“Think of the countless human acts, acts of copulation, spread over millennia, that led to the birth of Plato, Attila, or Napoleon. Yet it is on these unpredictables that human history largely depends” (C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, p. 39).
We look around ourselves and we think we see solid things. We look at them for half an hour and we see solid things moving through time, like a dreadnought in the ocean. We therefore assume that taking all this solidity for granted is somehow not a form of spiritual insanity.
I do need to give a fair warning here. I am going to use an illustration that may make some people think something like “now was that really necessary?” But I think it is. If you think it might not be, this would be a good place to stop reading.
The human race is like a giant mobile hanging from a ceiling ten thousand feet up. Each object on the mobile (there are billions of them) is heavy. Each one of them is going to live forever, that’s how heavy.
But what connects each object to the next level up? There is nothing solid about this. Each generation is connected to the previous one by a gossamer-thin thread. The odds against any of us being here are enormous.
How did each everlasting soul come to be? By the union of one human egg with one spermatozoon. The spermatozoon that fertilizes the egg determines the unique individual. In each act of conception, the candidate spermatozoa number in the millions. The numbers vary, with an average being about 250 million spermatozoa per ejaculation. To give some perspective, the population of the United States is currently around 320 million.
Now given that your most recent newborn is crawling around the living room right now, delighting everybody, think for a moment about all the things you did the day of her conception that determined that it would in fact be little Sally delighting you right now, instead of thick-set Roderick, or any one of 250 million other plug-uglies.
For a sexually active fertile couple, absolutely everything they do, all day long and every day, is affecting the entire future history of the human race. There is nothing you can do that will leave the 250 million spermatozoa unaffected in their race to the egg. The particular spermatozoon that reaches the egg does so because father stopped to pick up a quarter on the way home, scratched his head two times instead of three times, extended the foreplay by seconds, etc. This is what I meant by a gigantic mobile. The connections are all virtually invisible, and all human history is suspended from them. And each one of them bears the weight of everything below.
Not only so, but this is not limited to fertile and sexually active people. It also applies to anyone who knows and interacts with fertile and sexually active people. If you have a co-worker who together with his wife is trying to get pregnant, if you chat with him for an extra moment in the parking lot after work — wham! a whole different outcome.
And if a family has four kids, and their kids have four kids, and then they do the same, what do you have after 10 generations? A little over a million people. Are you still glad you picked up that quarter? Remember this is not generic “people.” It a completely different million because they are all downstream from Sally instead of Roderick. In fact, the Roderick line would have been responsible for several wars. Roderick is bad news.
I have a stick of Old Spice that some wisdom in this line on the back of it. “If your grandfather hadn’t worn it, you wouldn’t exist.” These are words to remember. I would say words to live by, except that you can’t really live by them. You can only recognize the necessary nexus between sexual fertility and high Calvinism, and remember to trust God.
That’s the real lesson here.
Bingo
Uhh…. Put down the brownies Doug. Not sure who you bought them from, but it was clearly the wrong person.
But it was the very act of stopping to get those brownies that irrevocably altered the course of world events!
Was Lazarus sleeping? — was he “there”, but in dead sleep?
Is he sleeping again? — “there” but dispersed and possibly a bit absorbed into you?
Is the “creation” of our soul inexorably connected to our bodies?
“How did each everlasting soul come to be? By the union of one human egg with one spermatozoon.”
So is that soul also body?
Sounds like one of those pregnancy nightmares you get after eating pickles and chocolate ice cream. Also, your newborn should not be crawling around on the living room floor. That would be disturbing to see.
Other than that, well said. We are all a walking miracle.
He phrased it as “your most recent newborn.” I did a double take on that, too, and then figured out that my most recent newborn is a rising sophomore in high school.
That would also be disturbing to see crawling around the living room. :)
Only happens after a particularly tough cross country team workout. :D
It takes a woman to catch those details (I mean that as a compliment). It went right over my head, but most things do.
Yes. I have thought about this very thing in as much detail.
And it is more than the actual people. It is also the events that occur that may not have.
Or each one is just a random, unguided choice.
On another note (but with similar depth)- all the water that exists in the world has always existed in the world since the beginning of world history. Reused, restored, recycled. Oceans, rivers, rain, tap water, sweat, saliva, urine…..
DW’s son has a whole section in one ofhis books about water. You should check it out ifyou haven’t already. “Notes from the Tilt-A-Whirl” by ND Wilson
Children are hereditary. If your parents didn’t have any, neither will you.
