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You're sharing time with close friends. The kind of friends who really defined the word until Facebook stole it. The conversations drift, nobody seems to feel the need to dominate with a "better" story in the same genre. And so eventually you get there. It may take most of the night and some sort of mind altering activity or substance - Madeira, medication or meditation - but talk turns to God, Yahweh, Jehovah, Allah, Buddha - Wikipedia has a list of 101 names for God. Someone says something as innocent as "God only knows," or "Let's leave that in God's hands," and suddenly there it is, the elephant in the room: God.
Ask a "person of the cloth" about God and they will most likely provide you with the acceptable response vetted by their faith. But more truthfully, I think most of us see "the deity" more clearly in a paraphrase of a well-known American president: "Well, Senator, that depends on what you mean by 'God.'" I doubt that there has ever been a time in the history of sentient humankind when we have not agonized over what we mean by God. To attempt a comparative presentation would be foolhardy, since it would necessarily imply that I know what others mean by God. So, my discussion must begin with my first definitional assumption: god is in both definition and relationship uniquely personal. (And, yes, the drop to lower case is intentional. Since God is only one of the myriad names for god it seemed that continuing to use the predominantly western Christian version would get the discussion off on an unintentionally constrained footing.)
So back to the elephant. Our relationship to a deity is personal because, despite any shared liturgy or prayers spoken in unison, those words take unique meaning deep within us. Unique because, as I have written elsewhere, we are an N of one, utterly unique in the universe. That inescapable scientific fact, embedded countless times within our DNA, mandates a unique experience of any stimulus, and that includes our relationship to and/or definition of a deity. As we are unique in the universe, so our relationship to the deity must also be unique.
Now, if you were paying attention, you realize that science a.k.a. DNA, just pulled a chair up to the table. And how could it not? Most of the sacred writings of the world's dominant faith's were written long before the periodic table of elements. The theistic faith expressed in those early texts sometimes, for "believers," trumps science. Often that is the case not because "sacred texts" are demonstrably more legitimate, but simply because they were earlier, seemingly authoritative, stabs at answering the same perplexing questions with which science still struggles. The fundamentalist argument seems to run that if science doesn't have all the answers, well, then we can ignore those it does provide. I can empathize with that inclination, but not the conclusion. One of the most daunting challenges for any scholar, scientist or theologian is admitting that you were wrong. The earth was not created in six days, nor does it lie at the center of the universe. Those are painful admissions for both the authors of the ancient texts and the users of the earliest telescopes.
Still those shared disappointments reveal that the mystic and the mathematician are kindred spirits, that science and theology stalk the same prey: Why does the world work the way it does? How do I reconcile what I observe around me with what I feel inside me? From where does life spring, and where does it go when it leaves here? Are we alone in the universe? And, as Lieber and Stoller wrote for Peggy Lee, "is that all there is?" The fact that we articulate the questions raises this perplexing issue: from whom do we expect an answer?
The faith-based assertion was often that the primary prophet of the faith had, with the help of the deity, indicated the general direction for the best guess at the answers. Science tends to believe that, at least, it has rejected the obviously erroneous conclusions. And then we stumble upon the "earth was created in six days and sits at the center of the universe" dual theology/scientific fallacy, and it seems that both lines of investigation may have led us astray. But probably not.
The fallacies are, for the most part temporary, the result of a transient hubris born of the fleeting belief that our particular niche of existence is somehow exceptional. Consider the calendar that is most likely displayed by the device through which you access this text. Mine defines the year as 2013. Through whose eyes? Well, Christian eyes. The eyes of admittedly biased scholars who assert that their prophet was born roughly two thousand years ago. 2013 AD, After the Death of Jesus of Nazareth. Is the currently politically correct 2013 BCE, "before the common era" any more accurate? Whose common era? Different lenses yield different results. It is the Jewish year 5773, Muslims, Hindi, Chinese - all draw a theological or cultural line in the sand that asserts from this moment the calendar begins, often because, for their faith, at that moment truth became visible. Those are faith-based delineations, drawn from millennia of theological assumptions that occasionally reflect constrained science.
Constrained how? In the most pragmatic sense, constrained by what we could see and measure. We thought ourselves the center of the universe because we could see no further than the objects in the night sky discernible by the unaided human eye. Anything smaller than a grain of sand or pollen became mere conjecture. However, as we devised tools to see further past each end of our experiential spectrum, both faith and science revised their conclusions and commentaries to avoid the inevitable collisions with the evolving empirical evidence. It is in the spirit of that inevitably flawed yet necessary demarcation of the human interaction with existential reality and the passing of time, that I would like to propose a new line in the sand: The Hubble Calendar. It would give dates using BH and AH - Before Hubble and After Hubble. And I mean the telescope. That makes this the year 24 AH. Why pick the launch of the Hubble Telescope as the calendrical set point? Because it was the day when, in very important ways, truth became visible. Work with me here.
