Seven Ways to Survive a Solar Apocalypse

In my family, we have some apocalypse rules.  These vary, depending on the type of apocalypse.

If it's a pandemic, we sneeze into the inside of our elbows, and hide out inside the house for a month or two.  If it's zombies, Dad has a bite-proof armored motorcycle suit, a sledgehammer, and knows to go for the head.

If it's robots?  Meaning, an artificial intelligence that arises to challenge humanity after a singularity event?  The family rule is this: side with the robots.

Yeah, I know.  I'm a species-traitor.  But I always did kind of have a thing for the Borg.

But there are other, less familiar apocalypses, ones that call for different tactics.   The question was posed to me, in a phone meeting with my publisher: how would you survive a massive solar storm?   My novel When the English Fall examines the impact of such an event.  In it, our little world is hammered by an unprecedentedly massive coronal mass ejection, a wave of charged particles from the sun that fries the global power grid, shuts down the net, and compromises most electronics.

It's happened before, way back in 1859, when what's called the Carrington Event damaged telegraph systems, gave folks electric shocks, and put on an astounding auroral display.  If a Carrington-scale event happened now, the impacts on our technologically dependent culture would be catastrophic.  What would increase the likelihood of our surviving?  How could we cope?  What would the prospects be for our recovery?

Here for your amusement and survival advantage, I offer a listicle, your seven best ways to make it through that particular civilization-busting disaster:

1) Have emergency reserves.

This is pretty standard, but nonetheless key to most crises.  The question, simple:  how long could you shelter in place?  If you look at your stock of nonperishable food and water, how long could you last?  A week?  A month?  Two days, but only if you include that questionable Chinese food at the back of the fridge that you can't quite remember ordering?

A Carrington scale event might require four to six months to recover, but that first month would be key.  Could you and/or your household manage a month with no outside support?

If the answer is, gosh, we just never seem to have food in the house, then you really do need to change it.  Canned food, for several weeks.  Potable water, and a way to either purify or collect drinking water.  A heat source for cooking, with sufficient fuel.

With all electronic records either wiped out or inaccessible, we'd likely revert temporarily to a cash economy.  Your credit card/debit card/Applepay?  Utterly useless.   Having cash on hand as a reserve would be useful...assuming our culture maintains enough trust in one another that'd anyone would still take it.

And no, gold doesn't count, for all of the right-wing pseudo-prepper sites that pitch it in the event of currency collapse.  I mean, sure, you can stock up on the bullion and krugerrands if you want.  But when push comes to shove, gold won't be worth its weight in Chef Boyardee.

2) Keep physical records.

Our new net-economy creates all sorts of wonderful forms of connectivity, all of which would go away if our communications infrastructure was critically compromised.  That means no access to records, no evidence of your bank balance.  Full recovery from a Carrington-scale event would be a matter of nine months to three years, after which, what?

If everything you do is online, where would be the evidence of your culturally-held resources when things clambered their way back into normalcy?

So print a couple of things out, so you'll be able to prove you have those accounts.

And have a few books on hand that tell you how to do things.  You know, books?  Those analog repositories of knowledge that operate independently of any external power source?

On your shelves, have books that describe survival basics, simple horticulture, and first aid.  Maybe a map or two.  Those will be remarkably helpful.  Can you eat that mushroom?  How do you stitch up a wound?   You'll need to know those things, and Google won't be around to help.

Plus maybe a novel or three, just to take your mind off of things for a while as you read by candlelight.

3) Store a generator and key emergency electronics in a Faraday cage.

If you surround a carefully selected cache of vital electronics with a Faraday cage (a grounded structure of metal), it will channel the energies of an electromagnetic event into the earth.  That's be true for solar events, extra-solar energies (like a near-space supernova or a burst of focused energy from two colliding neutron stars in our galactic neighborhood), or a localized electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear device.

So find a place in your basement, take a bale of chicken-wire, some metal posts and grounding screws, some copper wire, and a drill, and then...

"I'm not going to do that," you say.  "That's nuts."  Well, fine.

That one's a little overly preppery, I'll admit, bordering on tin foil hat levels of survival paranoia.  But it would be efficacious.  Are you sure that you wouldn't even consider...

Right.  OK.

Here are a few more that are...less nuts.  Let's go attitudinal.

4)  Cultivate an attitude of resilience. 

We are an increasingly fragile people, torn by the empty anxieties and induced stresses of our consumer culture.  That level of emotional vulnerability would nontrivially reduce our capacity to survive any catastrophic event.  The sturdier we are personally, the more likely we are to be able to deal with eventualities in a level-headed way.  Panicking or freezing up?  We'd be SOL.  Focusing our energies on complaining about how unfair this all is to us or on our feelings?  Again, that does you not a damn bit of good.

If you're used to demanding "safe space?"  Understand this: apocalyptic events are not safe spaces.  You can't worry about microaggressions when the whole world is trying to kill you.  If you're obsessed with your rights, complaining endlessly about how unfair everything is?  The universe couldn't care less.

What you need to survive more than anything else is a strong, integrated, stubbornly hopeful sense of self.

In studies of survivors, that's the most powerful shared trait.  Survivors just believe, resolutely, that they're going to make it.  Then they work towards that goal.  That belief doesn't guarantee you won't bite it.  But if you give in to despair or panic, you significantly increase the probability you aren't going to make it through a crisis.

Faith, in other words, can be a powerfully beneficial adaptive trait in a crisis.

5) Know how to do something.

Personal competence at the things that matter helps.  And by this, I mean things that speak directly to the act of survival.

Can you repair things, be they electronic or mechanical?  Do you know first aid?  Could you stitch up a wound?  Could you build a fire?  Could you build a shelter?  Could you find your way somewhere without GPS? Could you find food in a patch of woods if need be?  Do you know how to fish?  Can you hunt?  Do you know how to grow anything, or what forage can be had in the nearby woods?

It might seem overwhelming, given the strange and existentially irrelevant demands that our culture places on us.

But given how many things you do know, it's really not that difficult.  You don't need to go the full MacGuyver.  Just be really good at one or two useful things.   "I can't," you say.  "Pish posh," I say.

