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I should have posted this a month ago when our first episode came out, but now that the second one is now available, why not now?  Our plans earlier this year to develop a podcast within The Christian Humanist Network (http://www.christianhumanist.org) have finally come to fruition, and I’m truly excited about where things are heading.Galileo_facing_the_Roman_Inquisition

Our first episode sets the stage, explaining our backgrounds, how we got into this project, and what we see as our vision for the podcast.  You can listen to it here: Book of Nature 1: Opening the Book

Our second episode gets into some real meat about the differences between science and scientism: Book of Nature 2: Science vs. Scientism

So, please subscribe to us on iTunes, leave a review there if you are so inclined, and send feedback to bookofnaturepodcast@gmail.com.  Or, if you prefer, head over to the show notes page and leave a comment there!

We plan to set up a Facebook page in the very near future, as well.

Easter season is upon us again, and for me it will never be the same. A few years ago, on Easter Sunday, my paternal Grandmother, Jytte Dawson, passed away, and I wrote about it at the time. Last Wednesday, April 16th, my maternal Grandmother, Virginia Geib, joined her in eternity. You can read her obituary here.

Both of my Grandmothers were fortunate to have been surrounded by friends and family in their final moments. Both had friends and family caring for them around the clock in the months and weeks leading up to their deaths. I realize that not everyone is so fortunate, and I am grateful to have such a family.

But this post is about my Grandmother. I’m finding it difficult to write this post, not the least because I know I can never do justice to what an amazing woman my Grandmother was. My brother, who is a substantially better writer than I, said so many things so much better than I. Nevertheless, here is my attempt.

During the bulk of my childhood, I divided my time between jaunts in Saudi Arabia and Ohio, following my father’s work as an aircraft mechanic. During our times in Ohio, we lived very close to my grandparents, and on occasion even in the same house. Thus, my weekends and evenings were often filled with my Grandmother’s presence. The best way I can describe it was an overwhelming feeling of love and devotion that infused the air whenever she was present. There was no question in anyone’s mind that our extended family had her at the center. She was the glue that held us together. Some of my fondest memories were of my uncles, aunts, and cousins all coming together at Grandma’s house for Christmas. We had a ritual, called cookie day, where all the cousins (and I have a lot of them!) would compete to decorate the most or best Christmas cookies. How I miss those times! My grandmother silently organized and bustled around the room through all of this, making sure everyone was fed and happy. She never asked an iota in return. All this makes her loss so much more painful to me and my family. But, if anyone has earned her rest from a lifetime of giving of herself to her family and friends, it’s my Grandma.

Some of my earliest memories were of Grandma reading a story to me at bedtime, or singing a song. I can still hear the soft words of “Down in the Valley”. I remember her prayers over dinner, which almost always included an invocation to God to keep our nation out of war. As I grew older, and while we still lived close by, Grandma and I would have regular evening chats about any number of topics. She always wanted to hear how school was going and she spoke to me as an equal. Every year on my birthday, without fail, my Grandmother and Grandfather would call me and sing to me their own special birthday song. When I married my wife, they began doing so for her as well. Over the years, my grandma was someone I knew I could always confide in without fear of judgment, and my only regret is that I didn’t avail myself of her wisdom more often.

My Grandmother was more than just the matriarch of our family. She loved her husband Doug “Skip” Geib, to whom she was married nearly 60 years. Their devotion to each other was evident every time I saw or heard them together. I never even remember a time when they so much as raised their voices to each other. She was a huge Elvis fan, and owned many of his albums. She worked for many years as an accountant for a local general store, and she had one of those calculators that prints at home. Let’s just say I’ve never seen someone wield one so skillfully. When she got into a rhythm, the combination of key clicks and printer noises actually had a musical and soothing quality to my young ears, and I can still hear it echoing in my mind to this day. There are so many other tidbits about her life than I can relate, but I hope I have at least conveyed a taste of the kind of person my Grandma was.

