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The Abolition of Man Part One – C.S. Lewis

May 24, 2012

National Review ranked the1943 book #7 in its 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of the 20th Century list. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute ranked the book as the second best book of the 20th century. In a lecture on Walker Percy, Professor Peter Kreeft of Boston College listed the book as one of five “books to read to save Western Civilization,” alongside Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy, Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton, and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

After the posts of the past couple weeks on pornography, I recalled a Woody Allen line about being on the losing side of the sexual revolution which dovetailed to this classic C.S. Lewis piece that concerns Man’s somewhat questionable conquest of Nature. If you have never read it, please do. A simple but depressing message: We have been sold for slaves.

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It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said and however he flattered, when he got me home to his house, he would sell me for a slave.
John Bunyan

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`Man’s conquest of Nature’ is an expression often used to describe the progress of applied science. `Man has Nature whacked,’ said someone to a friend of mine not long ago. In their context the words had a certain tragic beauty, for the speaker was dying of tuberculosis. `No matter’ he said, `I know I’m one of the casualties. Of course there are casualties on the winning as well as on the losing side. But that doesn’t alter the fact that it is winning.’

I have chosen this story as my point of departure in order to make it clear that I do not wish to disparage all that is really beneficial in the process described as `Man’s conquest’, much less all the real devotion and self-sacrifice that has gone to make it possible. But having done so I must proceed to analyse this conception a little more closely. In what sense is Man the possessor of increasing power over Nature?

Let us consider three typical examples: the airplane, the wireless, and the contraceptive. In a civilized community, in peace-time, anyone who can pay for them may use these things. But it cannot strictly be said that when he does so he is exercising his own proper or individual power over Nature. If I pay you to carry me, I am not therefore myself a strong man.

Any or all of the three things I have mentioned can be withheld from some men by other men — by those who sell, or those who allow the sale, or those who own the sources of production, or those who make the goods. What we call Man’s power is, in reality, a power possessed by some men which they may, or may not, allow other men to profit by. Again, as regards the powers manifested in the airplane or the wireless, Man is as much the patient or subject as the possessor, since he is the target both for bombs and for propaganda.

And as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.

It is, of course, a commonplace to complain that men have hitherto used badly, and against their fellows, the powers that science has given them, But that is not the point I am trying to make. I am not speaking of particular corruptions and abuses which an increase of moral virtue would cure: I am considering what the thing called `Man’s power over Nature’ must always and essentially be. No doubt, the picture could be modified by public ownership of raw materials and factories and public control of scientific research. But unless we have a world state this will still mean the power of one nation over others. And even within the world state or the nation it will mean (in principle) the power of majorities over minorities, and (in the concrete) of a government over the people. And all long-term exercises of power, especially in breeding, must mean the power of earlier generations over later ones.

The latter point is not always sufficiently emphasized, because those who write on social matters have not yet learned to imitate the physicists by always including Time among the dimensions. In order to understand fully what Man’s power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power.

In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. And we must also remember that, quite apart from this, the later a generation comes — the nearer it lives to that date at which the species becomes extinct — the less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects will be so few.

There is therefore no question of a power vested in the race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.

The real picture is that of one dominant age — let us suppose the hundredth century A.D. — which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species. But then within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still. Man’s conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man’s side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs, he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car.

I am not yet considering whether the total result of such ambivalent victories is a good thing or a bad. I am only making clear what Man’s conquest of Nature really means and especially that final stage in the conquest, which, perhaps, is not far off. The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have `taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho’ [One of the three fates, the daughter of Zeus and Themis {"divine law"}, who spins the thread of human life.]and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it?

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please. In all ages, no doubt, nurture and instruction have, in some sense, attempted to exercise this power. But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be enormously increased. Hitherto the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when we read them — how Plato would have every infant “a bastard nursed in a bureau”, and Elyot would have the boy see no men before the age of seven and, after that, no women, and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no turn for poetry — we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.

The second difference is even more important. In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao — a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed.

Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgements of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education. The conditioners have been emancipated from all that. It is one more part of Nature which they have conquered. The ultimate springs of human action are no longer, for them, something given. They have surrendered — like electricity: it is the function of the Conditioners to control, not to obey them. They know how to produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce. They themselves are outside, above. For we are assuming the last stage of Man’s struggle with Nature. The final victory has been won. Human nature has been conquered — and, of course, has conquered, in whatever sense those words may now bear.

The Conditioners, then, are to choose what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the Human race. They are the motivators, the creators of motives. But how are they going to be motivated themselves?

For a time, perhaps, by survivals, within their own minds, of the old `natural’ Tao. Thus at first they may look upon themselves as servants and guardians of humanity and conceive that they have a `duty’ to do it `good’. But it is only by confusion that they can remain in this state. They recognize the concept of duty as the result of certain processes which they can now control. Their victory has consisted precisely in emerging from the state in which they were acted upon by those processes to the state in which they use them as tools. One of the things they now have to decide is whether they will, or will not, so condition the rest of us that we can go on having the old idea of duty and the old reactions to it. How can duty help them to decide that? Duty itself is up for trial: it cannot also be the judge. And `good’ fares no better. They know quite well how to produce a dozen different conceptions of good in us. The question is which, if any, they should produce. No conception of good can help them to decide. It is absurd to fix on one of the things they are comparing and make it the standard of comparison.

To some it will appear that I am inventing a factitious difficulty for my Conditioners. Other, more simple-minded, critics may ask, `Why should you suppose they will be such bad men?’ But I am not supposing them to be bad men. They are, rather, not men (in the old sense) at all. They are, if you like, men who have sacrificed their own share in traditional humanity in order to devote themselves to the task of deciding what `Humanity’ shall henceforth mean.

`Good’ and `bad’, applied to them, are words without content: for it is from them that the content of these words is henceforward to be derived. Nor is their difficulty factitious, “We might suppose that it was possible to say `After all, most of us want more or less the same things — food and drink and sexual intercourse, amusement, art, science, and the longest possible life for individuals and for the species.

Let them simply say, This is what we happen to like, and go on to condition men in the way most likely to produce it. Where’s the trouble?’ But this will not answer. In the first place, it is false that we all really like the same things. But even if we did, what motive is to impel the Conditioners to scorn delights and live laborious days in order that we, and posterity, may have what we like? Their duty?

But that is only the Tao, which they may decide to impose on us, but which cannot be valid for them. If they accept it, then they are no longer the makers of conscience but still its subjects, and their final conquest over Nature has not really happened. The preservation of the species? But why should the species be preserved? One of the questions before them is whether this feeling for posterity (they know well how it is produced) shall be continued or not. However far they go back, or down, they can find no ground to stand on. Every motive they try to act on becomes at once petitio. It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all. Stepping outside the Tao, they have stepped into the void. Nor are their subjects necessarily unhappy men. They are not men at all: they are artifacts. Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man.

Posted in C. S. Lewis, Science And Religion | Tagged Man's conquest of Nature, the Conditioners, the power of Man to make himself, the Tao | Leave a Comment »

A History of Water — Karl W. Giberson

April 18, 2012

And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.
And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good.
Genesis 1: 6-10

The Long And Winding Stream
The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them.
Rachel Carson

Water gets even more interesting when we look at the history of how it got to the earth. The story begins with the big bang, the cosmic fireball we met earlier.

Popular views of the big bang picture all the matter in the universe exploding outward like something blowing up in an action movie. This original matter then combined into the cosmic structures we find in the universe today. This picture is way too simple.

The big bang produced no matter. Only unimaginably high energies emerged from that mysterious and transcendent event. Picture the energy released as an atomic bomb explodes; now multiply this many times over. These energies were so high that matter simply could not exist. Of course, there was no such thing as matter in the universe then, so this statement is a bit odd.

A universe with no matter in it would remain quite uninteresting, but fortunately the universe was born with a set of remarkable physical laws. One of the most basic of those laws was discovered by Albert Einstein in 1905: E=MC².

This law is the most well-known equation in all of science. Most people don’t know any equations at all, but if they do know one, it is E=MC². It has graced the covers of magazines, T-shirts and posters. It inspired the atomic bomb, nuclear reactors and dreams of unlimited free energy from seawater. And most important, it was the door through which matter entered our universe.

As the early universe expanded, it cooled, following the same laws of physics running your refrigerator. Cooling is simply the name we give to a decrease in the energy content of a region of space, whether it is your freezer, a Canadian winter or the entire universe. Any quantity of energy will have to decrease in temperature if it spreads out to fill a larger volume. This is why opening your door in the winter cools your house — some of the heat energy flows out the door, futilely trying to warm up the front yard.

As the early universe expanded and cooled it reached critical temperatures where interesting things happened, like when water cools and freezes. If you were swim‑ming under water that was about to freeze — hopefully in a wetsuit to keep you from also freezing — you would see ice crystals suddenly appearing, seemingly out of nowhere. Small bits of water would suddenly be transformed into slivers of ice. Liquid would have become solid. This is what water does as it cools. In the same way, as the early universe cooled, matter popped into existence.

Matter first appeared in two forms — the familiar electrons, with negative electrical charges, and the less familiar quarks with electrical charges of 2/3 and –1/3. Quarks are odd particles conceived in the 1960s to explain the peculiar behavior of other particles. One of their many odd properties is that — like teenagers at the mall — they are never found alone. As soon as they appear, they immediately combine with each other. But they don’t just combine — they form specific particles that have total electrical charges of either 1 or 0.

The most familiar examples of particles with these charges are the proton and neutron, respectively, but there are others. One curious result of this rule of combination is that we never encounter particles with fractional charges, even though we know that both protons and neutrons are composed of particles with fractional charges. In the early days, before this odd rule was understood, heroic efforts were mounted to find a fractionally charged quark hanging out by itself, but none were discovered. Eventually the theory came to include a rule precluding lone-ranger quarks.

After the quarks combine in the early universe, the newly minted matter consists of protons, neutrons and electrons buzzing about in a chaotic but steadily cooling mix. The particles move at great speeds but gradually slow down as the universe expands and cools. Positively charged protons attract negatively charged electrons. As soon as the speeds get low enough — which occurs at a specific temperature — the electron drops into an orbit about a proton, like a child leaping onto a spinning merry-go-round when it slows down enough. The neutrons occasionally bang into protons and stick there, forming the combination still found today in the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. The universe is now full of hydrogen atoms, with a few helium atoms leavening the mixture.