Just repurpose all of the neurons you dedicate to knowledge of the Kardashians, or any and all data regarding NFL salaries.  Boom.

You don't need to know everything.  Why?  Well, here's why:

6) Know your neighbors.

In the aftermath of a solar storm, social connection would be key.  One human being is a vulnerable thing.  Ten humans, working together?  Much, much stronger.  Your skills join with theirs, and the community you create becomes a more robust entity.  So you need friends. Real friends.

Meaning, not friends on Facebook.  Not Snapchat, or Twitter.  Having fifteen hundred Facebook friends and twenty three thousand Twitter followers would mean diddly squat when the net went down.  All of the blabbering hyper-immediate irrelevance of our online social lives would cease to have any bearing.  What would matter is local connection.

So.  Do you have such a place of local connection?  Who is your tribe?  Are they human beings who live near you?  Or are they commuting co-workers who are nowhere near you physically?  Are they shuttle-activity-parents you've gotten to know from your kids various obligatory sportsball teams?  Those people will be nowhere near when the world falls apart.  The people who count are right there around you.

Make a mental map of your neighborhood.  Those souls, the folks who you likely don't know, who move like shadows on the periphery of your busy bee awareness?  That's your crisis team.

Yeah.

You've probably got work to do.

7) Continue to support space science and observatory infrastructure.

This is the biggest...and most counter-cultural...one.  Honestly, the best way for modern-era humanity to survive a solar storm is supporting science.  This flies against our 'Murikan tendency to view survival as an individual thing, as a rugged loner or pioneer family wins out against all odds.

But for cosmic events, the response needs to be at a national or global level.  It requires a sense of common purpose.

That is where we are now.  An array of probes and satellites currently provides us with significant advance warning in the event of a major solar storm.   NASA and other international space agencies maintain a constant eye on the star we orbit, both to better understand it and also to give advance warning in the event of a major solar event.

With those resources in place, we'd have a chance to prepare.  We'd have advance warning to unplug devices, to shut down and secure sensitive equipment.  It's the cosmic equivalent of getting alerts from the National Hurricane Center.  If you have three days to prepare for a Cat 5 Hurricane, the outcome is different than if it just roars up in the night.  It'd be the difference between Katrina and the 1900 Galveston hurricane.  Both were devastating, but one massively more lethal, with the difference being the time given to prepare.

One of the assumptions in my novel is that America has allowed both our transportation infrastructure and our space infrastructure to degrade.  Solar missions have a limited lifespan, and they're not cheap.  And infrastructure isn't "sexy."  We neglect it to our peril.

If we don't see the value in science, or we allow ourselves to drift down the rabbit hole of technological regression, we're vulnerable.  Good thing we have an administration and a Congress that understands the value of science, right?

So.  There you go.  Your seven handy-dandy tips for survival in the event of a solar storm.  Good luck!

Puppies, Babies, and Other Organic Processes

It was a little distractoid, one of the great torrent that flow across the part of my media consciousness set to "science."

It had to do with puppies, which is why it was circulating so much over the interwebs.  Because, well, puppies.  Awww.  It involved research recently published in Science magazine, which assessed the connection between humans and our canine friends.  The underlying concept: when dogs and people look at one another, there's a measurable neurobiological response.  Pleasure hormones are released and can be measured, in much the same way that they come a-popping into our cortices when we look at babies.

Awww.  Babies.

The concept behind the research: that human beings and dogs "co-evolved" in such a way that their socially-mediated responses to one another were tricked into registering cross-species eye-contact in the same way homo sapiens sapiens registers human to human eye contact.  Both humans and dogs register the same response, meaning that when you get the warm fuzzies from your dog looking at you, it is getting the same warm fuzzies from looking at a human.

Awww.  Humans.

On the one hand, I do find this sort of thing interesting.  Observing the way that human beings have developed a sense of connection with another species, and how we seem to share the same measurable reaction to one another?  It's what science does, and that's cool on many levels.

But on other levels, something jars in me when I see the interaction between living beings reduced to chemical process and learned behaviors.  If I perceive you perceiving me, there's something more at play than millennia of random selection and neurochemical reinforcement.  If we allow ourselves to primarily conceptualize those connections in that way, as about the sub-processes underlying our awareness, then something is diminished.

I am not engaged in a moment of playful delight with a furry pal.  "I" am an array of organic reactions participating in a complex sequence of evolutionarily mediated interactions with another organic system that has co-evolved to be responsive to the same social inputs.

This is true, of course.  It is.

But "I" become less present in that understanding, less engaged.  The relationship can become deconstructed to the point of non-existence.

We lose the soul of it, the geist of it, and in that risk losing our way.

Stories, Data, and Truth

It was an excellent little article, an exploration of the struggle many Americans have with science.  On the one hand, we say we love it, because science is awesome and nifty and stuff.  On the other, we seem to have trouble processing science as a decision-making framework.

When presented with scientific findings, we are perfectly willing to ignore them, or find reasons to just keep on blundering along.  Science tells us that the universe is 13.9 billion years old, and does so definitively.  But we ignore it.  Science tells us, with charts and graphs and clear deductive reasoning, that homo sapiens sapiens evolved.  But we reject it.  Science coughs and suggests, strongly, that perhaps it might be a mistake to turn our planet into a superheated, carbon-choked Venus.  But we listen to the lies told by the folks who sell us gas instead, because we like our big SUVs.  Science sees us choosing not to vaccinate, and struggles not to punch us in the nose for being such complete morons.

It's a clear dissonance.  The question: why?

Part of it, I think, has to do with the way we human beings understand our world.  We are creatures of story.  Our stories define us, give us a sense of ourselves, and give us a sense of purpose.

And this, as the article describes it, is part of the problem.  For our understanding of what is true, the article laments, we rely on "stories rather than statistics."

We prefer our truths told as tales, not as data points.  So we'll base our decisions on anecdotes, which as we really should know, are not reliable reflections of broader realities.  That story spun out by the mom at your preschool whose sister knew a woman whose kid started showing signs of autism after he got his MMR shots?  That has more value than the reflections of a thousand researchers, God help us.

