Wisdom begins with wonder

Last updated on: March 23, 2025 at 3:22 am by Dan Peterson

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Wisdom begins with wonder 2025-03-23T03:22:13-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Along the Na Pali coast of Kaua’i (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

We spent much of Saturday out on the ocean, traveling from Port Allen, in Eleele on the south coast of Kaua’i, around to the end of the famous and spectacular Na Pali cliffs on the northwest side of the island, and back again. The weather was perfect. (Sunnier than in the image above.) We cruised among scores and scores of spinner dolphins and past a honu, a sea turtle. Snorkeling not far from Port Allen itself, we saw lots of fish — several beautiful, bright Yellow Tang, for example — over the coral reef, as well as a monk seal and a honu. While watching three hikers cautiously easing their way down the aptly-named Crawler’s Ledge at Na Pali, we also saw two or three feral goats, who seemed quite a bit more sure-footed than the humans did. After the cruise (which we did through “Capt. Andy’s,” which I can highly recommend), we drove up along Waimea Canyon for a very different view from the summit of Na Pali.

Waimea Canyon, on the island of Kaua’i (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I don’t apologize for posting a blog entry that some will dismiss as a mere exercise in”Gee whiz!” “It is through wonder [thaumazein],” said Aristotle, “that men now begin and originally began to philosophize” (Aristotle, Metaphysics Α, 982b11-12). And Plato represents Socrates as saying that “wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder” (Plato, Theatatus, 155d).

On the flight over to Hawaii the other day, I read Taking Leave of Darwin: A Longtime Agnostic Discovers the Case for Design, by Neil Thomas. Professor Thomas is impressed by a physician and writer named James Le Fanu, and, in turn, I was impressed by what he wrote in response:

Every day, writes Le Fanu, we are the unwitting beneficiaries of an incalculable number of invisible natural wonders, such as the purifying function of the liver (which is able to perform more functions than the largest chemical refinery), or the autonomous functioning of the heart, whose diminutive size belies its enormous pumping power (artificial heart machines, being the size of a chest of drawers, have to be hauled around on trolley wheels and can only be used for a number of hours as a stop-gap before transplant), or our physiological capacity for bodily self-repair: think (I might add) of a bicycle puncture mending itself automatically or the implication of the April Fools ad put out by BMW some decades ago to the effect that the special paints applied to the company’s cars were self-cleaning. What seems amusingly preposterous in the case of human manufacture is perfectly practicable in human physiology via the cleansing function of the liver.

We might also usefully ponder the fact that there exists a diminutive universe in each of our individual cells which went all unsuspected for millennia before mid-twentieth century advances in electron microscope technology. Or what about that bodily system we all refer to glibly (but uncomprehendingly) as the immune system — how many people know how that works? No, I didn’t either. This is what Linda Hamlin says about its well-nigh preternatural complexity, and keep in mind that the excerpt below only scratches the surface of the immune system’s complexity:

Faced with the onslaught of microbes, how does the normal human body defend itself and stay healthy? To begin with, it keeps out as many potential pathogens as possible with barriers such as the skin and other non-specific defenses. The skin, which is waterproof, is impenetrable to most invaders, and it provides fatty acids that many microorganisms find toxic. Areas not covered by the skin, such as the eyes, mouth, lungs, and digestive tract, are more vulnerable, but they have alternative defenses. Tears, saliva, urine and other body secretions contain lysozyme, an enzyme that can kill certain types of bacteria by splitting the molecules found in their cell walls. Mucus in the nose and airwaves engulfs bacteria and stops them penetrating the membranes. Cilia — tiny beating “hairs” — then push the mucus out of the airways into the throat, where it is swallowed. In the stomach, acid kills most of the microorganisms in food, as well as starting the process of digestion.

Needless to say, our bodily organs are quite beyond the ability of human bio-engineers to reproduce. To give a prime example, experiments in the United States to introduce artificial hearts to patients had to be withdrawn some decades ago when the fatalities topped 200 with no realistic hope of medical experts being able to improve their technology. Forty years of research and development and forty billion dollars went down the drain. If such gargantuan efforts and expense could not fashion a functioning heart-substitute, it becomes all the more difficult to imagine a heart being constructed by the serendipity of random mutations and natural selection. (111-113)

Continuing, Thomas writes:

We should . . . be more appreciative of nature’s ingenuity and the sheer ease with which we see, hear, talk , eat, drink, make love and reproduce our kind. Such should be the central core of school biology lessons, promoting a sense of wonder in the young mind at the very fact of existence. The reason that it does not form that core is that scientists and the educational establishment subscribe to the materialistic-mechanistic model of human functioning , and therefore tend not to “do” wonder.

As a footnote to Le Fanu’s argument, I would add that we also betray collectively some element of false entitlement about our innumerable boons: we feel hungry, eat, and by some magical alchemy of which we know little — and couldn’t care less about — our bodies transform the food into the very substance of our physical frames. We take it for granted that we are born with hinged bones to provide low-friction articulations, eye-protectors (eyelids), tears secreted by the lachrymal glands to lubricate the eyes so that they don’t feel scratchy, and an optic nerve to transmit electrical impulses to the brain to decode visual cues so that we can know where we are. We shrug off as unremarkable the fact that broken bones will, unlike broken vases, mend, or the fact that minor wounds will heal by the process to which medical people refer with a complacent lack of affect as “bodily regeneration.”

As far as external nature is concerned, we are the beneficiaries of plants’ photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert light energy into chemical energy and produce oxygen, yet we give little thought to this bedrock of our existence. (Nobody, by the way, has the first idea about how photosynthesis might have evolved.) The same goes for the sun’s warming rays and all those cosmological constants described above. As for that huge symbiosis by which all life is connected productively in a web of interrelated functions (rainwater for crops, grazing animals fertilizing the soil with dung, worms aerating the soil so that crops can grow, and on and on), this is just another part of what we see as our entitlement, assuming we even bother to think about such things at all. The list could be extended practically without limit. (113-114)

A newly married couple standing in front of the Laie Hawaii Temple (LDS Media Library)

A new Gospel Topics essay appeared from the Church a couple of days ago on “Race and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.” Race-related issues have troubled more than a few members of the Church for a long time, so I hope that this essay will be helpful to them and to others who might be concerned with the subject.

The Accra Ghana Temple by night (LDS Media Library)

Before I close, though, I want to share with you some gruesome gleanings from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™. Theism is a global blight, and there’s a segment of my readership that desperately wants and needs to be kept informed about its latest horrors. I don’t want to let them down:

“Latter-day Saints Around the World: March 2025: Emergency aid reaches Ghana’s rural communities, while interfaith unity flourishes among young adults in the Philippines: Newsroom features stories from its dozens of websites worldwide to show what members and leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are doing to serve their communities. Today, we feature news from Bolivia, Ghana, Guatemala, Mexico, the Philippines, Tonga, Uruguay and Vanuatu.”

Posted from Poʻipū, Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi

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