All the particles in the universe are now electrically neutral atoms — their negatively charged electrons• balance their positively charged protons. The powerful electrical forces of attraction and repulsion no longer dominate, and the much weaker gravitational force takes over. The brand new hydrogen atoms float freely about but gravity gathers them ever so slowly together. Clouds of hydrogen gradually form, growing ever larger, and as they get larger they pull with more gravitational force on other atoms. Eventually much of the hydrogen is collected into huge steadily growing clouds that surpass the size of the moon, then the earth, then a large planet like Jupiter. As the clouds get larger they become more compressed, their gravity growing ever stronger.

Nothing limits how strong gravity can become. Eventually another threshold is crossed and the hydrogen atoms become so densely compacted they actually fuse together in a nuclear reaction. This fusion ignites the gigantic balls of hydrogen and, like a slow-motion fireworks display, great spheres of hydrogen turn into stars. Unfortunately, there are no life forms in the universe to witness this extraordinary display, especially since this turns out be a critical step in preparing the universe for life. But amazingly the images of these fireworks end up traveling for billions of years across the universe and are eventually observed, long after the events have faded into history.

The gravity within these newly born stars crushes the hydrogen nuclei, fusing them into helium nuclei and giving off great quantities of light and heat. The process begins to fill the blanks on the periodic table of the elements. Two hydrogens make helium. Add one more and we have lithium. Two helium make beryllium. Add another and we have carbon. Other combinations make nitrogen, oxygen, neon, sodium and on down the periodic table.

At this point the universe is billions of years old and still without an isolated drop of water anywhere. No stars have planets orbiting them, and no solid surfaces exist anywhere on which one could stand. The raw materials out of which planets and people will eventually be constructed are buried deep inside brightly shining stars, and if this were where it ended, there would be nobody to lament our brightly glowing but failed and stillborn universe. But there are more chapters to the story, as you might have anticipated, based on the simple fact that you exist.

Going Out With A Bang
Amazed, and as if astonished and stupefied, I stood still, gazing for a certain length of time with my eyes fixed intently upon it and noticing that same star placed close to the stars which antiquity attributed to Cassiopeia. When I had satisfied myself that no star of that kind had ever shone forth before, I was led into such perplexity by the unbelievability of the thing that I began to doubt the faith of my own eyes.
Tycho Brahe

Large stars near the end of their lives regularly explode as a matter of course. With the force of a billion atomic bombs they strew their contents over unimaginably vast regions of space. It is, of course, a once-in-a-lifetime event for the star — a literal going out with a bang. And even though recorded history is just a few thousand years long — and stars live for billions of years — we have some examples of such explosions that were noted by careful observers.

In A.D. 1054 what is now the Crab Nebula exploded in a flash of light bright enough to be seen in daylight for weeks. Observers in Korea, China, Japan, North America and the Middle East all recorded the supernova, as it is now called, although Europeans did not. It seems that Europeans, convinced that the heavens were perfect and unchanging, managed to delude themselves into not seeing this new star, which must surely have been quite visible.

The great Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe witnessed another supernova in 1572. Like his predecessors, he could not believe that such a dramatic change in the heavens was possible, but, apparently unlike his predecessors, he had enough confidence in his observations to know that he was seeing something remarkable. Brahe’s protege, Johannes Kepler, witnessed another supernova in 1604, and then there were no more visible from earth until 1987, when a star exploded in a nearby galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud.

A supernova explosion fills a massive region of space with the elements created inside the star; the powerful explosion, though, follows known laws of physics as it distributes its contents about the universe. A vast cloud of chemically enriched material, trillions of miles in diameter, results from the event — an event absolutely critical for enabling life.

The grand cloud that results from the supernova resembles the original cloud out of which the star formed in the first place, with one important difference — it contains a substantial roster of different materials, and not just hydrogen and helium. This time around gravity has more to work with, beginning again to gather the material in the huge cloud back into balls. The largest chunk at the center becomes another star — one that starts out with heavier elements, in addition to hydrogen. It is the ultimate recycling project, but unlike recycling on earth, the atoms getting recycled remain in mint condition, no matter how many times they are used.

Some of the smaller balls end up orbiting about the second-generation star. These smaller balls contain many different atoms, and some of them have a curious molecular combination of hydrogen and oxygen. In most parts of the universe these molecules are in the form of a solid. In the others they are a gas. But on balls that are exactly the right distance from the central star, the molecules are liquid, an all-purpose, seemingly magical liquid called water.

Water is found in several places in our solar system. Hydrogen is, of course, the most common element in the universe, and while oxygen is less common it is readily available to combine with hydrogen and form water. Water in the form of ice is a major component in comets and can be found in trace quantities in the atmosphere of Venus, under the surface of Mars and possibly even on some of Jupiter’s moons.

(We have to keep in mind, however, that more than 99 percent of the mass of the solar system is in the sun, so the distribution of elements elsewhere is almost irrelevant from the perspective of the solar system as a whole. The earth has a lot of water, but the earth is a tiny, insignificant speck compared to the sun. And because the water tends to cover so much of the surface, it is easy to overestimate the total amount. Astronomers are not sure exactly where the water on the earth came from. Constructing the early history of our solar system is an enormous challenge.)

From a purely scientific point of view, water is a molecule like any other — and there are lots of molecules. The laws of physics and chemistry describe its behavior, and there are no deep mysteries embedded in its familiar structure. But the laws of physics and chemistry conspire to make water unusual in ways that are critically important for life. Most peculiarly, water expands rather than contracts when it freezes. This makes ice lighter than water, so it floats. Floating ice insulates the water beneath it from the cold temperatures of winter.

Absent this layer of insulation bodies of water all over the earth would freeze solid. If ice were heavier than water, the layer of ice that formed on the top would sink to the bottom and another layer would freeze on top and sink until the entire body of water was a solid piece of ice. This would kill almost every life form in the water.

Water is also an effective solvent. Waste products from our bodies dissolve readily in water and can then easily be expelled. But wait — as they say on television — there is more. Water is also a remarkable coolant capable of absorbing heat and carrying it away from our bodies in the form of sweat. And water stores heat in our bodies, helping keep us warm in cold weather. Magical.

The Gathering Of The Waters
If anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward.
MATTHEW 10:42

The creation story in Genesis records that God gathered the waters. In the King James Version that I read as a child it says, “God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.” In ways that the original readers of Genesis could never have imagined, the gathering of the waters was a cosmic process that took billions of years and involved all the laws of physics and chemistry. The water that we take for granted that covers so much of our planet and makes up so much of our bodies was forged in the nuclear furnace of a star that exploded in the suburbs of the Milky Way galaxy billions of years ago.

That water now cycles endlessly through the life process here on earth — cooling, cleansing and nurturing us. It irrigates our crops, nourishes our livestock, cleans our clothes and gets turned into snow at ski resorts. In those parts of the world where it is plentiful, clean and fresh, we take it for granted and play with it. In Quebec City they construct a hotel out of ice every winter to attract tourists and invite hardy souls to hold their weddings there, wearing parkas and snow boots. We think nothing of using thousands of gallons so our lawns will be green rather than brown in the heat of summer. Water is like air — plentiful and useful.

In parts of the world where fresh water is rare, its value is more apparent. There is a school in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, where children used to walk a quarter mile during their breaks to get a drink of water. I used to walk to the hallway to get a drink when I was in school. World Vision, one of many organizations helping with water problems around the world, installed a well near the school that the children now use to get water. On school days a group of laughing, happy children can be seen working the oversized pump that takes several of them to manage. The water that emerges from its modest faucet is welcomed in ways that few North Americans can appreciate.

For those schoolchildren the water is simply a welcome part of their diet and lifestyle now. Some of the children that stay in school and go on to university will eventually discover that the precious fluid summoned from beneath the earth by a few children cranking on a lever was created billions of years ago, deep in the heart of a star, via processes of unimaginable subtlety. Those that have learned to worship God will no doubt marvel and give thanks.

Water exists because the universe has a set of laws that guide its steady development from the big bang into the present. If we suppose that water and the life it enables are of no consequence, then we can dismiss these laws as irrelevant. On the other hand, if we believe that God is the Creator of life and that life has a purpose, then these laws take on a new character. If God is the Creator, then these laws exist because God created them. And these laws work because God upholds them from moment to moment. Viewed by these lights, the origin of water and life are creation events, intentionally enabled by the Creator of the universe.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged A supernova explosion, E=MC2, quarks, the Big Bang, The Gathering Of The Waters, water and life | Leave a Comment »

Living On A Goldilocks Planet – Karl W. Giberson

April 17, 2012

A mere 20 light-years away in the constellation Libra, red dwarf star Gliese 581 has received much scrutiny by astronomers in recent years. Earthbound telescopes had detected the signatures of multiple planets orbiting the cool sun, two at least close to the system's habitable zone -- the region where an Earth-like planet can have liquid water on its surface. Now a team headed by Steven Vogt (UCO Lick), and Paul Butler (DTM Carnagie Inst.) has announced the detection of another planet, this one squarely in the system's habitable zone. Based on 11 years of data, their work offers a very compelling case for the first potentially habitable planet found around a very nearby star. Shown in this artist's illustration of the inner part of the exoplanetary system, the planet is designated Gliese 581g, but Vogt's more personal name is Zarmina's World, after his wife. The best fit to the data indicates the planet has a circular 37 day orbit, an orbital radius of only 0.15 AU, and a mass 3.1 times the Earth's. Modeling includes estimates of a planet radius of 1.5, and gravity at the planet's surface of 1.1 to 1.7 in Earth units. Finding a habitable planet so close by suggests there are many others in our Milky Way galaxy.

God is infinite, so His universe must be too. Thus is the excellence of God magnified and the greatness of His kingdom made manifest; He is glorified not in one, but in countless suns; not in a single earth, a single world, but in a thousand thousand, I say in an infinity of worlds.
Giordano Bruno, 1582

Giordano Bruno (1548 – February 17, 1600), (Latin: Iordanus Brunus Nolanus) was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. His cosmological theories went beyond the Copernican model in proposing that the Sun was essentially a star, and moreover, that the universe contained an infinite number of inhabited worlds populated by other intelligent beings.

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About twenty light years — 120 trillion miles — from earth, in the constellation Libra, a planet named Gliese 581g orbits a star resembling our sun. It’s the fourth planet out from the star, which can only be seen from earth with a telescope. Not far from the middle of its solar system, comfortably situated in what astronomers call the “Goldilocks Zone,” the planet is not too hot and not too cold, but “just right,” like the porridge in the fairy tale. Its gravity is also not too strong and not too weak, so it could have a stable atmosphere like earth. And its star is not too bright and not too dim.

