some of the things are so fundamentally alien to human sensibilities as to shatter the mind

I think that’s really supposed to be more evidence that the universe doesn’t care, which is - as you pointed out - the horror of the thing.

The other horror he exposes us to is inbreeding/crossbreeding, with the idea that everything we’ve built up as pure and meaningful is really just an artifact of arbitrary lines in the sand.

I just Googled “lovecraft uncaring” and pulled up these bits:

This is because that Lovecraft’s horror is subtle, evoking from the page and curling around like a miasma in the mind. His universe is one of inhuman, uncaring gods and a sense of ultimate futility, incurring the sense of dread and fright in the reader

and

You want to know the real terror in the Cthulhu Mythos stories? It’s not just that godlike monsters want our world, not only that secret cults are carrying out conspiracies forged eons ago that will inevitably destroy the human race. It’s that nobody up there cares. This is, like, the natural order of things. We gradually realize that Cthulhu and his bunch aren’t even evil, because “good” and “evil” are human concepts that mean nothing to the uncaring universe. Now that’s scary.

Of course, to a rationalist it’s not. Really in the same way that a rationalist, while he can understand what Kierkegaard is on about, doesn’t really feel the dread or “Fear and Trembling” that Kierkegaard is writes about at length–they’re predicated on a reaction to something counter to a comforting worldview.

I agree that most modern rationalists accept that the universe doesn’t care about us, but I think most modern scientists believe that the universe is potentially comprehensible. It would probably be dismaying to many to learn that the universe was not accessible to reason.

(If I have the wrong impression of Lovecraft, please correct me.)

I mean isn’t it true that the essential horror of these stories (at the time they were written) arose from the notion that the universe wasn’t a caring place designed for the comfort of Man, but rather that it was an old, cold, hungry place filled with beings that could (and would) destroy all humans more-or-less by mistake? We are to Cthulhu as ants are to us, etc. That horror only works if you have a worldview where people matter, and Man as a species matters.

A modern rationalist, on the other hand, has already accepted the fact that the universe doesn’t care about him, or his species, or his planet, solary system, galaxy, etc… and the universe will trundle along on its cold and uncaring way with or without them. They will miss this horror viscerally, and will probably only recognize it when someone points out the social context in which the stories originally occurred. (Fortunately the glorious purpleness of the prose is preserved through many worldviews. Heh.)

If Cthulhu were to rise, it would just be another data point for the rationalist, not an existential and philosophical crisis. He would need to toss out some hypotheses that Cthulhu’s existence invalidated and come up with some new ones–assuming he wasn’t eaten, or force to breed with frog-creatures, etc., but his worldview could adapt.

Of course that one doesn’t let me drop Lovecraft references.

Sigh. Reason is just fundamentally opposed to the Great Old Ones.

You’d think four years and several research efforts would have been enough to settle the question with some authority.