Easter is a season rife with symbolism about renewal and creation, and what better example than a beautiful garden, tended with care? My grandmother was an avid gardener, and I couldn’t wait to see what new things she was growing and eagerly looked forward to her tours. Sometimes she would even let me help! Gardening, to me, and I suspect to my Grandmother as well, strikes me as a particularly primal and earthy way of expressing the creativity that is part and parcel of our nature as Image-bearers of God. It’s taking pieces of nature and working with them to create something that is unmistakably a partnership of the wildness of Nature and the organization, intelligence, and creativity of human beings. I’m really not doing the concept justice, but I do hope you grasp the gist of what I am saying. It is making things new.

God promises that he will one day make all things new:

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” – Revelation 21:3-5 (NIV).

When that far-distant day comes, when Heaven and Earth are one, one of the first things I’ll do is stroll into my Grandmother’s garden and ask, “Grandma, please show me what you are growing, and can I help?”. This is my hope.

Grandma, I love you. It has been a privilege to be your first grandchild. I only hope that I have made you proud. Rest in peace now, until we meet again.

I conclude with the beautiful song by Chris Tomlin that we sung in Church Easter morning:

The good folks at The Christian Humanist have interviewed me again, this time about meteorology. View the show notes here, and find their feed on iTunes to listen to it! We had a far-ranging discussion about Aristotle, storms in the Bible, the long and cold winter in the eastern U.S., the Polar Vortex, and the supposed dichotomy between scientific and teleological/theological descriptions of weather events. These guys (all three are Ph.D. English professors) are great podcasters (is that a word?) and talk about a lot of interesting stuff that scientists like myself otherwise would rarely think about, and I highly recommend subscribing to their podcast on iTunes.

I had a great time in this interview, but I was a little nervous. This had the effect of causing me to lapse into inanity and general inarticulation from time to time. I obviously need more practice. Specifically, regarding the discussion of the dichotomy between scientific and theological descriptions, I didn’t feel that I explained my point of view very well. When describing the formation of hail from a scientific perspective, and then pointing out that this didn’t preclude the use of hail as punishment on God’s part, I didn’t mean to imply that God used hail for punishment all the time, or that bad weather in general is always punishment by God (I actually don’t think that this is the case). My point was rather that a thoroughgoing scientific explanation does not preclude such a possibility, as these different types of descriptions are looking at the same problem from a different angle. In my view, God is just as much responsible for the everyday natural happenings of the Universe–those very things that are amenable to scientific investigation–as he is for any sort of “true supernatural” miracle. Clearly there is lots more to say on this latter point, which brings me to my big announcement.

The Christian Humanists are enlarging their project, having recently added a new podcast to their repertoire, The Christian Feminist Podcast. Recently, they approached me and two other scientists who are long-time listeners if we would be interested in hosting our own separate podcast discussing all manner of issues of science as it pertains to the Christian faith. We all enthusiastically accepted. The podcast will be called “The Book of Nature“, and will debut sometime this fall. My hope is that being in verbal conversation with other Christian scientists (no, not those kind), will help crystallize my own thinking on this area of inquiry and my writing about such things on this blog. So, stay tuned! I’ll have more information as the debut date nears.

Well, it’s been quite a long (but good) year so far, which is part of the reason I haven’t blogged on here so much. This past year has seen me switch employers, have several papers published, submitted, and in various stages of preparation, and the birth of my first child in mid-July. Another reason I haven’t blogged as much as I had hoped is that I just simply haven’t had much of an urge to do so, not because I don’t remain passionate about the topics this blog was meant to address: far from it! Rather because I’ve found writing down my thoughts to be surprisingly more difficult than I had anticipated. But, I have no plans of giving up this blog, and hope to change this situation over the next few months. I have lots of ideas for posts, including a discussion of “nothing” and what it means in physics and philosophy, musings about whether God intervenes in Nature and what that would look like if He did, why I used to be a young earth creationist and why I eventually abandoned that view to embrace theistic evolution, my position on global warming (hint, it’s happening and humans are at least partly to blame!), a post on tornadoes and “natural evil”, and many others. Stay tuned!

