Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

"The Paradox of Quantum SpaceTime" for Emergent Theology Today




I read the Scientific American article below not many days hence when reviewing the topic of spacetime (Where Does Space and Time Come From?) and thought a complimentary piece on (quantum) Theology might well be in order too. Obviously, the naturalist point of view from Scientific American will be one of mundane experience void of any biblical commentary per the divine element of creation, life, or death. But still, our purpose here is to simply try to conceive of Time in it's origin, conservation, causality, connection, need, necessity, and quantum nonexistence to multi-dimensional spacetime. And once conceived, perhaps one day better commentate about the corollaries we might find between quantum science and that of its sister philosophy, quantum theology.

Statedly, God's universe is as often paradoxical as it is incomprehensible. And we would do well to bear this in mind when attempting to understand this same God theologically. Too often we have simplified God by our plethora of philosophical and biblical statements when we might do better to sever all ties to the church's outdated (and outmoded) mundane expressions of God while attempting to re-imagine this same God through the refracting lenses of postmodern science and theology. Add this to the errant idea of trying to qualify any postmodern discoveries against the past judgments of any pre-modern, medieval, ancient, or pre-civilized, cosmological sentiments of bygone eras (grammatical, contextual hermeneutics not withstanding) and you'll get the point I'm trying to make. That our past may inform us to previous enlightenments but cannot disengage us from making our own more relevant insights and discoveries for post-modern society today.

By attempting to re-describe our theology of God we might, perhaps, be more attune to developing a theology that is more in line with contemporary thought and expression. A theology that connects yesteryear's orthodoxies to today's poststructural language and idioms, thoughts and ideas. Which might reach across the humanistic divides of all scientific disciplines and find the biblical God of the Old and New Testaments re-expressed in today's 21st century contextualized understanding. A theology which would be more robust in philosophical and scientific thought while more compellingly re-expressed through comparative biblical terminology using contemporary postmodern paradigms. Some few examples that come to mind would be that of Deconstructionalism, Open Theism, Relational-Process Thought, Existential Behavioralism and Cultural Anthropologies, Evolutionary Creationism, and so forth. A labyrinth, as such, of open sourced theological study forming the literary backbone of a postmodern, Emerging (or, Emergent) Theology.


But do not imagine for one moment that the church's biblical theologians can look away from today's scientific discoveries and not be impacted to think new thoughts previously unthought of God differing from the ages past. Ages that did not have the science and learning availed to it as we do today. Which cultural event is nothing new since the early days of the church influenced first by Hellenism, then by later medieval and Renaissance thought, which then evolved once again in the Age of Enlightenment and Modernism. Even so, today's postmodernism will be similarly affective upon the church's many outdated doctrines, dogmas, and conceptual understandings of God, the Bible, and even of ourselves.

This is not heresy but the natural progression of human endeavor and enterprise. Moreover, the heresy would be to retain our older concepts of God as unmoved and unmovable, rather than remitting to the living God of humanity found through all time and expression in the ages of man. Who urges the aegis of the church to master its relevancy of mission and message by progressing into every age of man actively, dynamically, humanely, and hopefully. Not negatively, fearfully, acrimoniously, or uncertainly in despair and frustration.

Even so, does God Himself move forward apocalyptically in contemporary lockstep with man's overeager, sometimes Babel-like, societies unfailing in their aspirations and attainments to overreach their potential by sinful means, war and domination. Requiring some sort of divine caution and brakes to this world's aggressive humanism, and godless re-conception, of itself. For we are graciously invited into God's creational temple-space not to replace Him but to enjoy His creation with Him. As exampled by the fall of Adam and Eve who rejected this hallowed templed space by wishing to be like God by their own will and admission. Which was quite out-of-plan and out-of-sorts with God's overall objectives of sharing and fellowship, rest and peace. And to God's great wisdom to not let it proceed any further towards its ultimate eternal destruction by removing humanity's reach of the Tree of Life.

Let us likewise be not so hasty to do this same thing. For we are mortal, though joined immortally with one another through time eternal. Showing wisdom then in seeking God's design and blessing without usurpation, greed, envy or ill-will. Using the Spirit's wisdom to update our old-line church doctrines and dogmas in re-evaluation of God's overall plans and design for contemporary relevancy of mission and message.

Who plants within the restless hearts of men His laudable insights and searching knowledge towards the discovery of newer medicines, ecological practices, technologies, and societal improvements. Who opens man's eyes to the beauty, the majesty, the paradox, and mystery, of His divine Being, creation, and even to ourselves, spun in the web of moiling existence, turmoil, and dark meaning. Each temperament lifted like a silken filament leading towards unexplored shores heralding novel frontiers rich in unfathomed insight, progress, and societal development. For this is the hope of the Kingdom of God by its inauguration into the life of humanity and its civilizations through Jesus' death and resurrection. An earthy kingdom with a heavenly design. A kingdom filled with life and light, not death and destruction. A kingdom God ushers us all towards as honored guests and adoptive children enjoying all the rights of privilege and position, pedigree and purchase.

