Prospero's Books

The universe answers the yearning soul

 "So scientists cannot find God through microscope, telescope, spectroscope, or the like. Whoever said they would? The Bible, for example, tells people to look deeply into the cosmos and ask themselves what kind of being might be responsible for such a thing. Mystics are simply a people who, having answered that question to their own satisfaction, proceed to find evidence for their conclusion in all they see and feel around them. The universe answers the yearning soul--one way or another" (266).

--Tobias Churton, founder editor, Freemasonry Today, in The Invisible History of the Rosicrucians

Significance is otherwise

"Ever since the great scientific revolution was set in motion by Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, it has been a commonplace of commentary that the more that science teaches us about the natural world, the less important a role human beings play in the grand scheme of things. 'Astronomical observations continue to demonstrate,' Victor Stenger affirms, 'that the earth is no more significant than a single grain of sand on a vast beach.' What astronomical observations may, in fact, have demonstrated is that the earth is no more numerous than a single grain of sand on a vast beach. Significance is, of course, otherwise."

--David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, 7-8

Put in Swiss cheese and out come quarks

"Imagination, Casubon, use your imagination! What happens in those atomic machines, in those megatronic positrons or whatever they're called? Matter is broken down; you put in Swiss cheese and out come quarks, black holes, churned uranium! It's magic made flesh, Hermes and Hermès. Here on the left, the engraving of Paracelsus, old abracadabra with his alembics, against a gold background, and on the right, quasars, the Cuisinart of heavy water, gravitational galactic antimatter, et cetera. Don't you see? The real magician isn't the bleary-eyed guy who doesn't understand a thing; it's the scientist who has grasped the hidden secrets of the universe. Discover the miraculous all around us!"

--Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, 369-70.

An even better magic trick

I've been listening to Peter Mayer's song Holy Now:

When I was a boy, each week
On Sunday, we would go to church
And pay attention to the priest
He would read the holy word
And consecrate the holy bread
And everyone would kneel and bow
Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don’t happen still
But now I can’t keep track
‘Cause everything’s a miracle
Everything, Everything
Everything’s a miracle

Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn’t one

When holy water was rare at best
It barely wet my fingertips
But now I have to hold my breath
Like I’m swimming in a sea of it
It used to be a world half there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

Read a questioning child’s face
And say it’s not a testament
That’d be very hard to say
See another new morning come
And say it’s not a sacrament
I tell you that it can’t be done

This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
It used to be a world half-there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now

You can listen to the first minute of the song at Peter Mayer's Web site.

Whose center is everywhere

In The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, Brian Swimme points out that any location in the universe can be thought of as the place it began, because every point was once "part" of the single point that was the Big Bang:

We exist then at the very origin point of the universe, because every place in the universe is that place where the universe flared forth into existence (89).

I'm reminded of a saying that I've seen attributed to more than a dozen different writers: "God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference, nowhere."

A noble life within the Great Holy

"Conceivably for as long as three hundred thousand years, humans have huddled together in the night to ponder and to celebrate the mysteries of the universe in order to find their way through the Great World they inhabit. No matter what continent humans lived on, no matter what culture, no matter what era, the work of cosmology took place every year and every month and even every day--around the fire of the African plains, in the caves of the Eurasian forests, under the brilliant night sky of the Australian land mass, in the long houses of North America. There the people told the sacred stories of how the world came to be, of what the human brings into the universe, and of what it takes to live a noble life within the Great Holy that is the universe.

"I say that every culture did this, but that of course is not exactly true. For we contemporary humans do not. Modern humanity seems to be the first culture to break with this primordial tradition of celebrating the mysteries of the universe. When we learn about other cultures who do, we feel a sense of superiority or nostalgia, depending on our evaluations of such cultures. If we regard the scientific enterprise as freeing us from earlier superstitions, we look with pity upon these primitives who devoted so much energy to teaching fantasies about the universe. On the other hand, if we think that earlier or other cultures knew something important about the universe that completely escapes our ways of knowing, we are left with a sense of sadness that such experiences are not possible for us today" (9-10).

