Return of the native?

As you can see, this blog has remained untouched and unvisited for several years. I'm now visiting it just in case someone comes here to say something about one of the books (https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/budstark)  I have on Smashwords. If you're here for that or anything else, please feel free to leave a message.

Mythologizing the Bible

In his book, Jesus Christ and Mythology, Rudolf Bultmann, eminent New Testament scholar of the last century, said that “Myths speak about gods and demons as powers on which man knows himself to be dependent, powers whose favor he needs, powers whose wrath he fears,” (page 19). Innocuous enough if we are talking about myths in Cliff's Notes. Obviously the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Indians and Greeks devised narratives to help clear up the mysteries and riddles of life by attributing them to supernatural causes. But those are not the myths of Bultmann's concern. He says that if we understand Jesus “to have been begotten of the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin,” and understand him “to be the Son of God in a metaphysical sense, a great, pre-existent heavenly being who became man for the sake of our redemption and took on himself suffering, even the suffering of the cross,” then our conceptions of him are mythological.
Given Bultmann's definition of “mythological,” most christians must confess to believing in myth. And if we believe in myth, in his opinion, we don't have faith in “modern science” and are not “modern men,” for all modern men are right to believe that modern science and the modern study if history preclude the possibility “that the course of nature can be interrupted or, so to speak, perforated, by supernatural powers,” (page 15). In our defense, “modern science,” in the short time since Bultmann lived, has become increasingly baffled as to what life is, how it began, and how it could possibly operate without intelligent direction given that it is so complex, resilient and prolific. For those who believe myth to be no more than fantasy, Darwin's pond is the most fantastic. The warm pond he imagined life to have begun in has evaporated into a huge question: Given a universe that has no life sustaining atmosphere in any direction for as far as the telescope can see, how did Earth come by an atmosphere that thrives with life? Moreover, if big bang cosmology is right, as most cosmologist believe it to be, then unless something super-natural set things off with the big bang, modern science comes to an absurd conclusion—something came from nothing. Should christians then blush because we believe that the course of nature has been interrupted—believe in myth as Bultmann defines it—or modern man blush because he doesn't?
Many of the most popular modern scientists believe that life is an accident, it doesn't mean anything. History therefore doesn't mean anything, it simply is. Christians, on the contrary, believe that history, Biblical history especially, contains examples—sometimes allegorical—that affect our lives. For instance, the Apostle Paul explains to the Corinthians how the history of the journey of the children of Israel into the promised land was history, but symbolic history replete with examples for how they should live in the world and in Christ's kingdom (I Cor 10:1-11).
I have chosen Mark's account of Christ meeting a demoniac, Mark 5:1-20, to illustrate what “mythologizing” biblical history means to me. I don't compare Mark's account with that of other gospels, nor present much historical background. I only ask what this text, by itself, means to me. In fact, this particular story is special to me because, if far less harrowing, my story is the domoniac's story. There are stories in the Bible that are not written as historical fact, but whose truths are presented in symbols. This is not one of them. Mark has written this story as fact and we have no reason to accept it as otherwise, especially on the basis of an uncertain and ever-changing “modern science.” But if we are to get much spiritual help—and there is much spiritual help for us in this story—then we must not ask only what the facts are but what they mean; we must mythologize. If we do it right we will find that even though the facts familiar to Mark are not facts with which we are familiar, their meaning is all too familiar.
Jesus meets a demoniac, Mark 5:1-20, a historical myth.
“In the evening [Jesus] said to his disciples, 'Let us go over to the other side,'” (4:35). The evening seems an unlikely time for a six or seven mile trip across the Sea of Galilee; did Jesus anticipated the storm at sea and the storm awaiting him on the distant shore? In any case, when they crossed over they crossed more than water, they crossed from Judaic culture and religion to Greco-Roman culture and religion.
The cultures and religions were different, the human condition the same: “When Jesus got out of the boat a man with an evil spirit came from the tombs to meet him,” (5:2 ). Accept this story as history and, according to Bultmann, you are mythologizing, for this man is possessed of demons whose wrath he fears and whose powers he cannot resist. To one degree or another, aren't we all.
5:3-5 This man, living in the hills and tombs, apart, alone, was dead while he lived. Contrast him with the crucified Christ. The women go to care for a dead man in a dead man's tomb. What they find, however, is an angel who asks them (Luke 24:5), “Why do you look for the living among the dead?” No mere myth can compare with this simple contrast; the living demoniac is dead; the dead Christ is alive!
How this man came to be possessed by demons we do not know. But if he bargained with evil, a part of the bargain he must not have understood was that once he possessed whatever he was offered, it would soon possess him. If indeed he bargained, it cost him a great deal of his sanity and freewill, for no man in his right mind would choose to be in the torture this man was in. Once possessed, however, he was no longer in his right mind, his freewill was no longer free. He could no longer simply choose not to be possessed. As is the case with most of our addictions and habits, once the demons possessed this man's soul, his “psyche” in Greek, they owned him body and soul, for no physical constraints could bind him (5:3,4). Moreover, by accommodating his demons he had become his own worst enemy; “he would cry out and cut himself with stones,” (5:5).
It is likely that the man did not choose to be possessed at all; that the demons forced themselves on him. To believe that evil comes only by choice, or because it is somehow deserved, is to believe that the world behaves logically and justly. Since the fall in the garden, it doesn't. The rain, which didn't fall at all before the fall (Gen 2:5,6), now falls equally on the just and the unjust—the innocent suffer with the wicked. We are not all equally blessed with fine physical bodies and minds, or born in a well governed country. We cannot think that we deserve all our blessings nor believe that those who suffer deserve their lot. The fact is, most of what we are and have was conditioned at birth. Because we are one with the human race, whether we like it or not, we who are blessed are responsible to those who are not. Christ's message is that from those who are blessed with much, much is required (Luke 12:48). But all the help that our fellow pilgrims can offer is not enough to offset catastrophe forever. The only everlasting hope for humanity is not in time but in eternity; not in this world but from out of this world; not by merit but by grace.
We can't assume that this man ran to Jesus because he knew who he was. Perhaps for the same reason that Jesus' presence terrified the demons, because they did know who he was, it gave the man hope. Even so, it must have taken every ounce of his remaining willpower to defy his demons and act on that hope: “When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him,” (5:6). Jesus did not immediately address the man but addressed the evil possessing him: “Come out of this man you evil spirit!” (5:8). With the man's voice the demon shouted in response, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? Swear to God that you won't torture me.” In acknowledging that Jesus was the Son of the Most High God, they seem to assume that his greater power equated with a greater ability to torture. Their frame of reference for the execution of power was to control, as their control over their host demonstrated, and their mode of control was torture. Having been a treacherous friend in the past myself, I know where these demons are coming from.
One may know nothing about demonology and know that this demon's conception of self hood is confused. Jesus demands of him, “What is you name?” singular, and the demon in fact confesses that he is a contradiction; he—singular—is not one but many. His very name is a contradiction: “My name is 'Legion,' for we are many,” (5:9). My human impulse toward these beings is pity. Knowing that they are not logical—they almost killed the man who was their place to live, and were obviously schizophrenic—and knowing that they were apt to cause their own destruction, I probably would not have given them the freewill they begged for. My pity is predicated on easy sentimentality; good for a movie or a home-coming, but hardly fit for magisterial duties. Mercy, however, is predicated on absolute justice. To have mercy on someone means to excuse that person from the condemnation he deserves. Unless justice first exists, there can be no mercy.
Christ, the creator and ultimate magistrate of creation, knows the heart and knows what condemns or justifies it. He executes justice or mercy as he sees fit. “The demons begged [him] again and again not to send them out of the area,” which was the same as their asking for free reign to posses some other poor soul in the area. “Send us among the pigs,” they begged. With our limited knowledge, we can't know for sure whether Jesus executed justice or mercy, but we do know that he acknowledged their freewill and granted their wish. They entered the pigs and the pigs “rushed down a steep bank into the lake and were drowned,” (5:13).
“Those tending the pigs ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, and the people went out to see what had happened.” What they saw was the man who had been demon possessed “sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid,” (5:14,15). Their reaction to the power of Jesus was the same as that of the demons—fear, and a desire that he not change things. The demons had begged him not to send them out of the area; he didn't and they destroyed themselves. Now the people witness his having brought sanity and peace to a hopeless demoniac and are pleading with him to leave their region, (5:17). In essence they are saying, don't dress us and put us in our right mind. Don't curse us with too much sanity, for inherent in it is an uneasy burden of freewill and accountability. Leave us with the demons we know.
Compare that with Peter's reaction when Jesus miraculously filled his net with a wealth of fish. Like the demons and the Gerasenes, Peter was afraid and asked that Jesus leave him. But his reasons were exactly opposite theirs: “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man” (Luke 5:8). Rather than seeing Jesus as a threat, or seeing in him the potential for great wealth, Peter identified Jesus' power with righteousness and felt that he was unworthy of his company. Jesus Messiah meek and lowly in heart, knows Peter better than Peter knows himself: “Don't be afraid,” he says, “from now on you will catch men.” (same as the demoniac)
One can understand the reasons the owner of the pigs might have wanted Jesus to leave. Jesus was responsible for his having lost a considerable asset. Mark first says that it was a “large herd of pigs” (5:11), then emphasizes this detail by giving the number: “about two thousand” (5:13). Obviously pork was popular among the Romans on this side of the lake. Only a thriving business would support such a large heard. But Mark emphasizes first, not the business aspect, but that the demoniac was healed. He gives the detail about the pigs as a secondary consideration: “Those who had seen it told the people what had happened to the demon possessed man—and told about the pigs as well” (5:16). Whatever the business man's story, it is not the story Mark is telling here. This story is about Jesus' healing of a man possessed by a legion of demons, and of a people possessed by a legion of reasons for wanting Jesus to leave lest he demand too much sanity of them and therefore too much responsibility. Reading about this former demoniac sitting there, dressed and in his right mind, one gets the impression that he is now the only sane one of the bunch.
And what does that mean to him? It means that he wants to be in the company of Jesus. But not in the way we think of being in Jesus' company. This man wants to be in the physical company of Jesus, which we cannot be because he is no longer physically here. He “begged to go with him” (5:18), to get into the boat with the Lord and cross to the other side. What a heartbreak when “Jesus did not let him, but said, 'Go home to your family and tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you.” This former demon-possessed man did not let his savior down, but did more than was specifically asked of him. He told not only his family but “began to tell in the Decapolis [an area of ten Greco/Roman cities] how much Jesus had done for him” (5:19,20).
When Jesus got into the boat and watched this man's figure disappear in the darkness, no one on board with him knew what Jesus knew, that soon, on the other side of the lake he would hang from a cross. The former demoniac must have been just as dismayed and heartbroken as the rest of the disciples upon hearing of his savior's crucifixion. Probably he eventually heard of his resurrection and ascension. But did he, in this life, ever think of himself as I think of him, a precursor to those to whom Christ gave the great commission to go into all the world and preach the gospel? A precursor to Peter as a fisher of men?

