Operating in Parallel

Yesterday, I started in reading the first in the series of books I've lined up as background work for my next writing project.   The project...an exploration of the interface between M-Theory and Christian faith...has a deliciously windmill-tilty feel about it.  Nothing like writing about a topic that no other Christian seems to care about to ramp up the book sales, eh?  

Still, I've got this gut sense it's a fascinating topic to explore.  If I'm going to explore the science of it, though, I'm operating under some significant limitations.  First and foremost, I'm not a scientist, nor do I play one on TV.  Feigning expertise in this area would be a fools errand.  Equally foolish would be trying to start a second career as a physicist.  There's just not enough free drive space in my cerebellum to attempt that.

What is worth doing, though, is reading through some of the lay-accessible literature on M-Theory cosmology.  These are works written by folks with scientific street cred, but who are trying to interpret and present the results of quantum, string, and M-Theory for bright-eyed Neanderthals like myself.  In the absence of the late lamented Carl Sagan, there are still plenty of folks out there interpreting for the laity.

First among the works I'm perusing is Parallel Worlds, a book by Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist at CUNY.  It's a good accessible read, and one that seems even within the first few pages to point strongly to a creative tension between M-Theory and faith.  Kaku begins with noting the tension between our linear, temporal, and changing spacetime...with a beginning and an end...and the idea of the eternal and unchanging.  The great narrative arc of Genesis and Creation seems to stand separate from the concept of God the Impassible and Eternal.    

Not being a theologian, Kaku assumes that this is a tension that only exists if you contrast the Judeo-Christian narrative to the Buddhist understanding of Nirvana.  Honestly, though, it's a tension that exists within Christian faith.  How can God be unchanging, and still be the God of Love?  How can we who are endless change stand in relationship with the I AM THAT I AM? 

It's also a dialectic that exists within classical philosophy at it's most primal level.   The argument between proponents of being and prophets of change has been going on since Parmenides and Heraclitus had at it in Fifth Century Elea.  That's Fifth Century Bee See Eee, folks.  

Within the framework of an M-Theory Creation, some of that ancient tension may be resolved.  As Kaku promisingly puts it:

What is gradually emerging from the data is a grand synthesis of these two opposing mythologies.  Perhaps, scientists speculate, Genesis occurs repeatedly in a timeless ocean of Nirvana.

Not just scientists, eh?  I'm looking forward to reading more of Kaku.

M-Theology, Ethics, and Metanoia

"You mean," said Lucy rather faintly, "that it would have turned out all right - somehow? But how? Please, Aslan! Am I not to know?""To know what would have happened, child? No. Nobody is ever told that...but anyone can find out what will happen ."

Given the impossibly vast and absurdly convoluted scope of being suggested by The Grand Design's M-theory, any reasonable or insightful person will be left a bit stunned.  The universe that flows forth from M-theory and other multiverse cosmologists is utterly and bafflingly confusing.  How can we say one thing is better than another, or one path is better than another, if everything that can ever possibly be exists?

It can leave you feeling that not only is there not hope for purpose in being, but it also leaves room for such an immeasurable number of ways things can go horribly, impossibly bad.  Looking out at the horrors that are, and knowing that they could be...and may be...far worse...this is a terrible, paralyzing thing.  As, perhaps, is the awareness of how infinitely far we are from realizing our ideal state of being.

But so it goes.   As sentient and self-aware beings, we know good and evil, joy and sorrow.   Having tasted that fruit, we have none of the blissful ignorance of foulness that would be our Eden.

But what do we do with that knowledge?

We are created free to choose, and there's weight to that.  If, as M-theory holds, our choices functionally form a new stream of being, and from that stream of being flow forth myriad and infinite other streams, then our choices are not irrelevant.  They are immense.  Knowing this, how are we to act in the face of this terrifying freedom?

