils of Life

There is probably no object within Nature that has not been used as a symbol sometime in human history.  Sometimes it is hard to understand what association provoked a particular object to become overlaid with certain meanings.  But not in the case of stones.  The obvious hardness of stone invites symbols and metaphors drawing upon that quality.  ("He had a heart of stone.")  So also does the association of timelessness prompted by rocks' not changing visibly during a single human life.  ("It is carved in stone.")

Given these associations with solidity, there is irony in that in the late 1700's, stones became associated with change -- immense change!  So much so that people felt that the stability of human existence was crumbling. In the late 1700's, the Scottish geologist James Hutton developed the principle that geological features of landscapes, even as immense and striking as they sometimes can be, had come about through slow geological changes over an immense amount of time. The shocking message of the stones was that, viewed from a wide perspective, they had been forever changing. Moreover, the message in some of those stones -- fossils -- was that there had been forms of life long before human history.

Today, a couple centuries later, most people have accepted that our human history is but a tiny piece of an immense cosmic timeline.  A timeline so incomprehensible that we have to use abstract numbers or metaphors (such as a 24-hour cosmic clock) to try to grasp it. Our human urge to connect with life encourages us to bring this matter of immense time down to a level we can relate to.  Down to a level we can hold and touch and feel.  That is what a small fossil can do!

I remember when, as a child, I first had a fossil explained to me.  I do not recall what type of tiny animal the fossil was an imprint of.  But I do remember how, as I held the hard stone and examined the small shape, I felt as if I were holding not an imprint but the skeleton of the animal itself.

John Muir
  (1838-1914)

For people of James Hutton's era and of the 1800's, an additional shock was the message in the fossils that entire species of life had gone extinct.  How could Providence allow such a thing? Other minds, however, were able to look at the matter of fossils and extinctions from a different perspective.  A more favorable perspective seems to have been more accessible for people who could see God's Spirit as being present through all the course of time, and as caring for all forms of life, not just human life.  For example, the American naturalist John Muir, looking at stone fossils as if they had a written message in them, put it this way:          "In looking through God's great stone books made of records reaching back millions and millions of years, it is a great comfort to learn that vast multitudes of creatures, great and small and infinite in number, lived and had a good time in God's love before man was created."

~~~

Do you remember when you learned about fossils?  Is there some fossil you particularly recall?

(The photograph of the fossils is by cobalt123 and is used under a

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.)