No random event is interesting. Some thinkers, materialist by temperament, will express wonder at some part of what they insist is a random universe. But this is borrowed wonder, a stolen emotion, stolen from the stored cultural capital bought by people who lived in a different cosmos.

Fortunately, insight is a free gift within language itself. If we ask the speaker to exegete their wonder instead of just driving by it, within a few sentences they’ll unconsciously speak – name – the source of the wonder, the word representing the source of their wonder will be a noun they don’t believe in.  An anthropomorphism.  Embarrassment ensues.   Then embarrassment often shifts to anger, which is why those who like to have their random cake and eat their wonder, too, get angry when asked to explain.

Random events only hold interest in relation to non-random causes. By “non-random” I mean an event with an intelligent cause rooted in moral purpose. And the moral purpose is supplied by the observer as well as the causative agent; the observer, the one housing awe and wonder, sees in the “random” event some opportunity for human good, however that observer defines good, and no definition of good comes intrinsically from the random. It is supplied by an intelligence.

Physicists study events with long causal chains which stretch through billions of Sol-cycles. No moral purpose arises from these chains and years.

To convert the unknown cause into a known effect – to learn – implies a moral purpose.

So what is the purpose for the many years of hard study, first to finish school then to advance the discipline?

Knowledge is its own reward? This is an assertion as naked as “God exists.” It really means “I derive personal pleasure from increasing my knowledge of the causal chain one more step backward toward…” Good for you.

Knowledge reduces pain, increases pleasure, and delays death?  Sure, it does (well, at least medicine and engineering does), and I’m glad it does, but in the spirit of pulling on causal chains: why should humanity survive? “It is self evident” is no more intellectually rigorous than “turtles all the way down”.

These folks import their meaning from somewhere wholly unrelated to the scientific method.  Any physicist who attempts to articulate his personal purpose will not be able to finish the first sentence without standing, logically, upon some good which he would personally defend against any random destructive force.  So he would viscerally, instantaneously sort among the effects, deflecting some and grasping others, as he grabs his favorite child from the traffic in the road.  Which is to say physicists are people first, and they spend their days like you and I do, sorting among the effects of long ago causes, rejecting some and embracing others on the basis of personal benefit.  Then, when safe and fed, they do science.

No random event is interesting. It becomes intresting when a non-material moral framework is projected onto it by the observer, rightly or wrongly.

So there is no such thing as wonder at the random universe; there are simply people who are happily out of touch with their own feelings. There is no such thing as a perception of the random which is interesting except as a potentiality for order is visible within the random. “Order’ You see the flower, it is beautiful,

Borrowed wonder

Moderns say ancients invented God to explain the terrible lightening, the large sky, the unexpected drought or harvest. The ancient rustic had a simple equation in his head with an unknown operator, and he substituted the symbol “God” in the place of the unknown operator.

“Wonder” ocupies the same term in the same mental equation in the modern sophisticate’s mind