The blog

‘You are not thinking. You are merely being logical’

If you want to know about mystery, ask a quantum physicist

Solvay, 1927
The famous Solvay conference of 1927. Bohr is middle row, far right. Others present include Erwin Schrodinger, Wolfgang Pauli, Arthur Compton, Wernher Heisenberg, Lawrence Bragg (who won the Nobel Prize aged just 25), Paul Dirac, Louis de Broglie, Max Born, Max Planck, Marie Curie, Hendrik Lorentz, Albert Einstein, C T R Wilson and Owen Richardson (who was born just down the road from where I grew up). Each won the Nobel Prize for physics. They still dominate the undergraduate physics syllabus today. I stayed at that hotel as part of a writing prize and have seen the book signed by this astonishing assembly.

Here’s the world according to the very quotable Neils Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics.

‘Prediction is very difficult, especially concerning the future.’

‘How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.

‘The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.

‘You are not thinking. You are merely being logical.

I borrowed these quotes from here.

God. Hiding. But not all that well.

He’s too big to find anything to hide behind.

This is cool but complicated and involves mathematics.

I have been paddling in the magisterial physics textbook The Road to Reality by (Sir) Roger Penrose. He claims:

  • When mathematicians make discoveries, they generally feel they are not making up something new. They are exploring an existing thing.
  • This thing–mathematical truth–exists objectively, and it is not restricted to space or time.
  • Down at the dawn of philosophy, Plato taught this — and every subsequent philosopher (as is widely suggested) has only ever written footnotes to his work.

Plato also taught there were two other absolutes that objectively exist and are unrestricted by space and time: Good and Beauty.

Truth, the Good, and Beauty — each infinite, omnipresent, unchanging, eternal, objectively real and underpinning the Universe as we perceive it. Necessary, even. 1

God might be hiding but, yup, we can see him.

How can we know anything about God? And giving your email address to spammers.

It’s not as hard as you might think


Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field in UV
The only way we can know about God is if he tells us. We can’t leave the Universe, look at him, and come back, because we remain part of the Universe. Where we go, it goes. But God is outside the Universe.

So we won’t know anything about God without a revelation from God.

That means listening to someone who thinks they have a revelation from God.

And that is, as I said in the title, like offering our email addresses to spammers. The world is full of people who think God is speaking to them. A lot of them are kooks.

What do we do? 

As I wrote in my book More than Bananas, I think the only tool in our box is our total human response. So this must involve:

  • Reason
  • Common sense
  • Intuition
  • Emotion
  • What the community around us thinks
  • What the community who believe in revelation is like

and

  • A certain element of risk

Interesting…

(Note: More than Bananas is currently available as a free download as a kind of ‘gateway drug’ to my other writing.)


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Vocation: allow some wiggle room

Just read a lovely blog post by cartoonist Jessica Abel that adds a healthy corrective to the business of not-dying-with-your music-still-inside you.

Don’t get too hung up on the idea is possibly the take-home. Or maybe, don’t make an idol out of it.

It is wonderful, and energizing, and satisfying, to launch out to do the thing you’ve always really wanted to do. But, she counsels wisely:

  • allow yourself some wiggle-room: You need not feel trapped by whatever you think you “must” be doing creatively. Maybe you want to be a musician. That can play out in dozens of ways. Some more likely to pay the bills than others.
  • Vocation doesn’t have to be epic or worldchanging: look for what you can do that’s useful, that gives you pleasure, and do more of that.

Helpful.

Darkness and light. Really?

That’s no way to talk of my friends

Argemone ochroleuca flower6The people I know who are outside of the Christian faith would not respond too well to Bible verses like this:

But you were once darkness — now you are light in the Lord. (Ephesians 5:8)

I see their point. I would rather call my neighbours and colleagues funny, courageous, kind, hospitable, warm-hearted. And so on. Rather than, you know, ‘darkness.’

Of course the Apostle Paul (for it is he) is writing at this point not to outsiders to the faith, but to insiders, and surely he is encouraging them in their self doubt, and reminding them of God’s kindness. He uses a different language when he is stirring people to follow Christ in the first place.

But it raises the question: what are we actually talking about here? Is faith a thing? Or is it just a religious rebranding of an unchanged heart?

I think it’s a bit like re-purposing a good, old, disused building or taking on a neglected allotment (an allotment in the UK is a patch of land that you can rent cheaply to grow vegetables). An old allotment actually may contain all kinds of treasures, fruit trees, brambles, an asparagus patch. But it is overgrown.

A new owner comes. The bindweed and the ground elder don’t vanish overnight.  Both before the change and afterwards, the allotment is a mix of good crop and weeds. But after the new owner comes, it has new direction, new planting, new purpose, intentional ground clearing, a new direction and a new destiny. And it’s still easily neglected, plagued with slugs, not necessarily all that fruitful.

What came before wasn’t worthless. It contained real treasure. Yet the upheaval and change is real too. Darkness and light.

