Charles Cameron

That’s it in a nutshell!

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If you arrived here without reading part I of this post — Are science and religion both standing on thin air? — you may want to go read it first. But not necessarily. It’s about whether we can reason about God, or maybe Nothing, as the origin of all things — or whether the universe just popped up of its own accord.

Obviously, different people have different opinions about all that, and if they’re argumentative types, they argue.

What I want to do here is to avoid the argument completely, and ask you how you feel.

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I am going to offer you three quotes, by three well-known writers, each of them saying in effect, “that’s it in a nutshell”.

One of them is a medieval Catholic mystic, one a poet from the transitional period between the medieval-religious and secular-contemporary worldviews, and the third hopefully somewhat representative of contemporary secular thought.

First, the mystic Julian of Norwich:

In this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, and it was round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought “What may this be?” And it was generally answered thus: “It is all that is made.” I marvelled how it might last, for it seemed it might suddenly have sunk into nothing because of its littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: “It lasts and ever shall, because God loves it.”

As you read this post, I would like you to get a sense of how free you feel to breathe. Does it feel constricting, with its religious terminology, its “vision” and its God”? Does it feel liberating, with its sense of another, visionary world, beyond or behind the one that presents itself to our senses?

And then, hey, there’s the poet William Blake:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Does that let you slip past the constraints of religiosity, while retaining a sense of poetry, of mystery perhaps? Or does it still seem a bit fey, more fantastic than real, just, let’s be honest about this, not entirely practical?

And hoo boy, do I have a third quote for you.

This one’s from an interview the science fiction author JG Ballard gave to The Paris Review. I’ve dropped out a question from the interviewer, because it would have made for a clunkier read — but I think Ballard, whose The Crystal World I very much admire, comes across “clean and clear” here:

I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession. It’s like picking up an ashtray and staring so hard at it that one becomes obsessed by its contours, angles, texture, et cetera, and forgets that it is an ashtray — a glass dish for stubbing out cigarettes. … Yes, so the unity of the enterprise is forever there. A whole universe can be bounded in a nutshell. Of course, why one chooses certain topics as the subject for one’s obsessions is a different matter. Why was I obsessed by car crashes? It’s such a peculiar idea.

How’s that for dystopia?

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And so, my question:

As you read those three quotations, each of them centering on a universe in a nutshell, so to speak — which one gives you a sense of freedom? which one sits well on your shoulders? Which world do you live in? Which do you prefer?

Do all three fall under the general rubric of Fantasy and Science Fiction, perhaps?

Are science and religion both standing on thin air?

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We can argue the pros and cons of religion all we like, but I’m not sure it will tell us much more than what our own basic hunches are.

This is part I of a two part post.

Look, there have been a couple of books out recently that suggest something — the universe or universe of universes — might just have come out of nothing, without nothing having to have come out of anywhere special itself.

And there have been a couple of reviews of those books that I’ve read recently, and they don’t think that “it’s nothings, nothings all the way down” is any better than “it’s turtles, turtles all the way down”.

If you’re interested in that discussion, the next two chunks will be of interest to you — but if not, you can skip them and go right to my follow up post — That’s it in a nutshell! — with its three short quotes and a question.

So here are the two chunks — gobbits, if you’re a literary type — that I thought might be of interest.

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The first comes from David Albert‘s review of A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence M. Krauss. Albert is a philosopher at Columbia and the author of Quantum Mechanics and Experience:

It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electro-magnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.
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The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.

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The second comes from Kathryn Schulz‘s review of Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? Schulz is the book critic for New York Magazine:

You can say A because B, B because C, C because D—but what explains D? If you say A, your explanation is circular. If you say because E because F because G (H, I, J, K … ), your explanation is an infinite regress: a taller stack of turtles. You might, instead, argue that D is explained by X, where X is some kind of necessary truth, a logical deduction or physical law. But this presents an interesting question: How, exactly, do you get a material universe out of a necessary truth? “Are the laws of physics somehow to inform the Abyss that it is pregnant with Being?” Holt asks. “If so, where do the laws themselves live? Do they hover over the world like the mind of God? … How do they reach out and make a world? How do they force events to obey them?”
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Got me. Got everybody. Try as we might, we can’t find a way to tell a sound causal story about the origins of the universe. The absence of an explanation is one thing, but the absence of any imaginable form that an explanation could take is something else, and it has caused many cosmologists to throw up their hands.

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So my general impression is that both religion and science are treading on thin air. And I don’t mind if you call it God, or Nothing, or Mystery.

I like it. No, make that: I love it.

But that’s me. Hopefully, you’re ready now for part II…

Not Morsi but Mahdi

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[ cross-posted from Zenpundit — Egyptian presidency, Mahdist candidate, Center for Millennial Studies, Christ candidate ]
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Source.
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I ran across this reasonably remarkable web image while following a link from the tail end of Tim Furnish‘s comments on the Egyptian presidential election, and can’t really comment on the candidate himself, either as Mahdi-claimant or as (failed) aspirant to the Presidency.

I am, however, put in mind of my days with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University, and a fellow I met at one of their conferences there called Chris King. But I’ll let another friend of mine from those days make the introduction — here’s Damian Thompson, writing in the Daily Telegraph a while back:

I spent the evening of December 31, 1999, climbing up the Mount of Olives, only to be confronted by a wild-haired messiah figure in a patchwork robe walking down the slope. That was surprising enough, but my jaw really dropped open when he said: “Hi, Damian.” Turned out we’d met a few weeks earlier, at a conference organised by the Center for Millennial Studies in Boston. The “messiah” was a Kiwi maths lecturer called Chris King, which he explained also meant “Christ the King”, though only in a complex esoteric way. (He was a lovely guy, actually.)

