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.