Out Here Among the Stars

I was pleasantly surprised when I recently learned that Carl Sagan's Cosmos series is available through Netflix's streaming video service.  I don't know if it's a new addition to the service, but it is a welcome one.  I've seen most of the series' short thirteen episode run here and there in various different ways over the years, but this gives me the opportunity to watch it all in order and at my own leisure, which, naturally, is the nice thing about the Netflix service.  I find that, like all works that resonate deeply with me, I return to it time and again with a different perspective that reflects my own progress as a person.  It becomes like a touchstone or a familiar place; it remains constant and serves as something to mark your own change and growth by.

For instance, watching it now, I keep thinking about recent conversations with my friend Vincent, who has a somewhat passing, almost mild, antagonism towards science, depending on what kind of mood you catch him in.  Vincent isn't alone, of course, and there are plenty of other people with similar feelings.  Yet, I can't help but wonder if their problem isn't as much with science - as a collection of data and a discipline of factual inquiry - as much as it is with the attitudes and mind-sets of certain scientists who rub them the wrong way.  One might be tempted to cynically conclude that they just resent more sober minds raining on their fairy tales, and that they lash back with any means at their disposal.  But I'd like to think there's a little more to it than that.  I suspect that when Vincent thinks of science, he tends to think of Richard Dawkins or someone similarly disposed.  

Yet, the problem with Dawkins isn't necessarily that he's a scientist or even that he's an atheist.  Rather, the problem is the implicit insistence on an almost militantly prosaic viewpoint whereby he arrives at his conclusions.  He comes off as the sort of smug jackass who subjects a religion to ruthlessly "logical" interrogations, not as a way of trying to learn more about it and gain insight into its tenets, but as a way of holding it up to mockery as an irrational farce.  It's the sort of game a person is up to when they ask how Noah fit all the animals on the Ark or how reincarnation accounts for population growth.  These aren't necessarily invalid points, but the people raising them usually aren't looking to know; they're looking to deflate.  Consequently, some people come to feel like they are under fire from science and reason.  The irony is that the prejudice and dismissive close-mindedness that underpins such smug games goes against the very spirit of science and reason.

Most likely, Sagan would have agreed with Dawkins on nearly all matters of scientific fact, but it's the man himself that makes all the difference in the world.  His Cosmos series was billed as "A Personal Voyage", and it takes a moment's pause to appreciate the significance of this.  Clearly he wasn't talking about "personal" in the sense of "biographical", and there's little about the man himself throughout the series.  What is personal is Sagan's passion and wonder for his subject matter, his sense of amazement when he tells us that we are all "made of star stuff", his hopefulness of finding intelligent life out there in the universe, his benevolent optimism towards the human race, and his urgent concern about the possibility that we might destroy ourselves which he mentions again and again as a warning and a leitmotif through the series.  Sagan sees poetry where Dawkins insists on prose.  They may draw many of the same conclusions and believe much of the same things, but for entirely different reasons.

Throughout the Cosmos series, Sagan displays a boundless enthusiasm that fits him well in his role as a teacher.  He constantly puts things in a perspective that's deliberately designed to evoke awe and curiosity.  I particularly liked the calender model he uses to try to bring the fourteen billion year existence of the universe down to a manageable scale that the mind can grasp.  He stands on a stage with a giant illustrated calender laid out on the floor.  The calender year represents the entire life-span of the universe, and down in the right hand corner is a tiny little spot, the last few seconds of December 31st, which represent all of recorded human history.  "Everyone we've ever known, every story ever told, happened right here.", he tells us, and suddenly the majesty of the universe, and our fragile place in it, is as clear and touching as it has ever been.  This is the amazing achievement of Cosmos.  "What we do at the beginning of the next cosmic year is up to us.", he continues, touching again on the themes of optimism and concern.

So, I come away from all this wondering if there isn't another dimension to how we draw the lines between us.  We get hung up on the differences between our beliefs and ideologies that we tend to lose sight of the fact that it's the people behind those differences that really matter.  Whatever side of whichever line someone falls on, it's the spirit of the person, the humanity, the compassion, that bright eyed warmth that really matters.  A heart in the right place is worth far more than the details of any particular dogma, as far as I'm concerned.  We focus on the difference between things like science and religion, and we forget about the difference between people like Dawkins and Sagan.  We're all on the same journey, turning and revolving out here among the stars.  Sometimes it's how we feel about that journey that makes all the difference.

The Aliens Who Already Walk Among Us

What I am about to tell you is shocking.  If you have small children then you might want them to leave the room.  Of course, then you'd have to come back here to read the rest of the post, and that would leave the little tike unattended.  There's a good chance that they could hurt themselves or start crying because you left them alone.  That would be a big distraction.  To be on the safe side you should probably wrap them up in duct-tape and shut them up in a closet until you're done reading this.  I wouldn't want them to be traumatized.

If you've seen the show Ancient Aliens on the History Channel, then you probably know by now that aliens built the Egyptian pyramids.  If you haven't seen Ancient Aliens, it's basically a show made by people who think Occam's Razor is something you use to cut up lines of coke as you spin more outrageous alien theories for you next episode.  They use aliens as a ready explanation for all the mysteries of archeology, as though they had an unlimited tube of the stuff.  Primitive stones cut with amazing precision?  Must have been aliens.  Hieroglyphic carvings found in darkened chambers?  They must have had alien light bulbs.  Impressive feats of engineering?  Here, let me squeeze a little alien on that.  There you go.  It may at first glance seem like the stupidest show ever put on TV, but Giorgio Tsoukalos (pictured on the right) passes the History Channel's "fringe theory/crazyman beard" test, so there must be some credibility to what he says.  Yep, that's pretty sane looking facial hair he's got there.  Nothing weird looking about that guy.

Okay, so I think we've pretty much established that aliens built the pyramids to everyone's satisfaction.  I mean, we've established it to everyone's satisfaction, not that the aliens built the pyramids to everyone's satisfaction, although we do seem pretty happy with them.  Thank you, aliens.  Anyway, while the aliens were hanging around, overseeing the construction of these pyramids that were having built so that they could...ummm...well, uhhhhh...so that they could...ohhhh...  Anyway, they probably had camps set up on the site, and maybe they even had their families with them.  And maybe, just maybe, they even brought some of their household pets with them.

Now, we also know that the legendary Egyptian gods were actually aliens.  I think I heard that on Ancient Aliens too, or maybe it was that Stargate movie.  Anyway, that's not important.  The point is that if the Egyptians considered the aliens to be gods, then it figures that they would consider the aliens' pets to be gods as well, or at least highly superior beings, objects of reverence in their own right.  So what would happen if some of these alien pets got loose and ran away, as pets are known to do?  And what if some of these pets were left behind after the aliens had departed?  And what if the Egyptians found some of these strays, and because of their reverence for them, decided to keep them as pets themselves instead of cooking them over a barbeque?