And that's problematic on a deeper level, not just because anecdotal evidence causes us to make stupid decisions, or to spin out tales that are fundamentally ungrounded in reality.

It is problematic because if we set the storytelling part of our humanity aside, we cease to be human.

None of us understand our lives in terms of statistics and data points.  That is not what gives us our personhood, what establishes who we are.  Narratives create both individual identity and community cohesion.

Deeper still, narrative establishes purpose and moral ground, in a way that science simply cannot.  Storytelling creates meaning, and establishes the valuations that determine how we choose to act on the information we're encountering.  The deepest and most transforming stories don't even need to have actually happened to create moral purpose.  The stories told by my Teacher, or the wisdom fables of Aesop?  They didn't happen, and yet they frame existence in a way that creates identity.

The purpose of science is establishing what is or is not empirically true in our material reality.  That's the point of scientific method.  What it cannot do, and has neither the tools nor the desire to accomplish, is make any meaningful statement about how that information should be used.  Data is simply the ground for gathering more data.  Knowledge serves only knowledge.  And that path, clinically removed from its impact on persons and living systems, is a dangerous one to journey.

So where, in this dialectic tension between these two very different ways of knowing, lies the synthesis?  How do we integrate the data into the tale, and the tale into the data?

It lies, I think, in being willing to listen to the impacts of our stories on reality.  If the purpose of the story we're telling is radical compassion for neighbor and stewardship over creation, the report we'll get back from the data will go one way.  If the purpose of the story we're telling is material power, profit-maximization, or the glazed-eye pursuit of a snarling, fever-dream delusion, the data will report back another way.

Ye shall know them by their fruits, as the Teacher once said, in a pause between stories.

The Fire Next Time

I and a small group of intrepid members of my congregation have been heaving our way through the book of Revelation for the last half-dozen weeks, and it ain't easy going.  The convoluted mind of John of Patmos and the circuitous, repetitive pattern of his visions are notoriously unforgiving.

Even if you understand the symbolism and the Matrix-stutter narrative arc of that wild and hallucinatory book, it's still a hard one to crank through.  John's faith is bright and feverish, often seeming devoid of both logic and compassion.  Love your enemies?  Hah.  Love watching them burn, more like.  There's not a whole bunch of agape going down in Revelation.  But hey, what would you expect from visions brought by an angel who identifies himself as the Morning Star?

Well played, my wealthy, tasteful friend.  Well played.

Silliness aside, one of the charges leveled against the apocalyptic mindset is the degree to which it can disengage us from the here and now.   Why care about the mess we're making of our little planet, if that mess is all part of the end of things?  Why worry about the wars and injustices that we human beings inflict on each other, if they're just leading up to the final destruction of something that deserves to be wiped out?

"It's all going to be destroyed anyway," the refrain goes.  "Why should I care about saving it?"

For folks who'd really rather see things turn for the better, that attitude of willful resignation is seriously problematic, because it contributes to things getting worse.

Here's the rub, though.  Even if you think John of Patmos wouldn't have known the Jesus of the Gospels if you'd whacked him upside the head with them, he was right in this one thing:

The earth is going to be completely destroyed.  Wiped clean, and cast into a lake of fire.

Of this, there is little doubt.  I'm sure of it, in fact, so sure that I'm right now going to pitch out a timeframe for that destruction, with at least as much confidence as Harold Camping.

If we're lucky, we've got just about two point eight billion years.

Well, less than that, actually.  But it all wraps up then, as our sun exhausts itself and swells outward into its red-giant phase, devouring the inner planets in a wash of fading fusion fire.  Life will become impossible.  The earth--everything that it is, everything that it will be--is unquestionably doomed.

So why should we care?  I mean, really, why should we?  What's our motivation? We know with certainty that even if we make every conceivable effort and turn our little garden world into a perfect utopia, it's going to be obliterated.

The motivation comes from our integrity in the present, and our stewardship over the time we have been given.  It's the same motivation that drives us to care for our bodies, even though we know we're going to eventually die.  It's the same motivation that moves us to love our children, even though we know the same thing will ultimately happen to them.

In this time, with this awareness we've been given, our task is to live out the justice and compassion of God's Reign.  Period.  And sure, it's all going to end.  That might be two point eight billion years away.  Or tomorrow, when an errant round fired by a K'tall singularity cannon during the battle for the p Eridani system comes tearing in at point seven five of lightspeed.

No matter what, our task is to be good and just stewards, living lives that reflect the integrity of our purpose.

Mystery, Scripture, and the Need for Creation's Witness

As I walked through the steamy air of a late summer morning, I had John Calvin on my mind.

Lord help me.

It was a lovely morning, but for the burgeoning heat of what was to be an intensely swampy Southern day.  The sky was thick with clouds, the air was damp with the lingering wetness of evening storms.  Here and there, drops fell from the wet leaves above.

And I was thinking about Calvin.  More specifically, the thing that rose unbidden from my memories as I engaged with creation was a reflection on Calvin's Institutes, and one of the justifications for our Reformed focus on the Scriptures.

There were many reasons the Reformers felt that Christians should focus on the Bible.  First and foremost, being engaged with the texts of Scripture yourself meant that you were connected with them.  At that point in history, most Christians were illiterate, and the church made no meaningful effort to teach the meaning of the faith.  Going directly to the texts was a liberation, and a counterbalance on ecclesiastical overreaches.

But there were other reasons.  Among them was the argument from Creation.  The world around us was God's work, Calvin suggested.

"There are innumerable evidences both in heaven and on earth that declare his wonderful wisdom; not only those more recondite matters for the closer observation of which astronomy, medicine, and all natural science are intended, but also those which thrust themselves upon the sight of even the most untutored and ignorant persons, so that they cannot open their eyes without being compelled to witness them..." (Institutes, I.v.1)

But creation is also wildly and deeply inscrutable, a profound mystery that could confuse and distract us in our smallness.

"It is therefore in vain that so many burning lamps shine for us in the workmanship of the universe to show forth the glory of its Author.  Although they bathe us wholly in their radiance, yet they can of themselves in no ways lead us to the right path.  Surely they struck some sparks, but before their fuller light shines forth these are smothered." (Institutes, I.v.14)

Thus, the need for Scripture, because we're just too stubborn, stupid, and self-absorbed to grasp the unmediated self-expression of the Creator.   We need something more, something to help us integrate that awareness into a cohesive purpose.

