Entangled States

Quantum entangled wedding vows

You just knew that I *had* to share this. A conceptual artist is offering to bind people into wedded bliss by entangling their "fleshy" wave functions.

Here's the scoop from Discovery Magazine:

"A scenario might go like this, said Keats in an email correspondence with Discovery News about his project:

In the simplest case, involving only two people, the couple begins by walking down a long hallway from darkness into sunlight. (The hallway is wide enough for them to walk side by side, but too narrow to accommodate more than two people at a time.) At the end of the hallway, the couple will find two sets of footprints, on which they'll stand facing one another, nearly touching. (Depending on their preference, they may be dressed or naked.) They'll look up and see a window bright with sunlight, and suspended in that window above their heads they'll find the entanglement apparatus, which has been precisely calibrated (using a system of adjustable prisms) to divide the sunlight passing through a nonlinear crystal (made of beta-barium borate) so that half of the light shines on each person's face. They'll stand for approximately a minute, allowing countless entangled photons to bombard their skin, gently entangling their flesh by the photoelectric effect. Then they'll turn away and walk back down the hall and out into the open.

According to Keats, the couple won't know to what extent they've become entangled, because any attempt to measure a quantum system disturbs it."

Read the full article here.

Okay. So this is a little odd, but poetically speaking it's sort of sweet don't you think? I mean, a key part of the wedding services that I've done includes binding the hands of the couple in the celebrants stole as part of the blessing. (I was gratified to see the Archbishop of Canterbury use that symbol when he witnessed the vows that the new Duke and Duchess of Cambridge made at their recent wedding.)

A sacrament is an outward symbol of an inward grace. What the particulars of the outward symbol are can be up to interpretation... I've seen all sorts of different wedding rings, different forms of vows, etc as part of the sacramental rite of Marriage in the Episcopal Church.

So why not add a moment of quantum entanglement?

Is it that much different than a Unity Candle, or golden lassos?

I wonder if I could get this apparatus installed at the Cathedral in time for the weddings next month? Hmmm.

Christian Hope and Thermodynamics

A friend of mine, Lucas Mix, (astrobiologist and college chaplain) has a great essay on his blog about the relationship between science and religion, specifically Christianity. He starts by pointing out that people who read the Bible with an inerrantist, infallibilist hermenuetic should have at least as difficult a time with the idea of Entropy as a Universal Law as they do with Evolution. A straightforward reading of the biblical story makes one expect that the Universe will eventually come to a steady, highly ordered state of existence, which is pretty much the exact opposite of arc predicted by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

But it can be, thankfully, more complicated than that.

He writes:

"Back to entropy.  From a scientific perspective, I use a story of a universe in which the second law applies.  I believe the universe will end in heat death.  It is a story of decline and disorder, but also a story that tells us important things about life (we eat to acquire energy, to heat our bodies and repair disorder, to continue living – humans as closed systems would die) and about stars (stars burn hydrogen to produce heat and to radiate heat and light), and about a hundred other things.  The second law tells us that if order is maintained, we really should look for an outside source of energy.  Science tells us about a universe of atoms moving toward heat death.

Christianity presents an alternative.  Christians recognize, and have always recognized, that matter moves toward heat death – or as Paul would say, death has dominion over the world of the flesh.  We also recognize that if you start looking at souls instead of atoms, the world looks a great deal different.  The Christian perspective has people coming into relationship with one another and with God.  Christ entered the world to ‘atone for sin,’ that is to make us one with God and one another (at one = atone).  The Bible states that the ‘Kingdom of God is at hand.’  It doesn’t mean that some sore of physical castle will appear from another dimension.  It means that there is a different lens through which to view the world, a spiritual lens, and through that lens, we see individuals forming communities of love.

Christianity cannot provide an alternative physical hypothesis about heat death (or for that matter evolution).  It is not a theory of atoms.  No one can prove Christianity scientifically, nor should anyone mistake it for common sense or irrefutable logic.  Anyone who says so is selling you something."

Read his full essay here.

A couple of early thoughts for Lent IV

I'm thinking of titling Sunday's sermon "Beautiful eyes". But that's really just a hook to hang my own thoughts on as I think through what the lessons are saying to the particular congregation I serve. I'm rather taken by David's beautiful eyes in Samuel that ultimately lead him astray when he gazes upon Bathsheeba; and the contrast with the clay eyes that Jesus gives to the blind man that allow him to see the Truth.

I love this idea that Jesus gives the blind man clay eyes. It says that explicitly in a textual variant of Syriac provence. And that is probably following Irenaeus' commentary on the passage that point on that Jesus' is completing the work of creation by adding mud to the mud-man (Adam) who's completing has awaited the Messiah's advent.

But there's this too... The argument over the healing is an argument over plain visible fact versus interpretation of scripture. It is the religious authorities who are unable to see the truth of the fact standing before them, because they are blinded by their preconception of who God is, and their concepts of the limits to God’s freedom.

It reminds me of the argument over the biological process of Evolution and the parts of the Church that are struggling to make sense of something that goes against their understanding of who God is.

Jesus Wars: Phillip Jenkins

Every year it's always a bit of trial to find a good book for Lenten study, but it was a little easier this year than most. Late last year I finished Jenkins book on the lost history of Eastern Christianity and was so impressed by it that I decided to take a shot on his newest book; "The Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Year."

