The Strange Theology of K Pop Demon Hunters

You can ruin pretty much anything by overthinking it, and K Pop Demon Hunters is no exception.

In the event you're old and cranky and utterly outside of the zeitgeist, K Pop Demon Hunters is an animated movie produced by a partnership between Sony and Netflix.  It tells the definitively fluffy tale of a three-member K Pop (that's Korean Pop, boomer) girl band called Huntr/x who...in addition to packing stadiums full of adoring fans..are also engaged in a battle to prevent the earth from being overrun by demons.  They do this through the magic of their infectious bops and by killing demons with their prodigious martial arts skills.  Hunter/X has a chance to create a magical shield around the world with their song, one which will wall off the demonic world forever.

The demon world finds this threatening, and the dictator of the demons is convinced by a hunky demon musician that the only way to battle Huntr/x is to form the Saja Boys, a demonic boy band.   Music and actual battles ensue.

It's wonderfully animated by the same team that created the brilliant animated Spiderman movie.  It's an artfully spun cotton-candy confection, one which reflects the pop-ethos of both Korean and Korean-American culture, and it's been a wild success.  Meaning, the songs sung by the two in-movie fictional bands have topped the pop charts, the soundtrack is a number one album, that sort of thing.

Am I the target demographic?  O Lord no.  Those sugary tunes and synchronized dance moves just slide right off my middle-aged neurocalcified brain.

And as a Presbyterian, I'm always both overthinking and looking for a theological angle.  As it happens, theology of a sort is front and center in the movie.

Here, there will be spoilers.  Just saying.  Go forth forewarned.

The movie's obligatory romantic entanglement is between Jinu (the leader of the Saja Boys) and Rumi (one of the three members of Huntr/X, who also happens to be half-demon by birth and is hiding the tell-tale marks of that identity).  Most of the Message in the film is about how shame turns you into a demon, forcing you to hide yourself behind a web of lies and self-loathing.  For example: Like every other demon, the hunky pretty-boy demon Jinu was been enslaved by the demon king Gwi-Ma, trapped by his shame at having betrayed his family in exchange for success.

Why Rumi is ashamed isn't quite clear.  She's ashamed of being half-demon, but if becoming a demon requires you to be ashamed, how that works seems a bit recursive.  Perhaps she's ashamed of her demon father?  Or ashamed of her demonic heritage?  Or ashamed of lying about being half-demon?  I couldn't quite parse that out.

As the movie progresses, the one great goal is creating the ultimate Honmoon barrier between the worlds, trapping the demons forever in the infernal realm ruled by Gwi Ma.   Rumi and Jinu fall in love, of course, and at the end of the film, Jinu overcomes his demonic shame.  He chooses his love for Rumi, and sacrifices his soul so that Rumi and the other members of Huntr/X can defeat Gwi-Ma and...activating the new improved Honmoon shield...forever trap all of the demons in their bitter realm of shame and lies.

As I watched, this was where my overthinking kicked into overdrive.

Here's why.  We know that, if loved, Jinu can change and be released from the power of shame.  We know that Rumi, a half-demon, can be freed from the power of shame.  

But what does that mean?  It means that every other demon...all of whom are souls who have been enslaved by Gwi-Ma...can also change.  It's clear they're all living in fear of the demon king, and when they're not being slaughtered by Huntr/X, most of them are portrayed sympathetically.  They're not really threatening, and are utterly powerless against the OP triple threat of our heroines.  Heck, two of the demons...a three-eyed magpie demon and a Totoro-eque tiger demon who Jinu uses as messengers...are cuddly comic relief.

So what does that say about Rumi's goal, and the conclusion of the movie?   

Again, the great victory of the film was to be this: trapping every single soul that has been enslaved by demonic shame eternally in that oppressive realm.  When this happens, backed/evoked by a triumphant Girlboss pop song, we're supposed to cheer.  All the while, we also know that within the logics of the narrative, every one of those demons has both human backstory and a self-loathing that they could still potentially overcome.   

Yay inflicting eternal torment on the damned?  You..um..go girls?  

As a recovering Calvinist, this seemed...oddly hopeless.  

Particularly for a sugar straw candy concoction like K Pop Demon Hunters.  Being doomed forever because of shame seemed a bit on the grim side, and flew in the face of the whole "coming to terms with the truth of yourself" and "acceptance" schtick.

And here's where my plans for this post went a little awry.

As I dug into it a bit more, I found  a little detail in the freshly minted "lore" for the movie.  Because no IP out there now doesn't have lore, as internet fandom interfaces with world building to create fractally endless ruminations on the "universe" that any popular narrative inhabits.

The shield formed at the end of the film wasn't, evidently, the long planned Golden shield.  It is, or so the eagle-eyed interwebs informed me, very possibly a Rainbow shield, which may be permeable, which may mean the hunky demon Jinu could still be alive, which may point to a sequel, Q.E.D., O.M.G.  

Was that evident at any point in the watching of the film?  Nope. 

Is it evident to a casual viewer?  Not really.  

But pop fandom has an explanation for everything, and can make angels dance on the edge of even the slightest detail.  Films are watched, and rewatched, and watched again, with deep meaning hinging on the tiniest fragment of narrative minutia.

