Wheel in the sky keeps on turning

During class this evening, for whatever reason, the vision of Ezekiel the Prophet came up in conversation. Lest it's been awhile since you've cracked open that corner of the Scriptures, I'll remind you that it's the almost hallucinogenic-seeming description of the angels, the heavenly temple, and God himself. The relevant point comes to us in Ezekiel 1, verse 15ish:

"All at once wheels appeared close to them, one at each of the four sides, [...] and each looked like a wheel within a wheel. Moved they, it was ever one of the four ways the living figures looked; and they did not turn round in moving. As for their size, their height was terrible to look upon; and the whole frame of them, all round, was full of eyes."

This portion of the vision has been traditionally explained as a revelation of God's omnipresence - nothing escapes his sight. This fact, of course, is testified to throughout the scriptures, such as in Proverbs 15:3: "Go where thou wilt, the Lord’s eye is watching; good nor evil escapes his scrutiny."

However, this vision stirs to mind some ideas from a class I took a few years back. Ostensibly, the class was an honors symposium on the advanced sciences and mathematics, but really it was a sort of math, quantum physics, ethics, and philosophy class all rolled into one. We read Jorge Luis Borges alongside Heisenberg. One thing that I distinctly recall is the unpredictability of quantum particles. According to Schrodinger and others, particles change their behavior depending on whether they are observed or not. There was one experiment that was left overnight with no one watching that seemed to show light acting as a wave. Whereas, when the same experiment was observed, it seemed as though light was acting as a particle.

In any event, at the quantum level, it becomes very tricky to get down to what more naturalistic types would call "reality", because sometimes reality is incredible odd. To get back to Ezekiel's rather terrifying vision of God, we once had a class discussion on whether or not the universe needs to be observed by something outside of it in order to exist. The all-seeing eyes of Ezekiel's wheels seem to hint that the operation of the universe is intrinsically tied into the observation thereof.

Dante's vision of the Empyrean

This little thought experiment begs the question of whether its acceptable to read modern sciences into ancient scriptures. Some may accuse me of playing the "God of the gaps" game, wherein we simply place our idea of God into the increasingly smaller gaps that science leaves in our understanding of the world. In taking this particular class, however, it became abundantly clear that there are many more gaps and uncertainties than we tend to think of on a daily basis - especially once one delves either too deeply or ascends too highly in the scale of the universe.

Furthermore, as a Catholic, I believe that there is Truth, with a capital T, which exists, a priori to ourselves. If God is creator, than creation testifies to this truth just as much as His revelation of Himself in the scriptures. Saying that God is an omnipresent observer necessary for the cohesion of quantum mechanics does not diminish what God said through Ezekiel in quite a different way. We have each foot in a different realm of knowledge at this point.

To muse further, I wish to consider the Medieval (well, Aristotilean originally) conception of God as the primum mobile - the unmoved mover. To the knowledgeable men of those ages, the universe was a series of revolving spheres that descended from God, though the heavens, to the earth. God, the Prime Mover, causes each sphere to rotate, which gives order to the sphere below it and so forth. Dante explains this perceived celestial hierarchy completely in the Paradiso, the final third of the Divine Comedy. In the final Canto, when Dante had reached the Empyrean (the fixed "sphere" wherein God abides) he describes it thus:

"In the profound and shining-clear Existence / Of the deep Light appeared to me three circles / Of one dimension and three different colors. / One seemed to be reflected by the other, / Rainbow by rainbow, while the third seemed fire / Breathed equally from one and from the other. / O how pale now is language and how paltry /  For my conception! / And for what I saw / My words are not enough to call them meager. / O everlasting Light, you dwell alone / In yourself, know yourself alone, and known / And knowing, love and smile upon yourself! / That middle circle which appeared in you / To be conceived as a reflected light, / After my eyes had studied it a while, /  Within itself and in its coloring / Seemed to be painted with our human likeness / So that my eyes were wholly focused on it. / As the geometer who sets himself / To square the circle and who cannot find, / For all his thought, the principle he needs, / Just so was I on seeing this new vision / I wanted to see how our image fuses / Into the circle and finds its place in it, / Yet my wings were not meant for such a flight — Except that then my mind was struck by lightning / Through which my longing was at last fulfilled. / Here powers failed my high imagination: / But by now my desire and will were turned, / Like a balanced wheel rotated evenly, / By the Love that moves the sun and the other stars."

