Deserts

“Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” -Isaiah 43:19

In the Bible, the people of God are often called to wander in the desert. Jesus Himself was driven into the wilderness for forty days before beginning His ministry. Deserts represent times of great spiritual testing and preparation; they are the starved, barren places in our lives, places with no water.

When we pass through the desert, we’re forced to rely on God to lead us to water and shelter from the elements. We’re driven down to our knees before Him on a daily, even hourly basis. Our strength is severely tested in the desert. It’s far more than what we were expecting; well beyond the distance we thought we could walk and the conditions we thought we could endure. No one enters the desert willingly. God takes us through the desert for His own purposes, to accomplish His own designs.

Air

It’s amazing to think that one of the substances we depend on the most, one of the most essential ingredients for our bodies to run on, is surrounding us at all times. Yet we almost never think about it, because it’s completely invisible to us. All we see is the way it affects the world around us.

Air is everywhere: a nice, refreshing cocktail of 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.9% argon, 0.04% carbon dioxide, and trace amounts of other gases. Without our lungs constantly pulling in that oxygen, our brain would never be able to function, and we’d be dead within minutes. But the act of breathing air is so second-nature to us that it’s even a cliché. When something comes naturally to us, we say it’s “like breathing”.

Air is actually the name given to Earth’s lowest layer of atmosphere, the troposphere. This layer extends up into the sky by 20 km at the equator, ~7 km around the polar regions. It gets thinner as you go up toward the next highest atmospheric layer, the stratosphere. That’s part of the reason planes fly so high above the Earth — the lack of air improves their fuel economy.

From space, air appears blue. When God looks down at our tiny little planet (or any aliens that might also happen to be watching?), He sees a blue planet. It looks that way because air scatters shorter (blue) wavelengths easier than longer (red) wavelengths. That is also why the sky looks blue to us: we’re actually seeing the air over our heads scattering blue light.

There are several parallels between God and air, and I believe He actually intended to communicate these things about Himself to us through air. Remember He didn’t need to make us breathe air; He chose to.

God is invisible, just like air is invisible. Yet we are totally dependent on Him every minute of our lives. We need God to keep us alive, even more than we need to breathe. God faithfully provides us the air we need to breathe. He gives spirits to our bodies, which we also can’t see. We also understand that He is omnipresent. He surrounds the surface of the Earth, just like air. “In him we live and move and have our being.”

Jesus compared the movement of the Spirit of God to the blowing of the wind. We can’t see where He’s going or where He’s coming from, but we feel Him moving and we know He is there. Living a life of faith is often like following the wind. We have to choose to believe God is taking us somewhere, even though we can’t see where.

Semi-related tangent: I tend to waste a lot of my life indoors. When I go outside — particularly when I’m on a field trip out in some godforsaken, rocky wilderness — I’m always struck by how fresh the air is, and how such a subtle difference can change my whole perception of the world. Fresh air is a gift from God that many people forget, or take for granted.

We live in cities for most of our lives. Our appreciation of nature gets swallowed up by all the buildings around us. As a result, we hardly ever get to experience true fresh air. Many of us spend our lives drowning in a sea of smog.

That’s one of the main reasons I love going out into the field. I get a chance to break away from the city life for a couple days, and experience nature as God intended, as He did for 4.5 billion years before we ever came along. I get to breathe fresh air and feel its invigorating power. I think spending a good dose of time in fresh air once in a while is crucial to our physical, mental and spiritual health.

The Big Bang: part I

Prologue

“In the beginning was the Word.” -John 1:1

One common way to describe the act of Creation is that God created the universe ex nihilo, or “out of nothing”. I actually think that’s a misleading way to look at it. Before time and space existed, there was not nothing; there was God.

In Exodus 3:14, Yahweh tells Moses His name: “I AM THAT I AM”. In John 8:58, Jesus says the following: “Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.”

God is the ultimate reality. He was, and is, and is to come. All throughout the universe, all before and above and behind and beyond it, GOD IS. His Existence is one of His key defining traits. He is the bright, shining Reality upon which all things derive their own existence, like shadows cast by a glorious Sun.

Before we get to the Big Bang, we should reflect that God created the universe out of Himself. I am not meaning to say that God is all and all is God. But it is still true that the universe He made flowed from His very heart, like a river of living water. The universe bears the Artist’s signature in every atom.

Singularity

As predicted by general relativity, the universe began as an infinitesimal point of infinite density approximately 13.798 billion years ago — aka a singularity. In the understanding of modern science, a point of infinite density is impossible. Also, quantum mechanics does not allow a particle to inhabit a space smaller than its wavelength. So we are already getting the picture here: the origin of the Big Bang is far beyond our current understanding. Both general relativity and quantum mechanics break down when attempting to describe the Big Bang. We are simply out of our depth at this point in our studies. This is the mystery of the beginning of time.

Planck epoch (up to 10^-43 s after the Big Bang)

The Big Bang has just happened, and the entirety of physical existence has sprung into being. Imagine the staggering sum of energy and mass contained in every single atom of the universe, exploding outward from a point smaller than a pixel on your computer screen. Again, our current laws of physics break down when trying to describe the conditions of the universe during this epoch; it was so small that the primary force governing existence was tiny quantum fluctuations in gravity. It was also so incredibly dense and hot that all of the four major universal forces — gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear and weak nuclear forces — were likely unified into a single Law of Physics. Cosmologists refer to this as the grand unification epoch and it likely lasted until 10^-36 s after the Bang.

