“You mean the bureaucrats who want me to justify the work in dollars and cents. Like the folks who value the space program only because it brought us Velcro and Tang.”
“Yeah.”
“I ask them how they expect to do conservation if they don’t understand evolution.”
I sighed with pleasure and relief at his simple pragmatism. “Thanks. I needed to hear that. I got into a wrangle with a creationist last evening, and it’s a pleasure to be reminded of how passionately a scientist cares about his work.”
“Why, of course we feel passionately about it,” John replied. “If we weren’t passionate, how could we devote our lives to trying to understand just a little bit more about creation? And there’s the irony. We are studying creation, after all.”
“Right,” said a bearded man across the aisle. “We just aren’t studying
special
creation. Although I’ve never seen that theory
scrutinized. I wonder how it would stand up?”
John said equitably, “I like to think I keep that theory out on the table while I work. This is science, after all. We are supposed to keep an open mind.”
The bearded man shook his head ruefully. “Doesn’t it just burn your ass, John? Those assholes from the religious right had the gall to picket us! I mean, what’s their problem? Do they feel confident in their beliefs only if everybody agrees with them? They’d never make it in a scientific arena, where the whole job is to present ideas and evidence with the hope that someone will shoot it down if you’re not right.”
John nodded his head thoughtfully.
“I had to leave just as that was heating up yesterday,” I said. “And I missed the TV coverage of the press conference. What happened?”
“You missed nothing,” said another voice.
I looked up over my shoulder. Earthworm Magritte had moved up the aisle and was perched on the arm of a seat a row behind me. Today he was wearing a clean, if threadbare T-shirt with CALIFORNIA MUSEUM OF PALEOBIOLOGY, NOT OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, across it, but the pants looked like the same pair he’d had on the day before and the day before that. From this close-up, he was no less imposing a figure than I had encountered the two previous days, but certainly more human. He had rather sad eyes and, as I had noticed before, smelled pleasantly of mint. “It was the usual sound-bite crap,” he continued blunt as ever, “all this shit about ‘Scientists are out to disprove the existence of God.’ That’s an argument that starts out with the presumption that all scientists are atheists.”
The bearded man said, “Aw, hell, I don’t believe in that God stuff, but that doesn’t mean I’m out to disprove it. I got better things to do with my time.”
I smiled ironically. He sounded like Enos.
“Well, and so what if you
are
an atheist?” said Magritte.
“Although I’ll bet a year’s pay you’re a closet pantheist. A spirit in every rock.”
“I take my spirits
on
the rocks,” said the bearded man.
“But think about it,” said Magritte, “like John says, here we are devoting our professional lives to trying to understand just a little bit more about what we see around us.” He gestured out the window toward the steep rampart of the Wasatch Range, which rose imposingly behind the city of Provo. “What am I supposed to call all this? This is
creation,
a perfectly good noun from a standard dictionary. We’re all so fascinated by it that we spend our lives studying it. You want devotional activities, try a life’s work on for size. Creation’s designs and systems are nothing but exquisite, inspired. And some half-wit with a Bible steps up and accuses us of not feeling moved by it, of not being so damned impressed that we just want to spend our lives sitting humbly at its feet.”
We sat quietly for a moment, contemplating our lives.
The bearded man broke the reverie with a defiant laugh. “I’m still an atheist,” he insisted. “You’re trying to say there’s no difference between science and religion. I beg to differ.”
“I agree,” Magritte hastened to say. “But there’s also an overlap. I looked the word
religion
up in my dictionary. The first definition is ‘Concern over the unseen,’ and things like that. The second definition is ‘A specific fundamental system of beliefs and practices agreed upon by a group of people.’ You’ve got to agree that both of those apply also to science.”
John said reasonably, “But there’s a difference in intent.”
“Perhaps,” Magritte answered. “But you get my drift. My vote is we redefine our terms, and agree to apply the term
science
to study of matters physical, and apply
religion
to the articles of faith and practice. Then we can save
spiritual
for matters of the soul.”
John said, “The picketers would have a field day with you. That’s being way too rational.”
I heard the familiar sound of Allison Lee clearing her adenoids. Her perfectly groomed face jutted into the aisle three rows back. “Yeah, face it, Worm, there are plenty of phenomena that are not rational, and science and the scientific method cannot address them, but they still occur. Like, your Aunt Mildred won’t get on a flight to Los Angeles because she has a premonition. The plane crashes. She even had a sense of the terrain in which it would crash. You can’t explain that scientifically, and yet it happens. Or little Freddy has cancer and all of modern medicine can’t heal him. The Sisters of Perpetual Prayer get together and lay their hands over him and he’s healed. Explain that. And it’s time the word
irrational
lost its pejorative connotation.”
“Just so,” said Magritte. “But now, like I say, you’re speaking of spirituality and metaphysics.”
The bearded man said, “That can all be explained by coincidence.”
“Now I would argue with the fundamentalists that you are refusing to observe that which is right in front of you,” Magritte replied.
The bearded man asked, “You having visions again, Magritte? Maybe you had a few drinks with the departed spirit of George Dishey last night or something?”
Magritte grinned, a kind of stretching of his lips over peg-shaped teeth. “Yeah, good old George. He liked to play with reality a bit, didn’t he?”
No one replied.
Magritte said, “Now, there’s something no one wants to talk about, our dear departed heretic, George. He bent the truth a bit, and we were all too chickenshit to say so in so many words. Too bad George isn’t with us today; Dan could maybe rub his nose in the facts once and for all. But then, he wouldn’t have showed, and that would have
really
frosted us.”
John said reasonably, “We asked him to debate Dan in public, but he wouldn’t.”
