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There were two great, abiding mysteries in my life when I was a young boy; mysteries that I puzzled over for years but never solved. I discovered them while lying in bed trying to fall asleep. Bedtimes are convenient for adults but they may or may not align themselves with the sleep patterns of a child. I was an overactive boy who had a hard time convincing his cerebral cortex to shut down after a day of full-throttled activity.

Many nights I lay in bed, watching the shadows deepen on the walls and listening to Bible stories or music on a record player. Waiting for sleep was grueling work. Minutes slowly ticked away, and a single hour was an eternity. It was in these mysterious hours of waiting that I discovered two mysteries which I could not explain or understand.

Click here to read the rest of this essay at The Christian Century online.

Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson

What if you and I could sit across the table from each other tonight, under the stars? What would you say to me? Some people say, “I’ve read a lot of your writing, you know?”

“Yeah?” I say.

There’s not much to say after that. “Thanks” doesn’t seem to work. “That’s cool” sounds arrogant, like it’s somehow cool to have read things that I wrote. Mostly I just hold still until the moment passes.

“Is that weird?” people sometimes ask. “Is it weird to suddenly find out that some stranger knows a lot of personal stuff about you, and you don’t know anything about them?”

This really does happen to me. It happened to me last week, as a matter of fact. A guy named Gary at a coffee shop. Really great guy. English accent. We ended up talking for about two hours.

“No,” I say. “It’s not weird because I don’t think about it. It’s like it’s not happening.”

That’s the truth. It’s as if someone said, “I saw you naked two weeks ago.” Yeah? Well, you’re not seeing me naked now, so I guess it doesn’t bother me too much unless we keep talking about it.

Now if I could ask you something – anything – I would say, “Do you believe in things that we might want to be true, but for which there isn’t a lot of hard evidence, maybe no hard evidence at all?”

I’d be trying to ask if you are a faith person. Any kind of faith person. Maybe you believe in Buddha, or Jesus, or God, or Allah, or any number of other ideas about an eternal being or beings. And if it turned out you were a faith person, I’d like a follow-up question.

What kind of faith do you have?

Is it frightened faith? You need the comfort of believing in the stuff your parents taught you about God, and you’re scared shitless that someone is going to talk you out of it? That’s okay. I've been there myself. I’m just trying to figure you out.

Or is yours that kind of arrogant faith that says, “Everyone else must be a complete idiot not to have faith and believe what I believe.” I hope not, because you seem so nice. Plus, I probably don't believe what you believe, so now I'm stupid and how are we going to have a decent conversation once that's established?

Is it desperate faith? Are you trying to hold onto meaning in a world in which meaning is increasingly hard to find? Yeah, I get that. I feel you.

Is it stubborn faith, like mine? Are you just ornery enough to stare down an empty universe and say, “I DEMAND that there be meaning in these skies.” And then you stare real hard and angry right into the Milky Way. Then you laugh because of how small and silly you are. You laugh at yourself, but you keep staring. You ARE going to stare down the universe.

You know, I’d just kind of like to know what kind of faith is keeping you in the game these days.

Or.

If you’re really not a faith person – at least not so much in the obvious and traditional ways – then I’d be REALLY fascinated and want to know the whole story.

Are you the sort who has always seen the default human position as NOT believing in magic or gods or any of that stuff? In your mind the evidence would have to be pretty strong to push you away from your default position of unbelief. Maybe you’ve never been able to understand why so many see it the opposite way. Like believing in God is the default, and you’d better have a damn good reason for not believing.

See I would get that. I would so get that about you. Because I seem to see just about everything in ways that are the exact opposite of most people. I know what that’s like.

Are you a kind of arrogant, angry, “only idiots believe in God” sort of person? I hope not. Because if you are, then I’m stupid, and how are we going to have a conversation now that my stupidity is out on the table for everyone to see.

Ooh, are you one of those dreamy and courageous scientist types, who has such a rigorous epistemology that you just can’t violate it for mythic reality, no matter how beautiful the myth and no matter how old it is?

Yeah, see I find that to be romantic. I was almost you. Just…almost. Sometimes I fantasize about being you.

