Because You Never Asked

     (This essay was written around 1997. As I make ready to put it up on my website in 2006, the embarrassing --- and that is the word that most resonates with me --- debates swirling around such concepts as “creationism” or  “intelligent design”, bring this essay back into focus.)

     Somewhere in this mass of dubious philosophical patter I remember saying that the concept “God” was just another word for insecurity, no more than an attempt to explain various and sundry mysteries that we can’t seem to explain for ourselves. Who are we? Where did it all begin? How did we get to this point? What happens when you die? Why did it take so long before anyone could dunk a basketball?

     Rather than sitting with a dumber than dumb look, scratching our heads to a mangy mess, someone decided … Eureka! God did it. This cleared up a lot of problems and everyone felt much better. Now we could go to Las Vegas and really blow it out. What? Me Worry?

     But what would life be without its mysteries?

     Thankfully, although the crutch we call “God” helps many people cope with life’s unpredictability, there are still some great mysteries even the most sophisticated technological wizardry has not been able to crack. How did those huge stone statues end up on Easter Island? How could something as complex and technologically advanced as Machu Picchu have been constructed where and when it was? What about the Egyptian pyramids and mummification? What happened to the dinosaurs? Why does anyone think Madonna is sexy? These are some of the mysteries that have eternally stumped mankind and I immediately feel burdened with the intellect of a “valley girl” whenever I ponder such transcendental questions.

     Huh?

     Just such an inexplicable mystery has crept into my life and I’d like to share it with the reader. I will also make an attempt to solve the mystery, but that will come later.

     There are many people who believe the consumption of chocolate is more a substance addiction than a culinary preference. I would agree with this theory because chocolate is something you can eat every day without tiring of, something which cannot be said for your favorite gourmet delight, be it mom’s Yankee pot roast, the perfect linguini at your special Italian restaurant, or that succulent lobster at the “Boston Copper Kettle Chowder House”.

      As a card carrying “chocoholic”, I frequently buy a Hershey bar at a particular convenience store where they sell bars of dark chocolate, which is more to my liking. Over the last 4 months, covering about 50 chocolate bars, I’ve noticed a very peculiar thing:

     Your basic Hershey bar is divided into 12 wedges of chocolate arranged in 4 rows of 3 each. These wedges, like paper that is perforated for neat detachment, are easily separable from the whole bar. This obvious fact is relevant for reasons I will explain later on.

     As my chocolate cravings ran their daily course, I began to notice that each bar of dark chocolate was broken in exactly the same manner before I had a chance to start eating it. The familiar dark brown wrapper never showed any signs of ill treatment and the breakage was only evident once the wrapper had been stripped away. As I began to take note of this phenomena, I became very careful in handling the candy so as not to prejudice the integrity of the bar. In spite of such care, the exact same breakage always revealed itself as I daintily removed the inner layer of paper foil. But the true mystery lies in the nature of the breakage.

     Rather then try to verbally explain the perplexing way in which these candy bars were broken, I shall diagram it:

 

     As you can see, the break does not follow the easily detachable wedge lines, and there is always a separate little piece in the upper right corner which stands alone. If one were to take one of these bars and specifically try to break it in just such a way, it would be virtually impossible … and yet, without any signs of tampering, this is how each of these bars have come to me over the last 4 months.

     I will now go off and do some investigating, including buying a dark bar at a different store, buying various bars of milk chocolate, and who knows what else. This essay will continue when the data is in.

     OK, the data is in. I will now proceed to a theoretical explanation of my findings. I will then relate such findings to a broader, more philosophical discussion of the human condition.

     Firstly, it should be said that the particular semi-sweet or dark chocolate bar in question, unlike the more familiar milk chocolate, is very difficult to find. Hershey almost exclusively sells its dark chocolate in a larger, thicker size not relevant to this investigation. After a Columbus-like exploratory epic, I managed to find the pertinent bar in the sprawling expanse of neon-lit, refined sugar of the local Walgreen’s store. None of the 3 samples I purchased were broken. In addition, none of the milk chocolate bars I examined were ever lacking the wholeness with which they were meant to arrive to the consumer. However, as the investigation ran its course, my fine tuned, Colombo-like instincts began to realize that the texture of the dark chocolate seemed a bit more brittle than the milk chocolate, thus lending itself with more facility to the type of seismic damage now under consideration.

     One more element has recently insinuated itself in evidence: in a remarkable display of coincidence, after months of dark chocolate bars broken in the manner described above, they began to appear whole again at the usual place where I buy them. I then found out that they are delivered to the retail outlet in a 2 by 3 foot box containing hundreds of them.

     The reader now knows as much about this mystery as I do, and, with the help of the evidence available, can come to his or her own conclusion. I have decided that the following scenario might most approximate reality: the evidence leads one to believe that the breakage in question is confined to one store. My theory is that the box in which the last shipment of dark chocolate was delivered was rudely dropped, thus sending an earthquake-like tremor through its contents. Considering the more brittle nature of the dark chocolate, it lends itself more readily to such damage. Once the contents of this box were finally sold, the seismically ruptured merchandise suddenly disappeared.

     But I am not completely comfortable with this explanation.

     Firstly, would each and every candy bar show exactly the same pattern of damage in such case? The singular quality of the cataclysmic thump might have this effect, but there is still room to doubt. Even more dubious is the fact that the breakage did not follow the easily separable wedge lines provided for neat and easy detachment. Wouldn’t these wedge lines be the logically weakest points along which any quake-like upheaval would run? Wouldn’t the “Big One” in California run along some well documented San Andreas type fault line?

     The “chocolate bar mystery” has provided enough data to at least theorize as to what happened. Admittedly, any conclusion reached is open to question, but there is enough information available to make an educated guess, or to at least know there is a rational answer to the riddle.

     We are not so utterly lost so that we have to resort to some mythical Deity or Providential explanation.

     Perhaps the most influential person to come along in post-Medieval history is the great English naturalist, Charles Darwin. This man’s evolutionary theories --- and they are just theories pointing us in the right direction rather then giving us all the answers --- have given human beings a clearer understanding of their existence than they have ever had before. Where did we come from? Where are we going? How do we fit into the universal scheme of things? Darwin gave us some rational clues to these timeless mysteries. We no longer have to resort to the purely gratuitous use of some omnipotent “God” to explain such things.

     “God” has always been a childish way to hide our absolute ignorance about something. Knowledge is a traditional enemy of God. Being that we can never know everything, this battle between rational knowledge and mystical faith will always exist. I’d have no objection with this state of affairs if the mystical faith people would stop killing each other over who’s God is the best. But this is a very difficult task because fabricated “truth” substituted for a lack of rational data will always lead to fatal misunderstandings.