“Yeah,” said Magritte, “he played with our minds by accepting date after date and then never showed up. No ‘Sorry,’ no ‘I got a hangnail,’ just no George. For that and a thousand other dodges, we all despised him. But we wouldn’t say so, wouldn’t publicly rip the buttons off his uniform and drum him out of the corps.”
“So what?” asked the bearded man irritably.
“So what? So what is we did something a whole lot worse. We just closed ranks on him. Squeezed him out of every job. Shot him down behind his back every time he proposed a symposium. Left him out in the cold.”
“But he never showed us his data,” said Allison. “No one ever even saw anything he collected until it was in final mount and delivered to a museum—sign here, and here’s your bill for some astronomical sum. And God only knows where it really came from.”
As Allison spoke, I saw another familiar face peeking from behind the back of a seat several rows behind her. It was Lew, the department tech. He smiled smugly, gorging on this new gossip.
I turned my gaze away from him and focused back on Earthworm Magritte. Playing devil’s advocate again, I said, “So why didn’t you all just consider him a commercial collector? Don’t some of them have Ph.D.’s?”
Magritte said, “Because when you make money the issue, the system is corrupted. Because he started out as one of us, and we all feel betrayed.”
“Aren’t you being a little dramatic?” asked the bearded man. For him, the conversation had gone beyond intellectual sport, and he looked nervously toward the front of the bus, to see if Dan was listening.
Magritte said, “But it
was
betrayal. Like all the times he
published something fanciful or preposterous, just to disagree with Dan. Or like the time he rushed Dan’s ideas about that prosauropod into print, shoving it into the newspapers before Dan could get it through the rigors of colleague review. It took Dan two and a half years to get that one out, and by that time, it looked like Dan was stealing from George. And what do we have as a result? We have Dan running a field trip like this one, dragging the press out to the site quick before someone scoops him. Dan wasn’t always like this. George goaded him into it; we all know that. Like I say, the system was corrupted.”
I tried to imagine how Dan might have felt about a stunt like that. It must have eaten at him, plagued him like a yowling cat who stands six inches beyond the reach of a chained dog.
“So why
didn’t
anyone say anything?” I asked.
Magritte shoved his glasses up his nose. “Because it wouldn’t have been very scientific of us to drum him out of the corps; it would smack too much of the Salem witch trials. Science is an open debate. The burden of proof is on the presenter. Salem was a closed debate, where the burden of disproof was on the accused. In science, we don’t practice blood atonement.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s where the blasphemer’s blood is spilled into the earth to atone for his sins. We aren’t as direct about things. Instead, we just bury our sinners alive. You don’t agree with the status quo, you better damn well bow and scrape and kiss butt until you’ve mollified your elders and they can retire gracefully and maybe claim you as a brilliant protege. You see, that’s how it really all got started. Dan kissed ass and George kicked butt, and guess who got the grants?”
The bearded man said, “Magritte, you took too much acid back in college.”
“You didn’t take enough.”
The bearded man laughed.
Magritte’s eyes brightened behind his Coke-bottle glasses. He grabbed the bearded man in a half nelson and proceeded to give him a Dutch rub. The bus broke into roars of laughter. Bits of wadded paper flew through the air from a group of young wags in the back of the bus.
Someone from a few rows away hollered, “What you selling, Worm? You working undercover for the New Age dickheads out there in California?”
Magritte grinned, showing a row of his short, narrow teeth. “Yeah, I’m pushing Amway. I was just working up to that.”
“You’d do better with Mary Kay cosmetics,” someone suggested.
“Leave the cosmetics to Allison,” Magritte replied. “The Church of the Dinosaur Footprint and Baptismal Cologne.”
Allison gave him a Bronx cheer. “Cologne? I use only perfume, Worm. But it’s all toilet water to you!”
“Wait!” roared another. “The Worm was just getting warmed up. I want to hear his gospel.”
Magritte turned and spread his short, thick fingers across his chest. “I think whoever made this place signed Her name on every rock and flower.”
“So you’re a Goddess worshiper?” asked the bearded man.
“I give equal time to every paradigm,” said Magritte.
“That even rhymes,” the bearded man rejoindered. “But you couldn’t convince me for an instant that someone just stepped up here and built this ball of rock and tissue in just six days. That’s fatuous. You know it and I know it.”
Magritte looked thoughtful. “I don’t go for the literalist translation of the Book of Genesis any more than you do, but there isn’t a man or woman on this bus who isn’t completely knocked out by the perfection of natural systems, the way they all dovetail and work together. We look out through the windows of our five senses and see such marvelous systems, design, and order, such themes and variations, from the basic
structure of matter up to the paths of the celestial bodies, that we can never get enough. The evidence within the laws of nature are god enough, even without the beliefs and liturgy that comes packaged with most religions.”
Conversations sprang up in surrounding rows, returning the bus to its earlier state of hubbub. Then Allison’s voice cut through the chatter again: “So, Worm, you got God’s numbuh; what does Huh business card say?”
Magritte thought a split second and replied, “GOD: No Job Too Large or Small.”
Appreciative laughter erupted, and the bus bubbled into intellectual chaos again.
“Nah!” cried a voice, “It’s ‘GOD ASSOCIATES: A Rhyme, Reason, and Spirit in Every Rock, Tree, and Squirrel.’”
“No! Try ‘GOD, INC.: Arcane Knowledge on a Need-to-Know Basis,’” suggested a third.
Yet another voice offered, “GOD, INC.: Sacrifice That Fatted Calf or You’re Toast!”
“Nah, too Old Testament!” yelled a heckler farther back in the bus.
“Equal time for Buddhists!” squealed another woman.
“Just phone 1-eight hundred-four-A-DJINN!”