Does the Universe Love You?

On theology and conspiracy theories

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

I don’t know how old I was, exactly, when I became a skeptic. I suppose it’s just something I’ve always been, in the same way that my hair has always been some shade of brown. It feels like a physical feature, rather than an acquired trait. 

At the same time, I’ve always had a very wild imagination. It’s almost as if my skepticism exists purely for the purpose of decimating what I’ve deemed to be a bad idea in order to let some other feral speculation take root, and grow, and blossom, and spread. 

But these two things don’t actually work well together. Instead, most of the time, I’m caught in an internal battle between wild speculation and decimating skeptical critique. Not good for the self esteem! But at least it keeps me from falling off the edge of one side or the other. 

Because of this war in my own disposition, I’ve watched the discourse on conspiracy theories emerge with curiosity. On the one hand, when I hear about conspiracy theories (or people who’ve become vulnerable to them) it feels totally incomprehensible to me. My skeptical mind cannot imagine being seduced by any of the conspiracy theories I’ve heard. On the other hand, my wild skeptical imagination knows (and loves) the kind of strange and unpredictable power that ideas have over us.

Thinking about conspiracy theories, and the strange power they have over people, has actually made me rethink the nature of the academic field I was intellectually trained in: theology. Is theology itself—theories about the divine—not just a vast and ancient field of wild, speculative, seductive conspiracy theories?

Theology and the Universe

There’s one theological idea, in particular, that seems especially ripe for this sort of critique: the idea of The Universe. Not the scientific idea that there is a material universe, and we live in it. Rather, I’m talking about the much more theological idea that there is The Universe, and we’re living in it. More specifically, the idea that The Universe has some unified form of agency that engages with our puny human forms of agency in some way. The idea that The Universe actively intervenes our lives in order to send us messages, block our paths, or help us manifest our desires. 

It’s a rather sneaky idea, I think, in that it’s not obviously theological for many people. For many people I think it reads as perfectly in tune with science. It doesn’t appear to affirm any form of divinity that’s created the material universe. It’s just a reference to what is, materially speaking: the universe. So The Universe has a secular feeling, in that way. And yet, it’s an idea that allows people to cling to some of the old relics of theology that often go missing in a more secular worldview. Perhaps chief among these relics is the idea that there’s a meaning and purpose at the heart of things. The Universe allows people to keep affirming that we’re not living in the midst of chaos because everything happens for a reason—it’s all decided by The Universe.

Where Did The Universe Come From?

I’ve been trying to trace the genealogy of The Universe, because I’ve gotten more and more curious about when exactly this theological idea was birthed and started to take shape. The term itself is a combination of Latin words: unus (for one) and versus (to turn back to). So the word has ancient roots. But it’s difficult to imagine that it was applied to our cosmos as we do today until at least the early modern period. 

But when did it become divine? When did The Universe become a kind of secular deity? It’s tempting to implicate Baruch Spinoza who, in early modernity, articulated an equivalence between God and Nature that people still love to make reference to today. But for Spinoza God-or-Nature was pretty impersonal—not the sort of deeply interested personal form of agency it seems to be for so many people today. This, perhaps, was more the work of theosophy: figures like Madame Blavatsky and Rudolph Steiner who, in the early 20th century, pushed back against culturally stagnant Christian doctrines and tried to produce wild new fusions of science and spirituality (thanks to Robert Corrington for pointing me in that direction!)

I like to understand these genealogies, because it helps me to think more critically about ideas, and take them apart. But there are, of course, a great many people who don’t necessarily see the subtle theological genealogies of The Universe at work, and are critical of it nevertheless. Part of the reason, inevitably, is that it feels so deeply offensive to look around us at the mass deaths from pandemic, the mass deaths from war and genocide, and the mass disasters of economic inequality and climate change and assert that it’s all happening for a reason. As if some sort of sadistic divine agency is teaching the most innocent among us a very important lesson. It sounds like spiritual bypassing on a grand scale. 