 

Do try this at home

Get out of that one

Love letter/Around 2008 an atheist SF writer named John C Wright prayed this:

Dear God. There is no logical way you could possibly exist, and even if you appeared before me in the flesh, I would call it an hallucination. So I can think of no possible way, no matter what the evidence and no matter how clear it was, that you could prove your existence to me. But the Christians claim you are benevolent, and that my failure to believe in you inevitably will damn me. If, as they claim, you care whether or not I am damned, and if, as they claim, you are all wise and all powerful, you can prove to me that you exist even though I am confident such a thing is logically impossible. Thanking you in advance for your cooperation in this matter, John C. Wright.”

Three days later he had a heart attack.

 

Book Review: ‘The tenth parallel’ by Eliza Griswold

My monthly review of a wonderful book for those of us navigating the space between faith and doubt.

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Accept no substitutes for a writer who travels to wild places and talks to people. Eliza Griswold (what a wonderful name, like something out of Dickens or Harry Potter) explores in her book the peoples of latitude ten degrees north of the equator.

She concentrates on the human geography, the conflict between the desert and the sown, the aristocratic nomad and the dirt-digging farmer, and — her real purpose — between Islam and Christianity.

She’s either fearless, or crazy, in her pursuit of former terrorists and other dodgy characters, as well as of the people who are perhaps just the collateral damage in this turbulent region– the two Muslims who were to be caned for suspected adultery, who just wanted to marry so they would not be shamed, for example.

She meets plenty of missionaries and zealots on both sides. On the way she is led to Christ by Franklin Graham, Billy’s son, an experience that was evidently more satisfying to him than it was to her.

Halfway round the world she meets a former mujahideen trying a new career selling beauty products. And on and on.

Eliza Griswold resists cynicism, stereotyping and the urge to fit what she is seeing into some coherent analysis. She’s very likeable. The daughter of a radical, liberal bishop, her very puzzled poking around in this confusion is to me almost a vital sign of a living faith.

I loved the contrast (in a rare personal aside) between her own nail-chewed hands and the worthily worn ones of her professional-Christian mother. Hers is a ‘doubt’ that is the penumbra of bright belief.

I have one little caveat which is that her library-work isn’t always quite as excellent as her reportage. Her footnotes sometimes lead us to other popular accounts, not authoritative sources. There’s the odd place where she’s surely oversimplifying, for example: ‘Under the Roman Empire, the practice of Christianity was punishable by death until 313, when the Roman emperor Constantine officially legalized it.’ (p 78). Rome’s persecution was patchy and sporadic.

After reading this book I’ve learnt more, and understood less, about the people at the join between Islam and Christianity , an area mightily unwritten about and largely unknown to the Western world.

A question for us

Scattered‘Do you love me?’

Inside all of us–I guess and hope, because I’m surely not the only one–is a red-faced, awkward, sweating, small and ugly person.  It’s when that person and Christ talk together the real work is done.

Peter and Jesus had that conversation. Ignore their history, their beards, the sound of lapping waves and crunching footsteps, the barbecued fish in their teeth. Ignore their age and size, big blokes, rugby team blokes. Ignore Peter’s  secret tears, recriminations, justifications, sleepless nights, self-doubt, arguments with himself and despair.

Here’s the conversation:

‘Do you love me?’

‘Lord–you know.’

‘Tend my lambs.’

The Silence

Silence‘Every mouth will be silenced’ (Romans 3:19)

I love that thought. A whole world’s chatter dying away as Christ looks on. Some people are looking straight at him. Others are talking among themselves, and they get a poke from their neighbours, or they look up.

I don’t think Christ looks on censoriously, the teacher about to give a telling off.

His look is just grace. Undermining our arguments. Dismantling our complaints. Shining on our tarnished trophies. Grace, grace, grace.

I feel hot, red, awkward, unworthy as the silence falls and the gaze continues.

So do we all.

 

 

Walking the space between what we have to do and what we love to do

Don’t seize up or blow up, fill up.

Footprints

It’s kind of basic to being a Christian. We want to know God’s will and follow it. You can’t call Christ ‘Lord, Lord’ and then go off and ignore what he says. We have to pursue obedience.

But for me the Christian life only works when we pursue joy as well.

My experience is that we try to do things faithfully and obediently but without joy we can manage to a certain extent—and we have to, because we all have to do stuff we don’t particularly like doing.

But if that’s all we do, and we do it for a long time, we start to run out of steam, get cynical, feel trapped. We may not know how it happened—we never wanted it to happen—but we know it has happened or is currently now happening. Externally we can look fine but internally, we know things are not so good.

(Of course the other side is true too. If we merely pursue pleasure and happiness, that too becomes rather empty.)

A kind of repentance

Somehow—it seems to me—the fruitful place is when we are under the influence of both faithfulness and joy. We obey Christ. But we lean towards, move into, preferentially choose, those tasks and roles that seem to answer a deep longing in our hearts, those things that nourish us, those things we love. ‘I have food’ said Jesus to the disciples, ‘of which you know nothing.’ He found joy and nourishment in his obedience.

Choosing joy as well is obedience is a kind of repentance. Why? Because it is turning away from a focus on jobs to be done and gaps to be filled and turning back to Christ himself. It is realizing, again, we have an audience of just One, and everything we do we do for him. It is seeking to have him re-create us again, a bit more in his image. It’s admitting our need and helplessness, not looking to him for a medal.