July 4th, 2012 will go down in history as one of the most significant days in science history, and certainly of the last few decades. A new particle consistent with the long-sought Higgs Boson has been discovered at the Large Hadron Collider. Leading up to this discovery, I had been keeping up with various particle physics blogs, and the rumors I were reading pointed to a major announcement. Excited, I stayed up late on the 3rd just to watch the live webcast from CERN. I have to say, watching the excitement in the eyes and voices of the physicists giving the announcement of a 5-sigma detection of this new particle sent shivers down my spine.

Almost 50 years ago, a theoretical physicist by the name of Peter Higgs (who is still alive and kicking and was present in person for the announcement!) wrote a paper (initially rejected, no less!) describing a mechanism that would allow fundamental particles to acquire mass by virtue of interacting with the “Higgs field”, a field analogous to the gravitational and electromagnetic field, that permeates all space. (This field was only later called the Higgs field; Peter Higgs was far too modest to name the field after himself!). In this landmark 1964 paper, he pointed out, almost as an afterthought, that this field would have its own particle, which came to be called the Higgs Boson (again, he didn’t name it such himself!). As an aside, Higgs was not the only player in this game, there were several other scientists who contributed to our theoretical understanding of the Higgs mechanism and Higgs Boson. Rather than going into that here, I recommend you peruse the relevant Wikipedia articles, which discuss these issues in depth.

To drastically oversimplify matters, this mechanism was incorporated into the so-called Standard Model of particle physics and quickly became an essential feature of it. Up until now, it was the last puzzle piece of the Standard Model that had not been put into place. Just like the electromagnetic field has its corresponding “quantum”, or particle, namely, the familiar photon, so the Higgs field has its corresponding particle, the Higgs Boson. Unlike the photon, however, which each of us detects everyday with one’s retinas (assuming one is not blind, of course!), the Higgs Boson has been devilishly difficult to pin down. For, while the Standard Model predicts that it should exist, it inconveniently doesn’t tell us what its mass is. And, the details of how it behaves and how easy it is to detect depend crucially on its mass. That’s one of the reasons it has been so hard to find. Another is the fact that, whatever mass it has, it’s unstable, and once formed, immediately (within an incredibly small fraction of a second) decays into other particles. Thus, it cannot be observed directly, but only by observing the products of its decay and working backwards to infer its existence, sort of like inferring the existence of a long-extinct dinosaur by digging up its fossilized footprints.

Why is this important? Up to now, particle physicists strongly suspected that something like a Higgs field exists in nature, because otherwise, it is very difficult to account for the fact that many observed particles (such as quarks, and the W and Z bosons that mediate the weak force) have a non-zero mass. Theoretical calculations of the behavior of these particles work best when such particles are massless. The fact that they aren’t (we wouldn’t be here if they were!) obviously required an explanation, which was the motivation for a series of papers introducing the Higgs field. As stated before, the Higgs Boson is a byproduct of this additional field (you can think of it as an “excitation” of the field, sort of like a breaking wave of water on the beach is an “excitation” of the ocean it comes from). And particle physicists have been searching for it ever since, because the only way they know of confirming the existence of the Higgs field is to detect the particle associated with it.

Now, it appears they’ve finally found it. The fact that such a particle was predicted almost 50 years ago, and experimentally confirmed just this past year is as much a testament to the power of scientific theory as one will ever come across. I for one am excited, and I’m not even a particle physicist! On the other hand, many theories that have been posited in the interim to attempt to explain the mass of fundamental particles apart from the Higgs field and the Higgs boson have now fallen flat on their face with this new discovery. Such is the nature of science: you never know when a theory is going to be dramatically upheld, or completely ruled out, by a new discovery. And we scientists wouldn’t (or shouldn’t!) have it any other way!