Even so, it would behoove us as Emerging Christians to develop an emerging theology of God in a postmodernistic age of endeavor and challenge, accomplishment and despair. Providing an emergent theology granting relevancy to the mission and message of Jesus our Savior, Redeemer, Sovereign Creator, wise Ruler and gracious Lord. Who seeks with us a country not of our own making, but one filled with the wisdom and glory of the God of the Ages. Who clothes Himself with the garments of Time and Space, and strides across the Heavens in holy adoration, breathless wonder, and inscrutable council. To this God we bow our hearts in contrition to whisper, in the waning silences of the deepest voids of our hearts and the quantum universe, Amen and Amen.

R.E. Slater
February 12, 2013


 


The Paradox of Time:
Why It Can't Stop, But Must
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=could-time-end
By this thinking, time’s demise is no more paradoxical than the disintegration of any other complex system. One by one, time loses its features and passes through the twilight from existence to nonexistence.

The first to go might be its unidirectionality—its “arrow” pointing from past to future. Physicists have recognized since the mid-19th century that the arrow is a property not of time per se but of matter. Time is inherently bidirectional; the arrow we perceive is simply the natural degeneration of matter from order to chaos, a syndrome that anyone who lives with pets or young children will recognize. (The original orderliness might owe itself to the geometric principles that McInnes conjectured.) If this trend keeps up, the universe will approach a state of equilibrium, or “heat death,” in which it cannot get possibly get any messier. Individual particles will continue to reshuffle themselves, but the universe as a whole will cease to change, any surviving clocks will jiggle in both directions and the future will become indistinguishable from the past [see “The Cosmic Origins of Time’s Arrow,” by Sean M. Carroll; Scientific American, June 2008]. A few physicists have speculated that the arrow might reverse, so that the universe sets about tidying itself up, but for mortal creatures whose very existence depends on a forward arrow of time, such a reversal would mark an end to time as surely as heat death would.

Losing Track of Time

More recent research suggests that the arrow is not the only feature that time might lose as it suffers death by attrition. Another could be the concept of duration. Time as we know it comes in amounts: seconds, days, years. If it didn’t, we could tell that events occurred in chronological order but couldn’t tell how long they lasted. That scenario is what University of Oxford physicist Roger Penrose presents in a new book, Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe.

Throughout his career, Penrose really seems to have had it in for time. He and University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking showed in the 1960s that singularities do not arise only in special settings but should be everywhere. He has also argued that matter falling into a black hole has no afterlife and that time has no place in a truly fundamental theory of physics.

In his latest assault, Penrose begins with a basic observation about the very early universe. It was like a box of Legos that had just been dumped out on the floor and not yet assembled—a mishmash of quarks, electrons and other elementary particles. From them, structures such as atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies had to piece themselves together step by step. The first step was the creation of protons and neutrons, which consist of three quarks apiece and are about a femtometer (10–15 meter) across. They came together about 10 microseconds after the big bang (or big bounce, or whatever it was).

Before then, there were no structures at all—nothing was made up of pieces that were bound together. So there was nothing that could act as a clock. The oscillations of a clock rely on a well-defined reference such as the length of a pendulum, the distance between two mirrors or the size of atomic orbitals. No such reference yet existed. Clumps of particles might have come together temporarily, but they could not tell time, because they had no fixed size. Individual quarks and electrons could not serve as a reference, because they have no size, either. No matter how closely particle physicists zoom in on one, all they see is a point. The only sizelike attribute these particles have is their so-called Compton wavelength, which sets the scale of quantum effects and is inversely proportional to mass. And they lacked even this rudimentary scale prior to a time of about 10 picoseconds after the big bang, when the process that endowed them with mass had not yet occurred. “There’s no sort of clock,” Penrose says. “Things don’t know how to keep track of time.” Without anything capable of marking out regular time intervals, either an attosecond or a femtosecond could pass, and it made no difference to particles in the primordial soup.

Penrose proposes that this situation describes not only the distant past but also the distant future. Long after all the stars wink out, the universe will be a grim stew of black holes and loose particles; then even the black holes will decay away and leave only the particles. Most of those particles will be massless ones such as photons, and again clocks will become impossible to build. In alternative futures where the universe gets snuffed out by, say, a big crunch, clocks don’t fare too well, either.