And there, the teachings of the Tanakh and the Gospels and Epistles come into play.  They become the lens that helps us focus, to see our purpose clearly.

I get that.  I do.  It's helpful to have a framework.

On the other hand, the same thing that structures our thinking can also be spiritually dangerous, for reasons that are implicit in Calvin's own argumentation.  The Creator of the universe speaks directly through existence, all of which articulates the Divine Intent.

And sure, it tends to blow our minds a bit.

But shouldn't it?  I mean, really.  Looking at the scale and wild complexity of our space-time, and the potentially infinite depth of a yawning multiversal cosmos, we are, as Calvin put it, "whirled and twisted about" by our encounter with a power that so vastly exceeds our own that we can feel utterly lost.  (Institutes I.v.11)

That's certainly the reality encountered by modern science, which--after a brief and heady period when it thought it had it all worked out--is beginning to surface complexities so impossible that they seem profoundly beyond our capacity to grasp.

And that, it strikes me, is a necessary part of a robust and authentic faith.  Sure, we need a framework.  But we also need encounters that are unmediated by that framework, encounters that shatter and reform us.  We need something that tears us from our self-absorption, that gives us a sense of scale and mystery and God's transcendent, numinous power.

Contemplating creation, as it so happens, is really good at that.

One Book Versus Many Books

This slightly murky meme popped for me in one of my feeds recently, and not for the reason that it was meant to.

I'd seen the comparison of the US Army wife (gun, flag, bible) and the jihadist (gun, flag, Quran) all over the place, so that it'd be repurposed for something like this is not surprising.  Memes beget memes, after all.

What this one was meant to be, I think, is a condemnation of people of faith and their "one books."

Reading many books, or so the visual implies, makes you more likely to have a telescope.

Because, well, science!

Or something.  It's not exactly the clearest meme semiotically.  Ah well.

There is, of course, another minor problem with this one, one that goes beyond the whole "correlation/causation" thing of which one would presume science-friendly folk are aware.

The man on the right, standing there like a book-cabinet centaur, he has...hmmm...let's count them.  Onetwothreefour...hmmm.  He's obscured some of his collection, but it looks like between 38 and 40 books, if you include the one book he's holding in his hand.  They're mostly textbooks, by the look of them.

The jihadist is presumably holding a copy of the Quran in the hand that is not carrying the gun.  That is correctly described as one book.  It is the writing of a single author, divided thematically into chapters, written over several years for a single purpose.

The soldier's wife is holding a Bible in her non-gun hand.  We get that word, "Bible," from the Greek words τὰ βιβλία.   "Ta Biblia," if you know a wee bit o' Greek, means "The Books."  It's plural, because the Bible isn't a book.  It's a collection of books.  That is what the word means.

Oh, sure, it tends to be all together in between one cover, but that means what, precisely?  One could do that with almost any literature.

What the Bible is, frankly, is such a wildly different array of literatures that to consider it inherently "one book" is insane.  Isaiah is not a chapter of that book, nor is Ecclesiastes or Job.  They were--and really, still are--independent and free-standing units.  They are, themselves, books.

Here, you have a remarkably varied ancient collection, sixty-six books in all.  They were written by dozens of different authors across thousands of years, in two very different languages.  They play out across cultures, representing both urban and rural views of life and meaning.  They represent poetry, history, wisdom teachings, and music.  They have--read on their own and objectively, outside of the blurred and idolatrous lens of fundamentalism--a wild array of different perspectives, styles, tones, and emphases.

And so, if you know the reality of the Bible, this is a slightly silly meme.  I am assuming, of course, that it is not a very subtle allusion to the necessity of historical-critical method in examining the texts of the Christian canon.  It's just trying to make a point, and doing so clumsily and inaccurately.

Especially given that the issue here isn't the books.  It's not the books at all.

It's the (Flags + guns) < (Telescopes + Maps) equation.  That's where the issue lies.

That's always been the issue.

Bang, Saith the Lord

The news from the world of science yesterday was exciting.

The observations came from BICEP2, an instrument that measures cosmic background radiation from its chilly vantage point on the South Pole.  What's been detected are "ripples" in that background, echoes of that first great yarp of being.  They affirm an almost impossible expansion of our space and time, as being leapt from singularity into a cosmic vastness in a snap of a finger.

Assuming you could snap your finger in a picosecond.  Which you wouldn't want to, because the energies involved wouldn't just blow your arm off.  They might just blow a nice big hunk out of our arm of the Milky Way.  Oops.

Whichever way, it's a powerful affirmation of the theory that has governed much of scientific cosmology for the last fifty years.  The Big Bang is the way things happened.  We know this the way we know that the earth isn't flat, and that we know the moon isn't cheese.  We can see it, and touch it, and taste it with the new eyes, hands, and tongue of scientific instruments.

This is a big thing, rather obviously.  It means that science is pressing deeper into the nature of things.  As the Washington Post's coverage of the discovery put it:

This is obviously difficult terrain for theorists, as the question of why there is something rather than nothing creeps into realms traditionally governed by theologians.

Yup.  This is our house, alright.  Hello, science!  Welcome!  Take a load off.  Care for something to drink?

But what for me makes this a particularly exciting discovery is that it pushes observational science just a tick closer towards the strain of speculative cosmology that seems most amenable to faith.  If this reinforces inflationary theory, which it does, then it becomes another bit of data that gives coherence to the multiverse as an explanatory model for the nature of all existence.

Again, from the article:

The inflationary model implies that our universe is exceedingly larger than what we currently observe, which is humbling already in its scale.  Moreover, the vacuum energy that drove the inflationary process would presumably imply the existence of a larger cosmos, or "multiverse," of which our universe is but a granular element.

Clearly, we're not there yet.  Multiverse cosmology remains squarely in the realm of speculation.  It's hard to empirically test for things that lie outside of time and space, eh?  But it is informed speculation, both rational and with some legitimate explanatory power, just as the Big Bang theory was when it was first proposed.