So, what’s next? Now that this new particle has been discovered, there are several things that particle physicists are going to follow up on. The first thing is to continue collecting more data. The particle was originally discovered by sifting through the debris of trillions of proton collisions to look for the unique signature it would produce above the noisy background of all the other particles produced; the problem is orders of magnitude worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. More collisions that produce the particle are needed to determine its properties. The Standard Model predicts that the particle should have very specific decay modes into other particles. For example, it should most often decay into a pair of bottom quarks, and much less often into a pair of gamma ray photons. If the decay rates of the Higgs Boson differ from the Standard Model, even a little bit, then it would be a signpost pointing to new physics (what particle physicists refer to as anything beyond what the Standard Model already accounts for) just around the corner.

Many physicists strongly suspect that the Standard Model is not the whole story, for various reasons. One is its inability to explain why the various particles have the particular masses they do, which seem to follow no discernable pattern. Another is why there are so many different kinds of particles to begin with. Another big one is the fact that it doesn’t account for gravity at all. But, to date there have been only a handful of observations that have been at odds with its predictions, which have been confirmed to astounding precision time and time again. The LHC was built in part to probe new frontiers that might tell us more about how the Universe works at its most fundamental level and give us clues to how we might solve some of the Standard Model’s problems. Now that we’ve found the last missing piece of the Standard Model, what this piece tells us could be the bridge to a fundamental new understanding of the physical Universe, and that’s something to get excited about!

As is often the case when I see an either-or question like the one in the title of this post, my knee-jerk reaction is to say, “I don’t know, maybe both?”. (I tend to be very suspicious of dichotomies, suspecting that many more are actually false than is commonly assumed.) In this case, after further reflection, I would definitely say both.

The folks over at The Christian Humanist have put together a really nice podcast all about epistemology. I highly recommend you head over to their site (also linked in the blogroll on the left), subscribe to their podcast feed, and give it a listen. In one part of their podcast, they discuss the relationship of epistemology to modern science, specifically by arguing that modern science actually contains elements of both a “rationalistic” epistemology, and an “empiricist” epistemology, even though it is commonly assumed to be largely described by the latter.

I have to agree, but first I need to explain what is meant by the terms “rationalism” and “empiricism” in this context. Now, I’m certainly no expert here, but from what I’ve been lead to understand, rationalism is a theory of knowledge that tends to emphasize the faculties of pure reason, although the Wikipedia article linked to above appears to define this as “idealism”. Perhaps someone who knows more about these distinctions can chime in here. Rationalism, thus defined, would be concerned in a scientific context with the building of models and theories, logical and mathematical, for which to make sense of the data of science and to make predictions about what new observations and experiments might show. On the flip side of this is empiricism, which is a theory of knowledge that emphasizes observational data, gathered by our senses, and by extension, our scientific instruments and observations and experiments utilizing those instruments.

The question in my mind is, which one of these epistemologies, if either, is primary in modern science? I myself have tended to lean toward an empirical view of things as having the final say in matters of science, and I think many (dare I say, most?) scientists would agree with me. What I mean is, that at the end of the day, all of our rationalizing–that is, our theories and models–can be overturned by new observations and experiments. On the other hand, I also think that theories in science are absolutely indispensable for at least a few reasons: 1) They help us make sense out of patterns we see in nature, which is what gives form to science and keeps it from being a mere collection of facts, 2) they make predictions about what new phenomena we might uncover once we have the technological capability of doing so, and theories are thus at least in part measured by how successful their predictions are, and 3), they guide the development of new ways of observing and experimenting to begin with. In this way, theory feeds back on experiment, which in turn tells us how well our theories are doing. So, with this way of looking at things, one can argue that both theories of knowledge are needed in the modern scientific enterprise. I might also point out that this is one of the areas where philosophy can really help us scientists think more clearly about what, in fact, we mean when we talk about gaining scientific knowledge, and how we come about that knowledge.

What do you think?

P.S., I also made a comment on the blog summary of the podcast that gave some specific contemporary examples of the interplay of theory and observation/experiment, if anyone is interested.