So this is what an alien looks like, right?

Okay, you ready for it?

Ready!?

BOOM!  I rest my case.

              

The World (Reposted)

I originally wrote this piece for a project which Vincent and I were working on during this past summer.  I'm not sure how much sense it will make when taken out of the context of that project and all the strange metaphysical disputes Vincent and I were having, but I figured it might serve as something appropriate for Rachel Hoyt's latest sociology study which is on the theme of "doors & windows."  Anyway, it is what it is.  It's about the World.  I'm not sure how else to put it, so I'll just let it speak for itself.

It's Early Morning.  The light is just beginning to show in the sky outside my window.  A bird perched somewhere in the tree below greets the day with its delicate call.  Man has several names for this bird and this tree in various languages, and science has names for them in Latin which identify their genus and species.  I don't know these names, but then neither do the bird or the tree.  These names were not affixed to them by nature, but rather by man.  However, these names do identify genuine natural realities about them.  The words "bird" and "tree" signify them as something distinct from one another, and their particular names signify their distinctions from others of their type.  If it is a sparrow in the tree, we call it so in English because it possesses those attributes in common with birds of the type "sparrow", and in contrast to the attributes of another bird which we would call a "blue jay."  It has possessed these defining attributes for millennia before mankind affixed these attributes with the name "sparrow", for millennia before there even was such a thing as man, and it was certainly long, long before man began to be confused by himself and to doubt himself and to doubt the world and to ask, "Where is this 'sparrowness'?  Is it real?  Is it in the bird somewhere?  Could I find it if I cut the bird open?"  But the sparrow has gone on, simply being what it is, contently singing its unique song sung only by sparrows, oblivious to the sweet, simple, and breathtakingly obvious answer its providing to our question.

At this hour there is very little traffic passing by on the road below.  The road and the vehicles that travel on it are creations of man.  They were ideas conceived in the mind of man, and turned into physical realities by shaping and manipulating matter, giving it the form and function designed by the human mind.  These things stand as a testimony, as evidence of the co-operation between reality and the mind.  The matter involved behaves according to physical laws, and the people who designed these things were able to do so because they discovered these laws, they believed these laws, and they shaped the material involved in such a way that they would be able to use these laws to their advantage.  The car travels on the road because of the laws of motion, of thermodynamics, of combustion, and many more besides.  If these laws were simply the invention of man, or if they existed solely as a fantasy in the mind of man, or if they had no relation to physical reality outside the mind of man, then the matter involved in the car and road would behave completely indifferently to these laws.  They would slump like stubborn horses refusing to stir as man struggles at the reins of his desires.  They would sit rotting in a field as useless heaps of junk.  For they themselves are objects which lie outside the mind of man and beyond its direct control.  The fact that the car works stands as proof of the accuracy of man's concepts of these laws.  Like the bird and the tree, man has named these laws, man has studied these laws and formulated theories about them, man has designated them by the general word "laws" because of his confidence in his own ideas about them, but the functions and relationships between physical matter that they designate are genuine realities.  And again like the bird, these functions and relationships existed long before man discovered them, long before man existed.  "Nature", Francis Bacon said, "to be commanded, must be obeyed."  The car drives by as elegant proof of this.

As the car passes, its sound increases in pitch as it approaches me, and then abruptly switches to a low pitch as it goes by and speeds off in the other direction.  This is called "The Doppler Effect", and it is a peculiarity of my perception.  The sound of the vehicle never actually changes, but yet this effect is not entirely an illusion either.  It is a relationship between my ear, the speed of the vehicle relative to me, my position relative to the vehicle, and the compression and decompression of the sound waves as they travel the distance between the car and me.  There are a number of such peculiarities.  These are not delusions or unrealities, but rather consequences of my perspective on the world.  The way the information of the world reaches my senses and my mind is itself part of the world, and it too behaves natural law.  Like the Doppler Effect, these things can be discovered, scrutinized, and studied as part of the reality with which we all have to deal.

Sometimes these peculiarities have led man astray, and such an example is appearing now just over the trees.  In casual speech we still say the sun is rising, but by now it is common knowledge that the Earth is turning to meet the sun.  It is true that I have no first hand verification of this fact, and that I'm forced to take other people's word for it.  It is possible that mankind is in error about this "common knowledge", or that a vast number of people have lied to me about it all my life.  But when I consider the evidence that the human race as a whole claims to possess on the matter, my mind is set at ease on the issue of error.  When I consider the number of people that would have to be involved in a "lie", various world governments, various space programs, phone companies, GPS manufactures, astronomers...well, the list goes on....I'm persuaded to accept this "word" as honest in the face of the alternative.  I'm confronted frequently by such situations, most of them not as clear cut and easy to decide on.  I weigh the available information, consider the agendas of the source, consider its fidelity to other information, and consider how much internal sense it makes unto itself.  It may not be the most solid foundation to decide what one believes in, but given the limits of my own first-hand experience, it's the best that I can do if I hope to learn anything beyond the limits of my own life and the things that I personally witness.  I am not omniscient, nor do I claim to be, nor do I believe anyone else can claim to be.  It is always possible that I am mistaken, or that I have been misled.  But I believe that the truth is constant, irregardless of my wanderings.  I have seen Saturn through the lens of my own telescope, and I have seen that Venus has phases like our moon.  This is valuable corroboration of what I've been told, as well as an awe-inspiring experience.  There's nothing quite like seeing it for yourself.

Although I must occasionally rely on my fellow man for factual information, it is not through man that this information is fact.  Whatever the actual relationship between the sun and Earth, or the actual nature of anything else for that matter, the facts of these things exist without regard to whether they are known or believed by ten or ten million people.  I may rely on my fellow man in my belief that the world is round, but if the world is round, it is not out of respect to the opinions of men.  For thousands of years, man believed that the Earth was flat, and the world stayed round in absolute indifference to that belief.  When Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth by comparing a shadow made by the sun at Alexandria with a shadow made by the sun in Egypt, the truth of the round Earth was waiting there to be discovered, outside of the ignorance of man.  When Copernicus discovered that the Earth went round the sun, the rest of mankind was still in the dark, scratching their heads over retrograde motion.  If facts existed entirely through men, then the entire history of science would just be men making things up and then selling the rest of mankind on the idea in order to make it fact.  It was the evidence presented by Copernicus and Eratosthenes that changed the minds of man, not the minds of man which changed the evidence.  The power of consensus is in its persuasiveness, not in its control over reality.  How can I know this for sure?  Another car drives by, reminding me of the physical laws by which it operates, reminding me of man's cooperation with those laws as facts beyond themselves, reminding that the inventions of man have often worked in defiance of consensus and the general faith of the population.