At their core, most religions assert that they draw two central truths from their conception of the deity: First, a definition of the universe that the deity has created, and, second, rules or guidelines that define how you are supposed to live in that world. My estrangement from organized religions grows from an inability to accept the legitimacy of either truth as presented by the world's established faiths. The stumbling block for the first truth comes from the fact that the early theologians were utterly ignorant of the nature of the universe in which they lived. Mind you I did not say the world in which they lived. I am as amazed as anyone by the growing evidence of the depth knowledge reflected in the artifacts from ancient civilizations - the math of Stonehenge, what appear to be ancient electric batteries in the pyramids. Fascinating and mystifying. But those are tiny mysteries when compared to the new celestial and quantum data that seem to greet us daily to interpret and reinterpret the nature of the universe. Hence, if the ancients were babes in the woods when it came to the nature of the universe in which they lived, how can we place any faith - big and little f - in their assertions regarding how we live a moral and ethical life in that world? Mind you, I'm not saying that the ancient works must reach flawed conclusions, but I am saying that there is no data to support the conclusions that they do reach.
Let me also point out that I don't propose Hubble as a demarcation of certainty - actually the opposite. Hubble and all the other remarkable advances of Big Astronomy and Little Quantum Mechanics, keep us aware of how much we do not know, not only what we can see, but what we still cannot see - maybe Hubble Humility? Remember that a vital element of "truth" is realizing that it is always hedged by "doubt." Theology encourages us - in times of incomprehensible trauma - to accept "god's plan." Science gives us "levels of significance." Truth is hedged by doubt. Let us consider for the moment the following thought: perhaps the Hubble telescope brings us no further to the 'edge of all things' than did the telescopes of Galileo's time. Perhaps we are, relatively speaking, equally ignorant of the actual nature and limits of the universe as were the ancient scholars whose views we now find quaint. It is certainly possible. So, aside from the visible and the still hidden, what does the BH/AH line in the sand divide?
Two important answers spring to mind. First the line should divide arrogance (BH) from humility (AH). It is like the standard scene in many films and videos: The protagonist for some reason or another picks a fight with a seated stranger. The stranger ignores the protagonist for as long as possible, but then stands up revealing that he is two or three times the size of our protagonist. Before Hubble (BH) we, at least most of us, thought we knew about the universe. "Come on, guy! Wazza matter? Ya chicken? Come on!" Then Hubble stands up and removes the scales from our eyes revealing a universe of inconceivable, unimaginable vastness (AH). "Oh, my! I thought you were someone else. Can I buy you a drink?" So, as we consider the universe from an AH perspective we should attempt to remain humble regarding the scope of our knowledge and understanding.
Humble, yes - but not foolishly so. It isn't a case of "we're not worthy, we're not worthy!" It is more a case of "we're not certain, but here is an intriguing guess . . . ." For me the intriguing guess comes not from the "monstrously large" revealed by Hubble, Kepler, and their swiftly multiplying telescopic kin, but rather from the mind-blowingly microscopic world of string theory and particle physics. As I address the details of these issues in mind-numbing detail in The God Chord (search for Robert Schrag on Feedbooks.com or email me at robert.schrag@gmail.com for a free copy) let me simply give you the Twitter version here: String theory implies that the universe, however large, is made of tiny vibrating strings, of music, and that the particles that construct all existence are attracted to, or repealed from, each other by the song they sing. Supersymmetry implies that this celestial harmony goes on forever and ever, from inconceivably tiny to the unimaginably humongous, throughout the multiverses - song without end.
I believe it is this unending harmony that we are trying to identify as we craft our endless names for god. It is a pointless endeavor. The harmony is - there is no point in naming it, in limiting it, or in claiming it. There are more intriguing issues to consider. And those are, of course, the second major piece of every theology or secular philosophy; knowing the nature of the universe - super-symmetrical harmony - how are we to behave in that universe? Again, I would refer you to earlier posts for my answer: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm. If we can accomplish at least one of the four everyday then we can rest somewhat humbly assured that we are moving along the path of being in tune with the universe.
And why bother? Who cares? That leads to . . . what is it by now? The mastodon in the room? The most intriguing question: Is the universe sentient and self-aware, and do we eventually become contributing, sentient, self-aware portions part of that entity? Do we eventually become part of a universal soul?
Ridiculous! Absurd! Heresy! Theologians will seek to dissect or dismiss the science that nudged me to the question and scientists will decry the lack of evidence or data that even suggest the hypothesis, let alone ways to test it. Poppycock!
Maybe, maybe not. Let's save that for another time. I've claimed your eyeballs enough for today, July 27, 24 AH
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