Gliese 581g orbits about its sun in the middle of what astronomers call the habitable zone. Five hundred other planets have been discovered to date outside our solar system, and this is the first one that might be habitable. It is also nearby — at least by astronomical standards — being located in our galactic neighborhood. A huge spaceship traveling over the lifetime of many generations of astronauts could conceivably get there, although the expense would be so great as to essentially render the project impossible.

Astronomers have waxed eloquent about Gliese 581g. One of the discovers called it “Zarmina’s World,” after his wife, convinced that such a “beautiful planet” deserves a more interesting name than Gliese 581g. A Penn State astronomer, enthused at the prospects of extraterrestrial life, says Zarmina’s World is the “first one I’m truly excited about.” After decades, of finding uninhabitable sterile orbs, this discovery has finally provided a license to think seriously — or at least scientifically — about the prospects that we are not alone in the universe.

The hypothetical citizens on Zarmina’s World have already been embraced by the Catholic Church as “children of God.” [This curious fact was left unfootnoted by Giberson and a Google Search didn’t reveal his source for the statement. Unless of course “official Vatican astronomers” double as the Magisterium…Ah well, makes for good reading by the uneducated secularists in our midst.]An official Vatican astronomer, Jesuit priest Jose Gabriel Funes, finds nothing surprising in the prospects of extraterrestrial life: “Just as there is a multiplicity of creatures on Earth, so there could be other beings created God.” Another Vatican astronomer-priest assures us that the Zarminians would have souls, and says he would be happy to baptize them, they asked.

Theologically conservative Protestant Ken Ham, head of the creationist organization Answers in Genesis, disagrees. He claims that Vatican astronomers’ offers to baptize the Zarminians shows that they “can’t truly understand the gospel.,, “The Bible,” says Ham, “makes clear that Adam’s sin affected the whole universe. This means that a aliens would also be affected by Adam’s sin, but they can’t have salvation…. [T]o suggest that aliens could respond to the gospel is just totally wrong.”

All this fussing and fretting about aliens might lead one to believe that some sort of signal had been received — an unmistakably intelligent message like what Jodie Foster’s character, astronomer Ellie Artoway, deciphered in the move Contact. The great distance to the planet rules out the possibility of actual alien Zarminians being among us, but a mere twenty light years is no barrier to radio transmission. If the Zarminians started twenty years ago broadcasting messages to earth, or even generically in all directions, we would be receiving them by now. Radio waves have, in fact, been emanating from earth in all directions for almost a century and could be detected by any extraterrestrial civilization with the appropriate technology. But we are receiving no radio messages from 581g or any other planet in the universe. So why all the excitement about the Zarminians?

Hope Springs Eternal
Our Moon exists for us on the earth, not for the other globes. Those four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us…. From this line of reason we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited.
Johannes Kepler

Zarmina’s World, as near as we can tell, is not like the earth. Astronomers have not “beamed down” on a planet with breathable air, familiar gravity and comfortable temperatures, as Captain Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise were constantly doing on Star Trek. We now know that the vast majority of planets are nothing like those convenient Hollywood fantasies.

Zarmina’s World is three times the mass of the earth but only slightly larger, so gravity would be much stronger there, due to the greatly increased density. Upon being beamed onto that surface Captain Kirk would find himself weighing over 500 pounds, posing challenges for his trademark brawls with the local aliens. In fact, he would have trouble even standing upright, seriously compromising the charismatic persona that always seemed so appealing to the local alien females.

Zarmina’s World is much closer to its star than our earth is to the sun-14 million miles compared to 93 million for the earth. Its “year” is just 37 days long. It rotates so slowly that one side almost always faces the sun, creating temperatures as hot as 160 degrees — beyond even the most dreadful spots on the surface of the earth. The dark side is like the Canadian winters I enjoyed as a boy: -25°F (that’s below zero!). In the literal twilight zone between the unbearable heat and the Canadian cold would be some pleasant temperatures, where creatures like us could certainly make ourselves at home. Zarminians, if they exist, would have to move every so often as the planet slowly turned, to remain in the temperate zone where water could easily be maintained in liquid form.

The hopeful, even confident, speculations that there might be life on Zarmina’s World reveal just how eager astronomers — and many other members of our species — are to discover that we are not the only life in this big universe. Vogt, co-discoverer of the planet, and the earthling Zarmina’s husband — Mr. Zarmina — believes that “chances for life on this planet are 100 percent.” Vogt’s speculation, alas, is one part science and ninety-nine parts wishful thinking: Zarmina’s World has some surface area between 32°F and 212°F (0°-100° C). So, in the event that water exists in those regions — which we don’t know — it would be liquid. And water is essential for life. Therefore, there could be life on Zarmina’s World — which is more than you can say for the hundreds of other planets that have been discovered outside our solar system.

We don’t know if Zarmina’s World actually has any water, but the chances are reasonable based on what we know about water in the universe in general. Whether that water has contributed to the formation of life is an entirely different question. What these speculations about life in Zarminian waters remind us is how critically important and unusual our water supply is here on the earth — a cosmic quirk that we take for granted. There is an inextricable link between liquid water and life, both here on the earth and anywhere else in the universe we hope life might exist.

Water, Water, Everywhere — Or Not
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar; And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door. Its fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm — Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.
Robert Service, The Cremation Of Sam Mcgee

Almost three-fourths of the surface of the earth is covered with water, and virtually all of the world’s cities are on a body of water. Most people live near rivers, lakes and oceans. And water even makes up 60 percent of the human body, a fact readily apparent when one is sweating in the hot sun or desperately thirsty.

Water, in many parts of the world, seems almost magically available. It pours from our taps on demand, falls from the sky, bubbles up in springs, cascades down the sides of mountains and over cliffs. We swim in it, bathe in it, run it through hoses to water our lawns or entertain our children. We make ice from it to put in our drinks. We skate on it. Even beavers use it freely and recklessly, creating gigantic ponds in which to raise their families. In those many parts of the world blessed with an abundance of water, we take it for granted.

In the larger universe, however, water is rare. In some ways the universe seems so inhospitable to liquid water that one might infer that water is not welcome.

For starters, the temperatures don’t cooperate. All but an insignificant fraction of the volume of space is essentially empty. The volume taken up by stars, planets, moons, comets and other bodies where water might possibly be found is quite insignificant. And all this empty space is cold — really cold.

Growing up in Canada I learned a lot about cold. In the midst of winter, during my teen years, I arose before dawn to deliver my village’s only daily newspaper, the Telegraph Journal. The thermometer outside our kitchen window was a stark and skinny messenger framed against the darkness, feebly illuminated by light from inside the house. The mercury on many mornings all but vanished into the little ball at the bottom of the thermometer, with temperatures reading -40°F (Canada had not yet gone metric). The weather report on the radio would warn that additional chilling from the wind had reduced that temperature even further, sometimes to more than -60°F. Dressed warmly by my thoroughly Canadian mother and with one of her hand-knit woolen scarves about my mouth, I would head out into the pitch-black frigid morning to deliver the news to the good citizens of the little village of Bath, New Brunswick. I would return an hour later, an icicle several inches long hanging from the scarf in front of my mouth, where my breath had condensed and frozen in the cold air.

A decade later I found myself studying at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where thermometers had no need for negative numbers. I arrived in the middle of August and was greeted by temperatures that routinely exceeded 100 degrees, a dreadful situation made even worse by high humidity and requiring the continuous use of air conditioners. In between the extremes of New Brunswick and Texas lie the narrow temperatures that humans enjoy — 85 degrees at the beach, 72 in our offices, 65 on a pleasant evening as we turn in for the night.

The temperature ranges experienced by humans seem extreme but that is simply our limited and parochial view. Those cold temperatures that greeted me as I headed out on frosty Canadian mornings are positively balmy compared to the average temperature of the universe, which is more than 400 degrees cooler. If you took a space voyage to another star system, the temperature outside your window for most of the long journey would be -454°F. A cold Canadian winter would be a welcome relief from such unimaginable cold. On the other hand, the temperature on the stars runs as high as 70,000 degrees, an inferno capable of melting just about anything. You would be incinerated just by getting too close, never mind actually making physical contact.

‘The temperature range where humans feel comfortable is thus extremely narrow compared to the universe as a whole. And even the larger range where humans can exist the habitable zone — is very narrow.

Water seems even more remarkable when we note that only 5 percent of the total matter in the universe is the ordinary familiar stuff made up of atoms and molecules. The other 95 percent consists of largely unknown stuff called, for lack of better terms, dark matter and dark energy. All the elements on the chemists’ periodic table, all the vast collection of atoms and molecules that comprise the earth, the sun and the other planets, all the stars in the Milky Way galaxy — all this matter is less than 5 percent of the total stuff in the universe. And this small percentage is itself composed almost entirely of hydrogen, with water making up but a small fraction. Water thus comprises much less than 1 percent of the universe. Given that water accounts for two-thirds of the matter in our bodies, we can see that we are most unusual from a purely chemical point of view, not to mention our more remarkable characteristics.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged Gliese 581g, the "Goldilocks Zone", water, Zarmina's World | Leave a Comment »

Learning To See The Universe – Karl Giberson

April 11, 2012

''Galileo Galilei showing the Doge of Venice how to use the telescope'' by Giuseppe Bertini 1858

We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of ‘even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.
Albert Einstein

***************************************

The Dutchman Hans Lippershey invented the telescope in 1608. He owed his “aha” moment, at least according to legend, to children playing with lenses in his shop, where he made spectacles. The children were playing with pieces of the glass that Lippershey so painstakingly and precisely ground into lenses for his visually impaired customers. The children noticed that a weather vane on a nearby church looked larger when viewed through a pair of lenses. Intrigued by the children’s discovery, Lippershey installed lenses in a tube and invented what he called a “looker.” Shortly after, he applied for a patent for his looker.

The patent office turned down his application on the grounds that the device was so simple that its workings could hardly remain secret. They were right. After all, it had been discovered by children. A year later, the great Italian scientist Galileo Galilei heard a vague description of the device and built his own looker. His first feeble attempt magnified objects by a mere factor of three. With some effort he improved the performance until the magnification was around nine times, and got rich in the process.

On August 21, 1609, Galileo showed off his supposedly original invention to Venetian political leaders, including the chief magistrate — called the “Doge” — Leonardo Donato. The demonstration took place in the bell tower of Saint Mark’s cathedral, from which one could look in any direction. Galileo’s impressive performance got him named professor to the University of Padua for which he accepted a generous one thousand florin pension a year. (Wikimedia Commons)

In late August 1609 Galileo, then a professor at the University of Padua in the Venetian Republic, led some senators up a tower in Venice so they could look out to sea with his new spyglass. The senators assumed he had invented the remarkable device and were suitably impressed. Galileo’s `optical tube,” as they called it, enabled them to “discover at a much greater distance than usual the hulls and sails of the enemy, so that for two hours or more we can detect him before he detects us.” As the “inventor” of the amazing instrument, Galileo got a big raise and tenure.