For that reason, it makes a bunch of sense for those of us who hang out in "realms traditionally governed by theologians" to be ready to fold that into our conversations about faith.

The Cosmos Reboot and Faith

I'll confess I didn't watch it.  Oh, I will, eventually.  No question.  But I don't watch things when they come out anymore, a part of my having adapted to this whole wacky interwebs thing.  I have grown accustomed to watching things...well...when I want to.  Most of us have.

Which is a pesky thing, because it means you miss out on the big launch moment, when the media buzz is out there humming and chattering.

So last night, I missed it.  After a long Sunday of pastoring, my brain was depleted.  But that didn't mean I wasn't aware of it happening.  The marketing for the relaunch of the beloved Cosmos series has been everywhere lately, and I will make time for it.

On the one hand, there's always a little reboot resentment involved.  You know, reboot resentment?  That feeling you get when Hollywood remakes a beloved, perfectly crafted story that needs no remaking?  Like, say, the recent and pointless Robocop.  It wasn't terrible, but really.  C'mon. Why even bother?

Or Willy Wonka.  Lord have mercy, did Tim Burton botch that one.

For those of us who love science, there's not even any question of the place that Carl Sagan's Cosmos has in the pantheon of awesomeness.  For an entire generation...two, in fact...that series was a  wondering, joyful journey through the amazing creation we inhabit.

On the other hand, there are two great reasons to have rebooted this series.  First, an entire generation hasn't seen it.  There's been nothing quite like it since, and the younglings and not-so-younglings of this era deserve it.  Given the scientific illiteracy of American society, we kinda need it.

Second, and even more important, science hasn't stood still.  The thirty-odd years that have passed since Cosmos aired...yes, "aired"...have seen significant advances in both our understanding of the mechanics of being and our grasp of the cosmos itself.  We have peered deeper into existence, and further back into space-time.

And science is discovering that we no longer inhabit quite the same universe we thought we did back thirty years ago.  It goes deeper.  It is infinitely, mindblowingly larger.

I'm sure Neil Degrasse Tyson's going to get into that, and what's even more important is that people of faith listen in.  Because if we don't have a faith that can meaningfully engage with these new understandings of existence, then we may as well start building museums featuring Jesus riding into Jerusalem on an animatronic velociraptor.

So as time permits, I'll look forward to watching it.  Later, without commercials.  I can't stand commercials.  Dangit.  Where's the skip button?

As, frankly should any Christian who cares about whether our faith can stand in conversation with the reality God has placed us in.

Dear Atheist Mom

The picture of your child stuck out at me, most likely because it was supposed to.  After a recent and somewhat painful debate between a popular elocutor for science and a Young Earth Creationist, some of the Creationists put up images of their unanswered questions, written with markers on pieces of paper.

One might think people for whom the written word is a fundamental absolute would get the difference between "your" and "you're," but maybe they're too focused on translating from the original Greek.  Sigh.

But snark I must not, because Lord knows I still regularly mangle "its" and "it's."

So, of course, it could not end there.  There was a 'net sign exchange, in which atheists pitched up their rebuttals and challenges, with counterquestions written in Sharpie on pieces of paper.

Of the atheistic responses, yours was the one that leapt out.  There was your daughter, smiling and bright eyed.  These were not her assertions, of course, but likely assertions posed by you, her atheist parent.  There was some subsequent net-kerfuffle about the use of a child as a public prop, but the way I figure it, you view religion as a fundamental threat to her integrity.  I'm guessing you're the mom, too, given the handwriting.  From your fierce mom-love and your anger at what you perceive as a threat to her, you want your beautiful kid out there, as the face of the debate.  I'll admit to having struggled with that, myself, especially when it came to including her image in this post.  I prefer to keep my children's faces off the net, particularly around contentious issues where net-trolls can and do say terrible things from the safety of their basement lairs.  But I will follow your choice, and respect her integrity as a person in this post.

She's great, of course, and looks like a charmer.  I will take your black-marker list as a very legitimate descriptor of your hopes for your great little kid.  Just looking at her, one can see that she is full of wonder, and smart, and full of potential, and beautiful, as all creation is.

What such a delightful little sentient creature deserves, though, is our best swing at an accurate representation of things...and I'm not quite sure atheism is serving her well on that front, because atheism as a movement is not interested in truth so much as it is in refuting faith in all of its forms.  It exists solely as a negation, after all, which means it has a problem with non-binary thinking.

That can be observed in the statements in red-ink.  "According to Religion," it begins, as if that's a single and univocal category.  According to Buddhism, are the subsequent statements true?  How about Hinduism?  What about the Bahai?  Or Unitarians?  Or Wiccans?  Is it true for Native American religious expression?  Do Jews believe this?  What about Muslims?   Or Sikhs?

None of the above, I'm afraid, if you understand how the concept of Sin plays out across human religious expression.  It is an accurate statement for a painfully significant subset of global Christianity, most likely the subset that is the dominant culture in the area where you live.   But even there, is this what some corners of American evangelical conservatism teach children about themselves?  In some cases, yes, and that's a pity.  As a Presbyterian Teaching Elder, I can tell you that it is not even close to how the old-line denominations teach our kids, not by a long shot.

But I've reviewed conservative Christian curricula for children in my role as a pastor, and even the ones that are too literal for my tastes tend to go this way:

"Jesus loves you."  "God loves you."  "Here are some wild ancient stories with cool characters!"  "Did we tell you you are loved?  Well, you are."

So is the red-marker-list accurate?  No.  And we owe our children our best shot at accurately representing the world.

Then there's the list in black-ink.  "According to Science," it says.  But is the list that follows according to science?  It is not.  It is the romantic view of science held by most atheists, one that I can understand myself.  Science is awesome and cool, a vital and essential human endeavor that opens our eyes to the ever-unfolding, incredible creation we inhabit.

But "Wonder," "Beauty," and "Greatness?" These are not scientific terms.