My area of expertise in science, namely the field of Meteorology, is a rather specialized field. It can be viewed as a subset of fluid mechanics, which itself is a subset of classical (or Newtonian) mechanics (or physics). In other words, a meteorologist is a specialized classical physicist, who barely rubs shoulders with that other realm of physics: quantum and particle physics. Indeed, to be perfectly honest, quantum physics is more general, but just because one is a quantum physicist doesn’t mean that one automatically understands all the vagaries of classical physics. What I mean is, classical physics is itself a subset of quantum physics, in that it is an approximation to quantum physics on macroscopic scales, that is the familiar scales of everyday life. But, it is far from obvious how the myriad interactions between particles and forces result in the overwhelming complexity of physical phenomena on macroscopic scales. (It is sometimes said that macroscopic physics “emerges” out of quantum physics). The scales are just so different that it is, at least at the present time, practically (if not theoretically) impossible to fully understand the deep connections between scales, even though we know they are there. It so happens that classical mechanics is an excellent approximation to quantum mechanics (and is rather easier to handle) at macroscopic scales, which is why the exploration of classical physics, without recourse to quantum effects, is still a fruitful scientific enterprise and is likely to be for the foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, I have always been interested in quantum and particle physics out of pure scientific curiosity, and have always meant to educate myself on it as a side pursuit. I just needed a catalyst. A colleague of mine sent me an email a few months ago regarding a potential discovery of a new particle at the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab. I looked into it, and before I knew it, I was immersed in a Wikipedia link-fest, learning about the fascinating world of particle physics. I stumbled upon several blogs maintained by both experimental and theoretical particle physicists, and frustrated that I didn’t understand the jargon and the various graphical plots they were discussing, I decided to pick up an introductory book on particle physics.

I learned about the elegant beauty of the so-called “Standard Model” of particle physics (see here), how much of it is based on rather simple physical principles which collectively are called “symmetries” of nature, and how the different particles interact with each other through the four fundamental forces of the natural world that have so far been discovered: electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces. I learned about unsolved puzzles, such as why the photon, the particle that “carries” the electromagnetic force, has no mass, but the W and Z bosons, the particles that “carry” the weak nuclear force, are quite massive.

Then I learned more about the Higgs boson, that one missing piece of the Standard Model, the one that would explain why all the other particles have the masses they do (or, in the case of the photon, why they do not). All other particles that are predicted by the Standard Model have been discovered just as it predicted they should be, except for the Higgs boson (see here). Without getting into too much detail, this particle interacts with it’s own corresponding “field”, the so-called Higgs field, and with all the other particles in the Standard Model, and in doing so, “endows” them with the masses they have. As we speak, there is an ongoing effort at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe to find the Higgs boson, for while the Standard Model predicts that it should exist, it doesn’t tell us what mass it has. So far, the search has been able to rule out the Higgs boson over a wide range of masses, and it is running out of places to hide, so to speak. If the Higgs boson is *not* found, or if it is found within a particular range of masses, it would mean that the Standard Model of particle physics is not the whole story, and that there is far more to discover about the inner workings of nature. Even if it is found just like the Standard Model says it should be, there is still much more work to do, and there are other areas of physics where we still have many mysteries to solve.

This particle has been dubbed the “God Particle” by the media, probably in no small part due to its elusive status, and yet its central importance to at least one unsolved question in physics, namely, why do the different particles have the masses they do? Why are some more massive than others? For example, the proton is much more massive than its oppositely charged counterpart, the electron. Why do some particles have no mass at all (like the photon)? Why do any of them have any mass at all? What *is* the nature of mass anyway? You get the idea. It’s an important particle. While the name “God Particle” sounds provocative and mysterious, I don’t think the motivation behind naming it that was anything but flippant.

As far as subatomic particles in general are concerned, I think they are all fascinating and display a profound beauty and elegance, and even simplicity (in a sense), in their interactions (as do the mathematical equations that describe them). To me, this underlying symmetry and order is suggestive of a deeper beauty, elegance, and even simplicity (again, in a sense) in the God behind them. So, I propose that they should all be called “God Particles”.