Faced with an infinite array of possible choices, and the weight of choosing, the only way to step away from despair or cynicism is to make those decisions based on our knowledge of the good.  Here, faith is required.  Faith has always been necessary to pick through the thicket of competing values, even back when spacetime was nice and linear and cozily deterministic.  You can, of course, have faith in many things.  But without faith in that which transcends self and clique and tribe and nation and species, we make decisions that can be based on a "good" that is "good" only in the contingent sense of self or culture, and that might be harmful or destructive in ways we just can't see.  It's a bit like shopping at WalMart, or fishing the seas until they are lifeless deserts so we can all eat at Red Lobster.

Christianity, and Jesus in particular, tells us that those decisions involve repentance, because the Kingdom is at hand.  Repentance is a word many folks are uncomfortable with.  It seems to imply a wagging finger, and a disdainful, judgmental look, and someone clucking that we've been very naughty.  I tend to prefer the Greek word that was originally used by the authors of the New Testament, as the Gospel was spread throughout the Roman Empire:  metanoia.  That's what we translate as "repentance," but if you break it down, its got another spin to it.  Meta means, roughly, "after."  Noia comes from a root meaning "knowing," or "knowledge."   Repentance is what we do, and how we act, after we are grasped by and transformed by God's understanding.  God's understanding is, after all, love.

We turn away from those options that involve brokenness and horror and darkness.  We close off their possibility for being.  We move towards that which brings reconciliation and hope and light, and in doing so open up new realms of possible joy.

Given the radical freedom with which we have been created, our guide in acting for the optimal good...and even for being able to say meaningfully what "good" is...lies in our ability to see those choices as our Maker sees them.  In the manifold providence of the God that knows all things, including the Way of love through the chaos of our terrifying freedom, lies the path and the choice that will bring the greatest joy.   That's true in every moment.  With our reason, with our emotions, and with the radically defining existential purpose that flows from faith, our ethical response to a universe in which our choices matter infinitely is to seek that Way.

If we want to see the good happen, then we need to be transformed by it, guided by it, and in faith participate in it.   That there may be deeper horrors and evils on other paths means nothing.  We have chosen to turn away from them, and to freely participate in shattering them.  That there may be greater perfections and joys than we can imagine should only be a source of rejoicing.

"Of course..," said the Faun.  "The further up and the further in you go, the bigger everything gets.  The inside is larger than the outside."

M-Theology, Free Will and Determinism

One of the most longstanding issues in Christian theology is the tension between divine sovereignty and free will.  In one corner, you have Presbyterians like my bad self.

We Calvinistas have argued...quite logically...that in order for God to be God in any coherent sense, the Creator must be all knowing and all powerful.  Nothing whatsoever can happen without God having a hand in it somehow, because to imply that would suggest that God is not either omniscient or omnipotent.  Predestination, with it's assumption that God has foreordained those to be saved, is one of the necessary theological results.  Double predestination, which takes that and flips it to the hell-side, is another rather less pleasant result.

Then there's the "everything is God's will" correlate argument.  If God is completely sovereign, and all actions flow forth from God, then I'm just doing God's will when I down my sixth single malt whiskey of the evening.  If God is all powerful, then there's no way I could even raise it to my lips without his say-so.    So...cheers!

It also means that God wills all sorts of far deeper narstiness.  Like, say, the killing fields of Cambodia.  Or the Holocaust.  Or Jeffrey Dahmer.  All part of the plan, baby.  All part of the plan.

On the other side lie those pesky, pesky Baptists and possibly a Methodist or two.  They argue...quite logically...that a God who created human kind absent free will would not be a God we could meaningfully worship.  Without our free and unfettered assent to God, coming into right relationship with God would be meaningless.  What's the point of repentance and the transformation of our life if we're just a puppet?  How can we be in relationship with God if that relationship involves no choice on our part? 

So what matters is that we assent, that we repent, that we wander up weeping to the altar for the twenty-seventh time this year to renounce that demon-whiskey.  We have to choose to be baptised, or it has no meaning.  But...if our will is what matters, and it is for us to choose whether we follow God or not...then God is powerless over us.  And if we can choose against God's will, then God is not all-powerful, not the Almighty, not the font of all being.