Dante's description of God clearly blends Ezekiel's winged wheels with the Medieval conception of the Prime Mover. God is the source of the turning of the spheres of the physical universe ("The Love that moves the sun and the other stars").

Perhaps we might further compare such an idea with that of the modern conception of string theory. The overly-simplified version states that all matter is composed of strings (of probability, essentially) which vibrate in the tenth dimension and give being to sub atomic particles. It is easiest to think of the tenth dimension as the realm of possibility - it is the sum total of all possible outcomes in all possible universes. Thus, strings are not bound by changes in reality, so to speak, since they exist in a non-(directly)-observable realm of all-things-are-possible.

Pantheism is a false belief, as God is not present in all things in an immanent way, but it is interesting to consider these strings as a way of bridging God's omnipotence and omnipresence. Since God is infinite, he is not bound by time, space, or, presumably, any dimension we could think up. But, it is intriguing to imagine the tenth dimension, wherein the strings vibrate, as a sort of modern primum mobile. It is a sort of Empyrean. If God were in the tenth dimension, He would see all (thus fulfilling the need for a universal observer), but also see all possibilities and all of their possible outcomes. This, I think, preserves our free will, but still allows for God's sovereignty and intervention.

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I don't really know why I felt the need to write all of this out, and I'm certainly not sure that I believe it all, but, I think it can be fruitful to start drawing these connections, if only for a way of generating thought experiments. Does all of the above line up with historic Christian doctrine? I suppose it could. But, my purpose was not theological so much as philosophical. As we approach the limits of what we can know definitively about the deepest mysteries of the universe, I think it's sort of fun to jump from the empirical to the spiritual and consider the one's effect on the other. As a Catholic, the unseen is just as real as the seen after all.

In which we ponder science and religion

The feast of the Epiphany (today) seems an appropriate time to consider a subject that has cropped up in a few of my conversations of late - the relationship between science and religion (namely the Catholic Church). The appropriateness of the Epiphany for such an intellectual musing centers on God revealing himself to the world via the star of Bethlehem and the subsequent arrival of the magi from the east. The magi, we must assume, were pagan philosophers and astronomers who looked to the stars and the world about them for answers to the mysteries of life. With the birth of Christ, their vague searches among the shadows for spiritual meaning were over when they encountered the truth in the manger.

This is where our consideration of the twin subjects of science and religion must begin - the search for truth. In terms of religious, and specifically Christian thought, God is truth. Or, put another way, all that is true comes from God. The Scriptures testify to this readily for Our Lord proclaims in the Gospel of St. John, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." In order to conceive how science and religion fit together, we must consider God the author of all that is true in the universe, as he himself declares.

The second step we must take is to consider how we as humans come to know truth. First and foremost, we are born as material creatures in a material world - thus we have an understanding of the physical world around us through our senses and our investigations. We are also born with and develop an intellect, which subscribes to the natural law - the law written on the hearts of all human beings. Therefore, the things which we observe in nature and the things that we discern in our hearts tend toward truth. This tendency, however, is perfected by God's own revelation of himself - the divine law. Revelation is a third source of truth and is found in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition and is interpreted by the Magisterium (teaching authority) of the Church. This is the Catholic position on how truth may be known.

Science fits in quite nicely in this system of the world. For, we must note that science is founded on claims that can only be classified as mystical, or even religious in nature. That is, they cannot be proved or disproved through the sciences:

• The world is intelligible. This is the primary assertion of science. It is the basis of all scientific inquiry. Scientists must believe that the world is imbued with meaning and that it can therefore be made sense of. This premise is largely glossed over as common sense, but we can see its grounding in Western thought if we compare it to, say, the Native American worldview. Many Native American tribes (if not all) subscribed to the belief that nature is sacred and that it is not to be tampered with. Science could not develop under such philosophical circumstances. Science, the knowledge of the world around us, can only exist when we desacralize our surroundings. 
• The mind is capable of discerning truth. This is also so obvious to us Westerns that we often don't stop to think about it. However, in order for the scientific method to function, we must believe that our mind is capable of rational decisions. We must, in essence, possess that faith that our interior thoughts correspond with exterior realities. Hence the importance of the soul in theology. If we were soulless collections of randomly-collected cells, what faith could we have that our bodies naturally evolved to know right from wrong. Thus, the true skeptic is trapped by his skepticism into believing he is unable to know anything for certain. Science cannot exist under these conditions either. 

