I had an incredibly successful summer fly-fishing for small and largemouth bass. I went out many nights, mostly on the pond upstream from my home, paddling through lily pads in my little kayak. Some nights I stayed out until 11:00; I could determine the hour by counting the number of times the hammer struck the town clock in the church steeple at the south end of the pond. It was all just wonderful, idyllic; a seemingly quintessential New England life.
There was one evening in particular however wherein I felt myself tempted toward abject atheism. Disbelief in a deity assaulted me like mosquitoes after sunset: there was no swatting away doubt. For a moment the death of God was undeniable. I was alone in the universe as surely I was alone on a pond. There was no anchor for my mind, or my hopes, just the drifting with the wind, the indifferent, chaotic wind.
You see, I was casting my fly -- a green popper designed to look like a small frog -- in a warm, evening breeze, and I spotted a larger splash than usual when I finally let drop the lure 30 feet from me. Clearly something was not right; I noted a snarl in the leader and floating line I was using. Frustrated, I yanked the line into the cockpit of my kayak to determine the severity of the problem.
What I discovered was a knot that took my breath away. This knot wasn't merely a snarl. No, this was a knot that had intentionality written all over it. This was a deliberate knot. It looked like it had been tied by some brilliant weaver; some sprite in the air adept at crochet. If you don't know, a fly line consists generally of two lines, the main one, the flyline, which, in this case, was a floating line which helped keep my lure on the water's surface, and a short transparent leader, a strong, durable filament designed to conceal that the lure is attached to something. The clear leader is about "presentation," about fooling the fish into seeing merely a bug or frog on the water, and not something tethered to an opaque floating line several feet away.
Amazingly, this artful knot was indeed spun in the wind. My casting forward, backward, forward, backward, each stroke necessary for me to strip line to extend my cast in the typical rhythm of a fly-fisherman, along with the breeze coming across the pond, combined to create a knot that essentially wove the popper I was using into this dazzling web of flyline and leader. The rubber "feathers" of my lure were perfectly incorporated; they were tied elegantly into the lines in a way that suggested conspiracy, even magic: something had grabbed my line and lure, tied a perfect knot, all while the line and lure were airborne, and for no other reason than to thwart me. To torment me. My rod was for me a device for fishing; for the laughing cosmos, it was a knitting or crochet needle working toward an insane confusion that did not at all look confused.
As my aggravation settled into awe, I began to think about the genesis not only of the knot, but of the whole cosmos. I had been taught in science, and by the atheistic philosophers allegedly informed by such science, that this cosmos was utterly random in its genesis: that there was no Designer, no external Initiator, that the "cosmos is all there is, all there was, or all there ever will be." No doubt there have been some, like Stephen Hawking, who suggest that the cosmos was born without God, but nonetheless came forth from a pre-existing amalgam of laws, energy, and potency and potentiality: the universe took shape according to constructs inherent to the nature of a universe taking shape, constructs that "just were."
I've long if not always balked at such assertions about an un-intended, un-designed universe. I particularly halted at the idea posited by atheists that this was an uncaused universe that inspired them to awe, and this for no other reason than that the same atheists could not find awe in the idea of an uncaused God. They were favorable to an uncaused universe, but an uncaused God was anathema to them; the one they permitted and accepted, and the other they rejected out of hand.
But as I beheld the knot before me, one seemingly born of nothing but chance, I could see the atheists' point. Given enough time, given enough "chance" to mix in the air in the random patterns of a fly-fisherman's cast, a knot of incredible, awe-inspiring beauty could be tied along the very edges of a fly-rod's arc. There was no Designer here; this was random, a once-in-infinity collision between nothing and Being. This knot just was; it just appeared, dynamic and interesting, and it would NEVER APPEAR AGAIN.
This latter admission invigorated the rush of atheism that swirled around me. I could not duplicate such a knot; it would never exist again, nor could another be created identical to it. There could not be a duplicate, an identical knot. Was this not true of everything? Was this not true of the universe? Surely if there was a God then duplication would be well within the bounds of His powers, no?
But as I untied the knot slowly, though not in silence as a few unfortunate expletives slipped out of my mouth, and as I began to cast my fly into the watery sunlight all around me, I began to recall my days as a philosophy student. Duplication, I remembered, was inherently impossible: two things could be identical in all matters but one -- number. What this meant is that this A and this A are only nearly identical, as they both are separate in number; in position, place, space and time. There is no such thing as a true clone, as the clone of the original is not the original. Duplication is thus intrinsically impossible, a contradiction in terms. God Himself could never duplicate anything exactly. For a duplicate to be a true duplicate it would have to be the original, and that is impossible. Such violates the law of non-contradiction.
Moreover, I began to realize that I was not in an unclosed system but a rather closed one. The wind around me was not infinite: it was constrained by laws of motion, gravity, density; wind was just the movement of trapped air on a planet. It was not an infinite system; there was a fixed amount of air and a potentially quantifiable number of ways the air could move. The universe itself was, according to the scientists and atheists, a closed system: Carl Sagan himself once came up with a number that he averred was the largest number that could ever be, claiming, I believe, that the number could not exceed the number of "things", the particles, of which the universe consisted. To Sagan the universe and number ray were limited, constrained.
On top of that I was using DESIGNED and WILLED things: fly-rod, fly line, and bait; a kayak; human hands, an arm, a shoulder, a spine, a brain; electrical impulses coursing through flesh, twitching muscles, pulling tendons, rocking bones, stretching ligaments. None of these was infinite; my body, the kayak and the fly-rod were not flitting about in chaos or randomness. They were each poised in time, as objects that behaved according to design and structure and certain laws; there was an architecture here that was undeniable, and a limitedness that made the architecture possible and even successful.
No, this was not a moment for atheism but theism. The knot before me was created by orderliness, by the very design of the cosmos, the man in the boat, and the things made by men. Design and intent were all around me; I was as intentional as the fakery of the fly I was using. The knot hadn't "just happened." It was, without a doubt, created; I had, in concert with the wind and the dynamics of pole and line, tied this knot according to a set of quantifiable strokes of my arm, wrist, fingers.
All this finally opened my heart and mind to the Christian assertion that the universe is not really closed; that God inheres in His creation -- it is His idea, after all -- and that He is nonetheless outside of it, standing as Creator, Maker, Designer, and that He can enter His creation at any time. In our very thoughts and reflections on things like chaos and beginnings our minds invariably and necessarily bring qualities of order, sequence and time to those thoughts. We cannot know or perceive chaos: it does not exist to us, even, really, as an abstraction. It is to us nothingness. It is the unknowable.
And that is the point, really. It is unknowable to those within the universe. We cannot see the outside of the box because we are not only in the box, but of it, the very dust of it. There is no possibility of what is inside the box ever gaining a position that is itself outside the box: we cannot ever be objects to ourselves. Nor can we escape time, order or place to see what is outside of, or before, all that is All.
So a knot that threatened my faith served to tie me more fully to the God Who Is. I am not alone on the surface of a sunset-filled nothingness, casting about willy-nilly for a nothingness to hook myself into. I am connected already; there is a hook that pierces my side. I float in a space that is brimming with wonders -- a space so full of the lovely Intent of God it's hardly a space at all. I splash, I leap, I fight and pull; I tie myself in knots.
I paddle my way home through lily pads, towards the God Who catches and releases, the God Who untangles and sets us free, to float, to dream. To become fishers of men. This I affirm, accept. Believe.
God is out there, and never far away.
Peace.
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