Taken from Welcome to the Fallout

“Look at that.” He stopped and stabbed a finger at the oldest church in our historical district. The building, an Episcopal parish, rose three stories above the brick sidewalk, its ornate arched moulding guarding the meticulously preserved front door. “Such beauty raised up to promote such ugliness. It’s hard to believe.”

“What isn’t hard for you to believe these days?” I murmured, then paused. “Let’s go in.” The closing door cut off the hum of feet and voices from the street. We crossed the foyer and entered the sanctuary. The room was empty, lit only by afternoon sunbeams thrust carelessly through high stained glass windows. “This place is beautiful because its builders knew they had something important,” I said. “Their vision was meant to impact the world.”

“Don’t kid me.” The walls flung his words back at us. We were at the pulpit now, looking at the concave sounding board and, above, the organ pipes. “Religion may have some validity,” he conceded, “but not as a guide for knowledge or science. As an attempted system of rational thought, religion couldn’t be more outdated. Honestly, do you realize some of the idiocies that have boomed from pulpits like this? Racism, hatred, irrationality?”

“Of course. Sometimes the church has done a lousy job of living up to her vision. But that’s because we’ve allowed ourselves to follow your standards.”

“You mean the bedrock standards of modern civilization. Are reason, observation, and science something you can just lightly toss away?”

“I don’t want to toss anything away,” I returned. “I just want to properly interpret. But you want to set the terms of the debate in such a way as to ensure your victory.”

“In what way?”

“Do you hear that, that, that?” I raised my voice, and the syllables raced around the sanctuary before subsiding. “Let’s imagine a man,” I continued, ” who lived in this sanctuary, and knew nothing outside it–no windows, no skylights. He was an extremely scientific man who thrived on observation. He heard the echoes, and placed microphones all over the sanctuary to capture them and feed the data to computers. He could use this data to pinpoint the exact location of the people who caused the echoes, and he knew exactly how an echo would behave once it left the wall or sounding board.”

“So what?”

“So this guy’s work is based totally inside the sanctuary. Anything outside it is by definition outside his study. Now suppose someone claims one day to have heard a voice from ‘outside,’ from something called ‘the street’ or a ‘radio.’ This, of course, is preposterous. There’s nothing outside the sanctuary, or at least nothing we can observe. Microphonology deals only with echoes inside the church; anything else is unmicrophonologic. So the sound you thought you heard was either the product of your own imagination, or an anomalous echo we don’t yet have the technology to explain.”

He rolled his eyes. “Go on.”

“Let’s suppose the next day something else very strange happens. Someone walks in and claims to live in a house across the street. Our microphonologist chuckles knowingly. ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and I bet that outside this sanctuary is a coat room. Maybe beyond that there are even leafy plants, or metal vehicles on wheels.’ ‘Well…yes,’ the visitor tries to explain. But our man isn’t superstitious enough to believe this. He asks for rational grounds–proof by observation. ‘Tell me,’ he inquires, ‘what data from the microphones suggests the possibility of an exterior world? Have you somehow followed the echoes’–here there is a snorting sound–’to the street?’”

“What are you getting at?” he interrupted. “Modern science isn’t so parochial as that. Scientists examine all the data we experience, from inside the atom to outside the solar system.”

“But the point is that it’s all empirical data. It’s all bounded by sense experience and the scientific method. Using this stuff is fine, but you’ve made a lethal assumption. You’ve insisted–without empirical justification, in fact–that all we know or can reasonably justify about reality must pass through this gateway. You’ve limited knowledge to the sanctuary. If someone comes in and suggests the existence of houses, roads, and trees, you dismiss the claim based on your standard of evidence. But the strange visitor would disagree with your limited view of acceptable evidence. He holds that knowledge can be obtained by leaving the building and going to a place called a ‘library,’ for instance. He would point out, with Kant, that while science may describe what is, it cannot describe what must be; it can’t limit our range of inquiry. You’ve got two conflicting interpretations of standards of evidence, and debate over this can’t be resolved as easily as a debate within one system. You can’t just dismiss his view; you’ve got to question his authority. And when you do, you’ll find that the world outside the lab is a lot more wild.”

The echoes reverberated off the walls and died away.

Chris Alexion

Nathaniel, Chris Alexion, and Hans in Escalante National Monument, Utah

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