To a Scientist

Andrea Tsurumi

Dear Folks,

For years I have been writing a book to be called (almost finished) "The Patriarchal Nightmare: The Maternal Principle in Nature, Culture and Persons." There was an article by this scientist Saturday in The New York Times. Here is my answer now added to my book.  - John G

A Sour Note from One Scientist.

The following article appeared in The New York Times by Alan Lightman, a physicist who teaches humanities at M.I.T. (Lightman, 2014k, p. 17). The article is entitled “Our Lonely Home in Nature.”

Like so many of his cohorts, he does not believe that “Nature is purposeful. Nature simply is…..There is no reciprocity. There is no mind on the other side of the wall.”

He writes this because he considers mother nature’s many calamities, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, “happen without the slightest consideration for human inhabitants.”



He sounds like Christians who believe in a Puppeteer God. So Nature is both mindless and cruel, like cruel parents. However, Nature is not moral like humans. It is, however, stunningly committed to the service of life, as every storm and quake are balancing forces, like our dreams do, as now proven in sleep disorder labs throughout the world. When volunteers are awakened every time REM occurs, they rapidly become restless and even psychotic. In this simple exercise, we discover that life does have purpose. Since dreams are participants in the mind of the unconscious which receives its mind from nature, how can this scientist say nature is purposeless? He also has to acknowledge that Nature’s seeds that authors the life of plants, animals and humans have purpose. And plants, animals and humans constitute three quarters of existence on earth. All, therefore, that is left is the first quarter, all minerals. Then the issue becomes this: there must be a hidden mind in these vital substances, since all living organism emerge from them.

One final thought: why does Dr. Lightman posit these few violent moments in Nature, when in immeasurable amounts, the miracles of every drop of water and element of air, of every blade of grass and tree are present on our land?