Saturday Morning @ The Story-of- Everything Place

The Idea Waiting To Be Born: A Parable in Pictures

2010-09-24T11:15:00.002-04:00

This is a way of seeing creativity through the Ten Oxherding Pictures of Zen Buddhism. It is set in the context of the New Story of Everything.

I'll begin with a bit of explanation. . . .

I first saw the Oxherding Pictures during a small but intense conference on the subject of generativity that was held in Kyoto's Daikaku-ji Temple, once the detached palace of the Emperor. It was hosted by the Future Generations Alliance Foundation. One afternoon the discussion turned to creativity, and my American colleague and I were asked if we had ever seen the Ten Pictures, and if so, what we might say about them. Neither of us had even heard of them.

Within an hour, photocopies of the pictures, taken from a German source, were laid before us. Several hours later, a second set appeared, accompanied this time by commentary in English. These two sets, it turned out, were merely preludes. At dinner the following evening, my colleague and I were each handed a set of simple wood-block prints by the artist Tomikichiro Tokuriki. They were accompanied by two booklets. One contained the interpretive verses of an obscure Chinese poet named Pu-ming. The other was blank. It called for our interpretation.

Before leaving Kyoto, I talked with one of our hosts, Master Kido Inoue, about the pictures. I asked if it would be offensive to the Zen tradition if I were to make an interpretation by telling a story different from the tradition's.

"They are only a tool," he said through a translator.

And so I thought: if I used the pictures as a tool, even to tell a different story, I would not be dishonoring the tradition from which they came, but following in its very spirit. I asked the translator to convey this to Master Inoue. She did, and he thanked me.

And then I felt released.

Upon my return home, I did some reading and learned that the Ten Oxherding Pictures tell the story of Zen discipline, of the journey to enlightenment. They're like an extended parable. Different versions of the parable developed as it was carried from China, the place of its origin, to Japan. One version consisted of five pictures; another, of six; still another, attributed to the twelfth-century Japanese Master Kakuan, of ten. In some versions, the ox turns white as the story progresses. In others, the ox remains black.

This history was interesting, but not as interesting as the experience of just looking at the pictures. Sometimes, as the figures of the ox and oxherd sank in, I saw Tradition wandering through the woods and a Seeker trying to corral it. Sometimes I saw Life bending at its knees and a Traveler climbing on its back. And sometimes I saw God raising his head and a Soul losing itself in his immensity.

But mostly I saw an Idea Waiting To Be Born and the One who is destined to bring it to the world. So, twelve years later, this is the story I tell, in the spirit of a tradition that graciously offered a tool.

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The First Picture

2010-09-24T11:05:00.000-04:00

It all begins with a boy, an oxherd, deep in the forest. He could be anyone anywhere, young or old, male or female, East or West, North or South. Anyone searching for a big Idea. It begins with you, too, the fly on the wall, the bee in the tree, hiding there on that branch, peeking out from behind those leaves, bug-eyed, waiting to see what will happen. Why do you wish to know?

The artist Tomikichiro draws the boy with a look of self-assurance, even cockiness. There's a whip in his hands. But the poet Pu-ming sees something else: he insists the boy is lost. Why should such a one be lost?

The boy is lost because he is . . . a boy. He is immature, not ready for an idea the size of an ox. Could he even spot one? Would he know how to approach it? How to make the capture? And even if he caught it . . . what then?

The boy is lost for another reason. He has, in the poet's words, "violated his own inmost nature." And now he is far off course, looking in all the wrong places, taken in by appearances, consumed by the desire for gain and therefore terrified by the prospect of loss. I will be the One, he thinks. But what if he is not? What if the ox eludes him? What if he ends up with a mouse and someone else, the ox? Despite that cocky look, the boy is full of fear. He has many sleepless nights.

Yet he keeps on searching. Perhaps he has heard, far in the distance, the sound of something crashing through the forest. And I wonder: perhaps the Idea is searching too. Wandering through a forest of its own. Immature, like the boy. Far from home and far from ready for a meeting.

How close have they come, do you think? A moonless night, a mountain pass thick with fog, heading in opposite directions. Could they have nearly touched, the oxherd and the ox? The boy and the Idea Waiting To Be Born?

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The Second Picture

2010-09-24T11:00:00.000-04:00

The boy does all the right things. He copies the sutras, learns the doctrines, practices the crafts, studies the theories, weighs the evidence, absorbs the wisdom of the ages. He learns the story of the universe. For years he studies traditional ways.

And then one day, sitting by a shaded stream, he sees an imprint in the mud. Then another, and another. He recognizes them: they are hoofprints, deep and fresh, traces of something massive. The years of study tell him: these are the signs of the ox.

And so he follows.

But . . . .

But something is wrong with the picture. Look at the eyes of the boy: they're on the sky! Doesn't he know that oxen don't live in the sky, don't graze on the clouds and drink in the rain? The boy is seeing things. His senses are deceiving him.

How can we straighten him out, you and I? Well . . . if you got out of that tree and into the story, you could buzz around the boy, bite him on the nose, get his attention. Then I could shout in his ear:

     Wake up, young man!
     You've got it backwards.

     Ideas don't come from the sky.
     They don't wait up there,
         eternally pure,
         clear as glass,
         deaf to the call of gravity,
     Until
         at some appointed time
         in some appointed place
         in some anointed One
     they drop like wingless angels
     to find a place in flesh,
     spirit descending to earth.

     No!

     Ideas germinate in mud,
     rise up
         through bone
         and blood
         and brain,
     looking for
         a pen,
         a brush,
         a reed,
         a chisel,
         a voice,
         a people
     to coax them out
     and lift them up
     to find their place in the heavens,
     flesh turned into spirit.

     Young man, watch where you're going!
     Keep your eyes on the ground!

Chill, says the artist, there's nothing wrong with the boy. There's nothing wrong with the picture. Yes, his head is in the clouds. Yes, he sees some apparition there. But soon he will mature. Soon his eyes will catch up with his feet. And it's his feet that matter: they know the secret of mud.   Just look! The feet of the boy are following the tracks, and he's beginning to run!

The nose of the ox reaches the heavens, says the poet. And I think: the Idea has caught the scent of something coming its way. That's why it's turning now--into an open meadow, where grass grows fresh and sweet. It's a place to be seen, a place of revelation.

The Idea stops and waits.

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The Third Picture

2010-09-24T10:55:00.000-04:00

The Idea waits in a seeing-place: this means the boy's seeing has matured. The years of study have had their effect. So have the sting of the bee and the guidance of the feet. Now, says Pu-ming, the boy's eyes are "properly directed," his ears keen and alert, his senses in "harmonious order."

And so he sees. Not the words of another, not some markings in the mud, but the Idea itself. There, out in the open, grazing peacefully, ready for the taking. "The splendid head decorated with stately horns--what painter can reproduce him?" asks the poet. How will the oxherd find the words?

The Idea senses the boy's presence, feels his eyes upon its back. It turns and looks, its black fur glistening. This is the One in whom I will be born, it thinks, the One to give a dumb ox voice. It lets the boy approach and feels a tether slipping through its nose. This is the moment of revelation: as a shaft of light breaks through the clouds, the boy "gets" the Idea. Nearby, a lark begins to sing.

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The Fourth Picture

2010-09-24T10:52:00.001-04:00

Suddenly a storm erupts, a storm within the ox. "How wild its will, how ungovernable its power!" the poet exclaims. The rope strains: who has who by the nose? Right now, there is no question: the Idea has the boy. Look who's on the ground! Look who's getting dragged around! Look who's lost his whip!

What has gone wrong?

Nothing has gone wrong, but much has happened. For at the very moment that the boy "got" the Idea, it changed. It showed itself to be a beast with a mind of its own. A beast with a thousand muscles, an Idea with a thousand implications. Now the boy's mind races. "When one thought moves, another follows, and then another--an endless train," says the poet. The boy tries to write a thousand notes, but he cannot keep up. His world is turning upside down.

"What have I gotten into?" he moans, as his face is rubbed in the mud.

You have no idea, smiles the ox.

"Where did you come from?"

Where did you? (And you, the bee?)

"You're going to kill me!"

You are going to disappear!

Now the boy drifts off. He dreams again of the moment of revelation, of the shaft of light and the song of the lark. But he cannot go back. The poet says he must now commit "the whole energy of his being" to hanging on. I say no. I say to the boy, "Let go of the rope! You can't handle this Idea! It's going to take you where you do not wish to go!"

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The Fifth Picture

2010-09-24T10:49:00.000-04:00

What can the boy do to tame the ox? To slow his racing mind? To get some rest?

Nothing. It's not up to him.

It's up to the ox, says the poet. "When it is properly tended to, it will grow pure and docile." And Pu-ming is correct, for in a moment of calm, the ox lies down. It stares at the boy and recalls all the times it has come to this, all the times it has ended right here.

I just don't know, it thinks, I don't know how to be born. Perhaps I shouldn't fight the boy. Perhaps I shouldn't be so anxious. Perhaps I shouldn't let him see so much of me, not now at least. Perhaps I should befriend him. It lets the rope go slack.

Sensing a change, the boy rises to his feet and meets the ox's gaze. In his mind he hears the words, There's nothing to fear, I'm only an idea.

"What about the thousand muscles?"

Throw the thousand notes away.

"What if I forget?"

You'll remember when it's time.

"Where will I end up?"

In a land that will seem strange to you.

"What will happen to me?"

The ox is silent. It would like to ignore what destiny requires of the One, but it cannot. Its eyes speak: You will be forgotten. You will disappear.

The boy's face drops. The ox has seen it happen many times before. This is when they walk away.

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The Sixth Picture

2010-09-24T10:48:00.000-04:00

What's this? The rope laid aside? The oxherd riding on the ox, playing a reed, still in the story? The two moving as one?

It's true, for one thing has a way of leading to another. The boy never accepted the terms laid out by the ox. He never rejected them. It's just that his hands were sore and his legs were tired and he had no place else to go. The ox seemed willing, so he climbed on its back.

The boy knew by then that the Idea would never be his to keep, never be his to profit from. And since he'd never own it, he lost his fear of losing it. And that is when he changed. That is when he ceased to be a boy.

The Idea changed too. Freed of the oxherd's possessiveness, it ceased to possess him. It turned white, its mass emptied out, the burden it imposed gone. It became transparent: the oxherd could see through to its very essence. It began to rise, no longer bound by forest mud to earth.

Now the oxherd lets the Idea carry him aloft, as if on a breeze. He doesn't notice when he lets go of the sutras, discards the theories, forgets the story that he learned and loved. He doesn't notice the thickets of doctrine passing beneath him. All he knows is the sway of the ox's back, its undulating muscles, the warm aroma of its skin, the beat of its heart. He plays its music. Now the oxherd is certain that the birth will come--somehow, somewhere, sometime--if not through him, then through another.

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The Seventh Picture

2010-09-24T10:46:00.000-04:00

The two drift down a mountainside, ending up at the oxherd's hut. The oxherd lays his whip and tether at the door and falls into a deep sleep. The ox goes further. It walks into the very heart of the oxherd's home and falls asleep under the straw-thatched roof. In its dreams it tells the oxherd, I am here.

The oxherd feels the Idea deep within his being, and in his dreams he hears it speak. It tells a story, its very own. The oxherd wonders, Is this my story too? This is what he hears:

     I was in the speck,
          infinite in density,
          infinite in destiny,
     the speck from which the universe began.
     I had no knowledge of what would come,
          no taste of matter,
      no taste of life,
          no taste of spirit.
     But I was there,
     the secret in the speck,
     the Idea Waiting To Be Born.

     A secret I remained
          in the sudden, great inflation,
          in the forming of the atoms,
          the forging of the stars and galaxies,
    the gathering of planets.
     For endless years, endless eons,
     through endless space, racing outward,
     I was passed along,
     the secret in the speck.
     I was waiting to be born.

     And then
     a bit of starry dust remembered
     how to make another bit
         in its very image,
         in its very likeness,
     and there was life.
     The bits found other bits,
     intertwined like acrobats,
     erected miracles
   that swam
         and crawled
         and flew
   and plodded, step by muddy step.
     My feet discovered spirit
     but my tongue could not find words.
     So I remain a secret.
     I am waiting to be born.

When the oxherd awakes from his dream, the ox is gone. The oxherd is not surprised, nor does he panic. He knows, in fact, that he will never see the Idea again. And this is the reason: what he once saw has now become his seeing. It's like a pair of glasses: once you put them on, you don't see them anymore. You see the world afresh.

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The Eighth Picture

2010-09-24T10:44:00.000-04:00

Nothing is left now, nothing remembered. The search, the capture, the struggle, the peace, the ox's back, the sleep and the dream, even the ox itself: all are forgotten. Only the oxherd remains, only the self that sees, and now it vanishes too. There is only a breathing.

The breathing speaks: "Let there be light!"

And, suddenly, there is light.

The breathing speaks again.

          Somewhere,
          a pen goes to paper,
          a brush to canvas,
          a chisel to stone,
          a voice to the wind.

          Somewhere too,
          a question is posed,
          a commandment given,
          a cornerstone laid,
          a telescope launched,
          a blessing offered.

An oxherd (he could be anyone) gives birth to an Idea. Flesh becomes spirit.

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The Ninth Picture

2010-09-24T10:42:00.000-04:00

Sitting in his hut, the oxherd looks out at a world that's strange but eerily familiar. He sees light and dark reversed, creation lit like snow against a nighttime sky. East is West out there, left is right, first is last. Buds blossom at night, on branches white and luminous. The oxherd wonders: Who could have done this? Who could have brought this world into being?

The oxherd doesn't know because he lost himself in its creation. He disappeared. Now, says the poet, "he watches the growth of things, while himself abiding in immoveable serenity." He is so still, so empty, that he seems not to exist, even to himself. The only thing he knows is what's before him.

It could indeed be a foreign land, with its nighttime blossoms and its strange new story of ideas coming up, not down--a mirror image of what the oxherd learned. A thousand things have found new places. Soon the oxherd will have to leave his hut and find his footing there, find his way around. He's in the place the ox foresaw but lacked the words to speak of.

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The Tenth and Last Picture

2010-09-24T10:35:00.000-04:00

So where have you been? Haven't seen you in a while, haven't heard you buzz. Did you fly off to another story? Or did you lose yourself in this one, vanishing like the oxherd?

Thanks to the artist Tomikichiro, I can tell you what became of the boy who was once lost in the forest. As you can see, he's now an old man. Once he had a whip, now he has a cane. That smirk has become a warm and generous smile.   He's too old to chase ideas on his own, but he's intrigued by those that beckon others. And so, as the poet Pu-ming tells us, he leaves his hut each morning and walks to the city--barefoot, bare-chested, covered with mud and ashes, wearing that smile of his. He goes his own way, revering the ancient sages but unknown to the wise men of his own day. At night he returns home, leaning heavily on his staff, his eyes on the ground.

If you asked the old man, he would say that he is empty. But if you asked others, they would say that he is full. Just look at that belly! And look at that bag, with all that it contains!

It contains a story, and there to receive it is a child. She could be anyone anywhere, young or old, male or female, East or West, North or South. She's already good at catching fish, but now she dreams of something more. She listens, wide-eyed, to the old man's tale of an ox that roams the forest, an ox with the name "The Idea Waiting To Be Born."

     And as the story casts its spell
     the girl discovers an Idea
     wandering through the forest of her mind.
     She sees its hoofprints in the mud,
     the place where grass grows fresh and sweet,
     and then
     the massive, stately body of the ox.

     She sees the tether in the ox's nose,
     hears the storm erupt,
     feels the straining on the rope,
     and then the letting go.
     She sees the ox turn white
     and feels it float beneath her,
         drifting down the mountainside,
         coming home,
         finding sleep,
         and hearing in a dream
         the story of the secret in the speck.
     And then she sees and hears and feels no more.

     But in her heart a fire burns.
     Her mind is set ablaze.


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A Sabbatical

2009-07-10T17:29:00.002-04:00

It should be evident to those of you who have been following this blog that I have taken a sabbatical. Several other projects have garnered my attention, including work with the Chicago Memory Bridge Initiative and the 2009-2010 Common Reading Program at the University of Arizona. Both are related to my book on autobiographical memory, White Gloves. I hope to get back to the Saturday Morning blogs as time permits.

For those of you who are new to this blog, here are links to all the articles, in the order in which they appeared. This is the 50th, a nice round number at which to take a break.

1. "The Whole Story of the Whole Cosmos for the Whole Person"
2. Is the Bible a Story of Everything?
3. The Shortest Story of Everything

4. "Let There Be Light!" When Was That?
5. "Let There Be Darkness!" In Just One Story

6. Matter, Life, Spirit: It's the Order
7. The Trouble With Matter
8. Life: So Simple a Beginning?
9. What is Spirit?

10. Impossibly Beautiful
11. A Blog Is a Gumball

12. Pluto and the Pea
13. The Other "E" Word
14. It Slumbers

15. A Solitary Ray

16. Goldilocks Comes to Cosmology
17. The WHO Outside the Universe
18. The WHAT Outside
19. You Call This Friendly?
20. The Three Bears Return
21. N = 1
22. The Pearl of Great Price

23. Impossibly Beautiful II
24. Lilies
25. The Ornament of the World

26. The Journey
27. Reason? Or the Whole Life Experience?
28. Jesus and the New Story

29. What Happened in the Meadow
30. The Universe is the Word

31. The Pastor and the Atheist
32. The Gospel According to Evolution
33. Resurrection

34. Evening Thoughts

35. Memo to Matter
36. St. Augustine, Meet the LHC

37. So the Christian Said to the Atheist . . .
38. Tua Culpa?

39. Killing For a Story
40. Killing For the Written Word

41. More Than Any Creed
42. A Bridge to Somewhere Else
43. When Genesis is a Story

44. What's IT Got To Do With It?
45. Print IT
46. You Cannot Go Back
47. The Revelation Test

48. How a Story Found Its Soul
49. How the Story Found a Speaker
50. A Sabbatical

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How the Story Found a Speaker

2009-03-27T11:02:00.006-04:00

Dear Story,

I wonder if I triggered some memories last week. Maybe you got thinking about a time when words like "religion" and "science" didn't exist, when "cosmology" was more than a subfield of physics, when you got that first look at the universe. And when you had that spirit.

The Story of Everything I was telling you about recovered his spirit. He got in touch with an ancient part of his being, with a soul that loved mystery and bowed before it. Once he felt it (her) again, he closed the door on books forever. They were too fixed, too orthodox, too . . . dead. He wanted to take a fresh look at the universe.

Who could have guessed what happened next? The Story took off on a second exploration of the cosmos. Not surprisingly, he found more than he had the first time around, more than he could have imagined. Not surprisingly, he was astounded by what he found, even exhilarated. What he hadn't counted on was the fatigue, the sheer exhaustion. The Story could never get to the edges of the universe. They were just too fast for him. He couldn't cover everything. There was just too much of it.

