God's architecture - Part VIII

I think potential is 'built' into the universe as I would say that a box of legos or tinker toys have a built-in potential to assemble into new shapes and forms. Perhaps we could call the 12 basic building blocks of the universe, a lego set. The standard package (in particle physics called the Standard Model): quarks and leptons with variations of up/charm/top down/strange/bottom e-neutrino/u-nertrino/t-neutrino electron/muon/tau. And the 4 fundamental forces. That's it! Maybe? But we have to acknowledge that these 'things' are different from one another in that one of the building blocks cannot be reduced and be found to be an assemblage of the other building blocks. They are each different. Yet with these 'legos' comes potential to produce EVERYTHING. Remove one, and? Potential halts? The tinker toy set with spools 'without' holes to insert the round sticks thereby reducing the potential for building to nil. Yet these basic building blocks (governed by four fundamental forces: strong/weak/electromagnetic/gravitational) create the entire universe. Of course we humans cannot peek behind the scenes and see if indeed the lego building blocks are actually constructed by Ole Kirk Christiansen in Denmark -- or if the lego building blocks just happened to be 'here' and each of the blocks just happened to be perfectly fitted to one another, and of course the forces just kind of fell into place and were too, miraculously (used in a non-metaphysical sense), 'there' ... and to top it off, we would have to believe that unguided, uncreated, unplanned, willy-nilly, these bits of magic (also used in a non-metaphysical sense) just kind of ... well, just kind of happened. For me, reason and logic alone 'demand' that something is afoot!

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.” --Albert Einstein

I think humans are birthed into this universe with, for the most part, a blank slate, blank in that none of us would instinctually begin building well constructed dwellings, as many animals do, without the input/teaching of other humans. And anyone who has raised or has been around infants and small children will attest to their 'natural' curiosity, their forever questing about their environment in order to fill their 'blank slates' with ever more knowledge that provides an ever increasing understanding of how their environment operates. This seems to be the human equivalent to animal instinctive behavior, or perhaps how instinctive behavior has evolved. Of course with age begins the shutting down of this 'natural' curiosity -- the imagination -- by authority figures, parents/society (and sadly for some, this shutting down begins at birth). But for those who were either sheltered from 'uncurious' and 'unimaginative' authority figures, or who where born with a 'natural' tenacity that defied those attempts to extinguished their curiosity and imagination, the world, material and mind, is forever opened for exploration, and almost child-like, these folks cannot accept what others believe, limits.

Pause

"Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day."

--Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Brothers Karamazov)

God's architecture - Part VII

We may discover that this ALL is because the Designer designed a design that itself designs ad infinitum more designs that unceasingly design endless variations of ever more designs evermore.

God's architecture - Part VI

I believe 'God' is beyond the 'all' that we as humans can understand or comprehend or can touch or even imagine, for of course we are the stuff of this universe that is where we find ourselves encapsulated within and are defined by. 'God' is the 'placeholder' term that we humans use for that which is beyond, beyond not in a time/space sense, but beyond in an intellectual sense. As such, each human defines the meaning of this term --'God' -- and as such, this term defines that which we humans try so hard to do, to use words to define, to describe, to make real through our utterances. So I think 'God' (the word we create in order to have something to grasp on to) is within each of us as a strange longing for that which created us ('created' -- another human word that falls far short of something that happened beyond time/space/matter -- a paradox since 'happened' requires the dimension of time). And so 'religion' is the human means to make this strange longing real, something that can be understandable in this time/space/matter world. In Christianity this longing is made human by our story of Jesus, perhaps a 'placeholder' for that which is beyond us -- God. To understand God in human terms, we need a human vocabulary, and Jesus is that vocabulary. For me this story is not something that can or needs to be proven, for it isn't about solitary facts, but it is about community, it is the story that we again and again seek to understand in our quest to live our lives with others, with community, living a life that is defined by love -- loving our neighbor as thyself. And yes, that is right behind 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.' Proof? "Every event has a cause. Trace a sequence of events backwards in time and one must eventually arrive at an uncaused causal agency. That agency is God." Yes, that the 'first cause argument' and yes, that isn't proof. But I think a nice thought, perhaps a thought that reaches the limit of human deductive reasoning. What a place deductive reasoning to stop at, the instant of the Big Bang, the birth of time/space/matter, all before escape the best tool we have, the human mind.