Fra Angelico, adoring and disillusioned

Having volunteered to do a report on Fra Angelico for our Renaissance Society class, Learning in Retirement, Sacramento State University, I hurried home to open some books and see what I had gotten myself into. The Encyclopedia Britannica gives the high points of Fra Angelico’s life: He was baptized, Guido di Pietro, in Viccio the republic of Florence, in 1400, and died in 1455 in Rome. In recognition of his angelic life, after his death he was named Fra Angelico. He became a Dominican monk in his early twenties and resided in the monastery of San Domenico at Feisole, and took the name Fra Giovanni da Feisole, the “Fra,” meaning Brother. Vasari tells us that he was a devout Dominican who was offered the post of archbishop of Florence at one time and refused it.
Brother Angelico was no cloistered monk. Such men as Cosimo de Medici the Elder and Pope Eugene IV commissioned him to do many pieces. Most of his surviving work is found in Florence and Rome. Several of his great altarpieces have been dismantled and now appear in many galleries around the world. His art represents what is known as the “Early Renaissance Florentine style,” the style that prevailed between Giotto of the fourteenth century, whom the art historians Dora and H.W. Janson designate “Medieval,” and Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo Da Vinci in the sixteenth century, whom they designate “High Renaissance.”
I scribbled these facts and late that night went to my computer and called up Fra Angelico on google.com with the trepidation of King Saul commanding the witch of Indore to call up Samuel’s soul from the grave and tell him what the morrow would bring. From the grave Samuel told King Saul that tomorrow he and his sons would be where he was. Thankfully my research was not fatal. In fact it enlivened me so much that this report is as much about Fra Angelico’s affect on me as it is on the artist himself.
Pictures the size of postage stamps appeared on my screen and I selected one attributed to Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi, “The Adoration of the Magi.” It hangs in the National Gallery in Washington DC. I had just been looking at a black and white rendition of it in my miniature copy of the Janson’s The Picture History of Painting that I bought for 90 cents in 1964. Layer by layer a picture of people and animals and rocks and hills and ruined walls of classic antiquity appeared on my screen in luminous browns and reds and pinks and blacks. Thrust into the center of it all, extraneous, was a recently constructed wooden and stone stable. This picture blew me away. Had I the spiritual capacity, my encounter with this picture that night might have initiated a mystical experience. Wherever he was in the history and development of art, that night he was not merely taking up space between greater painters—he was Fra Angelico. For this single moment in my own stage of art appreciation, late at night, on my computer screen in this painting—if indeed the whole painting is his—he gave me as much delight as I could have asked of Michelangelo. He gave an experience that perhaps Michelangelo could never give me.
But the initial awe cannot be maintained for long. Before I had a chance to analyze what in this painting so struck me, and what in me was struck, the intensity was gone. I was given a glimpse of wonder and it was taken away. But it is not all taken away, thankfully, wiped completely from my mind. The memory of the awe lingers, and I can view the painting and remember that this painting once held for me something more than an educated appreciation. This painting is for me what Robert Frost in “The Figure A Poem Makes” tells us a good poem is: “…a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but a momentary stay against confusion.” In my confused world I need a stay, however momentary.
Obviously, whatever in this painting zeroed-in my workaday modern consciousness was more than the sum of the painting’s parts. I can call up all the parts before me on a computer and analyze them at my leisure, and pleasant as that is it does not recapture the euphoria. However, it is inaccurate to say that I “came down” from one level of art experience to a lower level. An educated appreciation is not on a lower level than was my initial excitement with this painting, just a different level, different but closely related, as love-making and love are related but not the same. Like my late night experience with this painting, love-making demands an intensity one cannot maintain. But love may last a lifetime and involve sharing, sacrifice, devotion, care, and perhaps children as a result of love-making. Studied discussions of art is like love and involves love. It is the celebration and nurture of culture. Euphoria won’t tell me what Fra Angelico copied of his 15th century world that it should be a momentary stay against my 21st century confusion; what in Angelico’s “Adoration of the Magi” I can discuss with my art classmates.