So when the conversation dies down and we are both left looking at the stars, wouldn’t it seem like there would be no way we could remain unchanged? For one thing it would be just the two of us sitting at our little table beneath an infinite dome of starry mystery. We’d be talking about all the possibilities of what might be. It seems like there would be no way we could avoid feeling like brothers or brother and sister, right? Two humans, pitting their minds, hearts, and souls against the sky and against the unfolding drama of knowledge and mystery?

It would be sad when we had to part ways, and I would probably say, “But we can still be friends, right?"

rlp

My friend Milton posted this picture of the Hubble Deep Field Image the other day. The pretty little smudges are galaxies.

Click for larger image

In case you don’t know the story of this image, it represents a “keyhole” view of the universe. The Hubble Space Telescope focused on one small patch of the sky for about 10 days, pulling in ancient light from across the universe. This image is only a speck in our sky. It’s about the size of a dime when viewed from 75 feet away.

And this little speck is absolutely filled with galaxies. About 1500 can be counted using an enlarged image. 1500 galaxies in a single dot of our night sky.

The universe is so large that it causes my mind to reboot whenever I try to think about it. You can’t really think about the size of the universe in any accurate way, of course. It's far too big to understand. But here’s a way you could try to think about it:

Our solar system exists on a spiral arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across and contains between 200 billion and 400 billion stars. There is a star that is relatively close to us; Alpha Centauri is a mere 4.4 light years away. Given the size of our galaxy, we’re practically on top of each other.

Click for larger image

Voyager 1, launched in the late 1970s, has only recently left our solar system. The two Voyager spacecrafts are the fastest things humans have ever made. Currently they travel at a speed of about 1 million miles a day, which is pretty damn fast. Still, it took a good-sized chunk of your lifetime for the fastest thing we have to make it out of our own solar system.

The Voyager mission does not include traveling to Alpha Centauri, but if it did, it would take 70,000 years to get there at its current speed. So says a combination of Wikipedia and my calculator.

Chew on that for a moment. Our two stars, almost touching in the photo. Seventy Thousand Years.

When I consider the stars and the universe – or more accurately when I consider my inability to consider them – I experience a strange combination of physical, emotional, and spiritual reactions.

First I feel a kind of mild vertigo, the sort of thing that you would expect to feel if you suddenly found yourself in the middle of a shaky rope bridge over a deep canyon. Our world normally feels so big and solid to me, and my place in this world seems entrenched and well-established after 45 years of living. But suddenly, I am a speck of dust in an instant of time so brief that it can’t be measured. My feet feel light, as if I might float off our spinning planet any second. I want to throw myself on the ground and grab two fistfuls of grass for good measure.

My mind reels. Everything seems to be shrinking.

Then I feel a sorrowful panic. Christianity has already shrunk in my lifetime from being the shining center of all truth and purpose to something less than that. Even looking at things from the inside, even willing to give the benefit of every doubt, Christianity seems like a bumbling, prosaic movement which is, as often as not, violent, anti-intellectual, and xenophobic.

But I love Christianity so much. Or at least I love what it could be. I want to hug it. I want to throw my arms around the beautiful language of salvation and redemption. I want to curl up in the warmth of my faith community, the people I love so deeply in this world. Truly they are like family to me. I feel I could get drunk on our ancient symbols, myths and stories, the ones that speak in luscious tones vibrating through a million voices across the centuries.

So first vertigo, then panic, then longing. After that I generally calm down a bit. My tiny mind and delicate emotions cannot bear even my small thoughts of the universe for more than a few minutes. I relax. Sometimes a shrinking reality can be a comfort. My sins, the things that I have done wrong and the ways that I cannot be what I should be, also shrink. I feel I can forgive myself for them, small man that I am. Why the hell not? Look at the size of the universe!

This forgiveness is the Grace that Christians speak of. The main story of our faith tells us that we must be forgiven and can be. Funny how it takes science to bring that reality to my guts.

For some reason, this experience always ends with a crazy happiness that I cannot easily explain. I become giddy with the knowledge that ultimate reality is so far beyond our grasp. This lets me off the hook, to a certain extent. We’ll never know reality. We’ll never even map our solar system, you and I. We’re small people, but we have grasped the idea of existence. We know love, seek knowledge, and recognize goodness and evil.

