Nature proclaiming

There is not a flower that opens, not a seed that falls into the ground, and not an ear of wheat that nods on the end of its stalk in the wind that does not preach and proclaim the greatness and the mercy of God to the whole world.

--Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

Hmmm, and what would Michael Jackson say?

Well, he did say a few things.

“In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe.”

“The meaning of life is contained in every single expression of life. It is present in the infinity of forms and phenomena that exist in all of creation.”

Along the path

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."
--Lao Tzu

Just musing

I think that humans discover, assemble, or create in the limited sense that they assemble the tinker toys (as Chet Raymo has referred to all the stuff the universe is made of, the building block elements) in new and unique ways. All of God's tinker toys were here way before 5 billion years ago, all with their 'built-in' potential, potential to assemble and make more complex stuff, that which too with potential for ever increasing complexity. So do humans really create? Perhaps in a limited sense, for without the Tinker Toy set, humans are without. Are physics and mathematics creations of humans? Is the ability of a life form to think abstractly when seeing 4 objects, then looking at the hand and holding 4 fingers up, and understanding that apart from objects and fingers, 'four' is something unto itself. Living in a world full of discrete objects, being able to group similar objects and using an abstract idea (numbers) to hold/memorize a particular 'group' would have great evolutionary advantage to that creature that discovers this 'trick' -- a trick that resides only in the brain/mind.

Human architecture - Part IV

A free will thought

In the pre-quantum, pre-chaos theory world of Pierre-Simon Laplace, he defended causal determinism with, "We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes."

I think the word 'free will' is such a general term, the ability to make a choice, think, act voluntarily without outside coercion or pressure -- it begs for a playing field to play upon. And so that is what we consciously (or unconsciously) do, we construct playing fields to fit how we are using (or understanding the use of) the term. The super intellect in Laplace's quote would have the broadest playing field for free will to play upon, and so, free will would be lost in the observation of the every cause and effect that lead to the 'free will' act.

I can imagine a spectator in the stands watching a baseball game, with full view of the play action, this spectator would have a great view and understanding of the complete game. Yet say a TV spectator is watching the same game, and say the camera is fixed upon the pitcher the entire game! What an entirely different understanding of the game this viewer would have.

We are living a TV view of reality, and our brain/mind can but gather a 'sample' of this reality, yet using this sample, it 'reconstructs' all the missing data. In this reconstructed world, I think we do have free will. It is real to the world we live in. Of course if we ever evolve to become like Laplace's super intellect, then we will have to deconstruct and rewrite this story.

Human architecture - Part III

Thought 1 (rethinking a previous thought)

I view all life infused, if you will, with potential, much of the inorganic too is infused with potential, potential in that elements can and will combine to create compounds, in physics scientist postulate that fundamental matter particles (quarks) combine to create protons, neutrons and hadrons. This 'potential' seems to be the given in the cosmos, we don't see a Big Bang exploding with a bunch of 'somethings' that forever remain separate 'somethings', but we do see a bunch of 'somethings' interacting, combining, mutating, structuring, building upon one another to create new 'somethings' that never existed before (or so we think). Darwinian evolution is all about potential. Life is all about potential. When you awake in the morning, once you open your eyes the world bursts forth with potential. Potential for what? Perhaps only our imagination can tell us that. To imagine what does not exist as if it did exist and further to exploit potential to make that imagination a reality, what do we call that? Creation?

Thought 2 (a new thought)

Perhaps 'God' is thoughtless? Of course most humans hold tight to the matter of 'thought' as if it were the nature of that which some call 'God' -- yet we are allowed to imagine -- and that in turn makes constructs within the brain -- in that something called mind -- and as every maker of things knows, the construction is normally limited by the tools and material at hand, so in our human minds we construct anthropomorphic imaginations of even that which we acknowledge is beyond the everyday stuff of the universe that we dwell within.

Human architecture - Part II

We are star dust

Carbon atoms, we are, originally from stars, exploding stars, carbon star dust, the building blocks of our every cell, the matter that makes us something, visible and touchable, the matter that most think matters.

But a thought is a matterless matter that 'real' matter fails to grasp, yet all around, the entire universe, the mundane of sameness -- sameness in all carbon atoms, one at the far-end of the universe and another in the cell of your fingertip -- mundane of sameness abounds, yet again, each of us that live, hold matterless matters within our skulls, bony carbon shells to protect the less (our existing right-now self awareness) from the more (the boundless universe of atoms and stuff).