If I decide to trust in my fellow man, not as the determiners of my reality, but rather as fellow travelers seeking to discover its true objective nature, then I am able to gaze with them beyond our solar system, beyond our galaxy, and out to a distance of 14 billion light years in any direction.  This is not believed to be the limits of our universe, but it is the limit of what we can see.  We believe that this is so, because we believe that the universe came into being 14 billion years ago, and light from anywhere beyond that hasn't had time to reach us.  This last idea is bit controversial back here on Earth, it challenges what many other people believe, and leads to a lot of arguments along the frontiers of what we know, and what we are capable of knowing.  But like my sparrow, the universe goes on, placidly indifferent to the conflicts and confusion of man.  It is what is.  Whole stars are born and die out without man ever setting eyes on them, possibly without anyone ever setting eyes on them.  They burn just fine without the fuel of being seen.

So, this is the world as I find it.  My confidence in it begins with me, with my first-hand experience and with the rational conclusions that I have drawn from that experience.  I extend that confidence to the experiences, the explorations, the discoveries, and the ideas of my fellow man, depending on what degree I'm willing to trust them and how much I concur with their conclusions.  But I believe that the world out there beyond me and the facts of that world exist without regard for my confidence, or my confidence in my fellow man, or their own confidence in what they think they know.  I believe that the world out there is what it is regardless of what I think I know about it, or what anyone else thinks they know about it.  First-hand experience has convinced me of that much at least.  The world has demonstrated its constancy to me time and again.  I go to sleep, and reawaken and the world shows every evidence of having gone on steadily without my knowledge.  The world has cut me and bruised me many times to prove its solid existence.  It has often frustrated my efforts and at other times it has rewarded them in turn to demonstrate its indifference to my whims and wishes, and its obedience to my cooperation with its facts.

My understanding of the world begins here with me, in this room.  I can doubt the things I've been told about it.  I can doubt my own conclusions that I've drawn about it.  But I can not doubt the world itself.  I can not doubt the foundation of it, which begins for me with my immediate experience.  It could be said that I have no grounds for believing in this world, but yet I have no grounds for doubting it either.  The world itself transcends belief and doubt, because the grounds for those things have to be found in the world.

Suppose I do try to doubt the world.  I reject the world wholesale as it begins for me here in this room.  I try to flee from it through a door marked "doubt."  I find that this door opens onto this same room, and it returns me right back to the world, searching for the grounds with which to justify this doubt.  I dismiss this world as a dream, and again I try the door hoping it will return me to waking reality.  I find myself right back in this room facing the world which provides me with no evidence that I am asleep or that there is any "waking" world beyond this one.  I defiantly declare that the world is an illusion unto itself, and I flee again through the door, only to find myself dumped again on the solid floor of this room, the world showing me no distinction between physical matter and the illusion of physical matter.

As a thinking being, it is my privilege to keep insisting on trying that door for the rest of my life if I like, to perpetuate my attempt at doubt indefinitely, but I can not escape the fact that that door will always return me right back to this room.  It is not that I have grounds for believing in the world.  It is not that I have a reason to believe in the world.  It is simply that the world is inescapable.  My only choice is between the futility of trying that door over and over, or embracing the world as I find it, as it begins here with my immediate experience in this room.  Only by embracing the world can I leave this room, to explore it, to learn about it, to understand it, and to experience it.  

The Richard Dawkins Elimination Scheme

In several interviews I've heard evolutionary biologist and notorious atheist, Richard Dawkins, make a statement to the effect that over the ages mankind has gotten rid of a vast pantheon of gods, and all that remains is for us to rid ourselves of the last remaining one.  He seems quite satisfied with this formulation of his, as often as he's repeated it.  I think its pat simplicity appeals to him.  It suggests that history is on his side, trending towards his point of view.  Now, I'm not here to defend religion.  I'm not even here to take a definitive stance for or against Dawkin's atheistic position.  I'm just here to take issue with this idea of his, which I think gives him the appearance of having a very shallow and superficial attitude towards religion, and which plays into the stereotype of atheists in general.  He comes off as the sort of person who dismisses belief in a deity as a bunch of superstitious poppy-cock, good for nothing but providing comfort to gullible idiots.  Such flippancy isn't going to do much to help his case.

For starters, his formula isn't even accurate.  While it's true that the three major, Western religions are all monotheistic, and that they all have roots in the same Hebrew texts, I'm not sure that anyone can say for certain that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all worship the same God.  Is the differences between them just a matter of doctrine, or are they all following completely different deities?  Are they on different trains or different tracks?  Who can say?  At the very least, the other two religions definitely don't agree with Christianity about Jesus being God, or a part of God, or a dimension of God.  That alone suggests that they're operating in different spheres.  Also, you have the plain fact that polytheism still exists in the world, most notably among the Hindus.  However, I'm most certainly not here to take Dawkins to task for toe-stepping or offending people.  That was pretty much inevitable from the moment he declared himself an atheist.

No, the far more troubling problem with his formula is the impression it gives that monotheism was arrived at by a process of elimination.  You almost picture an all out death match among the gods, and Jehovah ended up being the last deity standing.  This completely misses the fact that a monotheistic deity is of a completely different stripe from a polytheistic one.  Divine apples and celestial oranges.  Monotheism wasn't the result of some stream-lined clearinghouse of the gods.  It was a revolutionary concept.  A completely different approach to the matter of religion.  Abraham's belief in one "true" God took everything in a fundamentally different direction.

Oddly enough, monotheism opened the road for a scientific outlook to eventually emerge.  Under polytheism, the workings of nature were often attributed to a kind of drama among the gods, this god controlled the wind, this god controlled the sea, and so forth, and the storms and shifts in the air were a result of conflicts between them.  By consolidating the workings of nature in a single deity, monotheism consequently suggested the idea that this deity had designed nature to work by a certain clockwork system, rather than by the struggles and politics between opposing gods.  There is a placid austerity in the creation story recounted in Genesis that stands in stark contrast to the violent chaos found in other creation myths, and it's even been suggested that God's "day of rest" was specifically included to highlight this fact.  The monotheistic universe is not a product of strife and war, but rather of contemplated design.

