12

The Pragmatic Seed

Four, five, six billion years ago the seed drifted through space. Then the seed was simply a seed, and it had no knowledge of itself. It rode the electronic and magnetic winds of the universe, and neither time nor space existed for the seed. It was all chance, for the seed had absolutely no idea of what it required or what its ultimate destiny was. It moved through a starry, incredible universe, but it also moved through empty space, for the stars and the galaxies were only pinpoints of illumination in infinity.

The professor and the priest were old, good friends, which made their talks easy and not terribly argumentative. The one taught physics, the other taught religion. They were both in their middle years, beyond most passions, and they savored simple things. On this particular fall day, they met after an early dinner and strolled across the campus. It was a cool, delightful October evening, the sun still an hour before setting, the great maples and oaks robed in marvelous rust and amber—as the priest remarked, an evening to renew one’s faith.

“I had always thought,” said the professor, “that faith was an absolute.”

“Not at all.”

“How can it be otherwise? Of course,” the professor added, “I speak as a man of little faith.”

“More’s the pity.”

“But some little knowledge.”

“I am glad you qualify it.”

“Thank you. But aren’t we both in the same boat? If your faith needs periodic renewing, and can be influenced by so commonplace an event as the action of certain chemicals in the leaves of deciduous trees, then it is as relative as my small store of knowledge.”

Lost in his thoughts for a minute or so, the priest admitted that the professor raised an interesting point. “However,” he said, “it is not my faith but myself that wants renewing. Just as God is absolute, so is my faith absolute.”

“But God, if you choose to believe in Him, is not knowable. Is your faith also unknowable?”

“Perhaps—in a manner of speaking.”

“Then thank heavens science does not depend on faith. If it did, we should all be back in the horse-and-buggy era.”

“Which might not be the worst thing in the world,” the priest speculated.

In the infinity of space, however, the laws of time and chance cease to exist, and in a million or a billion years—one being as meaningless as the other—the winds of space carried the seed toward a galaxy, a great pinwheel of countless blazing stars. At a certain point in space, the galaxy exerted its gravitational pull upon the seed, and the seed plunged through space toward the outer edge of the galaxy. Closer and closer it drove, until at last it approached one of the elongated arms of the pinwheel, and there it was trapped in the gravitational field of one of the countless stars that composed the galaxy. Blindly obedient to the laws of the universe, the seed swung in a great circle around the star, as did other bits of flotsam and jetsam that had wandered into the gravitational field of the star. Yet while they were all similarly obedient to the laws of chance, the seed was different. The seed was alive.

“No, it might not be the worst thing in the world,” the professor admitted, “but as one who has just recovered from an infection that might well have killed him had it not been for penicillin, I have a bias toward science.”

“Understandably.”

“And some mistrust of a faith that renews itself with the beauty of a sunset.” He pointed toward the wild display of color in the west.

“Nevertheless,” the priest said gently, “faith is more constant and reliable than science. You will admit that?”

“By no means.”

“Surely you must. Science is both pragmatic and empirical.”

“Naturally. We experiment, we observe, and we note the results. What else could it be if not pragmatic and empirical? The trouble with faith is that it is neither pragmatic nor empirical.”

“That’s not the trouble with faith,” said the priest. “That’s the basis of faith.”

“You’ve lost me again,” the professor said hopelessly.

“Then you get lost too easily. Let me give you an example that your scientific mind can deal with. You’ve read St. Augustine?”

“I have.”

“And if I say that the core of my faith is not very different from the core of St. Augustine’s faith, you would accept that, would you not?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“You have also read, I am sure, the Almagest of Claudius Ptolemy, which established the earth as the center of the universe.”

“Hardly science!” the professor snorted.

“Not at all, not at all. Very good science, until Copernicus overturned it and disproved it. You see, my dear friend, empirical knowledge is always certain and absolute, until some other knowledge comes along and disproves it. When man postulated, thousands of years ago, that the earth was flat, he had the evidence of his own eyes to back him up. His knowledge was certain and provable, until new knowledge came along that was equally certain and provable.”

“Surely more certain and provable. Even your fine Jesuit mind must accept that.”

“I am a Paulist, if it matters, but I accept your correction. More provable. More certain. And vastly different from the earlier theory. However, the faith of St. Augustine can still sustain me.”