Mind you, Jenkins, a recognized authority in Church History and formerly a darling of the more strident evangelicals, is no liberal. He writes both as a historian, and as a person of faith. You get a sense of his own struggle with the implications that the details of the history he lays out has for an overly romanticized vision of the Church. (The sort of vision that I tend to stray into more often than is warranted.)

We're using this book for our Lenten series and I'm reading it with a group of ordinands that I've been asked to help prepare for ministry in the Episcopal Church. Both groups have been delighted with the book. It reads well. In fact most of the people in both groups have galloped ahead and finished the book ahead of schedule. A few have gone back and bought Jenkins' book on the lost Churches of the East and his earlier book on the rise of African Christianity.

The most telling point for me comes in the introduction to the book. I was already familiar with the struggles over Christology in the early Church but I think I tended to imagine the struggling was all very genteel. A raised eyebrow over sherry or something like that. Very proper.

Jenkins points out, picking up a theme of his previous book, that if we want to have a sense of the daily life of the early Church we should be looking at Islam today. He notes in passing in his previous book that much of the common life of Islam is directly descended from the popular piety of what we call the Syriac and Nestorian Churches. (What he calls the Miaphysites - whose Primate was found in Babylon and who broke away from the Orthodox, Chalcedon faith in the fourth and fifth centuries.) He notes that the minaret has its origin in the poles that the stylites lived upon, and the regular bowing to the East that is a common part of daily Islamic practice is a custom well known among the Syriac Christians.

If we want to have a sense of the real flavor of the struggle between the Chalcedonian Christians and the Miaphysite Christians, we should look at the present day struggles between the Sunni and the Shiite Muslims. The Iraq Iran wars represent just about the level of ferocity as the literal wars between the Chalcedonian and Myphysite churches in their day. The Arab street has nothing really on the old Blue and Green factions of Constantinople (New Rome) whose chariot racing factionalism rather naturally bled over into religious sectarianism.

Watching the film Agora earlier this year was a visceral glimpse into the world that Jenkins is writing about. If you've seen the movie but not read the book (or vice-versa) make sure to complete the pairing.

The other big impression the book has made upon me is to put some of the present political scheming within the denomination that I am a part of (Episcopal) into a large context. It's hard to get nearly as upset over the scandal of people writing nasty blog posts about each other when you read of bishops using their thuggish monks to bash in the heads of the priests and bishops who opposed their theological views. We may take each other to court, but that's a much better venue for uncontrolled conflict in the Church than the battlefield. Perhaps we need to do a better job making that point to some of the people affecting scandal over the present state of affairs within modern mainline Christianity.

But it is the scandal over the present division that the books presentation of history makes even more concerning. Yes, we're fighting with subpoenas and not with clubs or swords today, but we're still fighting. Jenkins points out that Islam rose so meteorically, and so categorically killed off the Syriac christians (in the same way it is doing today) because the Western parts of the Church (Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox) refused to come to their aid. The schism was so deep at that point that we could no longer imagine that there was a reason to make common cause.

Mainline denominations, and pretty much all of organized Christian religion are in serious decline in the West today. And rather than make common cause with each other to teach about the God who loves us and would save us from ourselves, the gulf between us is growing wider and wider. It won't be too long I fear before the concept of working cooperatively with each other becomes as unimaginable to us as it was the Eastern and Western Christians of the sixth and seventh centuries.

Physicists predict end of Religion. Sigh.

The BBC reported last week that a team of physicists, including some from the University of Arizona, have created a model for religious observance that is predicting the death of religion in at least 9 countries in the near future.

It's a relatively simple non-linear model apparently:

"'It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility.

'For example in languages, there can be greater utility or status in speaking Spanish instead of [the dying language] Quechuan in Peru, and similarly there's some kind of status or utility in being a member of a religion or not.'

Dr Wiener continued: 'In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.'

The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the 'non-religious' category."

Full article here.

Color me skeptical.

There's an old line among physicists that sometimes the ability to do amazing things in relatively simple areas does not mean that we can do the same sorts of things in complex systems. It's usually expressed in shorthand: "Remember the spherical horse."

The aphorism comes, supposedly from a physicist who was flush with the triumph of Thermodynamics to explain how industrial engines worked. He decided to try to explain the horse too. But key to the model is the need to explain how heat energy goes in and out of a system. Horse shapes are hard to model mathematically. Spheres are easy.

The problem is that in making the problem easy enough to be able to be solved, the physicist basically reduced the complexity so far that the answer the models gave were basically useless.

I'm thinking something similar is going on in this situation.

For the models to work the way the group describes, they have to assume that religion is only, and this is a big deal, only a sociological and anthropological phenomenon. There's no admission that God exists, that God is external to reality as described by their model and that God might be actively engaging the process of faith.

Those of us who consider ourselves to be people of faith would beg to differ with this ommission. To us, God is the origin of the religious impulse, and it is God's gracious action in the lives of believers that leads us to faith.

But that can't really be modeled, because there's not any way to put parameters on the absolute Freedom that we believe is a chief characteristic of God.

So, don't worry to much that physicists are predicting the end of religion. We have our problems, and the church of tomorrow might not look much like the church of the 1950's, but its death has been predicted many times. And "somehow" it just keeps on going.

