Resolution 2012

Last year, I rolled into 2011 promising myself that I would do a range of things.  There was the usual weight loss/fitness yearning, of course...but I've found that's a commitment best made continually.  Linking it to the New Year has just never quite worked out for me.  Instead, I pledged myself to e-publishing a book I'd written in college.  That was done, thank the Maker.

This year, the creative project that's sitting on the back burner is an exploration of M-Theory, multiverse cosmology, and the Biblical narrative.   It's tentatively titled, "New Heavens, New Earth," but I'm thinkin' that feels a bit grandiose.  Ah well.  A better title will come.

It has sat untouched on this laptop and my backup drive for a few months, crowded from my day-to-day by the demands of kids and work and my D.Min. program.  But I'm 20,000 words in, almost half a book.  I'm still hoping to get it finished.  It's still interesting to me, dagnabbit, and even if it goes nowhere, I want to get 'er done.

So...that's the resolution.  I'll get this manuscript done by the end of August, hopefully well before the Mayan universe comes to a crashing end in December.

To stir my discipline in getting it done, I'm also hoping to make it an independent study elective for my doctoral work.  Structures of accountability are remarkably efficacious in getting yourself motivated to do the things you know you really need to do.

Repentance and Probability

As my reading of The God Who Risks continues, I'm finding myself leaping and skimming a bit.  Part of that, I think, comes from the tendency of Sanders to feel he has to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that every last part of the Biblical narrative reinforces Open Theism.  So he goes, endlessly, exhaustively, through scripture. 

It doesn't, of course.  Open Theism continues to seem theologically inadequate.  Even while I grasp the good-hearted spiritual yearning that underlies it, its view of God is too narrow, to small, and too temporally bounded.  God is, for the Open Theists, aware of past and present, but can't predict what will come to pass.  In this, the God of Open Theism isn't so much a Deist Clockmaker as a parent who sends a woefully unprepared child down a double diamond ski-slope.

"Honey, bend your knees.  Look where you're going.  No.  NO!  LEFT!  GO LEFT!  LEEEEEFFFT!  LOOOK OUT FOR THAT...OOOOH!  AND THAT...   Oh.  My.  That'll make failblog for sure."

This is not the I Am That I Am, nor is it the God who lays it down for Job, nor is it the God Jesus called Father.  It's a minor and slightly bumbling demigod in the Canaanite pantheon.

Where there is theological weight to Sanders' arguments is in his exploration of the meaningfulness of repentance in the classical model of God's sovereignty.  If the universe is a single narrative stream, one linear sequence of events from the moment of creation to the moment things end, then there is no way to reconcile an omnipotent and omniscient Creator with the concept of repentance.

If everything is as God wills it, then we sin because God intended us to sin.  As Sanders puts it:

According to specific sovereignty nothing happens that God does not want to happen.  Every state of affairs, including my personal holiness, is precisely what God desires. (p. 251)

So if we sin, it is not that our volition is out of keeping with God's intent.  It can't be.  Nothing is out of keeping with God's intent.  God wills you to do that fifth shot.  God wills you to shake that thang.  If God didn't, then you couldn't do it.  Or so the argument goes.

That is equally true of repentance, which is as predetermined as just keepin' on sinnin.'  Given that it's all God, the meaningfulness of human response to God's grace is, under that system of thought, kinda questionable.  Resolving that tension has always been the challenge for thems of us who are Calvinish, and none of the deterministic responses laid out in the God Who Risks (pp. 252-254) are particularly strong conceptually.  If there is no probability that we will do what is not God's will, then we can be hardly be faulted for our actions, or rewarded from turning away from evil. 


That's not to say that what Sanders proposes is much better.  A weakly contingent God is hardly either optimal or theologically robust.


But if human will is part of the process of a dynamic multiverse creation, then the manifold providence of God includes our will, our acting, our doing, and our agency.  Our decisions matter, and govern the way in which we stand in relationship to our Creator in the time and space we have been graciously given.   Sin...turning away from love of God and love of neighbor...becomes a choice with deep weight.  It also becomes a choice, not just the turning of the cogs of destiny. 