Then a strange thing happened. Call it coincidence, call it providence, leave it at "synchronicity." The Story ended up on an airplane next to a guy who was making calculations on a notepad. Once the flight got going, the Story slipped into his mind to check it out.

Things seemed oddly familiar in there. The man started talking to the Story like he was just another thought. Only it wasn't what the Story wanted to hear. How you--the man was pointing at the Story--lived on a little planet out in the boondocks of space. How you were the center of nothing. How the universe was 13, 700,000,000 years old and you were a mere 25,000. The man looked at his calculations. "If the universe is a year old, you're a minute old."

Whack! Not the way you'd expect a conversation to start with someone fated to be your Speaker. It got worse. The man didn't like the Story the way it was. He wanted to tell it backwards, to put Spirit at the end, not the beginning, to make Spirit something that emerged, not something that created. Not exactly a minor revision.

They got into an argument. As it wore on, the Story started having flashbacks. He recalled a boy who once loved the Story, who was abandoned by it, who grew angry at it, and . . . . suddenly, the Story realized where he was. He had felt a longing and a love.

Once they got off the plane, the Story left the man's mind and spent many days walking by the sea. He needed time to think. He knew his fatigue would not pass and that it was a sign of something more. He had to find a place to breathe his last, which meant he had to find a Speaker. The man on the plane? No . . . the Story could never become what that man wanted. He could not betray all those who had believed in him for so long, and believed in him just as he was, with Spirit at the beginning, in the place of honor.

The answer came in a dream. Just a few images. A river flowed into a desert and became a trickle. A wind lifted it up. A cloud carried it beyond the desert. It rained. The Story had to surrender, had to be lifted up, had to be carried to another side, had to acknowledge that a story served its speaker and not the other way around.

So the Story left the seashore and entered the man's thoughts for the very last time. The man lifted it up, carried it across, and spoke: a New Story for a new time, a new beginning, a new end.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2009 JOHN N. KOTRE

How a Story Found Its Soul

2009-03-20T08:00:00.000-04:00

Hey, Story,

I'm guessing you pitch most of the letters you get but you'll want to put this one under your pillow. I'm going to tell you how a Story of Everything found its soul. Which implies, in case I have to spell it out for you, that you have lost yours. Interested?

This Story had been collecting books for centuries, and he spent most of his time in his library, just staring at them. (Sound familiar?) Just staring. All the books happened to be The Story of Everything. Different languages, different editions, same story--his. Those books were a thousand mirrors and he was absorbed in them. We're talking Narcissus here, big-time.

Then someone saw a star die. Hardly relevant to an earthly creature, except this Story had always told himself that he'd live as long as the stars. He figured it meant forever. Poor choice of metaphor. A few centuries later some guys walked in with a bag of bones and laid them out on the floor. "See the pattern?" they said. "Evolution."

These guys were brutal. The Story had never heard the word "evolution," but they didn't care. They just looked him in the eye and said, "You're dead." I could tell you the Story was upset, but the truth is he was terrified. Dead? Dead? He looked at the mirrors. They had nothing to tell him now.

But he didn't die. He actually got a little curious. An odd question occurred to him and--get this--he asked it out loud. "Have I evolved?" Can you believe it? A story asking if it had evolved! A few weeks later he was opening a trunk in the attic and, wow, the stuff that was there! Scrolls, written by hand. Bamboo strips with strange characters. Papyrus, pressed from the stem of plants. Beautiful pictures, designs. Everything created by hand, nothing by machine. The Story realized he had once been a written thing.

He began having flashbacks. Sounds. They took him back to an even earlier life, one before writing. One night he was sitting in his basement in total darkness, drinking wine, trying to hear a memory. Suddenly he felt. A hand reached out and touched him. He knew in an instant who it was, and then he really remembered.

It was her. Silence. Back in the beginning she had lain with him and breathed with him and then they'd set off on a journey through the cosmos. A Story and a Silence, hand in hand. He had searched for absolutes, for centers, but she had sought the edge of every mystery, never stopping till she got there. Not to the edge before the edge but to the very edge, the one before the things you couldn't know. And then she'd simply bow.

At least that's the way I heard it. I don't know what really happened back then, but I do know that after that night in the basement the Story was changed. His library began to feel like a museum, like death itself. One day he got up from his chair and closed the door on it forever.

It was a l-o-n-g trek after that. Maybe I'll fill you in sometime. Suffice it to say the Story now saw the universe very differently. He realized that he was part of it and that he would die like everything else in it and that something new would grow from his remains. Strange, it was only when he found his soul--his soulmate, actually, his other half--that he lost his fear of dying. I wonder if there's someone like that in your past. If there is, I'd love to hear about her. Or it. Whatever. Just click here.

Be well,
John Kotre

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2009 JOHN N. KOTRE

The Revelation Test

2009-03-06T12:22:00.008-05:00

In centuries past, artists would sometimes cover an old painting with a new one. The practice was called pentimento because the artists were said to "repent" of their earlier work. When they were done, the new portrait looked like an original. It looked like it had always been there, the only one on the canvas.

When I look at a Biblical text these days, I think of pentimento. I'm seeing the last of many layers. These are the stories that survived, the ones that were remembered and made the final canonical cut. Beneath them are other layers. Layers of translation: the King James English, the Latin, the Greek, the Hebrew or Aramaic in which the stories were first spoken. Layers of information technology: printing, writing, speaking. Layers of interpretation: stories as infallible or even inerrant; stories as history, science, or creed; stories simply as stories. But the old layers are inaccessible to me. What I see looks like an original.

In the case of pentimento, we know the other layers exist because their lines and colors sometimes bleed through to the surface. (See it in a Picasso.) X-Rays and infra-red help as well. In the case of sacred stories, ancient fragments bleed through, and scholarship provides the X-Rays. But though we know the older versions exist, we cannot see or hear them. We cannot recover the original revelation of God.

So maybe it's time to revisit "revelation."

The word appears in many of the world's religions and it's been debated by many of its theologians. (Try Wikipedia for a quick sample of opinions.) Understandings differ as to who, what, where, and how. Does revelation come to a single person or a group? Is it law, poetry, wisdom, philosophy, narrative, what? Does it come on a mountain, in a cave, under a tree? Must it find its way into writing or can nature itself be a text? Can simple facts be "God's native tongue"?

My question is when. Did revelation happen back then, and only then--so that Mohammed, for example, becomes the seal of the prophets? Or is the canon still open, as it is for Latter Day Saints? When it comes to sacred stories, I believe the door's still open. Revelation was then. Revelation is now. The bottom layer was the Word. So is the top.

And so is one thing more, and it comes in the hearing of the story. The Word is what the story creates in you. And the test of that creation is both simple and classic. It's about the fruits.

If a story inflates, if it makes you self-righteous, self-important, and self-serving, if it leaves you brooding over the past and seeing enemies everywhere, if it calls you to (holy, cultural) war, it is not the Word of God.

But if the story inspires, if it creates hope, joy, goodness, peace, kindness, tolerance, patience, endurance, and humility, it is indeed the Word. And it's the Word if it leads you to a truth, however hard to take, and gives you the grace to rejoice in it.

If you're curious about the source of these two lists, check out I Corinthians 13: 4-7 and Galatians 5:19-23. These Christians texts are no different from those of other faiths. The Revelation Test has nothing to do with infallibility and inerrancy, with history, science, or creed, nor with decisions made by bodies of men. It has everything to do with you. A story is "revealed" if it helps you lose yourself, accept the truth, find compassion, and carry on.

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COPYRIGHT (C) 2009 JOHN N. KOTRE

You Cannot Go Back

2009-02-27T12:28:00.007-05:00

The "conservation" experiments of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget are tried-and-true classics. Show a child of five a short, fat glass of juice; pour the juice into a tall, skinny glass; and suddenly there's more of it. Lay out a row of quarters, then spread the row out. Suddenly . . . more quarters.

It's not magic, it's just the way children that age see and think. (Watch them.) In a few short years they'll be thinking differently. They'll be able to see quantities, and "conserve" them, the way adults do. And--something Piaget never addressed--they won't be able to remember how they used to think.

I became aware of this curious amnesia when I'd describe Piaget's experiments to college freshmen. I was amazed at their amazement. This was a surprise! Yet why should it be? Weren't the students thinking this way just a dozen years before? How could they have forgotten? How could you and I?

It seems that when thoughts are encoded in a new, more complex structure--as they are around the age of six or seven--it becomes impossible to remember the older, simpler one. It's like water from a stream that's absorbed in a river. It cannot go back.

And yet some insist it can. There's a "child within," they say, and you can recover it. If you take a microscope to what they recover, however, you'll find evidence--in their speech or writing, for example--of an adult perspective. Psychiatrist George Vaillant said it best: once a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it doesn't remember being a caterpillar. It remembers being a little butterfly.

Several weeks ago I listed some of the transitions experienced by sacred stories in the West. They started out being spoken; then they were written, codexed, printed, and placed before a camera. They started out as simple narrative, and then became creed, science, and "objective" history. Knowing of these transformations, one wonders: can we go back? Can we hear the stories the way they were heard the first time, millennia ago, with all the creed, science, and history squeezed out of them?

The answer is clear: not any more than we can recover the eyes of a child. (Try a conservation experiment: can you get yourself to believe there's really more juice in that tall, skinny glass?) You can describe a child's perspective. You can analyze it. You might even explain it. But you can't re-experience it.

When it comes to sacred stories, fundamentalists will say they can. They believe you can get to the "originals within," and they believe they have. But if you look at the history behind the stories, you'll see that what is "fundamental" is often far from what's "original." It's another case of anachronism--of remembering a butterfly when there was only a caterpillar.

You can preserve a tradition's stories but not its earliest eyes and ears. Where, then, is "inspiration"? More important, when is it? At the time of the original speaking? The original hearing? In whatever the stories meant to an ancient mind that is foreign to our own? If that's the case, we're in something of a pickle. We cannot recover those ancient eyes and ears, so we're cut off from inspired text. How, then, do we hear the Word of God?

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Print IT

2009-02-13T07:51:00.000-05:00

And though the incident had taken place more than five hundred years before, to the Story of Everything it seemed like yesterday. Closing his eyes, he could still smell the ink lying in wait on rows and rows of metal type, could feel the paper gently blanket him, could hear the great screw twisting down, and then, after the compressing and the lifting (he nearly lost his breath), could see . . . himself, as though he were outside his body, looking down. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 6)

How has information technology (IT) affected our sense of sacred stories? Here is last week's timeline:

3,500,000,000 years ago. IT in a living cell.
50-100,000 years ago. IT in language.
5,000 years ago. IT in writing.
2,000 years ago. IT in a "codex," a book.

Now we add:

560 years ago. ID in print.
184 years ago. ID in photography.

Print appears 560 years ago (earlier in China and Korea). Johannes Gutenberg puts moveable metallic type, made to look like handwriting, into a converted wine press and produces part of a Latin grammar and then a stunningly beautiful Bible (see it). Fifty years later, in 1500, Europe has 20 million books in 35 thousand editions. It helps that inexpensive paper, invented in China in the second century, has now replaced parchment. (Sheep welcome the development.)

The impact of printing is complex. A decade after Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to a church door in Wittenberg (the year is 1517), 30 printers in 12 cities are publishing his sermons as fast as they can get their hands on them. The Bible is translated into vernaculars; it's now for everyone. More and more, sacred stories become the object of solitary reading and interpretation. Only the written word, not any community, is the source of Revelation. "Sola Scriptura" is the rock on which you stand to oppose a corrupt church.

Printing also leads to modern science. "The scientific revolution followed printing as a more refined way to deal with the exploding amount of information humans were generating," writes Kevin Kelly. "Libraries, catalogs, cross referencing, dictionaries, concordances and publishing of observations all blossomed." Now one can ask of Biblical stories, Are they "science"? Some say yes, some say no. Galileo is one of the latter. He ends up under house arrest, but it could have been worse.

184 years ago. The camera. ID in photographs (see the very first). A modern view of history emerges, emphasizing primary sources, eyewitness accounts, evidence, "objectivity." Leopold von Ranke says the historian is not "to judge the past, nor to instruct one's contemporaries with an eye to the future, but rather merely to show how it actually was." It's hard to believe that this is a new idea but consider: no one talked about "photographic" memory before the invention of the camera. This is "photographic" history.

Once you can imagine such a history, you can ask a new question, Are the Bible's sacred stories photographic? Again, some say yes and some say no. Thomas Jefferson literally slices up the four gospels and keeps only the verses he deems to come from the "historical" Jesus (see the result). In Europe, Enlightenment thinking and higher criticism do essentially the same thing.

What stories go through! In the West, sacred ones start out spoken; then they are written, codexed, printed, photographed, not to mention digitized and internet-ed. They started out as narrative, and then they become (in the eyes of many) creed, science, and history. Today, we wake up to them unaware of all that has happened. What do we do once we know the history?

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What's IT Got To Do With It?

2009-02-06T11:44:00.008-05:00

There now passed through the Story's mind all the forms in which he had existed. His life in speech, his life in writing, his life in print, his life in cyberspace. None could compare with the time he had spent in silence (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 6).

I've been writing about sacred stories reclaiming the language of the night and becoming stories again. Just stories. It makes me wonder how they got to be "creed" in the first place. What did information technology (IT) have to do with it?

Here's a timeline:

3,500,000,000 years ago. A bit of enclosed matter--call it a cell--remembers how it was created and makes a copy of itself. For the very first time, information from the past is directed to the future. It's done biologically, in silence.

50-100,000 years ago. IT in language. Stories. "No transition has affected our species, or the world at large, more than the creation of language" writes Kevin Kelly of Wired magazine. Narrative follows and is just as consequential. Down the road, someone, somewhere, tells the first Story of Everything.

5,000 years ago. IT in writing. Clay. Papyrus. Stylus and ink. Scrolls (see one). Text based on pictures, then on sound. Here's where things get interesting. All manner of daily accounting is now remembered accurately, but in the spiritual realm writing seems otherworldly, magical. Can you trust it? At times the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah has his doubts: "How dare you say: 'We are wise, and we possess the law of Yahweh. See how it has been falsified by the lying pen of the scribes!"

The same skepticism appears in India. "People did not believe it was possible to convey a spiritual teaching in writing," writes Karen Armstrong. "You could not, for example, understand the full meaning of the Upanishads simply by perusing the texts." You still needed oral culture--a teacher. Otherwise, the written word would freeze stories, encouraging a "misplaced clarity and certainty about matters that are essentially elusive and ineffable."

2000 years ago. IT in a codex (see). Take a blank scroll, cut it into sheets, fold the sheets in half, sew them together through the folds, cover with two wooden boards. Write on both sides of each "page." You get a codex, or what we now call a book. The technology develops in the first century AD and Christians are quick to adopt it. Small codices grow larger. "Once it was possible to produce and view (or visualize) 'the Bible' under one set of physical covers, the concept of 'canon' became concretized in a new way that shapes our thinking to the present day," writes religious historian Robert Kraft (here and here). Some stories are "in," some are "out."

In the fourth century the emperor Constantine makes a request for 50 of these mega-codices. They may be the first Bibles. Not surprisingly, he also makes sure, in 325, that Christianity produces a uniform statement of belief. Now Christianity's sacred stories exist in a single Book and a single Creed. Before, a few of the Book's texts claimed to be inspired; now the whole collection does. It's all the "word of God."

Fast forward a thousand years. Parchment, made from animal skin, has replaced papyrus as the surface of choice. Books (Bibles among them) are so expensive to produce and so rare that in 1424 the library at Cambridge University contains only 122, each with the value of a farm or vineyard. The creedal value of Christianity's stories matches their IT value. Their nature has been changed irreversibly, in a way impossible for us to fathom.

Next week: The transformation continues with printing. Can we recover the sense of story embedded in speech alone?

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When Genesis Is a Story

2009-01-30T08:00:00.001-05:00

Most Sundays you can find me in one of two churches and occasionally meandering from one to the other. One is the Catholic student parish here at the University of Michigan. The other is a small Anabaptist community consisting of Mennonites and Brethren. The one hour I hate to miss is the one in which a group of my Anabaptist friends work their way through the Book of Genesis.

It's a diverse group with different understandings of the Bible, and it includes someone who can read the Hebrew text. My approach from the outset has been to let the language of the day become the language of the night. I don't worry about history. I simply let stories--the language of the night--go where history cannot, where creed cannot. Deep into paradoxes, for instance.

Paradoxes of character: Abraham, the patriarch-to-be, seems detached from possessions, almost Buddha-like. You want to go right? I'll go left. You want to go left? I'll go right. I don't want the spoils of war, I only want my nephew back. I crave an heir but I'll give up my son. Here, take my wife. The mission of this non-possessive man? To father a people who would possess a land. Why does his detachment suit the mission?

Even more, paradoxes of culpability. Cain, responsible for the world's first murder, evoked sympathy from our group. He was set up. His anger was understandable, maybe even justified. Yes, he made a choice, but God made one first. He deliberately rejected Cain's offering in favor of his brother's. Is Cain alone at fault?

That story reaches deep into my experience of life. Who is really at fault here? Have circumstances, has "providence" even, led me into the wrongs I have done? I am free but I am also fated. Somehow, I collaborate in my destiny and I cannot tell you how.

When a sacred story becomes a story again, when its images enlighten experience, it is no less Revelation, no less the Word of God. It still delivers messages. At the end of many episodes--and especially at the end of Cain's--I always received the same one. Gertrude said it first, almost under her breath, but I was close enough to hear. "Carry on."

No matter where you are in life, no matter how you got there, no matter who's at fault, carry on. There will be consequences--"punishment"--but there will also be provision. When God expels Adam and Eve from the garden, it's with clothes of skin that he has made for them. And (did you notice?) he accompanies them. When he condemns Cain to be a wanderer, he gives him a mark of protection. Carry on.

And if you cannot, your seed must. At the end of the remarkable story of Lot ("adult" fare, to be sure), his daughters get him drunk so each can lay with him and conceive his child. Incest? The thought never occurs. The only thing that matters is descendants. Carry on.

And that, for me, takes one more story. It was added to the Genesis collection late in the day, but it was put where it could command the landscape: in the beginning.

Genesis 1, of course, lies at the heart of the American creation-evolution controversy. But that's because creationists want to make it what it isn't. If you let it be a story, it becomes an oasis at dawn. It carries you to a time when all is still again, when the sun's rays run the length of a valley and hold it in a moment of hope. The beginning: "And God saw that it was very good." No creed can get me to that place or evoke that hope. Unless I find it deep within, I cannot carry on.

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A Bridge To Somewhere Else

2008-12-19T09:11:00.000-05:00

Last week I asked if a religious tradition's images could be more powerful than its creed. The question arose after reading The Living God and Our Living Psyche, a book in which psychoanalyst Ann Belford Ulanov and psychologist Alvin Dueck build a bridge from Christianity to the work of Carl Jung.

Now, in this season of stories, another question occurs: could the bridge lead to somewhere else? Could it carry the stories Christians tell to a place in the Story of Everything? Could it do the same for the stories of other traditions?