Also, I believe that it's no coincidence that Abraham's monotheistic revolution came with the stipulation that no one was allowed to create a image or likeness of their new God.  You see, one of the problems with polytheistic gods is that they can't really grow as concepts.  They are almost inevitably bound in the form of concrete, perhaps ever physical, creatures by the relationships between them.  The fact that the dramas between them make it necessary to even imagine them speaking to one another and interacting in a clearly physical way, keeps them tied to Mt. Olympus instead of ascending into the ether.  A polytheistic society can only really progress by outgrowing their gods, to relegating them to the realm of stories and fairy tales.  Polytheistic gods are bound by their presence to one another, but a monotheistic God is present only to itself and only briefly glimpsed or sensed by the creatures on the mortal plane below.  A monotheistic God can be invisible, ineffable, limitless.  It can pass effortlessly in the mind between the abstract and the substantial.  Ostensibly, I'm sure the taboo against creating images of God was considered a token of reverence and respect, but in reality, I'm quite convinced the taboo was there to keep them from trying to place any concrete limits on the concept of God.  An impressive precaution.

As such, there are no limits to which man's understanding of a monotheistic God can grow.  In fact, it is an integral part of the concept of such a deity to perpetually transcend those limits (something I plan to get into in an upcoming post.)  A monotheistic God keeps pace with human progress, rather than falling behind as the polytheistic gods inevitably do.  The human concept of a monotheistic God changes and grows and evolves, and from the believer's standpoint God is up there, constant and beyond comprehension, and it is man changing, growing, learning, and groping up gradually towards the light.

None of this necessarily invalidates Dawkins' atheist position, but it does put a different spin on his dismissive flippancy.  He can't expect a monotheistic God to fall by the wayside like many of the polytheistic ones have.  A monotheistic God is a far more tenacious concept, more resilient and adaptive then he's willing to give it credit for.  I don't think it's something that is simply going to fall out of fashion.  A belief in God may even persist as long as there are human beings.  I'm not sure I can even conceive of a point along the time-line of human progress where a believe in God would become completely impossible or insupportable.  And as long as that possibility exist, there are always going to be people who believe in it.  Richard Dawkins might have to just accept that.                   

The Flat Earth Society

The world is filled with people who have all kinds of crazy ideas, theories and beliefs, most of them not as well thought out as mine, of course.  These people operate on the fringe.  You never seem to actually meet people who believe these things, and when you run them past most people you know, they tend to agree that they sound crazy.  Yet, these people must be out there.  Apparently, there are people who believe that alien lizards are secretly controlling the world.  Still others believe that the government is brainwashing you with messages hidden in bar codes.  But if I had to give out a prize for the absolutely craziest, stupidest, and most flat-out ignorant idea floating about out there, the award would go hands down and without a doubt to the The Flat Earth Society.

These people believe exactly what their name suggests.  They do the geocentric theory one better, and claim that the Earth is flat.  Their membership is small, naturally, but the fact that anyone at all believes this in this day and age is appalling and astonishing at the same time.  My favorite part about their belief is that while other crazy ideas focus on either one narrow aspect of reality or propose a shadowy phenomenon operating behind the scenes and only subtly apparent in the world, the Flat Earth concept represents a completely warped view of the universe.  As a bonus, if you click on the image below showing their model of their world which basically resembles a giant roulette wheel, you'll be able to read the text below the image providing bible verses which "condemn the globe theory."  You knew religion had to come into this sooner or later.

You might be thinking that that's an old picture, but regardless of that, rest assured this group is still quite active.  Some newer images I found also show that they haven't changed their basic model much over the years.  They still locate the Arctic, or what the rest of us in our ignorance designate as "The North Pole", at the center of their flat, disc shaped map.  Antarctica, on the other hand, is a snowy ring that circles the circumference of reality's outer limits.  I'm not sure how they account for the cold climates in these places under their model.  I didn't find any mention of that in my research, and I suspect that they never thought to address the issue.  At least they had the foresight to place the Antarctic on a steep slope.  If you're going to designate an edge to the world, you should at least have the decency to make it fairly inaccessible.  We wouldn't want people unwittingly stumbling into the void.  That was thoughtful of them.

Not all their arguments are based on scripture.  Oh, no.  They've actually got some "science" to back them up.  Their evidence includes such gems as pointing out that all the people and even our oceans would immediately fall off the world if it was round.  After all, you don't see oceans on the side of a beach ball.  Yes, they actually make this argument.  I don't suppose that there's any point in explaining how gravity works to these people or that there's no "down" in the cosmic sense.  Clearly it's beyond their comprehension that water falls off a ball because it's pulled there by the Earth's gravity, not because it's falling "down."  Likewise, they obviously don't understand that things wouldn't fall off the Earth simply because maps of the solar system depict things facing certain directions.  The empty space beyond The South Pole isn't "below" or "under" the Earth anymore than the space is "above" The North Pole.  If we favored "overhead" depictions of the solar system, would they be scoffing that the Earth would fall into the sun?  This is the kind of idiocy that makes witch trials sound downright sensible.

The motion of a round Earth is also problematic for them.  They argue that we would be thrown out into space as we rounded the celestial corner.  This one is a little more subtle.  If the first argument employed a toddler's logic, then this one at least employs a ten year old's logic. Granted it's a ten year old that's had a large rusty spike driven through the comprehension centers of the brain, but at least it suggests a basic understanding of inertia and motion.  The problem is that these concepts are completely misapplied.  For one thing, inertia pulls on the occupant of a swerving car because the car is deviating suddenly from a straight path and there's a struggle between the occupant being compelled to continue on that path, and the pull from the sudden shift in direction.  The Earth moves in an elliptical orbit.  None of its turns are a sudden deviation from a straight path.  Plus, once again there's the play of the Earth's gravity in this and the fact that it can't be transposed to some arbitrary place below the Earth and...but why am I even trying to refute this nonsense?

The funny thing about these arguments is that they're based in The Flat Earth Society's own idiotic misunderstanding of science.  It would be one thing if they had a coherent understanding of the heliocentric model and they were able to stand toe for toe against it.  As it is, they've constructed a straw man even more brainless than the Scarecrow himself.  They see gravity as merely something that makes things fall downward, and under this view a round Earth is unfathomable to them.  They're not engaged in a battle with science, but rather with their own gross ignorance of it.

Wikipedia reports that at the close of the last century, there were at least 3,000 members of the society.  Again, it's a small minority, but they are out there.  Think about that the next time you're standing in a long line at the grocery store.  There could be someone in that line with you that actually believes this garbage.  It shouldn't be hard to spot them.  Look for the drool on the front of their shirt.             