It is not the best painting Fra Angelico did, and to the lesser informed in art, like me, it is something of a footnote: one panel taken from several small paintings at the foot of a large altarpiece enclosed in a shrine designed by Ghiberti, the sculptor who did the famous doors on the Florence Baptistery. It may not even be by Fra Angelico; after all it is attributed also to Fra Filippo Lippi. None of that detracts from the initial impact this painting made on me. It is not always the most accomplished, the most powerful, the most beautiful that moves us. One wouldn’t call a leper waddling alongside a dusty road, beautiful. But just such a picture might change ones life forever.
What then do the lines and colors applied to this flat surface mean to an untrained eye like mine? It’s misleading to ask what the modern paintings of Mondrian mean. Such art does not mean in a traditional sense. Their lines and colors don’t copy any particular object in nature (although, since Mondrian, much wallpaper has come to copy him). There is no such puzzle about Holbein’s King Henry VIII; the subject is Henry VIII. We should ask, however, what Henry’s determined demeanor or sumptuous clothing tell us about him.
Fra Angelico’s “Adoration of the Magi” is like Holbein’s “Henry VIII”; we don’t puzzle over what his figures are. But we should ask why Angelico chose these particular figures and why he arranged them as he did. To answer that I used the method I use for poetry, the only method I know: note the obvious and ask its meaning for me; pay attention to detail; don’t hazard too many guesses about unfamiliar symbols. The first admonition is not always easy. In my report to the class, I missed the most obvious detail about this painting—its shape, a circle, which represents perfection. The last admonition—don’t guess what unfamiliar symbols mean—is easy enough but perhaps I should have heeded it more closely.
From its name I know this painting is about the magi who, bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh, journeyed from the east to Bethlehem to adore the new born Jesus, have known it since I was a child, although in our fundamentalist household back then we called them The Three Wise Men. I also know it from a significant poem in my life, T.S. Eliot’s Journey of the Magi:”

A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey...

and so forth. I used to read it to my children every Christmas.
On both sides of this painting and across the bottom are a horde of people. The line of people on the right seems to have emptied the city that one can just see to the right of that formidable rock, top center. These people are here for the same reason the magi are, but with a less informed purpose. They are not bearing gifts but have come to get something. I suggest that these are the hordes who will answer the call of Jesus, “Come unto me all ye who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”
As for the formidable rock, I know that Jesus said to Peter whose name means rock, “...thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” My guess is that this rock represents for Angelico, Peter as the first pope.
Most of the people are on foot, some are on horseback and a few on camelback. The stable is prominent here, and the peacock on the roost above it. The Jansons say this peacock is out of proportion to the painting, perhaps the practice of an apprentice. I can’t believe that in an altarpiece of this importance, this crowned peacock is merely done for practice. Perhaps it is God the Father, or the Holy Spirit who, at this point in history, defer to The Son. Were it to face us and fan its tail it would dominate the whole scene.
I read my interpretation of the peacock and my ego fanned like its tail, then folded and drug off when I read that in the renaissance the peacock represents resurrection. So much for my self-admonition not to interpret symbols one knows nothing about.
There is, however, a legitimacy in my interpretation, since my first order for interpreting a painting is to note the obvious and ask what it means for me. Peacocks are obvious and mean something to me. Were a rat balancing on that perch I would have a problem. For people like me there is not much in a piece of art whose every detail requires that we consult an expert to tell us its meaning.
The objective of symbols is to illustrate reality rather than explain it. Indeed, the best myths illustrate subjects whose meaning cannot be explained, such as why there is something rather than nothing. Good paintings do the same thing, they illustrate a reality which cannot be fully explained. If the painting is a true representation of nature—and by that I do not mean a photographic image—the painter may not know the full meaning of the nature he is representing. If an artist knows the meaning of his every representation then his art is simple pedantry. The peacock shall always remain God the Father or the Holy Spirit for me, even if in hindsight I have learned that conventionally it means the resurrection. It is convenient to know both, but one interpretation need not exclude the other. If this painting is to be valuable to me at all it is crucial that it mean something to me.
And what else, in “The Adoration of the Magi,” means something to me? Men inside the stable tending to the hooves of horses. Those hooves need tending because they have come a long way. To verify this I can ask myself what picture I might have drawn to illustrate that when saddleback was prominent someone had ridden a long way. I haven’t the genius to originate such ideas, and certainly not the craft to draw them, but we all can ask of a picture what its figures mean, even an abstract painting. The reason for their long journey is obvious, almost all of them are focused on the three haloed figures at the lower center: the newborn Jesus with Mary and Joseph.
But the people in the line on the right have no access to these haloed people. Their trail ends at an abrupt drop-off. Just prior to the drop-off stands a woman, her back to us, her arms spread. She seems to be telling the crowd, “Go Back! You can’t get to the stable this way.” At the end of the trail a kneeling figure worships the savior, but from afar. Beside him, at the very edge of the cliff, stands a woman with two children, one clinging to her knees. With her hand at her forehead she looks toward the holy scene as if to ask, “How does one get there?” Because the people on this path are perplexed, I interpret this to be that path which the New Testament says seems right unto men but whose end is death.
The woman with the two children—and the kneeling figure if he is her husband—at the very cliff that marks the end of the path, needs no interpretation. One step backward and the child at her knees might fall to its death. This scene dramatically illustrates that our first responsibility is to those in our immediate care, especially children. Not even religion supersedes this responsibility. And if not religion then certainly not pleasure or business. Followers of Christ cannot get closer to the kingdom of God than to be attentive to children, “for of such is the kingdom of God.”
The people on the left have arrived by way of a narrow gate and a difficult path, albeit, the exhibitionists on the ledge beside the gate, one totally nude, surely intend to attract attention to themselves and away from the Savior. They look like hecklers, or perhaps temple prostitutes of pagan Rome and Greece.
For Fra Angelico, the pagan walls have all collapsed, as have the walls of Judaism and all other religions. These temple prostitutes are a vanishing culture in Angelico's world, displaced in history by the humble stable and manger. For Fra Angelico’s time and his conviction, the “Way” was under the exclusive control of Rome. Had been since Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, established its authority a thousand years before. Anytime Christianity, whether Protestantism or Catholicism, takes a different tack this is the man it has to go back to and renegotiate with, whether it knows it or not. And Christianity was indeed on a new tack.
Angelico feared that the tack back to the humanism that was the glory of ancient Rome and Greece might eventuate in making man, rather than God, the measure of all things. All his monastic life he struggled against this humanism which at once threatened the power of the Roman Church and immortalized its art—Angelico’s art included. Absent that humanism in his art, we probably would not be talking about him today.
It is ironical that Fra Angelico illustrated with such conviction these walls in ruins while the walls of his own beloved City of God, so ingeniously designed by Augustine in his monumental theological treatise of that name, were themselves beginning to crumble. He struggled for a losing cause. Humanism was on the advance, and nothing illustrates that better than a painting by his great contemporary, Massaccio, “Expulsion From Paradise.” Who cannot sympathize with that tragic couple on their way out of Eden?
I had set out to find what in this painting applied to my modern world that it moved me as it did that night. I see now there is no identifying what triggered my experience; it was a gift. My gift does not approach the mystical experience of a St Thomas or a Pascal, but that night I got an intimation of what such an experience could be. Neither St Thomas or Pascal could describe their experience so one could hardly expect me to describe mine. My experience is shallow compared to theirs, and so are my intellect and powers of articulation.
It is of utmost importance that we see the art of man as only a stay against confusion, never as an ingenious means toward the ultimate clarification of all confusion. Currently, that warning must apply to our faith in and dependence on science and technology. Fra Angelico probably regretted losing the Catholic Church as the sole representative of the City of God on earth more than he feared what would take its place. But could he have foreseen modern science and technology exalted to the level of sect or cult in which man worships his own accomplishments, given the insight of “The Adoration of the Magi,” it would likely have horrified him as much as losing Catholicism saddened him. Popular scientist such as Stephen Hawking leave the impression that we are on the threshold of a unified cosmological theory that will explain all existence and demonstrate that while we and our science may not have caused the big bang that brought nature into existence, we can be confident no other sentient being could have. The terrifying aspect of this is that the human mind has deceived itself into believing that it can comprehend all existence that it encounters.
My guess is that beneath Fra Angelico’s brush we would be a clever people busy about our tower to heaven; Auschwitz and the atomic bomb and Stalin safely tucked away as only momentary stays against science’s ultimate clarification of all confusion. In truth, if all the carnage of the twentieth century failed to tell us that we are, with all our technology, a species who passes through periods of mortal madness, no painter can. Nor did our madness end with the twentieth century. Images of death in Iraq and Darfur would break a sane world’s heart. Gerard Hopkins’s poem to Margaret, “Spring and Fall,” reminds us that our mortality warrants mourning; none of us shall escape it and no science can eliminate it:

Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you morn for.