As does repentance.  And without repentance, the Gospel has no meaning.

The God Who Risks

Having finished reading large chunks of Greene's exploration of string and m-theory cosmology, I find myself now turning my attention to some related theology.

The book that's been in front of me the last several days is John Sanders' The God Who Risks, one of a couple of works I've got in the holding pattern on my nightstand that delve into a recent evangelical controversy.   It's a bit odd, finding myself reading evangelical intellectuals...and no, that ain't an oxymoron...but they seem more prone to writing books about God, and less prone to talking about "being church" or "moving towards a transgendered Latina little-person's theology of place."  

Front and center for Sanders is the theological dynamic between free will and determinism.  In that debate, Sanders is what might be fairly described as an Open Theist, someone whose emphasis on free will overrides pesky concepts like divine omniscience and omnipotence.

The essential concept underlying Open Theism is that while God knows the past and the present, God's grasp of the future is limited.  Though he knows what's in my fridge, God ain't got a clue what I'm going to have for breakfast tomorrow.  Waffles?  No, wait.  Maybe eggs and fakin' bacon?  Hmmm.

Open Theism has never really worked for me, although I understand the good-hearted Christian earnestness of that position's desire to get around narsty hyper-Calvinist constructs like double-predestination and the assumption that Your-Baby-Died-Because-It-Was-God's-Will-From-Forever-So-Suck-It-Up-Sinner.   I just can't connect it effectively either to my own experience of God or to the full narrative of YHWH in the prophets and the Torah.

There's that, and that the God of open theism is just a teensy little bit emo and vulnewable.  I mean, Sweet Mary and Joseph, look at that cover.  Sigh.

Still, I feel there's some interesting potential in that thinking.  Open theism's willingness to explore the presence of probability in the structure of creation seems to offer some opportunity for dialectic with the wildly entropic structures underlying the M-Theory universe.  The title of Sanders book alone resonates harmoniously with the whole playing dice with the universe thang.  

Plus, he's introduced me to the word "pancausality," which he probably, like, totally made up but is nonetheless awesome.

So...I'll see how it goes.

Physics is Good for Your Brane

As I continue my reading of Greene, I find myself enjoying the precision with which he uses language.   That precision makes him really quite accessible, but it has another collateral benefit.   The way in which he articulates the dynamics of quantum theory, general relativity, and the bridge theories that attempt to unify them lights them up in ways I've not had them lit up for me before.

In particular, the way he expresses string theory has allowed me, for the first time, to get a feel for why that theory is so compelling.  It's always seemed a bit on the precious side before, an odd amalgam of awkward imagery and mathematical abstraction.

But as Greene expresses it, the dimensionality of strings has popped.  Strings are...objects/energies that exist in one dimension.  Branes, which are the membranes within m-theory, can be zero-branes (singularities), one-branes (strings), two-branes (membranes), three-branes (three-dimensional), and on up through the ten-dimensions that comprise being.

Yeah, I know, I'm not totally capturing it.  But as Greene describes it in detail in the two chapters dealing with both string theory and it's more robust offspring M-Theory, it presents a compelling story of the foundation of things.

In fact, it's a more elegant vision of the underlying structure of our universe than atomic theory.  Those periodic table elements are just too cluttery...and, in fact, if you go back to what "atom" was originally supposed to mean when Democritus came up with the word, the "atoms" in the periodic table are not "atoms" at all.

If atom means "it can't be divided," then something you can split just ain't it.   But branes?  Those might well be.  M-Theory feels intuitively right.

Another fascinating tidbit in Greene comes when he explores the Many Worlds concept, which is how he terms the concept of the multiverse.  Working off of the writings of physicist David Deutsch, Greene notes that just as M-Theory resolves the tension between quantum theory and general relativity, it also seems to potentially resolve the tension between proponents of free will and proponents of determinism.

As Greene understands it, the idea of a functionally infinite array of multiverses means that free will finally has a place in the structures of spacetime.  Reality at the quantum level simply does not resemble a series of little gears and cogs, but is far more dynamic, energetic and generative.  While retaining a multiverse that is solid-state in it's completeness, this renders a radically mechanistic determinism meaningless.

