While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and Bigbangists at the Local Provincial Research University...

While Attending the Annual Convocation of Cause Theorists and Bigbangists at the Local Provincial Research University, the Mad Farmer Intercedes from the Back Row Wendell Berry ‘Chance’ is a poor word among the mazes of causes and effects, the last stand of these all-explainers who, backed up to the first and final Why, reply, ‘By chance, of course!’ As if that tied up ignorance with a ribbon. In the beginning something by chance existed that would bang and by chance it banged, obedient to the by-chance previously existing laws of existence and banging, from which the rest proceeds by the logic of cause and effect also previously existing by chance? Well, when all that happened who was there? Did the chance that made the bang then make the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help? Prove to me that chance did ever make a sycamore tree, a yellow- throated warbler nesting and singing high up among the white limbs and the golden leaf-light, and a man to love the tree, the bird, the song his…