Order and Intelligibility
A Series on Secularism - Part 3
Our age did not invent an unbelieving order; Rome had Stoic necessity, Epicurean chance, Platonist forms, modernity has Darwin’s slow ratchet and Skinner’s conditioning, coherence by the pound but no verdict for the conscience. The modern secular account is their child: five moves from impersonal beginnings to emergent order, adaptive minds, negotiated morals, aesthetic byproduct; when the dials look too exact, say we only woke where waking was possible. No miracles, just time and math doing their work; it is elegant, it is tidy and it does offer a certain peace, no Judge, no judgment, only systems.
Run this logic out though and it begins to narrow: duty becomes pragmatism, courage becomes hormones and ultimately, love becomes a strategy; the world stays legible and survivable, but maybe not livable. The watch is disassembled, all the gears laid bare on the cloth, but we can’t shake the feeling that beyond the windings and wheels that make seconds from momentum and minutes from mass there must be something else, some vitality flowing from the calluses of the old watchmaker’s fingers, or the cautious blue scrutiny of his eye which grants beauty to the complication beyond a mere feat of complexity.
Which is why the old book opens with a Name.
The Bible begins with a voice: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth,” but the tone is wrong, it’s third person, not first. You or I wouldn’t phrase it this way, so why does God? Our words are a manifestation of our thought process, and our thoughts are formed in a prison of our capability; we exist aware of our human limitations in every moment, bound by what we can see and manipulate; we speak in relation to those abilities, but God has no such boundary. We sit at our keyboard to write a book, or with a pad of paper, but God is existence incarnate, He speaks, and it is.
When God speaks this way, it is because He is declaring Himself the author of a new creation; He isn’t speaking as a character within the story, He is speaking the story into being. The name of God must be spoken because no one else is present to speak it, and no other name has the authority to begin the sentence.
God doesn’t exist on the same plane as the dust He just ordered into motion; He is inexplicable, unbound by time and matter, extant but immaterial in a way we will philosophize over for eternity without success. God is uncaused, and so He exists before explanation. We use words like omnipresent, immaterial, eternal, because they’re the best our language can manage, but even they fail, because all our concepts are born in time, shaped by our ever‑present awareness of decay and limited by causality. God is incomprehensible to us because we try to use time‑bound, cause‑driven thinking to explain something fully outside time and cause.
And yet the transcendent God begins His self‑revelation not in abstraction but in the act of creation and through this His transcendence leaks through, if only slightly, into the realm of our existence. He is not bound by this world, but His fingerprints are on it, each new creation bears his mark. Scale and complexity become echo chambers that only make His word ring louder. The more there is, the more the mark shows, what seems at first like noise resolves into a pattern.
You can start as small as a grain of dust, atoms held together by inexplicable forces, or as large as a spiral galaxy leaning into a celestial firework, you can count the primes and watch their stubborn distribution, or trace the Fibonacci sequence through pinecones and sunflowers, and you begin to realize that the world is not just stuff, it is syntax, it is ordered excess, it is not mass seeking meaning, it is meaning given mass. We call this mathematics, but math feels less like a human invention and more like a discovery, like we just brushed the sand off carvings that were already there, etched by a mind which came first. Reason was not born from chaos, logic is not a local dialect humans made up by random chance in a quiet corner of the universe, it is God’s grammar.
Push into biology and the choir grows, information braided into molecules, instructions folded inside instructions, cells reading and editing themselves like little scribes at their desks, error checking, repairing, sustaining, all of it humming along in real time while we pretend life is simple because the words are short, DNA, RNA, cell, gene, as if the brevity of the label can hide a miracle. Complexity here is not a mess, it is nested hierarchies where parts make sense inside wholes and wholes make sense inside larger wholes, until you realize that meaning scales, and the bigger it gets the more apparent our purpose becomes, the more authored it seems. Even emergence, a word we use when a higher order pattern appears from lower order parts only amplifies this wonder, because the possibility for the higher order had to be present in the lower from the beginning, a symphony perfectly written before a single note was ever struck.