Sublunary

“Everything sublunary is on the move, time knows nothing of rest. The solid earth is a rolling ball, and the great sun himself a star obediently fulfilling its course around some greater luminary. Tides move the sea, winds stir the airy ocean, friction wears the rock: change and death rule everywhere.”

Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, October 26.

I just have a simple thought to share today. Life is really, really cool. We are living in a beautiful world. There’s so much to learn, see, and do. There are things that exist that we can’t even imagine. Think about all the life forms on the planet. Think about how the world is constantly in motion, constantly changing and alive. Read that quote again by Charles Spurgeon. What a great vision he had of the world.

My problems and your problems are tiny in the face of this great big universe. And here we are, alive to see it, to experience it, this mysterious and peculiar thing we call reality. It’s a beautiful thing, and a thing that is passing quickly. Take joy in it. Spend some time today and just enjoy being alive. I need to remind myself of this as often as I can. That’s why this blog exists.

Meaning

(This post was originally written by a commenter named CatoFromFark on Reddit, and I liked it – so I’m posting it here.)

So, I have no idea what for real your blog is going to be about or what position you are coming from or anything. It looks interesting. And it sparked some thoughts that probably have nothing to do with what you are wanting to talk about. But as I’m bored I’ll type them out anyway.

I remember reading in a book about J.R.R. Tolkien’s philosophical basis for LOTR (though I can’t remember if this exact formulation was put forward by Tolkien himself or by the author), a question that I think gets at the root of a lot that’s wrong with the approach our current culture has to the universe. The question is: how big do you think the universe is, in reference to our knowledge and imagination? There are only three real answers: the universe is bigger than what we imagine, the universe is the same as what we imagine, or the universe is small than what we imagine.

The first answer was universally the approach of all people’s before the last century or two (“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” – Hamlet (1.5.167-8)). But since then we have universally changed perspectives to the third choice. Many think this is because science came and smashed all those “superstitions” people used to have, but I fundamentally disagree. I think this dynamic is related to science but not caused by it. And our life is all the poorer because of it.

So, before, the current world, people saw the world around them as a BIG place, full of meaning. Full of poetry. Full of mystery. The more we’ve learned the more we’ve discovered that we don’t know. We ought to have an even bigger perception of the mystery of the universe. But, instead, the opposite has happened. We’ve emptied the universe of its mystery and its meaning, until all we see are the dry materialist facts. This is made of that; this happened and then that happened. OK, but who cares? What does it mean? Why did we do this? Not because we learned stuff, but because of how we learned stuff and by whom.

As an example: Before the mid-17th century everyone believed the universe was geocentric. The Ptolemaic model was triumphant for over a millennia as the standard everyone believed. Not because they were stupid – the Heliocentric model had been proposed as early as Pythagorus, and by Aristotle, the merits of each option – the scientific merits – were well known and discussed. The geocentric model was believed because it was the best fit to the empirical data that they could discover. Ptolemy’s model was accepted because it was fantastically accurate for what it was needed for – creating calendars and predicting astronomical events (even today, mechanical (not digital) planetariums use a setup based on Ptolemy’s model to drive things).

But if that is all it was about, then nobody would have cared much. Predicting where Mars will be may be cool and all, but why would you care? If it was just math, then there’s no meaning. But it was more than that. Because we couldn’t detect much more than position for anything astronomical, astronomy was considered not a part of physics, but an extension of mathematics…and so was music. The medieval mind naturally associated these things together. They saw the movements of the heavens as the music of God – everything moving in perfect harmony and precision. When they composed music, they attempted, as best they could, to harmonize with this “music of the spheres.” In other words, what they saw in the physical world was charged with symbolic, spiritual, mystical, poetic meaning. It was emotionally compelling. And that stance doesn’t really depend on whether you are using Ptolemy’s model or Tycho’s or Copernicus’s or Kepler’s or Newton’s or Einstein’s. It isn’t about what is believed or why, but more how. It is about meaning. As evidence, you can look at Newton himself, who while the king of math and science was also very much a mystic. He studied the universe to find God. And he believed he did – in the universe itself and not just in the “this is beautiful and perfect” sense but in the mystery he found. If anything, as science progressed through these we ought to have seen this poetry more and more, not less and less. Not just reduced things down to just the material facts.

The interesting thing is the materialist stance is a very unscientific one. The earlier world KNEW there existed in reality things they could not see or hear or taste or touch. Which is just kinda’ common sense. And if you ask, in a formal scientific sense, whether or not it is possible that things exist that we cannot, as of yet, detect in any way, the logical answer must be yes. But this materialist sciencism mindset our world has isn’t a logical thing. It is an emotional thing. And it’s answer is an unequivocal NO. No, there cannot exist anything other than matter and energy – than what we can detect and sense. Believing there are such things is just like believing in an imaginary friend – and is probably a sign of mental illness. It’s not a statement of logic and reason, but of faith. Instead of God we believe in an all-knowing (in that it can discover everything that can truly be known) SCIENCE that teaches us all we know and gives us everything that is good in our lives. But science is a very empty God. Because it cannot give what we truly need: meaning.

Which is why our world is so dry and sterile. We’ve taken the meaning and emotion and symbolism and poetry out of the world and left a vacuum in its place. We’ve said that the universe is much, much smaller than the worlds we can imagine. That there is much more in our philosophy than exist in heaven and earth. Which is probably one reason (not to imply cause-and-effect because this is a chicken-and-egg thing) that all art and drama and entertainment (not to mention sports, politics, religion, etc.) has degraded into mere spectacle. Big explosions and fancy computer graphics or shocking things just for shock value. But no substance.