You might suppose that duration will continue to make sense in the abstract, even if nothing could measure it. But researchers question whether a quantity that cannot be measured even in principle really exists. To them, the inability to build a clock is a sign that time itself has been stripped of one of its defining features. “If time is what is measured on a clock and there are no clocks, then there is no time,” says philosopher of physics Henrik Zinkernagel of the University of Granada in Spain, who also has studied the disappearance of time in the early universe.

Despite its elegance, Penrose’s scenario does have its weak points. Not all the particles in the far future will be massless; at least some electrons will survive, and you should be able to build a clock out of them. Penrose speculates that the electrons will somehow go on a diet and shed their mass, but he admits he is on shaky ground. “That’s one of the more uncomfortable things about this theory,” he says. Also, if the early universe had no sense of scale, how was it able to expand, thin out and cool down?

If Penrose is on to something, however, it has a remarkable implication. Although the densely packed early universe and ever emptying far future seem like polar opposites, they are equally bereft of clocks and other measures of scale. “The big bang is very similar to the remote future,” Penrose says. He boldly surmises that they are actually the same stage of a grand cosmic cycle. When time ends, it will loop back around to a new big bang. Penrose, a man who has spent his career arguing that singularities mark the end of time, may have found a way to keep it going. The slayer of time has become its savior.

Time Stands Still

Even if duration becomes meaningless and the femtoseconds and attoseconds blur into one another, time isn’t dead quite yet. It still dictates that events unfold in a sequence of cause and effect. In this respect, time is different from space, which places few restrictions on how objects may be arranged within it. Two events that are adjacent within time—when I type on my keyboard, letters appear on my screen—are inextricably linked. But two objects that are adjacent within space—a keyboard and a Post-It note—might have nothing to do with each other. Spatial relations simply do not have the same inevitability that temporal ones do.

But under certain conditions, time could lose even this basic ordering function and become just another dimension of space. The idea goes back to the 1980s, when Hawking and Hartle sought to explain the big bang as the moment when time and space became differentiated. Three years ago Marc Mars of the University of Salamanca in Spain and José M. M. Senovilla and Raül Vera of the University of the Basque Country applied a similar idea not to time’s beginning but to its end.

They were inspired by string theory and its conjecture that our four-dimensional universe—three dimensions of space, one of time—might be a membrane, or simply a “brane,” floating in a higher-dimensional space like a leaf in the wind. We are trapped on the brane like a caterpillar clinging to the leaf. Ordinarily, we are free to roam around our 4-D prison. But if the brane is blown around fiercely enough, all we can do is hold on for dear life; we can no longer move. Specifically, we would have to go faster than the speed of light to make any headway moving along the brane, and we cannot do that. All processes involve some type of movement, so they all grind to a halt.

Seen from the outside, the timelines formed by successive moments in our lives do not end but merely get bent so that they are lines through space instead. The brane would still be 4-D, but all four dimensions would be space. Mars says that objects “are forced by the brane to move at speeds closer and closer to the speed of light, until eventually the trajectories tilt so much that they are in fact superluminal and there is no time. The key point is that they may be perfectly unaware that this is happening to them.”

Because all our clocks would slow down and stop, too, we would have no way to tell that time was morphing into space. All we would see is that objects such as galaxies seemed to be speeding up. Eerily, that is exactly what astronomers really do see and usually attribute to some unknown kind of “dark energy.” Could the acceleration instead be the swan song of time?

Your Time Is Up

By this late stage, it might appear that time has faded to nothingness. But a shadow of time still lingers. Even if you cannot define duration or causal relations, you can still label events by the time they occurred and lay them out on a timeline. Several groups of string theorists have recently made progress on how time might be stripped of this last remaining feature. Emil J. Martinec and Savdeep S. Sethi of the University of Chicago and Daniel Robbins of Texas A&M University, as well as Horowitz, Eva Silverstein of Stanford University and Albion Lawrence of Brandeis University, among others, have studied what happens to time at black hole singularities using one of the most powerful ideas of string theory, known as the holographic principle.

A hologram is a special type of image that evokes a sense of depth. Though flat, the hologram is patterned to make it look as though a solid object is floating in front of you in 3-D space. The holographic principle holds that our entire universe is like a holographic projection. A complex system of interacting quantum particles can evoke a sense of depth—that is to say, a spatial dimension that does not exist in the original system.

But the converse is not true. Not every image is a hologram; it must be patterned in just the right way. If you scratch a hologram, you spoil the illusion. Likewise, not every particle system gives rise to a universe like ours; the system must be patterned just so. If the system initially lacks the necessary regularities and then develops them, the spatial dimension pops into existence. If the system reverts to disorder, the dimension disappears whence it came.