God's architecture - Part V

As an outspoken opponent of racism and injustice and a proponent of liberal Christianity, Harry Emerson Fosdick delivered his famous sermon, "Shall the Fundamentalists Win?" on May 21, 1922 at the First Presbyterian Church NYC.

"Science treats a young man’s mind as though it were really important. A scientist says to a young man, 'Here is the universe challenging our investigation. Here are the truths which we have seen, so far. Come, study with us! See what we already have seen and then look further to see more, for science is an intellectual adventure for the truth.' Can you imagine any man who is worthwhile turning from that call to the church if the church seems to him to say, 'Come, and we will feed you opinions from a spoon. No thinking is allowed here except such as brings you to certain specified, predetermined conclusions. These prescribed opinions we will give you in advance of your thinking; now think, but only so as to reach these results.' "

God's architecture - Part IV

How many atoms are in the entire universe?

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000


or, 1 sexvigintillion (1 followed by 81 zeros or 10^81)

Someone on the Internet did the math, well, kind of, I think making a few assumptions.

Atoms in the Universe

10^66 estimates the the number of atoms in our galaxy to be in the area of 10^68 and, if dark and exotic matter are considered, then their numbers are possibly close to 10^69.

In 10^9, it is stated that there is a wide range of estimates given for the number of galaxies in the universe. Some put the number in the very low 100 billions, others bring it much closer to the one trillion mark.

The size of other galaxies range from one million to hundreds of billions of stars. The mass of some of the largest galaxies is trillions of times the mass of our sun. Again, it is supposed that much of this mass consists of dark and exotic matter.

If we consider our galaxy to be of average size, and use the highest estimates for both the number of atoms in our galaxy and the total number of galaxies, then the universe would contain about one trillion times the number of atoms as our galaxy. Since our galaxy probably has no more than 10^69 atoms, this would mean that at most the universe contains 10^69 x 10^12 atoms in all. This works out to be just under 10^81.

If we use lower estimates for the number of atoms in our galaxy and total number of galaxies, then the total number of atoms would be as much as 20 times less, or within the area of 10^79.

Hence, "atoms in the universe" belongs on this page which spans from 10^78 to just under 10^81.

God's architecture - Part III

How many atoms are in the human body?

7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

(give or take a few)

... okay, I'll say it, seven octillion.

God's architecture - Part II

If theologians would open their eyes (and minds!) to the countless revelations that science 'discovers' and realize that a revelation such as water is H2O and H2O is HOH and HOH is two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule which are chemical elements that are atoms and that these building blocks of wet reality are mind boggling truths that hint at the nature of God and how God creates, in that the Creation is not a haphazard mystery, but a knowable reality, if and only if one is willing to accept and collect truths as they are discovered, and include, not exclude them from the ongoing metaphor to describe the Unknown.

God's architecture

Perhaps evolution and an evolved 'forever questing for answers' is the reason we ask unanswerable questions, from birth, life is a progression of unknowns revealed, we live constantly with potential and possibility always on the tip of our mind.

"A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push."
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Eyes, Ears, Tongue, and Mind

Lately I've been thinking about how speaking is different from writing, the spoken word from the written word, as well as listening with one's ears as opposed to 'listening' with one's eyes. And of course some of the world's great teachers, Jesus and Socrates and Buddha, spoke, we have not a word from their hands. Plato listened, then wrote, as well did Matthew and Mark and Luke and John. I think Jesus was all about the moment (eternal moment?), speaking and listening, a community activity, a community of two or more, no time for solitary contemplation of static words when breathing words are one with and flow with time and become alive and create relationship. For speaker and listener(s) share a special intimacy of time and place and togetherness, whereas writer and reader share a solitude with a difference kind of intimacy, that of silent words and silent imaginations.

Nourishment

We live between the nothing more and the nothing less -- bologna between the slices of bread -- and like the sacred words of the Bible, to be consumed -- chewed, champed and munched -- and the less becomes more, and the more becomes less.