This meshes with my intuition.  Unlike Greene, though, I see this through the theological lenses of free will and predestination.  If God's creation is what M-Theory describes, there's suddenly plenty of room for Pelagius and Augustine to sit down with a beer on a nice fall afternoon and just chill.

Which, I think, might just be a good thing.

The Fabric of the Cosmos

My delving into M-Theory has continued over the last few nights, as I've waded into Brian Greene's The Fabric of the Cosmos.

Greene is a theoretical physicist and professor of physics at Columbia University, and his writing for a popular audience is both substantive and accessible.  Unlike Kaku's Parallel Worlds, which routinely used terminology related to faith, Greene is more vigorously secular.  Issues of meaning and purpose are subordinate to determining mechanics and structure.  The book makes very little effort to explore the whole Meaning of Life question.  It's purpose is to go deep into the underlying processes of reality.  Period.

Well, perhaps that's not quite right.  As Greene lays out his own journey of understanding, the first outside reference point relative to meaning and purpose is the existentialist movement.  His opening chapter is full of talk of his adolescent reading of Sartre and Camus...which, of course, endears him to me immensely.

What's interesting in Greene's brief discussion of philosophy is that he neatly steps around the struggle for meaning.  Meaning, Greene assumes, can be found in the "...assessment of the universe at all possible levels."  (p. 21)   That is his Sisyphian "struggle to the heights."  Instead of the application of the will in shoving that rock up a hill, his existentialist purpose comes in shoving knowledge further and further into the mysteries of the universe.

In the midst of affirming the value of heaving string theory up that mountain, Greene surfaces...as, if I'm remembering correctly, did Kaku...a famous quotation from physicist Richard Feynman.  That little snippet of wisdom claims that a knowledge of cosmology deepens appreciation of everything.  In contemplating a rose, for instance, one takes in color and scent and texture, but then that goes deeper.  You see..."the wonder and magnificence of the underlying molecular, atomic, and subatomic processes." (ibid).

Here, I found myself suddenly bemused.   I find the underlying molecular, atomic, and subatomic processes of creation equally wonderful and magnificent.  But when you go to that place of marvelous complexity, are you still contemplating a rose?  Or has the rose qua rose ceased to be relevant, just as space and time themselves cease to be relevant at Planck distances?

During a time of midweek meditation at my congregation a few months ago with a few of the old saints of my church, I was similarly contemplating a stained glass window in the sanctuary.  It's a bright and impressionist rendering of Jesus.

Deep in meditation, I found myself lost in the the light of the reds and greens, in the rippled textures of the glass, in the way light hung and refracted.  Seen from that level, the reality to which the window pointed ceased to be discernable.  The image vanished.  The meaning and intent of the artist disappeared in a thicket of other inputs.

It was a delightful, calm moment.  Yet at that level of contemplation, something was absent.  The awareness that a sentient being applied to create that particular arrangement of matter, the intentionality that went into creating that image, the narrative underlying that image...all of that was not evident.

There was still beauty.  But the storytelling and the imprint of sentience were gone.

When Greene implies that meaning can be found by knowing the universe "on all possible levels," I wonder if that is true.  One can find beauty on almost all of the levels.  But meaning?

Cosmology and Purpose

Those dancing strings sure can make the world odd..

As I finished up my reading of Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds yesterday, I'll freely confess that large chunks of it came off as coherent as Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky.  As uffish in my study I thought whilst sitting by the Tumtum screen, the words describing string theory and superstring theory came whiffling through my tulgey brain, and burbled as they came.

Part of this...a large part of it...comes from the inhuman scale of quantum mechanics.  I'll catch images here and there, as my spacetime-formed mental clutch graunches gears mightily against eleventh dimensional cogs.   The best I can get are approximations, images that rise out of my knowledge base in a feeble attempt to represent a reality that is utterly beyond my capacity to experience.  As I struggled to conceptualize strings, the best I could do was think of those little wiggly dragon tongues from James and the Giant Peach.  When Kaku got into talking about the challenge in modeling the music of membranes, the dimensionally expanded forms of string theory that provides the "M" in "M-theory," I found myself thinking of drum-heads.