The few people who actually read this blog up to this point may be wondering why I haven’t posted much of substance, and why there has been so much time between posts.

The short answer is that I have been struggling with two main personal issues. One is spiritual in nature, and the other a matter of a lack of discipline in writing. I’ll talk briefly about both.

First, the spiritual issue; this is mainly a struggle that I’ve had for a long time with the idea of confrontation with those who do not share my view, especially those who are my friends. I tend to dislike confrontation for many reasons, but the main one is a sort of over-correction for my past, when I was fairly confrontational and blunt about my opinions, which led to some less than desirable outcomes in my relationships at the time. Since then, I’ve mellowed out considerably, but I fear that I’ve gone too far the other way, and it’s taken me some time to come back to a balance. This blog is my attempt at finding that balance, and now that I see that more clearly, expect more posts on these important issues of science, religion, and faith than what you have been seeing.

The second issue has collaborated synergistically with the first. Namely, my lack of discipline in writing. I recently read a great book, that I actually stole from my wife, who had picked it up in an effort to help her own academic writing (don’t worry, I gave it back!). It is How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. The main thesis of this short book is that productive writing is all about having a regular writing schedule. To most, this may seem utterly obvious, but to someone like me, who is rather free-floating in my schedule, it was something of an epiphany. I am, I’m ashamed to say, one of those “binge writers” described in the book, who often waits to write until a deadline is approaching, or until the “inspiration” comes upon me to do so. Recently, I have made some strides in the right direction to improve my writing output by scheduling specific times during the week to write, and I’ve already seen my productivity go up. It occurred to me that I could do the same for my blogging. Even if I don’t post every few days, or even every week, as long as I schedule some time every few days to a week to work on a blog post or two, then I should have both more frequent and more substantial output.

I awoke Sunday morning, April 24th, to the sound of thunder and rain, something that had not been heard in Norman since January.  Indeed, we had had no precipitation of any consequence since a snowstorm in February, only a few fitful sprinkles and a couple passing showers that barely wet the ground.  But this!  This was a real deluge!  For practically the entire day, several thunderstorms with torrential downpours trained over the town, dumping over 2 inches of sorely needed rain (I had never seen the grass and trees look so anemic in the Spring since I moved down here in 2002, and the sense of patient anticipation on their part was almost palpable).  When the rain finally came,  I could practically feel the stressed and dormant vegetation rejoicing in the life-giving deluge, and I felt like laughing and singing.  I drove to church with a huge smile on my face.  The confluence of the promise of new and awakening life that came with the rain, and the connection to the significance of Easter was not lost on me.

About halfway through the service, I received the news: my paternal grandmother, Jytte Dawson, had passed away, aged 70 years.  She was survived by her husband of 53 years, Thomas; her sister Irene Gillespie; her son Daniel Thomas Dawson (my father), her daughter Jayne “Tuffy” Meyer, and two grandsons: myself, and my brother Grant.  Even though I knew it was coming, the news still struck me like the lightning in the thunderstorm outside.  My father choked up as he told me that she had passed away with the rising of the sun.  Again, the significance of this was not lost on me.  Even as her old life ebbed away, the sun rose with the promise of a new day, and in my belief, a new life to come at the end of days, when all is finally made new — of which the life of the land awakened by the rain drumming outside, as beautiful and glorious as it was, is a mere shadow.  For several moments, I stood and watched the rain pour down outside, listening to the sound of thunder, a similar cacaphony of emotions warring inside me: grief, anger, joy, hope.

She hailed from Denmark, a fact which I always found enormously cool growing up.  My brother and I affectionately called her “farmor” after the Danish word for “father’s mother”.  My parent’s relationship with her wasn’t always the best, for various reasons which I won’t get into, but suffice it to say that in the last decade or so of her life, both parties made great strides to patch up the hurts.   Watching this happen has implanted me with an unflagging optimism for the power of love and forgiveness, which I will carry with me for the rest of my life.