Personal gain, although of interest to Galileo, was not his primary interest in the telescope. He wanted a closer look at the heavens in the hopes of seeing something there that would prove that the earth was going around the sun and not vice versa. Galileo was convinced that evidence must be there, somewhere, to establish the motion of the earth, as the great Polish thinker, Nicolaus Copernicus, had proposed in his book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, published in 1543.

The new sun-centered model of the solar system had captured the imagination of some leading astronomers attracted to its simplicity. For decades, however, fans of the new model had been looking for some observational evidence that the earth was moving. But none had been discovered, which was puzzling. It seemed incomprehensible that the earth could be hurtling through space at seventy thousand miles per hour without some evidence that it was doing so.

Galileo, like any first-time user of a telescope, looked first at the moon. He was startled to find it “rough and uneven” with “huge prominences, deep valleys and chasms.” This ran counter to the prevailing view that bodies in the heavens were all perfectly spherical and composed of some perfect ethereal material not present on earth. The moon, Galileo would report, contradicting a two-thousand-year-old tradition going back to Aristotle, was clearly not “robed in a smooth and polished surface.” It looked much like the earth, in fact, undermining the standard view that the heavens were profoundly different than the earth, which was located at the center of the universe.

Galileo’s innocent observation was quite radical in the first decade of the seventeenth century. The prevailing astronomical tradition had long taught that the heavens were perfect and unchanging, in contrast to the earth, which seemed in constant upheaval. This claim derived from the simple observation that change was almost never observed in the heavens. Christian theology, inspired by this pagan Greek idea, had interpreted the consistency of the night sky in terms of sin and the fall.

Adam’s sin had corrupted the earth but not the heavens, so the heavens — including the pattern of stars — were still in the same perfect state that God had originally created. Hell, being at the center of the earth, was also in the center of the universe, the worst spot in God’s creation, of course, and as far away from the heavens as one could get. As one moved outward from the God-forsaken chaos at the center, things improved. The orbit of the moon was the boundary between the earthly and heavenly realm. The moon was in the heavens, beyond the sinister reach of the curse God had inaugurated in response to Adam’s sin. And yet it was not perfectly spherical. Why did it look so much like the earth if it was a heavenly body?

Early in January 1610, four wandering “stars” entered the field of view of Galileo’s telescope, each of them always close to Jupiter. Galileo grew excited as he came to realize these wandering stars were moons orbiting Jupiter, proving that not everything revolved around the earth. This undermined the notion that the earth was somehow the central — although most corrupted — point of the creation. Europe’s other great astronomer, Johannes Kepler, was thrilled with the discovery and went so far as to say, “Our Moon exists for us on the Earth, not for the other globes. Those four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us…. From this line of reason we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited.”

Galileo also found a way to look at the sun and located odd dark spots on it that came and went. Like the moon, the sun had a distinctly non-heavenly complexion. None of these discoveries provided the whiz-bang proof that the earth was in motion, but they certainly undermined other prevailing views. His more traditional contemporaries, however, were skeptical. Telescopes were rare, so most people couldn’t check for themselves. And those who had telescopes found them so hard to operate that they couldn’t always see what Galileo claimed he saw. Gradually, though, skepticism gave way to grudging respect as Galileo’s discoveries — which he lorded over his peers as evidence of his superior intellect — were confirmed by others.

Galileo’s star rose steadily in the firmament of Italian science as his discoveries became widely known. In less than two decades, however, his rising star would sputter and plummet back to earth in his celebrated confrontation with the Roman Catholic Church.

In the last days of 1612 Galileo recorded in his notebook a “fixed star” that he observed near Jupiter. (The star was much farther away, of course, but it was next to Jupiter visually, like the moons.) Five days later he noted another new star near Jupiter. On January 28, 1613, he again noted two stars near Jupiter. The first one was just another star, now noted in star catalogs with the exciting name SAO 119234. The second one would prove more interesting, although it would take 250 years to realize just how interesting when it turned out to be the planet now named Neptune.

Wobbles
I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
GALILEO

In 1633 an elderly Galileo found himself kneeling before the Inquisition and recanting his long-held belief that the earth moves about the sun. Despite his best intentions — and many promises to his colleagues and critics — his telescope had failed to turn up compelling evidence for the radical idea that the earth moves.

Contrary to widespread perception that the church was closed-minded and resistant to scientific ideas, the truth is that Galileo simply did not have any solid observational evidence. And based on both common sense and the best scientific understanding of the day, a moving earth should produce some noticeable effects. Many of Galileo’s contemporaries — themselves astronomers and mathematicians — considered Copernicus’s idea of a moving earth to be ridiculous for reasons that had nothing to do with the Bible or theology. And many of them agreed with Galileo about the motion of the earth, but believed the idea needed further development before it could be presented with any hope of being accepted. Galileo was fir from the only Copernican of his generation, but he was the only one campaigning to change everybody’s mind.

In 1597 Galileo received a copy of Johannes Kepler’s book The Cosmic Mystery, which argued in favor of the sun-centered universe. Kepler was in many ways Galileo’s Protestant counterpart and his only real peer in the pantheon of European astronomers. Galileo responded cordially to this first overture from Kepler, expressing his appreciation for a new “associate in the study of Truth who is a friend of Truth.”

He went on to explain how he had been arguing quietly in favor of Copernicus for years and had “written many arguments in support of him and in refutation of the opposite view.” But he feared ridicule and had not “dared to bring into the public light, frightened by the fate of Copernicus himself, our teacher who, though he acquired immortal fame with some, is yet to remain to an infinite number of others (for such is the number of fools) an object of ridicule and derision.” The word fools, unfortunately, was often on Galileo’s lips as he enthusiastically ridiculed those who disagreed with him.

Galileo’s advocacy for Copernicanism grew with each passing year, despite his consistent failure to find the evidence he promised. He became bolder and more aggressive. His fame spread across the continent and he grew steadily richer, with increasingly more lucrative academic postings and endless sales of telescopes. Gifted at debate and self-promotion, he steadily climbed the Italian social ladder, to the envy i1′ his colleagues. He made enemies and backed many of his into corners from where they could do nothing but seethe and look for an opportunity to get even.

Some more cool-headed Jesuit astronomers were quietly teaching Copernican astronomy in Catholic universities, and, had Galileo not turned the motion of the earth into a political controversy, their diplomatic approach would have probably carried the day and avoided what became a great humiliation to the church. As it was, they were quite frustrated that Galileo’s bombastic personal style got Copernicanism declared heretical and his book listed on an Index of Prohibited Books that good Catholics were not supposed to read.

The motion of the earth that we accept without a second thought today was troubling and without much support — scientific or otherwise — in the seventeenth century. It flew solidly in the face of a two thousand-year tradition; there wasn’t a single piece of observational data establishing it as true; it removed the earth from the center, where Christian theology thought it belonged, albeit in abject humiliation. Nevertheless, despite all these challenges, many Christians were slowly coming around to the new astronomy, and had Galileo been more diplomatic there would not have been any need for his great and celebrated confrontation between science and religion.

After recanting his heresies in 1633, Galileo spent the rest of his life in a comfortable apartment in Florence, under house arrest and forbidden to explore any longer the idea that the earth goes around the sun. He died in 1642.

Galileo’s celebrated trial before the Inquisition has acquired a mythical status in our secular culture. Paintings such as Galileo Facing the Roman Inquisition by Cristiano Banti (1857), plays like Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo (1940), and even public television’s documentary Galileo’s Battle for the Heavens (2002) have portrayed Galileo as a great hero standing up to a backward and superstitious church. Urban legends report that Galileo was imprisoned and tortured, neither of which is true. Scholars who have examined the Galileo case argue that these portrayals are oversimplified. He was not tortured; the closest he came to imprisonment was house arrest in a luxury apartment; and there is ample evidence that the Italian political scene, over against the church, played a major role in his condemnation. (Cristiano Banti/Wikimedia Commons).

The physicist Steven Barr continues on in a post dating from 2010. The secular scientists have long since rewritten this history and it’s fun to see them get a little comeuppance. To think that PBS was still circulating this crap in 2002 is laughable…

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged Galileo, Galileo and the Church, Telescopes | Leave a Comment »

Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred II By Marilynne Robinson

March 13, 2012

Marilynne Robinson was raised as a Presbyterian and later became a Congregationalist, worshipping and sometimes preaching at the Congregational United Church of Christ in Iowa City. Her Congregationalism, and her interest in the ideas of John Calvin, have been important in her works, including Gilead which centers on the life and theological concerns of a fictional Congregationalist minister.

We are much afflicted now by tedious, fruitless controversy. Very often, perhaps typically, the most important aspect of a controversy is not the area of disagreement but the hardening of agreement, the tacit granting on all sides of assumptions that ought not to be granted on any side. The treatment of the physical as a distinct category antithetical to the spiritual is one example. There is a deeply rooted notion that the material exists in opposition to the spiritual, precludes or repels or trumps the sacred as an idea. This dichotomy goes back at least to the dualism of the Manichees, who believed the physical world was the creation of an evil god in perpetual conflict with a good god, and to related teachings within Christianity that encouraged mortification of the flesh, renunciation of the world, and so on.

For almost as long as there has been science in the West, there has been a significant strain in scientific thought which assumed that the physical and material preclude the spiritual. The assumption persists among us still, vigorous as ever, that if a thing can be “explained,” associated with a physical process, it has been excluded from the category of the spiritual. But the “physical” in this sense is only a disappearingly thin slice of being, selected, for our purposes, out of the totality of being by the fact that we perceive it as solid, substantial.

We all know that if we were the size of atoms, chairs and tables would appear to us as loose clouds of energy. It seems to me very amazing that the arbitrarily selected “physical” world we inhabit is coherent and lawful. An older vocabulary would offer the word “miraculous.” Knowing what we know now, an earlier generation might see divine providence in the fact of a world coherent enough to be experienced by us as complete in itself, and as a basis upon which all claims to reality can be tested. A truly theological age would see in this divine providence intent on making a human habitation within the wild roar of the cosmos.