Which is, itself, remarkably theological.

It's nice to know that overthinking isn't just a Presbyterian trait, after all.

Our Father

I was sitting at table with a group of fellow Presbyterians, where they were pitching out their reactions and thoughts around my recent book on reclaiming the Lord's Prayer.  It was an engaging conversation, and their frank comments and thoughtful ponderings made for some delightful back and forth.

During the discussion, one of the folks around the table started chatting about the very first chapter of the book.  It being a book about the Lord's Prayer and all, it tracks through that ancient prayer phrase by phrase, and the very first phrase is "Our Father."  Pater Hemon, in the Greek of Luke 11 and Matthew 6, although without the italics or capitalization, because common Greek didn't roll that way.

One of the participants, an Older White Gentleman, had something to say about that.  "I was struck," he said, "by that first chapter about fathers."  "I didn't think," he continued, with a mischievous grin on his face, "that we were allowed to use that word any more."

This, I will confess, did occur to me in the writing of the book.

It is the strong preference of my comrades in the Presbyterian People's Front to avoid male pronouns in the evocation of God.  Growing up in a very progressive church, this would typically manifest in prayer language that either centered the divine feminine or attempted to avoid gender altogether.

There's a strong and relevant truth to all of that effort, because YHWH ain't a male bipedal hominid.  We're not talkin' Zeus here, not some towering white bearded dude in a robe glowering down from His Obviously Anthropomorphic Throne.  Theological assumptions of male dominance or superiority rising from that language aren't to be tolerated.

I steer away from the use of gendered language to describe God myself, truth be told, and at no point in the book do I ever refer to God as "He."  Not even in the chapter where I talk about God the Father.  Not even once.

I also don't mind if folks want to use other terms to describe God.  So many other words and images point to the Divine Nature.  God is Love, of course.  And Light.  And a Consuming Fire.   If Scripture's cool with God being like a mother hen with sheltering wings, or telling us the Creator of the Universe can manifest as an incandescent shrubbery, then all bets are off.  You do you.

So in that spirit of inclusivity, I'm not of a mind to abandon the use of the word Father in prayer, because it, um, works.  It ain't inherently broke.  Is it perfect?  No.  Of course not.  No human language, none, can bear the full weight of God's reality.  We could theologically wordsmith until the end of time, and still not fully capture it.  Our efforts to use our categorical semiotics more precisely just ends up creating a muddled, clumsy tangle.

Were I to reword the prayer to my own heretical idiosyncracies, I'd be forced to acknowledge that "Our Numinous Omnipassible Multiversal Panentheist Reality Engine" just doesn't flow off the tongue.   

Father isn't that.  It's not an academic abstraction.  It's a concrete, actual, material relation that's comprehensible on a human scale.

And we human beings, with our propensities for overcomplicating our lives?  That can be helpful.

The Boltzmann God

One of the more fascinating bits of silliness you'll encounter if you play around with modern cosmology is the idea of the Boltzmann Brain.

I've encountered this idea in various writings, most recently in my reading of Max Tegmark's latest book. It's a fascinating thought exercise.

Ludwig Boltzmann was a physicist and philosopher who lived at around the turn of the last century.  He's a bona fide giant in the field.  He came up with equations that explain things that...well...honestly...I don't have much use for in my day-to-day work as a pastor.

He didn't come up with the idea of the Boltzmann brain, but it was named after him.

The core of the concept is that--given Boltzmann's assertion that our highly-ordered universe is just a low-entropy sliver of a massively energetic and infinitely larger system--intelligence is just as likely to arise sui generis as evolve.

It's immensely improbable, sure.  But in the endless recombination of energies and ephemeral structures that would churn up from a functionally infinite and timeless chaos, such a thing would happen.

Meaning that awareness--sentience--could simply come into being.  It does not have to evolve.  It could simply be.

As that thought exercise goes, it tends to involve speculation that our awareness--and our whole universe, in some versions--is just as likely to be a Boltzmann brain event.  There'd be no way to know the difference.  We could easily be just seconds old, coalesced from the eternal wildfire of the tohu wabohu.

Please, please, no one tell this to Ken Ham.

It's also a concept that seems to have more purchase now that creation looks to be multiversal.  The dizzying energies of this cosmology lend themselves to some pretty insane potential realities.

What I find fascinating about this concept lies not in the possibility of a human cerebral cortex just manifesting itself in the void.  Instead, the idea that sentience itself might arise as an inherent part of being plays interestingly off of my own theological musings.

Why not a Boltzmann God?

The Theology of Lego

This last weekend, I went to see The Lego Movie with my sons.  In that, I was tagging along with a whole bunch of other American parents, drawn into our Amuse-O-Plexes by the promise of a family-friendly, slightly sly, and wholesome good time.  The boys had been asking to see it, and I happily obliged.

That my boys are a tiny bit past the Lego age became obvious when we found our seats in the theater.  My big guy is now a Big Guy, at six-two and two-ten, a month shy of his sixteenth birthday, all legs and shoulders, built like a quarterback with a rich deep bass baritone.  My little guy is thirteen now, growing fast, with musical tastes that lean towards Floyd and Zeppelin, Beck and Radiohead, and cinematic tastes that are...well...Kubrick is his favorite director, although he's recently taken a shine to Wes Anderson.  So we're not quite the target demographic, so to speak.

