Homocentric Universe

CREATION FOR CREATIONISTS:

Conservation Is for Conservatives: Francis Schaeffer wouldn’t recognize the religious right he helped create, not least when it comes to environmentalism. (John Murdock, MAY 24, 2024, Plough)

Russell Kirk, whose The Conservative Mind remains a classic text of the modern right, once said: “The issue of environmental quality is one which transcends traditional political boundaries. It is a cause which can attract, and very sincerely, liberals, conservatives, radicals, reactionaries, freaks, and middle class straights.” While some conservatives such as Roger Scruton, author of How to Think Seriously about the Planet: The Case for Environmental Conservatism, still demonstrate the truth of Kirk’s sentiment, a squeamishness about being seen with liberals has led most to abandon the field. What’s more, many now feel it is their duty to disparage those conservatives who stayed behind.

Political tribalism split apart concerns that, as Schaeffer demonstrated, can be held consistently and passionately within a biblical worldview. Schaeffer wrote of once going out of his way to compliment the residents of a lushly landscaped hippie commune which stood on the other side of a deep valley from a treeless Christian school campus he was visiting. Those who warmly greeted him noted that he was the first to come from “across the ravine.” In the decades since, the chasm between socially conservative evangelicals and planet-conserving environmentalists has only grown wider. […]

Can we then just ignore politics if we hike the Appalachian Trail, switch to pastured eggs and grass-fed beef, wrap our water heater, and put solar panels on the roof? Not quite. Even if too much emphasis has been put on politics during recent decades, in a democratic republic Christians do not have the option of simply washing their hands of public affairs.

Of course, the relationship of Christians to politics has often been a point of friction between Anabaptists and the more politically engaged wings of Christianity. Some would argue that we serve Christ better by being “the quiet in the land” rather than by putting signs in our hands. Perhaps the tension is overstated, though. Ron Sider, for example, has spent decades as an Anabaptist activist, and has done so without contorting his beliefs to toe a party line. Operating primarily in political circles on the left, the founder of Evangelicals for Social Action has nevertheless continued to affirm the importance of things such as evangelism, unborn life, and traditional marriage. Though one may disagree with some of Sider’s political priorities and policy suggestions, his witness bespeaks a man striving first for fidelity to the kingdom, not a party.

Sider told Christianity Today in 1992 of a trip to Switzerland he initiated after being criticized by the post-Schaeffer leadership at L’Abri. Unable to crack their perception that he was a dangerous man, an exasperated Sider later lamented, “Francis Schaeffer – I’m so close to him!” At least on the protection of unborn children and the care of creation, the views of the godfather of the evangelical left and the godfather of the religious right were indeed rather close. It is time for their political progeny to get close again. Instead of arm-wrestling with itself, the body of Christ should be extending both hands to a broken culture and a broken ­creation.

Dominion imposes responsibilities.

TO REITERATE AGAIN:

Why science needs metaphor (Tasneem Zehra Husain, , 18TH APRIL 2024, New Humanist)

If science has a native tongue, it is mathematics. Equations capture, precisely, the relationships among the elements of a system; they allow us to pose questions and calculate answers. Numerically, these answers are precise and unambiguous – but what happens when we want to know what our calculations mean? Well, that is when we revert to our own native tongue: metaphor.

Mathematics is metaphor.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

The Big Bang’s mysteries and unsolvable “first cause” problem: The “first cause” problem may forever remain unsolved, as it doesn’t fit with the way we do science. (Marcelo Gleiser, 4/06/24, Big Think)

The origin of the Universe pushes the boundaries of what we can understand. Simply put, most of science is based on two things: objectivity and causality. Objectivity asks for a clear separation between the observer and what is being observed. Causality assumes an ordering in time whereby an effect is preceded by a cause. As I pointed out in a recent book with my colleagues Adam Frank and Evan Thompson, the origin of the Universe brings both causality and objectivity to a halt. And it does so in a very different way from quantum physics, where both principles are also challenged. Quantum mechanics blurs the separation between observer and observed and substitutes deterministic evolution by probabilistic inference. It is, however, still a causal theory since an electron will respond to, say, an electromagnetic force in ways dictated by well-known dynamical causes (with, for a technical example, a Coulomb potential in Schrödinger’s equation). There are known forces at play that will induce specific dynamical behaviors.

But when it comes to the origin of the Universe, we don’t know what forces are at play. We actually can’t know, since to know such force (or better, such fields and their interactions) would necessitate knowledge of the initial state of the Universe. And how could we possibly glean information from such a state in some uncontroversial way? In more prosaic terms, it would mean that we could know what the Universe was like as it came into existence. This would require a god’s eye view of the initial state of the Universe, a kind of objective separation between us and the proto-Universe that is about to become the Universe we live in. It would mean we had a complete knowledge of all the physical forces in the Universe, a final theory of everything. But how could we ever know if what we call the theory of everything is a complete description of all that exists? We couldn’t, as this would assume we know all of physical reality, which is an impossibility. There could always be another force of nature, lurking in the shadows of our ignorance.