This is the pesky thing about being a mystic and not a mathematician, I suppose.  The swirl of symbols that Kaku doubtless uses to conceptualize these things are surely more precise.

Then again, when it comes time to lay out the "why this matters" conclusion, the summative chapter of Kaku's book has no answers.  As far as Kaku is concerned, the structures of the universe may prove to be elegant and beautiful mathematically.  But there's no meaning to be found there.  He writes:

...I do not believe this design gives personal meaning to humanity.  No matter how dazzling or elegant the final formulation of physics may be, it will not uplift the spirits of billions and give them emotional fulfillment.  No magic formula coming from cosmology and physics will enthrall the masses and enrich their spiritual lives.  (p. 358)

And then, Kaku goes on.  While he claims not to derive his ethics from his cosmology, the purpose Kaku finds in life is remarkably relativistic.  We build our own meaning, says he.  Meaning is what we make of it, nothing more, and nothing less.

Being a good sort, Kaku tries to articulate this in a way that affirms some generally good stuff.  If we're really creating meaning, then, well, we're going to create good meaning.  Work hard!  Love people!  Carpe Diem!  Be a mentor!  Work for justice!  Dominate the globe with your unstoppable army of quantum-forge-powered robots!

Well, not that last one.  Kaku's brilliance in cosmology seems to wander into Joel Osteen's shallow waters when it comes to ethics.   It's earnest and well-meaning self-actualization talk, but without a clear vision of what that might mean relative to concepts like "good."   He tries, for a whole page, to talk purpose and ethics, but it's just a gloss.  A pity, because the vision of being he proposes does seem to give a foundation for talking about "good" in terms that integrate with his physics.

When he talks about fulfilling potential, it feels for an instant like he's catching the importance of intentionality in an m-theory universe.  When he talks about the fundamental unity of quantum reality, it almost...almost...feels like the foundation of the mystic ethos.    But those things flutter away, undeveloped.

No matter.  It's still a faskinatin' book, and Kaku's efforts to translate this mindboggling complex stuff into lay language are to be strongly commended.

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...

M-Theory, M-Theology, and the Nature of God

Hawking and Mlodinow have, in establishing that the nature of the universe involves a functionally infinite array of different universes, inadvertently given viable rational ground for the existence of God.  But...err...which God?

The scope of the M-Theory universe is dizzyingly, immensely, terrifyingly vast, and contains the possibility of almost anything.   Among the panoply of possible modes of being, getting to a being that is omniscient and omnipotent is conceptually easy.  Such a being would be inseparable from the processes of creation that blort all things into reality.  It would be a self-aware and endlessly generative Reality Engine.  But is this the God that Christianity claims is the source and font of all being?

Such an entity easily passes muster as the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, or the distant, abstracted Clockmaker of Thomas Jefferson and the Enlightenment Deists.   It's also precisely the sort of entity that might have I Am That I Am on its nametag at this year's Higher Being Society Annual Convention. 

So we can kinda work our way to a Creator, immortal, invisible, in light inaccessible, hid from our sight.  But though we may love that old hymn, this isn't enough.  Does the God of M-Theology manifest the single primary defining characteristic of the God Jesus kept on about?  Can we point to such a Creator and assert that God is Love?

Honestly, though the M-playing field has gotten a whole bunch larger, I don't think that's any more difficult an assertion to make than it was back when the universe was only our little linear sliver of spacetime.  The disconnected, unmoved, unfeeling, utterly uncompassionate god-cog of Deism has always been inadequate conceptually, and the One Step Beyond we've taken into the multiverse doesn't change that.

The assumption of a being that is "impassible," meaning beyond the passions and feelings of humankind, is one of the underlying presumptions of most Greek philosophy about the nature of deity.  The Stoic logos, for instance, is neither personal or "feeling."  But the omniscience we suggest as a necessary aspect of such a being incorrectly approaches knowledge as abstraction.  Our human assumption is that an eternal, all-aware being would know things as we know.  We assume that our Creator knows us in the same way that even though I'm sitting in my church office, I know the wall in my living room is red.   Or through our symbolic forms of language or mathematics. 