When eco-historian Thomas Berry called for a new Story of Everything thirty years ago, he said its organizing structure would have to be the new scientific cosmology. More to the point, he said that the new story would have to include the old ones, especially those of a religious nature. In the current issue of The Global Spiral William Grassie reiterates both points in an article on meta-narratives.

How can this happen? How can a scientific story of evolution and emergence, covering 13.7 billion years, hold stories of a Divine Creation, of a Fall, of a Nativity, of a Redemption, to take just a few from the Christian tradition? How will Christians even get to the new Story? How will they embed their stories there?

I think it will take a bridge like Ulanov's, but something will happen in the crossing.

When they first step on that bridge, Christians will be telling their stories in "day language," to use the analogy of Michael Dowd. But if they make it to the other side, they will be speaking the "language of the night." Their stories will look the same, sound the same, have the same characters and plot. But the environment will be different, and the stories will be understood in a radically different way. Day language is the language of objective fact, publicly measured and verified. Night language is Jung's and Ulanov's specialty: myth, metaphor, subjective meaning. On one side of the bridge, for example, the story of the Fall will be understood as an historical event. On the other, it will be a symbol, capturing the experience of waking up to instincts shaped by millennia of evolution.

Going from day to night is an enormous change, which may prove unacceptable to many Christians. The fears Ulanov has encountered in her work with imagery will be there, especially that of reductionism. Crossing the bridge strips your stories of authority. They seem to become just stories, and your creed just imagination.

And here is where Ulanov's experience may prove invaluable. We can adapt her message to say that we are to engage a tradition's stories as if they were messages from the living God. But only if we let them be stories. Stripped of authority, stories open us up to life, and in this role they are hardly just stories. They are nothing less than stories. There is a presence in the night that is absent during the day.

Religiously, this is the season of the night, and of stories in the night. Muslims will tell the tale of a father's willingness to sacrifice his son, Jews the tale of a lamp that continued to burn, Christians the tale of a savior's birth. Many other narratives will celebrate the coming of Light. May all of them do what stories do best: open us up to life. I wish you the blessings of the season.

Note: A full review of The Living God and Our Living Psyche appears in the current issue of The Global Spiral. Take a look.

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More Than Any Creed

2008-12-12T13:00:00.005-05:00

I've been reading "bridge" books lately, ones that offer a connection between Christianity and some secular domain. I have just now finished The Living God and Our Living Psyche, a book in which psychoanalyst Ann Belford Ulanov tells her fellow Christians neither to fear the work of Carl Jung nor to dismiss it as out of date. I walked away with a stunning idea: images matter more than any creed.

Images, of course, are the stuff of psychoanalytic practice. But Ulanov is not your typical analyst. A Jungian, she has spent forty years focusing on the spiritual import in what she hears. Images, she says, are how "we differently apprehend God: some of us visually, others of us through bodily sensations, textures, smells, sounds." You could lay out her treatment of those "apprehendings" as a path.

It would begin with the personal, the idiosyncratic. A somber woman dreams of Fred Astaire dancing with joy and shouting out, "Where is God?" A man whose conscious God is found in the gospel of John finds a strange alternative in a dream: there he bows before a giant pig. Another man's God has a cleft hand from which electric energy hisses. Such images are not restricted to dreams. One of Ulanov's clients found deep release when he saw a mosaic of Christ with his toes curled over the world. The curled toes were the key.

In Ulanov's hands, these messages from the unconscious, bizarre though some may be, are also messages from God. They are no less than Scripture, and just as much in need of interpretation. In the case of one: put joy in your life. In the case of another: explore your feelings about a mother goddess, about the awesome power of reproduction. Interpretations like these (it's hard to imagine making them without a therapist) take you down Ulanov's path of imagery.

And there you encounter a second source of symbols, a collective source. "We receive pictures fashioned by centuries of other human psyches, canonized in Scripture and in worshipping traditions." God as rock, refuge, feeder, calmer of the seas. The story of the Fall, the Virgin Birth, the God-Man. These are "official" images, "objective" ones. Without them Christianity would be gasping for water. Its adherents would say its prayers and recite its doctrines but have no life. Even worse, "our faith [could] become a weapon of attack against self and others, particularly our children."

On Ulanov's path you drink from both sources. You engage the personal and the collective. You find a "space" between the two. "The rough edges of idiosyncratic, even neurotic God-images can be rubbed right in exchange with images fashioned by the historic church community." At some point the space opens further, so you ask what it "wants." The answer will feel like grace, like the voice of God calling you onward.

Onward, that is, until images themselves are no longer useful, until their very success "wears them out." It's surprising to hear this from Ulanov, but symbols are finite, after all, and mystery is infinite. Inevitably one reaches the unknowing of the mystics. Here, at the end of the path, no words come, nor any images. There is only "unmediated Presence," "animating Spirit," the "living God." Ulanov ends up taking Christians to God as "a psychic fact of immediate experience." The words are Carl Jung's.

Engage images, explore them, surrender to them, let them go. All the while let them be images, nothing more. Ann Ulanov's counsel could apply to many faith traditions, not just Christianity. In the author's words, images "open us up and bring with them a dimension of reality that transcends us. . . . They impart to us the gift of divine presence." Can any creed do that, any set of doctrines?

Note: A full review of The Living God and Our Living Psyche appears in the current issue of The Global Spiral. Take a look.

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Killing for the Written Word

2008-11-14T12:07:00.007-05:00

I have found the Book of the Law in the Temple of Yahweh.
--Hilkiah, 622 BCE, in 2 Kings 22

The lawyer shows you the papers. They're over a hundred years old but undeniably authentic. No one had known of their existence but it doesn't matter: you're in violation of their provisions. You will have to leave your home. It is going to be razed.

According to the Hebrew Bible, that was the situation facing King Josiah in 622 BCE. During renovations of the temple of Yahweh, the high priest Hilkiah had found an old scroll of the Law (sefer torah). No one had known of its existence either, but for centuries the kings of Israel and Judah had condoned practices that were explicitly forbidden. And forbidden, it was now clear, in writing.

Josiah was a young man, only twenty-six, and as the long-lost scroll was being read to him, he could only imagine how angry Yahweh had become. When the reading was done, he tore his garments and wept.

In Josiah's time, teachings that had once been spoken were now being written down. The Israelites and Judahites were becoming, as the Qur'an said later, a "People of the Book." The teachings were becoming scripture. What difference did writing make? Karen Armstrong:

The switch from the oral transmission of religion to a written text was a shock. Here--as elsewhere in the Bible--it evoked a sense of dismay, guilt, and inadequacy. Religious truth sounded completely different when presented in this way. Everything was clear, cut-and-dried--very different from the more elusive "knowledge" imparted by oral transmission.

There was a curious aspect to the newly discovered sefer torah. The scribes said the Law it contained had always been in writing. That was the form of the Law from the very beginning.

The beginning, of course, was Moses on the mountain. In the narrative found in Deuteronomy, Moses hears the Law being spoken but doesn't leave without a written copy--etched in tablets of stone, no less. When he breaks those tablets, God inscribes a second set. They contain the abridged form of the Law, the Ten Commandments. We learn of the complete edition later, in a long speech that Moses delivers just before he dies. The detail is endless but, according to the story, Moses manages to write all of it down. This is the text, lost for centuries, that the high priest finds in Josiah's time.

Or did he find it? Many scholars believe that the text--contained in the present book of Deuteronomy--was assembled well after the death of Moses. Some suggest it was a "pious fraud," put together on the spot, even in collaboration with Josiah. To launch the reforms he desired, Josiah needed the authority of writing. You create the writing now, you say it dates from back then.

The practice was nothing new. It was customary for writers of the time to attribute their teaching to great figures of the past. Even today it is a reflection of the normal way autobiographical memory works. The effect of saying always and from the beginning is to add clarity, certainty, and authority.

However the sefer torah originated, the impact of its "discovery" was enormous. With newfound conviction, Josiah tore down shrines, burned effigies, smashed sacred pillars, demolished temples, burned human bones on altars, and slaughtered priests. Then he celebrated a magnificent Passover in Jerusalem. The Law had been re-established.

This was but one event in a long, complicated transition to writing. How typical it was I cannot say, but it does show how misplaced clarity can be used to legitimate violence. Writing, in the case of Josiah, made it easier to kill for a Law, to kill for a Story.

Note: More of the transition to writing in Judaism will be discussed this coming Tuesday, November 18, in Nova's The Bible's Buried Secrets. The program's web site is already available.

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Killing For a Story

2008-11-07T11:29:00.009-05:00

Modern humans, perhaps more than at any other time in human history, are caught up in a web of entangled narratives. . . . We wage culture wars within and between our civilizations based on these narratives, which for the most part we do not even recognize as stories.
--William Grassie, "The Storied Nature of Self, Society, and Cosmos"

You. Yes, YOU. How did you let it happen? How does an innocent Story of Everything, a good kid, turn into a bully? What made you pick up that flag and start waving it around? Did you want everyone to die for you? Did you want them to kill for you?

You know what I'm talking about. The story of the Palestinians vs. the story of the Israelis. The story of Islamic militants vs. the stories of the West. Remember the Inquisition? Nothing but killing for a story. In the U.S. the fighting's over creation, evolution, and intelligent design. It's "only" cultural war. But there's still a lot of blood being spilled, cultural or otherwise.

I know stories matter. I know that structures for narrative are embedded deep in our human brains, as deep as structures for language, as deep as controls for breathing. But why do we have to kill in order to speak our story, as if it competed for air with someone else's? Isn't there enough air for everyone?

Maybe it's hubris. Maybe the violence starts when stories grow tall, add muscle, start to picture empires. When they become Stories, capital S. You know better than most. Does the killing begin with . . .

. . . the Christian narrative, the Militant Islamic Resurgence narrative, the American Experiment narrative, the Capitalist Prosperity narrative, the Progressive Socialism narrative, the Scientific Enlightenment narrative, the Expressive Romantic narrative, the Unity with Brahman narrative, the Liberal Progress narrative, the Ubiquitous Egoism narrative, and the Chance and Purposeless Narrative.

These are "meta-narratives," say scholars, Master Stories. Click here for more on that. Or here, for the source of the list above. Meta-narratives prefer the shadow world. As William Grassie says, they exist as "unarticulated background, the taken-for-granted truth, the way things really are." They lie so deeply in our psyches that we do not even realize they are stories.

YOU, sir (and you've mostly been a sir), are a Meta-Meta-Narrative, a Master Master Story. You cover everything--the whole cosmos, the whole earth, the whole human race. You speak of origins and destiny. You create moral imperative. You enter sacred texts and there you become the Word of God. And that's when things get dicey.

You know by now you're not alone. You know about all those other Stories, all with the name of Everything, all entangled by global communication. I understand: discovering them has been a blow to hubris. But you'll survive. So will they. There's air enough for everyone.

So here's a suggestion for you and your kind. Drop the flags, come out of the shadows, and get back to being stories. You know, just stories. Get to know each other. If you've made it to a sacred place, remember that you got there as a story, not a creed. So why not be what God created you to be? Why not act like a story? Why not speak like a story? Do you even remember how?

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Tua Culpa?

2008-10-17T08:20:00.000-04:00

Mea culpa. My bad. Our Christian bad, said David Myers in the opening lines of A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists. Without exactly saying tua culpa, without trying to extract a comparable confession from his addressees, Myers asks them to do what he has done: consider evidence regarding their claims.

Currently, claim number one is the neo-atheist contention that religion is toxic, that it "poisons everything," in the words Christopher Hitchens. A single contrary instance would dispose of that "everything," but Myers argues for more. He says the weight of the evidence is contrary.

If religion is toxic, he asks, why does the data say consistently that it gives people a sense of well-being? According to National Opinion Research Center surveys from 1972 to the present, 43 percent of Americans who attend religious services weekly report being "very happy"--versus 26 percent of those who seldom or never attend. These findings are representative of others.

And if it's toxic, why does religion add to length of life? Even after controlling for age, gender, ethnicity, and education, religiously active people experience greater life expectancy than others. The reasons include healthier lifestyles, less smoking, the support of fellow believers, and (see above) that sense of well-being.

Religious devotion benefits society as well. It is negatively correlated with crime and delinquency, and positively correlated with forgiveness, gratitude, compassion, and the giving of both time and money. In one Gallup survey, 46 percent of "highly spiritually committed" Americans were volunteering with the infirm, poor, or elderly, compared with 22 percent of the "highly uncommitted."

Has religion had destructive episodes? asks Myers. Absolutely. But on balance the above is hardly the work of a poison.

Myers goes on to ask a surprising question: why is skepticism a guy thing? His evidence: (1) The ten winners and fourteen runners up on the Skeptical Inquirer list of outstanding 20th century rationalist skeptics are all white males. (2) In the “science and the paranormal” section of the 2007 Prometheus Books catalog (it's the leading publisher of skeptical thought), there are 94 male authors and only 4 female. (3) Many studies report that men pray less than women and attend fewer church services. The same is true of whites in comparison with blacks. Conclusion? "Aggressive antireligious skepticism is predominantly a product of Euro-American White males, who often are expressing contempt for the beliefs of people quite different from themselves."

This, from one who "cherishes" skepticism and "cold" rationalism. The catch is that Myers also recognizes multiple forms of intelligence. Non-rational ways of knowing matter too, he says, and they are more prevalent among women. Research is showing that if you lose the emotional connection to thought, you lose judgment.

"Just the facts," says Myers in the manner of yesteryear's Joe Friday, and facts are the bridge he offers to skeptics and atheists. Behind his offer is the welcome recognition that they are not of a single type, any more than Christians are.

So who will respond to his "friendly letter"? If friendly types do (see Jonathon Haidt, for example), the results could be fascinating. No longer fundamentalist versus fundamentalist, enemies locking horns, unable to unlock, but data as Revelation meeting data as Reason. Some will complain, "This isn't Christianity" and some, "This isn't atheism." But a logjam will be broken.

The current issue of The Global Spiral, a publication of the Metanexus Institute, contains the complete review from which this post is adapted. Take a look.

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So the Christian Said to the Atheist . . .

2008-10-10T08:00:00.001-04:00

Maybe, just maybe, we have broken the logjam. This past summer I told you about a book in which a pastor and an atheist joined forces to spread a message of "evolutionary" Christianity. Their collaboration resulted from a connection of a different type: the two, Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, had recently married.

Now comes another book in the same spirit. David Myers, a Christian psychologist at Hope College, invites conversation and connection in a little volume called A Friendly Letter to Skeptics and Atheists. It's a ostensibly a response to Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation and other "culture war" books of that type, but it accords more with the Sermon on the Mount than any Christian response so far.

A member of the Reformed Church in America and a conservative on many fronts, Myers believes that everything must be subject to the test of "coming true." As Moses said, “If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord and what he says does not come true, then it is not the Lord’s message.” Data, then, are God's words. Let the chips fall where they may.

And the chips fall on many issues in the culture wars. Gay marriage, for example. Says Myers: (1) There is mounting evidence that sexual orientation is a matter of nature, not choice; it's a biological disposition that is well in place by birth. (2) The data say clearly that enduring marriage makes for happiness, the health of children, and the integration of societies. (3) The Bible contains 31,103 verses, over 2100 of which mention poverty and only 7 of which speak of same-sex behavior. Of those 7, none are the words of Jesus and none address enduring same-sex partnerships.

So, we say to our fellow people of faith: Should we not put on our social radar screens the concerns that Jesus had on his? What would Jesus do? . . . Rather than advocating a sexual double standard for straight people (marry or be celibate) and gay people (sorry, you must be celibate), why not proclaim a single Christian sexual ethic? Why not yoke sex with faithfulness? Why not seal love with commitment?

Christians distressed by that conclusion just might pray for Myers--except for the last ten years of research on "intercessory" prayer. It has uncovered no "God effect" on healing: in a variety of settings, patients who were prayed for fared no better than patients who weren't. (A study involving in vitro fertilization appeared to be an exception until two of its authors were found to be involved in fraud.) The negative results did not surprise Myers, who had predicted them in a notarized document before any of the research began. In fact, he says, a positive outcome would have conflicted with his Christian view of God. "The Lord's Prayer, the model prayer for Christians that I pray daily, does not attempt to control a God who withholds care unless cajoled."

Myers's approach is simple and direct. You test, you take the results as the word of God, you move. What's notable is the direction in which he moves when results clash with "Christian" ideas: not away from Christianity but toward it--toward its core, that is, toward the true meaning of Jesus' message, the true meaning of prayer.

"Get the beam out of your own eye," Jesus taught, and that is the approach Myers takes in A Friendly Letter. He has data for skeptic and atheist eyes as well (I'll sample some next week), but he wants to start the conversation here, on the Christian side. "If we have abetted poverty, injustice, climate change, genocide, or pointless war, then for shame," he says. Mea culpa. "We are guilty."

The current issue of The Global Spiral, a publication of the Metanexus Institute, contains the complete review from which this post is adapted. Take a look.

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St. Augustine, Meet the LHC

2008-09-19T08:17:00.011-04:00

"But how did Spirit get there?"
"It didn't get there, it was always there," said Dawn. "It had to wait, that's all." (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 30)

If you've been won over by the new Story of Everything, you've got to be watching the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva, which promises to reveal the secrets of Matter. You're watching it because of Matter's new place. It comes first in the story, "in the beginning," before there's even a thought of Spirit. In the leadoff spot there are daunting responsibilities. Sooner or later, Matter has to bring about consciousness, souls, our innermost being.

One way tellers of the New Story anticipate what's coming is by making Spirit inherent in Matter, even the original Matter:

If "dead" matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful powers. (Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey)

There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule. (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, A Sketch of a Personalistic Universe)

We might say that the simplest atomic structure, the hydrogen atom, already expresses a radiant intelligibility, a psychic as well as a physical aspect of reality. (Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts)

In this point of view, Spirit is destined to arise out of Matter. It comes after Life, so you'd be correct in calling it Matter's "third stage."

But Matter had to wait--a long, long time--to reach that stage. Which brings to mind the Christian saint Augustine, who lived from 354-430 CE. A teller of the Old Story, but far from a literal interpreter of Genesis, Augustine suggested that living things did not exist when God's creation was complete. Only their seeds were present, including the seed of the human body. In order to germinate, the seeds had to wait for the conditions of earth and water to be just right.

One thing was not seeded in the beginning, however: the human soul. In recognition of the tremendous leap that inner life represents, Augustine required a second creative act on God's part. In their own way, contemporary thinkers honor that same leap. Ken Wilber does when he says that "pure consciousness is not an emergent." And in a backhanded way Stephen Jay Gould does as well. Life, he says, was chemically destined to arise from Matter, but human intelligence was a random fluke. Play the tape of evolution a second time, you wouldn't get us at the end.

Seeds wait. Because Augustine's metaphor is so congenial to the fact of cosmic evolution, I have a suggestion for him. Why not come to Geneva and bring your commentary on Genesis? Shake hands with the folks at the LHC. Show 'em your book. Maybe they'd keep an eye out for your metaphorical seeds while they're picking up those pieces of proton. Maybe they'd shoot the breeze about the potential for Life. Maybe--it would knock your sandals off--they'd even bring up a potential for Spirit.