Chris King was, as Damian reports, both a likeable guy and an academic, and what I found most appealing about his self-presentation — beyond the very fact of his turning up to attend a conference on Millennial Studies — was that his view, essentially a gnostic one, was that we are all Christs in potentia, if we would but realize it… wait for it…

and his consequent request that his claim to messianic status should be peer-reviewed!

Trees: Phototropic Simplexities

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[ Cross-posted from Zenpundit — this one’s a prose poem: it begins with a statement so tight it needs to be unwound, & unwinds it ]
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I wrote this urgently starting when it “woke” me at 4am one morning in the late 1990s or 2000, and as soon as it was out, I found myself writing another piece in the series, a game design. Together, the pair of them represent a stage in my games and education thinking intermediate between Myst-like Universities of 1996 and my vision today of games in education. In this posting, I have added the words “figuratively speaking” for absolute clarity: otherwise, the piece remains as written all those years ago.

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A copse. Photo credit: Ian Britton via FreePhoto.com under CC license. Note how the wind sweeps the trees into a group shape.

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Trees: Phototropic Simplexities

Trees are phototropic simplexities, no wonder we like them they cowork so well too: copses, see.

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Meaning:

Trees we know: I as writer can refer you, reader, safely to them, “trees”, in trust that the word I use will signal to you too — triggering for you, also — pretty much the assortment of branching organic thingies about which I’m hoping to communicate that they are complex entities whose complexity comes from a simplicity of rule — branching — repeated with variations, said variants doing their branching in thirst of light, each trunk rising, limb outpushing, branch diverging, twig evading other twig much as one who seeks in a crowd a clear view of a distant celebrity shifts and cranes and peers — branching, thus, by the finding of light in avoidance of nearby shadow and moving into it, into light as position, that light, that position, growing, and thus in the overall “unified yet various”, we, seekers of the various and unified love them, to see them in greens themselves various in their simplexity is to say “tree” with a quiet warmth; while they themselves also, by the necessity of their branching seeking, if clumped together seek in an avoidance of each other’s seeking, growing, thus space-sharing in ways which as the wind sweeps and conforms them to its own simplex flows, shapes them to a common curve we call aerodynamic, highlit against the sky huddled together as “copse” — this, in the mind’s eyes and in your wanderings, see…

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Meaning:

Trees we can talk about. Simplexity is a useful term for forms — like trees — which are neither simple only nor complex only, but as varied as complexity suggests with a manner of variation as simple as simplicity implies.

Trees? Their simplexity is conveyed in principle by the word “branching”. Its necessity lies in the need of each “reaching end” of the organism to ascertain from its own position and within the bounds of its possible growing movement, some “available” light — this light-seeking having the name “phototropism”.

Simplexities — and thus by way of example, trees — we like, we call them beautiful.

Clustered together, too, and shaped by the winds’ patterns of flow, these individual simplexities combine on an English hilltop (or where you will) to form yet other beauties.

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Thus:

Trees are phototropic simplexities, no wonder we like them they cowork so well too: copses, see.

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Meaning:

I love trees. Want to talk about simplexities, beauty.

I wish to talk about beauty because it is beauty that I love, if I love it, that is beauty: love is kalotropic, a beauty-seeking. I am erotropic, love seeking — you can find in this my own simplexity, my own varieties of seeking, of the growths that are my growth, and clumping me with others under the winds, the pressures that form and conform us, you can find also the mutual shapes that we adopt, beautiful.

Simplexity, then, is a key to beauty, variety, self, character, cohabitation… Tropism, seeking, is the key to simplexity. Love is my tropism. Ours, I propose.

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Meaning:

Beauty is one simplexity perceived by another: the eye of the beholder, with optic nerve, “brain”, branching neuron paths that other simplexity, “consciousness” the perceiving.

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Meaning also:

That all is jostle, striving — a strife for life, in which the outcome overall is for each a “place in the sun” but not without skirmishes, shadows. The overall picture, therefore, beautiful — but this overall beauty hard to perceive when the specific shadow falls in the specific sought place of the moment, the “available” is not available, and the strife of the moment is paramount.

Branching being the order behind simplexity, differentiation…

Differentiation for maximal tropism at all levels — life seeking always the light, honey, beauty, is always and everywhere in conflict also with itself, competitive: and competition the necessary act of the avoidance of shadow, and the shadow creating act.

And beauty — the light, thing sought, implacably necessary food and drink, the honey — thus the drive that would make us kill for life.

I could kill for beauty.

I could kill for honey.

Figuratively speaking.

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Implying:

Paradise and Fall, simultaneous, everywhere.

It is at this juncture, at this branching, that we are “expelled from the garden” — can no longer see the beauty that is and remains overall, that can allow us to say also, “we are never outside the garden” — for the dappling of light on and among the leaves has become to us, too closely jostled, shadow.

And shadow for shadow we jostle, and life is strife.

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Thus:

The dappling of light on leaves, beautiful, is for each shadowed leaf, shadow, death-dealing, is for each lit leaf, light, life-giving: a chiaroscuro, beautiful, see.

Roots, too, have their mirror branchings.