Now that we have examined how science exists in our culture, we must get on to the true heart of the issue. I have heard outrageous claims that the Church stands in direct opposition to science. These claims are fueled by Dan Brown half-truths and the straw-man arguments of the New Atheists who need a convincing theological bogeyman. The knowledge proposed by the Church and the knowledge developed by scientific inquiry are of two fundamentally different species. Theological truths, as proposed by the Church, attempt to answer questions of why. Scientific truths, on the other hand, are very convincing in explaining to us what things are and how they work. Science falters when it attempts to answer questions of ultimate meaning. Hence, the Church has consistently taught that knowledge gained by the sciences is inherently good, since it uncovers truth that God has imprinted in creation. And, subsequently, since the scope of science and the scope of theology are two different spheres of thought, they can never be said to contradict.

On the theological side of things, we must be conscious of how we are interpreting divine revelation when considering scientific claims. Biblical Fundamentalism, though a fairly recent phenomenon in Christian theology, has a firm claim on a vast segment of the population. This can exacerbate conflict between religion and science, and can quite frankly make Christianity out to look quite foolish. Catholics have never been Biblical Fundamentalists in the modern sense of the term. Yes, the Church teaches that the Scriptures are infallible, and yes she teaches that they are the inspired word of God. She does not teach, however, that all Scripture is to be read at literal face value. She has never taught such a doctrine that is quite foreign to the Christian mind.

The Bible must be understood quite carefully. The various books are written in various styles. To say that the Psalms are to be understood as plainly as the Letters of St. Paul is to deprive oneself of the poetic richness of those songs. So, when we consider the accounts of creation in Genesis, we cannot read them with the journalistic expectations with which we read newspapers. The Church has fantastic precedent in this arena when we consider the writings of the bishops and other members of the early Church. The modern disciplines of history and science were not around when the Biblical books were written, so it escapes me why some continue to force these views on ancient texts. Not even the biblical scholars of the early modern period did that. 

So, let us briefly consider the creation of the world (a tall order, I realize). The best of modern scientific research says that the universe is approximately thirteen billion years old and began with a cataclysmic event known as the Big Bang (a theory which was put forward by a Catholic priest incidentally). Earth took shape slowly over the course of the ages and eventually life developed. How can we interpret the biblical accounts of creation in light of this knowledge? 

First, we must say with certainty that science will never be able to answer the question of why the universe exists, or why it was created in the first place. That is purely metaphysical in nature. Second, we must consider Genesis with our knowledge of what sort of writing it is. It is not journalistic, it is poetic. Just because it is poetic doesn't mean that we can't discern concrete truths from it. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• God created the world. It was not a random act of chance, but an act of the divine will to create.
• God created the world by speaking. In direct contrast to other ancient myths, whose creation stories were often violent, the God of the Bible spoke the world into existence. This prefigures the sending of Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God, to redeem creation.
• Creation is good. The account in Genesis speaks quite clearly to the fact that God did not create evil. Material creation is not inherently evil. We are not to attempt to escape the material world, rather we are to sanctify it. 
• Man occupies a special place in creation. Man is the only creature endowed with intellect. We are also unique in our creation in the image and likeness of our creator. We are not mere animals.

I could probably go on (I am sure books have been written on the subject). But with this example we can see how theological truths such as the ones above can never be proven or disproven by science, yet this does not make them untrue. Additionally, we can understand the truth of these statements without disparaging the truth of scientific inquiry which paints a different picture of how the events transpired. 

Science and religion thus only contradict when we force them to. This comes from both sides. Perhaps it is an atheist setting up the Church as anti-science and anti-logic. Perhaps it is your local fundamentalist preacher decrying the purported age of the earth. Whenever you here such arguments, recall that in reality both sides are much more nuanced and compatible than it often appears. The search for truth is not confined to the stars nor is it confined to the crib in Bethlehem. We just need to be able to see the two of them for what they are and not confuse their relative importance and impact on our lives.

And now for something entirely different

My range of interests is broad, bordering occasionally on universal, so I thought I'd share with you this bit of intellectual delicacy from the world of biology. The excerpt below comes from a fantastic collection of incisive and poetic biological-themed essays entitled The Lives of a Cell. The author is a man named Lewis Thomas.

"A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours. They turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryocytes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors of our eukaryotic cells and stayed there. Ever since, they have maintained themselves and their ways, replicating in their own fashion, privately, with their own DNA and RNA quite different from ours. They are as much symbionts as the rhizobial bacteria in the roots of beans. Without them, we would not move a muscle, drum a finger, think a thought." - Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell, Viking Press, 1974