One of the reasons I love big-end and little-end science, by which I mean cosmology and subatomic physics, is that it seems to me that both reveal God's creativity, wisdom and playfulness.
There is mystery galore in the cosmos, and just when you think you've figured out the world's dependable Newtonian reality, along comes some theory or observation that destroys your certainty.
As a friend said to me in a recent e-mail, "I once read that the universe is less like a great machine than it is like a great thought."
And why wouldn't that be true? The witness of scripture, after all, is that God spoke the world into existence ("Let there be light" and "Let there be. . ."). And what are words if not expressions of our thoughts?
All of this came up the other day when I read about a Brandeis University physics teacher who is proposing that the world we can see and touch and feel is actually a hologram. Really.
As the press release to which I just linked you explains, Matthew Headrick "works on one of the most cutting-edge theories in theoretical physics — the holographic principle. It holds that the universe is a three-dimensional image projected off a two-dimensional surface, much like a hologram emerges from a sheet of photographic film.
"'In my view, the discovery of holographic entanglement and its generalizations has been one of the most exciting developments in theoretical physics in this century so far,' Headrick said. 'What other new concepts are waiting to be discovered, and what other unexpected connections? We can't wait to find out.'"
You can read for yourself about what the release calls "an international effort by 18 scientists and their labs to determine whether the holographic principle is correct."
One thing I want to focus on is how all of this seems to me to be in harmony with the almost-century-old "Uncertainty Principle" proposed by German physicist Werner Heisenberg. It said that the more exactly you can locate a subatomic particle, the less exactly you can know the speed at which it's traveling, and vice versa. Sort of the way Schrödinger's cat can be simultaneously both dead and alive.
In short, the world is more mystical, magical, porous and paradoxical than most of us have ever imagined it to be, even though the language of the biblical creation stories can lead us to imagine a simple rock-solid universe that is in some fundamental way knowable.
But that biblical language in its original Hebrew is more reflective of a world of uncertainty, of puzzlement, even of playfulness. That language uses metaphor, myth and allegory as foundational building blocks of meaning. And we miss the point if we miss that.
For instance, in the opening verses of Genesis, the Hebrew words used to describe initial conditions at creation that often get translated as "without shape or form" or "without form, and void" are "tohu wabohu," writes Robert Alter in his three-volume The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary. But he says that "the second word of the pair looks like a nonce term coined to rhyme with the first and to reinforce it." (A nonce word is a made-up term used for a single instance.) So to keep the imaginative looseness of the original Hebrew in an English translation, Alter uses the alliterative terms "welter and waste."
It's his way of presenting us with the original puzzling uncertainties of the Hebrew text instead of repackaging the Hebrew into English words that simply try to explain what the Hebrew means. When that happens, much of the mystical, magical flow of the original is flattened, destroyed.
And let's suppose, just for fun, that the Genesis creation stories (there are two of them, and they don't match up very well) were trying to give us a clue about the holographic nature of reality. By translating the Hebrew in the way that most English translators do, that clue would be lost.
And remember that the world that the Bible -- and we -- are trying to describe is mostly invisible to us in that we simply have no way of seeing or touching dark matter or dark energy, which make up most of the cosmos.
All of which should lead to awe and wonder. And what are the primary impulses that lead to religion if not awe and wonder?
So God's world is not a case of what you see is what you get. Rather, it's what you get is far more than what you can see, sense, measure, touch or calculate. If that doesn't produce some humility in us, there's something radically wrong with us.
(The image here today came from this site.)
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JUST WHO ARE THE EVANGELICALS?
When you think of people who identify as Christian evangelicals, what comes to mind? This RNS column by a Calvin College history professor does a good job exploring the problems inherent in coming up with a useful definition of "evangelical." Life is complicated, friends, and we do no one any favors by pretending it's simple or monochromatic.
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