We have us a little conundrum.  Or, rather, we had.

Hawking and Mlodinow, along with the other theoretical cosmologists who posit a multiverse, may have accidentally resolved that argument.  The presumption of M-Theory is that the real nature of creation is the actualization of every possible thing.  This quantum-theory presumption is important, but not only because it gives a place for heaven and establishes that God is a likely aspect of the multiverse.

It also means that the God who created all things can do so without in any way limiting our free will.  Within the infinitely manifold providence of M-Theology creation, we may choose to act however we wish.  God sets us into an M-theory creation fully and completely free.  We are given the right to follow any path we choose, while the story of what happens to us as we set our feet down any of those paths remains known to God, even before we've taken that first step.


A theology that integrates this view of creation into itself lifts the dark weight of deterministic horrors that seem antithetical to God's nature.  It also retains free will, as fully and meaningfully as it can be retained as a concept.  It does that while fully affirming God's creative and sovereign power, and the deep significance of our response to God.

This, as I have said before, is non-trivial.   At a bare minimum, it's one less thing to pointlessly fight over.

So does this mean where the rubber hits the road?  How does this speak to our day-to-day lives as moral and ethical beings, given the choice of figuring out how to work our way through the fuddliness of an incredibly complicated existence?

Further up, and further in...

Hawking: Atheism Is Dead

The challenge posed by Hawking's M-Theory to God isn't that it assumes that God doesn't exist.  In fact, given the actualization of all possible being that is an essential component of Hawking's summation of quantum physics, a being that we'd recognize as functionally indistinguishable from God has the real possibility of existing.  Eternal.  Omnipotent.  Omniscient.  A being that manifests all those omnis, up to and including a 1980 Dodge Omni, has the likelihood of being true.

If M-Theory holds, this is necessary.

Hawking, atheistic though he may be, has scored an own goal.  Taken at face value, M-theory means the end of atheism.  Or, perhaps to be more fair, it is the point at which the...what's the word...claxonic certitude of both classical and neoatheism and the findings of theoretical physics part ways.  Into the atheistic version of theodicy, into that modern-era cry that There Is No Empirical Evidence, You Morons, there is inserted from M-Theory reasonable doubt.  Let the jury take note.

One can still, of course, be a committed agnostic.  Or one could hate the idea of God, refuting God for the sheer cussedness of it. Or one could reject the idea that God has any relevance to human life, or to our spacetime.  But if you attempt to definitively state that God does not exist, what you say is radically undercut by what M-Theory's insights into the nature of the universe tell us.

The M-theory challenge for theists ceases to be whether God exists.  It is, rather, the last of the three questions above.  What would be the relevance of God in the cosmology that Hawking proposes? Hawking clearly believes that the infinitely random and generative character of reality at a quantum level is in and of itself sufficient for existence.  Everything springs into being because it must.

From his cosmological premise, Hawking would be required to cede that among the 10500 possible permutations of physics that spring forth from singularity might be a self-contained, self-aware, and functionally infinite being that met all the checkbox criteria for God.  Heck, he and Mlodinow are willing to overtly say that somewhere, somehow, there exists a moon made of cheese.

But what he would be unlikely to cede is that such a being would be the Creator.  Even if God exists, such a God would be no more relevant to the broader swath of being than my left nipple.  Yes, it has to be part of being.  But so does everything else that might possibly be. 

This "God" would be impressive, but ultimately just another wacky bubbling output of the seemingly absurd physics that underlies all existence.  It would not be the Creator, but rather a part of the fabric of M-Theory existence, not the first cause, but part of the result.  And if this god-thing is part of the result, well, it's not really God in the way that theists or the world's religious traditions conceptualize God.

