God's Equations

I once read a book detailing the history of Albert Einstein’s famous general theory of relativity. It was the work of his life. His attempt was to develop a theory that would be useful to cosmologists in mapping space and time. He wanted to develop a model of the universe that would explain the data of mathematicians and astronomers.

In reading this book, “God’s Equations,” I was struck by a quotation in which Einstein said that through an understanding of math and science, we could get closer to knowing God. Most mathematicians and scientists have long forgotten this point, that their work and the work of theologians is one and the same- reaching out for the one unifying principal of the universe-God.

Very few people in history, in fact very few scientists, have ever fully understood the complexity of Einstein’s theory. Those who have understood it have been overwhelmed by the beauty and harmony of the formula. I don’t understand the formula. I barely can grasp a layman’s description of the formula, but I do understand the awe that scientists have felt in studying the formula.

Several years ago Chad and I went on a trip to Europe. We spent a few days in the Swiss Alps in the little town of Gimmelwald, which is as close to heaven as I have ever been. We hiked up majestic mountains drinking ice cold glacier water straight from the streams. We walked through giant fields of wildflowers serenaded by the clank of cowbells. It is a place of harmony, unspoiled by pollution, overpopulation, waste, development, and all the other scars upon the land. You can see the immense glaciers which melt throughout the summer, you see the rock that these glaciers have ground into fine mineral rich dust, you see the fields nourished by these glaciers, the cows feeding on those fields, fertilizing those fields, the locals taking only what they need. You see a world in harmony and balance, the way that I believe God intended the world to be. I remember the awe that I felt in seeing that world.

Today, I awoke at 5 a.m. I drove to the Inner Harbor through the slums that surround Johns Hopkins. I drove down dark streets strewn with trash. In the predawn darkness, the homeless were already milling about, begging, scrounging, stealing. The bus stops were occupied by those who depend on others to deliver them to their minimum wage jobs. 

As I drove through the cold, dark streets of the city, I thought about that trip. I have been to heaven and I have seen hell. I know there is a God because I have watched the beauty of a waterfall cascading down a sheer mountain cliff in Switzerland. I know there is a devil because I have seen a man reduced to living in a pile of trash on the steps of city hall, his only hope clutched inside a brown paper bag.

God developed certain rules for governing the universe. Objects in motion will stay in motion, unless acted on by an outside force. Gravity exists and exerts its will. A pretty girl will always get better service at a hardware store.

We can choose to understand the equations that govern the universe and realize that they make our lives better or we can ignore them. We are given that choice. We can choose to see rules as a hindrance to our freedom, or a means to maintain a balanced and healthy life.

God created the world and it was good. He told us to be good stewards of that gift. But we, particularly in America, have ignored that mandate. We have subtracted without adding and we shake our hands at the sky asking why it has gone to hell.

We tolerate a world where so much is controlled by so few. We pollute and destroy without thought of tomorrow. We spend as if there will be no tomorrow, no buyer's remorse.

One of God's most basic equations is this- for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction (otherwise known as Newton's Law of Motion). The apostle Paul said it this way, 'you shall reap what you sow.' 

Our book attempts to demonstrate this concept. We see, primarily through the character Gadreel, that action without forethought does not preclude consequence. Jumping without looking doesn't make the rocks below disappear. Gravity will pull you down whether you choose to acknowledge its presence. It's in the equations.

Pops, Larry and Me

The great thing about authoring a blog is that I can deviate off subject whenever I want. To quote Cartman, 'I do what I want.' So, today I am posting a short story that I wrote several years ago. It is a fictional story that I wrote to honor one of the most influential people in my life- my grandfather. It goes something like this:

A Fish Story…of Pops, Larry, and Me

I stood on the bank looking down as the water slid by, uninterested. Where was it going? I knew that on this day it would pass by dozens of guys like me. Tomorrow it would be miles from here and some new river would have crept in and unobtrusively taken its place.

Next year it might get the chance to do its part in forming the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World,’ or drive a Thai peasant from her hut, or maybe find itself imprisoned in a concrete cage and tortured with chemicals.

But for now it just rolled on by not paying a lick of attention to me with my stupid expression and tattered pole.

My bobber fought to join it on the journey. It, like everything else, didn’t want to have anything to do with me. Suspended below was a worm that was not having a good day. He had probably spent the morning minding his own business and now couldn’t quite understand why life was so unfair.

So far his torture hadn’t attracted the audience I was hoping for. He was a gamer, passionately going through the routine, but it was hot and no one else seemed to care.

I had learned in biology class that the scientific name for earthworms is lumbricus terrestris. I still don’t know why that matters or why I need to learn about the geography of Southeast Asia. There are so many things that I don’t want to know. That worm probably felt the same way.