Trying to Understand Relativity (part 8)

In the Principia Mathematica, Issac Newton laid out his revolutionary theory of gravity.  He laid out with incredible precision exactly how gravity worked.  His formulas were used to calculate the exact orbits of the planets with an accuracy that stood for hundreds of years.  Say the word "gravity" and Newton's name is probably the first to come to mind.  His work is a milestone in the history of physics.  But although Newton literally wrote the book on gravity, he left out one little piece of information.  He never made a clear statement of exactly what gravity is.  Sure, he demonstrated how it worked in complex, intricate, mathematical detail, but he never really delved into what it was, beyond the idea that it was a force of attraction between objects that depended on mass and distance.  But what was this force?  How did the sun reach across the millions of miles of empty space and hold the Earth in it's place?  It was like a puppet master moving a puppet, but no one could find the strings.  Newton provided precise calculations of how the puppet master's hands control the puppet, and he basically left it to someone else to figure out the nature of the strings.

The someone else was Albert Einstein.  With his theory of General Relativity, Einstein showed that gravity was caused by the fabric of space-time being warped by the mass of an object.  The heavier the mass of an object the bigger and deeper the warp it caused in the fabric.  Imagine you have a blanket stretched out tight in the air.  If someone sets a baseball on it, it causes a dip around it in the blanket.  If someone sets a bowling ball on it, it causes a wider, deeper dip.  If you bring the baseball close enough to the bowling ball, it will fall into the bowling ball's dip and hit it.  This is what causes gravity.  This concept corresponds exactly with Newton's calculations of his "force" which varied according to mass and distance, but in a way he probably never imagined.

After spending the past month discussing time and time travel, it's got me wondering if there isn't a point at which Einstein's theory runs up against the same sort of wall that Newton did.  In case you missed it, I added a rather long edit to the last relativity post.  It starts about halfway down with the word "EDIT".  If you're actually making a serious attempt to follow this mess, then I suggest going back and looking it over.  I start with an explanation of the concept of relative motion, and then the constancy of the speed of light, and then I get into a thought experiment demonstrating how the time distortion effect can be inferred from these facts.  It's a rudimentary explanation of Special Relativity, and it's about as far as I've gotten at this point.  

Now, I'm told that I need to bring General Relativity into the picture to solve our Bob and Ann problem, but I'm not quite done with Special Relativity.  For one thing, I feel like I've barely got a finger hold on the idea.  I certainly don't feel confident that I have my mind completely wrapped around it, and I'm not ready to move on just yet.  But something else bothers me as well.  I kind of get how you look at the constant speed of light and you're forced to draw the conclusion that time distorts to compensate, but I'm not quite sure what this tells us about the nature of time.  This is where I feel like Relativity begins to run into that Newtonian wall.  Maybe it's my own limited understanding.  I spent some time yesterday, looking up "space-time" and "Minkowski space" and found a lot of equations that might as well have been written in ancient Sanskrit, for all that I was able to understand them.  But yet, I couldn't quite find what I was looking for.

I get the sense that Relativity looks at relative velocity and the constant speed of light, and then simply demonstrates the mathematical fact of time dilation, in the same way Newtonian physics looks at mass, motion, and attraction and then demonstrates the mathematical fact of gravity.  It's like, you point to where they show up in the calculations, but you're not really explaining them beyond the math.  Perhaps I'm being presumptuous.  Maybe the answer has just gone completely over my head.  Still, I can't help but wonder:  What is the significance of the fact that time can be distorted?  Why are mass and velocity the defining factors in this distortion?  What does this tell us about the nature of time?  Suppose time is the "dynamic flux", the constant change and motion of all matter in the universe that I proposed earlier.  Then, what does it mean that an observer can see this flux slow at high velocity?  If anyone has any answers, feel free to speak up.

It's like "dark matter", which is a theoretical construct that scientists use to make the calculations work in astrophysics.  They really have no idea what it is.  It's just something that shows up in the calculations.  Or consider the puzzling results of the double slit experiment that show up in quantum physics.  There is an old fable about three blind men stumbling across an elephant.  One of them grabs the trunk, and declares that the elephant is like a long snake.  Another grabs the leg, and declares that the elephant is like a thick tree trunk.  Still another feels the side of the animal, and declares that the elephant is like a wall.  I get the sense that these scientists are like these blind men.  There's something there.  It reveals its presence in the equations, but what it is remains a mystery, seen through a formula darkly.  I don't mean this to be derogatory to scientists, by the way.  They'd be the first to admit to being mystified.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed that time and space were simply products of the mind, concepts that we filter reality through to make sense of it.  Frankly, I've always been appalled by this idea.  If time and space aren't objectively "real", then how can we hope to establish any sort of solid reality beyond ourselves?  The slightest flirtation with this idea and it feels as though the vast universe is about to collapse into my brain and become some sort of flat non-entity, like an image on paper with no depth.  It's likely that my understanding of Kant is as flawed as my understanding of Einstein.  But this idea that the speed of time's passing is relative to the speed of the observer forces me to at least consider if there isn't an element of perception involved in the nature of time.

And on that confusing note, I bring my contribution to "Time Travel Month" to an end.  I hope you've all had fun.  I enjoyed it, but I feel like I could go another ten years without talking about time travel and its strange paradoxes again.  It's been a little exhausting.  Oh...And hey, Doug, if you followed the link here from the first post of the month and you're reading this on February 1st, don't forget to mention something about the timetravelfund.com in the comments below that first post.  I don't want to waste any time getting on the ground floor of that amazing opportunity.  I'll thank you for it later.

(This post also available in extra cheesy version.) 

Trying to Understand Relativity (part 7)

I had planned to start off this post by correcting an error I made in the last relativity post.  I had said that a trip across a light year at 75% the speed of light would take 18 months, when actually it would be 16 months.  I was going to go into a lengthy explanation of how to figure this, but a lot has changed since then, and pursuing this mistake would be a waste of time.  You see, I've come to the conclusion that I've gotten completely off the track with this, and I need to approach the problem from a fresh angle.  I'm pretty sure that everything I've said up this point, and every piece of progress that I've thought I made is completely wrong.  So not only have I been making your brains hurt, I've been doing so with gross errors in logic and my ignorance of the concepts I've been trying to deal with.  For this I apologize.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here.  I've really been trying to put some genuine effort into figuring this out lately, and I want to give you some kind of idea where I'm at with this.  The best place to start would be with a comment I left on the last relativity post:

I was doing some actual reading on this today, and I came across an interesting explanation. Imagine you have a clock that works by bouncing a beam of light between two mirrors stacked on top of each other and facing each other. The interval between each bounce is one second. If you started to move the clock to the right, then it would look like the beam of light was traveling at an angle to a stationary observer because the position of one mirror would always be slightly to the right of where the other had been when the beam hits it. So from the stationary observer's perspective the beam of light would be traveling a farther distance between the mirrors. Since the speed of light is constant then the time it takes the light to reach each mirror is actually extended and therefore time becomes distorted. One second becomes 1.3 then 2 then 6 and so on, as the clock is pushed faster to the right. The exact amount of distortion can actually be calculated from the angle that the beam is skewed. But, if you were to run along side the clock, keeping pace with it, the beam would be straight up and down again and bouncing at perfect one second intervals. It's not just a matter of appearances. The distance the beam is traveling is actually relative to the observer.

