Tag Archives: astrophysics

Evan Wycliff – Agnostic Minister? Thinking About Thinking #46

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A black and white picture of a man praying in a church. The text reads "Can a Practicing Minister be an Agnostic?"

Can a practicing minister be an agnostic?

Evan Wycliff, the protagonist of Preacher Raises the Dead (latest and third in my mystery series), might not be a full-time agnostic, but there are days when he certainly has his doubts. In the first book in the series, Preacher Finds a Corpse, he’s just returned to his rural hometown, Appleton City in southern Missouri, because he’s given up on his studies. He earned a degree at Harvard Divinity, but along the way he learned way too much about the hypocritical and corrupt history of Christianity. Then, hoping to find better answers to the “big questions” in science, he undertook postgraduate work in astrophysics. He found those conclusions baffling as well.

As an unemployed college dropout, how can he make his way? He grew up on the farm, but these days it’s tough for farm owners to get by, let alone their farmhands. So he takes the occasional opportunity as guest preacher at the local Baptist church. And because he’s a skilled data-driller, he tracks down debtors who have skipped on their car loans (whom he tends to forgive more than he chastises).

In the second book, Preacher Fakes a Miracle, Evan helps a girl who is afflicted with epilepsy. Then the rumor around town alleges he’s a faith healer because, they assume, he must have cast out demons.

In the third book, Evan’s life gets a lot more complicated as he’s challenged with becoming a more responsible member of the community. The old pastor and his mentor Rev. Marcus Thurston decides to retire, and Evan reluctantly takes on the role of full-time minister, pastor of the church.

That’s when he finds out that not only preaching sermons, but also visiting the sick and the dying, along with officiating at weddings and funerals, is hard work. It’s a job – often a tedious one. And, some days, Evan just can’t find it in his heart to believe.

Fueling his doubts are the theories he’s studied of cosmologists who assert the increasingly accepted notion of a “godless universe.”

A book cover for "The Big Picture" by Sean Carroll. The cover features a glowing strand of DNAPhysicist Sean Carroll of CalTech is one of the proponents of the godless-universe hypothesis. He advances his argument in his book, The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself. The core of his argument is naturalism – meaning that the physical universe – encompassing everything humans can sense or measure – is all that there is. In an interview with Clara Moskowitz published in Scientific American, Carroll explains:  “There’s actually a movement called religious naturalism. Religion involves a whole bunch of things — practices, casts of mind, morals, etc., so you can certainly imagine calling yourself religious, reading the Bible, going to church and just not believing in God. I suspect the number of people who do that is much larger than the number of people who admit to it.”

As I discussed in my post about Brian Greene‘s book Until the End of Time, a trending consensus among cosmologists is that the dual processes of entropy (disintegration) and evolution (integration), can explain the emergence of complexity without God as creator or cause. Physicist Brian Cox, in his recent comments on the movie Don’t Look Up, implied that the most significant role of humans may be to create meaning in a meaningless universe. The philosophy of existentialism, which arose in the mid-twentieth century, possibly in response to the horrors of WWII, holds that the universe is fundamentally empty and meaningless. But as psychologists know all too well, human beings are “meaning-making machines.” We’re prone to finding meaning and purpose even in random events. This skill is a useful survival tool, making it routine for us to take lessons from our experiences to avoid future harm. An alternative view is the prevalent New Age belief is that there are no accidents in the universe.

Existentialists might say that people who find comfort in religion aren’t wrong – they’ve found useful meaning, even if that meaning is not objectively provable. But the naturalists may assert that everything that exists is simply the sum total of 14 billion years of accidents.

Drop here!

Physicist Says Thought Will No Longer Be Possible – Thinking About Thinking #45

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A picture of a starry sky over mountains with the text "What remains of consciousness at the end of the universe?"

Here’s my book review of Until the End of Time by astrophysicist Brian Greene.

Book Cover for Brian Greene's Until the End of Time. The book cover shows a starry night sky over a pine forestIt’s the best survey of current theories in cosmology that I’ve read. But it’s also the most unsettling to someone like me who tries continually to reconcile science and theology.

Fans of my Evan Wycliff Mystery series know that Evan is similarly conflicted. A farm boy from southern Missouri from a devout Baptist family, he thought he’d go into the ministry. But then he studied at Harvard Divinity, where learning more about the history of Christianity and its hypocrisies shook his faith. Then, seeking answers to the big questions instead in science, he enrolled in postgrad astrophysics at MIT. He dropped out of that program, too. Discouraged and heartbroken for other personal reasons, Evan returned to farmland roots, where he got occasional work as a guest preacher and a credit investigator for the local car dealer.

Evan is a preacher who some days is an agnostic. And he’s an amateur sleuth because he has investigative skills. People in his community come to him with problems that no one else has any interest in solving.

So – no surprise – from the standpoint of intellectual curiosity, Evan and I are a lot alike.

Two conclusions in Greene’s book would startle us both. First, there can be no such thing as eternity. The universe is about 14 billion years old and has more than double that time before it expires. But, according to Greene, expire it will – expanding and disintegrating into cosmic dust, then expanding more until particles are so far apart they can’t form any solid mass – no galaxies, no stars, no planets.

Now, from the viewpoint of the philosopher or mystic, eternity is not simply a long, long time. Or even a timeline that has no end. It’s a state of being. Time-less – an incomprehensible notion for the human mind.

But more disturbing still is Greene’s assertion that – long before the universe expires – thought itself won’t be possible. Thought in humans is biochemically supported electrical activity in the brain. When the cosmos becomes diffuse, no such complex structures will exist.