Weinberg vs a designed universe

God knows whether Dulcinea exists on earth or not,
or whether she is fantastical or not. These are not
matters where verification can be carried out to the full.
Cervantes, Don Quixote

If religion is to be viable it cannot abandon to science natural phenomena such as quantum mechanics, as if quantum mechanics were the property of science and not the common property of us all. Nor can religion abandon philosophy as if all philosophy were vain philosophy. Logic is not hostile to faith. The truths of philosophy and mathematics and the mysteries of quantum mechanics and outer space belong to nature, and nature belongs as much to religion as it does to science. If science has arrived at a demonstrable truth, then that truth belongs to religion. If philosophy has arrived at a logical truth, that truth belongs to religion. All demonstrable truth belongs as much to religion as it does to any other discipline, and should compel religion as much as it does any other discipline. Moreover, it is the job of religion to make sure that the truth that science or philosophy arrive at are verifiable by scientific and logical methods. That means that religion can only benefit from a knowledge of science and philosophy’s methods. If religion holds science to what it can prove by physical evidence, about whether the universe is designed or not, religion will be consoled by what science finds.
Religion’s blessing and curse, however, is that it is not bound by the methods of science or of logic. This difference is at the heart of the debate between religion and science. Science is compelled to use demonstrable models, and they would compel religion to do the same if it is to be believed. But religion is not driven by physical demonstration but by faith. Unless it is bound by love for humanity in general, religion is dangerous. Few people make this point more often than the late Carl Sagan. His Demon Haunted World accurately describes the world of carnage that religions have wrought. However, it is logical that if carnage fills our world, religious people have wreaked most of it, because most people in the world, and in history, are religious. Were the world and history peopled with atheists their carnage may have equaled religions; we don’t know. But if the Stalinist, Maoist and Pol Pot eras are any indication, perhaps we are better off with the devil of religion we know rather than the atheistic devil of which these eras have given us a mere peek.
Scientific theories fail to explain why there is something rather than nothing. It is a failure shared by religious and philosophical theories as well. Religiously speaking, if there is no god, we do not know why there exists something rather than nothing. If there is a god, we don’t know why he created physical existence rather than to have left it uncreated. And as to philosophy’s pursuit of why there is something rather than nothing, logic never arrives conclusively at an original cause of which existence is the effect. Lacking such proof, how shall I, a professed Christian, demonstrate that it is more logical to conclude that the universe exists because it was created, than it is to explain that existence just is—that ours is an accidental universe as scientists describe it.
Scientist almost always confuse the parameters for this debate. They are physicists, but usually resort to non-physical moral and ethical arguments against arguments for design. To illustrate this confusion, consider Physics Nobel prize laureate, Steven Weinberg’s “A Designer Universe?” found on numerous web searches in physics and cosmology. This is an essay about whether or not the universe shows signs of having been designed. Weinberg is a physicist so I assume that he is asked to give a scientific assessment of this question. His essay, however, is hardly a scientific argument against design. It is an ethical/moral argument against a benevolent designer. As such his very frame of reference is not physical but psychological, that is, spiritual. If his argument disproves a theory that says that a spiritual force created the universe, it will have done so by spiritual means.
Weinberg’s first point is that he cannot talk about the universe as designed unless he has “some vague idea of what a designer would be like.” This is no scientific premise. One may find a humming, turning metal alloy machine—something of a giant Paley's watch—and have no idea of its purpose or its designer and suspect that something designed this thing. The several polished and oiled parts are together by no volition of their own – metal can’t think – in an assembly of balance and complexity. Since the assembly was obviously devised, and metal cannot devise, it is logical to conclude that something other than the individual parts devised and assembled this machine. The reason for this machine’s existence, whatever it is, is not in the parts but in the parts as they function together toward some mysterious end; remove a part and the machine no longer hums and turns. These things we may know about the machine that tell us virtually nothing about what the designer is like. Should we find that this machine exists to bring pain—a torture machine—then we may ask about the morals of the designer, but that is no physics question. It is not logical therefore for a physicist to conclude that because the machine is a torture machine it can’t have been designed, because no designer this intelligent would create a torture machine. In fact, we are part of this particular machine, this world, and the most fundamental question to begin with is one we must ask ourselves: how can psychological (spiritual) questions be asked in and about a purely accidental material world? Is there, in fact, such a thing as good and evil upon which to found an ethics?
This world is often a torture machine, whatever else it may be. Any of us have a legitimate reason to ask why, Weinberg included, but we ask from a moral/ethical reference, not a scientific one. It’s a question that many Christians—but by no means all—avoid or dismiss with the story of The Garden of Eden. The art and matter of Eden itself demands interpretation. It is a story too complex to be used as a historical justification or dismissal of the question of why there is evil in the world. Surely the eating of forbidden fruit is no infraction grave enough to have brought the wrath of God down on all humans, none of whom were born at the time of the infraction, and none of whom were guilty except Adam and Eve. To insist that god was justified in condemning all humankind because of the infraction of their first parents is to make nonsense of our God given moral compass, Milton notwithstanding.
One can accept that the laws and the individual parts of the universe are so assembled that it is illogical to conclude that the parts assembled themselves or were assembled accidentally, without having to explain the moral reason for why they were assembled as they were. Existence is horrible at times, and I don’t know why. But physics compels me to believe, or at least to consider, that the universe was intelligently assembled—it turns and hums. If I accept science that tells me how unbelievably improbable our path has been from the big bang to now, I cannot logically not consider it. Once I consider that possibility, then I have an insight into Leibniz’s question—why something rather than nothing?—that physical matter alone could never ask. Once I ask this psychological question, I am compelled to ask another: why is this something designed as it is and not otherwise? Atheist should feel compelled to ask why there is something rather than nothing, and theists cannot escape asking why the something is created as it is and not otherwise. Both must realize, however, that neither answer can be perfectly satisfactory, probably because we could not understand the answer if it were told us.
Weinberg says that “the human mind remains extraordinarily difficult to understand, but so is the weather. “We can’t predict whether it will rain one month from today, but we do know the rules that govern the rain...” He sees nothing, he says, about the human mind that is beyond the hope of understanding than is the weather. Let me suggest that should Weinberg ever perceive the weather perceiving us and asking why, from moral or scientific reasons, it and we exist, then he would surely be convinced that the laws that rule the weather have suddenly taken on a complexity that the weather’s simple material cannot account for.
Weinberg follows the weather observation with the observation that “human beings are the result of natural selection acting over millions of years...” This brush stroke, prevalent among cosmologists, conceals more than it reveals. It is not significant that it took a long, circuitous rout to arrive at intelligent life—the human being. The primary significance of human beings is their intelligence, and to say that it took us a long time to gain intelligence is no explanation for what intelligence is or how we posses it. Should the weather or a plant or animal evolve to ask the questions humans ask, then unless we can give a better explanation than that they came to do so “over millions of years of breeding and eating,” we must admit that we cannot account for intelligence. We know it is there, we know that it deals with thought and logic and mathematics—which have no material existence—but how it is there and why it is there and what it is, we do not know. Here is what Roger Penrose of Oxford (under whom Stephen Hawking received his Doctorate) says:

A scientific world-view which does not profoundly come to term with the problems of conscious minds can have no serious pretensions of completeness. Consciousness is part of our universe, so any physical theory which makes no proper place for it falls fundamentally short of providing a genuine description of the world. I would maintain that there is yet no physical, biological or computational theory that comes very close to explaining our consciousness and consequent intelligence...(1)

