An open letter to Dan Brown (presumably the famous writer)

Dear Mr. Brown, Re. your thoughtful, albeit suicidally depressing, GOD AND SCIENCE essay:

It appears as though you've thrown in towel a bit prematurely. Maybe you're French? I don't know. But I do know that, in a world which OVERWHELMINGLY bows the knee, kowtows, kisses the ring or otherwise grovels & bleats like pathetic sheep---to one deity or another---"science’s victory" is anything but "inevitable."

And if your "sunsets" have somehow grown more monochromatic, it isn't the fault of physics. The laws of nature are still the same, whether or not it was Jehovah or Allah or Aslan (or some long-gone concept which homo sapiens will never even guess at) that first flipped that original light switch.

Poor Mr. Brown, if you could only live in my universe for a few moments, you might see that there are indeed still plenty of things to wonder at: to watch a baby's little cranium push its way into the this world; to hang weightless in a forest of gently waving kelp and watch as the sun beams create a light show the likes of which any hollywood special effects guru would die for; to surf down a desert mountain on a four-foot deep blanket of solidified water, which feels more like goose down fluff than crystallized hydrogen and oxygen; to push little buttons and watch your thoughts congeal on a two-dimensional hologram in front of you; etc. etc.

Yeah, there are still plenty of things to wonder at. The problem is NOT one of having lost something: Wonder. No, the problem is evidently your inability to pull yourself from the muck of deicentric thought processes, unfold your wings and begin to soar in this unfathomably big, bad, scary, and almost completely unknown universe we live in. It's really not a bad place! Try it sometime.
In complaining that "the complexities of the universe have been shredded into mathematical equations," you exhibit an astonishing degree of naivete, confusing a mere description of the Thing with the Thing itself. Indeed, it's as if you're saying, that spoken language has somehow made the ideas and concepts which rattle around inside our craniums meaningless.

"Science proclaims that Planet Earth and its inhabitants are a meaningless speck in the grand scheme. A cosmic accident."

I guess I must've slept through that class, because I can't for the life of me recall ever having heard any intelligent person refer to the universe as an "accident."

You seem to believe that a lack of knowledge and evidence of the events that led up to our present state of existence somehow makes the possibility of those events a null proposition. Granted, it does appear to be much easier, at least for the majority of the human race, to simply attribute all things unknown and/or unknowable as having come from an all-powerful deity...somewhere...out there...in that mystical place where people go when they die. We (I lump myself in with Humans only because we share a common origination; not with regards to the issue at hand) somehow dismiss the fact that all natural phenomena are directly tracable to whatever events came before them.

"Even the technology that promises to unite us, divides us."

Again, I don't recall the inanimate concept of "technology" as ever having "promised" to unite us. To be sure, many humans have suffered under the delusion that technology would somehow overcome human nature. Alas, hope springs eternal, unmindful of realities.

Alas, Mr. Brown, your last few threads of credibility vaporize with the pathetically juvenile and entirely laughable statement that the entire human race feels "utterly alone."

I don't.

My wife doesn't. My sons don't seem to. In fact thay all seem to fairly happy. Maybe we get in to therapy and find out what the problem is?

Or maybe you should join some kind of club, or have some kids, or go down to the corner pub and play a few games of pool with the local ironworkers; sitting in front of computer screens for days on end might be part of the problem.

"We are bombarded with violence, division, fracture, and betrayal."

That life is nasty, brutish and short, Mr. Brown, is not a new phenomenon. And besides that, no small amount of the violence in the short history of homo sapiens can be directly or indirectly linked to religion and a rigid adherence to laws and tenets believed to have come from God.

"Skepticism has become a virtue."

Skepticism has always been a virtue. Ask anybody who's ever bought a time-share.

You go on and on and on, digressing into simple mono-thoughts: i.e. "Cynicism and demand for proof has become enlightened thought." But you finally hit the nader of stupidity with the astoundingly broad proclamation, couched in the following question: "Is it any wonder that humans now feel more depressed and defeated than they have in any point of human history?" Indeed, in making statements such as these, completely unfounded, without any data to back them up, without even any sort of verifiable consensus to claim, Mr. Brown, you demonstrate exactly WHY science has, to borrow your own defeatist words, "won the war."

You see, Science---that impersonal machine that you seem to believe is steamrolling the poor human race into a meaningless mass of DNA-based pulp---would demand that, before you make such ludicrous generalities, you go out and do the boring and tedious work of gathering some verifiable data. But that doesn't make for good fiction, now, does it?

One wonders if maybe you're doing some sort of freewriting experiment---frenetically tapping out each and every thought, regardless of how ridiculous it might seem, in an effort to inadvertently stumble upon some little gem which might be the beginning of something worth pursuing (that common practice amongst us writers, which I myself occasionally resort to when the ol' creative digestive tract gets stopped up, so to speak)--- you ask: "Does science hold anything sacred?"

Yes, Mr. Brown, that would be Truth. Truth in all its beauty and all its unflattering ugliness.

Sincerely,
Marrs Maniteaux

PS: Go take a long walk in the hills and get some sunshine and fresh air. It's good for the soul.