For at least a year, she had been dealing with the horrible mental decline that is dementia.  I won’t get into the details, but it was a very trying time for all of us, most especially my grandfather, who patiently stood by her side during all her episodes of delusional anger and paranoia wrought by her condition.  My grandfather is one who took the “in sickness and in health” part of his marriage vows completely to heart, for which I deeply respect and look up to him for.  Partly due to his example, I am emboldened to show the very same level of devotion in my own marriage, no matter what the cost or what trials may come.  So, I guess that this post is partly a tribute to him as well.

A couple weeks ago, after a routine checkup on her knee, the doctors discovered something else was very wrong.  It turned out she had late stage cancer, which had spread from her lungs throughout her body, and had completely ravaged her liver.  There was no possibility of treatment.  My wife and I rushed out to visit her on Tuesday.  The cancer was so fast acting that by the time we arrived,  she was so far gone she barely recognized me. But before we left, I gave her a kiss and a hug.  I’ll never forget her kissing me back, and saying my name: “Danny”, which was all the energy and mental coherence she could muster.  It was enough.  I loved her, and I knew that she loved me, and knew it at that moment.

I finally went back inside the church sanctuary.  The pastor finished up his sermon, and we ended with a song that lanced me to my soul like few songs have.  I felt the Holy Spirit upon me like few other times in my life, speaking through the song and comforting me, and I’m not afraid to share it.  Some folks may scoff, or claim that I was emotionally vulnerable due to the news I had just heard.  Nevertheless, I had just encountered three events, juxtaposed with the Easter holiday, that each hammered home a different aspect of this day’s significance that had never before come together so powerfully for me in my 18 years of following Christ: the harsh reality of death, the hope of new and eternal life, and the empowering of the Spirit to begin to act out that new life, here and now on this planet.  Not just in some future state; we can only hope for that now, since we do not yet have it, to paraphrase the apostle Paul.  But I can choose right now, at this moment, to live out heaven on Earth in my relationships, my career, and my personal life.  It’s not as if I didn’t know or believe these things before: I did!  But never have they so powerfully come together in one moment in time, in a manner that I simply cannot deny, but only bow my head in reverence.  This is the stuff of the ineffable and transcendent, and I came away from it changed.  Time will tell if I can remain faithful to it.  For those who are inclined to, pray that I do so!

I do not claim to completely understand why my grandmother had to suffer the way she did, or why a good and loving God would allow her to do so.  I have become increasingly convinced that such a matter is so weighty as to resist any attempt at explaining it (or rebutting it) in mere words, which theologians and skeptics alike have debated and wrestled with for so many centuries.  I do not mean to imply that such discussion cannot be fruitful, but my Christian faith, however, tells me that God provided a very different and surprising answer: not one of mere words or formulas, but his very essence!  That is the significance of Easter to me, at least in this context.  God himself suffered and died, and in so doing, identified forever and inextricably with his finite and mortal creation, and in that lies the essence of goodness and love that we are seeking.  That is something that my mind and heart can both rest in, and is ultimately (to me at least) more satisfying than any theological argument.

On Easter, he rose again from the grave, leading the way for us. Even now I believe that my grandmother awaits that day when the dead will hear the sound of his voice, and awaken from the grave to a life beyond imagining.  I want to be there to greet her.

Thank you, Farmor, for your love and devotion to my brother and I, your loving grandchildren.  I will never forget you, nor what God has taught me through both your life and death.

Below is a video of the song (by Matt Maher) we sang at the end of Easter service.  My prayer is that it will edify you as it did me:

 

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.” ? — Carl Sagan

Sagan was one of my favorite public figures when I was younger.  I remember watching his science TV episodes on PBS with rapt attention.  In particular, I loved the scene where he took an apple and cut it in half to show how thin the skin really was, and then compared that to the thickness of Earth’s crust.  I was also entranced by his vision of what life in the atmosphere of Jupiter might look like (big floating gas bags, with no solid surface to ever rest on).