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Memo To Matter

2008-09-12T08:30:00.000-04:00

Memo To: Matter
From: JK
Date: September 12, 2008
Subject: The REAL Secret

The pressure is on, baby! Forget about the rack, forget about waterboarding. They've turned on the LHC and they're waiting for you. In case you haven't heard, or don't care, that would be LHC as in Large Hadron Collider. Or as in Let's Hear the Confession. You see, they want you to give up the secret.

I don't know why it came this. You used to be so simple, so solid, so there. I grew up seeing you, bumping into you, counting on you. Matter was the one reality I couldn't deny. Nobody could. But now I'm told you're sort of there. What's really there are atoms. And atoms are really protons, neutrons, and electrons. And protons, neutrons, and electrons are really gluons, leptons, mesons, muons, quarks--a whole zoo of nano-nano things, hadrons being in there somewhere. And all these subatomic things, deep down, are really something else. So why not spill the beans? Tell us what they are. Forces? Geometric points? Chunks of space-time? Strings of energy? Membranes? No one seems to know.

They're going to smack you around a bit to find out. Put you in the largest "experimental" chamber science has ever built. This sucker is seventeen miles in circumference and runs through two countries. Don't take my word for it, take a look. Pretty impressive, eh? You can feel important if you'd like, but I'd be terrified. They're going after the smallest stuff you've got. I don't know why it takes something so big to twist the truth out of something so little, but that's the deal. It's not how it works in outer space.

Right now they've shot a few of your protons into the LHC. They're shaping them into a beam and revving them up to the speed of light (well, 99.9999991% thereof). Sometime this fall they'll direct one beam into another and the demolition derby will begin. Six hundred million head-on collisions per second, each one spewing out thousands of particles. Sounds ouchy to me, but if that's what it takes to get you to talk . . . .

I can save you a lot of grief by telling you what they want. They want the secret. They want the Higgs. The Higgs field, the Higgs particle, the Higgs mechanism, whatever. They think the Higgs will tell them how energy converts into mass, how a "field" becomes a "particle," how Matter ends up as something we all bump into. Sounds like creation to me--and to them. That's why they call the LHC the Genesis machine. And why they call the Higgs the most fundamental particle there is, even the God Particle.

So if you've got a Higgs somewhere, fork it over. If you don't have one, if, omigosh, there is no Higgs, . . . well, let's not even go there. Once the LHC gets cooking, about a year from now, one ought to pop up every 2.5 seconds. Finding it will be the trick. It's not like a needle in a haystack, it's like a needle in a million haystacks. You could save us all some trouble with a few "Here" signs.

If you "cooperate," if you really start talking, you could even tell us about the Big Bang. And that's a big deal. But not as big as the REAL deal, the REAL secret. No one's talking about it right now, but shortly after the Bang you were nothing but hydrogen. That was the universe. The REAL secret is how you turned into opera, into love and hate, truth and lies, compassion and vengeance. How did hydrogen get around to reading memos? That's what I want to know, and I'm afraid the LHC will never get it out of you.

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Evening Thoughts

2008-08-01T09:13:00.000-04:00

Each time Adam touched a piece of the Story, he would see the hill where the oak once stood. He would see his grandfather's face. And he would ask, How can I take the words of a man I love and turn them upside down? How can I tell his Story backwards? (from The Story of Everything, Chap. 27)

It began in the morning. An 11-year-old named Thomas Berry had an experience of nature that led, in the afternoon of his life, to a New Story of the cosmos. Now Thomas is 93, a Passionist priest living in assisted care in Greensboro, North Carolina. It is late in his day. A former student, Mary Evelyn Tucker, has edited a collection of his papers and given them the title Evening Thoughts.

Tucker is currently co-director, with husband John Grim, of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University. Thirty years ago, after spending two years in Japan, she enrolled in Berry's History of Religions program at Fordham University. She is dedicated to Berry as one who has helped us all come home. "He has literally guided us back to our original place of birth, the universe itself."

Evening Thoughts is a simple way to enter the mind and heart of Tucker's lifelong mentor. All the themes are there: The universe as primary, humans as derivative. The universe as sacred text, more a source of revelation than any Book. Consciousness as "a dimension of the primordial atom." You will also find Berry's thoughts on the effects of nation-states and transnational corporations on the larger Earth community.

But, written as they were over many years, these aren't exactly Berry's evening thoughts. And, for some reason I cannot explain, I want to know what cultural innovators think in the evening of their lives. When they come to the end, what do they make of the journey? Berry wrote famously of being "in between stories." We know what his New Story is. What became of the Old?

In the course of their lives some innovators seem to leave the Old without a second thought. They focus on the New, as indeed they must if there's an ocean to be crossed. But . . . a leaving with no guilt, no pain, no fear, no sense of loss? I'd like to know more. How was the Old Story taken in as a child? How deeply, how securely? (This was a key in a study I made decades ago of Catholics who left their church.) And once they embrace the New, do thoughts of the Old return, thoughts of the land they left?

So I wonder: when Father Berry says Mass, if indeed he does, what goes through his mind? What does he make, for example, of the Christian redemption story on which the Mass is based, on which his very priesthood is? He has seen that story as a problem. Does it have a place, any at all, in the New Story?

Some bring the Old along, but redefine it. This is what Michael Dowd, in the middle of his journey, is doing with evolutionary Christianity. This was what the Catholics I studied who remained in their church did. Their original internalization of "Catholic" was deep and secure, and so as adults they wanted to remain "Catholic" no matter how unorthodox they became. They lost the doctrine but kept the name. In these cases, the question becomes, is this the Old in name only?

Some let the answer die with them. Why, we wonder. Why not speak of the Old? Because of a love for it? A sense of betraying it? Or, perhaps, to keep followers on board? All of us, to some extent, play the role of intergenerational buffer: we block the transmission of something that was instilled in us, something we find damaging or just no longer true. We carry the burden but do not pass it on. The Old dies with us.

Still, I'd like to hear about it. I'd like to glean some wisdom for the journey. What should you expect when leaving the Old? How can you be released from it? How bring it along, find it again at the end? These are truly evening thoughts. Some are destined to leave no trace. Some are more like seeds.

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Resurrection

2008-07-25T10:06:00.008-04:00

The words lie at the heart of Christianity: "If Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain" (1 Cor 15:17). What does the resurrection of Jesus mean in the evolutionary Christianity of Michael Dowd?

Dowd addresses the question by establishing criteria for reinterpreting religious symbols. New understandings, he says, must make sense naturally and scientifically. They must be true to experience around the world, not just within a given faith. They must inspire--both the religious and the nonreligious. Above all, they must validate the heart of earlier interpretations.

The heart. That's where the devil gets into the details. Can it be replaced while keeping a religion true to itself?

Dowd's approach works well with symbols of evil in Christianity: the Fall, Original Sin, Satan. Here the "language of the day" (science, reason, fact) translates readily into the "language of the night" (religion, myth, metaphor). Come at twilight and you'll hear a story you can indeed call "Christian."

But it's not so easy with the resurrection story. Like other miracle narratives, it is to Dowd a "meaningful night language expression of something about the nature of Reality." That something is this: pain and suffering can be redemptive, death is not the final word, one can transform troubled relationships and unjust social structures. To Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, the resurrection means that "something happened after the death of Jesus that had startling and enormous power."

One could extend this line of thinking. At the core of cosmic evolution lies a truth: death is generative. When early stars died, they produced the heavy chemical elements from which our earth was formed, from which its (carbon-based) life emerged. When mountains on that earth eroded, they produced the soils on which that life could root itself. As life sprang up, many forms went extinct. Had they not, earth's web of life would not have its present structure.

The death of Jesus takes this truth to another level. Extraordinary new things--a vision, an ethic, a church--came out of his death, out of all proportion to his life. These emergents can be verified historically. They "rose up." Nothing could be more generative.

But Christianity makes an additional claim: a body rose. It says it isn't metaphor but history. It says that Jesus ate. Liberal or conservative, one must at some point recognize what a tradition has been saying from the very beginning. Words must be honored, and here's the catch: what's night language to Dowd is day language to Christianity.

Dowd would claim that he is "validating the heart" of the resurrection story, that he is getting at the core of the doctrine. But who gets to say what the heart is, Dowd or the tradition? At its core--not Dowd's, not mine--the tradition says that Jesus rose, body as well as spirit. Nothing could be more central.

Dowd clearly loves his Christian heritage and holds it sacred. Jesus loved his heritage too, but there was an occasion on which he cautioned his listeners about putting new wine in old wineskins (Matthew 9:17). Sometimes you need a new vessel, a new name. It's a tough call.

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The Gospel According to Evolution

2008-07-18T09:30:00.003-04:00

Absorb it. According to Michael Dowd, that's what we're supposed to do with the New Story coming out of science. That's what religious traditions are "aching" to do. I'll wait for the aching. I suspect instead that the Story will seep into those traditions slowly, case-by-case, symbol-by-symbol. And the devil (you should excuse the expression) will be in the details.

Dowd, once a pastor but still an evangelist, is wasting no time with his own "evolutionary Christianity." His distinction between the language of the day (science) and the language of the night (religion) enables him to reinterpret symbols like the Garden, the Fall, Original Sin, and Satan (no need to excuse the expression, he says). Here's how it works.

First, some day language. Science reveals that our brain is an accretion of older brains. It evolved like a city, not from a master plan, but neighborhood by neighborhood. The first to arrive was our reptilian brain, consisting of the brainstem and the cerebellum. It's located down south. Above it grew our "old" mammalian brain (the limbic system), and above that the "new" mammalian brain or neocortex. What sets us apart is our fourth and newest brain, the prefrontal cortex. It lies behind the forehead. Take a look.

Our earliest brain keeps us breathing and looking out for safety and sex. The second gives us dreams and deep emotions. The third makes use of symbols; it's our chatterbox or "monkey mind." Our most recent brain is the source of consciousness and self-awareness, of purpose and planning, of complex choice. Neurologically, it's where your "I" resides.

The Biblical story of the Garden is "a superb night language description" of our brain's evolution, says Dowd. It captures the experience subjectively, from the inside. The story says that God led Adam and Eve to a place--a tree, it was--that knew good and evil. (Day language says our ancestors developed a prefrontal cortex, which enabled them to know the same thing.) The story says our parents "fell." They committed an Original Sin whose effects we have to live with, like it or not. (Day language says we've inherited the instincts of older brains, some no longer adaptive.) Is evil the serpent in the Garden or the reptilian brain? Dowd would answer unequivocally: it's both.

And Satan? Temptation "is something that every human experiences by virtue of having an evolved brain." Satan represents the dark side of our unchosen nature, the byproducts of its earlier brains. Seeing that side as "other," seeing it as personal, can help us deal with it. If we can give it a name, so much the better. It's how we get the heart involved, not just the head.

The day-night distinction reminds me of Stephen Jay Gould's NOMA strategy, and it works with these Christian symbols of evil. NOMA puts science and religion in separate compartments. Science here, religion there, and never the twain shall meet. But compartments leak and meanings mingle and Dowd rightly recognizes that we can tell but one story. That's what happens at twilight, and that's what can cause a problem in the gospel of evolution. I'll illustrate next week.

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The Pastor and the Atheist

2008-07-04T09:00:00.002-04:00

They met at a talk by Brian Swimme on the Universe Story. He was a pastor, an ordained minister of the United Church of Christ. Before that he had been a fundamentalist Christian and an ardent anti-evolutionist. She was a science writer and an atheist. An odd meeting, to be sure. What did they do? Get married.

It took a while, of course, but a few months after they tied the knot, Michael Dowd asked Connie Barlow if she wanted to become an evangelist. "Of evolution," added. Connie said, "I'd love to." So they took to the road, and for six years now have been bringing The Great Story to young and old--to agnostics, humanists, atheists, and freethinkers; to people of many religious faiths, liberal and conservative. I heard him speak at a Unitarian Universalist gathering.

Now Viking has just released a book that distills their message, Thank God for Evolution. It's loaded with endorsements from scientists (including Nobel Laureates), skeptics, seekers, and spiritual guides. It's worthy of all the attention. The book lays out where I was going to be five years from now. It got me there, with a few reservations, in a week and a half.

The story line is Thomas Berry's and Brian Swimme's (and that of others like Loren Eiseley before them) but it takes a step beyond. Berry said that the Great Story allows for the telling of all other stories. Michael Dowd says that all religious traditions are "aching" to absorb it. And then he takes that extra step, beginning an exploration of how one tradition--his own Christianity--would look with the story absorbed.

Simple distinctions open things up. If the universe is the Word, that Word is being revealed publicly to science and privately to religion. Moreover, science uses day language--that of facts and reason--while religion uses the mythical language of the night. Both languages are true, one objectively, one subjectively. For me, the public-private distinction limps at times, religion being far more collective than Dowd suggests. But the day-night distinction is clear and effective. I've used it myself to describe the workings of autobiographical memory, and it still evokes that haunting melody about the music of the night from Phantom of the Opera. Dowd uses both distinctions to frame the conflict between science and religion (and between religions), while giving all a place of honor.

Barlow and Dowd call their approach CREATHEISM. She's the creATHEIST, he the creaTHEIST. Creatheism has much in common with process theology and panentheism, but those, say the authors, have largely been confined to academia. Their approach could also be called the "gospel according to evolution."

I'll save the details for next week, but here's an indication of the spirit of this gospel. Dowd is a Christian who's proud of a connection with evolutionary biologist and evangelizing atheist Richard Dawkins. He includes in his book a different Dawkins from the one you may know. This one writes without anger about questioning tradition and relying on evidence, putting his thoughts in the form of a letter to his ten-year-old daughter. Dowd juxtaposes a quote from the Buddha.

Another indication is the story of an atheist's reaction to the Creation Evidence Museum, which was built near the site of dinosaur tracks in Texas. The atheist was Connie, and she was happy to be in this edifice of conservative Christianity, happy to see anything that provides meaning to "an otherwise 'amythic' and unstoried culture." Thus, she'd "rather have kids learn about evolution in meaningful ways in church than meaninglessly in school."

Thomas Berry said, you've got to hear the music of the New Story. Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow agree. Make it the music of the night, they say, and make it sacred.

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The Universe is the Word

2008-06-27T11:02:00.009-04:00

"Listen to this. Space and time shoot out from a point. In a matter of seconds, a universe is formed. It expands and expands. It slows down, it speeds up. And then, in some remote corner, it drops a speck of consciousness. It spills a little subjectivity. A touch of soul. Weird, eh?" (from The Story of Everything, Chap. 25)

Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme was working his way through a Greek salad when Thomas Berry suddenly said, "You scientists have this stupendous story of the universe. It breaks outside all previous cosmologies. But so long as you persist in understanding it solely from a quantitative mode you fail to appreciate its significance. You fail to hear its music."

An ear for the music led to a long collaboration between Swimme, now 58, and Berry, 94. Swimme established the Center for the Story of the Universe in California and the two co-authored The Universe Story in 1992. That's what the New Story was now called.

According to the authors, no book tells this story. No humans do. The text is nature itself. We are to read what's being said "by the galaxies, by the birds, by the Earth, by the winds, by the stellar explosions, by the fossils, by the rising and falling of mountain ranges, by the children of every species." These make up the Word.

Nature's text tells us that the cosmos has unfolded. From its original "flaring forth" it has gone through a series of stunning transformations, leaving atoms in its wake, then galaxies and stars and solar systems, then living cells and thinking selves. Each of these emergences was a decisive moment in the story. By reasons of its significance (look what it led to!), each was also a spiritual moment.

The unfolding had direction, "intention" even. It seems to have "aimed," for example, at greater differentiation. It's produced many different notes from a single one, all manner of Matter and Life from a hot and homogenous soup. Atoms and asteroids and ants, zebras and zucchini and Zen. It has related these different notes to each other. Atoms to atoms, zebras to zebras, cells to cells, selves to selves, you to me. The relationships, say Swimme and Berry, are based on attraction. They represent a kind of communion.

Selves like you and I illustrate a third direction of the unfolding: autopoiesis and subjectivity. Things in the universe organize themselves. Relate enough notes to each other and you get a melody. Increase the complexity and you get a symphony. The notes in the universe do it on their own. The more complex something gets, the more of an interior it develops--the more of a self, the more consciousness. In a human brain (the most complex object there is), a symphony isn't simply notes registering. It is an inner depth of subjective feeling.

Words like "communion," "self," and "subjectivity" are not standard cosmological fare. They are echoes of the music Berry once heard in a meadow. They are the stuff of spirit, not science. And it will take both, say the authors--science and spirit--to save our planet from the "technozoic" crisis that is leading to its devastation. An "ecozoic" vision is needed, a single story that tells of the universe as "a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects." Swimme and Berry ask us to reset priorities: "The well-being of the Earth is primary. Human well-being is secondary."

P.S. A scientific take on the direction of the universe appeared in the June issue of Scientific American--here. Keep your eye out next year for Brian Swimme's documentary film called The Heart of the Universe. Next week I'll tell you about the pastor, the atheist, and the Great Story.

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What Happened in the Meadow

2008-06-20T11:00:00.000-04:00

"I think I know," she said. "When the dust was ready, Spirit . . . like . . . breathed into it."
"But how did Spirit get there?"
"It didn't get there, it was always there," said Dawn. "It had to wait, that's all." (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 30)

Up until now I've been distinguishing Old and New Stories by asking how they begin. With an eternal Spirit, who creates Matter and Life? Or with Matter, from which emerge Life and Spirit?

In the New Story Spirit comes at the end. But therein lies a conundrum. Shouldn't something that emerges late in a development be present in what comes early--as a potential, say, or a seed? Hearing the New Story, a girl named Dawn concludes that Spirit was always in the cosmos. It was simply waiting to appear. Philosopher Friedrich Schelling thought of Spirit as "slumbering" in nature, only to awaken in mind and finally realize itself as Spirit.

There exists today a kindred cosmology. It's been called the New Story or the Universe Story or the Great Story. The names are interchangeable. As part of an organized movement, this cosmology seeks to redeem our ecological crisis. Spirit is inherent in Matter, it says; the universe has been sacred from its inception.

You can trace this cosmology back to North Carolina, where an 11-year-old boy crossed a creek into a beautiful meadow he had never seen before. A "magic moment" there (it seems to have been a mystical experience) proved decisive. He left with a simple idea that he carried for life. "Whatever fosters this meadow is good. What does harm to this meadow is not good." The year was 1925, and the boy's name was William Berry.

William changed his name when he entered the Passionist order of Catholic priests nine years later. He became Thomas in honor of Thomas Aquinas. After his ordination, he embarked on a remarkable education. First, a doctorate in western intellectual history, then a trip to China. He began teaching Asian religions in the United States and wrote books on Buddhism (1966) and the Religions of India (1971). Confucianism stood out for him because it expressed an "intimate relationship between the cosmic and the human." To the Chinese, he said, the human being is the "understanding heart" (hsin) of the entire universe.