So see, THIS I understand. It's the best explanation of relativity I've found. For the first time it gives me a perfectly clear idea of not only how but why relativity works. I just have to figure out how this relates to my scenario. Or maybe I need to come up with a new scenario. I don't know.

I was thrilled when I first discovered this illustration.  Finally, an explanation of relativity I understood.  I spend pretty much the entire shift at work that night bouncing that beam of light around between those two mirrors in my head as I went about the business of filling the machines and mopping the floor.  It actually made sense.  I just had to figure out how to apply this to Bob and Ann and I was home free.  

Unfortunately, as always, it turns out that none of this was going to be easy.  A few days later I had some quiet time to really think and dig into the situation.  It wasn't long before I came face to face with another huge problem.  You see, although the above illustration does a great job of explaining how an observer in one frame of reference can see time moving differently in another frame of reference that's in motion relative to his own, it doesn't help me understand how that time distortion affects the motion itself between the two frames.  That's the issue that I think is really at the heart of my thought experiment.  A message I sent to my friend, secondscout, who assured me he has the answers to all this, will demonstrate what I mean: 

Hey, since you're throwing your hat into the ring on this, I figured out something you can help me with. I found a good thought experiment the other day that explained the time dilation effect. I described it in the comments of my last post on my blog. It might be one you're already familiar with. Anyway, I think I have a good idea how and why the clock would look like it's running slower on a ship speeding away from you at near light speed. I'm having a problem now with the speed and distance the ship itself would appear to be going. Would it look like it's going it's actual speed, or would it look like it's traveling slower to the same degree as the time is slowed on board? Either way, I'm coming up with a problem.

I'll explain with a simpler version of my experiment that's closer to the classic twin paradox. Let's say Bob and his mother live in the same house. Bob hops aboard his rocket and takes off at 75% the speed of light. Now, to his mother watching at the window time appears to run slower aboard the ship. For every minute that passes aboard the ship, she sees 90 seconds pass on her clock at home. Now, if Bob looks back at his house, he sees the same thing. From his point of view, it looks like he's standing still and the house is zipping away from him at 75% the speed of light with a slower clock. From a relative standpoint it doesn't matter who's in a ship and who's in a house, it just matters that there's a gap widening between them and the speed that it's widening. It only makes sense to say he's going 75% the speed of light away from the house. His speed has to be calculated from a reference point.

Okay, so after Bob has traveled for a year, he stops. At 75% the speed of light, he's now 9 light months from the house. So when he looks back at the house, I would think it would appear that only three months have passed there since he left. At this point, I'd almost be willing to chalk all this business of slowing clocks and time dilation up to the most elaborate optical illusion of all time, caused simply by the delay in the light's travel time, and go take a nap, if it wasn't for one thing: The Mother.

See, it doesn't work out the same from her point of view. She can't look across the 9 light months and see him as he was 3 months after he left the house, because he wasn't stopped on the 9 light month spot 3 months after he left. He didn't stop there until a year after he left. So, supposedly she shouldn't see him reach that point and stop until 21 months after he's left the house.

But how can this be? They're both traveling at 75% the speed of light relative to each other. When Bob stops, they both stop. When they both look back, shouldn't they both see the same distance and difference between each other? Yet, it seems for the mother that she has to see Bob's speed slowed to the same degree as the time distortion. Meanwhile, Bob has to see the house move away from him at it's actual speed. At one year, he is 9 light months from the house. How could he truly say he was traveling at 75% the speed of light otherwise?

Now, you could try to look at from the opposite point of view. You could say the house was speeding away from Bob, and the mother looked back after a year across the 9 light month distance and saw Bob as he was three months after they parted. But the problem is that Bob stopping the ship is an event that happened at a specific position in time and space. It was that action that stopped the widening of the gap. It seems like everything would have to add up in agreement with exactly when and where it happened.

So, I hope this makes sense? I'm totally stumped. If you can help me out of this one, then I think I can figure the rest out. I think it's all a matter of flipping it around for his approach to House A. I think I was actually closer to the answer in my first couple of posts. If time on the ship appears to slow as it speeds away, shouldn't it appear to go faster as the ship approaches? I don't know. Maybe you can answer that one too.

I'm expecting a reply on this before too long.  I might copy it into the next post, with secondscout's permission, of course.  In the meantime, if anyone sees what I'm talking about and has any ideas, as always your contributions are quite welcome.  As you can see, it's two steps back and maybe half a step forward.  Now I can't even get Bob to leave his house without running into problems, let alone get him over to Ann.  Don't worry, we'll get these two crazy kids together yet.

EDIT: At the risk of making this the longest post ever, I'm going to go ahead with the edit I mentioned below.  Although the concept of relative motion is fundamental to the understanding of relativity, I haven't really delved too deeply into the matter in these posts.  Perhaps in the past I didn't fully appreciate what an important element it was.  Perhaps I took for granted that more people were familiar with the concept.  Either way, I think it's time to spare a few moments for a basic explanation of the concept.

In the comments below, Chanel was confused about how the house could be moving at 75% the speed of light in the scenario I laid out above.  I explained that it was a matter of relative motion.  We put some cars on a highway and I explained how their speeds calculated relative to one another.  If you're going 50 MPH and the car in front of you is traveling at 40 MPH, then from your perspective the car ahead of you is backing up towards you at 10 MPH.

