Edge Habitat

The place of God and the everyday

About 10 years ago, my folks acquired a property adjacent to their own. The property had long been used as a dump for its transient residents; amidst the impenetrable forest and thickets were strewn couches, rusting school bus chassis, beer cans, buckets, etc. An undertaking of love, my parents cleared the property of trash and turned the forest into a series of fields with islands of thicket for local wildlife and planted Douglas Fir and Noble Fir trees for a Christmas tree farm. Rabbits, deer and various birds began to frequent the property and a covey of California quail took up residence.

California quail prefer areas with adequate overhead cover (large shrubs, blackberry brambles, etc) adjacent to areas such as meadows or sage flats where they can browse for food. Their diet includes green forbs, insects, seeds and berries which all tend to occur in greater density in areas without substantial cover which places them at greater risk of predation, especially from avian predators. They typically roost at night in larger trees that provide protection from predators. Because of these diverse habitat needs (and many mammals and other birds are similar), quail love so-called “transition zones” or “edge habitat” such as the edges of meadows or clearings with nearby cover.

Ecologically, edge habitat is magical. The density of wildlife encountered in the few feet of edge habitat that lines a meadow (or vice versa, a forest) is significantly higher than that of wildlife found in either the meadow or the forest alone. Additionally, there are species found in edge habitat that are found nowhere else. Edge habitat allows something (or someone) to utilize two different ecosystems, in a sense allowing them to keep their feet firmly planted in two vastly different realms in a way that allows them to engage with and benefit from both while also being squarely within an ecosystem that is distinct from either.

Converting the wooded and litter-strewn property into an oasis of meadows and islands of brambles and thickets created enough edge habitat to sustain a covey of quail and countless cottontail rabbits, not to mention deer and myriad other bird species. The creation of this edge habitat however required a disturbance to the existing ecosystem. Trees were cut down and plants were removed. There was uncertainty as the existing ecosystem was disrupted, and a bit of a roll of the dice and trust that the native flora would reseed and create a habitable environment.

This idea came to mind while I was thinking about the interaction between spiritual experiences and the world of science. I wrestle with justifying faith in light of Bayesian reasoning and the scientific method and at times feel compelled to justify my faith to my inner scientist. A common refrain from rationalists and atheist scientists is that the scientific method can be and should be applied to questions of faith.

Does prayer “really work?” Run a randomized control trial (it’s been done with mixed results.) Does God exist? Prove it. If there is a God, why does that God allow children to suffer?

These are important questions. One can imagine how unsatisfying the response “just have faith” might have to the person who spends their time collecting and analyzing data, especially when they hear “just have faith” from Christians, Muslims and Jewish alike. What evidence would support one tradition over the other? If the truth is so evident, why are their so many differing opinions, all held with equal conviction? And why do a lot of people who claim to have encountered God road-rage and hate just like everyone else?

And yet despite its intellectual allure, the world of “rational atheism” is rather bleak and hopeless. To echo G.K. Chesterton, although this intellectualization provides an explanation for the world, it is a narrow conceptualization and seems to miss an element of life. And while the above are all incredibly important questions, their answers do not provide sufficient explanation for the experience of God in my life and in the lives of many others.

I have had experiences of transcendence (and I think many have) that were distinctly other and I felt I had encountered God. It was as if for a brief instant I saw life from a different, higher plane or I felt a joy that was beyond any other I had experienced. My entire life had been lived in gray and for an instant I saw in color. Such experiences are of equal importance as the questions asked by the atheist who would explain such experiences as odd firings of a collection of neurons. I won’t try to argue that, it’s very possible that those experiences have a biological correlate. However, the mechanistic explanation of a phenomena can answer the “how” but it cannot answer the “why” and I think this is where atheism (or even agnosticism) fall short. Yes some if not all religious experiences may have a biological correlate but why do we have them? Do they not speak to some reality that we can appreciate?

“Rationality” willingly accepts that we are rational agents and our five sense can be trusted and their judicious use can lead us to truth. Can not spiritual experience also lead us to some understanding of truth, beyond just the mechanistic with which rationality is concerned?

There are parts of life that can be rationalized but the rationalization misses their meaning. Respecting the dying wish of one’s friend has no logical justification but to do so is deeply meaningful. Although the bonding between mother and newborn can be linked to the release of oxytocin and dopamine, this explanation does not capture the significance of the experience and the lasting bond it marks. To provide only a mechanistic explanation reduces the experience because we are experiential beings.

I think humans inhabit an edge habitat, but unlike California quail, ours is existential. On one side we have broad, flat expanses of materialism; that which we can see, touch, taste, hear and smell. Much of society lives in this world and this is the world that science inhabits exclusively. On the other side of the edge habitat dwells the ineffable, the transcendent, the spiritual. Although I believe God is equally at home in all three of these habitats (the materialist, the spiritual and the “edge habitat” between them), we humans have far more difficulty being equally at home in all three, especially the middle one, our now-familiar edge habitat. But I think this is where we need to dwell. I think it is at the overlap of the spiritual and the everyday where we tend to experience God. I imagine on one side, vast sagebrush expanses of the everyday and on the other, the soaring, snow-capped peaks of the spiritual realm. Where the desert meets the mountains I see oases and valleys of green, where the experience of the everyday is watered and fed by the springs of God.

While a person can eke out an existence in the arid flats of the physical, such an existence (I feel) is unidimensional. It’s like living in all gray, with mechanistic explanations that exist independent of experience. Conversely, a person can live only breathing the high-elevation air of the spiritual expanses, but such a person can easily lose touch with the everyday. But when the everyday and God intersect (or rather, when we are aware of it), something magical happens, akin to the edge habitat created in what once was a forested trash heap. We are nourished and we encounter both the mundane and the transcendent. We thrive. God seems most appreciable in the experiences of life. To live them out without awareness of their meaning or of God’s presence is to starve oneself. The one world informs the other and vice versa. Without the spiritual we would not have the “why” for our mechanistic explanations and without the physical the spiritual would have no relevance for us.

I’d like to end with this thought: Christmas is approaching and I am reminded of the Savior’s birth. If ever there was a meeting of God and the everyday, the invasion of the soaring peaks into the flatlands of sage, it was in that man, the son of God and the son of Man.