Berry also developed an empathy for small indigenous religions and published a number of articles on native Americans. He found in these traditions a deep reverence for the land and all that lived on it, and a recognition of our dependency on it. Native people were a link to the meadow.

But the world had lost that link, and so at the age of 64 Berry called for a New Story of the cosmos. He published his summons in 1978 as the opening essay in a series on the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. It later became a Sierra Club book called The Dream of the Earth (1988). Evolution, said Teilhard and Berry, was not just a condition of life on earth; it was a condition of the universe. The cosmos isn't static and neither are we. Rather, we are part of a living, breathing cosmogenesis, sacred from the beginning, Spirit lying in wait.

Next week I'll tell you more about Berry's New Story and how it became the Universe Story. But right now the sun is shining outside my window, and I'm thinking it's time to find myself a meadow . . . and wait. Berry's was covered with thick grass and white lilies. Crickets were singing on that decisive day, woods were swaying gently in the distance, clouds floating across a clear blue sky. Says Berry, "It was a wonder world that I have carried in my unconscious and that has evolved all of my thinking." Something happened there.

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Jesus and the New Story

2008-05-30T13:00:00.000-04:00

Christians finding their way to the New Story, with its themes of evolution and emergence, face a daunting task of re-interpretation. How do they relate to the old, embedded as it is in Bible and Creed? What do they make of the stories? What do they make of Jesus?

Any number of writers are making that re-interpretation. One is Margaret Silf, whose Roots and Wings does so in a series of short, exploratory reflections. The book puts new wine in old wineskins, with all the perils attendant upon that process. Perhaps that's why she begins with the counsel, "Be not afraid."

Silf's revision opens with a walk through Eden, where she links the New Story to that ancient plot. When the serpent tempts, she is reminded of our lower "reptilian" brain. When Adam and Eve discover their nakedness, it's our hominid ancestors standing upright, exposing their tender undercarriage to possible attack. The curse of pain in childbirth? A narrow birth canal, the cost of the new bipedalism. Does Silf believe these meanings are actually in the Garden story? Sort of. To her, they are "other echoes" that the Genesis writer "had a hunch about" or perhaps articulated "unconsciously."

The major turnabout comes at the end: expulsion from Eden was not punishment but progress. Now homo sapiens had to toil and sweat to further its own evolution. Here, no case is made that "evolution" and "progress" are actually in Genesis. The wineskin is old, the wine entirely new.

Who, then, was Jesus, the "new Adam"? "This may be as far as the book goes for you," Silf warns. She reminds us that Jesus wrote nothing, left behind neither a philosophy nor a theology, established no form of government. Some would argue he established no church, founded no new religion. What he did leave behind was a spirit. "He entrusted the ongoing evolution of the human family to a few men and women who had understood who he was."

Silf's Jesus came up from the earth, not down from the heavens, and he did so just at the moment when homo sapiens was becoming spiritually aware. Jesus used the "lever" of love to shift the course of human evolution. Silf cannot accept the idea that he died to atone for sin. The God of compassion could not have demanded a blood sacrifice--the ultimate death penalty--to pay the price for some fall in the Garden 100,000 years before. Jesus was killed, rather, because he evoked the "shadow" side of a human nature incompletely evolved.

Did he rise from the dead? Silf imagines Jesus becoming a "wave of pure energy" that many call the Holy Spirit. He is the perfect model of where evolution is heading, or at least has the chance to head: a stage in which humanity fully reflects the divine life.

This is a new Christian story, and Silf is far from alone in telling it. The peril lies in the way it strains the old symbolic framework. At what point will the wineskins break? When is the story of Eden no longer the story of Eden? When does the figure of Jesus cease to be Jesus? The story cease to be Christian?

The New Story concepts of "evolution" and "emergence" are from the twentieth-century. For Christians to adopt them, they will have to take Jesus out of the categories of first century Jewish thought and bring him to the "gentiles" in a way Paul never imagined. The shifts in meaning may shock the orthodox, but they're no different from those that occurred in the first century after Jesus died. Arrange New Testament materials chronologically: the face of Jesus changes from first to last. Twenty centuries of art tell the same story. Risky business, this replacing of wine, but it's been happening from the very beginning. I think it's the only way a tradition lives.

Note: You can read the tales of science-spirit journeys by clicking here. The most recent is called "Journey Out of Religion." You're more than welcome to add to the collection.

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Reason? Or the Whole Life Experience?

2008-05-23T08:00:00.000-04:00

How many of are making journeys of the spirit? In February the Pew Forum reported that 28 percent of American adults had left the faith of their childhood--44 percent, if you included migration among Protestant denominations. Many ended up in other faiths, but 16 percent ended up in none. The amount of movement was staggering.

To hear the neo-atheists tell the tale--Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others--the only journey worth making is the one from religion to science. You "break the spell" of religion by embracing reason and evidence. If it sounds like a head trip, it is; and nothing could be farther from the truth.

People travel, not heads. Research I published decades ago, as scientific as you can get, showed that "pre-intellectual" or "a-rational" factors were the keys to transitions involving religion. The whole person made the journey, not just the faculty of reason. The whole life experience shaped the outcome.

The book containing this research will be re-issued this fall by Transaction/Aldine. The subjects were 100 young adults raised Catholic, 50 of whom remained in the church and 50 of whom did not. The two groups had received identical exposure to the church. The two acknowledged the same "evidence" about it. But now they construed that evidence in opposite ways. It wasn't a question of reason. Something came before reason. Something lay outside of it.

You can read a summary here, but the biographies of two famous scientists make the same point. When Charles Darwin boarded the Beagle at the age of 22, he was a firm believer in Genesis and had in fact completed studies for the ministry. Later in life he became an agnostic. He abandoned religion not because of any evidence he found on the Galapagos nor because religion was incompatible with his theory of evolution. Though he had given up a belief in creationism, Darwin left religion only when he beloved daugher Annie fell ill and died. He could not reconcile the loss with Christianity's claim that a good and loving God cares about every hair on our head.

As director of the Human Genome Project, Francis Collins led a scientific journey comparable to Darwin's. Yet his religious journey was nearly the opposite. At age of 22 Collins was an atheist, the son of freethinkers. He entered medical school and a few years later began having bedside conversations with sick and dying patients. Many were deeply religious and, despite their terrible suffering, they were at peace "Suddenly all my arguments [for atheism] seemed very thin," Collins wrote in The Language of God. "I had the sensation that the ice under my feet was cracking.'' He began an intellectual search that led to C.S. Lewis and ultimately to Christianity, where his faith survived a trauma, though not a death, involving his daughter. This was a journey of reason, science, evidence and . . . bedside conversations. Not a head trip, but a whole life experience.

The Metanexus Institute likes to talk about "the whole story of the whole cosmos for the whole person." If you tell such a story, it will come from everything that's happened in your life.

Note: You can read the tales of science-spirit journeys by clicking here. They've been submitted by readers, and most (but not all) are about traveling from Old to New. You're more than welcome to add to the collection.

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The Journey

2008-05-16T13:45:00.011-04:00

He was fifty years old, and he still didn't know how his own mind worked, what its deepest desire was. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 19)

I came to the science-religion dialogue as a scholar in neither science nor religion. My professional work was in psychology, and there I wrote books about the course of life, about memory for life events, and about the impact of lives on future generations. Somewhere along the line I left "scientific" psychology to record the tales of life's journey. They called it "narrative" psychology.

As I was finishing the last of those books, a story came to me. It came in several pieces over the course of several weeks. A title came, a character, a personification, a plot. The Story of Everything. When I told it to my wife, I wept.

I had no idea why the story moved me as it did, but I knew I had to write it. It took five years. I had a lot of science to learn and a genre to figure out, and besides, other things were going on in my life. At first I thought I was writing a children's story but then I realized it was a parable.

Only now do I realize why I was so moved. This was the tale of my journey. The events weren't autobiographical, but the energy surely was:

Story. Adam had no idea how often the word entered his mind and how seldom it escaped. He didn’t know how many beginnings and middles and endings were trapped inside of him, or how they kept lining up, now this way, now that. He didn't realize that, at his core, Matter was a story, not a science. Life was a story, too, not "biology." It was narrative, all of it, but Adam didn't know it. He was fifty years old, and he still didn't know how his own mind worked, what its deepest desire was.

Later, Adam was enlightened:

One morning at dawn, a low shaft of sunlight streaked through the valley where Adam was staying and outlined every flower, rock, and pebble. It was a solitary ray, and it lasted no more than a minute. But in that minute there awoke in Adam a solitary longing. Why that? he asked. Why now? It made no difference: he might as well have told the sun to go back down. For in that minute Adam learned which way from here. He learned what he had yet to do in life, perhaps what he was born to do. I am to speak a Story, he said, and he knew which story it was.

And yet he could not speak that story. Something had to happen first, and it finally did in a dream:

. . . When the sky began to panic, clouds came in and covered it, clouds so thick and low that he could hardly breathe. It began to rain.

Adam stood in the rain. As it came over him, he felt a cleansing. Something said, I forgive. And something else, I am forgiven.

Adam could not speak his story because it was new and he loved the old, even though it was deeply flawed. He had to forgive the old its sins. He needed forgiveness for abandoning it. Then he could speak "cleanly."

No matter how compelling the New Story, no matter how much the evidence behind it, there is still an Old to leave behind. You may say good-bye to it. You may say good riddance. You may feel regret. You may never look back. You may deny there was a leaving. The kind of departure depends upon the point of departure, on the ties that bound you to the place of origin. They can be complex, and they're all part of the journey, or at least they were of mine. Forgive and be forgiven.

Note: You can read the tales of science-spirit journeys by clicking here. They've been submitted by readers, and most (but not all) are about traveling from Old to New. You're more than welcome to add to the collection.

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The Ornament of the World

2008-04-18T13:18:00.009-04:00

In 955 a Benedictine nun named Hroswitha wrote of the marvels of a city far from her convent in Saxony. The city was Cordoba in present-day Spain, and Hroswitha called it "the ornament of the world." I'm struck by her metaphor.

Hroswitha learned about Cordoba from a man who came from there--a Christian bishop named Racemundo who was also called Rabi ibn Zayd. Racemundo was both a leader in his church and a diplomat in the corps of Cordoba's Muslim ruler. In 955 he was sent to the German court of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, and there he met Hroswitha. Racemundo spoke Latin and Arabic and knew the literature of the long-forgotten Greeks. He was a reflection of the ornament-city.

Exactly two hundred years before Racemundo's trip, in 755, a young Muslim of the ruling Umayyad family escaped the slaughter of his relatives by rival Abbasids. That was back east in Damascus. Abd al-Rahman fled west and wound up in Spain, in a frontier of the Islamic Empire known as al-Andalus, or Andalusia. A year later he became its emir. The House of Umayya had a new home.

Author Maria Rosa Menocal describes what happened next:

Abd al-Rahman . . . vigorously and uncompromisingly administered al-Andalus while refusing to play the games of tribal loyalties. In the long run his strategy succeeded brilliantly, and the result was (among other things) a thriving, powerful, and well-organized state, which he passed on to his heirs, and they to theirs, for a quarter of a millenium." (The Ornament of the World, p. 57)

At the heart of al-Andalus was Cordoba, known for its wealth, its military prowess, its palaces, its running water, its paved and well lit streets--but especially, wrote Hroswitha, "for its seven streams of wisdom." By one count, the caliph's library held four hundred thousand volumes, at a time when the largest in Christian Europe held a scant four hundred. Here Andalusians translated and eventually brought to the Latin West the lost works of the Greeks. The "Dark Ages" never cast a shadow on the ornament.

Cordoba was a city of tolerance. Despite intractable differences and enduring hostilities, Jews, Christians, and Muslims managed to live together in peace. And more: they blended cultures, as in the person of Racemundo. You could see it in their food, clothing, and language, in their philosophy, art, poetry, and song. Today it's visible in their architecture. (Take a virtual tour.) Cultures fused in Cordoba not because of interfaith dialogue but because beauty was allowed to cast its spell. The triumph wasn't doctrinal; it was aesthetic. Hence Hroswitha's methaphor.

Cordoba continued to shine even when bitter civil wars among Muslim factions destroyed the caliphate and fragmented al-Andalus. Christian power grew (the first Crusade was announced in 1095) but not at the expense of symbiosis in Andalusia. Even Ferdinand III took part. A Christian saint-to-be, he used a Muslim alliance to take over Cordoba in 1236. When he died, his son had his tomb inscribed not only in Latin, Hebrew, and Castilian, but also in Arabic.

Two weeks ago I wondered if science and religion could meet along the "Beauty Way." In Cordoba it appears they did. It wasn't the science of our day, but still it mingled freely with three different monotheisms. There was beauty in that mingling. Hroswitha chose her metaphor well.

P.S. You can learn more about the Andalusian story from the book (and upcoming PBS special) by Maria Rosa Menocal. The Metanexus Institute will celebrate this story at its forthcoming conference this July in Madrid. Menocal will be there.

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Lilies

2008-04-11T13:51:00.033-04:00

Last week, in the expanse of a desert, we were reminded of the beauty of Matter. This week, thanks to another reader, we can contemplate the beauty of living things. Dick Bayerl has had a long fascination with lilies and sent us these photos.

It's easy to get lost in the simple elegance of Lilium canadense, a wild variety found in eastern Canada. Design unfolds, but so does spontaneity. Is the combination a metaphor for all creation, for the cosmos itself?

According to the fossil record, flowers appeared out of nowhere about 125 million years ago. Chemical evidence in the record hints at an earlier date: 250 million years.

Flowers appeared as a way of attracting insects that would spread a plant's genes. It was a feat of co-evolution. This is Lilium henryi from China, and it "remembers" how to attract, over and over again.

Long after flowers emerged, humans came on the scene. They created hybrids--a feat of conscious design. This one is derived from Lilium henryi above. Now beauty exists not for the sake of genes, but for its own sake.

Be silent now and drink the beauty in. This flower lasts but a day.

How did the cosmos get around to growing lilies? Natural selection explains why these flowers look the way they do. It explains why I have the eyes to see them. But things are going on here that natural selection cannot reach.

Beauty is going on. The idea of it. The experience of it. The spirit of it. Not the kind of Idea that Plato had in mind, but close to it. In the New Story, beauty is an emergent. It depends on what came before--on genes and eyes and natural selection. But it cannot be reduced to them. When beauty becomes an Idea, something new starts to happen, something more, something "higher." Something causal. A reality is born.

Moments ago, in cosmic time, beauty emerged and began to circle an ordinary star in a remote region of the universe. Producing flowers was strange, but producing an idea was the oddest thing a universe could do. You just had one.

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Impossibly Beautiful II

2008-04-04T13:00:00.038-04:00

On my way to a writing a series about journeys, I stopped to reread comments about the Goldilocks Enigma. What was on the mind of readers? For several it was beauty, as it had been once before.

Reader Mark Thomas told me about a stunning collection of photos entitled Navajoland. (The photographer, Alain Briot, was good enough to let me post these samples.) "Who perceives what is beautiful?" Mark asked. "What is the code for beauty? Is it inherent in our DNA?"

Beauty lies in design, but what is the source of design? Above, one stone monument casts a shadow on another. The placement of the shadow is perfect, the design pleasing. Yet no intelligence planned it.

Here, a shaft of light enters an enclosed space. The required precision comes from "blind" nature. At Newgrange, another shaft of light enters an enclosure (take a look), but now the precision comes from human planning. Whether the source is blind or intelligent, I see little difference in the result.

Something about these photos were "eerily reminiscent" to Mark of Hubble space photos. Was it the expanse? The emptiness? The call from "out there"? In The Story of Everything the desert actually calls to Adam, telling him what to do in life.

How many similar calls have come in deserts? In desert caves? How many lie at the heart of religion? In this scene, is it the perspective that beckons? Or perhaps the focus on a single spire, a single shadow. Monotheism began in deserts.

Such calls are heard no matter what the season. What does beauty have to do with them? What does it have to do with religion? For that matter, what does it have to do with science?

Beauty lies at the core of neither. The universal religious commandment is not "Be beautiful" but rather "Be compassionate." Yet beauty is never far from religion. It permeates its art, its music, its architecture. It is seen in arches and pillars and spirals and domes, in stone that looks like lace.

Nor is beauty that far from science. Copernicus embraced heliocentrism not because it predicted planetary motion better than geocentrism (it didn't), not because he had proof of the earth's motion (he didn't), but because a sun-centered system was aesthetically pleasing. Similarly, Mark Thomas finds Planck units appealing because they're "beautifully simple."

This is from the Navajo Beauty Way ceremony:

On the trail marked with pollen may I walk
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk
With dew about my feet may I walk
With beauty may I walk

Walk with beauty and you may find a place where science and religion meet.

P.S. Be sure to see the work of Alain Briot at www.beautiful-landscape.com.

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The Pearl of Great Price

2008-03-14T13:44:00.018-04:00

All I know is where the cosmos is right now. Not at the beginning. Not at the end. But somewhere in the middle, two minutes after a most remarkable turn of events. (The Story of Everything, Chap. 25)

I'm dead-drop certain of one thing. Everyone agrees on it. Theists and atheists do. So do those who believe the universe has an outside, and those who don't. Also on board: those who endorse a strong version of the anthropic principle, those who endorse a weak version, and those who refer to it as the Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle (CRAP). Even Goldilocks would say okay.

Here's that one thing: the universe did produce an observer. It produced its own scientists, philosophers, theologians, poets, and storytellers. And, in cosmic time, it did it moments ago.

Right now we treat this indisputable fact like an old slipper. We're comfortable with it. We're used to it. We take it for granted. The wow factor disappeared millennia ago. We're not astonished by what is truly astonishing:

The man pointed down the coastline. "Look at all the sand on this beach. Suppose we came across a grain of sand, a single grain, that talked. How improbable would that be? How improbable that it existed? How improbable that we found it? One grain of sand is not the center of anything. But when one starts to talk, you've got to listen."

No slipper there. This character from The Story of Everything is not wowed by 400 billion galaxies (and counting), not by the trillions of stars they contain, not by God-knows-how-many planets. The universe is a veritable Sahara of sand, but he's astonished by just one grain. And with good reason.

It's almost impossible for us to get into this man's shoes and see the way he does. We carry too much history. For thousands of years, all we have known is the talking. We cannot, in fact, remember not talking. But only recently have we glimpsed all the sand. Of course we're astonished by the wrong thing.

So how can we put the sand in its place? How can we flip figure and ground? Here's a way of starting:

(1) Appreciate how out of place our talking is. I remember the first time I found sea shells embedded in sandstone in the middle of a southern Indiana field. I chipped a few out just to remember the eerie strangeness of it all. How in the world did they get there? Talkers circling a nondescript star are equally out of place. How did they get there?

(2) Appreciate how recent the talking is. On a scale where the age of the universe becomes one year, it began two minutes ago. All the stars and planets and galaxies aren't new. This bit of talking is. And it began--literally--right under our noses.