Imagine, then, the collapse of a star to a black hole. The star looks 3-D to us but corresponds to a pattern in some 2-D particle system. As its gravity intensifies, the corresponding planar system jiggles with increasing fervor. When a singularity forms, order breaks down completely. The process is analogous to the melting of an ice cube: the water molecules go from a regular crystalline arrangement to the disordered jumble of a liquid. So the third dimension literally melts away.

As it goes, so does time. If you fall into a black hole, the time on your watch depends on your distance from the center of the hole, which is defined within the melting spatial dimension. As that dimension disintegrates, your watch starts to spin uncontrollably, and it becomes impossible to say that events occur at specific times or objects reside in specific places. “The conventional geometric notion of spacetime has ended,” Martinec says.

What that means in practice is that space and time no longer give structure to the world. If you try to measure objects’ positions, you find that they appear to reside in more than one place. Spatial separation means nothing to them; they jump from one place to another without crossing the intervening distance. In fact, that is how the imprint of a hapless astronaut who passes the black hole’s point of no return, its event horizon, can get back out. “If space and time do not exist near a singularity, the event horizon is no longer well defined,” Horowitz says.

In other words, string theory does not just smear out the putative singularity, replacing the errant point with something more palatable while leaving the rest of the universe much the same. Instead it reveals a broader breakdown of the concepts of space and time, the effects of which persist far from the singularity itself. To be sure, the theory still requires a primal notion of time in the particle system. Scientists are still trying to develop a notion of dynamics that does not presuppose time at all. Until then, time clings stubbornly to life. It is so deeply engrained in physics that scientists have yet to imagine its final and total disappearance.

Science comprehends the incomprehensible by breaking it down, by showing that a daunting journey is nothing more than a succession of small steps. So it is with the end of time. And in thinking about time, we come to a better appreciation of our own place in the universe as mortal creatures. The features that time will progressively lose are prerequisites of our existence. We need time to be unidirectional for us to develop and evolve; we need a notion of duration and scale to be able to form complex structures; we need causal ordering for processes to be able to unfold; we need spatial separation so that our bodies can create a little pocket of order in the world. As these qualities melt away, so does our ability to survive. The end of time may be something we can imagine, but no one will ever experience it directly, any more than we can be conscious at the moment of our own death.

As our distant descendants approach time’s end, they will need to struggle for survival in an increasingly hostile universe, and their exertions will only hasten the inevitable. After all, we are not passive victims of time’s demise; we are perpetrators. As we live, we convert energy to waste heat and contribute to the degeneration of the universe. Time must die that we may live.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
George Musser is a staff editor for Scientific American.






Sunday, February 10, 2013

Follow Up Review: "Violence in the OT"

The Opposite of Critical Thinking is Fear
http://johnwhawthorne.com/2013/02/09/the-opposite-of-critical-thinking-is-fear/

by John w. Hawthorne
February 9, 2013

I’ve always said that biblical scholars have it rough because they know stuff. They know that the context of that verse we like to throw around doesn’t support what we want it to mean. They know that there are many nuances in the original language that our translations and paraphrases don’t capture. They know that there are many interesting theological, psychological, sociological, and political questions raised when we seriously examine texts.

Knowing stuff (and asking the questions that help them do that) opens them up to criticism from those who have more of an apologetic bent. The latter are quick to find fault for even asking the questions or exploring the difficult territory. The challenges of critical thinking have been on my mind over the past week as I read Peter Enns‘ blog. Pete had asked Eric Seibert, Old Testament professor at Messiah College, to guest write three pieces dealing with violence in the Old Testament. Seibert raises some interesting challenges dealing with triumphalism, power, and Jesus. The posts were provocative but dealt carefully with the challenges that faithful believers find in the texts. I have colleagues teaching a course on the theology of war and piece and gladly shared Seibert’s blogs — not because I fully agreed but because I thought he asked fruitful questions for class discussion.

The first response I saw in the blogosphere showed up last weekend in this piece by Owen Strachan of Boyce College. Strachan asked how it was that Messiah could allow Seibert to even teach there, given that Messiah’s statement of faith includes a commitment to the authority of scripture (others have pointed out that other parts of Messiah’s statement celebrate the importance of inquiry). Friday, Christianity Today posted this piece discussing the posts by Seibert and mentioning Strachan. Strachan linked that in another post that says CT sees “controversy” while he uses a somewhat obscure passing remark by Scot McKnight as his title.

Yesterday, Pete posted this amazing link. Apparently a commenter to the previous series had written as if he were Jesus (I’m giving Jesus the benefit of the doubt that it wasn’t really him — the sentence structure and illogical argument do not represent The Lord well). Other commenters suggested that asking such questions would find Peter without faith somewhere in the future. I mentioned last week that Spring Arbor is committed to seeing “Jesus as the perspective for learning”. I’m certain this is NOT what it means.