White Women and The Universe

Because of this, there are many people who end up ridiculing or chastising those who turn to The Universe for some form of spiritual succor. It’s a critique that many of us—even those of us who might otherwise occasionally find ourselves saying, “OK, Universe, I hear you!”—recognize and repeat. Some examples: here’s an old 2018 skit from the bygone Amy Schumer show about the women who call upon The Universe. 

And here’s some bad footage from “Beetlejuice: The Musical”, in which Delia Deetz talks about The Universe as a fun girlfriend (full disclosure: I saw this musical with friends last weekend and they all turned to me in the theater and were like, “Beatrice, that’s you!”) 

In both instances we have these naive white women who seem to have succumbed to a particular sort of theory: that The Universe is looking out for them. This idea is sustained by both an inflated sense of self-importance and an untroubled sense of privilege. Why are they so privileged? Because that’s what The Universe—their special secret agent—wanted. Why should they continue to expect their privilege to endure, even at the expense of others? Because it’s the will of The Universe.

So perhaps The Universe offers us a pretty convincing case that theology can look a lot like a conspiracy theory.

Theology as Speculative Fiction

But I was recently having a conversation with a colleague in theology, Robert Saler, for a project I’m working on (which I hope to tell you more about soon). He’s actually researched and taught about conspiracy theories, unlike me. So, his ideas about them are more developed. When I asked him what, if anything, is the difference between theology and conspiracy theories he didn’t see them as radically or qualitatively distinct. It’s not that theology is rational, while conspiracy theories aren’t. Or that theology has evidence on its side, while conspiracy theories don’t. But he did maintain a kind of distinction. Maybe, he suggested, it has something to do with the powers that theology seeks to give you access to. Maybe, for instance, it has something to do with grace. 

My conversation with Robert dislodged an old quote I’ve always liked, from my theology professor Sallie McFague. It’s about The Universe. Or maybe just the universe. Theology, as Sallie describes it, “is mostly fiction.” But it’s a certain kind of fiction. One that affirms, in essence, “that the universe is neither indifferent nor malevolent but that there is a power (and a personal power at that) which is on the side of life and its fulfillment.” 

When I look at the world around me right now, it does feel like speculative fiction to imagine that the universe is not malevolent. And yet, Sallie’s words also respond to something deep inside of me—something more intuitive. 

I have been loved so deeply in my life, and I have loved so deeply in return. I have seen so many incredible things—visions of incredible beauty that have left me with tears. Things like the distant horizon line from the top of a mountain, bioluminescent life surfacing on the ripples of ocean water, a spider weaving a web, the bright glow of stars nestled in the velvet dark of the night sky, the spinning whirlpool of another animal’s eyes as it’s watching me. These things—all this love, and all this beauty—has hit me so hard, and moved me so deeply, it’s impossible for me not to think about it as some kind of a force, or maybe even a forcefield that hums at the liminal edge of my consciousness somehow. 

It’s not that these things hide the horrors from me. I see them every single day, on the streets I drive down and the horrific news I read every single time I enter the web. And I don’t feel like any of this is happening for a reason. There is so much about what’s happening in the world right now that feels chaotically unfair. 

And yet I still find it difficult to imagine that absolutely everything is meaningless. I see too much meaning and order and beauty in the faces of the people I love, in that simple sight alone, to let me believe it. In other words, I am deeply skeptical about the claim that there’s no meaning, that we’re just spinning in the midst of chaos, and that the earth and the cosmos beyond it is entirely indifferent to our presence. Instead, I seem to be caught up in the conspiracy theory that there’s something (or maybe a million tiny somethings) that offers us an elemental benevolence. I don’t think it’s guiding us, or directing anything. But I still think it’s there. Humming, waiting, holding. 

What if this idea of an elemental benevolence—that seems to be so integral to theology—is actually a counter-conspiracy? Could it feed conspiracy theories? Perhaps. But, as Robert suggested to me, maybe it calls us towards another sort of impulse: not toward the antisocial mistrust of a conspiracy theory, but towards a much riskier and dangerous impulse to trust. Maybe this is why Sallie described it as a kind of speculative fiction: it’s a form of storytelling, not to deceive and not merely to survive, but to catch sight of, and be capable of, the wildest forms of love.