Enough said. It would soon be over for him.

Larry was a wily one. I had never seen him, but I could picture him anyway. Pops had touched him once, before I was born. Every June, when I came back for my annual visit to my grandparents place, Pops would always tell me that he had seen Larry over in the hole “just the other day.”

Pop loved to describe Larry’s gaping jaw, scarred from previous battles. He told me that the old fish had really lived and understood.

“Life is an education,” he would say. “Every day we are learning or we are dying. I guess that Larry still has things to learn.”

But this year there had been no sign of Larry. Maybe he had finally learned it all. Or maybe he just got bored and quite fighting the river. Perhaps he had kicked back and was floating past all those fisherman, smiling a big fish smile because he knew they were there. Maybe he had decided it was time to fulfill his lifelong dream of swimming through a hut in Thailand.

No. He was still there; watching me. He was probably wondering where Pops was. Why hadn’t Pop celebrated the end of the latest ice age by marching along the bank peering, searching, challenging?

But Larry couldn’t know. The war was over, and Larry had won. Mom said that Pop was with Jesus, but I had seen the wooden box lowered into the ground.

After today, Larry wouldn’t have to worry about me either. Every year I counted down the days until my mom would load up her station wagon and drive me the four hours to Pop and Gammy’s summer home. As we drove through the gates that announced our arrival, the anxiety that had built throughout the school year would leave me in an instant. Like that gasp of air that hits your lungs after surfacing from a deep dive, I would instantly feel alive and free. But this would be the last time.

Sure the house would be here, but I knew it would never be the same. I knew that, after today, Larry was rid of me. Truth be told, I doubt that I ever caused him any real concern. Pops, on the other hand, was what my English teacher would have called a worthy protagonist.

I closed my eyes against the tears that welled and could hear the familiar preface, “The first time I saw Larry he laughed at me.” Every year he told me the story before we ever ventured down to the river, and every year I would give the same reply.

“Pops, fish can’t smile.”

But Pops would patiently explain that there is a language deeper than words that all of God’s creatures understand. He would tell how Larry had challenged him, and he had no choice but to pursue.

And one year Pops had caught up.

“It was a perfect mountain afternoon. Not a cloud in the sky, and the air was so clean and bright you could taste it,” he would say.

“I was staring at the water when a long shadow caught my eye. A passing cloud I thought. Then my pole jerked ferociously and I knew what the shadow really was.”

For the better part of an hour, the two combatants waged war, joined by an almost invisible connection. But even the bravest of warriors wears down. Every creature has its limits.

That day Larry reached his. When the moment came, all the fight left his shimmering body. He followed along helpless…acceptant.

A pair of leathery hands lifted him into the horrifying and suffocating brightness. And then, inexplicably he felt himself falling.

Pops told me that as he pulled Larry from the water and held him up to look him in the eyes, an unexpected crack of late summertime thunder caused him to start and the giant fish had tumbled from his grasp.

Pops always smiled when he told me this, and I suspected that he was happy that Larry had gotten away. It seemed that it had been enough to wear the big fish into submission, to pull him from the water and look into his black eyes.

We continued to pursue Larry, year after year, but maybe Pops hadn’t really cared about catching him. As he had gotten older he seemed to focus less on Larry and more on me. In a way Larry became a silent participant in our comfortable triumvirate.

Over the last few years, Pops had seemed to wilt before my eyes. We still went to the hole and sat and talked, but he seemed increasingly distracted. He drifted off for minutes as if he was actually some place far away and had inadvertently forgotten to bring his body along.

Getting up and down off the logs that we used as fishing perches became increasingly difficult, and I saw the pain that the effort caused him. Last year had been the toughest. Our last fishing expedition was cut short. Pops had gotten cold. It seemed really odd, even to a dummy like me, since it was eighty degrees in the shade.

Before we headed back up the hill to the house, he told me that he loved me (which had strangely frightened me) and began talking about the river. He said that although we call the river by a specific name, that was just for convenience.

“The name is really a marker of time, not the river. The river is actually many rivers, and none. It is a part of a whole and it never stays, but also never leaves.”

“It is OK,” he said. “That is just the way things are.”

I could still see the intensity of his eyes as he said those words to me. I didn’t really understand what he said, that last time. But somehow I knew that he was right. It was OK. As I pulled in my line, I pictured Larry swimming around in that thatched hut, and I smiled.

HOW v. WHY

I have taken a few days off from the blog to work on a new business venture, a mobile kiosk that will soon be moving through the streets of Baltimore, spreading joy and dispensing vanilla lattes. As I was working on adapting the plumbing and electrical systems, a thought occurred to me- you can't run water through a wire, but you can run electricity through a pipe.