"According to science," one could just as easily describe that bright little child as a delivery system for replicating genetic material.  Or as a complex organic machine, interacting with the world through a sequence of biologically and culturally mediated patterns, both learned and hard-wired.  Her smile?  The reflex of a social animal.  The "love" felt for her by her biological parents?  A neurochemical response to visual cues that identify her as a vulnerable near-infant, part of an evolutionary pattern that insures the aforementioned continuance of particular genetic traits.

Her beauty?  She is beautiful the way that everything is beautiful, meaning she is remarkably complex.  From a purely scientific standpoint, her self-awareness is no more and no less beautiful than the amazingly intricate processes of digestion and excretion, or the processes of the human body as it decays following the cessation of life.

You're not going to tell her that, presumably.  You just tell her she is loved, and teach her to appreciate and marvel at the astounding reality around her, and tell her that she is great.  But in that, I would ask you to consider allowing her to engage with the real complexities that are part of faith and religious practice.  Where certain religious communities would bully and belittle and reduce her to nothing, don't allow them to do so.  It's a fight worth having, and I'm there with you.  But if you want her to grow up respecting your guidance, I'd encourage you to allow her to engage with the depth and subtlety of human existence.

Binary thinking does not do that.

Oh, and if you're actually Atheist Dad?  Oops.  Sorry for my assumption and generalization.  You have very neat, rounded, lovely handwriting!  Nothing to be ashamed of, and mea culpa.

Still and all, everything I said still applies.

God, Science, and The Multitude of Multiverses

As I continue to gently pitch my last book into the great yawning abyss of the interwebs, one of the ways I've been keeping engaged with the peculiar intersection between faith and multiverse/Many Worlds cosmology is through social media.  Every article, every new book, every bit of digestible information that is created exploring this wild new cosmology?  Thanks to the glories of the net, I'm there, and it gets added in to the list for reading or viewing.

One slightly older piece that I recently encountered was an article by an atheist/skeptic, who attempted to answer the question: "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

The article lays out a sequence of answers that scientific cosmology has given to this question, playing out an array of different theories.  The idea of a Creator is included, of course, but it is quickly dismissed.  So it goes.  We all have our blinders, so there's no point in having a whack at that one.

What was more interesting was that most of the cosmologies described were one form of multiverse or another.  Because, brothers and sisters, there ain't just one multiverse theory.  There's the Darwinian multiverse, and the inflationary multiverse.  There's the branching Everettian Many Worlds quantum multiverse, and the "brane" multiverse.  There's the 10 to the 500 possible universes that might arise from string theory, or the quantum foam multiverse.

I've read through listings of these various competing theories before, and they're fascinating.

But what I found myself wondering, as I perused these explanations, was whether they are mutually exclusive.  Oh, some might just be plain ol' wrong, sure.  But then again, many of them may be right. Most of them might be right, because there seems room in these theories for interplay with one another.  Within each of these multiverse theories, there seems to be space for others.

Why not an evolving, bubbling, budding, splitting, quantum-branching multiverse, one that layers impossible complexity on top of impossible complexity?

On the one hand, that would be wildly dizzying, a yawning chasm in which no one view of creation could ever claim ultimate purchase.

On the other hand, well, at least it would mean science would never run out of ways to keep itself occupied, like a dog let off the leash into an endless field filled with squirrels.

"Go get 'em," says the Creator.  God can be cool like that.

The Multiverse, Dark Matter, and Other Such Trifles

The other day, while my younger guy was in his drum lesson, I found myself taking another long and meditative walk.  It's how I prefer to spend my adult down-time, particularly now that I've deleted all social-media apps from my phone.  Lord, but that has helped me feel more sane.

And so I walked and looked up to the heavens and ruminated on something that had recently danced through my consciousness.  It was a popular press article I'd recently read on the continuing struggle of science to come to terms with an elusive thing they call "dark matter."

Our time and space has within it plenty of matter, of course, the stuff we can see and touch and measure.  But as astronomers have looked out at the gravitational dynamics of the universe, it's clear that there's something missing.  Our universe behaves as if there is significantly more mass out there, and yet we can't observe or find that mass.  By some estimates, nearly 85% of the mass that should be out there is just kinda missing.

That peculiarity of physics has been a point of some befuddlement since humankind first strapped on its cosmological reading glasses and really looked at the creation we inhabit.  Where the heck is everything?

As I walked and meditated, I found myself thinking about dark matter and the Many Worlds hypothesis, and it suddenly seemed that there was some connection.

Perhaps what we consider "dark matter" is not matter that inhabits our space-time at all, at least not in a way that we can currently empirically measure.  If our time and space is interlaced with other times and spaces, perhaps it is they that are leaving an echo or imprint on the gravity of our corner of creation.

It was a delightful spark of a thought, a mystic ah-hah realization, and yet another indicator that I have way too much time on my hands.

But such flights of fancy aren't necessarily real, as fun as they might be to speculate about.  Afterwards I googled around a little bit to see if anyone who actually has a clue about such things has had a similar thought.  Meaning, not a mystically inclined cleric such as myself, but an actual trained scientist/cosmologist.

And whaddaya know…it's actually out there.

Nice to know I'm not entirely crazy.  Not entirely, anyway.

Cassini and Faith

Yesterday, the first of the raw pictures came back from the Cassini spacecraft, on its long trek to the gas giants in the outer reaches of our solar system.  Many were striking, but the one that got me was the one to the right.  There, in the deep blackness of space, a bright point of light, a featureless blue-white sparkle in the heavens.  Below it, a smaller, slightly dimmer speck.

Earth and the moon, those two dots are.  Here we are, seeing ourselves from a distance that renders all of human life and history to its actual place in the universe.  We're teeny tiny, so infinitesimal as to be just a speck in the vastness.

This is not a new observation, of course.  It was made wonderfully by Carl Sagan, years ago, as images of a distant earth first reached us.  That Pale Blue Dot is so precious, yet so ephemeral.  

What struck me in seeing those Cassini images was, unsurprisingly, the faith spin on all of that.  Unless a faith can take the reality of our place in the vastness into itself, it just isn't real.  So much of the way human beings have come to understand our faith casts all of existence in earthbound terms.  We often proclaim a great and cosmic struggle, and yet the scale and scope of that struggle never leave the bounds of the speck we inhabit.

