Everest, from a distance, is still a magnificent dream. Up close nowadays it’s a nightmare featuring competing journalists, scoundrels, mountebanks, thieves, and even prostitutes mixed in with the true mountain lovers on its slopes. So I missed it. Robert Frost may indeed have depleted the complete store of New England insights, at least in his unique genre. So it goes. But the story of Spinoza may be different. I’m not sure we’re any closer to answering his questions than he was – except, perhaps, that we don’t get burned at the stake, crucified, or ducked in the millpond much anymore for challenging generally held religious, philosophical, scientific, or political ideas. We do get shot now and then; not for nothing was the gay Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire advised to wear body armor in public around the time of his consecration. But in general we’re freer to wonder why and how we’ve developed such a variety of beliefs and answers in response to phenomena that perhaps can never be understood more than partially.

The danger that’s inherent in such speculation is, and always has been, personal; to whit, that in wondering about the behavior and beliefs of those with whom we differ, we may condescend. I may think it infamous, for example, that a fairly large number of my fellow citizens seem truly to believe that the Nazi concentration and extermination camps of the 1930s and 1940s are a hoax perpetrated by people seeking to exploit the sympathy of society. But it’s critical that we not allow any disdain of ours for the notion to interfere with our search for the genesis of it.

Why do some people looking at a window pane stained with airborne kitchen grease see the face of the Virgin Mary? Why are others utterly certain that the United States Government – that behemoth that couldn’t even regulate creative securities traders or be trusted to administer public health care – engineered the collapse of the World Trade Center with cleverly positioned munitions, a conspiracy that would have involved at least hundreds, of whom none has uttered a peep? It beggars the imagination. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is why.

A friend handed me photocopies in church last Sunday, of two one-page pieces from Scientific Americanwritten by Michael Shermer, a former professor of the history of science and the editor of Skeptic Magazine. The first piece, “Patternicity,” asks why people see images, hear voices, and seek patterns in what probably are random phenomena? Naturally, Shermer answers his own question. He notes that creatures that identify patterns in their surroundings are more likely to survive than those that don’t. A rustle in the grass may be the wind, or it may be a tiger. Those that choose to act as if it’s a tiger may be a bit jumpier than those who don’t; but we’re their descendants because when it wasa tiger, they survived.

The upshot is that we have a natural need to make sense of our experiences, and as long as we can, we can navigate without too much error. But that need can lead us astray when there’s no apparent sense to be made of a happening, or if it’s too complicated to grasp. Those of us who know the geological causes of a tsunami can accept it as a regrettable, but natural calamity; those who can’t may interpret it as the act of a vengeful god. Many of us, for example, don’t know what, if anything, actually happened at Sodom and Gomorrah; but many others of us are certain.

Which leads to the second article, “Agenticity,” the belief that invisible agents – everything from an Intelligent Designer to angels, demons, and government conspirators – are controlling our lives; this in the absolute absence of theories that can be tested and replicated. The need to find predictive patterns to govern our lives is important to our survival: Plant too early, and you may lose your crop; head across Lake Champlain in questionable weather, and you may be in the news that night; drive fast on icy pavement, ...etc. The problems occur when we see patterns where there may be none: for example, the human being is too complicated and magnificent to be the result of random evolutionary selection, and therefore was created by a supernatural designer.

None of this brings us any closer to why some people see patterns where there are none, and others see none where they do exist. It seems to me to have a lot to do with how we’re raised. Belief in a higher power, for instance, can be wonderful, but whether that power acts directly in our lives is arguable. Some derive comfort and strength from what they believe is a personal relationship with that power. But I spoke recently with a pair of Fundamentalist Christians who claim to be discarding earthly possessions because “the signs” (patterns) indicate to them the imminent return of Christ, the Judgment, and the Rapture. Is it possible that for people isolated from general society in unanimous congregations the world seems so complicated, so ungodly, so ready for brimstone that they’ve given up on it, removed themselves, and retreated to simplistic solutions? If so, they’re following a pattern that’s been repeated unsuccessfully many times before, left a lot of people sitting on hilltops gazing upward, and still leaves the rest of us wondering: Why?