(3) Sell everything in your Story for this little grain. It's the pearl of great price. It's the rock-hard evidence. Forget about beginnings you weren't there for. Forget about endings you have no way of knowing. What was it like, this dawn of observing, of narrating?

"What's it like for a planet to wake up? And to do it for the first time?" That was the hard part, the impossible part, the man said--to picture the first time. "I can't imagine a first awakening. I've tried to do it, but I cannot. It's not like getting up in the morning. When you get up in the morning, you put on history, like clothes. Every day. But the first time . . . ."

I welcome the cloud that covers the beginning and the end of Everything. I'm happy, at the end of my life, to be in the middle. But I'm left in a quandary. What do I tell my grandchildren? It has to be something they will love, as I loved what I was taught as a child, but I don't yet know what it is. I honestly don't.

P.S. This is the last article in the Goldilocks-enigma series. I will be taking time off to prepare another series on journeys. In the meantime, I will post some thoughts on your latest set of comments.

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N=1

2008-03-07T12:01:00.009-05:00

I'm not a know-it-all, the Story realized that night on the cliff. I'm just a Story of Everything. (The Story of Everything, Chap. 21)

It's been fun guessing, but now it's time to nail the story down. We have here a universe that produced its own observer. It produced its own speaker, of that we can be sure, and it did so using hydrogen and a few other elements. Strange to our ear--why would hydrogen lead to a story?--but that's what happened.

The anthropic principle in cosmology, a.k.a. the Goldilocks enigma, gets you thinking about all that could or would have been. If X had been a little slower or Y a little stronger or just one number different, the universe would have ____ (FILL IN THE BLANK) ____. It reminds me of the years I spent listening to people tell the story of their lives. They would finish those "ifs" with everything from "I could have been a millionaire today" to "I wouldn't be talking to you today."

Coulda. Woulda. We're all Monday morning quarterbacks, but let's face it: we've got the life we've got and we've got the universe we've got--the one with the observer. That universe arose from what cosmologists call a singularity. N=1. There is no evidence for any other universes and it is proving impossible to test for their existence. There are regions in our own that we will never know about. They're retreating from us with ever increasing speed.1 So whether you talk about "other universes" or "unobservable regions" in our own, you're saying the same thing. You're saying "beyond our knowledge." N=1.

A life needs limits, and so does a story, and so, I suspect, does a cosmological theory. If N=infinity, there are no limits, no constraints. In a life, that means dissipation, and I think it does in a story as well. If everything is possible, then nothing is possible. Science has always felt constrained by evidence. Let's wait for the evidence to tell us that N=2 or 3 or more.

If we accept that N=1, certain things follow. There is no point in talking about "observer selection" effects in universes. There is nothing to select from. There is no point in calculating the odds behind our unlikely emergence. As the philosopher C. S. Peirce stated, "in reference to a single case considered in itself, probability can have no meaning." Indeed, if N=1, the anthropic principle (and the Goldilocks enigma) may have to be shown the door. They may be saying nothing more than, "If the universe were different, it would be different."

What becomes of God if N=1? What becomes of the one who presumably "designed" or "tuned" this cosmos? If you read the fine print in the fine-tuning argument, you'll discover a few key words. The values of the physical constants that shape our universe are arbitrary. They were free to be set. Someone had to dial up a number--to choose 186,282.397 for the speed of light, for example. There's also an assumption that the values are independent of each other, so that setting one doesn't automatically set the others.

But, according to cosmologist Paul Davies, a deeper understanding of the laws of the cosmos may show that these values aren't arbitrary at all. They may not be free and independent. In that case, the God who assigned the numbers will turn out to be, not a God-of-the-gaps, but a God-of-just-one-gap, the very first. He will be a symbol of our ignorance, and we will wonder, with Einstein, if an actual God had any choice when he created this universe. Another limit to our knowing.

Limits give a story a border of darkness, a blessed constraint without which we could not speak. Let's embrace that border. The other guys in the other universes can spin their own tales. Let's stick to the one we've got. N=1.

1. See "The End of Cosmology?" in the current issue of Scientific American for a discussion of the impact of an accelerating expansion on our ability to know the universe.

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The Three Bears Return

2008-02-29T12:01:00.011-05:00

Then how can all things be for man's sake? How can we be the masters of God's handiwork? (Johannes Kepler)

It's not a pretty picture. While Goldilocks is sound asleep, the three bears return to their house. "Someone's been eating my porridge," growls Papa Bear. "Someone's been eating mine," says Mama Bear. "Someone ate all of mine!" cries the baby. They find the broken chair and the messy beds. Just as they spot Goldilocks, she wakes up and screams. Then she runs out of the house and into the woods, never to return.

That's the tame version. In the older, R-rated edition, Goldilocks jumps out of a second story window when she sees the bears. "Whether she broke her neck in the fall; or ran into the wood and was lost there; or found her way out of the wood, and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her."

The story after which a cosmological enigma is named is actually a cautionary tale. In case you missed the warning, here it is: "Goldilocks, don't assume the porridge is for you. Or the chairs, or the beds, or anything in the house. They're not yours."

Should we take similar warning? Are we "the masters of God's handiwork," as Kepler asked? Is the universe for us?

You know how we came about. The very first stars baked up carbon in their furnaces, then died and sent it into space. A second generation of stars gathered it up and generated heavier elements, only to die and repeat the process. The spatial debris coalesced into a third set of stars--but also into planets, our own included. From there our kind of life (carbon-based) could emerge, and finally us, the surveyors of it all. On a scale where 13.7 billion years is reduced to 1 year, it took until December 31 and roughly 11:57 PM to get to us. That's a whole lot of time.

And it's a lot of space. All throughout that cosmic year the universe never stopped expanding, and it's doing so now at ever increasing speeds. In this game old equals big, so if the universe were any smaller (i.e., any younger), we would not be around. To get its observer, to get its story, the cosmos had to be immense.

It took a long time, a convoluted route, and gobs of space. If the point was to get to us, wouldn't there be a simpler way? Why bother with all the rest? Why not just . . . make us?

There are many answers to that question, and they could be placed on a continuum from "weak" to "strong" anthropic principles. But I can't say if we were "an accident waiting to happen," as a character in The Story of Everything does; or if the universe "must have known we were coming," as physicist Freeman Dyson does; or if "our conscious self-reflective existence is part of God's intention," as astronomer Owen Gingerich believes.

But I am not above heeding a warning from three storybook bears (especially the big growly one). Don't assume it's all for you. The universe may be for God, it may be for living creatures, it may be for itself, but it's not for us alone. There's just too much of it. Maybe the bears are saying that other creatures count too. What matters is the good of the whole.

And yet no other creature has the consciousness and freedom that we do. If creation isn't for us, maybe at this point it's up to us. At least the planet earth is. Our decisions have affected its present condition and will matter even more in the future. Listen to nature growling and you'll end up with the Biblical notion of stewardship.

Note: You can lend your signature to a movement of those who believe the earth is up to us at TheEarthAct.org.

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You Call This Friendly?

2008-02-22T12:01:00.012-05:00

listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go
(e.e. cummings)

Let's do the math. Two bowls of porridge were wrong for Goldilocks. Two chairs were wrong, and so were two of the beds. I forgot . . . when Goldilocks sat in Baby Bear's chair, it broke. Put that chair in the "wrong" column too, making Goldilocks two for nine. Only 22% of the house she found in the woods was right for her.

How much of the cosmos is right for us? How much is wrong? You can do the math or just take a walk in space, no equipment allowed. The math would go like this. Calculate the amount of space in the universe. Calculate how much is occupied by creatures like us, or observers of any kind (SETI is having a hard time finding them). Divide the latter by the former. You'd get one of those astronomical numbers. A decimal point followed by lines of zeroes, then a 1, then the % sign. An unprotected walk in space would make the same point. It's not a "bio-friendly" universe.

Yet that's the term cosmologists use, whether they think there's a Who outside or many whats. Midway through the Goldilocks enigma--I'm still flying by the seat of my pants--I want to think about that. I want to think about words like "just right" and "benevolent." Theoretical cosmology is mathematical, and its practitioners are really smart guys, but at some point they use language--my language--and that's where I'm entitled to a say. Here are some reflections.

1. The initial conditions of the universe were just right for lots of things. They were just right for toothpaste and barges and YouTube and lower interest rates. If you're going to talk about an "anthropic" principle, said Carl Sagan, you should talk about a "lithic" principle as well, since the initial conditions of the universe were perfectly right for stones. Take any outcome of any kind, dig into its history, and of course its origins will be just right.

2.The odds will always be astronomical. In 1969 I went to a convention, walked up to a desk, and started talking to the person standing next to me. If I had arrived at that precise place a minute sooner or a minute later, the conversation would not have taken place and my life today would be very different. As far as odds go, that's just the tip of the iceberg. What had to be right, years before, for the person I met to be born? For me to be born? For his parents? For my parents? And so on. Don't be impressed by all the zeroes: any outcome of any kind has overcome incredible odds.

3. If the initial conditions were just right for good, they were just right for evil. They were just right for terror and torture, for tsunamis and Katrinas. This is a universe with mixed outcomes. If you call it benevolent, you have to call it malevolent as well. This is a problem for believers in the Who outside, a problem that goes by the name of theodicy.

Maybe it's the earth that's bio-friendly, and not the entire universe. The dinosaurs might think so, their demise having come from outer space. But what about all the other species--over 99% of the total--that have gone extinct? It seems that life on our planet proceeds by eliminating other life. There ought to be a friendlier way. And while the earth is habitable now, it won't always be, even if we take good care of it. When the sun begins to die billions of years from now, it will become a red giant, and its outer edge will reach the earth's present orbit.

I'm not in a gray wintry mood, just in a mood for perspective. I want to get the story straight. It isn't lush out there in space. It isn't a rain forest. It's a near vacuum and it can get down to three degrees Kelvin and that's really cold. To say that the universe as a whole is "bio-friendly," much less observer-friendly, is myopic. How about "bio-tolerant"? Barely bio-tolerant? Just barely? The universe had the stuff to make us, but if it's friendly, it has a funny way of showing it.

Note: Paul Davies addresses degrees of bio-friendliness on p. 174 of Cosmic Jackpot. From the multiverse point of view, he says, it is likely that our universe is "marginally," rather than "optimally," bio-friendly.

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The WHAT Outside

2008-02-15T12:01:00.010-05:00

If there is a large stock of clothing, you're not surprised to find a suit that fits. If there are many universes, each governed by a differing set of numbers, there will be one where there is a particular set of numbers suitable to life. We are in that one. (Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, in Just Six Numbers)

Every now and then a universe happens. What's the big deal? A lot have happened, a lot are happening, and a lot more are going happen. All have different initial conditions and different laws. All are governed by different numbers. Only one set of numbers produces a universe with an observer.

Welcome to the second solution to the Goldilocks enigma. It addresses the statistical improbability of our universe without turning to divine providence. If the odds of a universe like ours are one in a gazillion, well, there are zillions of other universes out there. To use last week's analogy, there are zillions of other firing squads we know nothing about. In the vast majority of them, all the marksmen hit the target. In a few, a couple of marksmen miss. In a handful, the majority of marksmen miss. In one, they all miss. Simply the laws of probability.

What will the one man who survived the firing squad tell his grandchildren? What will be his story? "Somebody gave me a break" or "God had other plans" but not "It was an accident." He may fish for the reasons but he'll believe they're there. He will discount accident because he doesn't know about the other firing squads and cannot grasp the odds. Perhaps he just feels grateful and needs someone to thank.

Now think about the Cosmic Jackpot, which it seems we have hit. Solution #2 says it looks like someone made a conscious decision. It looks like there were reasons. It appears that someone wanted to give the universe an observer. But appearances are deceiving because we don't know about all the other universes. There may be an infinity of them, making up a multiverse. Most are sterile, but once in a great while one of them produces life and mind. Simply the laws of probability.

Solution #1 posited a Who outside the universe. Solution #2 posits many whats. It says there were houses in the woods that the story of Goldilocks forgot to mention. Nearly all were wrong for her. She chanced on the one that was right.

The multiverse theory wasn't developed to solve the Goldilocks enigma. In fact, the idea of many worlds goes back a long way. It was one of the reasons Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome in 1600. He embraced theological heresies as well, and he believed with Copernicus that the earth traveled around the sun.

Fifty years ago physicist Hugh Everett proposed a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, in which the universe sprouts countless branches with different events occurring in each. Most physicists dismissed the idea, and Everett left physics," though his thesis advisor, John Wheeler, tried to keep his idea alive.

Today, string theory and inflationary theory have gotten physicists thinking multiverse again, proposing ways that universes happen. For some, those universes remain possibilities. (Leibniz had this idea in the 17th century, saying that God chose among the possibilities.) But others say the universes actually exist, right alongside ours. Some are pictured as bubbles popping out of an eternally inflating space. I see Goldilocks' house standing in a row of condos.

On the Goldilocks map, the multiverse position lies close to the designer position. There is no evidence for those condos, or those bubbles, or any of those other universes. If no one has seen a Who outside the universe, no one has seen a what either. The Goldilocks Enigma is about an observer who is not in a position to observe the outside.

What, then, is left for this observer? What kind of knowing? Speculation? Conjecture? Inference? If you believe the equations in the bubble universe are real, the best descriptor is faith. Faith was part of solution #1. Faith is part of #2. If the cosmos has an outside, it's seems the only way to get there.

P.S. Billy Grassie, founder of Metanexus, offers another layman's take on the multiverse here. A "cosmotheological" view can be found here.

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The WHO Outside the Universe

2008-02-08T10:38:00.005-05:00

To my mind, there must be at the bottom of it all, not an utterly simple equation, but an utterly simple idea. And to me that idea, when we finally discover it, will be so compelling, and so inevitable, so beautiful, we will all say to each other, "How could it have ever been otherwise?" (Physicist John Archibald Wheeler)

Philosopher John Leslie approaches the puzzle of our just-right universe with a parable. A firing squad of 50 aims at one condemned man. The commander yells "Fire!" and everyone shoots. They all miss! The condemned man walks away.

What are the odds of that? No different, we are told, than the odds behind a universe that produces its own observer, as ours produced us. How do you explain either? Accident, colossal randomness? Or did agents act on purpose, with intelligent missing on the one hand, intelligent design on the other?

In The Language of God geneticist Francis Collins says it was no accident. If you conclude the soldiers missed on purpose, you have to conclude a designer designed on purpose. Collins rejects the Intelligent Design movement and its God-of-the-gaps, but he accepts the basic design argument that goes back to Aquinas and Aristotle and squares with Genesis 1. This argument leads to a Who "outside of space and time." It leads to God.

In God's Universe, astronomer Owen Gingerich travels much the same road, seeing the hand of intelligent design (but again, not Intelligent Design) in the cosmos. Both "efficient" and "final" causes are at work, he says. Why does water boil in a kettle? Is it (A) because heat causes water molecules to move around faster and then escape as gas? Or is it (B) because somebody wants some tea? Both, says Gingerich, after John Polkinghorne. (A) is the efficient cause, which science can probe. (B) is the final cause, which science cannot. When it comes to the universe, both point to a Who outside.

Where does this Who fall on the map of the Goldilocks story, the one for whom the puzzle of incredible odds is named?

Let's start with "causes." When Goldilocks discovers the just-right porridge, she doesn't ask, "How did it get here?" The question of efficient cause never crosses her mind. She is, you should excuse the expression, naively teleological. She goes right to final cause. What is the porridge for? Her actions reveal her answer.

It's the story itself that addresses efficient cause. The porridge was cooked (and the chairs and the beds made) by two adult bears. The house was their idea. They designed it. They built it from scratch. They furnished it. They created Baby Bear.

Baby Bear represents biological complexity, the kind that's most compelling to design adherents. Gingerich points out that the human brain is the most complex object in the cosmos, with far more connections than stars in the Milky Way. To Collins, the DNA that built that brain is "the language by which God spoke life into being."

All this is compatible with the tale of Goldilocks, but she's got something that we do not. She's been outside her just-right house. We have not. We can't get to the edge of the universe any more than we can get to its center. There isn't a wall to poke our heads through. But in the argument from design, and in the traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there is indeed an edge. There is an outside.

How can we know it? Take a leap of faith, say Collins and Gingerich. Make it reasonable, but take it. Both men are Christians.

Keep their answer in mind when you read next week's solution to the Goldilocks enigma. It doesn't involve a Who but a what--many whats, in fact. They're not deities but still they're out there. The same question will loom: How can we know the outside?

P.S. Another scientist who gives the answer Who to the Goldilocks enigma is Gerald Schroeder. You can learn about his work, and the opening quote from John Archibald Wheeler, here.

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Goldilocks Comes to Cosmology

2008-02-01T12:01:00.017-05:00

"Listen to this. Space and time shoot out from a point. In a matter of seconds, a universe is formed. It expands and expands. And then, in some remote corner, it drops a speck of consciousness. It spills a little subjectivity. A touch of soul. Weird, eh?" (from The Story of Everything, Ch. 25)

You know the tale. A little girl is walking in the woods and comes upon a house. She knocks on the door but gets no answer, so she walks in and looks around. On the kitchen table she finds three bowls of porridge. One is too hot for her taste, one is too cold, but the third is just right. In another room she tries out the chairs. A couple are too big, but again, one is just right. Then it's the beds--one too hard, one too soft, one just right. In fact, the third bed is so right that the little girl falls asleep in it, her tummy full of porridge.

You may know the story of Goldilocks, but you may not know that it's found a home in cosmology. That's because theoreticians are struck by a weird coincidence: the initial state of the universe, nearly 14 billion years ago, was also just right--just right for us, that is. It was just right to produce observers of the universe long after its beginning. Just right to "drop a speck of consciousness." Had the value of any physical constants been off by a hair, we would not be around.

For the record, this coincidence is usually called the anthropic principle, although the man who coined the term, theoretical physicist Brandon Carter, later regretted it. Early treatments of the subject include Carter's own, which suggested that the basic laws of the universe were fine tuned for life, Martin Rees's Just Six Numbers, and The Anthropic Cosmological Principle by John Barrow and Frank Tipler. Recent treatments include Paul Davies' Cosmic Jackpot and God's Universe by Owen Gingerich. It's Davies who likes to talk about the "Goldilocks enigma."

What was so finely tuned in the beginning? Energy from the Big Bang, to start with. Had it been greater, matter would have rushed apart too fast for stars and galaxies to form. Had it been less, gravity would have pulled the matter back and the universe would have collapsed. "If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size," wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. The rate had to be that precise . . . and it was.

The list of coincidences can get pretty long. The speed of light was precisely right. So were the strengths of the "fundamental" forces--gravity, electromagnetism, and two confined to the nuclei of atoms. Had any been off by 1 or 2%, we would not be here. According to Davies, the "biggest fix" of all involves dark energy, the name given to whatever drives galaxies apart at an accelerating rate. The odds of its value being just right? Four hundred flips of a coin. If you want a universe that produces us, he says, they all have to come up heads.

And they did. Why? That's the Goldilocks enigma.

