Prospero's Books

Significance is otherwise

2009-11-10T02:19:25-05:00

"Ever since the great scientific revolution was set in motion by Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, it has been a commonplace of commentary that the more that science teaches us about the natural world, the less important a role human beings play in the grand scheme of things. 'Astronomical observations continue to demonstrate,' Victor Stenger affirms, 'that the earth is no more significant than a single grain of sand on a vast beach.' What astronomical observations may, in fact, have demonstrated is that the earth is no more numerous than a single grain of sand on a vast beach. Significance is, of course, otherwise."

--David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, 7-8

Put in Swiss cheese and out come quarks

2009-11-09T14:07:01-05:00

"Imagination, Casubon, use your imagination! What happens in those atomic machines, in those megatronic positrons or whatever they're called? Matter is broken down; you put in Swiss cheese and out come quarks, black holes, churned uranium! It's magic made flesh, Hermes and Hermès. Here on the left, the engraving of Paracelsus, old abracadabra with his alembics, against a gold background, and on the right, quasars, the Cuisinart of heavy water, gravitational galactic antimatter, et cetera. Don't you see? The real magician isn't the bleary-eyed guy who doesn't understand a thing; it's the scientist who has grasped the hidden secrets of the universe. Discover the miraculous all around us!"

--Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, 369-70.

An even better magic trick

2009-11-02T14:52:09-05:00

I've been listening to Peter Mayer's song Holy Now:

When I was a boy, each week
On Sunday, we would go to church
And pay attention to the priest
He would read the holy word
And consecrate the holy bread
And everyone would kneel and bow
Today the only difference is
Everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

When I was in Sunday school
We would learn about the time
Moses split the sea in two
Jesus made the water wine
And I remember feeling sad
That miracles don’t happen still
But now I can’t keep track
‘Cause everything’s a miracle
Everything, Everything
Everything’s a miracle

Wine from water is not so small
But an even better magic trick
Is that anything is here at all
So the challenging thing becomes
Not to look for miracles
But finding where there isn’t one

When holy water was rare at best
It barely wet my fingertips
But now I have to hold my breath
Like I’m swimming in a sea of it
It used to be a world half there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now
Everything, everything
Everything is holy now

Read a questioning child’s face
And say it’s not a testament
That’d be very hard to say
See another new morning come
And say it’s not a sacrament
I tell you that it can’t be done

This morning, outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head
I remember when church let out
How things have changed since then
Everything is holy now
It used to be a world half-there
Heaven’s second rate hand-me-down
But I walk it with a reverent air
‘Cause everything is holy now

You can listen to the first minute of the song at Peter Mayer's Web site.

Not a being at all

2009-10-11T23:32:27-04:00

The opening sentences of Karen Armstrong's new book, The Case for God, will certainly keep me reading:

We are talking far too much about God these days, and what we say is often facile. In our democratic society, we think that the concept of God should be easy and that religion ought to be readily accessible to anybody. "That book was really hard!" readers have told me reproachfully, shaking their heads in faint reproof. "Of course it was!" I want to reply. "It was about God." But many find this puzzling. Surely everybody knows what God is: the Supreme Being, a divine Personality, who created the world and everything in it. They look perplexed if you point out that it is inaccurate to call God the Supreme Being because God is not a being at all, and that we really don't understand what we mean when we say that he is "good," "wise," or "intelligent." People of faith admit in theory that God is utterly transcendent, but they seem sometimes to assume that they know exactly who "he" is and what he thinks, loves, and expects (ix).

Whose center is everywhere

2009-10-10T17:55:26-04:00

In The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, Brian Swimme points out that any location in the universe can be thought of as the place it began, because every point was once "part" of the single point that was the Big Bang:

We exist then at the very origin point of the universe, because every place in the universe is that place where the universe flared forth into existence (89).

I'm reminded of a saying that I've seen attributed to more than a dozen different writers: "God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference, nowhere."