The field of physics observes constants tuned within knife edge ranges that allow stars to burn and heavy elements to form, balances that would unravel if anything at all was changed, expansion rates that give time for life to think about why it is alive, and the whole thing held within a narrow corridor where existence can flower. We try to dodge God here, too, by claiming the multiverse all but guarantees our luck and existence. We say that given an infinite number of universes this perfect balance was inevitable, infinite universes is itself an appeal to a grander logic, a framework that sits above the many and makes them possible, which only pushes the question back into brighter light, why is there a canvas that can hold so many paintings, and why is it the kind of canvas that yields beauty and intelligibility instead of blank white static?
Then there is beauty itself, the way a song at the right time can move you, bring you to tears, the way harmony feels right even when you do not know theory, the way sunsets refuse to be useful and are still necessary, and how moral beauty works the same way, courage is recognized across cultures, sacrificial love still revered by people who disagree on everything else, as if conscience recognizes some silent standard. If the world were only accident piled on accident, if mind were only a trick of matter, then these resonances would be suspicious, yet they persist. The more complex the system, the more places they appear, art and ethics and mathematics reaching for each other along paths that should not connect, and somehow they do.
Our own technology even testifies against our pride here, because every time we build a larger system we discover that success depends on humility before reality, engineers learn quickly that the world will not flatter their assumptions, software at scale punishes lazy architecture, bridges fall to sloppy math, distributed networks expose weak synchronization, and the only way forward is to align with what is, to submit to constraints that do not care about your feelings. The larger the canvas, the more the hidden structure becomes non-negotiable, and the more you respect it the more the world makes sense. Even the secularist in his hard sciences becomes a quiet disciple of what he tries to deny, his fruitfulness the byproduct of obedience to an immutable order.
So yes, add more layers, add ecosystems interlaced with weather and soil and ocean currents, add economies with supply chains spread like capillaries over continents, add languages evolving while still carrying ancient roots, add human souls trying to love and failing and trying again, and the case does not dilute, it concentrates, because every new layer creates more surfaces where God’s signature can be seen, more intersections where order and freedom touch, more chances for meaning to flash out from behind the curtain. Transcendence leaking into immanence is not a thin trickle; it is capillary pull drawing glory through the vellum of creation, rising farther, and at a certain size it is impossible to ignore.
This is why worship grows with knowledge rather than shrinking and wonder deepens with study rather than diminishing, the map gets bigger and more detailed but the orientation is forever the same, North stays North, and the little repetitions feel less like limits and more like a composer returning to a theme He knows and loves. God remains utterly other, beyond time and cause and our neat diagrams, yet He leaves Himself everywhere, not as a puzzle to trap us but as hospitality, come and see, come and eat, come and name what you are seeing with the right Name, and when you do you can stop viewing the chaos of this life as a maze or a jail and instead recognize it as a cathedral, vast, echoing, full of light, the sort of place where you finally feel at home.
In the fall, man rebelled against not just rule or law, but against the very hierarchy of being. He wanted to become like God, and at first glance, it doesn’t sound wrong. Doesn’t God want us to reflect Him? To bear His image? Aren’t we made in His likeness? But that’s not what the serpent was offering; to be like God in this sense meant to decide for ourselves what is good and evil, to cast off dependence, to self‑author, to invert the order God had established. It was a grasp at sovereignty, but we aren’t sovereign, we’re just dust, little motes looking up at God and saying, “I will be like you, without you,” but that was impossible and we knew it. Our stories echo our innate awareness of this limitation: Lucifer, Icarus, Prometheus, Ahab, Macbeth staring at a crown he had no right to wear, Ozymandias shouting into the desert, Faustus trading away his soul for knowledge that could never save him. The pattern never changes, reach past the line, ignore the limitations stitched into the fabric of this life, grasp at sovereignty and you fall, not because God is petty, but because reality itself bends around His name, and everything that refuses that fundamental truth will break.
Dylan R. Griffith is Director of Communications for Dissident Media. Follow him on X at @LivingDadJoke.
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