But this is such a limited way of knowing.   Omniscience has always seemed meaningless absent knowledge that isn't just conceptual in character, but that is ontological in character.  Meaning, the Maker knows all things...knows you...in the same essential way that you know that you now exist. Right now.  As you read this.

Though it's beyond our capacity for grasping, such a being's level of awareness would annihilate any meaningful distinction between itself and others.  In forming us, it knows us, and approaches us as not an it, or an "other," but as a "Thou." 

This being is and always has been the heart and goal of faith.  If love...the highest gift of our faith...is our yearning for participation in the other, and compassion for the other, then within the probabilistic boundaries of a functionally infinite multiverse, our capacity for reason can give assent to the possibility of what faith has always known.  That to which faith cries out, O God, is and always has been, love.  And now that faith is evidently necessary to understand the infinitely manifold providence of creation as it actually is, and infinite love can be discerned streaming up from that probability fountain, well, gosh.  Quantum cosmology and the deep yearning of Christian mysticism seem finally united.

But what does this mean for us?  What does M-Theology do for the way we live our day-to-day lives?

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...

How God Plays Dice

The first of the challenges to faith posed by M-Theory is the apparent randomness in the structures underlying the universe.  The Grand Design takes a good hard look at quantum mechanics, and notes that the model that best represents the nature of subatomic particles suggests that they seem to exist everywhere they could possibly exist.   Meaning, if a subatomic particle is moving from point A to point B, it does so in a straight line.  It also does so in a curve.  And a wildly squiggly and embarrassingly unfunny Family Circus kid-coming-home line.   It also does so by way of taking a bus up to New York to see a revival of Cats, and then coming back.  All of those options occur, but only one is observed.  For subatomic particles, there's no one, simple, straightforward, deterministic path or location in space time.  What ends up "happening" is completely unpredictable.

This means, according to Hawking and Mlodinow's interpretation of the bleeding edge of physics, that our spacetime is fundamentally random.  There is no design, because everything that has arisen has done so because of tiny random variances at the subatomic level, and their echoes in the larger visible structures of our universe.  Einstein once famously rejected the idea of randomness at the foundation of all existence by saying," God does not play dice with the universe." 

Well, says Hawking, hate ta tell ya, but that's exactly what is going on.  God does play dice with the universe.  The whole thing's a crapshoot.

So according to M-theory, everything is random, and could just as easily not have occurred.  Therefore, one might argue, the existence of a Creator who has an intent for our universe or provides purpose and meaning in life can't be defended.  It's just, like, totally random, dude.

But here, Hawking seems to have forgotten the most revolutionary assertion of M-theory.   The universe is not just our time and space.  It is every possible time and space.  It includes realities that may not involve time at all.  It involves dimensions in which the laws of our physics are replaced by other, impossibly alien laws.  It may even involve versions of our own space time in which Glenn Beck is a force for good, though that stretches even my credulity.

Sure, God plays dice.  But according to M-Theory, he rolls a one.  And a six.  And snake eyes.  And gets a Yahtzee.  And makes his saving throw against poison, even though he's only a level one magic user with a constitution of 5.

A multiverse in which every potential possibility is by necessity expressed is cannot be described as random.  It is, rather, complete.  It is utterly thorough.

Precisely what one might expect when an omniscient and omnipotent player sits down at the table to play.

This Theory is Brought to You By the Letter M

The lynchpin of the book The Grand Design, its purpose and goal, is to present what is being described as M-Theory.  M-Theory isn't just one thing, but is rather the combination of a series of assumptions about quantum mechanics, a latticework of existing subatomic theory.  While there's plenty of complexity to it, perhaps the most striking thing is that neither Hawking nor Mlodinow seem to have any idea what the "M" in "M-Theory" stands for.  They suggest "Master Theory," and a few others...but it's a bit unsatisfying.  Here's your theory of Life, the Universe, and Everything, and you can't even tell us what that letter stands for?  Humph.