In proper relationship with no one

2009-10-10T14:18:38-04:00

An example, from Brian Swimmne's The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, of how stories can illuminate systems, in this case how an ancient Greek drama can send a powerful message for today:

We can say that even though Oedipus was made king of Thebes, he did not actually live in the kingdom of Thebes. For to live in the kingdom means to live in proper relationship with the members of the kingdom. But Oedipus was in proper relationship with no one: he was the husband of his mother; he was the murderer of his father. And yet if anyone had asked whether or not he lived in the kingdom of Thebes he would think the questioner insane, for where else could he be? But in the deeper sense of his own understanding of his essential nature and role in Thebes, he was not a member of the kingdom; he was an abomination of the kingdom.
We too regard ourselves as living on Earth. But we do not live on Earth in the sense of living as members of Earth's Community. Both in our activities, as well as in our own understanding of ourselves and Earth, we are simply not members of Earth's life. We live in this split condition, thinking we are members of Earth, unaware that we are the destroyers of Earth (55-56).

A noble life within the Great Holy

2009-10-10T01:13:04-04:00

"Conceivably for as long as three hundred thousand years, humans have huddled together in the night to ponder and to celebrate the mysteries of the universe in order to find their way through the Great World they inhabit. No matter what continent humans lived on, no matter what culture, no matter what era, the work of cosmology took place every year and every month and even every day--around the fire of the African plains, in the caves of the Eurasian forests, under the brilliant night sky of the Australian land mass, in the long houses of North America. There the people told the sacred stories of how the world came to be, of what the human brings into the universe, and of what it takes to live a noble life within the Great Holy that is the universe.

"I say that every culture did this, but that of course is not exactly true. For we contemporary humans do not. Modern humanity seems to be the first culture to break with this primordial tradition of celebrating the mysteries of the universe. When we learn about other cultures who do, we feel a sense of superiority or nostalgia, depending on our evaluations of such cultures. If we regard the scientific enterprise as freeing us from earlier superstitions, we look with pity upon these primitives who devoted so much energy to teaching fantasies about the universe. On the other hand, if we think that earlier or other cultures knew something important about the universe that completely escapes our ways of knowing, we are left with a sense of sadness that such experiences are not possible for us today" (9-10).

--Brian Swimme, The HIdden Heart of the Cosmos

The magic of life's design

2009-10-09T13:56:29-04:00

"Truly random events offer neither excitement nor creativity. Not much, at any rate. With life, however, there is a flowering, unfolding, and experiencing that we can't even wrap our logical minds around. When the whip-poor-will sings his melody in the moonlight, and it is answered by your own heart beating a bit faster in awed appreciation, who in their right mind would say that it was all conjured by imbecilic billiard balls slamming each other by the laws of chance? No observant person would be able to utter such a thing, which is why it always strikes me as slightly amazing that any scientist can aver, with a straight face, that they stand there at the lectern--a conscious, functioning organism with trillions of perfectly functioning parts--as the sole result of falling dice. Our least gesture affirms the magic of life's design" (45).

--Robert Lanza, MD, with Bob Berman, Biocentrism

A stone, a leaf, an unfound door

2009-07-23T12:40:54-04:00

My high school friend Bob Evans has started a new blog to display stunning fine-art prints of his photographs. When you're on his site, be sure to click on the images to see their detail and tonality.

For me, the prints instantly called up memories of a passage from Thomas Wolfe that I know Bob knows: "A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces."

Cosmos, Nature, and Culture

2009-07-14T16:55:31-04:00

This weekend I'm presenting a paper in Phoenix at "Cosmos, Nature, and Culture: A Transdisciplinary Conference," sponsored by the Metanexus Institute. I've just posted the paper, "A 'Mirror up to Nature': Cosmos, Nature, and Culture in Shakespeare," on this site. It's my first long essay that grew directly from writing I've done for this blog.

If you're a reader of this blog and would be interested in getting together with me in Phoenix this weekend, please let me know.