But almost everyone, for generations now, has insisted on a sharp distinction between the physical and the spiritual. So we have had theologies that really proposed a “God of the gaps,” as if God were not manifest in the creation, as the Bible is so inclined to insist, but instead survives in those dark places, those black boxes, where the light of science has not yet shone. And we have atheisms and agnosticisms that make precisely the same argument, only assuming that at some time the light of science will indeed dispel the last shadow in which the holy might have been thought to linger.

Religious experience is said to be associated with activity in a particular part of the brain. For some reason this is supposed to imply that it is delusional. But all thought and experience can be located in some part of the brain, that brain more replete than the starry heaven God showed to Abraham, and we are not in the habit of assuming that it is all delusional on these grounds. Nothing could justify this reasoning, which many religious people take as seriously as any atheist could do, except the idea that the physical and the spiritual cannot abide together, that they cannot be one dispensation.

We live in a time when many religious people feel fiercely threatened by science. O ye of little faith. Let them subscribe to Scientific American for a year and then tell me if their sense of the grandeur of God is not greatly enlarged by what they have learned from it. Of course many of the articles reflect the assumption at the root of many problems, that an account, however tentative, of some structure of the cosmos or some transaction of the nervous system successfully claims that part of reality for secularism. Those who encourage a fear of science are actually saying the same thing. If the old, untenable dualism is put aside, we are instructed in the endless brilliance of creation. Surely to do this is a privilege of modern life for which we should all be grateful.

For years I have been interested in ancient literature and religion. If they are not one and the same, certainly neither is imaginable without the other. Indeed, literature and religion seem to have come into being together, if by literature I can be understood to include pre-literature, narrative whose purpose is to put human life, causality, and meaning in relation, to make each of them in some degree intelligible in terms of the other two.

I was taught, more or less, that we moderns had discovered other religions with narratives resembling our own, and that this discovery had brought all religion down to the level of anthropology. Sky gods and earth gods presiding over survival and procreation. Humankind pushing a lever in the hope of a periodic reward in the form of rain or victory in the next tribal skirmish. From a very simple understanding of what religion has been, we can extrapolate to what religion is now and is intrinsically, so the theory goes. This pattern, of proceeding from presumed simplicity to a degree of elaboration that never loses the primary character of simplicity, is strongly recurrent in modern thought.

I think much religious thought has also been intimidated by this supposed discovery, which is odd, since it certainly was not news to Paul, or Augustine, or Thomas Aquinas, or Calvin. All of them quote the pagans with admiration. Perhaps only in Europe was one form of religion ever so dominant that the fact of other forms could constitute any sort of problem. There has been an influential modern tendency to make a sort of slurry of religious narratives, asserting the discovery of universals that don’t actually exist among them. Mircea Eliade is a prominent example. And there is Joseph Campbell. My primary criticism of this kind of scholarship is that it does not bear scrutiny.

A secondary criticism I would offer is that it erases all evidence that religion has, anywhere and in any form, expressed or stimulated thought. In any case, the anthropological bias among these writers, which may make it seem free of all parochialism, is in fact absolutely Western, since it regards all religion as human beings acting out their nature and no more than that, though I admit there is a gauziness about this worldview to which I will not attempt to do justice here.

This is the anthropologists’ answer to the question, why are people almost always, almost everywhere, religious. Another answer, favored by those who claim to be defenders of science, is that religion formed around the desire to explain what pre-scientific humankind could not account for. Again, this notion does not bear scrutiny. The literatures of antiquity are clearly about other business.

Some of these narratives are so ancient that they clearly existed before writing, though no doubt in the forms we have them they were modified in being written down. Their importance in the development of human culture cannot be overstated. In antiquity people lived in complex city-states, carried out the work and planning required by primitive agriculture, built ships and navigated at great distances, traded, made law, waged war, and kept the records of their dynasties. But the one thing that seems to have predominated, to have laid out their cities and filled them with temples and monuments, to have established their identities and their cultural boundaries, to have governed their calendars and enthroned their kings, were the vivid, atemporal stories they told themselves about the gods, the gods in relation to humankind, to their city, to themselves.

I suppose it was in the 18th century of our era that the notion became solidly fixed in the Western mind that all this narrative was an attempt at explaining what science would one day explain truly and finally. Phoebus drives his chariot across the sky, and so the sun rises and sets. Marduk slays the sea monster Tiamat, who weeps, whence the Tigris and the Euphrates. It is true that in some cases physical reality is accounted for, or at least described, in the terms of these myths.

But the beauty of the myths is not accounted for by this theory, nor is the fact that, in literary forms, they had a hold on the imaginations of the populations that embraced them which expressed itself again as beauty. Over time these narratives had at least as profound an effect on architecture and the visual arts as they did on literature. Anecdotes from them were painted and sculpted everywhere, even on household goods, vases, and drinking cups.

This kind of imaginative engagement bears no resemblance whatever to an assimilation of explanatory models by these civilizations. Perhaps the tendency to think of classical religion as an effort at explaining a world otherwise incomprehensible to them encourages us to forget how sophisticated ancient people really were. They were inevitably as immersed in the realm of the practical as we are. It is strangely easy to forget that they were capable of complex engineering, though so many of their monuments still stand. The Babylonians used quadratic equations.

Yet in many instances ancient people seem to have obscured highly available real-world accounts of things. A sculptor would take an oath that the gods had made an idol, after he himself had made it. The gods were credited with walls and ziggurats, when cities themselves built them. Structures of enormous shaped stones went up in broad daylight in ancient cities, the walls built around the Temple by Herod in Roman-occupied Jerusalem being one example. The ancients knew, though we don’t know, how this was done, obviously. But they left no account of it. This very remarkable evasion of the law of gravity was seemingly not of great interest to them. It was the gods themselves who walled in Troy.

In Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the poet in effect interprets the ancient Greek epic tradition by attempting to renew it in the Latin language and for Roman purposes, there is one especially famous moment. The hero, Aeneas, a Trojan who has escaped the destruction of his city, sees a painting in Carthage of the war at Troy and is deeply moved by it and by what it evokes, the lacrimae rerum, the tears in things. This moment certainly refers to the place in classical civilization of art that pondered and interpreted the Homeric narratives, which were the basis of Greek and Roman religion. My point here is simply that pagan myth, which the Bible in various ways acknowledges as analogous to biblical narrative despite grave defects, is not a naïve attempt at science.

It is true that almost a millennium separated Homer and Virgil. It is also true that through those centuries the classical civilizations had explored and interpreted their myths continuously. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides would surely have agreed with Virgil’s Aeneas that the epics and the stories that surround them and flow from them are indeed about lacrimae rerum, about a great sadness that pervades human life. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh is about the inevitability of death and loss. This is not the kind of language, nor is it the kind of preoccupation, one would find in a tradition of narrative that had any significant interest in explaining how the leopard got his spots.

The notion that religion is intrinsically a crude explanatory strategy that should be dispelled and supplanted by science is based on a highly selective or tendentious reading of the literatures of religion. In some cases it is certainly fair to conclude that it is based on no reading of them at all. Be that as it may, the effect of this idea, which is very broadly assumed to be true, is again to reinforce the notion that science and religion are struggling for possession of a single piece of turf, and science holds the high ground and gets to choose the weapons.

In fact there is no moment in which, no perspective from which, science as science can regard human life and say that there is a beautiful, terrible mystery in it all, a great pathos. Art, music, and religion tell us that. And what they tell us is true, not after the fashion of a magisterium that is legitimate only so long as it does not overlap the autonomous republic of science. It is true because it takes account of the universal variable, human nature, which shapes everything it touches, science as surely and profoundly as anything else. And it is true in the tentative, suggestive, ambivalent, self-contradictory style of the testimony of a hundred thousand witnesses, who might, taken all together, agree on no more than the shared sense that something of great moment has happened, is happening, will happen, here and among us.

I hasten to add that science is a great contributor to what is beautiful and also terrible in human existence. For example, I am deeply grateful to have lived in the era of cosmic exploration. I am thrilled by those photographs of deep space, as many of us are. Still, if it is true, as they are saying now, that bacteria return from space a great deal more virulent than they were when they entered it, it is not difficult to imagine that some regrettable consequence might follow our sending people to tinker around up there. One article noted that a human being is full of bacteria, and there is nothing to be done about it.

Science might note with great care and precision how a new pathology emerged through this wholly unforeseen impact of space on our biosphere, but it could not, scientifically, absorb the fact of it and the origin of it into any larger frame of meaning. Scientists might mention the law of unintended consequences — mention it softly, because that would sound a little flippant in the circumstances. But religion would recognize in it what religion has always known, that there is a mystery in human nature and in human assertions of brilliance and intention, a recoil the Greeks would have called irony and attributed to some angry whim of the gods, to be interpreted as a rebuke of human pride if it could be interpreted at all.

Christian theology has spoken of human limitation, fallen-ness, an individually and collectively disastrous bias toward error. I think we all know that the earth might be reaching the end of its tolerance for our presumptions. We all know we might at any time feel the force of unintended consequences, many times compounded. Science has no language to account for the fact that it may well overwhelm itself, and more and more stand helpless before its own effects.

Of course science must not be judged by the claims certain of its proponents have made for it. It is not in fact a standard of reasonableness or truth or objectivity. It is human, and has always been one strategy among others in the more general project of human self-awareness and self-assertion. Our problem with ourselves, which is much larger and vastly older than science, has by no means gone into abeyance since we learned to make penicillin or to split the atom.

If antibiotics have been used without sufficient care and have pushed the evolution of bacteria beyond the reach of their own effectiveness, if nuclear fission has become a threat to us all in the insidious form of a disgruntled stranger with a suitcase, a rebuke to every illusion of safety we entertained under fine names like Strategic Defense Initiative, old Homer might say, “the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.” Shakespeare might say, “There is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”

The tendency of the schools of thought that have claimed to be most impressed by science has been to deny the legitimacy of the kind of statement it cannot make, the kind of exploration it cannot make. And yet science itself has been profoundly shaped by that larger bias toward irony, toward error, which has been the subject of religious thought since the emergence of the stories in Genesis that tell us we were given a lavishly beautiful world and are somehow, by our nature, complicit in its decline, its ruin. Science cannot think analogically, though this kind of thinking is very useful for making sense and meaning out of the tumult of human affairs.

We have given ourselves many lessons in the perils of being half right, yet I doubt we have learned a thing. Sophocles could tell us about this, or the book of Job. We all know about hubris. We know that pride goeth before a fall. The problem is that we don’t recognize pride or hubris in ourselves, any more than Oedipus did, any more than Job’s so-called comforters. It can be so innocuous-seeming a thing as confidence that one is right, is competent, is clear-sighted, or confidence that one is pious or pure in one’s motives.