If the most fevered yearnings of John of Patmos came true, and Revelation were fulfilled tomorrow, and the seas ran with blood and there were horsemen and beasts rose from the sea in a way that would give Guillermo del Toro goosebumps...so what?

The view from Cassini would show that same binary planetary system.  Maybe the Earth would have a slightly redder hue.  

But the rest of the universe would trundle along oblivious. To be meaningful in an existence of this scale, faith has to be both larger and more intimate.

Larger, in that we have to understand all of our sacred stories in a radically different way than our forebears.  They need to speak into the reality of our place in a Creation that is more wondrous and humbling that we ever imagined.

More intimate, in that we need to see the defining existential purpose of faith...which gives meaning and purpose on a human scale.  What matters is our capacity to find that which gives life integrity and direction, and there, an open, gracious faith does so.

If we can do these things, our faith still has purchase, even if all we yet are remains on that tiny bright speck.

The slightly bigger one, that is. 

Why Faith Needs Science

This morning, my wife called it "The Crazy Channel."

When it's time to wake up, I prefer getting it over and done with.  My phone alarm is the loudest and most annoying possible claxon.  And the clock radio by my bed is set not to the treacly sounds of smoov jazz or gentle classical, but to a Christian talk radio program.

That gets me up and motivated to turn off the radio, because the conversation makes me crazy.  Why?  Because I care about the teachings of Jesus, and the version I hear in the morning is, without question, completely insane.

The focus is invariably the End Times, and how they are almost immediately upon us.  Earnest callers talk with an earnest host, interpreting the shapes and patterns of their dog's most recent bowel movement as yet another indication that the Rapture is coming this next Thursday.

Well, not usually.  But that's not far off.

What's most distressing about listening in on this kind of Jesus conversation is knowing the impact it has on folks who are not Christian.  If you do not already view the Bible as the rule of life and faith, then listening in to the in-group chatter of a community that seems not to inhabit reality won't be compelling.  It will be disturbing.

Here, we're not talking "in the world but not of the world."  We're not talking about "now and not yet."    We're not talking about being a people oriented towards transcending ourselves and transforming the world towards God's most gracious intent.

The fundamentalist worldview simply does not describe creation.   It is utterly detached from what God has worked in the universe, and that has impacts on how Christianity is viewed.   If your interpretation of existence bears no resemblance whatsoever to what an objective observer can rationally defend, then sharing your message becomes a challenge.

For folks who aren't "in," things like a six-thousand-year-old universe are no less wackadoodle than the teachings of the Raelians.

If we're going to have a compelling message, Jesus folk need to engage with reality, and to do so in a way that is coherent and relevant.  Listening to the witness of creation itself is not a bad way to start.

Why Science Needs Faith

My evening devotional reading over the last few weeks has involved delving again into the writings of George MacDonald.  MacDonald's the brilliant hard-nosed last 19th century Scots mystic who's been a substantial part of my adult spiritual development.  He's not light reading, not at all, but that he's best read and then carefully digested makes his work great for pre-sleep meditation.

I've been carefully moving through his "Hope of the Gospel," in which MacDonald has let his imagination wander into some fascinating places.   His reflections towards the end of that work on the nature of animal life go into some pretty esoteric places.

At one point in talking about the spirits of the simpler, less sentient living beings around us, his mystic's sense of the interconnection of all being goes so far as to almost be talking about reincarnation, or some peculiarly iterative view of the nature of the soul.

It's a bit hard to tell, as he's intentionally coy about exactly what he means.

But as he gets deeper and deeper into his talk about animals and their souls - a line of thinking that was stirred by the gentle question of one of his children - his fierce Scots temper turns in anger against science.

Now, I love science and appreciate its insights, so the sudden wave of invective against it from a spiritual teacher came as a bit of a surprise.   MacDonald didn't appear to have the benefit of an editor for much of his writing, so a full page or more of "science is monstrous" pours out of MacDonald before he explains why he's so cheesed off.

When the reason came to light, though, it makes sense.  MacDonald had clearly been in conversation with late 19th century biologists, and was aware of some of the scientific practices of that era.  He was particularly horrified at the practice of vivisection and the way animals were used in experimentation.

From his mystical inclination, all living beings had value.  Where the pursuit of knowledge objectified beings capable of suffering, and inflicted suffering for the sole purpose of expanding knowledge, MacDonald saw a horror.

That has always been the challenge for science.  Our efforts to develop an ever deepening understanding of creation are fascinating, but they have always been fraught with danger.  If we perceive existence as ultimately reducible to mechanics and process, life itself becomes less and less significant.  The first to fall are the simpler beings around us, the trees and the fish and the cattle.  But eventually, even sentient and self-aware life becomes meaningless, little more than the mechanism by which complex proteins replicate themselves.

MacDonald heard the arguments of scientists, that knowledge itself was the primary value, and rejected it.  If an action violates the integrity of another being, and radically devalues that living being, then the end goal of understanding is itself broken.  Without a deep sense of compassion for living things driving the process of seeking, one cannot seek the greater good.

Without compassion as a fundamental guide, science does not really deepen understanding.  It simply deepens our ability to project power.   And that isn't a good thing, either for the world around us or for the creatures who share it.

If an Asteroid Hit Your Faith

At 2:00 PM Eastern Standard Time today, another asteroid will go  sailing by our planet.  Discovered only last week, 2013 ET is the latest in a series of cosmic objects to go howling by the Earth.

This hundred-meter wide hunk of space rock is almost six times larger than the hunk of space rock that slammed into our atmosphere over Russia recently, injuring hundreds as it exploded with the force of a score of Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.  

That event was the most impressive impact since the legendary Tunguska impact over a hundred years ago, and coincidentally happened on the very same day another huge asteroid was making a close approach to Earth.

All these cosmic near-misses have gotten me to wondering about the impact a major asteroid strike might have on Christian faith.   It'll happen eventually, kids, and when it does...well...how would your faith fare?