But they wanted to see The Lego Movie, and so did I, because we all of us loved Lego when we were younger.  So we hit a cheaper matinee, and went unashamed into a theater full of parents with tiny sippy-cup people, and enjoyed the film.

As always, my pastor hat was on, though, and so I found myself taking note whenever anything surfaced that had theological implications.  Because pastors do that.  It's sort of a nervous tick, one drilled into us by years of sermon preparation.

There were spiritual and theological assumptions to the film, of course, as there are to everything.  I mean, how can you have a movie in which Will Ferrell plays a quasi-omnipotent character called The Man Upstairs and not see the theology in it?  So for those of you who've seen the film, I offer up the following little list.

It's spoiler-filled, chock-full of plot-line revealing ruination, so consider yourself duly warned.  Here you go:

1)  Everything Is Awesome.  Agh.  Argh.  Earworm!  Ack!  Seriously, that song just keeps bopping into my head, in that way that involves my subconscious endlessly singing, "Everything is Awesome! Something something something part of a team."  Sigh.

But as a theological statement, that works on a bunch of different levels.  It speaks to the view that the ultimate goal of Creation is something amazing.  It reminds us, in a poppy, chirrupy way, that having a hopeful and joyful attitude makes us more creative and more open to the possibility of creativity.

2)  You are the Special.  This theme surfaced repeatedly, as our little plastic protagonist struggled with his sense of identity.  Emmet Brickowski is no-one, the Everyminifigure, utterly unspecial...and yet not.  Like most Everyman characters, he's the bearer of truth...which, actually, is the meaning of his name in Hebrew.  That's the word emet, not the word brickowski.  Lord, but do we pastors overthink these things.

Emmet matters, the movie tells us, even in his simple, earnest plain-ness, because he has been gifted with the ability to create with what is around him.  Sure, his great creative vision is a double-decker sofa.  But even that has its place.

This concept gets pressed out into the almost completely nonviolent end to the movie, where even the villain is transformed by it.  There's no "kill-the-bad-guy" ending here, thank the Man Upstairs.  Instead, Lord Business is given the opportunity to be changed by Emmet, and turns to grace and creativity.  Here, the fundamental potential for good that is present in all human beings is affirmed, as is the capacity of even the worst of us to be transformed by grace.

I can't speak for other world faith traditions, but that's a pretty darned important part of Christianity.

3)   Believe.  This was the part of the film where Richard Dawkins walked out grumbling.  Belief is a hateful plastic brick delusion, he muttered to himself, while the audience laughed at the self-aware metabanality of a talking-cat-poster ethic.

And sure, it's simple to the point of seeming trite.  It's easier to critique and snark and immerse yourself in cynicism about life.  But so many good things are plain, simple, and hobbitish.  If you believe in a possibility, that is an absolute prerequisite for your moving reality towards it.  Simple?  Sure.  But true nonetheless, as much as we might want to overthink our way past it.

Faith...that there is such a thing as goodness, that there is a point to our existence...is an essential part of a healthy life as a self-aware being.  It centers and defines our humanity, and allows us to both endure and triumph.  It opens us to as-yet-unmanifested realities, in both ourselves and in our relationships with others.

4)   Rigid Linear Determinism Does Not Accurately Reflect the Nature of the Created Order.  I can't quite remember where this line surfaced in the movie.  I think maybe the UniKitty character said it when the film took us into Cloud Cuckoo Land.  Or maybe I'd just wandered off into my own mind for a moment.

This was, without question, a core theological assumption of the film.  Yes, the universe has structure.  In the case of the film, interlocking bricks of a near-infinite variety.   In the case of our time and space?  It's a little more complex, but close enough that the metaphor can't be missed.  That structure is in flux, ever changing, and open to our inputs and creative energies.  What it must not be is rigid, superglued into place by the desire to control it and to make it a single, unchanging, and dead "perfection."

In the theology of this little film, I see a bit of a throw-down challenge to both rigid scientific mechanism and religious fundamentalism.  There is not just one way things can be, it says.  Stop trying to imagine that your particular understanding encompasses the intent of the Creator.  And in that, I think it more accurately reflects the nature of creation than those who would limit God's work to just one story.

5)  Everything is Awesome.  Oh, c'mon.  Again?  Lord, but does this song stick around.

I can't let it pass, though, because this works with the other meaning of Awesome, too.  Everything...meaning the vastness of Creation...is remarkably, immensely, inescapably awe-inspiring.  It's amazing in its complexity, in its intricacy, in its gobsmacking vastness.  It's amazing in its potential, and in our ability to engage with the the portion of existence we encounter and to create with it.

Awesome, indeed.

"Is God Dying?"

A few weeks ago, with my son ensconced in his drum lesson, I settled in at the library across the street to do some light magazine reading for pleasure.  It's still satisfying reading things that aren't screens, although I'm one of an increasingly small number of folks who actually do this.

The magazine in question: the December issue of Scientific American, which teased me in with an article written by a couple of psychologists on a recent study tracking the impact of internet use on the human capacity to remember.  It was...well...about right.  The author suggested that humans evolved to rely on distributed social memory, meaning, if you didn't know something, your friend would.  That's just part of the way human beings think and store information.