Sense of smell is a quantum mechanical phenomenon

I'm fascinated of late with the places where the quantum regime of reality intersects with the deterministic human scale regime. (If we're going to try to make use of "quantum mechanics" in a responsible way in thinking about spirituality then these are the sorts of places we need to look.)

So there's a report published today that apparently identifies the mechanism behind the sensation of smell as being based in quantum electron state transitions:

"The idea is that an electron on one part of a protein may move, and arrive at another part lacking a quantum of vibrational energy.

'The electron starts at one end of the room, if you like, and it can only make it to the other end if it gives up energy to the molecule in the middle of the room,' he explained.

'Once it's arrived, you say 'Aha! The fact that it's here means that somewhere beteween where it started and where it is now there's a molecule with the right vibrational frequency'.'"

Read the full article here.

This is interesting for two reasons off the top of my head. One, it means that apples smell like apples to everyone. Including flies. It removes the subjectivity of sensation - something philosophers have wondered about for a very long time. (Is my perception the smell of an apple the same as yours? Or do we have different consistent perceptions and just learn to associate them both with the concept of "apple"?) This would mean there is an external objective reality to the perception of smell - which is sort of neat considering that it's a quantum phenomenon.

Two - if other perceptions have an absolute measurable reality, it means it might be worth thinking if the same is true for spiritual experiences. The fact that most, if not all, have a concept of a higher reality might mean that there's an objective reality that could be tested - and it's not a totally subjective expression that can not be discussed in scientific terms.

Why can't the Atlanta process be the norm?

I just posted some thoughts about the Atlanta meeting led by the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music on Friday and Saturday. You can read the full post over at the Episcopal Cafe on the Lead. Here's a bit of a taste.

"I want to give the leadership of the SCLM major kudos for putting together a process supported by appropriate technology and outside financial resources that I think will make this coming General Convention decision over what to do with their report easier and more palatable to many. What this process has done extremely well is to listen to the diverse voices in the Episcopal Church. I participated in the small group conversations. I saw the scribe for our group carefully keeping track of our conversation. Our group arrived at some very interesting insights, some of which were new to me. The group process worked; and when we disagreed, that was recorded too. Later in plenary sessions, the disagreements were recognized and honored. There is not a clear consensus on what the Episcopal Church should do with the report it will receive. There is a shared recognition that either way the decision goes on authorization, there will be some parts of the Episcopal Church that will not be able to bear the decision. But there was no sense that anyone was walking away. They had been heard and everyone was committed to staying in relationship with one another somehow, someway.

That's what reconciliation actually looks like."

Read the full article here.

I'm a huge believer that we make the best common decisions when there is the broadest possible consultation. I saw that happening in Atlanta. And I want to ask the Episcopal Church at all levels, why this sort of thing is exceptional and not commonplace.

Agora: some thoughts

I finally took the time to watch the movie Agora. It was recommended to me over Christmas. It's been on the top of my NetFlix queue for a month or two waiting for me to have the time to watch it.

I'm also reading Phillip Jenkins' latest book "The Jesus Wars" and thus reading his description of the same time in history as is being dramatized in the movie. I suppose it's the book that's finally gotten me to pop the DVD into the player and invest the evening.

Agora is the story of Hypatia, a historical figure in 4th Century Alexandria - a period covered in Jenkins book as being a time in which much of the theological controversies of the early Church came to their head; particularly the discussions regarding the nature of God and the specific details of the relationship between the divine and human with in the historical person of Jesus.

The film opens with what is to me an anachronistic presentation of Ptolemy's description of celestial motion. Anachronistic because Ptolemy did his work in the early part of the second century and movie takes place in the 4th. I suppose the writers are attempting to set up a controversy between the scientific world of the Hypatia the philosopher and the religious worldview of the street in a way that is meant to evoke the Renaissance controversy between the Pope and Galileo. It spins out a domestic controversy of the conversion of Hypatia's family slaves to Christianity in opposition to the Pagan beliefs of her and her father.

(A side note, Hypatia's scandal at Ptolemy's circles within circles is something that doesn't actually bother people until Roger Bacon's day and the application of Occam's Razor.)

What's interesting to me is the way the film makes real the shame and honor culture that Jenkins describes as being the driver of so much of the what is to us today inconceivable violent controversy between religion in a cosmopolitan culture. As Jenkins suggests, to get a better sense of what it was like in those days, it's necessary to think of Alexandria as being like modern Baghdad with its conflict between Muslim sects, Christians and others. What we think of as unimaginable is being played out day by day with bombings, martyrdoms and honor killings all in the response to some perceived slight to one's religious views.

Christians managed to convert from following a God who refused to do violence in response to violence, to doing murder in God's name in less than a third of a millennium.

The film shows the pagans, trapped in the Library by the encamped Christians, discussing the nature of motion and planetary dynamics, as a way of setting up what the Christian rabble are going to destroy in revenge for the attack of the pagans upon them. The message seems to be that the Pagans are noble and educated. The Christians are hypocrites. Interestingly the destruction that occurred in Alexandria is sometimes argued to have taken place because of a spilling over of the anti-Arian arguments in the city at the time (though this view is controversial). The details of the destruction presented in the film are rather a bit of a stretch - to say the least. The part where the Christians are shouting Alleluia as the culture that has resulted from thousands of years of human intellectual inquiry strikes me as excellent drama but not particularly balanced.

