English, Dragonish, and the Problem with Fundamentalism

Yesterday, as I bumbled my way through a reasonably productive Monday, I encountered two things that got me thinking about faith and language.   The first of those two things was the video below, which was pitched out onto Facebook by the former head of the religious school at my family's synagogue.   It's a pleasant little bit of history, the history of the English language, presented by the inimitable Open University.   The Open University, in the event you haven't heard of it, is a British institution, one that allows easy access to quality, college-level coursework to anyone who has the desire to partake of it.   Back then I lived there in the late 70s, much British daytime programming during the day on one of the three television channels was dedicated to Open University lectures and course preparation.   Those wacky socialists and their educations!  Anyhoo, here it is, ready to sop up 10 minutes of your life.  It's a bit naughty in that wry British way, so thou art forewarned:



After this little excursus into the organic evolution of the English language, I took a break from FB and blogging, did a few chores, and then settled in for a bit of day-off gaming.  I'm playing my way through Skyrim on the PS3, and it's a remarkably entertaining, deep, and well-constructed game.  One of the elements that Bethesda Softworks has really nailed in both this game and others is a well-crafted soundtrack.  It's a contextual soundtrack, meaning the music shifts and varies depending on location, time of day, and whether or not you're blowing up zombies with balls of magical fire.

As I settled in with my controller yesterday, though, something caught my attention.  At the beginning of the game, during the initial load screen, there's a song.  It's a big bellowy hoo-hah song, all pomp and bombast, the sort of music that stirs the small Viking fragment of my genetic heritage.   In the midst of drums and blaring brass, a big male voice choir grunts and vocalizes, and then starts yarping gibberish in an MMA-meets-Glee testosterama.

When the yarping began, I realized, suddenly, that they weren't singing nonsense words at all.  For the purposes of verisimilitude, the game has a language that was made for it, a language spoken by dragons.  The words in that tongue are spoken throughout the game, and in a moment of geekish epiphany, I recognized dovakiin, the Dragonish word for "dragon-born."  And then the word Anduin, the name of the great dragon who brings about the end of time.  It was a bit like that time I first attended a synagogue service after learning Hebrew.  Only geekier.

I went online, and found the...cough...English "translation," which goes like this:



So here's a language, or the framework of one, that exists solely in-game.   I'm not sure there's enough there there for the American Bible Society to attempt a translation into Dragonish, but I figure if you can translate the Bible into Klingon, anything is fair game.

Twice in one day, then, there came the reminder of the ephemeral character of human language.  It's one of the reasons I find fundamentalist literalism so completely bizarre.

Sure, the nature of God is unchanging, and the nature of the Being that God speaks is boundlessly, deeply real.  But words?   As much as I love 'em, words in human tongues aren't the thing itself.  They can evoke.  They can suggest.  They can point to, and lead to, the Holy.  But they are not the Real that rises from our Maker.

Perhaps that's why we find it so easy to fight over them.   As MacDonald puts it:

God has not cared that we should anywhere have assurance of His very words; and that not merely perhaps, because of the tendency in His children to word-worship, false logic, and corruption of the truth, but because He would not have them oppressed by words...even He must depend for being understood upon the spirit of His disciple.

Viva la Neoreformacion!

The Evidence

A standard refrain I'll hear when chatting with folks who are skeptical about the existence of God is that there's just no evidence for a Creator. The universe is a deep and cold place, almost as deep and cold as the hearts of the human beings that inhabit our tiny little speck of nothing orbiting a nondescript yellow sun in a quiet fringe of an unremarkable spiral galaxy. Where is the hand of the Maker?

Further, where is the work of a gracious God in a world in which children starve by the thousands each day, where women are raped and mutilated in the Congo, and where ignorance and self-interest govern the lives of the faithful and unfaithful alike? How could a just God tolerate this [poop]?

