For some reason in GCSE religious education classes at school I was obliged to learn various arguments in favour of the existence of God. I wouldn't like to speculate on why this was considered important for our development, but one of them has stuck in my mind ever since. This argument is known to theologians and philosophers as the Watchmaker Argument, after its formulation by clergyman William Paley:
In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there; I might possibly answer, that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it had lain there forever: nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there. ... There must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers, who formed [the watch] for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use. ... Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation.
The implication of Paley's little story here is that the watch is clearly distinct from the heathland around it because of its complexity and clear purpose, and that therefore the universe, in its vast complexity and yet apparently regimented design, cannot possibly have come into being without the guidance of some intelligent entity, just like the watch could not have formed from random chance. But if we accept that the universe is indeed the result of intelligent design, wouldn't that also extend to heathland? Unless we claim that the heath is the only part of reality not subject to God's law (and I've had some experiences on heathlands which make me hesitant to fully discount that possibility), it seems like the difference that we are seeing between the watch and the surrounding landscape is not, in fact, the one which Paley wants to think it is.
I would argue that the factor that actually distinguishes the watch from its surroundings is not its complexity, but rather its relative simplicity. Certainly the heath has more moving parts. The chemical sterility and smooth geometric near-perfection of a brass watch-gear has an almost childish quality next to the coarse, random form of even the most unremarkable pebble, its shape and makeup implying millenia of geological action: erosion, shattering, smoothening. I'm sure I'm not the first person to make this critique in the over 200 years since Paley first wrote his analogy, but I'm not actually here to debate the existence of divine intelligence. The thing is, people always seem to want to underestimate the complexity of reality, to flatten the world until it does look simple next to even a basic piece of clockwork.
I think a lot recently about the human tendency to mentally sort things. It seems like a fundamental part of our cognition, or at least a difficult one to avoid, to look at anything and attempt to divide it into categories, or understandable collections of causal links. In fact we seem to naturally reject the idea that aspects of the world might not be understandable or predictable. Benjamin Labatut's excellent semi-fictional When We Cease To Understand The World (or, interestingly for this topic, in the original Spanish, Un Verdor Terrible, a terrible verdure) depicts this reaction from none other than Albert Einstein, when confronted with a seemingly irrefutable proof that the machinery of the universe simply cannot be fully understood. His famous quotation "God does not play dice with the universe" is here presented as a weak and spiteful protest from a man afraid of the implications of an unpredictable world.
To go outside, especially in England, is to see this fear of the irregular spread across the landscape. Fields are carefully divided and straight-edged as much as possible, fenced or hedged to prevent mixing of species. Rivers have been straightened, forests clearcut and wetlands drained to 'tame' nature into some kind of predictable or controllable (and profitable) form. Of course it has turned out that the world resists such simplification, and efforts are underway to reverse these previous flattening attempts and the damage they have caused. Oddly, ideas like re-meandering, reforestation and rewetting are seen as radical new approaches by many, whether or not that's a good thing, as if the current state of things is and always has been the norm.
It may be a mistake to hope that the average member of the public could ever have a complex and nuanced understanding of any niche topic, let alone the natural world. However, I have still been disappointed to see an otherwise positive trend towards attempting to connect with the natural world run up against this 'flattening' tendency. It's hard to come up with specific examples that illustrate what I'm getting at but there's something in the aestheticisation of wildlife, of moths and forests and fungi, which seems to reject the complex, messy and dirty reality. I can't begrudge someone for not knowing as many species of fungus as I do, but I wonder if it's possible to make widespread the idea that the world is simply more random, more confusing, often more disgusting than they might wish to understand it, but that it is so much more beautiful for all that.
On a recent trip around Scotland I was fortunate to see many beautiful sights. I found myself wondering what it was about these things, from mountains to the ocean, from waterfalls to beaches and from patterned stones to long-abandoned ruins, that I found so pleasing. The conclusion I came to is that all these things are irregular in their forms, strange and semi-random. Even the greatest geologist in the world given as much information as they desired could not predict the exact form of a rock formation, even if they might be able to approximate it from knowledge of the rock type and age and exposure. An architect or a structural engineer might tell you which part of a structure will be first to fall, but they couldn't possibly know how it will look after it hits the ground. I think there is a kind of freedom in that. If you walk through a city, there is a certain understanding of how things are 'supposed' to be. There are laws governing the movement of people and vehicles and the shape of roads and paths, but beyond that there is an expectation that a road will lead to somewhere in the most efficient way possible, or that it will lead anywhere at all. Buildings are constructed within specific parameters of shape and size and leave a certain amount of room to allow pedestrians to enter or leave. Expecting natural processes to conform to any kind of human requirement or expectation is an almost ridiculous non-sequitur, and so by existing in natural spaces we let go of the idea of making sense of the world, and we adapt ourselves to the environment rather than the other way around.
Even in artificial objects I believe the most beauty lies in the unpredictable aspects. The ivy slowly climbing a neatly-constructed building or the irregularity of brushstrokes on a canvas, the grain patterns on even the most precisely-crafted wooden furniture or the stains on a well-used teapot all add endless attraction over something smooth and clean and unblemished. Perhaps that's just how my mind works, because many people spend half their lives trying to polish and bleach and whitewash away all of these things. While a clean white teapot is hardly the end of the world, it seems to me that wanting one is a kind of minimal, harmless expression of the same mental process that turns meadows to monocultures or blasts through mountains.
I find myself wondering if people have always thought this way. The smooth and clean and mentally busy experience of the world which is normal to so many people now is an extremely recent phenomenon in human history. Would these thoughts even make sense to someone living before the industrial revolution, before the Acts of Enclosure, before agriculture? So much of leftist politics now seems to be about trying to make people understand that the systems and categories and semantics that they cling to are pitifully inadequate to encircle the whole of reality, and radical ecology is no different.