This film was the highest grossing film of the year in Spain. I don't recall of hearing about much outrage, though apparently the Catholic Defamation League of Spain objected to its message. Which means the majority of people who flocked to see it must have essentially agreed with its sense that the anti-intellectual Christian rabble is the greatest destructive force in civilization. Though to be honest, I expect filmgoers who agreed with the movie's view would not have excluded Islam from the honor either.

The film's argument that religion is essentially destructive is awfully one sided in its presentation. But frankly its historicity makes it hard to argue against. Those who follow the crucified savior are probably well chastened by that. I am.

Experimental proof that Universe demands consistency

One of the great imagined paradoxes of time travel is the question of what happens to you if you back in time and kill your grandfather before the date of your parent's birth. Do you remember a past that no longer exists? Do you "wink" out of existence?

This sort of paradox is actually a very serious question in terms of thinking about the continuity of reality if it can be shown that there are particles that are capable of traveling backwards in time. (At least on a poetic level it's well known that anti-matter might be a candidate for that, since in terms of a Fermi diagram description an antiparticle propagates exactly like the archetypal particle but with its arrow of time reversed.)

Relativity theory actually allows for the existence of Closed Timelike curves (CTC) that would, in principle allow a normal particle the possibility of going back in time. (You've seen versions of the idea in any number of Star Trek episodes.)

There's a team of physicists based in Italy and Japan who have taken the idea, fleshed it out theoretically and even developed and performed an experimental test:

"In the new theory, CTCs are required to behave like ideal quantum channels of the sort involved in teleportation. In this theory, self-consistent CTCs (those that don’t result in paradoxes) are postselected, and are called ‘P-CTCs.’ As the scientists explain, this theory differs from the widely accepted quantum theory of CTCs proposed by physicist David Deutsch, in which a time traveler maintains self-consistency by traveling back into a different past than the one she remembers. In the P-CTC formulation, time travelers must travel to the past they remember.

Although postselecting CTCs may seem complicated, it can actually be investigated experimentally in laboratory simulations. By sending a ‘living’ qubit (i.e., a bit in the state 1) a few billionths of a second back in time to try to ‘kill’ its former self (i.e., flip to the state 0), the scientists show that only photons that don’t kill themselves can make the journey.

[...]To demonstrate, the scientists stored two qubits in a single photon, one of which represents the forward-traveling qubit, and one of which represents the backward-traveling qubit. The backward-traveling qubit can teleport through a quantum channel (CTC) only if the CTC ends by projecting the two entangled qubits into the same state."

Read the full article here.

In other words, the only particles that can go back in time are ones that already have gone back in time - there can be no change to the continuity of history.

Interesting idea.

One of the key objections to time travel is that if it were possible, we'd be awash in "time tourists". Sort of a Fermi paradox for time travel.

But if the only allowed travelers are the ones that weren't here already... then that explains why my business plan that caters to the discerning time traveler isn't getting funded from the future. Ah ha!

Wormholes at the center of some stars?

As much as science fiction loves the idea of macroscopic sized wormhole as a sort of deus de machina to all interstellar or intergalactic travel, most of physicists dismiss the idea because the equations governing the wormhole's behavior are strongly unstable over time. They might exist, but if they do, they probably only exist for a fleeting moment.

But today there's a news report that a couple of astrophysicists propose a stable solution for a wormhole that instead of being a link between two regimes of empty space-time would be packed full of stellar matter and would like two stars together. Apparently such a solution is stable in time.

"They begin by imagining an ordinary star or a neutron star with a wormhole at its heart. 'For a distant observer, such a star would very much look like an ordinary star,' they say.

However, there would be some important differences. For a start, this star would have to have a twin at the other end of the wormhole. These stars would be like Siamese twins, joined at the hip by the most bizarre of connections.

These twins would also pulse in an unusual way. That's because the exotic matter in the wormhole would be able to flow back and forth, like liquid in a u-tube, setting up a kind of resonance that makes the stars oscillate.

That could lead to the release of energy in all kinds of ways, creating ultra high energy cosmic rays, for example.

It also means there ought to be a way of distinguishing these Siamese twins from other stars. That's harder than it sounds, however."

More here.

Well. That's sort of wacky. Lovely image though. I remember a few years ago reading of botanical research that reports to show that trees in a forest are not individuals but are part of complicated, constantly communicating sort of hive entity. Changes or dangers to one tree are communicated to the others so that the whole grove can respond.

I guess, poetically speaking, a web of connected stars in the galaxy would be similar.

I'll leave it to the reader to reflect on the obvious theological connections with St. Paul's language of the "body" - or even trinitarian language.

Refusing to use technology in church?

I've been an advocate of the church's embrace of technology for a very long time. I'm sure I've become sort of bore about it. But I'm not sure I'll go as far as this statement from a leader of the PCUSA:

"Cynthia Holder-Rich called herself “tech-curious” rather than “tech-saavy” and noted that “the tech scene keeps up its inexorable process of change, and being a decade or half a decade behind means that we in the church are generally out of the game.”

Landon Whitsitt, Vice Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), responded to Cynthia’s post.  He argues passionately about the role of technology.  He says:  ‘If we are not using technology as a part of our ministry . . .  we are saying we do not care about being an incarnational presence in this world.  By refusing to engage in the ways that those we would reach engage . . . we’re saying we don’t care about them.’ "

More here.