I’ll be honest, I miss Carl Sagan.  He was one of the best science communicators of the modern age, and while he often had rather harsh criticisms of religious beliefs and institutions, some of which I think were justified, others not so much, he did so in a mostly civil and respectful manner.  Contrast this with the angry, spiteful, ugly, and sometimes hate-filled rhetoric of certain prominent scientific atheists today.

Speaking of atheists, I recognize that Sagan could be considered an atheist of sorts (he himself shirked the label, and called himself an agnostic), and I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon among many of my atheist friends: like Sagan, they share an almost transcendent sense of awe and wonder of the natural world that amounts to, for all practical purposes, a religious one.  I find that as I grow as a scientist, I increasingly share this impulse, but from the perspective of a Christian theist.  It’s this remarkable point of confluence that I wish to elaborate on in this post.

I chose the above quote because I think it highlights one of the biggest points of disconnect that many theists have with the natural world (and thus that which falls under the purview of science).  The thing that sticks out at me most is that Sagan, an avowed nontheist, in my view has captured a profound truth about God that escapes too many Christians (not to mention other theists) today.  Namely, that he cannot be limited, boxed in, or ever completely fathomed by anything we think about him, or any theology we come up with.  (Note, this does not mean that we cannot know *anything* about God, or that there are no proper responses to God, but that’s for another post).  One needn’t go far to find Scriptural support for this: consider Isaiah 55:9 as a starting point.  The Psalmist, I think, understood that the unbelievable grandeur of the natural world pointed in turn to the ineffable grandeur of the Creator: see Psalm 8:3-4.  As far as I’m concerned, the new vistas we are opening up in science, in which so many wonders are being uncovered day by day, is about as powerful a testimony as I can think of for a faith in an even more awesome Creator God.

Now, before I give Sagan too much credit, I want to point out that I actually disagree with his assessment of modern religion, particularly when it comes to Christianity.  Christianity, at various times and places through the ages, has in fact looked at science in exactly the manner that Sagan laments that it hasn’t.  One only needs to look at any list of historic figures in science, and one will find numerous devout Christians among them: Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Blaise Pascal, and Michael Faraday are only a few that come immediately to mind.  These and other figures, to varying degrees, all shared the conviction that God’s nature was reflected in the wonders of the natural world, and indeed, that scientific discovery was in a very real sense, a way of revealing an even grander God than the prophets revealed, to paraphrase Sagan.

Unfortunately, these times, places, and people are fewer and farther between these days.  I will elaborate on this state of affairs in future posts, but for now, suffice it to say that I think that many modern Western Christians (of whom I am naturally most familiar with, being one myself) are at the very least missing a huge opportunity to grow deeper in their knowledge and relationship with God by meditating on the wonders of nature as revealed by science, and at worst, are actively spurning such endeavors.  Let me be clear, not everyone has to be a scientist; not everyone is called by God to serve him in such a regard.  But all members of the body of Christ should rejoice together when one part rejoices, and I’d like to see a bit more of that when it comes to the “science parts”.  Some of the reason for this, I believe, is a latent Gnosticism that the Church has seemingly never shaken completely in its 2000 years of existence, but I digress.

I’ll be frank: I have become increasingly convinced that in this particular area many atheists or other nontheists (at least those of the scientific persuasion, again of whom I am most familiar) actually have a better visceral understanding of the immanence of God in Creation than many theists, because of their willingness to be open to what our ever-increasing knowledge of nature has to offer.

For my part, when I stumble across something new during the course of my own research, I sometimes am overcome with a sense of awe.  Here I am, privileged to see something that perhaps no one else has noticed before, and yet, I get the feeling that it was here all along, and I just happened across it.  I indeed imagine that I feel like Johannes Kepler when he declared that he was merely “thinking God’s thought’s after him”.

And then I imagine I perceive a voice, saying “There’s more where that came from.  Keep going, keep looking, keep digging!”