The challenge, then, is twofold. It seeks both empirical proof and ethical proof. My responses to that need tend not to be the same as my Bibliocentric co-religionists. What's the point of quoting scripture to folks who don't recognize it as a source of authority? It's like trying to persuade Ken Ham of evolution by quoting from the Origin of Species. Instead, I tend to feel as follows:

1) I find existence itself to be a marvelous evidence of God. In it's complexity, beauty, and deep inscrutability, the universe in which we find ourselves is an astounding thing. It evokes both awe and a bit of knee-trembling, even...and sometimes particularly...among atheists of a poetic mindset. Our spacetime is neither static nor does it appear to have come into being in a way that is scientifically comprehensible. Our physics can only go so far back. That things just plain ol' exist is a marvel, and points to a reality that transcends the boundaries of what we can empirically know.

The way that things are...the intricate interweaving of physical laws and structures...also directly speaks to the connectedness of all things. Matter and energy and gravity and light are all part of a great and complex dance.

2) I find sentience to be a marvelous evidence of God. What am I? I know I must be, because Descartes told me so. But the self that is typing this now is an odd and marvelous thing. It has its roots in a biological system, in the complex processes of an organic neural network mounted atop a slightly sedentary bipedal form. It frames its conceptual grasp of the world through an array of abstract symbolic constructions that are derived from a sociocultural foundation. Yet it is more than an ephemeral and mechanistic process. It is. It has being. I have being. As do you.

This self that I am is does not exist in isolation. My awareness is both particular to myself as an individual and formed by connection to others and to the broader universe of being. Interconnectedness does not just define the physical universe we perceive. It defines us.

3) I find the ethics shared by all sentient beings to be marvelous evidence of God. Well, with a rather significant caveat. There are competing norms governing human behavior, obviously. There are the norms of coercive power and material self-interest, which have played themselves out across the history of humankind in some rather unpleasant ways. There is the norm of tribalism, the bond formed by genetics and blood and language and culture, which has frequently involved the hatred of the stranger and the Other.

But against these destructive ethics there is an alternative, one that surfaces as a strong and consistent meme among the prophets and the mystics of every major religious tradition. For those who have a sense of the presence of God, there is the awareness that there is more to us than the mechanics and desires of individual persons. There is the heart-knowledge that the seemingly insurmountable existential boundary between particular selves is illusory. There is the spiritual insight the joys and hurts of others are not just present for us in the abstract, but a part of who we are in ways that are radically defining. It is an awareness that underlying that ethic is a broader purpose to sentient existence, one that transcends not just the particular self, but also culture and species.

I am Christian because that ethos of living into a gracious interconnectedness is absolutely central to the teachings and life of Jesus of Nazareth. It defines his people. I see it further etched deep into the teachings in Torah, and in the prophetic call for justice...not just for "us," but for the Other. It presents an ethic that both reflects and harmonizes with the nature of being, one that is both self-evidently good and in defiance of the horrors that humanity inflicts on itself.

For some of the skeptical, the absence of miracles and wonders and signs and the mortality and brutality of humankind are evidence of God's absence. I understand and sympathize with this. Our mortality as beings, though, means little in the face of the interwoven nature of existence. It's a little daunting being so small and fragile, but then again, we're more than we seem. As to the brutality of humankind...well...how is this evidence of God's nonexistence? We have, in all of the world's traditions that reflect an awareness of the transcendent, ethics that radically resist the hatreds that lead us to coerce and abuse and destroy.

In the annual Jewish celebration of Passover, there comes a point in the ritual meal when the folks gathered round the table remind themselves of every detail in the story of deliverance from Egypt. In response to each moment of grace, the response is: dayenu. Meaning, in the Hebrew, "it is enough." There is in that statement a thankfulness for every moment, in and of itself, as an evidence of God's being and nature.

We have the marvel that is creation, and to that I say, dayenu. We have in the heart of faith an ethic that, if followed, brings healing and hope and joy, and to that I say, dayenu.

There is more, of course. Much, much more. But even these things are enough.

Maybe I'm just easy.

Fragile Things

Having read the entirety of Jack London's Call of the Wild last night on a whim, I marveled at just how much it was a product of its era. It was...as I'd remembered...the furthest thing from a romantic image of the Wilderness. It was brutish, bloody and deeply steeped in an ethic that seemed two parts Darwin, one part Nietzsche, and a little smidgen of Ayn Rand the way she used to get after she'd downed her second 40 of Colt 45. Dang, that grrl could get MEAN. It was all about the noble futility of the struggle of life in the face of a vast and uncaring universe.