I wonder what was in Goldilocks' mind when she first looked around the house she had found. Did she think that someone had cooked the porridge just for her? And what about us? Should we think that someone has cooked the books on our behalf?

The internet is full of travelers discussing this question. But no one has made the trip with Goldilocks, as I will do in the weeks ahead. Her story, the whole of it, has something to offer. Goldilocks has been outside her just-right house. She was, in fact, born there. Not us. We were born inside the universe, we grew up inside, and we remain there. There are no windows in this house of ours. There are no doors. We don't even know if our universe has an outside.

Point of view matters in this enigma. It helps to think "outside the box," but in this case we're in the box and can't get out. Standing where we are--and with no windows--we ask, why are we at home in this cosmos of ours? Why do we find those settings on the dials? And what about the porridge?

P.S. For a short version of the Goldilocks story, click here. For a longer version, with history, annotations and variants, click here. For a theologian's view of the anthropic principle, try this by Nancey Murphy; it's from The Global Spiral, an e-publication of Metanexus Institute.

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A Solitary Ray

2007-12-21T12:01:00.002-05:00

One morning at dawn, a low shaft of sunlight streaked through the valley where Adam was staying and outlined every flower, rock, and pebble. It was a solitary ray, and it lasted no more than a minute. But in that minute there awoke in Adam a solitary longing. Why that? he asked. Why now? (from The Story of Everything, Ch. 19)

Tomorrow at precisely 1:08 A.M. EST the winter solstice will come. I'll be asleep on the earth's northern hemisphere, halfway up from the equator, taking advantage of the year's longest night. I won't be feeling the 23.5 degree tilt of the earth that creates all this friendly darkness. Tomorrow, if the sky is clear, I'll follow the sun through its lowest trajectory of the year. This is the point at which the sun "stands still," sol-stice coming from the Latin for sun-standing-still.

What actually stands still is not the sun but the arc that it follows from dawn to dusk. That arc has been falling for six months now and the standing-still is the pause before it reverses direction and begins again to rise. The complementary pause comes six months later, at the summer solstice, when the arc stops climbing and begins another descent.

From the beginning of recorded history, festivals of light have celebrated the winter solstice. Other celebrations--
Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa and, this year at least, Eid-ul-Adha--appear in the calendar around the time of such festivals. Perhaps the original idea was to beg the gods to remove the threat of perpetual night. Today the meaning is more symbolic: we need the Light that wipes out fear, despair, ignorance and evil.

While festivals exist to celebrate the summer solstice, they do not say, "Enough of the light!" None implores for winter's reverse. None asks for more darkness. None begs the sun to fall. Who would want symbolic night--fear, despair, ignorance, evil?

It goes against the spirit of both solstices, then, to express a longing for the dark, as I have done here and here. The darkness I love, of course, is not moral darkness but the darkness in our knowing. All I ask is that we see it. All I ask is to be rid of false illumination--to resist the temptation to take theories, mathematical models, hypotheses, the words "could have" and "may have" as evidence. Let us continue to speculate, but until the evidence is in, why deny the dark?

In Ireland there's a circular mound, 5,000 years old and about the size of an acre, called Newgrange. (Be sure to see it.) Newgrange is less well known than its English cousin, Stonehenge, but it's a bit older--older even than the Egyptian pyramids--and it's just as great a mystery. At dawn on the winter solstice Newgrange receives a ray of sunlight deep into its central chamber and reveals intricate carvings of spirals and discs. That solitary ray lasts for 17 minutes a day, from the 19th to the 23rd of December.

Seventeen minutes a day, five days a year. That's it. The rest is darkness. Is light that reaches so deep worth that long a wait? It's not more light that I celebrate at the winter solstice, but the coming of light like that.

I wish you Light during this holiday season, and I thank you for your support in 2007.

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It Slumbers

2007-11-23T09:58:00.002-05:00

In the quiet that followed, Adam could almost see his granddaughter's mind at work, turning the Story over and over. Suddenly, she bolted upright. "I think I know," she said. "When the dust was ready, Spirit . . . like . . . breathed into it."

"But how did Spirit get there?"

"It didn't get there, it was always there," said Dawn. "It had to wait, that's all." (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 30)

What makes up Everything? For Bill Bryson, it's Matter, Life and a touch of Spirit. For Harold Morowitz, it's Matter and Life, with Spirit coming on strong. Ken Wilber strikes a different proportion. Ninety percent of his A Brief History of Everything--the last in this series of "Everything" books-- is about Spirit.

Wilber is a philosopher who dropped out of a biochemistry major in college to write his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, at the age of 23. Consciousness and integral thinking have been his abiding interest since, over the course of two dozen books. Much of his work is summarized in A Brief History of Everything, which was published in 1996. I read the revised edition, published in 2000.

The history that Wilber covers--moreso, interprets--is indeed that of consciousness, traced through philosophy, mainly from the West, and spirituality, mainly from the East. But playing in the background, and sometimes coming to the fore, are the sciences of Matter and Life, which complete his cosmology.

That cosmology begins with the Big Bang and Matter. Then comes Life, an emergent or holon that is "higher." Then comes (depending on which page you are reading) "mind and Spirit" or "mind, soul, and Spirit." No surprises so far: this is New Story all the way, with gradations once you get past Life.

But wait: there's a stunning sentence on page 179, six words that turn the story upside down. "Pure consciousness is not an emergent." Not an emergent, says Wilber. Nor is Spirit, the equivalent of pure consciousness. If Spirit is not an emergent, it's more than just the end of the story. It is also, in some way, the beginning.

What is Spirit? Wilber is liberal in his referents. It is Self, Subjectivity, the Ultimate I, the I-I, Emptiness. It is pure Witness, pure Seer, pure Presence. It is Buddha, Christ, God and Goddess, Tao and Brahman. It is the support, the cause, the creative ground.

For being so much, Spirit does very little . . . for a while. "Spirit slumbers in nature, begins to awaken in mind, and finally recognizes itself as Spirit." The metaphor of slumber comes from the German idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854):

Schelling's key insight was that the Spirit that is realized in a conscious fashion in the supreme identity is in fact the Spirit that was present all along. . . . At each stage Spirit unfolds more of itself, realizes more of itself, and thus moves from slumber in nature to awakening in mind to final realization as Spirit itself.

Interestingly, Alfred Russel Wallace, who hit upon the idea of natural selection independently of Darwin, "always maintained that natural selection itself was not the cause but the result of 'Spirit's manner and mode of creation.'"

Spirit at the beginning of the story. Spirit at the end. Spirit all along the way. The template is neither "old" nor "new," but this may be the story our children tell when their time comes. They ought to love the metaphor of sleep because they are part of the awakening.

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The Other "E" Word

2007-11-16T12:01:00.002-05:00

There's everything. There's evolution. But the key to the New Story may be an e word lurking in the shadows. It's emergence, the subject of a book by Harold Morowitz entitled The Emergence of Everything, the second in our series of "Everything" books. Emergence is evolution on steroids.

The concept of emergence addresses how you put elements together and wind up with something more. Take two hydrogen atoms, add one of oxygen, and you get something cool to drink on a hot summer day. That's more than dihydrogen oxide. Run hydrogen atoms through a series of emergences, do it over 13 billion years, and you get a whole lot more. You get us.

It works something like this. To my right is a dot. It's an element, the simplest of beginnings.

Now here's the dot combined with others. If I asked what you were looking at, you'd probably say "an x." That's more than dots; it's a letter of the alphabet. The letter is an emergent-- like water, or like a living cell that arises from a collection of chemicals.

Take it to the next level. Arrange the x's a certain way and you get a second emergent, this time a triangle. The dots are still there (very small now), the x's are still there, but now there's something new--a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Next week's author, Ken Wilber, calls it a holon. A holon isn't reducible to dots.

In a Story of Everything--the New version--you substitute Matter, Life, and Spirit for dot, x, and triangle. Life emerges from Matter. Spirit emerges from Life. Each is more complex than what preceded it. As the narrative of the cosmos moves along, the emergents become richer, more interior, more subjective, deeper--until you have something called Mind or even Spirit.

Harold Morowitz is a biophysicist involved in the study of life's origins. But in The Emergence of Everything he writes as more than a biophysicist. Every now and then you hear the voice of a philosopher, even a theologian. This is a whole person speaking, one who wants to "go beyond the obvious" and align himself with those who seek nothing less than to "know the mind of God." Morowitz regards his "speculative scholarship" as a calling.

How many emergents have arisen in the history of the cosmos? It all depends on how closely you look. Somewhat arbitrarily, Morowitz picks 28, from the formation of particles, stars, and solar systems to the formation of hominids, tools, language, and philosophy.

Emergence number 28, underway now, is Spirit, and here Morowitz acknowledges a debt to the vision of Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit paleontologist. Spirit is not defined, except to say that it goes beyond Mind, or Teilhard's "noosphere." Call me a heretic, says Morowitz, but as we emerge so does God. In a phrase whose meaning escapes me, he repeats, "We are the transcendence of the immanent God." He simplifies once: "We are God."

To be sure, the God that comes at the end of the story isn't the God of our traditional faiths. But Morowitz contends that science has forced us to rethink God. God cannot be a one-time creator nor can he ever rest, as on the seventh day in the Genesis narrative. He cannot rest because creation continues to occur. Each new emergent is in fact a new creation.

The subtitle of Morowitz's book--in places dense, in places accessible--is How the World Became Complex. What I'd like to know is why the world became complex, why evolution proceeds in the direction it does. I imagine that Morowitz would like to know this too. That, after all, is the nature of his calling. He wants to know the mind of God.

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Pluto and the Pea

2007-11-09T14:10:00.002-05:00

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is popular science writing at its best. In a series of short stories he visits the players and events behind the great discoveries that go into a Story of Everything. There are unsung heroes and liars (Edwin Hubble, no less!), Nobel laureates and janitors, and someone (Linnaeus) so obsessed with sex that he names a genus of plant Clitoria. The book is not, as the title suggests, a history of everything, but rather a history of how we got to know everything. In Bryson's hands, that history is fascinating.

It's fascinating not merely because of the drama but because Bryson has a way of communicating scale. Take the solar system. In depictions like this one, where Earth is the size of a pea, the giant Jupiter is located a few inches away and Pluto a few inches beyond that. But if the solar system were drawn to scale, Jupiter would be a thousand feet from a pea-sized Earth and Pluto would be a mile and a half. You wouldn't be able to see Pluto because it would be about the size of a bacterium. Scale matters.

It matters more in our knowledge. How much of that dinosaur skeleton you see in a museum is actual fossil and how much is plaster? Answer: in practically every case, it's all plaster. Closer to home, how much of the story of human lineage is fossil and how much (theoretical) plaster? Answer: the total world archive of hominid and early human bones--coming from roughly 5000 separate individuals--could fit in the back of a pickup truck. Even the heralded Lucy skeleton, a 3.2 million year old Australopithecus, is only 20% complete, 28% if you strip out bones that are redundant. Here's a look at her reconstructed skull. A BBC series called the skeleton "complete."

Scale in our knowledge is the ratio of light to dark, of evidence to the lack of it. The hard part is seeing the lack. I'm thrilled by the story of human evolution, but I have to recognize the enormous gaps in the fossil record. Some equate to the distance between Pluto and the pea. I don't want God to fill in the gaps but I don't want plaster either. If there is darkness, let it be.

Bryson is guided in his book by the New Story template--first Matter, then Life, then Spirit. How did life come out of matter? Quite naturally, say Bryson's sources, maybe inevitably. The age of the earth is 4.6 billion years; the first record of life appears at 3.85 billion. Once conditions were right, it didn't take long for life to get going.

And so evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould can say that bacterial life "was chemically destined to be." And biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve that life is "an obligatory manifestation of matter, bound to arise whenever conditions are appropriate." Curiously, when it comes to intelligent life, Gould does a flip-flop (I don't know about de Duve). Life was destined to come out of matter, but the next emergence, homo sapiens, was a random fluke.

Curious indeed, at least to this outsider. Why should one transition be a matter of destiny and the other an accident? But let's put both in scale. If the cosmos is like the Sahara, matter is its sand. We know so far of only one grain that's given rise to Life and Spirit. If we're in the dark about all the others, who's to say what's inevitable? Who's to say what isn't?

Inevitable or not, Spirit is beyond the scope of Bryson's book. As a science writer, he ends his engrossing tale at Life. That's "nearly" Everything, he says in his title, but by my calculus it's far from it. So let's change the title. How We Got to Know Two-Thirds of Everything would be more accurate. It's what Bryson covers--in scale, like Pluto and the pea.

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A Blog is a Gumball

2007-10-19T12:01:00.003-04:00

Chicago, late 1940s early '50s, St. Margaret Mary's, the wooden desks. I can still see the dark scratches on the surface, the narrow groove for pencils, the hole about the size of a silver dollar in the upper right hand corner. That was the ink well, but in eight years I never saw a drop of ink.

Several times a year we played musical desks and everybody ended up in a new one. The first thing you did, without looking, was stuff your workbooks into the space beneath the surface. Then you looked for a smooth spot somewhere on top. Good luck. Eventually you checked out the underside, and there they were. The lumps. Gumballs. Most were hard, with a sort of dusty covering. You could pry them off, but you learned real fast that you didn't want to. It was the yuch factor. The better course was to add to their number.

Which I did. Who knows, I may have planted a couple next to one of my dad's.

Blogs are gumballs without the yuch. You chew something over, roll it into a ball, post it on the internet, and see what sticks. That's the fun, seeing what sticks:

My understanding of "Let There Be Light" suggests that the light has as much of a spiritual quality as a physical.

Let's say a police office enters a crime scene in total darkness. . . .

Your premise that "if you poke it and it wiggles, it's alive" leaves me staring at my bowl of Jello.

I'd like to think that when the next animal pulls up and Adam says,"I name him giraffe" that God kind of does a spit-take or laughs milk through his nose and says, "Where the hell did that name come from!"

Spirit, natural as any miracle,
Great matter's second stage,
Provoked, shaped with clay,
Coaxed, warmed, fired to Self.

At some point it reduces to an article of faith, and isn't it deliciously ironic that even science must ultimately rely on faith?

It all adds up to an education--mine. On my terms, no less. I ask the questions and pick the brains. In return I get opinions, photos, poems, and a few accounts of journeys. I get leads. Have I been to Slate's Blogging the Bible web page? The one for FaithBooking? For the Jet Propulsion Laboratory? Have I read John Polkinghorne, Tom Wolfe, Loren Eiseley, Thomas Merton, Mario Beauregard, Teilhard de Chardin (if not, here's a DVD summarizing The Phenomemon of Man)?

I also get new perspectives, like that of an artist who looked--in both directions--at the sequence of Matter, Life, and Spirit in her creative process. And I get to hear from people I haven't heard from in a long while, several of them for over forty years.

I like to think in gumballs. They're essences. They're what you put in a nutshell. They're templates. Stick 'em somewhere and see what accrues, what fits. "Old Story" and "New Story" are gumballs, one a mirror image (almost) of the other. Spirit in the first position vs. Spirit in the last position. Are there actually cosmologies out there that fit the Old template? Chapter One of the Book of Genesis comes close, but there's too much Matter up front. Are there any that fit the New? Many come to mind, but none is a perfect fit.

But that's where the action is, the education--where something doesn't fit the template. Poor fits offer the promise of something new, something fresh, something to keep an eye on.

In the weeks ahead I'll be looking at three cosmologies that fit the "New" template. On a whim, I chose ones that had the word "everything" in their titles: Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, Harold Morowitz's The Emergence of Everything, and Ken Wilber's A Brief History of Everything. Getting each down to a gumball will be hard. I'll have to stick to it--and so will you.

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Impossibly Beautiful

2007-10-12T09:00:00.003-04:00

And they were something to behold, with a strange and distant beauty that called to Adam from afar. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 16)

Consider this the first "guest blog" at the Story-of-Everything Place. It is certainly the first visual one. Commenter John Bayerl sent in a set of photos that were judged last year, by astronomers, to be the best from 16 years of Hubble telescope operation. "This has to be part of The Story of Everything," said John. In an article in the Daily Mail, reporter Michael Hanlon said the photos "illustrate that our universe is not only deeply strange, but almost impossibly beautiful." I have to agree.

The winning photo, above, is of the Sombrero Galaxy, 28 million light years from earth and 50,000 light years across. The next four places were awarded to pictures of nebulae, those clouds of gas and dust that are both the graveyards and the nurseries of stars. All are within 8,000 light years of earth.

Second place went to the Ant Nebula. It derives its name from the way it looks to telescopes on the ground.

In third place was the Eskimo Nebula. The furry hood around the face is a ring of comet-shaped objects flying away from a dying star.

Number four was the Cat's Eye Nebula, one of the most complex nebulae known. It lies 3,000 light years away.

The Hourglass Nebula, 8000 light years away, came in fifth. It's narrow in the middle because the winds that shape it are weaker at the center.

Are the colors real? See how the Hubble web site explains what's behind the pictures. While you're there, go to their Gallery to get an idea of all that's in their collection. Photos six through ten in the judging can be seen here. As Jodie Foster said at the end of the movie Contact, "I had no idea!"

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What Is Spirit?

2007-09-28T10:20:00.002-04:00

And the stories he did it with the most were the ones about the things you couldn't see or hear or touch. The ones about the souls of trees, the things that animals knew, the two-edged ways of human beings. The ones about a Spirit. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 2)

And what exactly is Spirit?

(a) the things you cannot see or hear or touch
(b) something's inner essence, its very "soul"
(c) consciousness
(d) God
(e) all of the above

Theologian Amos Yong has counted sixteen ways the word spirit is used in the science-religion dialogue and admits he's missed a few. In the Old Story of Everything, Spirit is the very antithesis of Matter. In the New Story, it could not exist without Matter, and may not exist at all. What exactly is Spirit?

The answers are many because the New Story (first Matter, then Life, then Spirit) has many variants. Here are some:

1. Spirit concludes the story, but not as something real. This is the narrative of scientific materialism. Life is real, Matter is really real, and Spirit isn't real at all. Today the focal point of the Spirit question is the human brain. Over 350 years ago Rene Descartes said the brain--specifically, the pineal gland--was where body and soul met. But current neuroscience tells a different story, that body is real and soul is nothing more than neurological processes, which all come down to chemical processes, which all come down to physical processes, etc. Soul, at best, is (b) a metaphor for something's inner essence.

Interestingly, the Biblical understanding of soul is quite similar. The Hebrew word nephesh is translated many ways, but when applied to humans, it refers to the whole person, including the body. "There wasn't a soul in sight" captures the idea. So does the expression "in the depths of my soul"--meaning "in my inner essence." Christianity's "immortal" soul, capable of separating from the body, seems to have come from Plato, not from its own scriptures.

2. Spirit concludes the story; its meaning is (c) consciousness. Include in this category Spirit as mind, thought, intelligence, symbolic capacity, interiority, subjectivity. No matter what the name, Spirit in this sense is not "reducible" to neurological processes; it can't be boiled down to them. It may "emerge" from them, but it has a reality all its own.