I do however, share Weinberg’s opinion (with the exception of subjective experiences which can't be used in an objective essay) that the fundamental principles of nature appear to be “utterly impersonal.” But I don’t agree that they are “without any special role for life.” If one considers number as special, rather than size, then the myriad life forms on earth alone, living in every drop of water and covering every speck of land with plants and animals, then life is special. The number of these complex organisms rivals the number of stars we can observe in our sky, or stars and planets that have come to exist since the big bang.
Life’s role is special if an exception to Newton’s second law of thermodynamics is special. Newton’s second law of thermodynamics declares that, as a general rule, things tend to chaos. Life, however, exists as an exception to this general rule. It stops chaos in its tracks and rearranges matter in an order more complex than the whole physical universe. That it came together repeatedly over billions of years and against virtually impossible odds makes it special if “special” has any meaning.
In his “Designer Universe?” Weinberg maintains that the universe is not so finely tuned to accommodate life as some physicists have argued. The example these physicists give is the occurrence of carbon, which is essential to life, and the narrow parameters within which carbon is produced. Weinberg shows how the parameters for carbon are not as close as these physicists suppose they are, because carbon can be produced in ways that these physicists have not taken into account. I have no idea who is right, I am no physicist, but I do know that however essential it is to life, carbon is not life, especially not conscious life. One may know that gas is necessary to make his car run and have no conception of what an internal combustion engine is. It is unlikely that Weinberg can tell how conscious life began if he cannot tell what it is.
Weinberg is right that science explains more adequately than religion what the natural laws are, and why, if they were “slightly different” we would find ourselves in “logical absurdities.” But that point only emphasizes the balance in the machine, the why of which science has no idea. He is also right that religious theories are infinitely flexible, such that they are useless in describing the laws of nature. He is wrong, however, in saying that the tuning that brought about life is not as fine tuned as some scientist claim, and religion is right to say that such fine tuning is absurd if not miraculous. Perhaps these things are not as fine tuned in some areas, but in others they are fine tuned to a mystifying degree. We can’t know how fine tuned things have to be to bring about the universe—what fine tuning is there between is and is not? It is telling that in precisely the instance when his expertise is called on, it fails him. “I have to admit that, even when physicists will have gone as far as they can go. When we have a final theory, we will not have a completely satisfying picture of the world.”
Nor will religion, at least not Christianity. Christianity knows that it cannot have a completely satisfying picture of the world until God makes the world—including Christians—more satisfactory, until He reconciles the world to himself (II Cor. 5: 18, 19; NIV). Weinberg concludes his essay with a personal note about his own reasons for not believing in a designer: his mother died of cancer, his father was destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease, and scores of his second and third cousins were murdered in the holocaust. For him, he says, “signs of a benevolent designer are pretty well hidden.” Weinberg’s reasons for atheism are good reasons. They shake me because I have no answer for why a good god would allow such misery to continue. I consider my own argument for design shallow when compared with the questions the existence of evil compels me to ask. But in hopes that there will be some reconciliation between Weinberg's misery and my own near ecstasy at times, I must point out that Weinberg’s description of pain and death in the world is drawn from a moral/ethical framework that physics cannot account for, and upon which religion rests. Valid though his argument is as a moral/ethical observation, it does not dismiss a designer as the most probable reason for this turning, humming well organized mechanical device we call the universe.

Footnotes:
1. Penrose, Roger; Shadows of the Mind, ( Oxford University Press; New York, Oxford, 1994) pg 8.

Richard Dawkins, Witness to Eden

Richard Dawkins, Witness to Eden
By Donald Stark


Superstition
Climbing Mount Impossible, by the Oxford Darwinian and best selling author Richard Dawkins, begins with Dawkins having been irked by a “stock-in-trade” literary lecture in which the speaker suggested that the fruit in the Garden of Eden with which Eve tempted Adam was a fig. “The speaker obviously knew that there never was a Garden of Eden, never a tree of knowledge of good and evil.”1 Of such stuff he says in The Selfish Gene:

We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: ‘The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 [The year Darwin published Origin of Species] are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.2

Darwinian evolution—which, according to Dawkins, should replace all previous explanations of what man is—says that through some twist of nature a simple form of life emerged from primeval slime and from that life we humans eventually evolved. Were we to explain life as full blown, according to Dawkins, its complexities would make an explanation for the universe simple. So to explain life we must begin from the simple and proceed to the complex.3
Simple to complex is a reasonable way to explain most things, but not life. There is no simple life now, no fossil record of its having ever been simple, and no model of how it could ever be simple. Reduced to a single cell, life is still complex. “All living matter is made up of cells, and all cells come from previously existing cells.”4 Within each cell are its genes, and as Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge illustrates, the gene has its own complexities: It is “without meaning unless it is put into the context of what it is coding for (his italics), not least an extremely sophisticated biochemistry.”5
Dawkins’ “simple life” breaks down thus: it is as complex as a cell, and the cell as complex as its genes and the gene as complex as the DNA it houses, and the DNA as complex as its method of transferring information. Franklin M. Harold, Professor Emeritus of biochemistry, Colorado State University says, “Organized complexity is one of the essential characteristics of life.”6 Until Dawkins can find or create one simple life he can only be taken on faith, the very thing he condemns in Christians, Jews and Muslims who take Eden seriously.

Life, a lazy Explanation
Despite Erwin Schrödinger’s long-standing challenge to science to define life, no one knows what it is.7 To discover life on another planet or in a lab would not explain what it is, it would only demonstrate that given favorable conditions life might emerge. Although Dawkins does not know what life is, he says in the Blind Watchmaker that to claim that God created life “You have to say something like, ‘God was always there,’ and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say, ‘life was always there’ and be done with it.”8 But Dawkins must take the same lazy way out if he is to account for existence at all, life included. He can either affirm that the universe came from nothing or affirm that it, or something, always existed and from it all other things came to be. His way, however, has an additional complication: If he is to avoid the absurd conclusion that something came from nothing he must go where science cannot go—beyond the big bang—and claim that the universe came from “something” that existed prior to the big bang. What Plato asserted by logic and Jews, Christians and Muslims assert by inspiration—that the universe is not eternal—the discovery of the big bang makes scientifically emphatic.
If the beginning of the universe is hard to explain, the beginning of life is harder, says Dawkins, then goes on to explain it as so simple “there is no mystery about [it]. It had to happen by definition.”9 How it happened he cannot say specifically, but suggests several possibilities. Of the likelihood of any of them having actually occurred, he says, “We have at our disposal…odds of 1 in 100 billion billion as an upper limit.”10 Obviously, odds of one-millionth this number are not reasonable, so how does he convince any one? He intimidates. Reject his unreasonable odds and he’ll make a fool of you. Well, since I’m a fool anyway who never owned a new car, I’m used to high-pressure sales tactics. I read on, but now with a more critical eye than before, and find no reasonable odds for his theory.

Living? Who cares?
In his demonstration of the primeval soup model, as how life got started, Dawkins explains that if you had sampled the soup at two different times, “the later sample would have contained higher proportions of varieties with high longevity/fecundity/copying-fidelity.” This, he says, is what biologists mean by evolution. He then asks, “Should we then call the original replicator molecules ‘living’?” And answers, “Who cares?”11
A Jew in the Auschwitz extermination camp, 1943, cares. “Living” means more to her than something that rearranges itself and replicates itself. It means being a conscious human: judging good from evil, appraising beauty, loving, living in the present and expecting the future.
Dawkins cares too. He knows that we are more than our chemicals account for, otherwise he would not warn us about unintended consequences of his theory should we injudiciously adhere to what it implies. According to the theory, we humans are machines created by our genes. “A predominant quality to be expected in a gene is ruthless selfishness. This gene selfishness will usually give rise to selfishness in individual behavior…. Much as we might wish to believe otherwise, universal love and the welfare of the species as a whole are concepts that simply do not make evolutionary sense.” And the warning: “I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved. I am not saying how we humans morally ought to behave.”12
His point is well taken, he is no less moral than I am. However, we are not arguing with his morality but with his theory about how he came to know what morality is. He goes on: “There are special circumstances in which a gene can achieve its own selfish goals best by fostering a limited form of altruism at the level of individual animals.” Dawkins won't be fooled, however. He knows what is truly good and how it differs from the evil that his genes would have him believe is good. “Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.”13 Of course not, no other species has a knowledge of good and evil. By asserting that altruism is good and selfishness bad, Dawkins verifies that he knows good from evil, something his genes, he says, never taught him. As parable or history, this is the essence of Eden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The story of Eden illustrates that it is of man’s very humanness to know that there is a good and an evil. He can’t escape knowing it anymore than he can escape knowing that one plus one equals two. Although one may be a Jew, Christian or Muslim whether he believes Eden as history or myth (“myth” as a conveyor of truth), he cannot be any of these unless he believes that as a human he has knowledge of good and evil. That atheists share that knowledge emphasizes that these religions are about more than morality.