Today, despite the best efforts of both of my lads, the little caterpillar they rescued off of the sidewalk a week and a half ago finally stopped noodling around its jar. Fuzzy Munch Munch, which was apparently the tiny beastie's name, had been barely moving when found. It perked up a bit in the house, and briefly went back to it's task of eating and eating and eating some more. For those ten days, this little critter didn't drown during the storms, or gradually stop functioning in the face of near freezing temperatures. It was warm and surrounded with a constant supply of fresh leaves...and despite that, it just couldn't make it. 'Twas not to be.


This afternoon after school, there was a small impromptu burial and service. A headstone was prepared. Prayers were said. Taps was played on the recorder, and one of the billions of caterpillars to die this season was laid to rest with full human honors.

I found myself wondering what possible place this sort of overflowing abundance of compassion can have in the stark creation that Jack London describes. Where is the evolutionary value in it? Where in the implacable calculus of life's desperate struggle against a cold and cruel universe does such a gentle moment fall?

It seems not to compute, somehow. Perhaps it's childish. Perhaps it's foolishness. But it is, nonetheless, real.

Manifold Providence and Omniscience

Last month, I edited and reposted my own peculiar pomo-scholastic "proof" of the existence of God. Manifold Providence, as I like to call it, is a mild little heresy, an experimental jazz fusion of multiverse cosmology and classical theology. But hey, it keeps me entertained. It's nice to have hobbies.

A significant part of this little oddment rests on a theological assumption about the nature of God, and for some reason, I feel like blabbering on about it today. As a card-carrying Calvinist, I understand God to be both omniscient and omnipotent. There is nothing that God does not know, and God's creative power knows no limits or boundaries.

Given that foundation, God by necessity must know not only what is, but also must by definition know what might be. If omniscience is to be asserted in any meaningful way, then God knows not only the results of the choices we will make, but also the results of the choices that we do not make. Arguing otherwise delimits God to creation, which is a Biblical and conceptual nono. And we wouldn't want to do that, would we?

If divine knowledge is complete and not simply conceptual, then the reality of those paths we have not taken stands before God in the same manner of our current reality. That we do not and cannot know all of the different potential ways we might exist before God does not mean that God is not aware of us, in all of the ways that we both are and might have been ourselves.

For God to be God, God would be aware of an infinite array of possibilities, the fullness of all that could conceivably be. The unfathomable divine mystery would include a boundless omniverse of realities, some familiar, some impossibly strange, some with structures of physics and spacetimes that are completely different and antithetical to our own.

Omniscience, then, seems to require an infinite multiverse. An infinite multiverse, as I've argued in the link above, gives solid conceptual purchase to an ancient argument for the existence of God. The two concepts are interwoven and mutually self-supporting.

This may appear to be a delightfully cozy tautology, a line of reasoning that depends on itself for it's own proof. That's kinda the same thing fundamentalists do when they argue for the Bible's authority from the authority of the Bible. Then again, I'm fairly sure that a tautology by definition must be finite. As what is being described incorporates the infinite, it can't be a self-referential feedback loop. The conceptual integrity of the...

Oh. Wait. You're nodding off.

Sorry. I do go on and on.

I guess the broader question in all of this is...well...so what? Even if this is true, what could it possibly have to do with me? That, I think, is something I'll need to deal with another time.

Anselm's Ontological Proof 2.0

Proving the existence of God is just not something anyone bothers with these days. It's an old, stale, and dated exercise, the kind of pointless pseudo-intellectual dithering formerly undertaken by medieval monks after they'd delved too deeply into their daily allotment of ale.

Sure, fundamentalists claim to be able to do it, but their efforts generally involve a combination of 1) quoting the Bible 2) quoting the Bible some more and 3) assuming bananas were designed for human hands. These things make us sad.

Moderates and progressives have pretty much entirely given up on such quixotic efforts. What's the point? We come into knowledge of God through faith, not through reason. God exists in mystery, and trying to "prove" the transcendent is like trying to "prove" that feeling of awe you get when your first child moves in your belly. Some things just ain't empirical.