Now, our "friend" is Google, and we're increasingly using it to store our memories.  I've written about this before, of course, but I also live it out.  That's the point of this blog, after all.  It's my cloud-memory, set to "share" so that it can be yours, too.

But that article led me to another article.

"Is God Dying," it asked.  

It was an article by an atheist/skeptic, writing on the varying different studies showing a decline of religiosity in developed countries.  It was, to be fair, not a polemic at all, just a teaser title to suck in the reader.  Because the idea of God dying because certain human faith traditions are diminishing/changing is absurd.  If God exists, our faith or lack of faith is immaterial to that existence. 

But the concept underlying the question sent my mutant brain on a related but unintended path.

God is not dead or dying.  But is God alive in the first place?

I mean, sure, yeah, we Jesus folk will talk about the Living God...but when we think about life, and what it means to be alive, I'm not sure our statements about the Divine really mesh with the way that we understand what it means to be a living being.

In a biological sense, living systems have certain characteristics.  As we look out into the immensity of our universe, humankind hopes that somewhere, somehow, we might find that we're not the only ones here.  And as biology has struggled to come up with ways to understand what fundamentally constitutes "life," so's we'll have some clue of what it is when we stumble across it out there in the vastness, they've come up with some fundamentals.

Like: Life changes.  Life grows.

Has that ever been a part of the way we understand God?  I'm not sure that it has.  The idea of immutability, unchangeability, and permanence are kinda sorta core concepts when we consider God's identity.  Even if we factor in the radical generativity and "fecundity" of the divine, that change and growth is bounded by God's atemporal nature.

Like:  Life reproduces.

Yeah, I know, we say Jesus is the Son of God, but Christianity has never meant by that anything like the whole "Zeus as a Goose doing the humpty-hump with Leda" thing.  God creates and begets.  God doesn't reproduce in the same way that organic systems reproduce.  You want to quibble with that, I'll invite you to engage with the millennia of orthodox Christian exploration of the concept.  When you're done, come back and let's talk...in about a hundred years or so.

I think, ultimately, that the idea of God being "alive" seems to be a category error, particularly if we understand life in biological terms.

Why Your Pastor Needs to Be a Geek

He really didn't want to be there.

But "Thou Shalt Talk With Thy Pastor to Get Thy Badge," saith the Cub Scout commandment, and so he was.

I knew it, because I remember being a kid.  I remember doing stuff I had to do, but with my mind half-a-billion miles away.  So he sat there, trapped by the moment in the pastor's office with his father, his body a mass of squirms and distraction.  If it was physically possible to wriggle your way through a hole in the space-time continuum, he would have.

His dad gently coaxed him to ask the questions that he'd thought about beforehand, and he did ask them, sort of.   His eyes fluttered around the room, and his voice semi-audible.

I answered the questions he'd prepared, good ones, they were.  But I could hear my replies going WAAA waa WAAA in his mind, the meaningless trumpeting of a Charlie Brown grownup.

Again, I remember being a kid.  It's important not to forget the wholeness of yourself.

So a few gentle, steering questions moved us away from me being the Expert Faith Professional talking about Important Church Matters.   What kid cares about Important Church Matters?  That's sure not where I lived when I was his age.

The conversation turned to greener lands, to where I lived when I was his age.  To where I still live in part, being a geek and all.

We found ourselves in Middle Earth, and the Shire, and the world that Tolkien had woven.  In that world, we talked about Power, and what it had done to Smeagol.  We talked about how even Galadriel and Gandalf knew how deeply it can corrupt the heart.

And from Tolkien, we found our way to Cair Paravel, as he learned that J.R.R. and Clive Staples were friends.  We talked Narnia for a while, and Aslan, and how Aslan's song sang in harmony with another story.

Then to Hogwarts, where J.K. Rowling helped us frame a conversation about self-sacrifice and redemption.

And he was there, the whole time.  He was present, engaged, interested, voice clear, eyes up, engaged and thoughtful.

For a conversation about theology.  

Probability, Gambling, and God

As part of my tendency to read as widely and as wildly as I possibly can, the last few weeks have been spent nibbling away at Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise.   It's a fascinating book about statistics and probability, from a statistician whose track record in predicting American elections is remarkably accurate.

Though he's despised by the pundit-class, particularly those on the right wing who've been recently stymied by his predictions, Silver comes across as remarkably nonpartisan.   He cares about data, and being as accurate as possible.  Period.

One thing I most certainly did not expect as I read through Silver, though, was just how much theology would be involved.   This goes well beyond the opening chapters, where he spends page after page discussing the Reformation.  It goes beyond his quoting Proverbs.

Silver is a Bayesian statistician, meaning his approach to interpreting data is probabilistic and flexible.  Bayesian statistics derive their name from Thomas Bayes, an eighteenth century Presbyterian minister/mathematician.  Bayes created a theorem that calculates the likelihood of things, a theorem that he derived from a theological treatise on the nature of God's sovereignty.

This was beyond cool, and it took my reflections to interesting places.  Silver's explication of probability theory and Bayes essay on the nature of the divine play out interestingly against the theological implications of Many Worlds theory.