As the disciples said, “Who then can be saved?” Jesus replied, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible,” in this case speaking of the salvation of the pious rich. It is his consistent teaching that the comfortable, the confident, the pious stand in special need of the intervention of grace. Perhaps this is true because they are most vulnerable to error — like the young rich man who makes the astonishing decision to turn his back on Jesus’ invitation to follow him, therefore on the salvation he sought — although there is another turn in the story, and we learn that Jesus will not condemn him. I suspect Jesus should be thought of as smiling at the irony of the young man’s self-defeat — from which, since he is Jesus, he is also ready to rescue him ultimately.

The Christian narrative tells us that we individually and we as a world turn our backs on what is true, essential, wholly to be desired. And it tells us that we can both know this about ourselves and forgive it in ourselves and one another, within the limits of our mortal capacities. To recognize our bias toward error should teach us modesty and reflection, and to forgive it should help us avoid the inhumanity of thinking we ourselves are not as fallible as those who, in any instance, seem most at fault. Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.

Posted in Marilynne Robinson, Science And Religion | Tagged God of the Gaps, lacrimae rerum, the physical vs the spiritual | Leave a Comment »

Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred I By Marilynne Robinson

March 12, 2012

Myoung Ho Li photographed diverse species of trees with a 4x5 camera in a variety of seasons and at different times of day. Mr. Lee allows the tree’s natural surroundings to fill the frame around the canvas, transforming the backdrop into an integral part of the subject. Centered in the graphic compositions, the canvas defines the form of the tree and separates it from the environment. By creating a partial, temporary outdoor studio for each tree, Mr. Lee’s “portraits” of trees play with ideas of scale and perception while referencing traditional painting and the history of photography.

Ms. Robinson contemplates religion, science, art, and the miraculous. Marilynne Robinson is a professor of creative writing at the University of Iowa. This essay is an excerpt from her book When I Was a Child I Read Books, in which it appears as “Freedom of Thought.” The book will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in March 2012.

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Over the years of writing and teaching, I have tried to free myself of constraints I felt, limits to the range of exploration I could make, to the kind of intuition I could credit. I realized gradually that my own religion, and religion in general, could and should disrupt these constraints, which amount to a small and narrow definition of what human beings are and how human life is to be understood. And I have often wished my students would find religious standards present in the culture that would express a real love for human life and encourage them also to break out of these same constraints.

For the educated among us, moldy theories we learned as sophomores, memorized for the test and never consciously thought of again, exert an authority that would embarrass us if we stopped to consider them. I was educated at a center of behaviorist psychology and spent a certain amount of time pestering rats. There was some sort of maze-learning experiment involved in my final grade, and since I remember the rat who was my colleague as uncooperative, or perhaps merely incompetent at being a rat, or tired of the whole thing, I don’t remember how I passed. I’m sure coercion was not involved, since this rodent and I avoided contact. Bribery was, of course, central to the experiment and no black mark against either of us, though I must say, mine was an Eliot Ness among rats for its resistance to the lure of, say, Cheerios.

I should probably have tried raising the stakes. The idea was, in any case, that behavior was conditioned by reward or its absence, and that one could extrapolate meaningfully from the straightforward demonstration of rattish self-interest promised in the literature, to the admittedly more complex question of human motivation. I have read subsequently that a female rat is so gratified at having an infant rat come down the reward chute that she will do whatever is demanded of her until she has filled her cage with them. This seems to me to complicate the definition of self-interest considerably, but complexity was not a concern of the behaviorism of my youth, which was reductionist in every sense of the word.

It wasn’t all behaviorism. We also pondered Freud’s argument that primordial persons, male, internalized the father as superego by actually eating the poor fellow. Since then we have all felt bad — well, the male among us, at least. Whence human complexity, whence civilization. I did better on that exam. The plot was catchy.

The situation of the undergraduate rarely encourages systematic doubt. What Freud thought was important because it was Freud who thought it, and so with B.F. Skinner and whomever else the curriculum held up for our admiration. There must be something to all this, even if it has only opened the door a degree or two on a fuller understanding. So I thought at the time. And I also thought it was a very bleak light that shone through that door, and I shouldered my share of the supposedly inevitable gloom that came with being a modern.

In English class we studied a poem by Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird:”

THERE is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.

The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

The poem asks “what to make of a diminished thing.” That diminished thing, said the teacher, was human experience in the modern world. Oh dear. Modern Aesthetics. We must learn from this poem “in singing not to sing.” To my undergraduate self I thought, “But what if I like to sing?”

And then my philosophy professor assigned us Jonathan Edwards’s Doctrine of Original Sin Defended, in which Edwards argues for “the arbitrary constitution of the universe,” illustrating his point with a gorgeous footnote about moonlight that even then began to dispel the dreary determinisms I was learning elsewhere. Improbable as that may sound to those who have not read the footnote.

At a certain point I decided that everything I took from studying and reading anthropology, psychology, economics, cultural history, and so on did not square at all with my sense of things, and that the tendency of much of it was to posit or assume a human simplicity within a simple reality and to marginalize the sense of the sacred, the beautiful, everything in any way lofty.

I do not mean to suggest, and I underline this, that there was any sort of plot against religion, since religion in many instances abetted these tendencies and does still, not least by retreating from the cultivation and celebration of learning and of beauty, by dumbing down, as if people were less than God made them and in need of nothing so much as condescension. Who among us wishes the songs we sing, the sermons we hear, were just a little dumber? People today — television — video games — diminished things. This is always the pretext.

Simultaneously, and in a time of supposed religious revival, and among those especially inclined to feel religiously revived, we have a society increasingly defined by economics, and an economics increasingly reminiscent of my experience with that rat, so-called rational-choice economics, which assumes that we will all find the shortest way to the reward, and that this is basically what we should ask of ourselves and — this is at the center of it all — of one another.

After all these years of rational choice, brother rat might like to take a look at the packaging just to see if there might be a little melamine in the inducements he was being offered, hoping, of course, that the vendor considered it rational to provide that kind of information. We do not deal with one another as soul to soul, and the churches are as answerable for this as anyone.

If we think we have done this voiding of content for the sake of other people, those to whom we suspect God may have given a somewhat lesser brilliance than our own, we are presumptuous and also irreverent. William Tyndale, who was burned at the stake for his translation of the Bible, who provided much of the most beautiful language in what is called by us the King James Bible, wrote, he said, in the language a plowboy could understand. He wrote to the comprehension of the profoundly poor, those who would be, and would have lived among, the utterly unlettered. And he created one of the undoubted masterpieces of the English language. Now we seem to feel beauty is an affectation of some sort. And this notion is as influential in the churches as it is anywhere. The Bible, Christianity, should have inoculated us against this kind of disrespect for ourselves and one another. Clearly it has not.

For me, at least, writing consists very largely of exploring intuition. A character is really the sense of a character, embodied, attired, and given voice as he or she seems to require. Where does this creature come from? From watching, I suppose. From reading emotional significance in gestures and inflections, as we all do all the time. These moments of intuitive recognition float free from their particular occasions and recombine themselves into nonexistent people the writer and, if all goes well, the reader feel they know.

There is a great difference, in fiction and in life, between knowing someone and knowing about someone. When a writer knows about his character, he is writing for plot. When he knows his character, he is writing to explore, to feel reality on a set of nerves somehow not quite his own. Words like “sympathy,” “empathy,” and “compassion” are overworked and overcharged — there is no word for the experience of seeing an embrace at a subway stop or hearing an argument at the next table in a restaurant. Every such instant has its own emotional coloration, which memory retains or heightens, and so the most sidelong, unintended moment becomes a part of what we have seen of the world. Then, I suppose, these moments, as they have seemed to us, constellate themselves into something a little like a spirit, a little like a human presence in its mystery and distinctiveness.

Two questions I can’t really answer about fiction are (1) where it comes from, and (2) why we need it. But that we do create it and also crave it is beyond dispute. There is a tendency, considered highly rational, to reason from a narrow set of interests, say survival and procreation, which are supposed to govern our lives, and then to treat everything that does not fit this model as anomalous clutter, extraneous to what we are and probably best done without. But all we really know about what we are is what we do. There is a tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind, and to try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell.

The advice I give my students is the same advice I give myself — forget definition, forget assumption, watch. We inhabit, we are part of, a reality for which explanation is much too poor and small. No physicist would dispute this, though he or she might be less ready than I am to have recourse to the old language and call reality miraculous. By my lights, fiction that does not acknowledge this at least tacitly is not true. Why is it possible to speak of fiction as true or false? I have no idea. But if a time comes when I seem not to be making the distinction with some degree of reliability in my own work, I hope someone will be kind enough to let me know.

When I write fiction, I suppose my attempt is to simulate the integrative work of a mind perceiving and reflecting, drawing upon culture, memory, conscience, belief or assumption, circumstance, fear, and desire — a mind shaping the moment of experience and response and then reshaping them both as narrative, holding one thought against another for the effect of affinity or contrast, evaluating and rationalizing, feeling compassion, taking offense. These things do happen simultaneously, after all. None of them is active by itself, and none of them is determinative, because there is that mysterious thing the cognitive scientists call self-awareness, the human ability to consider and appraise one’s own thoughts. I suspect this self-awareness is what people used to call the soul.

Modern discourse is not really comfortable with the word “soul,” and in my opinion the loss of the word has been disabling, not only to religion but to literature and political thought and to every humane pursuit. In contemporary religious circles, souls, if they are mentioned at all, tend to be spoken of as saved or lost, having answered some set of divine expectations or failed to answer them, having arrived at some crucial realization or failed to arrive at it. So the soul, the masterpiece of creation, is more or less reduced to a token signifying cosmic acceptance or rejection, having little or nothing to do with that miraculous thing, the felt experience of life, except insofar as life offers distractions or temptations.

Having read recently that there are more neurons in the human brain than there are stars in the Milky Way, and having read any number of times that the human brain is the most complex object known to exist in the universe, and that the mind is not identical with the brain but is more mysterious still, it seems to me this astonishing nexus of the self, so uniquely elegant and capable, merits a name that would indicate a difference in kind from the ontological run of things, and for my purposes “soul” would do nicely.

Perhaps I should pause here to clarify my meaning, since there are those who feel that the spiritual is diminished or denied when it is associated with the physical. I am not among them. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul says, “Ever since the creation of the world [God's] invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” If we are to consider the heavens, how much more are we to consider the magnificent energies of consciousness that make whomever we pass on the street a far grander marvel than our galaxy? At this point of dynamic convergence, call it self or call it soul, questions of right and wrong are weighed, love is felt, guilt and loss are suffered. And, over time, formation occurs, for weal or woe, governed in large part by that unaccountable capacity for self-awareness.

