The God of the Whirlwind - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 182

atempt to unite the two. he rainbow covenant, however beautiful,
can hardly serve as a resource of consolation in our time. But stepping
beyond it is no small mater. If we do so, our entire sense of what religion
might offer us also changes; in fact, as I have suggested above, the awe
that arises out of the topic of Job accords almost exactly with a humility
in the presence of what a materialist science teaches us to see. It does so
not because it finally reconciles faith and reason but because it pushes
beyond them, cracking open both religious and secular interpretations of
our condition. The God of the whirlwind demands that we give up any
confidence that the universe will comply with our expectations. Awe in
his presence obliterates those religious institutions that would translate
his power into human terms, that would capture his voice in specific
doctrines, and that would assure us of our place in an eventual cosmic
triumph. By the same token, an encounter with such dark forces reveals
there can be no ultimate basis for secular hope, no guarantee that utopia
will come to pass, no prospect of historical closure, and no certainty that
any political promise will come true. The same awe that destroys our reli-
gious arrogance would also demolish our confidence that through reason
we will conquer those forces that challenge us. Through the experience
of that awe, we would thus give up our confidence that God is a larger
version of ourselves or that by speaking in his name we can subdue our
fellow creatures—or that with greater effort we might gain a rational and
systematic control over every aspect of our fate. We would be in the pres-
ence of what defeats us and for that reason takes us beyond ourselves.
By accepting our defeat, we would at last become capable of witness-
ing the unuterable wildness at the heart of things, the biological exuber-
ance (as Bruce Bagemihl calls it) that proliferates in sheer crazy inven-
tiveness and raucous excess without rhyme or reason, without hope of
explanation. 155 That wildness is the sense of the sacred of our time—a
version of the sacred that supersedes and devastates nearly every prior
experience that went by its name. In this version of the sacred there is
no solace for human beings except for our astonishment at its limitless
beauty and fragility, the splendor of what arises without origin or end,
what flourishes in the dark abyss of time.
Dazzled by that splendor, we can endure nearly anything that may
transpire. If we act in time, as we must, we will have withdrawn what