Silver spends a great deal of time talking about probability in the context of gambling.  I'm not a gambling man myself.  First, it doesn't float my boat, and second, I've watched gambling destroy too many lives and relationships.  More on that another time.

But there's one wager I know that might be interestingly informed by a fusion of Bayesian thinking and the Many Worlds Interpretation.   It's the wager suggested by Blaise Pascal.  That classic wager is also itself a probabilistic statement.  To woefully oversimplify it, Pascal's Wager suggests that there is nothing to be lost by believing in a God if God does not exist, and much to be potentially be lost if you do not believe and God turns out to be there.  Therefore, belief is a more rational position.

This has always struck me as a bit weak, if only because it seems too self-interested and abstracted.

Applying the Bayesian Theorem to belief in the probability of a God is a related but different wager.  Bayes laid out the probability of a thing in terms of an equation, which is perhaps one reason most human beings struggle with it.  I fiddled around with a spreadsheet for a bit the other day, trying to  figure out what elements might make for an interesting probabilistic proof.   What factors should be considered in calculating the probability of God?   Hmm.  Good question.

Faith as a transcultural phenomenon?  Sure.  But  the absence of empirically measurably evidence needs to be in there.  So do the belief patterns of scientists.  I mucked around for a little bit, assigning factors and percentages.  I was as conservative as possible, and as contrarian to my own faith-position as possible.  With the most pessimistic assumptions used as primary metrics, I ended up with a rather low probability for God's existence.  Not "impossible."  Just "highly improbable."

This was not news.  It's why faith requires a Kierkegaardian existential leap, eh?

Where the equation got interesting was when I took it beyond the assumption of one space and time, and into the multiverse.  As Stephen Hawking spitballed it, there might be...at least...10 to the 500 discrete universes.  Assuming they're not functionally infinite.   What I found?

Taking a Bayesian probabilistic equation and playing it out across ten to the 500 iterations, the answer is pretty much always yes.

The House always wins, baby.  The House always wins.

Dealing in Absolutes

With the manuscript away and in the hands of my editor, I've found myself re-engaging with the Believer's Guide.  Some if it came as I wove in the excellent edits plugged in by my wife.  You think you've read a thing through enough to catch every typo...but no...

Some of it has come as I have seen that goldarned fifth chapter for what it was.  Ack.  It's a clumsy flesh golem of a Frankenchapter, knit together out of the bits and pieces of essays and bloggery as I struggled to reassemble a stolen manuscript.

But mostly, the concepts stirred about afresh as I explored the heady fusion of a Many Worlds cosmology and classical theology.

When you come back to something after a while, those renewed eyes mean you can enter into a conversation with yourself, challenge yourself, and reconsider your thinking.  In particular, I found myself wondering about one of the sustained themes of the book: the challenge to absolutism.   Drawing from the joyous, endless generativity and freedom implied by a multiverse creation, a core theme of the book involves challenging the idolatrous certainties of both literalist fundamentalism and militant atheism.   And, frankly, any system that assumes that it's got the one final answer.

Absolutism bad, as Multiverse Hulk might say.

But wait, I say.  I do make claims about truth.  Throughout the book, and particularly in it's exploration of ethics, I present a series of arguments for both Love and God.  Throughout, I make the case that the ethic of radical compassion is The Essential Law governing sentient beings, and that love is the essence of God and God's self-expression.

I also argue for the existence of a Creator, The Ground of Being that is and should be the focus of our existence.

So, isn't that an absolute?  Seriously.  Isn't that just the same thing I rail against?  I mulled that one over for a little bit.  Took a good long walk on it, in the brisk cold of an evening.

And on two significant levels, the answer was no.

First, faith---the orienting of one's existence towards God--is not the same thing as orienting oneself towards a finite object or a neatly, cleanly defined system or pattern of understanding.   If you think for a moment you've entirely grasped the full nature of what you have come into encounter with when you stand in the Presence, then you've missed the point.  The thing you grasp cannot be the completeness of it.  It cannot ever be, for God's completeness is without end or limit.

The rigid certainties of the absolutist bear no resemblance to faith.

And love?  Love...understood not as emotion, but as the state of seeking and engaging in a compassionate relation with another free being...is also not an absolute.  It can't be, not if it's authentic, because the compassionate interplay between two free beings is not a finite thing.  Neither is bounded or delimited or set in stone.  Neither is an object.  Neither is an "it," and both are "Thou," as Martin Buber would have put it.

So the rigid certainty of the absolutist bears no resemblance to love, either.

First Cause

With my doctoral writing done for a few months, I find myself finally able to turn back to the Believer's Guide manuscript.  It's stewed and bubbled in the background for a few months, but the window of editing opportunity has finally opened up, as...finally...has the chance to start fishing around for publishers.  A book proposal or three have come together over this week, and have been churned out to midsized and smaller presses.

Because of all of this, I'm getting back into reading and thinking about the core concepts of the book, which inevitably stirs some entertaining mind-wanderings.  One of those is the whole "first cause" conundrum.

In a discussion group last month at my tiny church about the compatibility between faith and science, a well-informed and regular participant presented an opinion that I for a long time held myself.  It was a variant on what is often called the "First Cause" argument.

