The other day, my father took me out on the boat. I’ve never had much of an itch to be out on the water, but more and more I’ve found myself drawn to it. I find the experience kind of therapeutic, relaxing in an unconscious but very real way. Obviously, you have a different perspective when you’re on the water, and are forced to see the inhabited world from the point of view of an outsider. Ottawa, for instance, is a strikingly beautiful city. However, at the same time, I find it very easy to strip the landscape of all the buildings and imagine both a pre and post civilized world independent of mankind.
Water, of course, makes up 70% of the planet’s surface. This fact serves a reminder of just how small we really are on the planet, and how unknowable and mysterious the world around us is. I mean, the amount of the world that I’ve actually experienced is embarrassingly tiny. Really, as individuals, we know virtually nothing about the planet we live on, let alone the universe beyond us.
And so, whenever I’m out on a boat I feel appropriately small and vulnerable, and am inevitably given over to thoughts of divinity. I’ve never belonged to any church, and generally find organized religion to be pretty weird, and often self-serving, but it would never occur to me to doubt the existence of some ordering presence in the universe. All I need to do is think of the lobster.
I imagine some lobster living its’ lobster life in some marine abyss off the Northern coast of Alaska. This creature, which is about as physically dissimilar to a human as possible, could not possibly imagine ( if we could imbue the creature with sufficient consciousness to do so, and we cannot), that it inhabited the same planet as we do. And that in this world, there’s this huge overlord civilization that goes to movies and drive cars and fly airplanes. That we, in fact, manage lobster communities and harvest them for food. I mean, this would blow the lobster mind.
It seems clear to me that I’m a lobster, too. I go about my life with my head down, and I don’t have a clue what forces are truly influencing my life, and what realities exist just beyond my fields of perception. For me, this makes the posture of atheism to be an appalling failure of imagination. We know nothing, and really, all we need to do to be reminded of that is to just look out at the ocean, as eternal and dark as the sky above.