“How did each everlasting soul come to be? By the union of one human egg with one spermatozoon. The spermatozoon that fertilizes the egg determines the unique individual.” That can’t be correct — it’s not the whole story or even the most important part: as witness identical twins or triplets. I have identical twin sisters, and I assure one and all that they have been very different persons from birth, with *very* different personalities. When younger, they were so “identical” that one time the one’s daughter mistook her for the other (for the girl’s aunt); and one time, not having… Read more »
Which leads me to believe that our soul is something “added” to the mix sometime after conception. We are not just the sum total of our genes.
Or else our personalities are as malleable as the choice of sperm – Mary is different from her twin Molly because Molly spent those few extra minutes in the womb, or was closer to the front and heard some sounds better. Still helps make Pastor Wilson’s bottom-line argument.
I hear what your saying, and I enjoyed reading your story, but I think Doug was only saying that if it had been a different sperm, then “you” would be a completely different person. He could have said it more clearly, and I’m sure he’d agree with your assesment.
But that takes us right back to the idea — falsified by the reality of identical twins — that “the genes make the man”.
But, the picture is worse for the genetic determinist, for there are people living amongst us who are genetic chimeras; that is, the cells of their bodies are descended from two separate DNA-unique cell lineages.
I associate “plug-ugly” with Lord Peter Wimsey because of the passage in Gaudy Night where he speaks of breaking his ribs to avoid being shot by one, so this post was an exercise in altered expectations.
But it does highlight the best kind of Calvinism, to me, the kind that acknowledges God’s control while affirming that His sovereignity is not our own control.
This was a reference to an incident in Murder Must Advertise, wasn’t it? I can’t recall, does he break his ribs in the course of that story?
But plug ugly was a common term at that time for what Jim Rockford would call “gorillas” or others might call “goons.”
There is a reference to Murder Must Advertise in Gaudy Night, but it’s a different scene. This scene was talking about all the people who want to kill Peter. The MMA reference was the one time Harriet had been in Peter’s flat before, I believe.
I thought plug ugly was a reference to them plugging you with bullets :)
Is it the scene in GN where she dines with Peter at his club and he finds out about the anonymous letters? And his ribs are taped because someone shot at him?
Yes, that’s the one. He first refers to the assailant as “a very plain chap” and then in second reference (or it might be the narrator’s reference) as “plug ugly.”
And she kept dropping her napkin and he kept picking it up and not letting on that it was painful until she couldn’t miss it.
It might be, but what I meant was it’s not unique to Lord Peter or to Sayers.
Oh, I assumed that – Sayers was mostly a reflector of culture, rather than an inventor of over-stylized new slang and speech patterns. I just meant that Gaudy Night is my primary association with “plug ugly.”
Have you ever wondered why Sayers, such a devoutly religious woman, gave Lord Peter his skeptical religious outlook? It isn’t simply that he struggles with disbelief; it is more like Sayers decided that his sexual attitudes (his checkered past with Viennese opera singers and his taking for granted that his brother will be adulterous) were a necessary part of his aristocratic glamour. What I dislike about it is the treatment of religious people in the novels. Charles Parker’s Christian faith and moral outlook are ascribed to his being the son of a tradesperson from Barrow-in-Furness; Katherine Climpson’s Anglo-Catholicism is teased… Read more »
I haven’t wondered that much, really, because Sayers was deeply conflicted about her faith. She wrote brilliantly and passionately about God and virtue, but she lived the bohemian life of a writer, including rejecting many virtues required by Christ and the Bible. I don’t agree with writers like P. D. James who call her faith merely an intellectual God-game, but I don’t think she was ever a terribly “normal” Christian, and I see this tension between her faith and her desires/life/bohemian culture in the characters of Peter and Harriet. Peter is the agnostic’s dream – a moral, noble man who… Read more »
I think that Lewis once wrote a letter to Sayers, reminding her that an intellectual appreciation of the pattern of the Christian faith is not enough. I thought that her later life was more staid, and she tried to be a good wife to a difficult husband. Her father was a clergyman (Vane’s was a country doctor), and straitlaced enough that Sayers never revealed to them the existence of her son. I think she might have made a very happy Catholic; the faith would have disciplined her mind and nature. I find Jane Austen’s novels to be quite explicitly religious,… Read more »
I agree that Austen’s novels are infused with Christianity – but I also think there’s a tension about religion and religious practices that is not always comfortable. Not that everything has to be comfortable!
I do think there was something of a tendency towards more spiritual maturity in Sayers’s life, but I also think that like Austen, there’s a profoundly Christian approach to the ideas of morality, responsibility, love, and even virtue in Sayers’s world. Peter does say that detective novels are the purest literature we have, after all. :)
But if we want to get into really awful clergymen, there are always Mr. Brocklehurst and Mr. Pontifex.
Very true.
Is this the Calvinist version of the “The Butterfly Effect”?
Or, put another way, what does this have to do with the price of tea in China??