Pete Enns, Eric Seibert, and I work in schools affiliated with the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. Owen Strachan teaches at a Bible College (all the BA degrees are in Bible and they have a certificate for seminary wives) affiliated with Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. Boyce is a very different place from Eastern or Messiah or Spring Arbor. CCCU schools run the risk of using critical thinking as a tool of faith. Many Bible colleges (but not all) prefer to deal in tight arguments explaining how things fit together.

It’s not just biblical scholars of course. Biologists have to deal with issues of evolution. Sociologists have to deal with the changing nature of the Modern Family. Nobody worries too much about the economists or the chemists or the music theorists.

When we don’t ask questions it’s because we’re afraid of what happens if we do. If we tug on that particular piece of fabric the whole garment might come unravelled. Much is lost when the fear keeps us from exploring the Truth. And, to stay with my metaphor, we wind up walking around wearing garments with threads dangling all over the place — not very attractive.

Many of Jesus’ encounters with the Pharisees involved matters of interpretation vs. letter of the law (“why do you heal on the sabbath?”). Thomas asks questions we would today see as blasphemous (“you expect me to believe he was raised from the dead?”). Why do we ask such questions? In order to better understand. To not ask them is to hide from difficulty. But asking opens up valuable conversations. It lets us figure out the complexity of the world and keeps faith engaged.

I don’t know if I agree with Seibert’s positions or not. But I certainly appreciate him asking the questions. As I listen to other responses and perspectives, I’m better for it. We would only act to stop his comments if we were afraid of where they’d lead. But if the disciples weren’t supposed to fear a raging storm, why would Christians fear the writings of a college professor in Pennsylvania?

To critics like Strachan, questions are problematic because they could upset the entire apple cart. Liberal Arts institutions know that the apples are only good when you take them down and eat them.


 
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *



How Should We Interpret OT Violence in the Bible?
 
 
 


 
 

Where Does Space and Time Come From?



Where Do Space and Time Come From?
New Theory Offers Answers, If Only Physicists Can Figure It Out

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/04/12/where-do-space-and-time-come-from-new-theory-offers-answers-if-only-physicists-can-figure-it-out/

April 12, 2012Comments


SANTA BARBARA—”Maybe we’re just too dumb,” Nobel laureate physicist David Gross mused in a lecture at Caltech two weeks ago. When someone of his level wonders whether the unification of physics will always be beyond mortal minds, it gets you worried. (He went on to explain why he doesn’t think we are too dumb, though.) Since his lecture, I’ve been learning about a theory that seems, at first, to confirm this worry. It is so ridiculously hard that it could be the subject of an Onion parody. But at the same time, I’ve been watching how physicists are trying to power through their intimidation, because the theory promises a new way of understanding what space and time really are, at a deep level.

The theory was put forward in the late 1980s by Russian physicists Mikhail Vasiliev and the late Efin Fradkin of the Lebedev Institute in Moscow, but is so mathematically complex and conceptually opaque that whenever someone brought it up, most theorists started talking about the weather, soccer, reality TV—anything but that theory. It became a subject of polite conversation only in the past couple of years, as math whizzes who take a peculiar pleasure in impossible problems dove in and showed that the theory is not impossible to grasp, merely almost impossible.

Inspired by their bravery, I’m going to take a crack at explaining this strange beast, synthesizing lectures I’ve attended by Steve Shenker of Stanford University, Andy Strominger of Harvard, and Juan Maldacena of the Institute for Advanced Study, as well as informal chats with Joe Polchinski of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics and Joan Simón of the University of Edinburgh. I’m sure they’ll set me straight if I get something wrong, and I’ll edit this blog post to reflect comments I receive.

Vasiliev theory (for sake of a pithy name, physicists drop Fradkin’s name) takes to extremes the basic idea of modern physics: that the world around us consists of fields—the electrical and magnetic fields and a handful of others that represent the known forces of nature and types of matter. Vasiliev theory posits an infinite number of fields. They come in progressively more complicated varieties described by the quantum-mechanical property of spin.

Spin is perhaps best thought of as the degree of rotational symmetry. The electromagnetic field along with its associated particle, the photon, has spin -1. If you rotate it 360 degrees, it looks the same as before. The gravitational field along with its associated particle, the graviton, has spin -2: you need to rotate it only 180 degrees [to find its original image]. The known particles of matter, such as the electron, have spin -1/2: you need to rotate them 720 degrees before they return to their original appearance - a counterintuititive feature that turns out to explain why these particles resist bunching, giving matter its integrity. The Higgs field has spin -0 and looks the same no matter how you rotate it.