To this very logical objection, there is a solid theistic response.   The presumption of causality works just fine within the linear flow of our spacetime, but breaks down completely once we step outside of it.  If you have an Anselm 2.0 God that is eternal, unchanging, all-a-knowin' and a-doin', such a God would be aware of and part of the generative process of bringing all existence into actuality.  Even if generativity can be theoretically asserted as necessary in the quantum mechanic randomness of existence near singularity, parsing such a being out from the processes of that generativity would be meaningless.  As Hawking and Mlodinow note, time does not exist near the moment of singularity.  If a form of being is not bounded by time, then it can't be caused.  It has always been that process.  The two things cannot be said to be different.  In the beginning, both were. One was with the other, and one was the other.

That sounds oddly familiar.

Where that gets us theologically is to a being that can be described meaningfully as a Creator, arising from nothing.  But this is only a slightly larger version of the Deist creator, or the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover.   Yes, the clock is waaay more complicated and a teensy bit wackadoodle, particularly that universe made entirely of hampsters, but it's still the Clockmaker God.  Distant.  Dispassionate.  Sadly autistic, utterly unmoved by joy and unphased by suffering. 

What could such a God possibly have to do with the God asserted by Christian faith?

Further up and further in...

Stephen Hawking Has Proven That God Exists

Although it is alluded to throughout the Grand Design, its core argument against the concept of God lies in Hawking and Mlodinow's interpretation of the nature of the multiverse and the quantum mechanics at play in the early universe. 

The arguments are as follows.  The nature of the universe, say they, is such that it generates all possible structures, physics, and spacetimes.  The number of possible options within the universe is, they suggest, functionally infinite, being at a theoretical minimum of on the order of 10500 potential realities.  That means that while we might see intricacies and divine order in our universe, there are also quite literally billions of sad, stumpy universes that collapse in on themselves or disperse like cosmological flatulence a picosecond after coming into being.  This, according to Hawking, refutes the primary concept of intelligent design, by which one determines the necessary existence of God based on the elegance of the structures of physics.

The second argument from quantum theory is that the multiverse is sui generis, meaning it is self-creating.   Noting that subatomic particles behave in ways that imply they actualize all possibilities, and that at some point near Big Bang singularity the universe existed only at the subatomic level,  Hawking and Mlodinow suggest that it is this characteristic that causes the creation of all potential being.  Again, this is interpreted to indicate that God is not necessary in such a system. 

This is understandable, but it is hardly the only option.  Honestly, what they've done here is amazingly, strikingly, marvelously compatible with belief in God.  If M-Theory holds, it is perhaps the closest science has come to affirming some of the fundamental tenets of faith, and in particular the necessary existence of God.  With only the tiniest bit of conceptual aikido, just the gentlest redirecting touch, it becomes M-Theology.  

Let's take a look at that, why don't we?

Since the Enlightenment, science has been fundamentally empirical.  The scientific understanding of reality has been firmly locked into what can be seen and observed and touched and tasted, to the measurable dynamics of nature.   If it cannot be observed, science has told us, then it is not real, and asserting that there is anything outside of our spacetime has been declared delusional.  We theists, who with a few pantheist and panentheist exceptions tend to conceive of God as existing outside of our reality, well, we're just a widdle kwazy. 

With M-Theory, that has all changed.  At a basic level, this assemblage of quantum theoretics affirms that beyond our universe, beyond what can be seen, there lie all sorts of ineffable marvels that defy even the structures of our physics.  M-Theory, backed by the thrumming power of vast underground accelerators and complex and elegant computer modeling, with all the certitude of scientific observation leaning it's way, affirms the existence of the supernatural.   Beyond our reality, there are immeasurable heavens, says Hawking.  And immeasurable hells, adds Mlodinow, looking a bit spooked.

This is a nontrivial shift in scientific cosmology.

But what about God?  What place does a Creator have in this cosmological system?  Clearly, Hawking and Mlodinow do not believe that it is required.  The infinite generativity of quantum mechanics at the point of singularity are sufficient for them.   Yet, again, they seem very slightly oblivious to the implications of their assertions.  What they are proposing doesn't make God unnecessary.  Quite to the contrary.  M-Theory makes the existence of God defensible from a rational and scientific standpoint.