Rethinking a thought about bread and wine

What is the Christian Eucharist? Or Communion? Or Lord's Supper? Breaking of bread and drinking of wine that represents the body and blood of Christ, that a very short and incomplete explanation. The Catholic Encyclopedia has a long version, a version that I heard someone say was just so much gobbledegook. But for Christians it is a sacrament, that which is sacred, or as Augustine of Hippo said, "a visible sign of an invisible reality." So I was thinking that perhaps another way to understand the "gobbledegook" of the Eucharist, and certainly not an explanation your local parson will give, is that we are not to forget our past, our evolutionary past, a past so removed from our present reason and intellect that some refuse to believe it was ever so, but as many non-Christians look upon the Eucharist as ... well, as an enactment of ... well, of cannibalism, then one can understand how reprehensible this enactment can appear to be to an outsider. But what if we admit to our evolutionary past, a past that indeed would include every sort of animal behavior, even cannibalism. Imagine that ancient time when the human brain became a human mind, a mind that suddenly looked at the world about it in a totally different way, a way shaped by reason and intellect, and of course, superstition. But too, the superstition could and was in many ways the minds way to settle the onslaught of troubling questions, questions that animals don't ask themselves, questions that the new mind conjured up about the relationship of the self with other selfs, of the self with the world, of the self with oneself. So, I think Jesus not only wanted us to remember him, but to remember our past, and to never forget from where we came in order to understand where we are going, for the "born again" is a "180-degree turn about" in one's life, or you may think of it as maintaining the forward-movement of evolution in one's life, because, as we all know, we humans are certainly capable of regressing, instead of becoming more human, some choose to become more animal.

notes in the margin of last page of War & Peace

If I can adopt beliefs as 'hypotheses' and 'act as if they are true' with the idea that 'does this belief cause me to have a better interaction with the world (humanity), then for me this could become a truth. (little t)

The blazing night sky

Sometimes in places like Kansas, or the Mojave desert, one is not distracted by the razzle-dazzle of nature that seems to fascinate and occupy so many, but to the point, last night flat-on-my-back on the desert sand and staring straight up, I attempted to visualize what exactly is taking place above (and all around) my head. I suppose because I have two sensors in my skull that react to photons, the conundrum of "wave-particle" light got me to thinking. And forgive me for my most un-astronomy-like description of what my mind began to imagine. First off, I've always been puzzled by the description of emptiness in space, the "vacuum" in space, the vast nothingness between the floating stuff here and there. And darkness? We look up into the night sky and between the twinkling stars we think we view blackness, emptiness. But wait! It is all an illusion! Because the two light sensors in my head are my point-of-view, I cannot conclude that the dark places are really dark. For every star sends its wave-particle photons out, out in "every direction" and the "light" of each star is like a "continuously expanding" sphere, ever growing larger, a luminous sphere that continues to grow! And "behind" each expanding sphere is another, and another, and infinite anothers (so long as the star's thermonuclear fusion continues). And me, a single "point-of-view" can travel anywhere in the universe and "catch" some photons from that star. That star's photons (and every other star) are everywhere! Think of a zillion stars, each sending outward an infinitely expanding sphere, and these spheres of photons covering the universe, and nowhere dwells a place where photons are not whizzing by -- so light is everywhere! Human eyes, telescopes, are all single points-of-views. So they catch only an infinitely small "piece of the ever expanding sphere" of starlight. If that star is 10 light-years away, then if someone dwelled 10 light-years on the other side of that star, or 20 light-years from me, that being would also be catching photons from that exact same star. And a zillion beings in a zillion different places in the universe would all catch photons from that exact same star. So, last night for the first time I imagined that the darkness of space is just a grand illusion, and the sky is ablaze with light, light everywhere. My mind told me so, even when my eyes tell me not.

Unfocused focus

Is it possible today, or in the future, for one mind to think (with help from the senses and interaction with nature) grand unifying thoughts, as Darwin was able to think? Would more information have helped or hindered Darwin? With the Internet at his disposal, would his thoughts have become distracted or narrowly focused on a this or that? One needs almost a zen-like solitude to bring the mind to an unfocused focus, like an artist attempting to grasp the scene in front, blurs the focus of the eyes in order to experience the overall shapes and composition, the unity of the scape, without the mind afluttered by the detail.

Little and Big

A little number, the width of a plant cell: .00001276 meters. A big number, the total number of atoms comprising the earth: 33,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

Isn't it interesting how our mind attempts to grope at a string of zeros, some strings preceded by a tiny period, others followed by a tiny period, and inside the skull an imaginary scale -- imagined size to imagined places that one can never go, for the sensors of humans are scaled to our size, and not to the size of the universe. So we dwell in a tiny realm of scale, a slice of scale, for our size will not allow us to fit anyplace else.