For those faith folk who don't buy into the reflexive fundamentalist 6,000 year old universe thing, "First Cause" has come to be understood in the context of our observable time and space.   Looking out at the way that creation has banged out bigly, and how it appears to have begun at a point of inscrutable singularity beyond which nothing can meaningfully be known, science-friendly believers have seen the possibility of God on the far side of that event.

Beyond that first moment lies God, we've thought.  And we're not wrong.  We're just not right in the way that we thought, either.

This is one of the many challenges the Many Worlds interpretation poses for the faithful.   Because that moment?  It's not the boundary.  On the "other side" may lie an infinity of other realities, or just a single scraping of reality against reality.   Yeah, Stephen Hawking described the number of other potential universes as 10 to the 500, but I know physicists.  The technical term for when they start pitching out numbers that high is "spitballing at infinity."

What Hawking is saying is that the multiverse itself might well be functionally infinite and eternal.  And if it's infinite and eternal, there can be no first cause.

Which, to be honest, works just fine for faith, with very little muss or fuss.  Why?  Because while First Cause arguments make some sense relative to time and space, they have never been meaningful statements relative to being outside of the bounds of our time and space.  Some unpacking of that is in order, eh?

From faith we know that God is eternal, but we know more than that. We understand existence as not being limited to the bounds of the flow of time and space, and understand being in God's presence as partaking of that eternity.   Being eternal, timeless, and without cause is an integral aspect of God's identity.

But when we've tried to explain this to skeptics, the conversations always go the same way.

Jesus-dude:  "Everything had to come from something.  So that something is God."
Skeptic:  "Oh yeah?  Well, what did God come from?"
Jesus-dude:  "Nothing.  God has just always existed."
Skeptic:  "But if everything has to come from something, then God has to come from something."
Jesus-dude:  "No, because God is God."
Skeptic:  "But everything has to come from something.  You're not making any sense."
Jesus-dude:  "That's because things work differently in the universe.  God's not part of everything we see and hear."
Skeptic:  "Oh, c'mon.  How can there be anything outside of our universe?  That's wackadoodle."

And to be honest?  The skeptic does have a point.   There's some tension in that thinking.  Or, to be more plain about it, did have a point.  If Many Worlds gains more purchase as a cosmology, the whole classical First Cause argument isn't worth arguing over.  It's just no longer relevant.

If the universe is an infinite and immeasurable multiverse, then ascribing causality is functionally meaningless when considering that infinity.  And saying "first" is equally meaningless.   How can there be a "first" if being stretches out to places where time has no meaning?

And into this kwazy cosmic yarp, the faithful have to ask: at what point did God create?  Could we still refer to God as the "Creator?"  The answer returns: Sure.  At every point, always, back farther than we can see, and forward beyond the scope of our vision.   It's just that parsing out God's infinitely generous self-expression from God's nature becomes a meaningless exercise.

I really am enjoying this manuscript.

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.

Tweeting Tribalism

In an interesting crosspost over at Presbymergent and at his blog A Wee Blether, Adam Copeland pitches out a defense of social media as a means by which church can better be church.  By blogging and tweeting and...um..."facebooking," Copeland argues that we establish a profound and authentically spiritual connection to others and increase our awareness of others who share our faith.

There's real truth in that.  New media connects us to people we'd never have otherwise experienced.  There are folks I've known only online, and known for years, from whom I've been connected to writers and thinkers and music that have profoundly enriched my faith.  The ability to share and converse can be a serious blessing, and can enrich our ability to love God and neighbor.   It can be a powerful tool for grace.

As can a gesture.  As can the spoken word.  As can ink and paper.  The reach and immediacy of social media are different, though.  It has the immediacy of conversation, and the potential reach of mass media.

The spiritual challenge in social media is that it makes it easy for us to become tribal.  And we all want to be tribal.  It is our nature.   We like to be an "us."  We like to surround ourselves with sameness and the comfortable and the known.  In our global culture, there there are so many different voices.  Media can serve up the baffling and frightening reality that we don't necessarily hold Truth with a capital "T" quite as firmly as we might like.  We are not the center of things.  That shakes us.

So what social media offers us is a choice.  If we so choose, we can surround ourselves with sameness.  We can follow only those who interest us and agree with us.  We can fill our ears and lay our eyeballs only across those voices and words that reaffirm what we already know.   We can amass a vast array of witnesses who affirm our common knowledge, as our facebook friends, those we feed and those we follow all shout the same songs, and say the same things.  We can live our lives in the echo chamber din of the Daily Kos, or in Townhall.

In the relentlessly refreshing wave of tweets and status updates, we can become so lost in the ceaseless chorus of our own cyberclan that we lose the ability to see those different from us as anything other than our trollish enemy.  Yes, we yearn for the intimacy and comfort of the tribe.  But tribes, while great at being community, have a tendency to do a really for-crap job of being beloved community. 

There lies our other social media choice.  If we so choose, we can use social media to open ourselves up to the other.  Yes, we listen particularly to those who are called to openness, both to those called to be constantly reforming and to those called to hold on to what is good.   But we also listen to those with whom we disagree.  We follow those who are different.  We rss feed those who are supposed to be our enemies.   That doesn't mean we acquiesce.  We're allowed to still disagree.  But in listening, in understanding, we mindfully use social media to stir in ourselves both grace and compassion towards even our most implacable trolls.