Christian's have always used technology as part of our worship. There's a reason that most churches before the age of microphones were long rectangular spaces (awesome acoustics). We were the people who popularized the codex over the scroll, and gave the printing press it's first reason to exist. Churches are probably the biggest professional users of presentation software in any industry.

But there's a question of using appropriate technology isn't there? And sustainable tech as well. As I write this, oil is shooting up over $100/barrel on the reports of the rhetoric coming out of Tripoli. What will happen to the cost of paper bulletins with the full service printed out? What's going to happen to the cost of keeping a big technology friendly glass box worship space heated?

I can be pretty easily convinced that we might go back to prayer books in the pews, and Victorian-style worship spaces with limited seating, small windows and high ceilings if oil continues to increase.

It's not technology that going to make Church viable (if we insist on thinking that the Church depends on us to make viable). It's going to be effective proclamation with the appropriate tools. So the question for us in the next decade is going to be; "What are the appropriate technologies?"

My first guess? Mobile tech - small, energy efficient portable communications and reference devices. (Which is part of the reason we're one of the first congregations I know to have a decent mobile template for our parish website - take a look at www.azcathedral.org on your phone sometime.)

What do you think?

The Atonement in exemplarist vs subjectivist views

I'm reading the Actuality of the Atonement (making way slowly at the moment because of lack of time). I came across this interesting point about one of the unexpected consequences of Enlightenment thought with its emphasis on the autonomy of the individual:

The allusion to the Pelagian tendencies or the Enlightenment has been repeated here because it shows why ‘subjective’ or ‘exemplarist’ forms of the theology of the atonement have become increasingly popular in recent times. The terms subjective and exemplarist refer to different aspects of a single approach to the topic. The former calls attention to the contention that the central feature of a doctrine of the atonement is the effect the life and/or death of Christ should have upon the believer. What matters, it is argued, is that there should be repentance, a new moral seriousness, Christian love and the like. Exemplarism, on the other hand, stresses the objective basis of the doctrine, holding the love of God and the life of Jesus to be examples the believer must follow rather than a substitutionary transaction—as the opposing view is often parodied—changing the human status before God. (Clearly, there is no need for substitution in the light of the ‘Scotist’ belief that God can do exactly what he likes.)

Gunton, C. E. (2003). The actuality of atonement : A study of metaphor, rationality, and the Christian tradition (156–157). London; New York: T&T Clark.

Fascinating. It's a point I've never seen made before, and one, in the context of Gunton's larger argument that I find compelling. Have any of you come across this sort of reasoning before?

Is physics being sensationalized?

John Horgan is the latest voice in a chorus of voices that is warning that scientific popularizers and would be mystics are going too far in their speculations based on quantum phenomenon. His particular ire this week is shared in Scientific American and is directed at popular author Brian Greene:

"My beef with Greene is this: He has become a cheerleader for the descent of theoretical physics into increasingly fantastical speculation, disconnected from the reality that we can access empirically. Greene has argued eloquently for the plausibility of string theory, which (as I pointed out in a previous post) postulates the existence of particles that are far too small to be detected in any conceivable experiment.

[...]My tone was lightly mocking, because cosmologists themselves seemed to be kidding—even embarrassed—when they talked about all these alternate universes. But now Greene—as well as Stephen Hawking, Leonard Susskind, Sean M. Carroll and other prominent physicist/popularizers—want us to take multiverses seriously.

In Hidden Reality Greene notes that different theories of modern physics yield many different multiverse theories. One of the oldest is the many-worlds theory, which conjectures that all of the possible histories of our world allowed for by quantum mechanics are realized in other universes. Greene also touts the inflationary multiverse, which holds that new universes are constantly springing into existence via a mysterious antigravity force called inflation. String theory yields the brane multiverse; strings plus inflation produces the landscape multiverse; and that still leaves us with the quilted, cyclic, holographic and simulated multiverses, all of which Greene cheerfully elucidates.

These multiverse theories all share the same fundamental defect: They can be neither confirmed nor falsified. Hence, they don't deserve to be called scientific, according to the well-known criterion proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper. Some defenders of multiverses and strings mock skeptics who raise the issue of falsification as 'Popperazis'—which is cute but not a counterargument. Multiverse theories aren't theories—they're science fictions, theologies, works of the imagination unconstrained by evidence."

Read the full article here.

This has been a worry of mine for a while now. It's too tempting for people, especially for people in religion, to lust after a scientific patina for their latest enthusiasm. And quantum physics makes a particularly comfortable vehicle in which to go searching. The problem is, and always has been, that quantum phenomenon don't scale to the macroscopic world (similar to the way that all the interesting stuff in Relativity doesn't show up in our regime either.)

It's one thing to speculate, it's another thing to claim your pet metaphysical idea as settled.

Hat tip to slashdot, where there is more, including links to the way that Greene's writing is influencing mainstream conversation.

Dark Matter has gravity but doesn't interact with black holes!?

Dark Matter, the much sought chimera of modern cosmology, is roughly explained as being some sort of "matter" that has gravity but doesn't interact with electromagnetic radiation. It's thought that it constitutes the vast majority (like +90%) of all gravitating matter in the Universe, but we have no idea what it is. It's an idea invented to explain the odd behavior of rotating galaxies and to patch up some holes in the Big Bang theory.