Teeter-Tottering

Just as "God did it" is a closed door to deeper investigation, "I don't know" is a closed door to human imagination, yet "I wonder" opens all the doors, if one indeed is open to opening that which, when closed, provides so much superficial comfort.

Human architecture - Part I

"Miracles can be explained."

And yes, my fingers are right now tapping on a keyboard and how many 'things' are going on, from my mind to brain to my 'nervous system' that 'makes' my fingers tap the 'correct' keys, and then the human invention that I am tapping on, the keyboard, and tapping what? Oh yes, letters and words and sentences -- thoughts. All too miraculous these symbols/codes that other humans are able to decipher, to recognize, to assemble and reform a semblance of my thoughts in their minds. And each step of the way -- how many steps? -- science could explain most of those steps, I believe. But many steps are still out of reach of today's science, understanding not yet understood. And understood? All the understanding is ours, created by us, within this human package that we find ourselves dwelling within. Of course an understood miracle was at one time a not understood miracle. In both cases, the 'miracle' is independent of understanding or not understanding. Understanding is just a nice 'gift' that 'nature' cares not about, or I should say, nature -- the physical world -- is ignorant of. For as far as we know, we are the only ones with the wherewithal to organize our sense data and recreate a semblance of the physical world within our skulls and to ponder and muse about it as well as wonder how we fit within this world and too, even imagine a different world. I like to think that this is what Genesis 1:27 means by "So God created man in his own image..." -- God muses and so we too.

Desert Ramblings with a pipe of peace

We humans communicate with symbols, spoken symbols, symbols written. As in the Rene Magritte painting, "The Treachery of Images" -- the words in French translated: "This is not a pipe." We could say this symbol is once removed. A realistic depiction of a smoking pipe, no abstractions involved, so this painting symbolizes a "real" smoking pipe. Of course an abstract image could be said to be twice (and more) removed from the "actual" -- the material. And Magritte plays a double trick, he paints the realistic image of the smoking pipe, with the symbolism of a painted image, and then uses the "words" below it to announce to the viewer that this "pipe" is not a "real" pipe. And the viewer reads the symbols of the alphabet that combines unique individual symbols (letters) to create yet a far more complex symbol (a word) and further by combining these complex units of symbols (words) Magritte (and all writers) create a sentence, a complete thought. And where am I going with all this? Of course, to pronounce that we humans are creatures of symbols, and so too are our stories, even the one about "In the beginning ..." this "God" created everything (everything in the world we find ourselves dwelling within) and because this ... this ... this un-nameable something ... this something that we can only communicate about to one another with our human symbols when written spell "GOD" and what else? How does one attempt to speak of the ... the the? With the only thing we symbolic-communicating creatures have, our vocabulary of our self. And we speak of "the the" in anthropomorphic terms, the only ones that our symbolic-communicating minds can grasp in a storytelling sort of way. Otherwise, if we cannot accept this, this symbolic communication, then we cannot speak, and just shrug our shoulders, and then in dumbness touch only that which is touchable.

God's architecture - Part X

The meaning of life is to make order out of chaos.

God's architecture - Part IX

"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me." -- Immanuel Kant

Does it all come down to 'it all depends upon the mind that is mining'? The miner picks at the mound and the mining shapes the outcome, creating a void that the miner perceives as the reality, a reality created inside the miner's mind?

Okay, I was taking a bit of poetic license on how Kant showed how the human mind is an active player in the 'construction' of reality. I use the example of the candle, at arms length, burning, and yes the photons from the flame strike the retina and all the rest that takes place inside the eyeball and where the 'photograph' is 'coded' and this electro-chemical coded message takes flight through the optic nerve and arrives and is translated in the brain as a dancing flame, then the mind takes that interior dancing flame from the mush of gray matter and projects it at arm's length in front of your nose, and the flame you think you see before your nose is actually the 'projected flames' dancing perhaps a nanosecond in time behind the actual dancing flame before your nose. Then the mind makes you think the projected flame and the actual flame are one and the same. Yet the 'real' flame, or I should say, the flame you think you see, is actually an imaginary flame hidden in the darkness in the center of your skull, a flame without a photon, without light, without matter.

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.