Interlude: Where Wisdom Is Found

Here is Job 28, I find it interesting to substitute "Miners" for "Scientists" in this passage.

    1 There is a mine for silver

       and a place where gold is refined.
    2 Iron is taken from the earth,

       and copper is smelted from ore.
    3 Miners put an end to the darkness;

       they search out the farthest recesses

       for ore in the blackest darkness.
    4 Far from human dwellings they cut a shaft,

       in places untouched by human feet;

       far from other people they dangle and sway.
    5 The earth, from which food comes,

       is transformed below as by fire;
    6 lapis lazuli comes from its rocks,

       and its dust contains nuggets of gold.
    7 No bird of prey knows that hidden path,

       no falcon's eye has seen it.
    8 Proud beasts do not set foot on it,

       and no lion prowls there.
    9 The miners' hands assault the flinty rock

       and lay bare the roots of the mountains.
    10 They tunnel through the rock;

       their eyes see all its treasures.
    11 They search the sources of the rivers

       and bring hidden things to light.
    12 But where can wisdom be found?

       Where does understanding dwell?
    13 No mortal comprehends its worth;

       it cannot be found in the land of the living.
    14 The deep says, "It is not in me";

       the sea says, "It is not with me."
    15 It cannot be bought with the finest gold,

       nor can its price be weighed out in silver.
    16 It cannot be bought with the gold of Ophir,

       with precious onyx or lapis lazuli.
    17 Neither gold nor crystal can compare with it,

       nor can it be had for jewels of gold.
    18 Coral and jasper are not worthy of mention;

       the price of wisdom is beyond rubies.
    19 The topaz of Cush cannot compare with it;

       it cannot be bought with pure gold.
    20 Where then does wisdom come from?

       Where does understanding dwell?
    21 It is hidden from the eyes of every living thing,

       concealed even from the birds in the sky.
    22 Destruction and Death say,

       "Only a rumor of it has reached our ears."
    23 God understands the way to it

       and he alone knows where it dwells,
    24 for he views the ends of the earth

       and sees everything under the heavens.
    25 When he established the force of the wind

       and measured out the waters,
    26 when he made a decree for the rain

       and a path for the thunderstorm,
    27 then he looked at wisdom and appraised it;

       he confirmed it and tested it.
    28 And he said to the human race,

       "The fear of the Lord—that is wisdom,

       and to shun evil is understanding."

Thirty years ago ... and counting

Excerpt from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Harvard commencement address, June 8, 1978.

I am not examining the case of a disaster brought on by a world war and the changes which it would produce in society. But as long as we wake up every morning under a peaceful sun, we must lead an everyday life. Yet there is a disaster which is already very much with us. I am referring to the calamity of an autonomous, irreligious humanistic consciousness.

It has made man the measure of all things on earth - imperfect man who is never free of pride, self-interest, envy, vanity, and dozens of other defects. We are now paying for the mistakes which were not properly appraised at the beginning of the journey. On the way from the Renaissance to our days we have enriched our experience, but we have lost the concept of a Supreme Complete Entity which used to restrain our passions and our irresponsibility.

We have placed too much hope in politics and social reforms, only to find out that we were being deprived of our most precious possession: our spiritual life. It is trampled by the party mob in the East, by the commercial one in the West. This is the essence of the crisis: the split in the world is less terrifying than the similarity of the disease afflicting its main sections.

Those who can't follow a straight line

How many of us need to be told what to do, and how many of us want to be told what to do, and how many of us do what we are told to do, and how many of us do what we need to do, and how many of us don't do what we are told to do, and how many of us don't do what we know we need to do but don't know how to do it, and how many of us know how to do what we need to do but won't do it, for whatever reason, and how many of us can't think of a good reason to do anything, and so do anything, or nothing, and how many of us can't think a straight thought, while others draw straight lines with arrows for us to follow, yet our crooked thoughts seem to prevent us from following a simple straight line or a very long and winding sentence. We want things to be better, for you, for me, for everyone, yet far too often life is stuck in wants. And the irony is that sometimes living a living hell seems to be easier than trying to make sense of a straight line and following it. And they shake their heads. Blessed are they who think straight thoughts and but can't follow straight lines and live unsteady lives.

Global change

Instead of global "warming" I think I'll stick to the ever was and ever will be global "change" ... and aren't we an ornery bunch that forever wants change AND preservation. As well, tradition AND fresh and new and innovative and novel. I suppose we just want it ALL.