But honestly it's always struck me as this generations luminiferous aether. We invent it because of something we can't understand, and we keep searching for it but aren't finding it.

Now there's a report that a team of observational cosmologists have determined that what is thought to be the dark matter halo that surrounds a galaxy (which then explains the anomalous rotation curve) apparently doesn't interact with the massive gravitational black hole in the center of the galaxy:

"They have studied six galaxies that contain black holes but do not have a bulge, like NGC 2988 shown above. They did this, they say because: 'we want to know whether dark matter correlates with black holes in the absence of the component that we know correlates with black holes.'

Their conclusion is that it doesn't: the size of the dark matter halo has no effect on the size of the black hole at the centre of a galaxy. Their data suggests that bigger black holes simply sit at the centre of bigger galaxies and the dark matter has nothing to do with it.

But in the fine tradition of science, this clears up one mystery only to reveal another. If dark matter has this powerful gravitational influence, why doesn't it form into black holes?

Nobody knows. But there is another group of astronomers who will be studying this result with interest. These guys think dark matter is an unnecessary invention. Instead, they say, the rotation of galaxies can be explained if the force of gravity is stronger over these galactic distances.

So according to them there is a simpler explanation for the absence of a link between dark matter and black holes: it's that dark matter doesn't exist."

Read the full article here.

Hmmm.

There's obviously a lot more work to be done here, but I think there's a take-away for those of us who talk about the interactions between science and religion. We tend to try to explain our religious beliefs in terms of scientific ideas and facts. That's what Bishop Butler of Durham did back in the day with his tome entitled "Analogies". But as Bishop Butler discovered, while he was able to reach a detente between science and religion in his day (late eighteenth century), within 100 years science had effectively repudiated it's older understanding and moved on to a new world view that dismissed determinism with relativism and probability.

I think we're starting to witness something similar in our day. Quantum Physics may have a fundamentally limited scale, dark matter may not exist and string theory has started to fail its tests. People who are trying to construct a theological world view that is informed by all of these ideas (generally subsets of process theology) are going to find out that their scientific underpinnings are washing away with the changing tide taking with it much of the justification for their more radical ideas.

This isn't a bad thing; theology is in its most basic distillation an attempt to speak about God and God's work in language that is sensible to a particular time and place. But when folks are jettisoning settled theological ideas willy-nilly because they want to make Christianity more modern and more scientific, they probably need to take stories like the one above as a cautionary flag.

Cross as moral crisis

I've been reading about atonement metaphors and stumbled across this quote from Forsythe in his WW1 era book "Justifying God"

‘The cross is not a theological theme, nor a forensic device, but the crisis of the moral universe on a scale far greater than earthly war. It is the theodicy of the whole God dealing with the whole soul of the whole world in holy love, righteous judgement and redeeming grace’

Gunton, C. E. (2003). The actuality of atonement : A study of metaphor, rationality, and the Christian tradition (106). London; New York: T&T Clark.

I really like Gunton's idea of treating various versions of theological thinking about the Atonement as metaphors attempting to map human meaning onto divine action rather than as full explanations explaining the mechanisms of justification.

More to come from this line of thinking I expect.

Derek Olsen: On ‘Allegorical’ Interpretation

Earlier this year I posted a note that listed the areas I wanted to pay particular attention to in my studies this coming year. They represent issues that I've found myself wishing I knew more about, generally because they've come in conversation in the life of our congregation and I found myself wanting better answers to questions.

One of the three areas that I mentioned was looking into the proper use of Allegory as a tool for interpreting Holy Scripture. It was a common technique in the early church but it has fallen out of favor in academic studies. What I've discovered as a preacher is that when I make use of traditional allegorical interpretations of texts in a Sunday sermon, the congregation is fascinated by the ideas and wants to hear more.

So it turns out that the use of Allegory as a hermeneutical tool is a major area of Dr. Derek Olsen's PhD research. He's posted a quick response to my note on my blog that lays out some of the fruits of this study into the field.

Here's a taste:

"The major change with Reformation biblical interpretation, I’d argue, is the jettisoning of the context. I think it could be argued that with the rise of the Schoolmen, the mendicant orders, and the turn into Nominalism the liturgical context had already lost its important restraining function making it appear to the Reformers that they were pruning away the bad rather than losing a key component. Nevertheless, that’s what happened. Suddenly biblical interpretation was not and could not be an act of play. It was serious business. Without the grounding practices of Mass and Office, how each text was read suddenly mattered a lot more because the interpretive act was transformed into the grounding practice of the faith.

So—the liturgy was the context. But that’s not all. Particularly in the early medieval church and most especially in my world of the early medieval monastics, the liturgy was not simply the guiding context but was the fundamental tool through which Christians were inculturated into the hermeneutics of the Church. They learned to read through the liturgy.

On one hand, this is a literal truth: new monks or child oblates learned how to read through the memorization of the Latin psalter, then learning to match the words on the page with the texts they already had in their heads. They literally learned how to read from reading the liturgy. On the other hand, they also learned how to interpret the Bible from the liturgy and this happened in two ways, the first explicit, the second not so explicit. The explicit is that readings from the Fathers in the third nocturn of the Night Office gave them examples. They learned to interpret through what they heard and what was modeled for them by the patristic teachers every Sunday and feast day in the early morning.  And again at Chapter. And again at Mass. The not-so-explicit is the way that the liturgy introduces under-determined interpretive possibilities through the use of scriptural antiphons and responsories in the Mass and Office. When an antiphon taken from the Gospel of the Day is appended to the Magnificat it makes you hear it in a new way, as you are using  new lens. When a Pauline snippet is paired with a psalm, the mind begins working at it to find what the implied logical connection must be between the two. The hymns held together Scripture and Season for mutual reflection. (As it happens, the first paper I gave at the big medievalist meeting in Kalamazoo was on this topic. I’ll try and put it up on Scribd for those who are following me there.)