When that becomes our habit of being in the strange virtual half-light, then and only then do we start moving towards a twitter theology, towards living through social media in a way that can be called authentically Christian.

Diversity

Following on my post from the other day reflecting on something Carol said over at tribalchurch, why diversity?

I mean, yeah, leftys and lib'rals tend to go on about how important it is to be inclusive.  We could klatch endlessly about the liberation of transgendered Guatemalans living with dwarfism.  Sorry, "little people."  Or, oops, that's gente pequeña.  Or transexuales poco de Guatemala.  So hard to keep track of the lingo sometimes.

The reasons to care about difference, though, need to go well beyond simply wanting to include everyone because it's inclusive, even though that word makes us feel as warm and tingly as a hot brimming cup of fair trade Ethiopian Yergacheffe.

Here, I think Christian progressives tend to fall back on the language of secular liberal academe, and we do so to our failing.  To my eyes, the deepest justification for diversity comes from within Scripture.  The great narrative arc of the Tanakh, the Gospels, and the Epistles rings out with stories of how vitally important it is that we be open to the other.

Yeah, I know, you can spin it the other way.  You can get all Ezra and kick out all them apostate furrin' wimmen and their mudblood children.  If you're a social conservative in a strict constructionist sense, there are plenty of opportunities within the tradition to stand firm against the creep of "syncretism" and/or those voices that seem to chip away at the authority you know is your birthright.  You can use the Bible to keep those loud whiny women in their place.  You can scripturally shout down those uppity colored folk.  But just 'cause it's the truth that affirms you in all you've been taught doesn't mean it won't wither to writhing embers in the hellfire of God's inexorable love.

From within the core metrics of our faith, there are some key operating assumptions about hearing the voices of folks different than us.

First, there's the Exodus presumption in favor of the stranger.  At a bare minimum, those who are different and those who are outside of the boundaries of our culture and our should be met with welcome, grace, and kindness.  Why?  Because our mythopoetic memory is of having been strangers and slaves in the land of Egypt. When we cried out for deliverance, it was the cry of the oppressed other that was heard by the Lord.   This is our story.  If we approach the other...any other...without a heart of compassion, then we have failed to understand the essence of the Biblical narrative and our place within it. 

Second, there's God's tendency to consistently use those who ain't part of "us" to school us, save us, or whup our behinds when they needs a whuppin'.  The prophets through whom God spoke stood outside of the structures of human culture and power.  They lived in the wilderness because those in power tended to drive them there, preferring instead the saccharine comforts of those who told them what they wanted to hear.   God goes so far as to use even those who aren't part of the faith at all.  When Israel forgot about covenant and justice and mercy, and got to be all about power and privilege, Babylon was an instrument in God's hands.  When Israel wept, helpless and lost and broken by the rivers in Babylon, Cyrus of Persia was an instrument in God's hands to save them.  God is not part of our culture.  God is not part of any society.  God is not "us."  With us, yes.  Working in us and through us, maybe.  But if the Biblical narrative is to be ours, then we must live into the truth that God is present and active even in those who are radically other.  If we want to hear our Creator, then we have to listen and be present with the other. 

Finally, there's Christ's redemptive work.   Yeah, that.  Jesus reaffirms and radicalizes the Exodus favoring of the stranger.  The teachings of Jesus of Nazareth are oriented towards deep and God-centered engagement with the other, and in particular the other who is ostracized, hated, or powerless.  It is that baffling love for not just friends, not just family, but for the stranger and the enemy that makes Christianity a tradition that is 1) ever and always fundamentally countercultural and 2) worth following.

That isn't to say that Wuvvy Sparkleberry Jesus sprinkles lollipops and daisies on everyone.  Those who have worldly power, be it coercive or economic, well...Jesus has words for them.  Those words aren't easy ones.  Why?  Because defining ourselves in terms of society or the gun or the dollar turns us into adversaries of one another and of God.  Those forms of power make us approach others not in love, but with the intent of alienating them, or subjugating them, or profiting from them.

The more deeply we engage with those that worldly power declares other, the tax-collectors and the centurions and the lepers and the unclean, the more we manifest the Kingdom.

That, it would seem, is reason enough to make diversity a priority for Christians.

The Hidden Lives of Congregations

With my interim training program just a week away, I've finished up the last of my assigned "churchybook" readings.  The book I just completed, The Hidden Lives of Congregations, by Israel Galindo, was far and away the most comprehensive.  A few reflections:

Minus Side:  It's really quite dense.  This is not light reading.  Not at all.  It is leavened by the occasional anecdotal story about congregational life, but it's mostly meat, written in language that tends towards the academic.  It goes hard and heavy into some of the most significant findings of congregational researchers, occasionally to the point of being a bit inaccessible.  For a well educated layperson, this might work...but it feels very much like a text that speaks at the graduate level.  It isn't a book you can rush through in one sitting.  Or two.  Or five.  I liked it, but for some, that might make this inaccessible.