3. Spirit concludes the story; its meaning is (d) God. Or Goddess or Godhead. Or Brahman or Allah or Tao or Jahweh, albeit in different roles. The Being of a thousand names and the Being of no name. The One "out there," the One "in here." The Omega (but not the Alpha). The Absolute. However conceived, this God is something more than individual human consciousness. She/he/it is transcendent.

So what exactly is Spirit? This one I'm going to wait out. Maybe for a 100 years to see how the neuroscience plays out. Maybe for 5 billion to see how the universe does. I'll table the debate between monists and dualists. I won't make distinctions the way Amos Young did. I'll simply take "Spirit" as a whole and revel in all the word's associations.

Something's going on in the cosmos that wasn't going on before. Let's call it Spirit. At this point in time, my answer to the opening question is: (e) all of the above. What's yours?

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Life: So Simple A Beginning?

2007-09-20T20:22:00.003-04:00

And then . . . another breath . . . and fish were swimming in the creeks, and birds were flying in the air, and deer were walking on the hills. Skunks were sleeping in their holes. Things were growing. Flowers and trees. To each of them the Spirit gave a seed, its very own. To each it gave a name. And to all of them it gave the name of Life. (from The Story of Everything, Ch. 2)

Of these three questions--What is Matter? What is Life? What is Spirit?--the one about Life may be the easiest to answer. In the Old Story of Everything, Life was created directly by Spirit. In the New Story, it "emerges" from Matter and then "evolves." How is Life different from Matter? My rule of thumb: if you poke it and it wiggles, it's alive.

When you look into the origin of life, however, the poke-it rule doesn't quite cut it. What does? "Replication, mutation, and selection," says a scientist, probably a chemist. If molecule X makes copies of itself (replication), if a few of the copies are less than perfect (mutation), and if X's environment favors some of the copies over others (selection), X is alive. Why? Because X can evolve.

Biologists typically want more. X has to be enclosed. It has to have a membrane. It has to have a regulatory apparatus, a metabolism. Give it all that and it becomes a cell. Only then is it alive.

The earliest evidence of a living cell goes back about 3.5 billion years. (Take a look.) Earth itself goes back 4.6 billion. Whether the first cell originally came from outer space or whether it originated here, whether it was alone or had company, its appearance was a watershed event. Compare the Big Bang with whatever spark produced Life. One gave us a cosmos; one gave us a speck. One was immense beyond imagination; one miniscule. But the two were equal in stature.

So momentous was the appearance of Life that you can appreciate why the writer of Genesis would mark it by using the metaphor of God's breath (Genesis 2:7). Charles Darwin would use exactly the same metaphor to conclude The Origin of Species. (See the last sentence of Chapter 15.) It was, as Darwin wrote, "so simple a beginning."

But was it so simple? Not when you consider that the universe took over 9 billion years to produce that first cell--years of stars being formed and then blowing up, years of their debris coalescing into planets, and then--on one planet that we know of--that mysterious spark. The first cell's emergence was humble and obscure, but it wasn't simple.

Ah, but the second cell. That was the miracle of simplicity. All the first cell did was make a copy. It "remembered" 9 billion years of history and replicated it. There is a key in that to the whole story of the cosmos. At a certain moment something more complex--yes, something "higher"--comes into being. It incorporates what is "lower" and moves on. Something new begins to happen.

What is Life? Look at all the universe had to go through to produce the first cell. Look at how easily it produced the second. Life is the difference.

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The Trouble With Matter

2007-09-13T17:11:00.003-04:00

"And then the Spirit . . . breathed . . . and out they came: earth and sun, moon and stars. Hills and creeks and fields. Thunder, lightning, meteors. All in a single breath. The Spirit gave a name to what its breath had made. The name was Matter."

It was a word that Grandfather hadn't used before, at least not like that. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 2)

You can see it, touch it, stand on it, count on it. It's concrete, a reality no one can deny. You can build a philosophy on it, or a way of life. Solid stuff, Matter. So unlike the ethereal things we call Spirit.

Or is it?

In the Old Story of Everything (first Spirit, then Matter, then Life), Matter was indeed clear-cut. But in the New Story, where Matter comes first, that solid stuff gets real slippery and even downright spooky.

Problem number one: now you see it, now--mostly--you don't. Astronomers tell us that most matter is "dark." Look out into the universe and you can't see dark matter. You can't detect it with any instrument. You know it's there only because it pulls at visible matter--bending light, for example, or affecting the rotational speed of galaxies, or creating rings (you gotta see this). According to one estimate, dark matter comprises 22% of the mass of the universe versus only 4% of visible matter. The remaining 74% is dark energy.

Go to the microscopic scale and there's more trouble. Matter becomes atoms; then protons and neutrons and electrons; then particles like gluons, leptons, mesons, and muons; and then (finally?) quarks. But what are these fundamental particles? Forces? Geometric points? Chunks of space-time? Strings of energy? Membranes? In this strange world, one can only guess.

And what about "anti-matter"? It seems that every particle has an anti-particle with an opposite charge. An anti-quark to go with a quark, for example. Particle-antiparticle pairs can annihilate each other, a principle used in today's particle accelerators. That's why anti-matter is not found on earth, except very briefly. When some comes into existence, it is immediately annihilated by ordinary matter.

So what's a materialist to do? Not to mention a material girl? I can't speak for Madonna, but if I were a philosopher I'd say this. Realize that your understanding of matter is a function of the scale at which you perceive it. Realize that there are other scales. And then go on with the scale you've got, seeing matter, touching it, bumping into it.

But while you're rubbing your head, consider this. In the New Story, the stuff turns into music! Into love and hate, truth and lies, vengeance and compassion! All on its own. It needs a lot of time to do it, and only a little of it makes the grade. But if there's a you, you can be sure that some of it did.

Maybe the trouble isn't with Matter, but that we think too little of it. In the New Story, it's fertile in surprising ways. It's even a bit ethereal. It took nearly 14 billion years, but hydrogen turned into compassion. I'm rubbing my head. How did it happen?

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Matter, Life, Spirit: It's the Order

2007-09-07T12:47:00.003-04:00

Spirit, Matter, Life, thought the Story of Everything.

"Matter, Life, Spirit," said the man.

The Story winced. That was it--the very thing he would never get used to. Not the words, but the order of the words. It was what the man put first: Matter, not Spirit. (from The Story of Everything, Ch. 24)

The plot: it's how you arrange Matter, Life, and Spirit when you tell a Story of Everything. It's the order in which you put them. The order will tell you what the words mean. Which comes first? Which comes last?

We associate stories in which Spirit comes first with the Book of Genesis, but that's not exactly correct. In the opening verses of that book, Matter co-exists with Spirit. The earth is already present, although "without form"--literally a "trackless waste and emptiness." Water is present too, and a divine wind, sometimes translated as the "Spirit of God," is described as moving over it. It is only much later, in an obscure verse, that the Bible refers to God as making heaven and earth "of things that were not" (2 Maccabees 7:28).

In the Old Story of Everything, Spirit comes first. It assumes the role of creator, designer, unmoved mover, primal cause. The material universe comes out of its action. So does the living universe. First Spirit, then Matter, then Life.

In the New Story, it's almost the inverse. Matter comes first and Spirit comes at the end, with Life as the intermediary. The appearance of Spirit is so sudden and so recent that we're still not sure what to make of it. Part of the problem is that it's come out in us! We are the locus of its emergence and the only locus that we know of.

So what do Matter, Life, and Spirit mean? Philosophy, religion, and science have spent millennia on that question, but my attention span is minutes. So in the next three blogs I'll simply try to grasp their meaning in the New Story. Matter will be tough. It has a lot to account for now that it's in the lead-off position. Spirit will be tougher. It moves two positions, not one, from opener to closer. That's twice the work of redefinition. The definition of Life should be easy by comparison. It's Matter-plus. And there's the rub, of course: plus what exactly?

Make no mistake: a Story of Everything has to cover Matter, Life, and Spirit even if it chooses to call them something else. Make your story linear and put the three in whatever order you choose. Make your story circular and put whichever at the point of origin and return. Make your story hierarchical and stack the three of them up. But you've got to touch all the bases and you've got to say how you did it. Stay tuned.

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"Let There Be Darkness!" In Just One Story

2007-08-10T10:12:00.003-04:00

"Finally, the man spoke. 'You're right. I was late for the show. . . . But religion was late too. So was science. So were you. You weren't there for the Words of creation . . . and I wasn't there for the Bang.'" (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 24)

I haven't read Steven Weinberg's The First Three Minutes, but I have heard physicists tell rapt audiences about the first few seconds of the universe's existence. Amazing, I say, an outsider looking in. The first few seconds! The evidence I hear doesn't seem to come from back then, but from what is going on now, often in particle accelerators.* A skeptical beep goes off in my head.

Then I hear about the cosmic microwave background radiation, which dates from about 380,000 years into the universe's existence. It tells about origins too, but with a less extravagant claim. This is evidence that actually comes from long ago, even if not the first few minutes. You read it the way you would a fossil. No beep.

In a back copy of the New York Times Magazine I read about another early moment, the dawn of religion. Robin Marantz Henig is describing an ongoing debate among evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists. Did religious belief come about because it was adaptive in its own right or as a kind of accident, a byproduct of some other adaptation? The experts cited by Henig argue long and hard, but none has any evidence from back then, from the point 50,000 or 100,000 or 200,000 years ago, when religion supposedly originated. Beep.

Someone will have to tell me how you can get inside the head of hominids from 100,000 years ago without the benefit of a written record, or at least of one preserved in art. It can't be done. Contrast the availability of evidence here with that for biological evolution, where two remarkable streams of data flow side by side: the fossil record and the genetic record. Both come from way back then.

So I ask, Can't the first 379,999 years of the universe story remain in darkness, at least until we know a whole lot more? Can't the origin of religion, for which the evidence will never exist?

I love to tell stories in the dark and about the dark. I love to hear the speculation, the musing, the hypotheses. I love to hear about books like Barbara King's Evolving God: A Provocative View on the Origins of Religion. Twenty-five years of observing apes, of seeing them mourn their dead for example, has led her to tell such stories. Are these primate behaviors the very ones that led to religion? The stories aren't evidence from back then; they come from now. They can't be science because they're not falsifiable. They're like the origin myths told by religion, tales in and about the dark, speaking of their tellers, speaking of now.

Much as I love these stories, I would like to see one--just one--with the dark places left dark. No claims about origins. No Creation Museums. No special effects on PBS. No gods in the gaps. No strings. Lots of fades to black, occasional shafts of light. Images that reflects the actual state of our knowledge. Reality checks on religion and science.

It's not easy to see in the dark. It's even harder to see the dark itself. I ask for the wisdom--and the story--to make that possible.

*Check an excellent article in Scientific American (June 2007) on the new field of "particle cosmology." Perhaps a physicist could help us out here.
**I'll be taking a few weeks off from writing new blogs. Comments on current ones are still welcome.

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"Let There Be Light!" When Was That?

2007-08-02T17:24:00.003-04:00

No astronomer had ever seen that light before. No human being had. It was altogether new.

"New to astronomers," said the man before the Story even finished. "Newly detected. But actually very old. That light left its source billions of years ago. Close to when the universe began." (from The Story of Everything, Ch.25)

The light, says the man, left its source close to when the universe began. How close? When was the first light ever?

A simple question, but try to get a simple answer. In physics, the word light refers to radiation in general, even the kind you can't see. But it also refers to the kind you can--visible radiation, in other words, light in the ordinary sense.

If light means radiation in general, then the oldest seems to date from about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. This is the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) that was discovered in 1965. Before 380,000 years the universe was so opaque that light (or radiation) could not pass through. The reason had to do with photons running into electrons before complete hydrogen atoms were able to form.

Now I suppose you could call those early photons light, but they really ought to travel first. CMB light does travel, and it's very old and very close to the beginning, amazingly so. 380,000 years is only .003% of the time from the Big Bang until now. Take a look at how we image this invisible light, the very first.

The oldest visible light is also close to the Bang--under 1% of elapsed time--but not as close. It's starlight, and it comes from the time when the first generation of stars turned on, ending a period known as the Dark Ages of the Universe. That period is thought to have ended about 500 million years after the Big Bang, but the date keeps getting pushed back, with some astronomers now speculating that primitive stars were forming as early as 100 million years after the Bang.

We can't see their light, however. The best we can do are some infrared smudges that reveal the presence of galaxies at about 750 million years. At the one-billion-year marker--7% of the way--galaxies are looking plentiful and surprisingly modern. See for yourself by clicking on these links.

At which of these points did the God of Genesis say, "Let there be light"? At none of them, really. This God seems to have meant several things by "light," but mostly he meant daylight, which he separated from the darkness of night. Though the Genesis writer showed no signs of knowing it, daylight requires a later generation star and a spinning earth. That star (our sun) came into being about 5 billion years ago, the spinning earth about 4.6 billion. Daylight is relatively recent. Our own began a long way from the beginning, at the 66% mark.

So you've got CMB light, starlight, and daylight. Maybe the lesson here is that no matter how you define light, there is a point before which it appears. Light is information. If that is so, I wonder how we can talk so confidently about the dark time before there is information--about the Words of Creation or, alternately, about the Big Bang. Can't the story begin in darkness?

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The Shortest Story of Everything

2007-07-27T14:51:00.004-04:00

He had also found qubits and magnetars, proteomes and morganucodontids, ids and memes, e-commerce and virtual reality, fundamentalism and postmodernism. And thousands of other things he couldn't even name. He had, in truth, found too much. He had come across a glut of information. The problem was . . . he wasn't gluttonous. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 21)

Last Saturday I asked if the Bible was a Story of Everything and I answered no. The irony, of course, is that the Bible contains a Story of Everything--the creation account that opens the Book of Genesis. How can a brief narrative cover all of existence better than two thousand pages?

This is the age in which to ask that question. It's been estimated that a weekly edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person living in the seventeenth century England came across in a lifetime. Researchers at the University of California Berkeley have concluded that the amount of new stored information doubled between 1999 and 2002 and is now increasing at the rate of 30% a year.

How can you cover it all?

Google is trying. The company's name is derived from "googol," the term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Imagine 10,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
bits of information. Now imagine organizing them, which is how Google defines its mission. Now imagine getting them into a single human brain, which you have to do if you want to tell a story. It's tough but not impossible:

You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone, and it turns into rosebuds, giraffes and humans.

That's from Brian Swimme, who used it to sum up The Universe Story, which he wrote in conjunction with Thomas Berry. It's one of the shortest Stories of Everything I've ever seen.

How do you boil things down? Maybe the trick is to let a child do the talking, as poet Charlie Finn did in Deep Joy, Steep Challenge. This is his seven-year-old daughter:

Let me tell you a story.
First there was nothing and then there was something.
Then there was a little something that became a big something.
Then the big something became human beings.
The end.

In The Story of Everything there's an Old Story and a New Story. You can get each down to six words:

Old Story: First Spirit, then Matter, then Life.
New Story: First Matter, then Life, then Spirit.

Not much character development there, but you get the idea. It's a matter of order, of sequence. To tell a Story of Everything, you don't have to know everything. You just have to know where everything goes.

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Is the Bible a Story of Everything?

2007-07-20T14:33:00.003-04:00

The Story of Everything thought he was remembering his birth, but it was only his birth in print. He was the first story ever to be printed, the first to become a book like the one you are holding in your hands. (from The Story of Everything, Chapter 6)

Does this passage imply that the Bible--the first book ever to be printed--is a Story of Everything?

Just for the record, Johannes Gutenberg's Bible, published in 1455, was not the first book to be printed. In the West, it was indeed the first complete book (Gutenberg had actually printed part of a Latin grammar a few years earlier.) In the East, however, moveable type was in existence some 400 years before Gutenberg and an iron printing press was in operation some 200 years before. The oldest printed book that we know of is not the Bible, but the Korean work Jikji, a collection of Buddhist teachings, which was published in 1377. Take a look at both, however, and you will see that Gutenberg's Bible was a far more complex production.

Still, is the Bible a Story of Everything? I remember a discussion about Galileo discovering Jupiter's four moons. No one had seen those moons before, so I asked the group: were they in the Bible? Everyone said no except one young man. He "kinda thought" the moons were in there somewhere, hidden in symbol or code.

Galileo tried to save the Catholic Church from such thinking in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615). Only the "faintest trace" of the sciences can be found in the Bible, he wrote. "Of astronomy, for instance, so little is found that none of the planets except Venus are so much as mentioned, and this only once or twice under the name 'Lucifer.'" Further, the authors of the Bible "intentionally forebore" to speak of these things, even though they knew about them.

I'd love to know if Galileo was serious about that "intentionally forebore," but other than that I appreciate his counsel. The Bible is a Story of Spirit. But it's had to carry the burden of mistaken identity: down through the centuries it's been seen as a Story of Everything. The error has created mischief--and far worse--from Galileo's day down to our own. In the long run, it has diminished the status of the Bible.

The last time I checked, sixty-two moons had been observed circling Jupiter, some at enormous distances. I wonder what Galileo would think about them. I wonder even more what the young man would. Would he believe that all sixty-two were in the Bible? That everything was?

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"The Whole Story of the Whole Cosmos for the Whole Person"

2007-07-13T11:44:00.005-04:00

It's humbling when someone else says it better than you do, especially when you've been trying for a while. It's also tempting, because it'd be awfully easy to steal their stuff. I've been humbled and tempted twice as I thought about starting this blog.

The Metanexus Institute said it better in the heading of several of their newsletters: "Seeking the whole story of the whole cosmos for the whole person." "Whole story" said to me, science and spirit. "Whole cosmos" said, inner space as well as outer space. "Whole person" said, heart as well as head. And "seeking," well, that was the whole point. Wish I had said it first.

Then Michael Wilt, editor of the online Nimble Spirit Review, said it better too. In plugging the Story-of-Everything Place, the web site from which this blog originates, he celebrated the "cosmology cavalcade":

Stories of ultimate beginnings have always fascinated me. That there are so many of them is no surprise, given the diversity found on the planet in terms of geography, climate, and general living conditions. One could hardly expect peoples, preliterate or otherwise, to come up with common expressions of their origins when day-to-day experience ranges from Arctic ice to Saharan desert to Amazon rainforest to Rocky Mountains. Life experience at the 65th parallel will undoubtedly lead to a different cosmology than that at the equator. The cosmology of people who are enslaved will be different from that of those who enslave them. And then science brings its own vast set of empirical observations to bear on our exploration.

Wilt saw the Story-of-Everything Place as a kind of "cosmological bazaar" where people bring their stories, exchange them, and create new ones. Well, it's not that yet--it hasn't even gotten going--but that is indeed the idea. Wish I had said it first.

But I didn't. Which means I'm going to have to give in to a little temptation and "borrow" some language in order to launch this blog. Its subject matter: those whole stories of the whole cosmos for the whole person. Its spirit: the bazaar. Next Saturday's question: Is the Bible a Story of Everything? If you drop in, bring a friend. Even better, bring a story.

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