Figure 1: Unification of forces and superstring theory It is thought that when the universe was born, there was only one kind of force, which bifurcated into four kinds as the temperature decreased with the expansion of the universe. Superstring theory is expected to provide a unified explaination for the initially bifurcated gravitational forces and the other threee forces, and even to solve the riddle of the birth of the universe.



Figure 2: A moving string as the minimum unit of matter At present, the electron and quark are considered to represent the smallest units of matter. The standard model assumes that a point is the smallest unit, whereas superstring theory assumes a string. The string turns into a quark after entering one mode of vibration and an electron after entering another mode.


In Vasiliev theory, there are also spin -5/2, spin -3, spin -7/2, spin -4, all the way up. Physicists used to assume that was impossible. These higher-spin fields, being more symmetrical, would imply new laws of nature analogous to the conservation of energy, and no two objects could ever interact without breaking one of those laws. The workings of nature would seize up like an overregulated economy. At first glance, string theory, the leading candidate for a fully unified theory of nature, runs afoul of this principle. Like a plucked guitar string, an elementary quantum string has an infinity of higher harmonics, which correspond to higher-spin fields. But those harmonics come with an energy cost, which keeps them inert.

Vasiliev and Frakin showed that the above reasoning applies only when gravity is insignificant and spacetime is not curved. In curved spacetimes, higher-spin fields can exist after all. Maybe overregulation isn’t such a bogeyman after all.

In fact, it may be a positive good. Higher-spin fields promise to flesh out the holographic principle, which is a way to explain the origin of space and gravity. Suppose you have a hypothetical three-dimensional spacetime (two space dimensions, one time dimension) filled with particles that interact solely by a souped-up version of the strong nuclear force; there is no gravity. In such a setting, objects can behave in a very structured way. Objects of a given size can interact only with objects of comparable size, just as objects can interact only if they are spatially adjacent. Size plays exactly the same role as spatial position; you can think of size as a new dimension of space, materializing from particle interactions like a figure in a pop-up book. The original three-dimensional spacetime becomes the boundary of a four-dimensional spacetime, with the new dimension representing the distance from this boundary. Not only does a spatial dimension emerge, but so does the force of gravity. In the jargon, the strong nuclear force in 3-D spacetime (the boundary) is “dual” to gravity in 4-D spacetime (the bulk).

As formulated by Maldacena in the late 1990s, the holographic principle describes a bulk where dark energy has a negative density, warping spacetime into a so-called anti-de Sitter geometry. But this is just a theorist’s playground. In the real universe, dark energy has a positive density, for a de Sitter geometry or some approximation thereof. Extending the holographic principle to such a geometry is fraught. The boundary of 4-D de Sitter spacetime is a 3-D space lying in the infinite future. The emergent dimension in this case would not be of space but of time, which is hard even for theoretical physicists to wrap their minds around. But if they succeed in formulating a version of the holographic principle for a de Sitter geometry, it would not only apply to the real universe, but would also explain what time really is. A lack of understanding of time is at the root of almost every deep problem in fundamental physics today.

That is where Vasiliev theory comes in. It works in either an anti-de Sitter or a de Sitter geometry. In the former [anti-de Sitter] case, the corresponding 3-D boundary is governed by a simplified version of the strong nuclear force rather than the souped-up one [(no space, no gravity)]. By biting the bullet and accepting the borderline-incomprehensible Vasiliev theory, physicists actually end up easing their task. In the de Sitter case, the corresponding 3-D boundary is governed by a type of field theory in which time does not operate; it is static. The structure of this theory gives rise to the dimension of time. What is more, time arises in an inherently asymmetric way, which might account for the arrow of time—its unidirectionality.

It gets even better. Normally the holographic principle [(cf. Wikipedia - Holographic principle)] can account for the emergence of one dimension, leaving the others unexplained. But Vasiliev theory might give you the whole kit and kaboodle. The higher-spin fields possess an even higher degree of symmetry than the gravitational field does, which is a lot. Higher symmetry means less structure. The theory of gravity, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, says that spacetime is like Silly Putty. Vasiliev theory says it is Sillier Putty, possessing too little structure to fulfill even its most basic functions, such as defining consistent cause-effect relations or keeping distant objects isolated from one another.

To put it differently, Vasiliev theory is even more nonlinear than general relativity. Matter and spacetime geometry are so thoroughly entwined that it becomes impossible to tease them apart, and our usual picture of matter as residing in spacetime becomes completely untenable. In the primordial universe, where Vasiliev theory reigned, the universe was an amorphous blob. As the higher-spin symmetries broke—for instance, as the higher harmonics of quantum strings become too costly to set into motion—spacetime emerged in its entirety.