Eden, A Mythmaker’s View
If you will, momentarily think of Eden as a myth that the Jews have included in their history, as Greek mythology is included in Greek history but is not meant to be a literal history of the Greeks. A difference is that absent Greek mythology a history of the powerful Greece would still persist. Absent the story of creation and the fall—Eden—there would hardly be a history of the Jews. Because of this myth and its context Jewish history has become the focal point of Western history.
By whatever means we came to be, as mythmakers, what are we? Intellect sets us apart from other animals. Should a chimpanzee evolve to attain the intellectual capacity of a human, he might look around and ask why there is something rather than nothing; why things seem twisted as if out of some more reasonable picture—why so much suffering in so much beauty? He is still an animal, but now responsible, as humans are responsible, for the intellect which is at once his loss of innocence and his discovery of the knowledge of good and evil, justice, love, logic and mathematics, none of which are material, and a knowledge of which he never had when he was simply an animal. In fact the terms “animal”, or “primate” no longer define him. They are but minor physical characteristics of his new being, and his new being is defined best by what he knows, not by what he physically is. And what he knows defines him as less material than non-material—spiritual if you will.
An easy example of his non-materiality is his discovery and utilization of mathematics. Even though we may express it in conventional terms and apply it to material phenomena, mathematics is not material nor is it a convention. It adheres to strict laws that we can only discover and use but not disagree with. Mathematics exists outside time and space, in a real world but not a material world, a world that measures our world but remains immeasurable to us.
As a means of handling his perplexity at how he acquired such knowledge, he composes his myth. The first prerequisite for myth is that the mythmaker has a language. Language, like mathematics, describes the material world but is not itself material. The voice and the pen are material but these are only tools the intellect uses to convey thought, and thought itself, though representative of the physical universe, is not physical. The mythmaker must draw analogies between himself and other things in nature, and he must relate things he sees to concepts that he cannot see, such as love and justice, and himself as both an artist and a work of art.
His myth is like the story in Genesis of our first parents who were caretakers in a garden where among all the other trees grew the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They were free to eat of the tree of life but forbidden to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They exercised freewill and ate of the forbidden tree and the creator banished them from the garden and from the tree of life. Dawkins is disingenuous not to acknowledge that the story of Eden is an accurate allegory of humans as being more than simply primates who obey their selfish genes. Their defining characteristic is the knowledge of good and evil and their freewill to choose between them. This knowledge morally obligates them to undermine the selfishness of their selfish genes.
Eden's explanation of why our world is less than perfect, a world in which we must suffer and die because someone else sinned, shall always be a point of debate. But it is not debatable that the story of Eden and the fall would not be possible unless the mythmaker knew something about what he cannot have experienced. One cannot possibly conceive of less than perfect—which is allegorized by the fall and which we know ourselves to be—unless he has some innate sense of perfect—which he could never have been, even in the garden.

Eden, The View from Auschwitz
Were Origin of Species accurate down to the last detail it would not tell us what man is. It would only tell us what a primate is and then tell us that we are only primates. If we believe what science tells us about DNA we know this. Our DNA matches almost exactly that of a chimpanzee. The most obvious thing about this match is that our DNA describes us as primates but not as humans. Because Origin of Species attempts to explain what we are as primates it is at most a biology book. It fails to explain what we are as humans.
A tenet of the Abraham religions is that as humans we know good from evil. A second tenet, predicated on our knowing good and evil, is that justice exists. A third tenet is that justice will prevail: good will be rewarded and evil punished. There is debate among members of these groups as to what constitutes good and evil and reward and punishment, but none that justice will prevail. A leading tenet of of all of them, however, is that punishment can be averted by mercy, mercy that comes only by true repentance. For atheism, if an individual reaps his just rewards he must do so while he is alive, for the justice of his evil deeds cannot reach beyond death. Jews, Christians and Muslims believe that death cannot prevent it.
Dawkins says in The God Delusion that altruism, such as adopting a child out of compassion, is a “misfiring” of a genetic urge that is not altruistic but selfish. “I must rush to add,” he explains, “that ‘misfiring’ is intended only in a Darwinian sense. It carries no pejorative sense.”14 He is admonishing us to go outside Darwinism to find a good solution for an evil problem evolution has caused. That is tantamount to saying that as humans we are more than the primates Darwinian evolution has made of us, which is exactly what Eden tells us. According to the Eden story altruism is not a misfiring of our genes. As humans we have a knowledge of good and evil innate. Believers may disagree with an atheist about what is a good or evil deed, but he may just as well agree with the atheist and take issue with another believer, just as an atheist may agree with a Jew, Christians or Muslim and take issue with another atheist. Without a common frame of reference as to what constitutes good and evil, debate about what made particular deeds good or evil would be impossible. This is at the heart of what the tree of knowledge of good and evil is, as history or myth.
Dawkins says that what is good for our genes “had to wait for the twentieth century to reach a cognitive level, and even now full understanding is confined to a minority of scientific specialists.”15 But scientific specialists of the twentieth century dreamed up the Auschwitz death camp on their opinion of what was good for their genes, rather than on what was morally good. If they were mistaken as to what was “good,” they were not mistaken on Darwinian grounds. As Dawkins points out, Darwinian natural selection is antithetical to good and evil.
Atheists condemn Hitler as sincerely as Jews, Christians and Muslims do and from the same knowledge of good and evil and of justice that is predicated on that knowledge. But they cannot condemn him on the basis of Darwinian evolution. For justice they have to go outside Darwinism. If Hitler is only a primate he goes free by putting a bullet in his brain. To the extent that Dawkins proves that we have knowledge of good and evil that genetics—his main tool for evolution—is antithetical to, to that extent he proves the essential message of Eden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
But suppose Dawkins is right. We are products of evolution but manage after ten thousand years to defeat the selfishness of our genes and our species comes to deplore the death it wreaked in the past on its own kind. This brave new world can make no difference to the young woman in Auschwitz. She dissolved in a shower ten thousand years ago. It would be overly dramatic to say that a last shower awaits us all were the truth of it not beyond all drama. An alternative to Dawkins is that justice will prevail. For Jews, Christians and Muslims, and for the young woman in Auschwitz, that hope is only possible if there is a resurrection.

Stephen Hawking’s Unbound Theory vs God

Stephen Hawking’s Unbound Theory vs God

by Donald W. Stark

Stephen Hawking was admitted to the hospital, April 20, 2009, with a chest infection. I hope he is recovering well. Like millions of others, Hawking first introduced me to cosmology. Health difficulties are nothing new to Hawking, he has spent most of his life in a wheelchair, and every day of life since 1963 has been a bonus for him. That year he was diagnosed with ALS and not expected to live more than a few years. During those bonus years he wrote A Brief History of Time: From The Big Bang to Black Holes. Published in 1988, A Brief History went on to become the largest selling science book of all time. In its “Acknowledgements” Hawking says that his book discusses the basic ideas about the origin and fate of the universe in language that people without a scientific education can understand. It is necessarily from that perspective that this essay is written, for I have no scientific education.