So—where does all of this bring us? Back to the notion of a distinctively Anglican way of reading and interpreting the Scriptures. Is there one? Maybe… Is there the potential for one? Most certainly, because we of all of the Western Non-Roman ecclesial bodies have retained in theory that which was most important in the heyday of figural reading: the Mass and the Office."

More here. Do read the whole thing. It's really helpful. The idea of reading scripture through lenses formed by the prayerful encounter with the scripture is lovely, poetic, and in my experience, exactly what happens as you commit yourself to the regular reading of the Office.

And, yes, Derek, I'd love a copy of your dissertation.

Study focus for 2011

In the hopes that I'll actually follow through with some plans I have if I go public with them, I thought I'd post some of the areas I'm planning on focusing my reading and studies on in the coming year. For those of you who hear me preach, consider this fair warning...

Atonement:

I've been thinking a great deal about Brian McLaren's idea that the classic Anselmian version of the Atonement no longer makes sense to the average person these days. The idea isn't unique to McLaren, but I think for some reason, the way he states the case has made me think more about what the Church's (specifically the Episcopal Church's) response might look like.

I think the most common response that I've seen lately among preachers and lay leaders is to just dismiss the whole idea of that Christ's death was an atonement for sin as being no longer meaningful. And so it gets ignored, or worse, ridiculed. I'm not at all comfortable with doing that. First of all there's a great deal of talk about atonement for sin in the Bible and its a recurrent theme throughout Christian thought. I think the issue isn't with the idea of atonement per se as much as it is with the idea that there's only one way (the "Anselmian" or Reformation based) of talking about the Atonement accomplished during the Triduum.

What we call the "classical" understanding isn't the first understanding, isn't the patristic understanding, isn't the process understanding and shouldn't be used as a straw man to dismiss the whole idea that sin requires atonement as part of reconciliation. My own sense is that much of what Girard is writing about will form the basis of our 21st century understanding of the doctrine - and I want to follow that idea this year. I'm planning on starting by spending some time reviewing the classical historical understandings of Atonement - with a particular eye on the process by which a particular understanding stopped being plausible and how the subsequent view became so. I've got a couple of books on that topic on my reading list for this Spring. I'll try to post some reviews as I get them read.

Energy Price impact on parish and diocesan life:

I've been harping about peak oil and energy shortages on this blog for years now. I think I'm convinced that we're in the midst of shift away from an imported oil based economy. I don't know what the next energy economy will be based upon, though I suspect that it will be a mosaic of different sources rather than the monolithic one we have now. Coal will make a comeback. Fracking is already wrecking ecological havoc on PA and LA, but I don't imagine that we'll stop frantically searching for more energy here in the states. Look for off shore drilling to expand, solar furnaces to become more important and perhaps even a return to nuke power.

But all of those alternatives are more expensive than what we have now. (Which is why they're only bit players at the moment.) As we move in that direction, you're going to see energy costs go up across the board. Since wages for American workers have been stagnant for decades, this is going to effectively suck more money out of our market economy. It's going to limit sprawl based city growth. Etc...

It's also going to force us to reevaluate some of our basic economic models for parish life. Will people still be willing to drive 30 or 40 miles to continue to attend the parish church they grew up in? What will that mean to inner-city parishes. Are the inner-city neighborhoods ready for the migration of the ex-urban dwellers back into the city core? What will that mean for small urban parishes? What about large ones? What about large sprawling buildings built when energy was basically free? Will we see a return to small buildings? (Apparently that's already happening in the building industry according to friends of mine in the lumber business.)

I think it's time to flesh out some answers to these questions.

Hermeneutics:

The Archbishop of Canterbury has been calling for the development of a consensus understanding of what constitutes an Anglican hermeneutic. If I recall correctly, I think the last Lambeth Conference did as well. I'm not at all convinced that there *is* an Anglican hermeneutic - at least not at this particular moment in history, but I think the fact that we're calling for one is a tacit admission that we feel the lack of reasonably broad consensus about how to approach biblical texts in the 21st century.

I stumbled across a note on an online forum a few months ago that was essentially a request for more information about the Alexandrian model of hermeneutics vs. an Antiochian one. The idea was that the Antiochian method was more literal, the Alexandrian more allegorical. I've been thinking about that since I read it. I don't think there's a neat division into two schools - that's a little simplistic to say the least - but the idea that maybe its time to rethink our feelings about allegorical understandings of scripture has stuck with me.

Diana Butler Bass came out to visit us in Phoenix this past Spring and she commended our Cathedral on the good work we were doing re-traditioning our message and preaching of the Gospel. I think she's absolutely right that we need to focus on doing this - it's a piece with finding a new approach to the Atonement isn't it?