Now, all this might seem needless confusing and a complete waste of time, but the fact of the matter is that the speed of nearly everything with one crucial exception is calculated from a reference point.  Generally we use the Earth itself as a reference point, and since most of our experience is confined to the surface of the Earth, this works out nicely and we never give it another thought.  When we're driving at 50 MPH in our car we never consider that this is 50 MPH relative to the Earth.  We just figure that's the speed we're moving.  But now let's say we stop at red light.  At that point, we figure we're standing still, and someone standing at the side of the road would agree.  They would look at our car and say it's stopped.  However, the Earth itself rotates at about 1,000 MPH give or take.  So, to someone out in space, they would say you're spinning at 1,000 MPH on the surface of the Earth.  The guy standing by the roadside thinks you're stopped because he's spinning at 1,000 MPH along with you.  Now, suppose there was a guy further out in space.  He would say, no, you're spinning at 1,000 miles an hour AND orbiting the sun at 67, 062 MPH.  Standing still indeed!  Now, suppose there was someone even further out in space.  He would say, no, again.  He would say you're spinning at 1,000 MPH, orbiting the sun at 67,062 MPH AND orbiting the galaxy at 447,000 MPH.  Finally, if you asked someone in another galaxy how fast you were moving, they would say you're spinning at 1,000 MPH, orbiting the sun at 67,062 MPH, orbiting the galaxy at 447,000 MPH and all the while you'd also be speeding away from them at 2,250,000 MPH (depending on which galaxy you talk to.)  So you see, the question of how fast you're going depends entirely on the reference point you're figuring your speed from.  In reference to the Earth, you're standing still.  In reference to the sun, you're spinning at 1,000 MPH and orbiting it at 67,062 MPH.  In reference to the center of the galaxy....you get the point.

Here's another example that doesn't involve a trip to deep space.  Let's say you're on a bus.  You're sitting in the back, and your friend is sitting up front.  You throw a tennis ball to your friend.  A guy sitting across the aisle clocks of the speed of this tennis ball, using a radar gun or something.  He gets a result of 5 MPH.  From his point of view, that's how fast the ball is moving.  Okay, now let's say you pass a guy standing on the street just as you throw the ball, and let's say the bus is going 50 MPH.  If he also had a radar gun and he had the slightest interest in knowing how fast the tennis ball was moving, he would get a result of 55MPH.  From his point of view, that's how fast the ball is moving, because the frame of reference that the ball is being throw at 5 MPH is itself moving at 50 MPH, so the results are compounded.

You'll remember though, that I said above that there was one crucial exception to all this.  That's the speed that light travels.  Light stands apart from all these interlocking frames of reference.  It travels at the same speed regardless of who is looking at it.  Let's say that instead of throwing a tennis ball, you shined a flash light up at your friend.  The guy across the aisle would clock the beam as traveling at the speed of light.  The guy standing on the street would also clock it as the speed of light, not the speed of light plus 50 MPH like the tennis ball.  The movement of the bus isn't a factor.  The light travels the same speed regardless.  Hell, even the guy in the other galaxy would agree on the speed.

Well, this created a problem.  Light is so much faster than the speeds we usually deal with (186, 282 miles per second) that it isn't real an everyday problem, but it was a problem nonetheless.  How could light cut through all these frames of relative motion and always end up being the same?  Something had to give.  Einstein came along and figured out that that something was space and time itself.  Why is that?  Well, that brings up back to the clock experiment I mentioned way up at the top of this post.

Fig. 1

The clock (fig. 1) operates by bouncing a beam of light between two mirrors.  The beam of light is represented by the yellow lines going up and down.  For the sake of argument, we'll say that the interval between each bounce is one second.  That would make the mirrors 186,282 miles apart.  That would be one huge friggin' clock, but again, for the sake of argument.  Every time the beam hits the mirror, it makes the clock tick one second.  Up, down, tick, tock.   It's a clock; it measures time; yawn...whatever.

Fig. 2

But, let's say you started to watch the clock move to the right.  Fig. 2 is suppose to represent the clock in motion, but you know how my Paint skills are.  The grey clocks are the same clock as it's moving, alright?  So, since the clock is moving, when the beam of light bounces from the bottom mirror to the top one, the top mirror is no longer in the same spot directly above where the bottom mirror was when the beam of light left it.  During the time the beam of light is traveling from bottom mirror to the top, the top has shifted to the right, because the clock is moving to the right.  From where you stand the light traveling in a zig-zag pattern of angles (fig. 2) which means it's traveling a farther distance.  It's not only covering the distance between the mirrors up and down.  It's also covering the distance that the clock has moved.  If we were dealing with tennis balls, there wouldn't be a problem.  We would just add the speed that the clock is moving to it's bouncing speed, and everything would fall nicely into place.  But light is different.  We still measure it traveling at the same speed.  So, since it's traveling a farther distance, but yet going the same speed, that means it takes longer to travel between the mirrors.  Since the clock is still ticking a second for each bounce, you begin to see it take longer and longer to tick a second as the clock moves faster and faster and the beam of light has to travel a farther distance and a more acute angle to keep up with it.  The clock begins to slowwww dowwwwnnn.  Tiiiiicccccckkkkk.....tooooooocccccckkkkk.  Gradually you notice that the time on the clock is falling behind the time on your watch.  Time is moving slower for the moving clock.

Now, suppose your friend was standing there with you.  They don't feel like just standing there watching the clock, so they run to catch up with it.  As they reach a speed where they're keeping a perfect pace with the clock, they look over and see fig.1 again, because relative to them, the clock is once again standing still.  So the years pass, and you stand there watching your friend and you grow old, but they stay young because time has slowed for them relative to you.

This "relative to you" is the crucial point.  If your friend looks back at you, it seems that you are receding from them.  If you're leaning against another one of these fancy clocks, they'll see the zig-zag effect on your clock and they'll think time is slowed for you.  You see, it's all relative.  So, who's growing the long white beard here?  Well, that brings you to the Twin Paradox.  The problem I propose above is a little different.  

Let's say your friend runs for a year.  They run at speed that will put them at a distance where the light will take 9 months to travel the distance between you after a year.  Then they stop and look back.  Now, you're both standing still relative to each other and time is ticking the same.  The light that reaches your friend has taken nine months to travel from you to the spot they're standing on, so they see you as you were nine months in the past.  But you can't look across that same distance and see your friend as they were nine months in the past, because they weren't stopped on that spot nine months ago.  They were still running with the clock.  This is where I'm stuck.

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The Existence of God

Some people look at the stars and find God.  Some people find God in the first glimpse of the face of their newborn child.  Some people find God behind the bars of a prison cell, or at the end of their rope, or when they're scraping rock bottom looking for that last fix.  Some people find God at an alter call at a Sunday evening service where the drowsy light of the setting sun shines through.  Some people don't find God until they're drawing that last painful breath.  I found God in the periodic table of elements.  To each his own, I guess.