The locus of the human mystery is perception of this world. From it proceeds every thought, every art. I like Calvin’s metaphor — nature is a shining garment in which God is revealed and concealed. As we perceive we interpret, and we make hypotheses. Something is happening, it has a certain character or meaning which we usually feel we understand at least tentatively, though experience is almost always available to reinterpretations based on subsequent experience or reflection. Here occurs the weighing of moral and ethical choice. Behavior proceeds from all this, and is interesting, to my mind, in the degree that it can be understood to proceed from it.

Posted in Marilynne Robinson, Science And Religion | Tagged religion, Robert Frost, The Oven Bird, the sense of the sacred, William Tyndale | Leave a Comment »

Protected: From Mythopoetic Thinking And The Truth Of Christianity Part III — Keith Lemna

June 30, 2011

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Protected: From Mythopoetic Thinking And The Truth Of Christianity Part II — Keith Lemna

June 29, 2011

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Protected: Mythopoetic Thinking And The Truth Of Christianity Part I — Keith Lemna

June 28, 2011

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Reading Selections from The God of the Mathematicians by David P. Goldman

May 13, 2011

Gödel and Einstein, 1954

Some of the religious beliefs that guided Kurt Gödel’s revolutionary ideas.

David P. Goldman is a senior editor at First Things. The following are reading selections from a piece that appeared last August

The Human Mind Cannot Be Reduced To A Machine
Kurt Gödel was a believer — or, at least, a knower — whose engagement with God included a reworking of the ontological proof of God’s existence. Born in 1906, Gödel was arguably the great mathematician of his time. Certainly no twentieth-century thinker did more to show that the human mind cannot be reduced to a machine. At twenty-five he ruined the positivist hope of making mathematics into a self-contained formal system with his incompleteness theorems, implying, as he noted, that machines never will be able to think, and computer algorithms never will replace intuition. To Gödel this implies that we cannot give a credible account of reality without God. But Gödel’s God is not the well-behaved deity of the old natural theology, or the happy harmonizer of the intelligent-design subculture. Gödel’s God hides his countenance and can be glimpsed only in paradox and intuition. God is not an abstraction but “can act as a person,” as Gödel once wrote, confronting those who seek him with paradox, uplifting man through glorious insights while guarding his infinitude from human grasp. Gödel’s investigations in number theory and general relativity suggest a similar theological result: that God cannot be reduced to a mere principle of the natural world. Gödel may have seen himself as a successor to Leibniz, whose critique of Spinoza’s atheism set a precedent for much of Gödel’s work.

The Difficulties In Ascertaining His Theological Intent
When we try to ascertain the theological intent underlying Gödel’s mathematical investigations, though, several difficulties arise.The first is Gödel’s reticence. “Although he did not go to church,” his wife Adele told the logician Hao Wang shortly after Gödel’s death in 1978, he “was religious and read the Bible in bed every Sunday morning.” But fear of ridicule and professional isolation made him reluctant to talk about his faith. “Ninety percent of contemporary philosophers see their principal task to be that of beating religion out of men’s heads,” he wrote to his mother in 1961.

A two-page draft of an ontological proof for God’s existence forms the whole of Gödel’s explicitly theological output. He showed his paper only to close friends, but word got out, and the clever young things on campus giggled behind his back. His biographer Rebecca Goldstein, who was a graduate student at Princeton during Gödel’s last years, snickers that she and her peers “found it hilarious” that Gödel “deluded himself into believing that God’s existence could be proved a priori.” The ambient hostility drove some of his best students out of the profession and may have worsened the eating disorder that hastened his death.

Another difficulty is that Gödel’s work extends across several demanding fields, each with a high threshold of preparation.

An Irrationalist Who Proved That Nothing Can Be Proved?
There is also the problem that scavengers have been at work on his legacy for decades. The postmodernists have tried to claim him as an irrationalist who proved that nothing can be proved — just the opposite of what he intended. Rebecca Goldstein rightly debunks the postmodern claim, but her biography of the great mathematician makes no mention of his religious faith except to ridicule it, ignoring key facets of his work with theological implications.

Nonetheless, the ontological proof provides a point of entry into Gödel’s work, linking intuitive theology with his mathematical investigation. The proof, in one form or another, has been known at least since the eleventh century, when St. Anselm of Canterbury paused to ask: If God is greater than we possibly can conceive, then how could God not exist?

In the best-known version of the argument, Anselm noted:

1. The definition of the word God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived.”
2. God exists in the understanding, since we understand the word with that definition.
3. To exist in reality and in the understanding is greater than to exist in the understanding alone.
4. Therefore, God must exist in reality.

Versions of the argument, with key twists and turns, have been introduced in Western philosophy through the centuries by thinkers from Descartes and Leibniz down to the twentieth-century American philosopher Charles Hartshorne. And, from the monk Gaunilo in Anselm’s own time down through St. Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, and Bertrand Russell, these same centuries have seen philosophers who vehemently reject any form of the argument.

In all versions there exists a tension among premises. If God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” how can we understand God? Whatever we might conceive, God must be greater. If this is so, then how can God exist in the understanding?

Barth’s Reading Of Anselm
In his 1930 book on Anselm, Karl Barth offers a theological rather than a philosophical answer: We understand God by calling on him by his proper name, “that which is greater than anything that can be conceived.” “It does not say,” writes Barth, “that God is, nor what he is, but rather, in the form of a prohibition that man can understand, who he is.” In effect, Barth says that “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” is something of an alternative appellation for YHWH, God’s personal name in the Bible.

In Barth’s reading, Anselm’s statement is not only proof, but also prayer. By asking us to attempt to conceive of that than which nothing greater can be conceived, Anselm restrains our impulse to worship, instead, a projection of ourselves. This intent, Barth adds, makes irrelevant the usual critique of Anselm. Thomas Aquinas objects that simply thinking something exists does not necessarily mean that it does exist. Kant jokes that the essence of a hundred imaginary thalers is the same as the essence of a hundred real thalers in my pocket, but their spending power is quite different.

Such refutations do not apply, Barth insists, for Anselm’s exercise presumes faith. But that move, in turn, raises up a theological problem. As the Jewish philosopher Michael Wyschogrod has noted, “If the ontological proof is successful, then God would be one of the things that have being. It would then be the case that the Empire State Building is, and the Eiffel Tower is, and God is.” Being would be an umbrella concept, covering God and many other things — which would make being our ruling concept. Naming God as “that which is greater than anything that can be conceived,” or “TTWNGCBC” rather than YHWH, gives us not a more refined faith but only a more refined atheism.

Spinoza And Leibniz
And that is just how the secular Enlightenment proceeded. Atheism in its modern form began with a revision of the ontological argument at the outset of Spinoza’s Ethics. It could not have been otherwise, for to make sense of a world without God, atheism first had to usurp the attributes of God and assign them to nature. Something “than which nothing greater can be conceived” within the natural world gives us Spinoza’s “infinite substance.”

Spinoza begins his Ethics with an ontological argument: “God, or substance, consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality, necessarily exists” because “if this be denied, conceive, if possible, that God does not exist: then his essence does not involve existence. But this is absurd. Therefore God necessarily exists.” In Spinoza’s words, “By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite — that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.” God is reduced to the “substance” of nature.

But the ontological argument turned out to be a cuckoo’s egg in the nest of atheism. Spinoza abducts Anselm’s TTWNGCBC from heaven and locks him up inside the natural world. The trouble is that once inside nature, TTWNGCBC consumes everything else and becomes all that there is in nature. If God is inside nature, then there can be nothing in nature outside of God. Spinoza concludes: “As God is a being absolutely infinite . . . and he necessarily exists; if any substance besides God were granted it would have to be explained by some attribute of God, and thus two substances with the same attribute would exist, which is absurd; therefore, besides God no substance can be granted, or consequently, be conceived.” If we actually can conceive of TTWNGCBC within the natural world, then we can conceive of nothing else at all.

Hegel quipped that the cause of Spinoza’s death “was consumption, from which he had long been a sufferer; this was in harmony with his system of philosophy, according to which all particularity and individuality pass away in the one substance.” Spinoza’s younger contemporary Leibniz pounced on this vulnerability, turning Spinoza’s system inside out: Instead of an “infinite substance,” Leibniz postulated a “pre-established harmony” controlling an infinite number of independent monads. Leibniz added a purely theistic premise: By the law of sufficient reason, he argued, God does not do anything superfluous and therefore does not create anything twice.

In a purely formal sense, the systems of Spinoza and Leibniz seem to be mirror images: Spinoza’s single substance cannot explain individuality, and Leibniz’ individual monads cannot communicate with each other; “pre-established harmony” has the same function as “infinite self-generating substance.”

Undergraduate courses misleadingly lump the two together under the rubric of “rationalism.” But there is a fundamental difference: By inverting Spinoza’s metaphysics, Leibniz makes room for God to return from his Babylonian captivity in natura naturans, [vocab: Natura naturans is a Latin term coined during the Middle Ages, meaning "Nature naturing", or more loosely, "nature doing what nature does".] to lordship over being. “Sufficient reason” is a theistic premise, to be sure, but it explains the world as we perceive it, rather than the single monistic glob implied by Spinoza.

If Spinoza tries to capture the ontological proof for atheism, Leibniz sets out to restore it to theism, suitably corrected to answer the objections of Thomas Aquinas. If we suppose that God possesses all positive properties, Leibniz argues, then necessary existence is a positive property and must pertain to God. If we agree that it is logically possible for a perfect being to exist because “all perfections are compatible with each other,” then we must conclude that a being possessing all positive properties must exist: “There is, or can be understood, the subject of all perfections, or a most perfect being.”

Gödel And Leibniz
Kurt Gödel was a lifelong student of Leibniz; during his four decades in Princeton at the Institute for Advanced Study he checked out every book on Leibniz in the university library. In an answer to a questionnaire found in his posthumous papers, he wrote, “My belief is theistic, not pantheistic, following Leibniz rather than Spinoza.” He reworked Leibniz’ version of the ontological proof in 1941, using the notation of modern mathematical logic (although he showed it to no one until 1970). I doubt Gödel believed he had found the ultimate and irrefutable proof of the existence of God. His deep interest in the ontological proof, rather, was one facet of his commitment to defend Leibniz’ theism against the new Spinozans of mathematics and physics.