A Brief History of Time: From The Big Bang to Black Holes recounts that in 1929, Edwin Hubble made the observation that wherever you look, galaxies are moving rapidly away from us, just as the Russian physicist, Alexander Friedmann, had predicted they were. Friedmann took Einstein’s theory of relativity at face value and accurately described our universe as expanding evenly in every direction. Cosmologists concluded that if the universe is expanding, it must originally all have been in one place at one time, and then it banged.

“There was a time, called the big bang,” says Hawking “when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense.”¹ This, as he goes on to say, creates a big problem for science because mathematics cannot handle infinite numbers. “This means that the general theory of relativity…predicts that there is a point in the universe where the theory itself breaks down. Such a point is an example of what mathematicians call a singularity. In fact, all our theories of science…break down at the big bang singularity.”² An answer to how that original “point” came into existence before time and space, and why it deployed into time and space, dissolves in a singularity for most scientists. Hawking, however, believes that if his no boundary theory—central to all his popular works—is ever worked out, it will avoid the singularity—that mysterious “point”--at the big bang and predict how the universe started off.

The breakdown of mathematics is but one of Hawkins's theory's problems. He says that in order to predict how the universe should have started off, one needs laws that hold at the beginning of time. The beginning of time, for Hawking, is the big bang. At the big bang, physical existence was minute, therefore Quantum mechanics—our best physical theory for describing laws for minute phenomena—would be needed to describe existence. Shortly after the big bang, as the universe became large, the theory of relativity—our best physical theory for describing laws for existence in the large—would be necessary. To be consistent the two must form a continuum such that any theory that reflects physical reality now, and predicts how it must have been at the big bang, would have to combine the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. Unfortunately these two theories are not logically compatible with each other, and no unifying theory seems to be in the offing. Hawking says that even though we do not know what could unify these theories, “We are fairly certain of some features that such a unified theory should have.”³

In order to see what Hawking says his theory would tell us, let's avoid the details of these features and assume that everything is resolved. What then? He says his theory would then give us a history of a particle that represents the history of the whole universe.

There would be no singularities at which the laws of science break down and no edge of space-time at which one would have to appeal to God or some new law to set the boundary conditions for space-time. One could say: “The boundary conditions of the universe is that it has no boundary.” The universe would be completely self-contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE.⁴

BE WHAT?

What would this small dense particle, with which Hawking proposes to replace the singularity that gave rise to the big bang, and leave no place for a creator⁵ be? If all other scientific theories fail at the infinite—a singularity—how is it that Hawking's theory about an infinitely small, infinitely dense particle does not fail? Hawking never explains how his infinitely small, dense particle is less a singularity than the singularity it is intended to replace.

Moreover, he posits this particle--”point”--as existing before the big bang, therefore before the existence of time, space, and matter. But absent time, space, and matter, there could be no particle, no time for it to be in, no space for it to occupy, no matter for it to be. There would be nothing to see, no “large class of observations,” without which, according to Hawking’s own criteria, no good theory is possible.⁶

For now, let’s again sidestep these problems so as to see with Hawking what he sees as the beginning of the universe, indeed, the very seed of a universe before it bangs and forms galaxies and stars that eventually house, what he calls, insignificant creatures like ourselves. “Using the no boundary condition, we find that the universe must in fact have started off with just the minimum possible nonuniformity allowed by the uncertainty principle.”⁷ Briefly stated, the uncertainty principle shows that a particle of the least possible size, the quantum, behaves in ways that the human mind cannot possibly understand. An example would be a single particle that seems to occupy two places at the same time. Hawking says that “Quantum mechanics ... introduces an unavoidable element of unpredictability or randomness into science.”⁸ This unpredictability in its lowest allowable measure is what Hawking is referring to when he says that the universe started off with the minimum possible nonuniformity allowed by the uncertainty principle. We can't be certain of what this non-uniformity is, but Hawking assures us that without it our universe would be a thin, cold soup rather than galaxies and stars.

Here then is how Hawking’s theory describes the incipient universe: an infinitesimally small, infinitely dense particle with the smallest nonuniformity allowable under the uncertainty principle.

Hawking describes this particle as a sphere, and as a sphere, it has no singularity or edge. He uses the earth as an analogy of it, saying that he traveled round the earth without ever having run into a singularity or an edge.⁹ We have granted Hawking’s theory a lot of leeway, but here we must object. Because the earth is in the shape of a sphere, and one traveling around it will never run into a singularity or edge, one cannot conclude that the earth is infinite, at least not in its existence. Nothing in its shape proves that the earth cannot have had a beginning in time, and shall have an end.

Moreover, until this “infinitesimally small, infinitely dense” particle explodes, it does not exist in any physical sense of the word exist. No model can describe something beyond time and space, and time and space, as Hawking and all cosmologists have told us time and again, did not exist beyond fourteen billion years ago. Until the big bang, nothing existed. Hawking makes no sense when he describes this tiny particle as if it existed before the big bang. Nor does he make sense when he says that life and intelligence are insignificant, and that because the earth is a sphere that a person could walk forever around and never fall off, the earth is infinite. Hawking's particle, if it is to replace the need for a creator, is going to have to make more sense than Hawking here describes it.

HAWKING’S INFINITE PARADOX

If we are not careful Hawking will roll that particle into an infinitesimally small, infinitely dense ball and sneak it by us without our seeing it and asking that haunting metaphysical question, “Where’d that come from?” If something is infinitely small, it follows that there is an infinite number of divisions that are smaller than it, and an infinite number of divisions larger. If it is infinitely dense, there are an infinite number of divisions that are denser than it and an infinite number of divisions less dense. That’s what infinite means.

No one illustrates better the breakdown of mathematics when it meets with the infinite than the fifth-century B.C.E. Greek philosopher, Zeno of Elea. Here is one of his paradoxes: Two runners are racing around a track; the second runner is gaining on the first. He halves the distance between himself and the lead runner, then halves the distance again, then halves that distance and so forth. It is mathematically impossible for the second runner to overtake the lead runner because however many times the second runner halves the distance between himself and the lead runner, there will forever be another mathematical number to halve—divide two and you get one; divide one and you get one-half; divide one-half and you get one-fourth. You can divide forever and never arrive at a last division between the two runners.

Zeno used that paradox to show some illustrious Pythagorean mathematicians of his day that their theories and formulas, divorced from the physical world, can lead to absurdities. It’s a lesson that has escaped Stephen Hawking. Laymen like me avoid the problem by simply pointing out to the Pythagoreans of Zeno’s scorn that the second runner did indeed overtake the first. The problem lies with the primacy the Pythagoreans place on mathematics. For centuries, mathematics was a religion to the Pythagoreans. They are something of an historical allegory of a tendency in humanity to put too much faith in scientific systems, the blessings of science not withstanding.

But Zeno’s paradox is less a problem than Hawking’s paradox. The failure of mathematics to describe one runner overtaking the other is not a denial that in reality the second runner overtakes the first runner, but an illustration that mathematics can neither avoid nor explain infinity. Zeno’s “infinite” is not a difficulty in reality but in mathematics. Stephen Hawking’s difficulty is not in mathematics but in reality—how does one describe something as either existing before time and space, or describe something as coming from nothing?

THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

Remember those nonuniformities at the big bang that Hawking characterized, “as small as they could be, consistent with the uncertainty principle.”¹⁰ Without these minute imbalances, he has no theory, but more importantly, he has no starry universe about which to theorize, for if the big bang were perfectly balanced, the universe would now be a thin, cold soup and Stephen Hawking would not exist.

Auto mechanics call such nearness, “clearances.” For instance, “clearance” specifies the space between a rod bearing and the crankshaft throw in an engine. Those in my 1986 Ford Ranger, four-thousands of an inch, allow a thin layer of oil to cushion the transfer of power from the up and down motion of the pistons to torque that turns the crankshaft. Too close and the bearings melt. Too wide and the rods hammer the engine to junk iron. These clearances were designed not just to convey oil, but ultimately to convey people. Designed well it seems, the old four cylinder has gone half a million miles and never had the pan pulled. It is illogical to attribute the clearances in my Ford to accident, and illogical to attribute to accident the far, far closer clearances that brought our universe to exist and persist.