Book cover for The Feeling of Life Itself by Christof Koch. The cover is an abstract illustration of gray waves with the title displayed in red text.Now, unaddressed in Greene’s survey is the question of whether consciousness and thought are aspects of the same physical process. Some scientists, including Christoph Koch, have tried to explain consciousness as super-complex electrical activity in the brain. Koch has found no such explanation. He theorizes that computers, no matter how complex, can never be conscious. In his book The Feeling of Life Itself, at the conclusion he can only guess that consciousness is some as yet unmeasurable, fundamental property of the universe, a feeling shared by all living things, in various degrees depending on the complexity of their brains. For rigorous scientist Koch, it’s little more than a guess.

Where is God in all this? Our religious traditions hold that God is pervasive consciousness and eternal. Another hypothesis of Greene and his colleagues is the so-called godless universe. That is, the dual processes of entropy (diffusion) and evolution (ever-increasing complexity) are sufficient to explain everything that exists.

Which brings us to the most elusive question of all, one that philosophers have debated for centuries, which also has the scientists stumped:

Why is there something rather than nothing?

The paperback copy of "Preacher Raises the Dead" on a yellow background with text reading "Preacher Raises the Dead: An Evan Wycliff Mystery. The third book in the series"

Thinking About Thinking #41 – Unlikely, Unbelievable, and Astonishing!

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Did you ever reflect on how unlikely it is that the apparent size of the Moon and the Sun are so nearly the same? From the standpoint of astrophysics, there is no reason why this coincidence should exist. There’s nothing about the size of the moon or gravitational balance between the Earth and the other two bodies that would cause the virtual sizes in the sky to match up so remarkably.

And then consider that the full solar eclipse is possibly the most significant recurring event in human cultures throughout history. Awe-inspiring. Significant, for all kinds of invented explanations.

Whether you credit creationism, intelligent design, extraterrestrial engineers, or extraordinarily unlikely random events, all you need to do is look up to get the message:

This is a very special place!

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Thinking About Thinking #38 – The Gravity Well – A trap or a dwelling place?

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Here’s my book review of The Gravity Well: America’s Next Greatest Mission by Steven Sanford.

Steven Sanford was trained as a research engineer and spent almost three decades as a NASA employee when he left the agency recently to work for a contract engineering firm. He was Director for Space Technology and Exploration at NASA’s Langley Research Center. The gravity well refers to the huge physical effort required to overcome the Earth’s pole and climb into space. It is the first and most significant challenge of space travel. Having attained escape velocity from our planet and venturing far enough up and out, a space vehicle will have the option to park in one of several fixed locations called Lagrangian points. At these distances, gravitational forces are balanced, such that location can be maintained indefinitely, with no further expenditure of energy.

This is the logical place to build space stations. The Gravity Well, the book, is in effect Sanford’s heartfelt, elaborately reasoned letter to US taxpayers and members of Congress. The single most beneficial thing we can do to stimulate the economy and reset national priorities would be to augment the relatively modest NASA budget by a third.

The current authorization is about $19 billion. Sanford argues persuasively for $30 billion.

He doesn’t even propose we take the hit all at once. His proposal is for Congress to increase that budget by $1.2 billion per year for 8 years. His proposal is precise, achievable, and modest. Its diminutive fiscal size becomes apparent when you compare it with the voracious requirements of the Department of Defense, which exceeds a half-trillion dollars per year. And that’s not counting the supplemental allocations for various wars.

Sanford’s argument is also straightforward: No single expenditure by the federal government holds the prospect of producing such generous returns.

For example, he points out, “A single asteroid, no wider than your living room, can contain $10 billion worth of gold, along with platinum, tungsten, and the rare-earth metals we desperately need here where supplies are running low.”

And you don’t even have to conquer a third-world nation or fight a war with some other superpower to grab this stuff. (That’s my inference, not his explicit point.) Your tightfisted representative might well ask, “Why can’t private industry do this?” Well, it can and it will. But the history of all major technological advances is marked by government taking the early steps reducing risk and forging a path of entry for private investment. Computers, micro electronics, the Internet, and the telecom backbone all have their origins in broadly funded government initiatives bold. Brash and ambitious as are Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, none would have dared invest in advanced rocketry if the basic engineering were not already mature.

Sanford cites a little-known example that aviation itself might have taken much longer to evolve – if at the end of World War I the US Postal Service hadn’t gambled the then-colossal sum of $5 million to fund transcontinental airmail service.

Let’s start by making every member of Congress aware of the gravity Well. Let’s also make it required reading in high school – and our manifesto for a grassroots political movement. Let’s inspire America to a new vision of world leadership that emphasizes international cooperation for mutual benefit. And dare we hope for not just survival but a grander destiny.

However, I’m not predicting immediate success. I hope I’m wrong. But Sanford’s proposal seemed to well reasoned and too eminently logical to have any effect on public policy in the near term. If national pride drove the swelling of the defense establishment. reallocating money to space would be easy. But it’s widespread fear that motivates the building of redundant piles of weaponry. Congress today is full of unscrupulous, self-interested politicians who, despite their patrician educations, find that sneering at science and leveraging the public’s fears get them votes.

Can we seriously believe that an Ivy-League trained-lawyer has so little understanding of science as to scoff at evolution, climatology, and the obvious need for population control? For Sanford’s plan to work, the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Laura Sinclair (that’s the January 2017 Woman Physicist of the Month) need to run for office.

And sooner rather than later, we need a better educated electorate that respects learning more than celebrity.

Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. Maybe the next best thing to being there?