Gödel’s proof is written in logical notation. Like its Leibnizian model it turns on the notion of “necessary existence,” although it contains additional intermediate steps. Gödel begins by asserting that “positive” properties may be distinguished from properties in general. “Positive means positive in the moral aesthetic sense (independently of the accidental structure of the world),” he explains. The property that conjoins all positive properties also must be a positive property; and because “necessary existence” is a positive property, this property-of-all-positive-properties must include necessary existence; Gödel defines it as the “God-like property.” God therefore possesses all positive properties, and, because non-positive properties are the negation of positive properties, God cannot have any non-positive properties. Moreover, because “necessary existence” is one of these positive properties, God must exist in all possible worlds.

The objection of circularity might be raised because “positive properties” may be called positive because they are Godlike to begin with. It is not clear either that all positive properties are logically compatible, as in the paradox of divine omniscience and omnipotence.

Objections To Gödel’s Argument
Other objections have been raised to Gödel’s argument. It seems to imply, for example, that every positive property also must exist, for all positive properties belong to the God whom the argument proves to exist. The modern philosopher Jonathan Sobel argues that we are thus driven back to Spinoza’s problem, in which God is in everything and everything is in God, because we cannot distinguish between necessary existence and contingent existence. (Dean Koons has suggested a possible if problematic repair of Gödel’s proof in which only the cosmos itself is considered to have necessary existence.)

Gödel’s proof is best understood as an exercise within his broader Leibnizian program. If we attempt to speak in purely natural terms of “that than which greater cannot be conceived,” we cannot help but refer to the mathematical concept of infinity. That is just how Spinoza thought of his infinite substance, and to embed the infinite, an attribute of God, within natura naturans was a pantheist credo. Leibniz, the co-inventor of calculus, knew that an infinite number of infinitely small quantities can have a finite sum, and his infinity of infinitesimals, therefore, does not upset the finite character of created nature. But already, with Leibniz’ refutation of Spinoza, mathematics was emerging as the laboratory for ontological investigation. Whether that should be the case is a source of perpetual debate, but it is hard to imagine how it could have happened otherwise in the seventeenth century.

To treat mathematical objects as the proper subject of ontological investigation requires a grand assumption, to be sure, that, in Gödel’s words, “mathematical objects exist independently of our constructions.” Gödel worked for years, for example, on an unpublished essay refuting Rudolf Carnap’s view that mathematics was no more than a syntax to manipulate man-made symbols.

The meta-mathematical debate continues to this day, and how it will be resolved has not yet come clear. Nonetheless, it is perhaps telling that Leibniz, the philosopher who offered the most logical rejoinder to Spinoza, was able to do so because, coincidentally, he was the mathematician who formulated the modern concept of infinitesimals.

Leibniz’ infinitesimals led to another Gödel discovery with deep theological implications. In the nineteenth century, mathematicians learned that the calculus discovered by Leibniz and Newton could not integrate or differentiate some classes of functions. The calculus began with the insight that an infinite series whose terms grew infinitely small might have a positive sum. But some functions resisted the calculus. These include “spiky” functions in which changes in sign, for example, occurred in arbitrarily small intervals. From the study of such functions came the disturbing insight that some infinities are “bigger,” that is, more densely packed with numbers, than other infinities. And this inspired one of the nineteenth century’s greatest mathematicians to attempt to treat the different orders of infinity as if they were just another kind of number — the “transfinite numbers” — and thus to domesticate infinity.

Georg Cantor
Georg Cantor was the discoverer of these transfinite numbers in the early 1870s, when he showed that some infinite collections were “larger” than others. There is a one-to-one correspondence between the integers and the rational numbers, such that the rational numbers may be thought of as a “countable” infinity. But there is no such correspondence between the integers and the real numbers, conceived of as a continuum line.

That was an insight of historic importance. But it did not satisfy Cantor, who believed that he had solved the problem that had eluded Spinoza — namely, to preserve the differentiation of individual objects within natura naturans. By bringing God’s infinitude into the natural world, Spinoza was left with nothing but his single substance. At least in the realm of numbers, Cantor believed, infinity itself could be ordered with a new series of “transfinite numbers,” each representing a different order of infinity. He envisioned a new kind of cardinal numbers denoting infinite sets of numbers.

The infinitesimal monads of Leibniz thus would no longer require God and the principle of sufficient reason to differentiate themselves because infinite series of numbers would arrange themselves naturally into Cantor’s transfinite ordering. Cantor’s theology was confused — he also hoped to reconcile his views with those of Thomas Aquinas and the Church Fathers — but his belief that he had solved not only a mathematical problem but also an ontological mystery is well documented. A draft in his letter book states, “I have examined all objections that have ever been made against the infinite numbers, and above all because I have followed its roots, so to speak, to the first infallible cause of all created things.”

Cantor asserted that the infinity of the integers and rational numbers was the first transfinite number, and he named it “Aleph-zero.” What, then, was the second transfinite number, or “Aleph-one”? He had proven that the infinity of the continuum of real numbers was “denser” than that of the integers; unlike that of the rational numbers, it could not be counted. He assumed that if the first transfinite number contained the integers, the second transfinite number would contain the continuum, and that no other transfinite number could be discovered between these two.

That is Cantor’s “continuum hypothesis,” which attempts to identify a first and second transfinite cardinal number. From there, he believed, all the possible orders of infinity could be counted, the same way the integers count groups of one, two, three, and so forth. He not only recognized, but was driven by, the ontological implications of this assertion: If the continuum hypothesis turned out to be true, Spinoza would be vindicated because God’s infinity could be packaged into a neat series of numbers. Cantor spent the last thirty-five years of his life in a vain effort to prove this. He died in 1918 in a mental hospital.

Gödel And Cantor
It was Gödel and, later, Paul Cohen who demonstrated respectively that Cantor’s continuum hypothesis could be neither proved nor disproved within existing set theory. Indeed, Cantor’s hypothesis remains maddeningly undecidable. Intuition, added Gödel, strongly suggests that Cantor’s hypothesis is wrong: Among the infinite number of transfinite numbers, there are an infinite number of cardinalities between the integers and the points on the continuum line, and mathematical investigation of the infinite will remain infinitely fruitful. God’s infinitude remains safe in heaven. Mathematicians have proven that an infinite number of transfinite numbers exist but cannot tell what they are or in what order they should be arranged.

Gödel noted drily that this represents a problem for philosophy and epistemology rather than for mathematics, which can continue its investigations without ever exhausting the subject. Gödel’s result shows that not even in terms of numbers, the simplest objects we can specify, can natura naturans explain the individuality that we observe. The parallel between Gödel’s attack on the continuum hypothesis and Leibniz’ critique of Spinoza is very strong, and it is remarkable that both hinged on foundational insights into number theory.

Whether or not we believe, as did Gödel, in Leibniz’ God, we cannot construct an ontology that makes God dispensable. Secularists can dismiss this as a mere exercise within predefined rules of the game of mathematical logic, but that is sour grapes, for it was the secular side that hoped to substitute logic for God in the first place. Gödel’s critique of the continuum hypothesis has the same implication as his incompleteness theorems: Mathematics never will create the sort of closed system that sorts reality into neat boxes.

Gödel’s Critique Of General Relativity
There is yet a third place where Kurt Gödel’s mathematical work has theological purchase: in Einstein’s failure to reconcile the deterministic world of general relativity with the probabilistic world of quantum mechanics. Einstein famously declared his belief in “Spinoza’s God”: a god, that is, who is indistinguishable from nature and who reveals himself through natural harmonies. Einstein, we might say, was a “strong Platonist” who actually believed that if one discovers the eternal forms to which natural phenomena correspond, all the world’s mystery will yield itself up to science.

The often noted problem is that the intuitively intelligible world Einstein created with the deterministic equations of general relativity jars with the probabilistic world of modern quantum mechanics. Einstein and Gödel were close friends, but they disagreed profoundly on religious and philosophical matters. As Gödel told Hao Wang, “Einstein’s religion [was] more abstract, like Spinoza and Indian philosophy. Spinoza’s god is less than a person; mine is more than a person; because God can play the role of a person.”

Gödel’s personal God is under no obligation to behave in a predictable orderly fashion, and Gödel produced what may be the most damaging critique of general relativity. In a Festschrift for Einstein’s seventieth birthday in 1949, Gödel demonstrated the possibility of a special case in which, as Palle Yourgrau described the result, “the large-scale geometry of the world is so warped that there exist space-time curves that bend back on themselves so far that they close; that is, they return to their starting point.” This means that “a highly accelerated spaceship journey along such a closed path, or world line, could only be described as time travel.” In fact, “Gödel worked out the length and time for the journey, as well as the exact speed and fuel requirements.”

Gödel, of course, did not actually believe in time travel, but he understood his paper to undermine the Einsteinian worldview from within. Yourgrau observes, “The very fact that this inconceivably fast spaceship would return its passengers to the past demonstrated, by Gödel’s lights, that time itself — hence speed and motion — is but an illusion.” Stephen Hawking so abhorred the implications of Gödel’s demonstration that he proposed an ad hoc bylaw for general relativity, the “chronology protection conjecture,” simply to exclude it. Like Einstein, Hawking then believed that a grand theory of the universe would allow humankind to see into the “mind of God.” In recent years, though, Hawking has come closer to Gödel’s point of view, going so far as to conjecture that a sort of Gödelian “incompleteness principle” might exist in physics as well as in mathematics.

Summary
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, critique of the continuum hypothesis, and examination of time in general relativity all have theological implications. After reviewing them, is it appropriate for us to speak of a theology? Gödel evidently thought so. In 1961 he made notes for a lecture in which he ranked the contending worldviews in contemporary science “according to the degree and the manner of their affinity to or, respectively, turning away from metaphysics (or religion).” “Skepticism, materialism, and positivism stand on one side; spiritualism, idealism, and theology on the other.” He dismisses “idealism, e.g., in its pantheistic form,” as “a weakened form of theology in the proper sense.”

“One would, for example, say that apriorism belongs in principle on the right and empiricism on the left side.” But, he adds, “On the other hand, however, there are also such mixed forms as an empiristically grounded theology.” Gödel was at least a weak Platonist — he considered mathematical objects to be real and his research therefore to be empirical. He thought his theology thus to be an empirical one, founded on man’s experience of the infinite fecundity of the creator’s mind. That is why Gödel’s religious thinking is so rich and also why it is so challenging: One must actually follow the work to make sense of the conclusions, an unusual challenge for theologians, and one they have shirked for too long.

Posted in Science And Religion | Tagged Gödel’s God, Leibniz, Spinoza’s atheism | Leave a Comment »

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