Hawking says that the uncertainty principle, which I have described above as unfathomable to the human mind, “is a fundamental, inescapable property of the world,” because of which “one cannot measure the present state of the universe precisely.”¹¹And yet it is this very unexplainable principle that Hawking uses to explain his theory. This goes against logic. One cannot logically explain something by using in his explanation something that is unexplainable. In the case of the uncertainty principle, how the smallest particle behaves is not only unexplained, it is uncertain. And yet this uncertain particle Hawking uses to predict how the universe started off, a prediction—or theory—that he says leaves no place for a creator.

Until Hawking can predict what the quantum particle will do and why it does it he cannot justify his prediction that when it bangs it will eventuate in that just-right-billion-upon-billion-to-one imbalance that becomes stars and galaxies and his own being. A creator with a design in mind is more logical.

COCA-COLA VERSUS THE SECOND LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS

Another difficulty Mathematics has is in describing the big bang as the beginning of time. Mathematics cannot distinguish between the past and the future. Hawking’s theory sidesteps this impossible mathematical situation by relying on the 2^nd law of thermodynamics to describe a universe that moves toward the future rather than the past. The 2^nd law says that things that are hot now, if left unattended, will become cold in the future; buildings left unattended will grow dilapidated.

One can't argue with this. In our experience time does indeed move toward the future rather than toward the past, much as Hawking describes it. The objection is with the idea that, because of the 2^nd law, time inevitably will eventuate in chaos. I must warn people like me who have no scientific education: to object to the inevitability of the 2^nd law is to be seen as a fool. Our consolation is that the exceptions to the 2^nd law which these same scientist accept without question—and there is a world of them—appear far more foolish than our objection.

The cosmologist, Brian Greene, gives as such an exception the return of gas back into a soda bottle after it has wheezed out. “Don’t hold your breath waiting for this outcome…” says Greene, “but it can happen.”¹² This means that the bottling of soda is itself an exception to the 2^nd law. Here's how: ingredients that, under the 2^nd law, would go to entropy—disorder—are stopped on their trek to chaos, picked, cooked and put into a precise, orderly design and bottled. Even if only to satisfy our taste and quench our thirst, these ingredients are given meaning, a property not possible under an insentient 2^nd law. In fact the Coca-Cola Bottling Company has been bottling and capping order in defiance of the 2nd law since 1886 .

When one opens a bottle of Coke, he opens order, he opens design. Experience compels us to reject any odds that say that once a Coke bottle is opened, it is possible that the ingredients, on their own or by some quirk of nature may return to the bottle in the same proportions they left. They were put in by the Coca-Cola Bottling Company and should they return by some quirk of nature we would call it miracle.

The objection to my Coke example is that in the bottling of Coke, energy is expended and adds to the total entropy of the universe. It does, but in no definable proportions. The physical act of concocting and bottling cola requires planning and calculating. And planning and calculating presupposes a living being with nonphysical intelligence (thoughts are not physical; they have no extension in time and space). The driving force responsible for creating intellect may not be physical energy at all, as we think of energy. Force itself is a mystery, but to complicate the Coke mystery, until we know what kind of force creates intelligence we can’t know the total amount of energy expended in creating an intellect that can bottle soda, and thus cannot know the amount of energy expended in the bottling of soda. We cannot use that force in a one-for-one calculation with physical energy. We may be dealing with two different currencies here, one like the pre-Second World War Deutsch Mark and the other a 1956 dollar.

On earth, existence is not always on a one-way track to chaos, but often to order. That gas escapes from opened bottles and temperatures level out is no proof that overall disorder will prevail. Every living organism is an example of nature assembling itself into an orderly construction. Scientist are quick to point out that this exception to the 2^nd law is only temporary and that shortly the organism will die and continue on its way to chaos. But the exceptions are so numerous—every living plant or animal—that reason makes one wonder if there is some rule at foot that the 2^nd law is not accounting for, and which science is reluctant to consider.

In any other than a scientific context such claims as gas returning to soda bottles or dead matter assembling into living matter would be considered outrageous, especially if the one claiming it cannot explain why or how it can happen other than to say that it is an exception to the usual way things happen. Hawking not only accepts the 2^nd law—outrageous exceptions and all—as inevitable, he basis a key component of his unbound theory on it. Were any one but a scientist to place such faith on a law with such supposed exceptions he would be considered a religious crackpot. The concept of design for the universe is not not nearly as outrageous as the exceptions to the 2^nd law.

WHAT BREATHES FIRE INTO THE EQUATIONS?

I would like to trace back one of those billions of particles speeding away from the big bang, trace it back to that tiny speck in which all such specks were fused before they exploded. Then trace that speck back as gravity shrinks it ever smaller and denser until it arrives at a point that Stephen Hawking in the twentieth century would describe as “infinitesimally” small, “infinitely” dense. But I would like to go further back, because if this speck really is infinitely small and dense there are an infinite number of smallers and densers to trace back. Eventually my pursuit tires me and I finally ask the question that’s bugging me, “Does this speck get so small that it finally ceases to exist?”

If it doesn’t arrive at a point where it exists one second, and a second beyond ceases to exist, then it must have existed always. The other alternatives are that it materialized out of nothing (absurd), or that something already in existence caused it to exist. If the universe did not exist before the big bang, what was the big bang that caused it to exist, and why did it bang? If the universe somehow existed infinitely before time, I want to know that. If it exists now, in infinite space, or if it has finite dimensions as my house does, I want to know. These questions that deal with physical reality I would hope a scientific theory could answer for me. They are what philosophers call ontological questions.

Roger Penrose, under whom Hawking received his PhD, calls Hawking one of those “‘positivists’ who have no truck with ‘wishy-washy’ issues of ontology in any case, claiming to believe that they have no concern with what is ‘real’ and what is ‘not real.’” He quotes Hawking: “I don’t demand that a theory correspond to reality because I don’t know what it is. Reality is not a quality you can test with a litmus paper. All I’m concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of measurements.”¹³

Penrose asks, “What is the physical justification in allowing oneself to be carried along by the elegance of some mathematical description and then trying to regard that description as describing a ‘reality’?”¹⁴

Mathematics is real, but in no physical sense. “Two plus two equals four” is a formula that may describe physical reality, but it is not itself physical. Hawking’s theory, if ever proven, may give an accurate mathematical formula for how the universe began, but describe nothing that is or ever was materially real. Hawking closes his book with precisely this point: “Even if there is one possible unified theory, it is just a set of rules and equations. What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”¹⁵

The humility of this closing statement is absent from most of A Brief History of Time. He opens his Brief History by requiring that a theory of cosmology conform to close rules of science. He closes with a confession that mathematics does not answer the crucial question of physical existence. Between the opening and closing he claims that his mathematical model, the no boundary little ball, displaces any need for a creator, a hefty ambition for “just a set of rules and equations.” If his theory displaces a need for a creator, one would at least expect him to know what creation is, what reality is. This, however, he says he does not know.

Give Hawking his due. His Brief History of Time is precisely that—a good brief history of cosmology. His no boundary theory that attempts to displace a creator, however, remains with those that Brian Greene characterizes as valiant but non-conclusive.¹⁶ Were it worked out it would not tell how the universe started off. It would simply affirm, mathematically, that the little ball has existed eternally. It would be our present universe, reduced to a tiny ball the why of whose existence and whose bang forever a mystery.

1 Stephen W. Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 8.

2Ibid., 46

3Ibid., 133.

4Ibid., 136.

5Ibid., 146

6 Ibid., 9, 55.

7 Ibid., 140.

8 Ibid., 56.

9 Ibid., 135–36.

10 Ibid., 149.

11 Ibid., 55.

12 Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York: Random House, 2004), 156.

13Roger Penrose, The Road To Reality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 785.

14Penrose, Road, 631–32.

15Hawking, A Brief History, 174.

16Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 366.