Our saintly scientists, single-minded and incredibly committed to the search for truth, draw down amazing pictures from the ancient light in the sky. These pictures help me to know that it is okay to be nothing more or less than what we are.

People. Human beings, strangely warped and trying to understand that. Trying to worship what cannot be known, trying to learn, trying to find our place in the Cosmos.

rlp

Learn about Voyager

Some Christians and scientists seem to enjoy fighting about evolution, natural selection, and creationism. At least I hope they enjoy it. It would be a shame to spend so much time doing something that you dislike.

The scientists bring a lot to this fight. They’re scientists, first of all, and we hold them in awe because of that. I know whenever I see a scientist on the street, I stop and stare. It’s the white coat, goggles, and the little flask with a rubber stopper that get my attention. Also scientists can write down all sorts of information using mathematical symbols. I don’t know what that stuff means, but it makes me think that they know something. And you have to give them this: the scientific method is impressive. The scientists always do their homework. They aren’t sloppy.

The Christians always come to the fight with the same old, tired argument. The second law of thermodynamics. They LOVE the second law of thermodynamics. It’s their trump card, their patron saint of science, their “nanny-nanny boo-boo,” and they never get tired of talking about it.

You see, the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy always increases within a system. Things move toward disorder. When left to their own, things do not grow more complex. The energy in the system diffuses, and the system winds down toward inactivity.

In other words, if you toss a ham sandwich on the sidewalk, you wouldn’t expect to come back 10,000 years later and find it smiling at you.

So the basic argument coming from the creationist’s point of view is that you shouldn’t expect complex things like fingers and flippers and fundamentalists to develop out of single celled organisms. And this argument sounds pretty good on the surface.

Except that it’s completely wrong.

The second law of thermodynamics applies to closed systems that have no external source of energy. But if there is an external source of energy, things move from disorder to order all the time. You don’t believe me? Go clean up your kitchen.

The earth, you see, has an external source of energy. Turn your eyes toward the sky. Now move your head around until your eyes start to hurt real bad. See that huge ball of fire? There you go.

Things on the earth do move from disorder to order. Not in my daughter’s bedroom, mind you, but in other places. This is what the scientists are talking about. They have seen evidence of complex systems developing out of lesser complexity. If I was a scientist I could demonstrate this – plus I’d get the lab coat and goggles – but you can trace the energy behind putting your kitchen in order all the way back to the sun.

God doesn’t have to micromanage the rise of complex organisms from more primitive forms. The sun plus unthinkable amounts of time do the trick. If you want to believe that God handles every detail, you can, but that doesn’t work very well, philosophically. It makes the problem of evil hurt real bad. Like sun on your eyeballs.

If this upsets your theology, I know that’s hard. It’s always hard to change the way you think about God. But you need to let your theology flex and bend to fit our ever-growing understanding of the way the world works. I know that sounds like heresy, but our theology changes as our knowledge of the cosmos grows. It always has.

I say we should take this conversation to the stars. Lift your eyes from the squirming fur that covers our planet and consider the heavens. Leave the shadows of the cave wall and stop spitting paint on the back of your hands. Stop worrying about why your uncle grew a third nipple and look to the galaxies and the universe.

I don’t know who came up with the idea of stars spinning around black holes in beautiful, random patterns while life does or does not develop in all its awesome diversity, but that person is a fucking ARTIST. That is large. Fling the stars onto an ocean of dark matter and let them do their thing. I swear I can feel the joy rising to my skin and then up to my scalp when I think of it.

That artist. That’s who I’m talking about. Whoever or whatever set all of this in motion. Whoever dreamed up the stars and delights in their handiwork.

That’s who I’m singing to.

rlp

Some information about thermodynamics here, here, and here.

The big day is finally here; you’ve made it to college. You’ve worked hard to get into Cornell, and I assume you are giddy with excitement. Almost drunk with it. This is the beginning of a modern adventure that is almost mythic for our culture, and I hope you see it that way.

I went off to college in the fall of 1980. Sure, the world was a different place then, but I felt much the way you do now. If I recall, my main concern was not looking stupid. I knew I was a freshman, but I didn’t want to look like one, you know?