Perhaps it is not so surprising that Vasiliev theory is so complicated. Any explanation of the nature of space and time is bound to be intimidating. If physicists ever do figure it out, I predict that they’ll forget how hard it used to be and start giving it to their students for homework.


About the Author: is a contributing editor at Scientific American. He focuses on space science and fundamental physics, ranging from particles to planets to parallel universes. He is the author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to String Theory. Musser has won numerous awards in his career, including the 2011 American Institute of Physics's Science Writing Award. Follow on Twitter @gmusser.
More Resources:

Wikipedia - SpaceTime

Wikipedia - The Philosophy of Space and Time

Scientific American (5/17/11) - Space Is An Elaborate Illusion

Scientific American / res - The Paradox of Time: Why It Can't Stop, But Must

The Origin of Space and Time by John Gowan - http://www.johnagowan.org/convert.html


Mapping the History of Space & Time




Holography, Unfolding and Higher-Spin Theory, Mikhail Vasiliev







Saturday, February 9, 2013

Book Review: Ed Dobson, "Seeing Through the Fog"



Death Is For Real


Amid a flurry of bestsellers promising firsthand proof of Heaven's existence,
Ed Dobson takes a brutally honest look at the pain of terminal illness and the
 difficulties of dying well.

Review by Rob Moll
[posted 10/31/2012 8:56 AM ]

Seeing Through the Fog:
Hope When Your World Falls Apart


Seeing Through the Fog: Hope When Your World Falls Apartour rating - 5 Stars - Masterpiece
Author - Ed Dobson
Publisher - David C. Cook
Price - $12.99

I recently was reading the story of a former evangelical Christian, profiled by Tony Kriz in his new book,Neighbors and Wise Men.After growing up in a small, insular expression of the faith, he discovered a wider world outside it. In particular, this passionate believer discovered an environmental movement that spoke to his soul while his church home ridiculed the environmentalists. So, he switched his allegiances: "The Christian church has no coherent answer for earth care. And for that reason I now know I could never be a Christian."

Initially, this remark angered me. The evangelical movement has more than a few dissenters from the typical attitude toward environmentalism. They could have saved this man's faith. But as I gained some sympathy, I realized that the man's apostasy illustrates our need for faithful dissenters, insiders who stay true to the movement while critiquing its failures. These dissenters add diversity and show us new ways to be faithful followers of Christ.

It wasn't too long ago—when political evangelicalism was loud, and its hypocrisy easy to see—that I, immature and ignorant, wanted to lodge my own critiques against the church.

A faithful dissenter

Thankfully I discovered Ed Dobson, the faithful dissenter who voiced my own critiques while remaining inside the evangelical fold. Dobson was formerly a board member of the Moral Majority, a spokesperson for Jerry Falwell, and a vice president at Liberty University. Dobson had since become a successful pastor, leading a megachurch in Grand Rapids, and he remained a powerful voice in the pulpit and in his books. He was named "Pastor of the Year" by Moody Bible Institute. Dobson was an evangelical of evangelicals. He was a religious righter of the Religious Right.

And he gave me an answer to the problem of the church entwined with politics. In Blinded by Might, coauthored with fellow Moral Majority member Cal Thomas, they blame the Religious Right for that entwinement: "We have confused political power with God's power." Dobson and Thomas argue that the church has been compromised and distracted from its central mission. In 2008, Dobson voted for Barak Obama, telling ABC news that Obama "more than any other candidate represented the teachings of Jesus."

Dobson was a dissenter even during his days as a student at Bob Jones University. He turned away from, but never fully rejected, those who once nurtured him. Dobson speaks fondly of his days in fundamentalism and doesn't deride those he left behind. As Dobson has matured beyond the fundamentalist and Religious Right communities, he has simply pursued greater faithfulness and obedience to God for himself, his congregation, and the church at large.

Another kind of leadership

Now, Dobson is embracing a new role. After several years living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease, Dobson is breaking the mold of the public figure diagnosed with a terminal illness. Such personalities typically retreat into private, preventing the public from seeing them in a weakened state. Or, these figures blandly assert that the disease will have no effect on their responsibilities.

As his body dies, muscle by muscle, Dobson is speaking at conferences, writing books, and is starring in a series of videos about his ALS, called "Ed's Story." Having left politics and now the pulpit, Dobson has embraced a new ministry. He is now teaching Christians to die well. Because learning to die well requires us to discover the meaning of a good life, Dobson's final journey instructs us all.

The church has always given an ear to its members who were near death. Today, travelogues written by children who visit heaven are our bestsellers. But earlier evangelicals read stories of transformation at the end of life and the narratives of faithful dying. Such stories filled religious periodicals. They weren't offered as eyewitness proof of Sunday school pictures of heaven. Obituaries never told about "battles" with illness but of abiding faith, deepened relationships, and glorious entries into heaven through the sad reality of death.