Having said that, I am now compelled to offer up my carefully reasoned proof of the existence of God. We small church pastors have time on our hands for stuff like this.

To set the stage, let's discuss the possibility of a multiverse cosmology.

"Quoi?" you say, suddenly speaking French. You catch yourself, and say "What? What does that even mean?" Well, in order to grasp this rather painfully abstract concept, perhaps the best way to approach it is to think about how we understand the universe. The realm of existence in which we find ourselves is bounded by four dimensional spacetime. "You're not helping," you say.

Fair enough. Let's go through the dimensions for a moment. Zero-dimensional objects are singularities, infinitely small "points." A bit like the dot below...only infinitely bitty:



A one-dimensional object can be conceptualized either in terms of Ann Coulter, or more traditionally, a line. It's infinitely larger than a point, as an infinite number of points can exist across it's span:



A two-dimensional object is a plane, which contains an infinite number of lines within itself:



A three-dimensional object is a solid, which, again, contains an infinite number of planes:



Here's where I've always hung up conceptually. As we move into considering four dimensional "objects," most theoretical cosmologies describe something that expands spatially outward from a cube, taking up infinitely more "space." This has always struck me as...well...silly, particularly given that the fourth dimension is empirically staring us right in the face. Rather than noodling around in theoretical folderol, why not just call it the way it self-evidently is: the fourth dimension is time. "Tesseracts," as some theoreticians call 4D objects, are nothing more than three-dimensional objects put into motion:



Apply change to a 3D object, and at every instant, it is infinitely different from the moment before...while simultaneously remaining completely dependent on the 3D object that "came before." Philosophically, the seemingly infinite nature of change across space-time was perhaps earliest noted in Zeno's Paradox, which I always thought would make an excellent excuse for showing up late to work. "You know, according to Aristotle, I shouldn't even be here at all." This only works in academe, I fear.

As physics goes deeper into the nature and structure of spacetime, what they're finding is that that the structure and movement of spacetime itself integrates seeming randomness into itself. Predictive models just can't seem to quite capture exactly how change will occur, even in some apparently simple systems.

What some cosmologists think...although it is admittedly and by necessity entirely within the realm of speculation...is that the universe we perceive is in fact just a single manifestation of an infinite array of spacetimes, within which all possibilities for being are manifested. To the spatial dimensions and to temporality we would then add potentiality as an aspect of the structure of the universe.

By that line of reasoning, there could be universes that vary from our own in impossibly minute ways, by a single twitch of a subatomic particle. There could be more significant variances, like the universe in which Sam Harris is a closeted lesbian who sings lead vocals for a megachurch praise team in Topeka, Kansas. Then there would be universes that had radically different structures from our own, in which the very physics that ordered them was different.

While that all exists within the realm of theoretical cosmology...we can no more truly grasp it's depth than we can truly grasp the nature of singularity...I think the possibility of such a "multiverse" or "omniverse" or "allverse" is likely. Shoot, if you believe in the omniscience and omnipotence of God, I'd argue that's it's even necessary theologically. That, however, is another argument for another time.

If you are open to a multiverse cosmology, in which all possibility of being is manifested, then you must also by necessity be open to the possibility of the existence of God. Why, you may ask?

Well, because an omniverse cosmology effectively eliminates the only valid objection to St. Anselm's ontological proof for the existence of God. As just saying that probably doesn't clear things up for you, let me unpack that a tad.

St. Anselm, a philosopher/archbishop from the tenth century, was famous for arguing that God's existence was necessary because God was that than which nothing greater can be conceived. As Anselm conceptualized it, God must exist. His line of reasoning was as follows: That which exists is inherently greater than that which does not. If God only existed as a concept within the human intellect, then God would not be "that than which nothing greater can be conceived." Therefore, God must exist. The obvious problem with that is that...well...we can think up many things. That doesn't mean that they by necessity exist. There is a difference between possibility and actuality.

Unless...unless... you think that the universe is a multiverse of infinite possibility. In a multiverse, suddenly Anselm's ontological argument has purchase, and the empiricist counterargument becomes essentially irrelevant.

Within this cosmological framework, an omniscient and omnipotent being...of God...becomes not just probable, but likely.