The first thing I want to say to you is that you should relax. You’re just as clueless now as I was in 1980. It’s okay. Being a freshmen, you’re supposed to be clueless. People expect it of you. And there is a certain freedom that comes with being clueless, so enjoy it. Take advantage of it. Run around the campus poking your head into buildings and asking dumb questions. Feel free. If you try to look sophisticated, you’ll spoil the atmosphere of the campus. Every campus needs a freshmen class, so play your part, okay?

Next year you can pretend to know everything. You won’t, but by then you’ll know enough to LOOK like you know everything. That’s called being a sophomore.

Now up until last Spring when I visited your campus, all I knew about Cornell University was that Carl Sagan taught there, and that it was a fancy, schmancy, sciencey, engineering kind of place. You guys are good with hard knowledge and cold facts. It’s your specialty. That’s cool. The world needs thinkers like you, so play your part.

It’s likely that you have an analytic kind of mind, so what I’m going to say next should not surprise you.

The future is closed to us. You can’t know it. You can guess at it, but that’s about all you can do. If the time interval between a point in the future and the present is short, you might make a pretty good guess at what that future moment will look like. But if the point in the future that interests you is more than a few months away, forget about it. It’s a crap shoot. No one really knows what’s going to happen.

So we don’t know what’s going to happen to you over the next four years. For some of you, the next few years will be wonderful. For others, I’m sorry to say, there will be unexpected grief and even tragedy. I mean, we just don’t know. We don’t know details, but there is one generalization that I think will be helpful for you to keep in mind.

Listen. This is the only thing I can tell you that is almost certainly going to happen to you. You are going to change. You will not be the same person you are now. I know that technically that’s true of everyone, but the next four years are going to mark MAJOR changes in your development as a human being. It is likely that you will never again undergo as much change in so short a period of time.

If you are basically a conservative person - politically, socially - then you will be challenged greatly. You will question those time-honored tenets and traditions that you cling to with such hope and faith. If you are basically a liberal person, you will also be challenged greatly. You will wonder what made you think you were smart enough to so flippantly set aside the time-honored tenets and traditions of your parents and your culture.

Whatever you are now, if over the next four years you do not question everything - your past, your parents, your worldview, your faith or lack of faith in God – you will have thrown away an incredible opportunity. Never again will you have this much leisure to sit around and talk about Truth. If you make it through your Cornell years with no angst or fear, you will have fought very hard to remain just as you are. You will have played it safe.

Please don’t do that. It breaks my heart to think that you might do that. No, no, no. Please be silly, clueless freshmen this year. Let your curiosity be as tender and fearless as a budding shoot that tears away brick and mortar to make a place for itself in the world. As sophomores, take up your new passions and hold your banners high. Be arrogant and a little rude. Think that you know everything. Who knows, maybe you do. As juniors, let the future whisper in your ear. Let the future call you to become a little more serious. But for God’s sake, save room in your heart for a panty raid or two.

Your senior year will be here before you know it. You will actually have a measure of wisdom and sophistication by then. You’ll know some things. It’s kind of sad to think about it.

And after you leave Cornell, years will go by, and if you continue growing as a person, one day you will smile and discover the truth. You are and have always been a small and silly person on a very beautiful planet in a fairly normal solar system on the edge of a vast, spiral galaxy that floats in an ocean of a universe that is completely beyond our comprehension. The search for truth is much bigger than you or I can imagine, so the best you can do is play your part. Playing your part is the best that any of us can do.

Lean in close now, my new friend, so that I can whisper something in your ear. It’s a secret, and I want you to know it.

We are all freshmen. Always. All of us.

rlp

Note: I was asked to write a simple address to new freshmen at Cornell University by one of the campus ministers. I'm sure some Cornell students will come by and read this, because the campus minister mentioned it Sunday in a service filled with new students and parents. A link to this entry might be announced in the school paper or something. I'm not sure about that. But this is not an official address given at the invitation of the school administration.

The lion's roar came out of the age of enlightenment. It was the roar of freedom. It was the roar of truth. It was the roar of the victor standing over the body of his vanquished foe. It was an angry roar, and the lion had good reason to be angry.

But now this roar has grown louder and more powerful until it's almost the only thing we can hear. The sound of it rings in our ears, and the smell of the lion is on our breath and oozing from our pores....

Click here to read the rest of this essay at The Christian Century online.

Archive of Christian Century Articles by rlp