One of the most depressing features of many anti-science proponents is how weak, empty, and gray the natural world is for them. It is characterized as a world empty of satisfaction for the curious among us. There is no mystery. The cosmos is a dead and dying thing. For some of the religious among us, the only thing that makes nature worth living in is the presence of God. But there is an innate contradiction in that vapid assertion. I want to replant the seeds of wonder in that barren soil, focusing not on that tiny deity who can do no better than the deist imagining a clockwork universe that needs constant attention and adjustment to keep it going as if the creator were really a human who can never get it quite right, because they can’t see the consequences of their action past a simple and brutal instrumentalism.

This barren universe, created by theists and atheists without either imagination or creativity is a death trap for the living. It can neither satisfy our hunger for mystery, provide puzzles that can’t be solved, nor a sense of the infinite. There is no beauty that cannot be explained, nor emotion beyond our comprehension. Human logic is large enough to capture it all, and wrap it up in a tidy package before throwing it into the dumpster.

In contrast, I would like a rebirth in our minds of the effervescence of the quantum world creating and destroying galaxies of matter in every instant, travel the depths of the fractal dimensions in an eternal recursion of ever-increasing precision. I want to see the emergence of life over and over in ever more detail and watch as it diversifies into the millions and billions of versions of different and interacting biomes. Life, death, and reproduction changing, twisting, shaping, and building the physical landscape into unique symbiotic realities. I want to see the world flourishing in every way, and societies of termites, bees, meerkats, birds, humans create their own emergent societies. I want to see hope again in the natural rhythms of the seasons, life and death, longed for and hoped for. I am tired of the artificial immortalities stretched out before us as if Eden were a static 23°c garden that loses its charm when boredom sets in.

I want the poetry of reality to elevate us above our fixations, and realize the greatness we have in our grasp. I want us to accept our nature, and the nature of our neighbors in a creative dance by rejoicing in life instead of always trying to snuff it out.