This rather profound thought occurred to me as I was wiping the water that had just burst from a pipe out of my eyes, realizing that I had failed to turn off the electricity. Luckily, I did not electrocute myself, but I did learn something- morons shouldn't mess with plumbing.

I also realized that sometimes, we as humans, attempt to use a wire to funnel water. We use the wrong tools to build the birdhouse. We use the wrong lens when examining a problem.

Let me give you an example- my brother (the real brain behind the book) is a doctor, is engaged to be married and will soon be a first-time father. As a doctor, he needs to look at a problem that a patient brings from a detached, scientific perspective. However, if he uses this same perspective in dealing with his fiance', he might experience the following:

[fade in on couple getting dressed for dinner party]

Honey. Does this dress make me look fat?

Well, dear. Given that you are pregnant, your body is storing higher levels of glycogen, thereby increasing your bmi, so technically you are fat. The dress really has nothing to do with it. 

[zoom in on crying girl and fade out]

In other words, you can't use your medical school training to comfort your pregnant fiance'. You need to use different paradigms when examining different types of problems. You can't use philosophy to work out a scientific problem. You can't use science to work out a philosophical problem.

This is because science answers one specific question- how? Philosophy and religion, on the other hand, don't offer the necessary framework to understand how. They are meant to help discover why. Part of the problem that exists between science and religion is that too often scientists forget that they don't have the why tools, and philosophers sometimes mistakenly believe that are able to reason out the how.

In the Fallen Angel Trilogy, we attempt to use both. I hope we don't electrocute ourselves in the process.

Alcoholic Angels

Did you hear the one about the drunken angel? Apparently no one has. I was amazed that of all of the rather controversial items that we take on in the book, the issue that generated the most push back was the concept of angels drinking.

There are several characters in the novel who have a taste for yanin. Although it is never explicitly stated, it is inferred that this is some type of wine.

While to me this seemed like a minor point of controversy, [after all we endorse a version of the big bang, we  imagine angels using wormholes, we conceptualize a network through which dark energy is continually recycled, we even have angels mining the material of quasars] many of the earliest reviews contained questions about drinking in heaven.

Here is our answer: perhaps angels never tasted wine in heaven; however, the fact that Lucifer, an angel living in heaven, was able to be tempted to reject God and was able to convince a third of the angels to follow suit seems to indicate a level of temptation in heaven.

If there is no temptation, there can be no choice. Sin needs opportunity in order to exist.

Sin is most often the misapplication or perversion of a good thing. Food is good; gluttony is bad. Sex is good; promiscuity is bad. Football is good; the Dallas Cowboys are bad.

So an angel walks into a bar and orders a martini...

* I would have given proper attribution to the picture above, but found it in several locations and wasn't sure who to attribute it to. If it is yours, thanks!

The Trouble With Time

The concept of time has been a point of contention between philosophers and scientists for thousands of years. To this day many different ideas about the nature of time exist.

Sir Isaac Newton believed that time was a fundamental structure of the universe. This realist view postulates that time is a real thing that people and events move through.

Immanual Kant argued that time is a mental framework which allows us to experience, rather than a real thing. It is a means for us to organize and understand the world, much like language.

Einstein developed the idea that time is dependent on the spatial reference of the observer. It is this theory which opens the door for ideas like time travel or relativistic travel (theories that we utilize in the book).

I believe that all of these ideas are partially true. And in the book we use these different definitions of time in order to explain some of the ways in which science and religion both fail to see the bigger picture.

Here is an example:

Monotheists are adamant in arguing that God created the earth in six literal days. Scientists are equally adamant, although much less exact, in arguing that  it had to take billions of years for the earth to form. This is because both sides are choosing to define time in a very Newtonian way (which is ironic since monotheists believe that God is omnipresent and most scientists embrace the theory of relativity).

While I might not be able to perceive time in anything but a realist view, except perhaps philosophically, I am rational enough to understand that my perception is limited. I can conceive that if there is an all powerful deity, he might not be subject to time the same way that I am. Here is an example from the book:

A deep voice interrupted his thoughts. A word rang out in the stillness. He did not recognize the word, but he somehow knew it. It was the word. The word of initiation that gave life. He couldn't repeat it. As soon as it was spoken he could no longer hear it, but he saw it begin.

            The great orb suddenly exploded in a dazzling display of light. The giant ball of gas became instantly alive with life-giving energy and heat. The immense glowing globe drifted off to the side and Ariel could see, in the newly brightened space, a much smaller sphere approaching. How was he seeing Gaia?

            A voice answered inside of this own head.