Perhaps it stands for Monkey Boy.  Or Mork.  Or Methuselah.  Or Maneschevitz.  Menudo?  Or Auntie Em. 

I asked my father-in-law about this over dinner last night.  He's a plasma physicist, meaning he explores the high energy matter that comprises stars.   His take on the mysterious "M" was that it came from the term "m-brane," with the "brane" being not the thing in your noggin, but a concept from a variant on subatomic string theory.  A "brane" is a bit like a rolled-out or flattened-out string, which would help, if we really knew what "strings" were.  As for the "m?"  Errr.  He wasn't sure quite what that meant.

Fiddle.

This is a bit of a bummer, because going into the book, I thought I knew.  I was just working under the assumption that the "M" in "M-Theory"  was a reference to the most revolutionary concept in M-Theory: the idea that our observable universe, the space-time continuum in which we find ourselves, is only one of a functionally infinite array of spacetimes.  It isn't a universe.  It's a capital M Multiverse. 

It's that new framework that theology has to address, because it does have some pretty profound implications, and poses some pretty significant challenges.

The Grand Design

A few weeks ago, the religious interwebs were a-hum with chatter about a proclamation by theoretical cosmologist Stephen Hawking that the universe could easily have blorted itself into being without any help from a creator.  There was much tut-tutting, from both the lumpenproletariat of Christianity and Episcopalians.  Of course you need God, cried Christianity!  Laws may be one thing, but there must causality beyond simple mechanics.  God gives both being and purpose, proclaimed the voice of the church, and Hawking just doesn't get it!

Well, no, actually.

In responding thusly to Hawking, I'm afraid it is the church that has entirely missed the point.  We're having the wrong argument.  We're standing in a room, talking to ourselves, and have failed to engage Hawking in any meaningful way.

What is most notable about what Hawking has to say is not that he doubts that God is necessary as a first cause or Aristotelian Unmoved Mover of our spacetime.  There are plenty of scientists and atheistic folk who've been doing this for years.  What his book is doing is far more radical.  It's challenging the conventional understanding of the universe.

Those of us Jesus People who aren't taking huge brain-choking hits off the Young Earth Creationist Bong typically understand the universe as having come into being with the Big Bang, that inexplicable surge of Something into Nothing.  There are many sentient Christians who have no difficulty adapting their faith to this prevailing cosmology, seeing how easily and elegantly this meshes with our Biblical stories of creation.  We see God at work behind that glorious, impossible event.

In the early days of modern astronomy, though, there were two competing views of the suddenly-very-much larger universe.  A significant group of early scientists held...based on available observations...that the universe was solid-state, permanent, and never-changing.   The universe had never been created.  It had simply always been.  From the standpoint of the narrative of Christian faith, this solid-state cosmology was completely and totally at odds with the idea of God as creator.  It was a major conceptual threat, for had it been proven to be true, the whole narrative of Biblical faith wouldn't even have worked as metaphor.  The two positions were conceptually irreconcilable.

As it happened, though, further and more accurate observations showed that the vast panoply of stars and galaxies had not always been there, and that they instead Banged out Bigly Billions and Billions of years Before.  So...the universe had arisen from nothing, or at least out of a state of being that was inherently not empirically observable and thus beyond the reach of science.

We theists, as the kids say these days, was down wit' dat.

But the proposed unified theory that Hawking is presenting represents a significant shift in cosmology.  The "M-theory" proposed by Hawking and others suggests, from the findings of quantum physics, that our spacetime is but one of a potentially infinite array of spacetimes.  This is a sea change in the way that we understand existence and the nature of being.

Clearly, Hawking and his co-author Cal-Tech physicist Leonard Mlodinow feel that this theory renders God irrelevant.  But they're theoretical physicists.  Theology ain't their thing.  They do not, as my wife's rabbi might say, know from faith.

So for the next few blog posts, I'm going to read through The Grand Design and muse over M-Theory.  Is it, in fact, a threat to Christian faith and/or the belief in God in the same way that a solid-state spacetime would have been?  Or is it a cosmology that believing and sentient Christians can integrate authentically into our faith, in the same way that we've had no trouble integrating Big Bang theory?

Further up and further in...