Obviously, a Chicxulub-equivalent impact would have several significant faith ramifications.   You know Chicxulub, right?  That's the impact that seems most likely to have taken down our dinosaur friends sixty-six million years ago, and it was a huge honkin' deal.  That asteroid wasn't a hundred meters wide, but a hundred miles wide.  And the result?   Earthquakes.  Fire raining from the skies.  Megatsunamis, meaning waves that were nearly two MILES high.  The end of the Mesozoic involved destruction on a gigadeath scale, the veritable Walmart of extinction-events.

The way I figure it, faith responses to such an event now would take several different forms.   For many of us, the most likely response would involve some rather brief but fervent praying, followed by getting to meet Jesus face to face.

But as there are a billion of us evenly distributed around the planet, not all Christians would be obliterated in those first rather unpleasant hours.

The question then becomes: how would what you believe fare in such an event?  For those whose faith is grounded in the desire to prosper, I'm not sure faith would hold out.  Mass-media health and wealth preaching in the face of a global calamity would just seem...well...silly.  Beyond the absence of all media, "just name it and claim it" wouldn't feel quite so amazing if by "naming it and claiming it" you were thinking about naming and claiming a few more mouthfuls of charred squirrel bits.

And those ministries that have focused on end-times prophecy?  I'm not sure they'd be doing so great either.  If your whole faith revolves around getting conveniently raptured away before the cosmological poop hits the fan?   A major disaster would have the unfortunate tendency to make you question it.   How could you preach about the end of the world after the world had already ended?  It'd be a tricky wicket.

But for those survivors whose Christian faith focused on what Jesus actually taught, and how he asked us to live, our faith would be more relevant than ever.  Communities of radical compassion are profoundly resilient in times of crisis.  The ethos of care for the stranger and the neighbor does rather well when the going gets rough.   If by discipleship we mean what Jesus meant for us to do, and not wild theological speculation or selfish grasping, then Christianity would be just as viable after the end of the Cenozoic era.

The further your faith is from the reality of God's creation, the more poorly it would fare in a global catastrophe.

But love?  Love knows the real.  And love adapts.

Love, Dust, and Ashes

With a peculiar admixture of St. Wuventines Day and Ash Wednesday churning about in my head, I found myself reflecting yesterday on an infographic on page one of the WaPo's Science and Health section.

"Love is in the Mind, Not the Heart," it proudly announced.  The graphic explored the neurology of variant forms of emotive response, wrapping up the concept of love in a neat package of chemicals and transmitters.

Attraction?  That thrill of love's first kiss, that whirring surge of excitement when you both realize that the other feels the same way?  That's a heady cocktail of dopamine, noradrenaline, and seratonin.

Sustained attachment?  The gentle contentment of a couple comfortable together after decades, or the deep heart love you feel for your child?  That's an output of oxytocin and vasopressin, the evolved neurochemical response of a social creature.

Now, all of that is true, and measurable.  But just as there are places where faith can stumble, let me say that despite science being a big bucket of awesome most of the time, this is one of those places it flails about miserably.

You can approach love this way, sure.  But it's clumsy and mechanistic, completely divorced from the experience of love.  You've missed it, and missed it completely.  It's like that smart but clueless friend who goes to see a brilliantly acted Shakespeare comedy, and insists on spending the entire time deconstructing the semiotics of meaning underlying patriarchal Elizabethan culture.  They don't laugh.  They aren't participating, or allowing themselves to engage.

And yes, we are mortal beings, creatures woven up of dust and ashes.  But sorting diligently through the dust will not bring you closer to the reality of the experience.  Analyzing the carbonized proteins of the ashes will not make your encounter with another being any richer.

It does not deepen our humanity, not in any way that I can perceive.

Ah well.  Nothing's perfect, I suppose.

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.

Hard Science

Things here in the Nation's Capital continue in their endless quest to make this country better.  Like, say, the current Republican effort to derail improved nutrition standards for school breakfasts and lunches.    According to the hard-nosed logic of the GOP, fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low fat offerings are just more expensive than processed food.  And times are tough.  We just can't afford budget-busting good food for our children in these difficult economic times.   Better to just have our first graders Do the Dew and Snap into a Slim Jim.  And Funyuns, well, they're almost a vegetable.   If our kids get used to eating right, that could really impact the well-being of our growing health care industry.   And that means lost jobs that Americans need.   See?  The GOP has your best interests at heart!

Oh, wait!  There's more!

Take, for instance, a provision offered up by Rep. Danny Rehberg, (R,Montana).  That provision requires that all FDA decisions be based on "hard science." 

Rehberg's efforts seem to have two primary targets.  First, there's a growing effort to regulate menthol in cigarettes.  Menthol cigarettes always struck me as a bit nasty, even back in the days when I'd smoke my way through a pack a year.   The impact of menthol, of course, is that it makes it easier to inhale without coughing out the little cloud of carcinogens you've just inhaled.   That's why it's included in cough drops, eh?  So, technically, menthol doesn't do any harm itself.  It just makes it easier to smoke.  So...hard science says...menthol is just fine!

 Second, Rehberg's provision would block regulation of antibiotics used in farm animals.  The overuse of those antibiotics is, according to the American Medical Association, one of the likely causes of the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  But agribusiness opposes those regulations, because, well, they bite into the bottom line and make it harder to factory-farm.  And the scientists who work for Monsanto and ADM, well, they question the validity of the AMA's concerns.  Based on science, of course.

As Rehberg puts it, there's a difference "...between a sociologist and a geologist."  Decisions need to be hard-nosed, clear, and rooted in indisputable facts, not the squishy malleable findings of social science.  Why go with the findings of a state university epidemiologist, when you could instead be looking at data from a tobacco industry biochemist?   Hard science is clearly better.

To which I feel compelled to ask a simple question of Rep. Rehberg, whose decisions are all based on the latest and best science.

That question would be: "How old is the earth?"

Not exactly, but roughly.   Here, I'll make it easier.  Here's a ScanTron form with two bubbles, which can be filled out with a number 2 pencil.  Bubble 1 says: "Less than 50,000 years old."  Bubble 2 says: "More than 50,000 years old."  One is true.  One is not.  What does hard science tell us?

As a Representative from a district that is as Red as Stalin himself, I'm sure his Bible-believing constituents would appreciate his clear, straightforward, non-vacillating answer based on hard science.

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...