In the beginning was the Cause. And the Cause was without purpose or agency. And the Cause was neither Good nor Evil. Rather, it just Was. Immediately thereafter came the Effect. There was neither intention not design, yet the Effect followed inexorably and inevitably from the Cause, because that is How Things Work.

The Effect in turn became a cause, which begat another effect, which became a cause and begat another effect, and so on and so forth. A mind-boggling number of causes (and effects) came and went. Things continued along like this for an Exceedingly Long Time.

Verily, one day a cause occurred which was unlike all the eleventy-gazillion other causes preceding it. It was a cause, but it was also an Action (just as square is a rectangle, but a rectangle is not always a square), because it was accompanied by some small degree of purpose that all the causes before it had lacked. The Action inevitably created an effect, but since the cause got a fancy new name, the effect got one too, and it thusly became the Reaction. And the Reaction was Equal to the Action, but was also Opposite to it.

Another (slightly less) Exceedingly Long Time passed. Causes and effects continued to happen, yea unto every single nanosecond. Some small portion of the multitude were actions, followed unwaveringly by reactions, equal and opposite though they were. As time unfolded, there appeared actors, and actions, of increasing subtlety and complexity.

Agency and purpose were increased on the face of the world. The connection between cause and effect became apparent. The predictable pattern of their relationship was observed by many, and ignored by many others. And slowly, the ones who understood how effect follows cause were more successful than those who did not. And they did breed like bunnies, and spread throughout the world.

And it came to pass that some actions were planned in advance, in expectancy of their reactions. And the planners were those who understood best that effect follows cause. They observed that their actions did cause reactions. They learned that they could achieve desirable effects simply by creating the correct causes.

But they looked upon the world, and were troubled. For they saw effects in the world that were beyond their ability to explain. They could not work out the causes behind such things as weather, babies and death. And they saw their own intent at work, and they knew that they were able to change the world around them through their actions. And they assumed, like the solipsistic little primates that they were, that there must be a purpose behind every other cause and effect they observed. They knew not the distinction between cause and action, and they were self-deceived.

And assuming that there was some invisible agency at work behind every effect in the world, they tried to work out ways by which they could influence the decision-making process. They tried various combinations of words. They created elaborate dances. They wore silly hats.

And lo, their efforts were ineffective, because there wasn’t anybody listening to their prayers or watching their dances. The causes, like the first Cause, lacked purpose or agency, and were not receptive to such entreaties. Weather, babies and death all continued to happen as the happened.

But on occasion, Coincidence (which had been in and among all things, yea from the very beginning) did convince them that they had made any difference at all. They happened to dance on the day the seasonal rains began to fall. They prayed on the same day that the volcano ceased erupting. And because they were so adept at perceiving patterns, they remembered those supposed successes, and forgot about the villages levelled by lava flows. They failed to notice the times when they bathed in the river without having to jump out and answer the signal fire. And thusly were their biases confirmed.

And lo, because they were storytelling, idea sharing primates, they shared their success stories with each other. The better stories became very popular, and the rituals increased in both ubiquity and complexity. Some storytellers continued to believe that they had some connection to an invisible actor, who ruled over all the causes they could not easily explain. Other storytellers realized that they could convince people to do, with joyful hearts, pretty much any bugfuck crazy thing they were told, even unto giving their money to a guy who lives in a gold house in Rome, entirely foregoing bacon, or moving to Utah. And seriously, who would be able to keep that kind of power from going to his silly hat holder head?

And their ability to understand the physical world also did grow. Their science began to explain events that had been the exclusive province of the storytellers. But the stories had a head start.

And lo, any time that their science would reveal the true, natural cause behind an observed effect, others would squeal and whine and rend their garments, and complain that it was an assault on the stories. They would wail and gnash their teeth, saying that explaining How Things Worked destroyed the magic and wonder of the world, preferring an invisible, ineffable agent to an actual explanation. And still others would ignore the science altogether, or twist it out of all understanding to make it sound like it supported a particular story, even when it truly showed that the story was kind of silly.

But there were some few who did enjoy knowing How Things Worked, and who did realize that the stories were fine for people who knew not of gravity and electricity, but that folks who took microwaves, mobile phones and intercontinental flight for granted should not be satisfied with “goddidit.” They ignored the wailers and the whiners, and continued to work out the true, natural causes that shaped the universe; for they truly knew that the world was a tiny part of a vast cosmos, and that, with enough hard work and thought, they might someday understand even exactly how it all came to be. That, despite it being fantastically unlikely, we have, all and sundry, gotten to be alive and in existence, and each of us has within our oversized skulls a brain that might one day cure cancer or work out the math for string theory. Because seriously, how fricking cool is that?

And lo, the stories still linger. They cling unto relevance with the persistence of the termite infestation. They are invoked to explain an increasingly tiny and desperate collection of mysteries still unknown to science. And some folks manage to believe in both the stories and the science, despite the travails of cognitive dissonance. But truly, science is ascendant, and the influence of the stories is dwindling in all things. Except maybe American politics.

Thus endeth the lesson.

spread the panic!

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Tags: action, cause, effect, reaction, religion, science

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 10:00 am and is filed under Panic!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.