Minus Side:  It can feel a bit cluttered.  As it reviews and presents most of the literature on congregational life and dynamics, it sometimes gets a bit overwhelming.  With multiple typologies of church types and dynamics, it presents faith communities in such a multivalent way that establishing a clear set of metrics for measuring congregational health can get a bit challenging.  It comes at congregational life from so many different directions that it can be a bit dizzying.  There's intentionality in the structure of the book, but sometimes it feels a bit like drinking from a churchybook firehose. 

Plus Side:  It is thorough.  On the flip side to the above, it really does provide a complete review of congregational research.  Typologies that lay out the impacts of organizational size, internal structure, congregational self-image, and spiritual style are all presented.  Of all of the books that I've gone through for my interim training prep, this one has felt the most useful.  It really does open up the breadth and depth of congregational life.

Plus Side:  It resonates with reality.   Many academic works feel like just that...academic works, full of theories and concepts that exist in the Platonic realm of church forms, but have no connection to how things are.  With this book, I lost track of the number of times I scribbled things like "Yes!" and "Exactly!" and "That's so true!" in the margins.  The ways that Galindo opens up church decision-making, organizational stumbling blocks, and other elements of how congregations function (or don't) is profoundly grounded in the actuality of church life.  Having grown up in a large church, and having served both mid-sized and small congregations, I see a tremendous amount of truth in Galindo's research-based insights.

Plus Side:  It's not just for interims.  Though referencing much of the same literature as the other interim books I read, The Hidden Lives of Congregations approaches congregational life in a way that does not assume you're only there to facilitate a transition.  It's more of a generalists book, something that is designed to be broadly useable by anyone in a position of congregational leadership.

Huge, Huge Plus:  It gets the theology right.  Many churchy books smother the spiritual element of congregational life under therapeutic or academic language, or have Christianity as a light gloss over top of a basically secular approach to organizational life.   While Galindo does a good, full job of exploring family systems theory and the broader organizational research on congregations, when it comes time to get to the heart of church, he sets aside that sort of language, and to my eyes nails it.  As he puts it, no matter what the size and context and systems dynamics of a church as a human entity:

All congregations have the same mission: to be the body of Christ in the world, participating with God in the redemptive work of restoring the people to unity with God and each other in Christ.  (p.42)

This is repeated, reiterated, and restated as the primary and governing purpose of congregations.  Which is good, because it is. 

Not sure why it is that Galindo seems better at this than others I've read.  Maybe...um...because he's Baptist?  Hmmm.

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-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...

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...

Reezus Reist Ris Ry Rord Rand Ravior

Why wouldn't our lickity pals be able to chase that frisbee through the pearly gates? A heaven without our furry friends would seem like rather less than a delightful place.

But that doesn't mean that there might not be folks out there whose theology is not..umm...dog friendly. As I fished around in my noggin for a hypothetical reason some compulsive Calvinist might deny eternal reward to a pup, I was only able to come up with one. So, here goes:

For many Christians, it is axiomatic that a prerequisite for entry into heaven is professing faith in Jesus as one's Lord and Savior. In fact, that's a pretty standard refrain for those who would consider themselves pure-bred orthodox. If faith in Jesus is a necessary prerequisite for salvation, then dogs and cats and sea monkeys are pretty much out of luck. Just getting Ms. Barkerton not to poop on the rug is hard enough. But getting her to speak and...believe in the salvific power of Jesus Christ? I'm not sure that even the most dedicated megachurch doggie training ministry could pull that one off.

From that radical position, salvation is two things. First, it is intensely anthropocentric. Meaning, about humans, kids. True, deep and right relationship with the Creator is only something that applies to humankind, which is made in the image of God. Other creatures, being less Goddy, are just SOL. Second, the fulfillment of that right relationship with our Creator can only be worked through faith in Jesus Christ. As animals...even the smarter ones...are not capable of having that faith, they're presumably just consigned to nonexistence. Their earnest howling and meyowling isn't part of the heavenly choir.

If your pastor is a heartless pharisaic sunnavabeetch, this is what he'll tell your children when your dog dies. Should that be even a remote possibility, I recommend finding another church.

But this theological position...which is the only one I could come up with...has within it a major flaw. Beyond it's obnoxiousness, I mean. If we are being truly orthodox about the purpose of Christ's saving work among us, we understand that work as undoing the brokenness that was wrought in the Fall. From that second creation story in Genesis, humankind drifted out of the perfect awareness of our place in Creation and with our Creator. We ate of the knowledge of evil...for we already knew the good...and drove ourselves from the Garden. By we, I mean "human beings." From a strictly Biblical perspective, there is no evidence that any other creature other than the serpent shares in our fallen state.

Dogs aren't fallen creatures. Neither are gerbils or hamsters. I'm not so sure about some cats, but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt. And if animals are not fallen, then they are not in need of reconciliation and restoration to be what God meant them to be. We're messed up, sure. We find all sorts of ways to not be the gracious, just, and loving beings we are intended to be. But they already are what they were intended to be. As such, there is no doctrine of sin that could meaningfully apply to them. And if that's the case, well, there's no reason that the pets of even the most rigidly orthodox can't join them in the hereafter.

Of course, this is all working within the framework of orthodox Christian thinking. Though I buy it in part, I'm...well...not quite that person.

So next post, I'll get around to presenting my own spiritual sense of this pressing, pressing issue. ;)