Beauty

Do you want to build a snowman?

The experience of building a snowman and enjoying the feeling of creating a "person" is one of the joys of being Canadian.  Places without snow have other advantages (...) but we get to create with this amazing material that just appears out of the sky.

Many of us have also experienced the feeling of having our creations destroyed by "the big kids".  This is a major policy issue at the local elementary school during winter.  The destruction of what was your creation is hard to deal with.  So much potential, gone.

Let us return to our examination of the universe.  We postulate a Creator, an entity who has a Mind and has created a universe and also the minds within it.  That act of Creation has echoes in our little snowmen, log houses, businesses, teams, et cetera.  We could say that we create because we have the nature of a Creator inside of us.  We are Its (His? Her?) snowmen!

Yet it is obvious to us that we do not live in an ideal world.  We are constantly under attack - from the weather, from random acts of destruction, from other people (other snowmen?) - it feels as if the system is not entirely for us.  Even though there are amazing resources out there, and we have won many battles (smallpox, polio, measles, tuberculosis, poverty), we are in a universe that has such potential, yet so often thwarts that potential.

So a story (meta-narrative) that would explain our experience of the universe would be valuable in interpreting individual events, and in predicting the kind of actions we should take in order to achieve success and avoid failure in our lives.  Empirically testing the results of that narrative would take lives or generations.  It may say nothing about the truth of the narrative, but it would give evidence of the efficacy of the story in aiding navigation of this universe.

So I return again to the story of the Creator.  The Creator builds an ideal Creation.  The Creation is made to host small Minds that reflect the creative character of the Great Mind that envisioned and created the universe.  In order to fully express the character of the Creator, the small Minds are embodied in the creation and given the freedom to act.  This freedom results in the loss of the ideal nature of the Creation, since not all free acts will follow a perfect path (as envisioned by the Creator, or as can be determined by examining the Creation).

The implications of such a story would be stupendous - it is an entirely different starting point than a naturalistic explanation of the universe supplies.  And indeed, it leads to a different kind of life - not a perfect life, but a life of beauty.

As you probably have figured out, the story that I refer to is chronicled in the Bible.  If you examine the historical record, looking for the impact of people who recognize this story and use it as a base for their behaviour, you will see selflessness, sacrifice, joy, faithfulness, community, and love in their stories.  And when the Creator gets personally involved with His Creation, the story just gets more beautiful.

God sees the beauty in each one of His creations.  He wants to see that beauty revealed and restored.  Rebellion against God's design leads to damage to His created beauty.  But, there are moments in everyone's life when they just can't help but display the beauty that is deep in their nature.  Treasure those moments, cultivate them in yourself and others.  We were created to enjoy that beauty, and to enjoy the One who imagined Beauty in the beginning.

Gravity

Few things are as mysterious, as ubiquitous, and as necessary to our life as gravity.

Water flows downhill.  Ice has a density less than water, so water floats when it freezes.  Rain falls on the just and the unjust.  Even pride goes before a fall.

When God said, "Let there be light!", did he include gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and electromagnetism?  Because as far as we know (dark matter and dark energy excepted), those 4 forces determine the course of nature.

Now I am reading C.S. Lewis' Miracles (a Christmas gift) and so I recognize that a Newtonian universe really would be determined, given a complete specification of initial conditions.  That leaves precious little room in the universe for free will or rationality.  From a scientific point of view, it's a good thing there is Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle -  which makes things unpredictable at the level of the very small, and chaos theory - which makes things unpredictable at the scale of weather and economics.

So we live in a principled, mostly (but not completely) predictable, mostly (but not completely) understandable universe.  One of the things that is perhaps more mysterious than Gravity is Mind.  How is it, if the universe depends on a combination of Newtonian determinism and quantum randomness, mixed together with chaotic instability, that there are organic beings that are self-aware?  Is Self-Awareness important to the understanding of the Universe in the same way that Gravity is?

When one examines the possibilities for the start of a Universe like ours, one is left with a binary choice (again, hat tip to C.S.): either the physical world is a creation, or it is an accident.  There is a God, or chance allows for the development of such wondrous things as trees and redheads.

 


Since no one from inside this Universe is still around from the time of its creation, all we can do is infer from what we see and understand (from looking at the present universe) what the moment of creation must have looked like.  Could a Big Bang have held all the matter of the whole universe in one spot?  Could we (and nebulae, and symphony orchestras) be just mud-spatter from an explosion?

But if there was a Creator, It was certainly present at the Creation, and one would hope that this Universe was not a dying act, leaving us with a designed world without a Designer.  It (the Creator) might even have some interest in Its work.  Perhaps there are some ways in which the understandability and the unpredictability of the Universe show the Personality of the Creator.

And then, certainly, Mind and Gravity would both be immensely important in the understanding of Creation.  Because Creation would have a point.

Your life would have a point.

You would not be a piece of mud splatter.  You would be part of a story that is being co-written by an Author and billions of little authors.  And maybe the lesson of Mind is that it is not completely determined by this Universe and may outlive it.

The Creek Bed

You never step into the same river twice...

Riverbeds change, currents change, rocks and trees and other obstacles impede progress.

But if there is water, it will find a way to flow downhill.

Understanding a river at any one time does not mean you understand it for all time.  But understanding the forces underlying the river will help you to be able to predict how changes will impact other parts of the river.  It may not be the same river, but it will be recognizable as related to the river you stepped in last time.

The world we live in is like a river.  It changes all the time.  This blog is going to be my attempt to scratch out on the cave wall a little bit of my understanding of the world and what underlies the system.

I live beside a creek, which hardly flowed last year due to a beaver dam.  The picture of the changing river is one that I often return to.  What are the "parts" of the creek that I will want to look at?

1) Spirituality.  Influenced by my faith, my family background, and writers such as C.S. Lewis and John Eldredge, I see the spiritual world as a major factor in the state of the world we see and feel.

2) Economics.  I don't know how #1 will interact with #2, and I may end up splitting these blogs, but I believe that economics plays a large part in the local world that we end up inhabiting.

3) Geopolitics.  As taught to me by Stratfor, I see that geography often constrains politics.  We'll see how that plays out.

4) Technology.  Things change so fast in the tech space that it helps to look for the longer-term trends behind the latest iDevice.

We'll see how much of each category we get into as we go.  Look for updates more often than weekly, less than daily.  I will post links to each post on Facebook if you want to follow that way, or you can use the tools provided by Google to keep track of the content here.

Shalom!

David Block
Sandy Beach, Alberta