In my previous blogging on the intersection between multiverse cosmology and theology, I've noted that M-Theory removes the only rational objection to an ancient proof for the existence of God.   That proof was offered up by a 10th Century Archbishop of Canterbury, in which he argued that God was "that than which nothing greater can be conceived."  Because we can conceive of an omniscient, omnipotent and eternally self-aware being, and because something that exists is greater than something that does not, God must exist.

It's a pretty argument, but the problem with it is obvious.  We can think of plenty of things, wonderful, amazing things, that don't exist.  We can imagine that we have our very own flying car.  We can visualize an America that is financially solvent.  We can imagine that Hamas and Likud watch futbol together and roar with laughter.  Within the finite boundaries of our cold, hard reality, there are plenty of things that don't exist, no matter how desperately we want them to.  Just because God is possible, doesn't mean that God actually is.

But with M-Theory, that objection falls away.   Hawking and Mlodinow are really, really adamant about this.  Quantum mechanics tell us that every possible thing exists.  And if all potentiality must by necessity be, then God must by necessity exist.

So Hawking has accidentally given us scientific grounds for belief in the transcendent.   He has also, inadvertently, suggested that God...meaning a being that we'd generally say meets that description...is an entirely probable part of that infinite, eternal, transcendent reality.

The logical question then arises:  what would be the relevance of such a Being?  Hasn't Hawking shown that reality just up and creates itself?  Yeah, maybe there's a God, but so what?

Further up and further in...

Resistance is Futile. Hawking Will Be Assimilated.

The concept of the multiverse has been resisted by nearly every corner of Christianity.  Catholicism has renounced it, although not at the level of the Papal See.   The Young Earth Creationists over at Answers in Genesis haven't said much about it, other than to scratch their heads, mumble confusedly about them newfangled theories, and go back to building their new animatronic diorama of Jesus riding a velociraptor into Jerusalem.

Some gracious and highly intelligent Christians who have embraced a scientific worldview do struggle with the concept, because it seems to subvert the things about this spacetime that they see as evidence of God's design.  I'm thinking, in this case, of folks like NIH Human Genome project director Francis Collins, who sees God's work in the marvelous and intricately interwoven dynamics of our spacetime.  He's not wrong, of course.  I see God at work in creation too, and for many of the same reasons.  But I think, ultimately, that clinging to the idea of a single linear spacetime will prove as pointless as assuming that the earth is flat, or that it is at the center of the universe.  There are some concepts we can let go without doing damage to our faith.

I think when folks like Collins assume that a multiverse is antithetical to Christian faith, they are responding that way for two reasons.  First, because the atheistic scientific proponents of the multiverse present it as by necessity atheistic, and second, because we haven't from the standpoint of faith fully explored the theological ramifications of a multiverse cosmology.

It is that first assertion that needs some non-reflexive testing against the core assertions of Christian faith.  Is a multiverse axiomatically atheistic?   One of the strengths of Christianity as a living faith is that it can incorporate into itself anything it encounters, so long as that thing is not antithetical to the purpose of the Biblical narrative, our view of our Creator, and the essence of what Jesus taught.  Some things, like totally stealing the practice of having an evergreen indoors, are trivial.  Other things, like the use of Aristotle's concept of substance by Tertullian and the Cappadocian Fathers to philosophically frame the relationship between Jesus and God and Spirit, well...that's a bit less trivial.

For reasons I've explored frequently in my blogging over the last five years, I hold that the insights of quantum physics and M-theory are entirely compatible with both theism generally and Christianity in particular.  Hawking and Mlodinow do not see it that way, and perhaps it's a bit cruel to take their candy.

So let's sample it.  Give it a lick.  See how it tastes.  The first question that has to be asked about M-Theory is this:  does it obviate the need for a God, or disprove God's existence?

Further up and further in...