            'You must understand that here and there do no exist for us. We are where we are and now we are creating a new world, a world that you helped prepare. You did well. This is a special creation. One that has been planned for a millennium and will be the site of a great and terrible chapter in the history of the Kingdom. In time the entire universe will come to realize that this creation marks a pivotal turning point.  Many will be tempted to doubt the wisdom of this creation, but I ask you to have faith that it is for the greater good that we gather here today.’

            What did this mean? How could this creation be both great and terrible? He was so excited to be witnessing this and so confused by what he was seeing and hearing. There was no here or there? What did that mean? Again the voice answered him inside his own head.

            'Some things you are unable to understand, but your faith is strong. We would ask that you continue to believe. We are not restricted by space and time the way that the created are. While you are here, in the throne room with us, these things do not apply to you either. You are literally in that small solar system in the Milky Way, but you are also here, securely seated in Mount Kol. You are going to witness a process that requires a week, but to you it will seem like minutes have passed. The word of creation has been spoken and that single word spawns all of creation, but we will try to explain it to you as we go.'

This scene comes from our conception of Gaia's creation. We hope that it gives you an alternative way to consider some of the issues that science and religion fail to find common ground on.

Ink on the Skin, Ink on the Page

When I was 21, I decided to get a tattoo. It was 1991 and I was a third year freshman in college. You might recognize this image as the logo for Led Zeppelin's record label, Swan Song.

After 21 years I still love the music of Zeppelin and I still kind of like my tattoo. Through the years it has meant many different things to me. 

In my twenties, it was an homage to my favorite band. Like many young people, I used music as a means to craft a sense of identity. Metallica, Guns n Roses, Rage Against the Machine- my musical influences reflected my lifestyle- fast and hard.

Later, after finishing graduate school and beginning my professional career, it reminded me of Icarus, the mythological character who flew too close to the sun with wax wings. He fell into the sea and drowned. This tattoo gave me a warning about the dangers of blind ambition and excessive pride. I chose to ignore the warning.

In my mid-thirties, I had the first of two children and this tattoo became the good angel, sitting on my shoulder, reminding me of the necessity of making the right choices. Or at least that was the intent. Given the choices that I made, perhaps it was a fallen angel, tempting me to do things that caused me to fail. My divorce would seem to argue for that interpretation.

Through the years I have often been asked if the angel was flying upward or falling downward. My answer is YES. It depends upon your interpretation.

Today, this slightly blurring, subcutaneous ink is a reality check. It is a reminder of the war that is going on between good and evil every day. It is a reminder that we live among the fallen, but we have a way out. My tattoo is Gadreel, or Ariel. You will have to read the book to decide which one.

God of Science

Religion that dismisses science lacks credibility. Science that dismisses religion lacks context. This week the Dalai Lama hosted the 26th Mind and Life Conference in the hopes of improving the discourse between the religious and scientific communities.

This is, unfortunately, all too rare in the world these day, particularly in the west. Where buddhist monks have learned to educate themselves and engage with the scientific community, too many priests and pastors seem strangely dismissive of much that science has to say.

And western scientists seem to take some sort of repugnant pleasure in an institutionalized condescension toward all things religious.

I believe that often both sides fail to look for common ground and shortchange their respective causes in the process.

Tail of the Dragon is a very theistic enterprise. The book's premise is that there is a God, who created all. But that God is a God of science. We do not dismiss concepts such as the big bang or evolutionary cosmology. We attempt to show how it is possible that the material that the earth is composed of could, in fact, be billions of years old, and could also have been formed by the word of God in six literal days.

Here is a quote from chapter one:

Creation itself was a perpetual condition, a never-ending ripple emanating from the utterance. The Kings spoke existence, and from that point of entry a continual well of creative force sprang. But that ongoing creative force differed from the initial creative act. That beginning came directly from the source, and it was Hasdiel's job to detail that initiation.  Today, instead of a new galaxy, with its innumerable worlds and species, new fellow arella would be created.  Arella, as celestial beings and the direct servants of the Kings, were always prime creations, derived directly from the utterance. 

I believe that I am a creation of God, but not directly. I am not a prime creation. God did not speak me into existence. Rather, he created the species that I have descended, and evolved, within. I was born through procreation. I have the color eyes, skin, hair, etc. that my adaptive genes have inherited. I don't believe that I descended from an ape, but I do recognize that both species were created using very similar materials and genetic maps.

The book's premise is that God initiated our species with an act of direct creation. From that direct creation, the species has continued recreating itself, adapting and adjusting as needed. God built in the genetic flexibility to allow us to adapt, because God is a God of science and uses scientific processes to accomplish his goals.

Much of what the church once taught is now thought of, even within the church, as superstitious nonsense (remember Galileo). And science understands far less than it tries to pretend (remember gravity). Until both sides forego their arrogance and realize that we are infinity tiny creatures trying to comprehend a vast universe, both will lose the opportunity to learn from the other.