The life within the seed and the structure of that life gave it a special relationship to the flood of light and energy that poured out of the star. It absorbed the radiation and turned it into food, and with food it grew. For thousands and thousands of years the seed circled the star and drank in its endless flood of radiation, and for thousands and thousands of years the seed grew. The seed became a fruit, a plant, a being, an animal, an entity, or perhaps simply a fruit—since all of these words are descriptive of things vastly different from the thing that grew out of the seed.

The professor sighed and shook his head. “If you tell me that a belief in angels has not been shattered, then you remind me of the man who grew wolfsbane to keep vampires off his place. He was eminently successful.”

“That’s hitting pretty low, for a man of science.”

“My dear fellow, you can still maintain the faith of St. Augustine because it requires neither experiment, observation, nor a catalogue of results.”

“I think it does,” the priest said, almost apologetically.

“Such experiments perhaps as walking in this lovely twilight and feeling faith renewed?”

“Perhaps. But tell me—is medicine, that is, the practice of medicine, empirical?”

“Far less so than once.”

“And a hundred years ago? Was medicine empirical then?”

“Of course, when you talk of medicine,” the professor said, “and label it empirical, the word becomes almost synonymous with quackery. Obviously because human lives are at stake.”

“Obviously. And when you fellows experiment with atomic bombs and plasma and one or two other delicacies, no human lives are at stake.”

“We are even. Touché.”

“But a hundred years ago, the physician would be just as certain of his craft and cures as the physician today. Who was that chap who removed the large intestine from half a hundred of his patients because he was convinced that it was the cause of aging?”

“Of course science progresses.”

“If you call it progress,” the priest said. “But you chaps build your castles of knowledge on very wet sand indeed. I can’t help thinking that my faith rests on a firmer foundation.”

“What foundation?”

The shape of the thing that the seed became was a sphere, an enormous sphere, twenty-five thousand miles in circumference, in human terms; but a very insignificant sphere in terms of the universe. It was the third mass of matter, counting out from the star, and in shape not unlike the others. It lived, it grew, it became conscious of itself, not quite as we know consciousness, but nevertheless conscious of itself. In the course of the aeons that it existed, tiny cultures appeared upon its skin, just as tiny organisms thrive upon the skin of man. A wispy aura of oxygen and nitrogen surrounded it and protected its skin from the pinpricks of meteors, but the thing that grew from the seed was indifferent, unaware of the cultures that appeared on and disappeared from its skin. For years eternal, it swam through space, circling the star that fed it and nourished it.

“The wisdom and the love of God,” the priest replied. That’s a pretty firm foundation. At least it is not subject to alteration every decade or so. Here you fellows were with your Newtonian physics, absolutely certain that you had solved all the secrets of the universe, and then along came Einstein and Fermi and Jeans and the others, and poof—out of the window with all your certainties.”

“Not quite with all of them.”

“What remains when light can be both a particle and a wave, when the universe can be both bounded and boundless, and when matter has its mirror image, antimatter?”

“At least we learn, we deal with realities—”

“Realities? Come now.”

“Oh, yes. The reality changes, our vision is broadened, we do push ahead.”

“In the hope that at least your vision will match my faith?” the priest asked, smiling.

The thousands of years became millions and the millions billions, and still the thing that was the seed circled the sun. But now it was ripe and bursting with its fullness. It knew that its time was coming to an end, but it did not resist or protest the eternal cycle of life. Vaguely it knew that its own beginning seed had been flung out of the ripened fruit, and it knew that what had been must occur again in the endless cycle of eternity—that its purpose was to propagate itself: to what end, it neither knew nor speculated. Full to bursting, it let be what must be.

The day was ending. The sun, low on the horizon now, had taken refuge behind a lacework of red and purple and orange clouds, and against this the golden leaves of the trees put to mock the art of the best jewelers. A cool evening wind made a proper finish for a perfect day.

No other words. “What a perfect day,” the priest said.

“Now that’s odd.”

They had come to the edge of the campus, where the mowed, leaf-covered lawns gave way to a cornfield.

“Now that’s odd,” said the professor, pointing to the cornfield.

“What is odd?”

“That crack over there. I don’t remember seeing it yesterday.”

The priest’s eyes followed the pointing hand of the professor, and sure enough, there was a crack about a yard wide running through the cornfield.

“Quite odd,” the priest agreed.

“Evidently an earth fault. I didn’t know there were any here.”

“It’s getting wider, you know,” the priest said.

And then it got wider and wider and wider and wider.