I've noticed that in preaching to a relatively young, bright congregation here in Phoenix, the most excitement seems to come when I can help them discover a traditional mystical and/or allegorical understanding of text. That seems to resonate more with the hearers than (to borrow a phrase from Spurgeon I think) focusing on the historicity of the Jebusites.

When I was in seminary the idea of preaching an allegorical interpretation of a scriptural passage was viewed with extreme distaste. Like "fail the preaching course" distaste. But the typical preaching we were encouraged to do just doesn't seem to be connecting anymore. Maybe it's time to look back to the Middle Ages and late Roman period and find new ways to connect with a post-modern, post-positivist audience. Clearly we need to avoid the trap of the "Seven characteristics of a Camel" sort of allegory, but my own sense is that it's time for us to think this through again.

So that's what I'm going to do - I want to spend some time reading up on the historical development of hermeneutics. I've got one book identified and I'll be looking around for some others. Suggestions would be welcome!

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That should keep me busy for the year. One of my resolutions this year is to try to post more personally speculative pieces here with the hope that you'll all join in the conversation with me to help me think through these questions. You've all done this in the past, and I'm amazed to look back over the past 5 or 6 years to see how you've challenged my thinking and helped me to come to a better understanding of answers to the questions I've been wrestling with.

Thanks for that, and thanks in advance for your continued participation with the process this coming year.

"Christ of the Klingons"

Interesting piece in Christianity Today about the implications of String Theory to theology. Actually, not so much String Theory as much as the Brane implications of said to theological thinking. (The article starts off sort of slow with a lot of gee-whiz stuff about string theory.)

But then it picks up with the idea that multiple universes would seem to imply a multitude of Jesus' incarnations. (I suppose assuming that the other Universes needed redeeming too.)

From the article, this quote by Robin Collins, a professor at Messiah College in PA (near where I grew up actually):

"'I've always had problems perceiving the infinite God that we believe in [as] creating life in just one spot,' Cleaver says. 'Over the entire past and future of humankind, there'll probably be no more than a few hundred billion humans to interact with God on this earth. That is a finite number that does not make consistent theological sense to me.'

Collins is intrigued by the possibility of a Messiah with two or more—even a million—faces. Since the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451, orthodox Christian theology has drawn a distinction between the divine nature and the human nature in the single person of Christ. There is no reason, Collins believes, that Christ's divine nature could not unite with other incarnational forms.

'Who's going to redeem the Klingons? And they're very much in need of redemption, as we know from various Star Trek series,' Collins quips. 'God the Son, being infinite as he is, could take on the Klingon nature, human nature—you know, a Klingon version of Jesus.… So the traditional formula, which is the standard orthodoxy, is actually very compatible with the multiverse idea.'
Whether or not we discover a multiverse, Cleaver wants to see the church address the idea of life elsewhere.

'The Catholic Church is far ahead of the Protestant churches on this,' Cleaver says. 'The Catholic Church had a conference on the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe within the past few years and invited both leading theologians and scientists. The Protestant churches should be doing the same thing."

Read the full article here.

Oddly enough I found the link to this article in an essay about the Mormon cosmological beliefs and the idea of Kolob and the destiny of humankind. That's worth another note in and of itself...

A Christmas Poem: Prudentius

Though you came from the mouth of God,
Born as his Word on earth below,
Yet as his Wisdom you lived
Forever in the Father’s heart.

This Wisdom uttered made the sky,
The sky and light and all besides;
All by the Word’s almighty power
Were fashioned, for the Word was God.

But when the universe was formed
And ordered by unchanging laws,
The Cause and architect divine
In the Father’s bosom still remained,

Until the slow revolving years
In centuries at length had passed,
And he himself condescended to come
Down to the world grown old in sin…

But such destruction of humankind
The heart of Christ could not endure;
And lest his Father’s handiwork,
Unvindicated, should be lost,

He clothed himself in mortal flesh,
That by arising from the tomb
He might unlock the chains of death
And bring man to his Father’s house.

This is your natal day, on which
The high Creator sent you forth,
And gave to you a form of clay,
Uniting flesh with his own Word.

Hymns for Every Day 11, A Hymn for Christmas Day.

A most blessed Christmas to you and to all that God has created in this wonderful and marvelous world.

The Hidden response in the Antiphons

Maggie Dawn a Chaplain and Fellow in Theology at Cambridge points out something I never knew:

"The capital letters (which in medieval texts were, of course illuminated) spell ERO CRAS, which in Latin means ‘Tomorrow I will come!’. Often when we pray we feel somehow that it’s a one-way conversation; our words disappearing into oblivion, as we hope (and sometimes doubt) that God hears us. Hidden in the O Antiphons is the indication that God not only hears, but is in dialogue with us. Advent is a period of waiting, but even as we wait his answer is hinted at in a hidden and inaudible whisper: Tomorrow, I will come.

When we pray, hope, doubt, wonder whether it’s worth it, whether God will ever hear us or act on our behalf, we can remember this Advent principle. The answer is in the future, in the Maranatha, yes. But the answer is already promised. Before you look forward for the answer to prayer, look backwards to the waiting. Somewhere, hidden in your conversation wth God, even though it feels like a monologue, there is the whisper of an answer."

More here.

I love a good Advent/Christmas acrostic. I never thought to wonder if there are any in our English carols - does anyone know? (Looking for such might be a nice way to force myself to pay closer attention to some of the music that I tend to sing without engaging during the 12 day festival.)