By taking his dying public, Dobson stands in this tradition. His latest book, Seeing Through the Fog: Hope When Your World Falls Apart (David C. Cook), offers the lessons Dobson has learned while dealing with a disease that kills slowly and painfully. In one of the Ed's Story videos, he says, "Every person knows that they are going to die. The difference is I feel it with every twitch of my muscles. I feel it in the very depths of my being."

Dobson writes about his fog of despair after his diagnosis, the difficulty of leaving his position as pastor, the challenge of prayer, and the constant worry when living with terminal illness. He writes about learning to give thanks—not for his disease, but for the many things ALS had yet to take away and for which he still could be thankful . Dobson writes about heaven and his powerful desire not to be there yet. He writes about his prayers for healing and the horrible things people say about faith and miracles.

To Die Well

The Christian tradition of dying well often has taught believers to hope for a slow death. It allows time for the preparation that a good death requires. Seeing Through the Fog, and particularly the Ed's Story videos, offers more than lessons in hope. It teaches the old practices of ars moriendi—the art of dying.

One Ed's Story video tells hows Dobson made a list of people from whom to ask forgiveness. Kathy had been a staff counselor at Dobson's church who was let go. The process had hurt Kathy, and she laid part of the blame at Dobson's feet. He knew she deserved an apology, and Dobson went to her, kneeled at her feet, and said he was sorry. "I found out much later that this was an event that marked her for the rest of her life," he said. "I didn't do it to mark her for the rest of her life; I did it because it was the right thing to do. I did it so that I could live my life without regret."
Dobson had intended to call Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, but he received a call from the radio host first. It is a generous anecdote that reveals a softer side of James Dobson. He had called to say he had been praying for Ed. When Ed asked for forgiveness, James asked the same from Ed. "Those few moments on the phone were incredibly liberating for me," Dobson writes.

Any serious illness will require a person to give up aspects of his life that were once considered essential. For the terminally ill, this giving up is a permanent and painful choice. Dobson shows his readers how he confronted the need to give up his lifelong role as a speaker. Whether speaking on television or preaching in the pulpit, Dobson's voice has been his life. But ALS destroys the muscles that control speech as well.

During one service after his diagnosis, Dobson spoke on giving. The offering plates had just been passed, and Dobson asked for one. He said we shouldn't just put a few of our possessions in the plate, but rather ourselves. Dobson delivered the rest of his sermon while standing in an offering plate.

In the hallway after the service, Dobson asked himself, "What am I holding back from the offering plate? ... I realized that my speaking and preaching should be in the offering plate." Dobson prayed, "I am now surrendering my speaking and preaching to You. I'm putting it in the offering plate. If the day comes when I can no longer speak or preach, I want You to know that it's okay with me."

An answer to death

I've had the opportunity to speak to a number of people who have been personally diagnosed with a terminal illness, or have known a family member who was similarly diagnosed. They're often surprised that dying today is only rarely a quick process. Most people die slowly over months and years. This is an experience that shakes their faith.

For anyone who needs to hear Christianity's coherent answer to the problem of facing one's death, or who needs a dissenter from popular narratives of near death experiences, Seeing Through the Fog is an excellent place to start. It is by no means the sum of the breadth of Christian teaching on dying well, but many readers may need to go no further than this book. The Ed's Story videos, which have received a good deal of media coverage, offer much of the same advice in a powerful, personal, and deeply touching way. I was disappointed that Seeing Through the Fog didn't evoke as powerful a response in me that the videos do.

Dobson's advice is soaked in Scripture, befitting a pastor who teaches from the Word. His generous spirit hasn't produced an upbeat book. He is brutally honest about the process of learning to die. His writing is at times stilted, suggesting the fact that he can no longer type but talks his writing using voice recognition software. Yet he writes with hope and joy of a deeper walk with Jesus.

Today, Christian's don't talk about death, but about near-death experiences seen to offer a kind of magical proof of the good life to come. For those Christians who, seeing today's bestsellers, wonder if Christianity has a coherent answer to suffering and death, Ed Dobson offers one. A faithful dissenter, Dobson offers real hope, meaning in the midst of suffering, the expectation of Jesus in the life to come, and ongoing transformation that brings us closer to him today.


Rob Moll is a CT editor at large and author of The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come (InterVarsity Press).

Editor's note: Some readers of an earlier version of this article thought it stated TonyKriz holds a negative view of evangelicals' commitment to environmental stewardship. We have edited the article to make clearer that the quote at the beginning of the review was given to Kriz by an interview subject.




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