--Brian Swimme, The HIdden Heart of the Cosmos

The magic of life's design

"Truly random events offer neither excitement nor creativity. Not much, at any rate. With life, however, there is a flowering, unfolding, and experiencing that we can't even wrap our logical minds around. When the whip-poor-will sings his melody in the moonlight, and it is answered by your own heart beating a bit faster in awed appreciation, who in their right mind would say that it was all conjured by imbecilic billiard balls slamming each other by the laws of chance? No observant person would be able to utter such a thing, which is why it always strikes me as slightly amazing that any scientist can aver, with a straight face, that they stand there at the lectern--a conscious, functioning organism with trillions of perfectly functioning parts--as the sole result of falling dice. Our least gesture affirms the magic of life's design" (45).

--Robert Lanza, MD, with Bob Berman, Biocentrism

Cosmos, Nature, and Culture

This weekend I'm presenting a paper in Phoenix at "Cosmos, Nature, and Culture: A Transdisciplinary Conference," sponsored by the Metanexus Institute. I've just posted the paper, "A 'Mirror up to Nature': Cosmos, Nature, and Culture in Shakespeare," on this site. It's my first long essay that grew directly from writing I've done for this blog.

If you're a reader of this blog and would be interested in getting together with me in Phoenix this weekend, please let me know.

Good maps--and poetry

My wife, Bette, and I have been reading George Johnson's Fire in the Mind: Science, Faith, and the Search for Order (see "What I've Been Reading"), set in our new neighborhood, northern New Mexico. (Also reading the book is our niece Andi, a Wisconsin Ph.D. student in plasma physics, in preparation for the great discussions that I know will happen next week when she comes to visit us for a weekend.)

Here we're reading the book in the greatroom of our Rio Rancho home, with its wondrous view, from the west, of the Sandias, a mountain range Johnson mentions often. We interrupt our reading at about 8:15 each evening (the time will get later each day for the next week and a half) to see the otherwise grey-green mountains turned suddenly bright pink, for about five minutes, by the sunset behind us. We then understand why the first Spanish here named the range the Sandias, the Watermelons.

My favorite passage in today's reading is a response to the questions, "When are we doing physics? When are we just conjuring with numbers? We build these systems to represent the world, then we are left to wonder what they mean. What is map, what is territory? Is there really any difference at all?

Johnson continues:

Niels Bohr believed the distinction was meaningless, that all we can hope for is good maps. The problem, he believed, is that the languages, both verbal and mathematical, that have evolved to aid our survival on earth are simply not equipped for navigation in the subatomic realm. "We must be clear that, when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry," he told Heisenberg on day as they trekked through the German woods. "The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections" (146).

Bohr makes, I think, the same point I made in yesterday's post: We can never understand "the creative mystery within and beyond the universe--the mystery I choose to call 'God.'" All we can hope for are good maps--and poetry.

The "hand of God"

My favorite science writer, Chet Raymo, has posted, and reflected on, this astonishing photo (click on it to enlarge it).It is an X-ray image of the space near pulsar B1509. He writes, "What do we make of this? A cosmic hand, vast and nebulous, reaching out to quench a fiery inferno. Or is it hurling a luminous discus, a universe in the making? Or conjuring the primeval fire?"

After a fascinating scientific answer to that question, he continues:

Still, we see a hand. Maybe even the hand of God.

It is human nature to see ourselves in the non-human world. Faces in clouds. The Virgin Mary on a water-stained wall. Canals and pyramids on Mars. When the Hubble team published the famous Pillars of Creation photograph, hundreds of people reported seeing the face of Jesus.

Nothing strange about any of this. We necessarily explain the unfamiliar in terms of the familiar, and what is more familiar than ourselves? The gods of all peoples everywhere have generally taken human form. The gods may have multiple arms, or wings, or thrones of gold, or infinite powers, but they are all projections of ourselves. Address God as Father, or Mother, and we are indulging in the same anthropomorphizing as the person who sees a spooky hand in the Chandra image.

Raymo is right--up until that last sentence. To many, of not most, believers, addressing God as Father or Mother is not anthropomorphizing, at least not the "same" anthropomorphizing as seeing a hand in the pulsar photograph or seeing the Virgin Mary on a wall. Instead, addressing God as Father or Mother is a conscious metaphor, a way to describe a relationship with the indescribable.

I have had a human mother and father, and I know that God isn't a parent in that sense. But I also know that the creative mystery within and beyond the universe--the mystery I choose to call "God"--somehow begat me and is somehow connected to me, in a cosmic network that is more like a family than like anything else.