At the origin of the Universe, the very notion of cause and objectivity get entangled into a single unknowable, since we can’t possibly know the initial state of the Universe. We can, of course, construct models and test them against what we can measure of the Universe. But concordance is not a criterion for certainty. Different models may lead to the same concordance — the Universe we see — but we wouldn’t be able to distinguish between them since they come from an unknowable initial state. The first cause — the cause that must be uncaused and that unleashed all other causes — lies beyond the reach of scientific methodology as we know it.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Dark Energy Could Be Evolving Over Time, Raising Questions About the Nature of the Cosmos (Will Sullivan, April 8, 2024, Smithsonian)

“If this is true, this just turns cosmology upside down,” Dillon Brout, a cosmologist at Boston University who was not involved in the new research, tells Space.com’s Sharmila Kuthunur. A finding like this would be a “paradigm shift in our thinking of what our best understanding of our universe is.”

“If it holds up, this is a very big deal,” Adam Riess, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who led the team that discovered dark energy 25 years ago and did not contribute to the recent findings, says to New Scientist’s Leah Crane.

“It’s exciting,” Sesh Nadathur, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in England who worked on the research, tells Quanta Magazine’s Charlie Wood. “If dark energy is not a cosmological constant, that’s going to be a huge discovery.”

Paradigms always shift.

OLD SCHOOL:

Safety First, Fashion Second as Schoolkids View an Eclipse (Eliza Berman, 1963, LIFE)

If you ever have the chance to view an eclipse, you’d do well to take a tip from the 1963 fifth grade class at the Emerson School in Maywood, Illinois. Wielding cardboard boxes and knives that today would surely get a kid suspended, the students demonstrated for LIFE’s readers how to safely look at an eclipse.

During the solar eclipse of 1960, hundreds of people had suffered permanent eye damage from looking directly at the sun. With help from the Illinois Society for the Prevention of Blindness, Emerson students avoided the same fate by building Sunscopes, pinhole camera-like contraptions that indirectly project an image of the sun. The magazine offered instructions for those wanting to replicate the project at home:

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

The “blind spot” in science that’s fueling a crisis of meaning (Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser and Evan Thompson, 3/07/24, Big Think)

Cosmology tells us that we can know the Universe and its origin only from our inside position, not from the outside. We live within a causal bubble of information — the distance light traveled since the Big Bang — and we cannot know what lies outside. Quantum physics suggests that the nature of subatomic matter cannot be separated from our methods of questioning and investigating it. In biology, the origin and nature of life and sentience remain a mystery despite marvelous advances in genetics, molecular evolution, and developmental biology. Ultimately, we cannot forgo relying on our own experience of being alive when we seek to comprehend the phenomenon of life. Cognitive neuroscience drives the point home by indicating that we cannot fully fathom consciousness without experiencing it from within.

Each of these fields ultimately runs aground on its own paradoxes of inner versus outer, and observer versus observed, that collectively turn on the conundrum of how to understand awareness and subjectivity in a Universe that was supposed to be fully describable in objective scientific terms without reference to the mind. The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and that we’re central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we’ll never be able to understand science as a human activity, and we’ll keep defaulting to a view of nature as something to gain mastery over.

Each of the cases just mentioned — cosmology and the origin of the Universe, quantum physics and the nature of matter, biology and the nature of life, cognitive neuroscience and the nature of consciousness — represents more than an individual scientific field. Collectively they represent our culture’s grand scientific narratives about the origin and structure of the Universe and the nature of life and the mind. They underpin the ongoing project of a global scientific civilization. They constitute a modern form of mythos: They are the stories that orient us and structure our understanding of the world.

For these reasons, the paradoxes these fields face are more than mere intellectual or theoretical puzzles. They signal the larger unreconciled perspectives of the knower and the known, mind and nature, subjectivity and objectivity, whose fracture menaces our project of civilization altogether. Our present-day technologies, which drive us ever closer to existential threats, concretize this split by treating everything — including, paradoxically, awareness and knowing themselves — as an objectifiable, informational quantity or resource. It’s precisely this split — the divorce between knower and known and the suppression of the knower in favor of the known — that constitutes our meaning crisis. […]

We call the source of the meaning crisis the Blind Spot. At the heart of science lies something we do not see that makes science possible, just as the blind spot lies at the heart of our visual field and makes seeing possible. In the visual blind spot sits the optic nerve; in the scientific blind spot sits direct experience — that by which anything appears, shows up, or becomes available to us. It is a precondition of observation, investigation, exploration, measurement, and justification. Things appear and become available thanks to our bodies and their feeling and perceiving capacities. Direct experience is bodily experience.

We collapse the wave function.