I grew up in a Christian home.  We went to church three times a week, twice on Sunday and once for Wednesday night prayer meeting.  We were there whenever the doors were open.  I also went to a private school for several years, also Christian.  I was knee deep in the religion.  It surrounded me on all sides.  Through-out my childhood I fluctuated between periods when I would become serious about being a "good Christian", and other periods when I couldn't care less and I just wanted to see what was happening with the TV shows I wasn't allowed to watch.  Regardless of these fluctuations, however, it never once even crossed my mind to question the truth of any of it.  God & the Devil, Heaven & Hell were as real and self-evident to me as my hand in front of my face.  I didn't even know that doubt was an option.

Then one day my brother, who's a few years older than me, came home from his college classes and mentioned that they had been learning about the notion that reality, as we know it, could be an illusion.  I remember his pointing to the light bulb hanging from the ceiling in the hallway and saying, "How do you really know that the light is on?  How do you know that you're not imagining it?  How do we know that we're both seeing the same thing?  How do you know you're not dreaming right now and none of this is real?"  I didn't know it at the time, but I wouldn't be exaggerating now if I told you that this simple moment on a rainy afternoon completely changed my life and who I was as a person, forever.  A tiny little crack had opened up in my view of the world, and I could see an incredible light coming from the other side.

I became fascinated by philosophy after that.  I started reading everything from Aristotle to Nietzsche.  I didn't understand half of it, and the half I thought I understood then, I didn't really understand either.  But the wheels were turning.  I started to keep a notebook of my ideas, a kind of fledgling precursor of this blog.  It wasn't long before the most obvious question of all occurred to me, "How do I know God is real?"  Now, it wasn't that I had been living under a rock and had never heard of atheism.  It was just that up to that point, I had never realized how someone could arrive at that conclusion.  Atheists were evil people, denying God so that they could live a life of sin and excess...or so I'd always heard.  Now I was seeing how reason, rather than sin, could lead you there as well.

Naturally, this didn't go over big at home or at school.  I started to rebel and get into trouble.   I started to ask questions.  Looking back on it now, my questions concerning Christianity and the existence of God could be broken down into three basic sub-categories: 1.) How do we know the Bible is actually the word of God?  2.) If everything that happens is God's will, then how does human free will fit into the equation?  3.) Did God decide and create the ideal of what is good, or does goodness exist independently of God and God is simply the ultimate realization of the ideal?  In other words, how could God be the highest measure of the standard and the creator of the standard as well?

Regarding the first question, the best they could do was quote me a bunch of Bible verses.  I had sense enough even then to know that you can't prove the authenticity of a document by quoting from a document itself.  I could write something on a napkin, and add a footnote that it was the word of God.  So that argument proved nothing to me.  Regarding the other two questions, oh we went round and round in circles on those.  I can't hardly blame them though.  Despite what I said in the opening paragraph, I'm still struggling with those myself.  Anyway, eventually they grew pretty tired of me at the school.  They put me on something they called "spiritual probation", a new type of thin ice that they basically invented just for me, and then they made it pretty clear that they didn't want me coming back to their school next year.  I was trying to open the minds around me in the same way mine had been opened.  Clearly some people were hostile to this.

In the midst of all this, everyday life went on.  In Chemistry class we were learning about the periodic table of elements.  We learned that all the chemical reactions between the elements were due to the fact that all the different elements are trying to reach a stability and stasis by having eight electrons in their outer shell.  Perhaps it was because 8 seemed such an arbitrary number.  If it had been an even 10, I might not have even taken note of it.  But as it was, it made me wonder.  I wasn't exactly seeing God in all this then, that came later.  At the time, I was just wondering.  Here was a rule that governed every physical reaction through-out the universe, but why?  Why did these atoms have such a thing for the number 8?  Who decided this?  The rule caused the reactions, but what caused the rule?

No doubt someone with far more scientific training that I could ever dream of acquiring  would be able to explain exactly why 8 is the magic number, but that would be missing the point.  Such an explanation would only remove the issue back by one degree.  My questioning had led me to that old conundrum that anyone who's ever had a conversation with a four year old child is familiar with.  For every "why?" there's another "why?" waiting on deck right behind it.  You can explain to the Nth degree how everything in the universe works, from the tiniest microbe to the collision of galaxies, but you'll never reach an ultimate explanation of why it just conveniently happens to be that way.  You can take the whole cosmic clock apart piece by piece and show exactly how it keeps time, but you still wouldn't be able explain why we're fortunate enough that this clock even exists instead of just a pile of cogs and gears.  In other words, how do you account for the principle of clockworkness itself?  Why not chaos?  Again, you could go deep, really dig down into the metaphysical foundation of everything and explain why the universe is governed by a system of consistent scientific laws, but you'll find another "why?" waiting right behind that one.  

Take evolution, for instance.  Now, to Christian people "evolution" is a dirty word, but ironically, I see this "God-principle" more at work there than anywhere else.  Just like with the periodic table, someone could explain to me in intricate and minute detail exactly how natural selection works.  I know enough about it myself to see that there's no mysterious magic behind it.  It makes, simple, natural, logical sense.  But aren't we lucky that it does?  There's even a built-in slight degree of imperfection in the universe that allows it to work.  This raises an issue for another day, but for now I'm just pointing out that there's even a perfect degree of imperfection to make it all work out, that slight little hiccup in the clock that keeps it running.

Now, you're thinking that all these issues have been raised before by the theory of Intelligent Design.  I would say, yes...but not quite...or maybe, up to a point.  You see, I'm not looking at all this and seeing the hand of a designer.  I'm thinking God is the design.  Once upon a time, people thought the clock itself was God.  Then someone came along and said, "No, God made the clock."  I'm saying that perhaps God is the principle of clockwork itself.  It's not the gears and springs and scientific laws; it's the thing that allows the gears and springs to work as a clock.  It's the reason a flower is beautiful, that falls as a shadow behind any other reason you might give.  It's not how we came to be here to see the flower; it's why.  It's...well, quite honestly, it's beyond my power to explain.  In fact, it's the very nature of it to reside beyond explanation.  If you try to explain God, you find that it slips another degree away, forever just beyond your grasp.

There might be some fall-out and controversy over this, or it might be met with bland, unimpressed indifference.  I don't know.  I wish I could say I was up to that task of really putting this into words.  I've heard before that writers should never whine about their own inadequacies of expression in their writing.  They should either put up or shut up.  Well, I've done my best at putting up.  I wish I could say that all this helps me sleep at night, and that I'm no longer confused and plagued with doubts.  But I am, and probably always will be.  That light bulb in the hallway changed me in ways that can't be unchanged, even if I wanted to.   All I have to offer is a feeling that I have, a sense and a faith that the ship of space and time is being guided along on a steady course, holding the whole crazy universal carnival together.