A Morning Ponderance…

An impossible thing happens every morning at twilight. Assuming you’re awake and gazing eastward, as the first glimmer of sunlight begins to creep over the horizon an unknowable paradox begins to unfold. We know that the sun is about 90 million miles away, and we know that light travels through space at about 186,000 miles per second; thus it takes about eight minutes for the light leaving the sun to finally reach your sleepy morning eyes. Yet, we also know from Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity that for an object traveling at the speed of light there is no passage of time… which means that if it were somehow possible to ride one of those photons of light with a stop watch in hand, over the course of that eight minute ride the time on that stop watch would remain at zero. More incomprehensible is the fact that since no time would have elapsed, over the course of that eight minute ride you would simultaneously occupy every conceivable point between the sun and the earth; you would in essence be stretched across the solar system, connecting the sun to the earth for eight minutes. Now, the concept of simultaneously occupying different points in space is something we know is impossible yet isn’t that hard to imagine. What becomes difficult is grappling with the actuality that those photons of light are also simultaneously occupying different points in time. It is seemingly untenable and yet it is a constant actuality that happens all around us.

It is a phenomenon with fascinating implications; consider the following thought experiment: Suppose that as you are looking at the eastern horizon at twilight there is a photon hurtling through space towards you. Having just left the surface of the sun, that photon will not be absorbed by the tissue of your eye for another 8 minutes. Having just woke up, you stretch and yawn audibly and then make a cup of coffee and a piece of toast before looking out the window… just as that photon hits you in the face and you see the first hint of the sunrise. Now suppose that that single photon somehow has eyes and a consciousness. It sees you stretch and yawn and make your coffee and toast and then look out the window; the difference however is that it sees those eight minutes of morning activity all in a single unimaginable moment. The photon of light simultaneously occupies the point in time where you stretched, the point in time where you yawned, the point in time where you made coffee, etc. Thus, it would ‘know’ (having an aforementioned consciousness) that as you were having your morning stretch, soon you would be yawning and making coffee then toast… as well as every other event that would unfold within that eight minutes between the sun and the earth. The reason the photon knows that a yawn will follow the stretch is not because of a particular foreknowledge on its part, but rather because the photon is already there.

From this we can gain a valuable insight into the theological doctrine of free will. When considering the notion of an all knowing God, a deity that knows everything that has happened as well as everything that will happen, it stands as an apparent contradiction to the freedom of will that each of us experiences. For a deity to know beforehand what choices and decisions we will make would mean that our lives are on a predetermined course that we are powerless to change. Contrarily, for us to have true freedom of will would mean that the future would always be uncertain and that it would be philosophically untenable that God could be all-knowing. For centuries philosophers and theologians alike have wrestled with this issue, often falling on one side of the debate or the other. Unfortunately this argument is framed poorly because it attempts to grasp the nature of God’s omniscience without regarding His omnipresence.
Our understanding of God is that not only is He all-knowing (omniscient), but that He is everywhere at once (omnipresent) as well. As such, He completely transcends our notion of space, but much more significantly He completely transcends our notion of time, He is an eternal being and as such the span of our lives, the span of history, the span of universal existence are to Him a single unimaginable moment. When understood in this way we can (and do) have a total freedom of will and God can (and does) have total fore-knowledge without contradiction.

Suppose I am walking down a road and one mile in front of me is a fork in that road. As I am walking, God knows (and has known since the beginning of time) that I am going to take a left at the upcoming fork in the road; not because I am predestined, or foreordained, or otherwise influenced to take a left, but because He is already there, at the fork as well as beyond. The experience of a God that transcends time would be much like that of the photon from our earlier thought experiment… He knows what lies ahead, not necessarily because He has predetermined it, but because He is already there. This of course is seemingly untenable and yet is a constant actuality all around us.

Even more difficult to grasp is the concept that an omnipresent God that completely transcends time and space would simultaneously occupy the beginning of the universe as well as the end of the universe, because He is quite simply already in both places. In this manner we can know that the universe as we experience it is a determined universe; which of course seems paradoxical since the notion of determinism is contrary to the notion of free will. However, the real paradox lies in the fact that free will is only possible within a determined universe. We as individuals are the products and culmination of the choices of all the individuals that have come before us, and our choices come as a direct result of their being. That said, the choices we as individuals make will directly influence those of the individuals ahead of us and a profound causality becomes evident… every decision we make has a direct effect on our own lives and the lives of those around us which in turn determines subsequent decisions. When viewed from a vantage point that spans the whole of time, Determinism emerges as a function of our independent and uninfluenced decisions. We live in a determined universe that God in His graciousness has given us the sovereignty to determine.

We know from 2 Timothy 2:4 that it is the uninfluenced will of an omnipresent God that we use that sovereignty to know Him:

“It is God’s will that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.”

The Problem Is Not Epistemological, But Ontological

In Defense of the Counter-Intuitive

I’ve spent the last 27 years carefully refining my sense of causality. This is not a profound statement; as individuals, it would seem we are made to be keenly and constantly aware of causalities all around us. The whole of any one person’s knowledge is simply an accrued total of remembered cause-effect relationships. From our first breaths to our last, our brain is constantly compiling the simple linear causalities that we are constantly experiencing. As infants, we quickly begin to make such associations: “Too much heat = pain,” “Crying = Someone will hold me,” etc. As adults, these associations grow continuously more complex: “Deadlines = Stress,” “Change = Uncertainty,” or “Crying = Someone will hold me” (I had to throw that in there). No matter how seemingly complicated a given causality may be, it can eventually be broken down into a number of simple irreducible linear elements. It is how we learn– our brains respond to basic causes and effects with differing levels of the chemical serotonin; generally the more serotonin is present, the more pleasurable the experience. In a process that we are generally not conscious of, our brains are constantly reducing the endless stream of incoming sensory “causes” into their more manageable simple factors and then responding with the appropriate chemical-release “effect”— think of it as a Pavlovian response at the cellular level. It is a fascinatingly binary system, reducing all of our good/bad sensory experiences into the simple on/off of neurotransmitters. As such, the way we perceive and experience the world around us becomes skewed somewhat to fit this causality processing context.

Within that context, we have finely honed intuitions regarding how the world around us works. We know that to open a door, we must physically push or pull on that door with sufficient force to open it. Even in the case of an automatic door, photons of light must bounce off our bodies into a photosensitive material which converts those photons into electricity. This in turn causes a solenoid to close an electrical circuit, which prompts the copper atoms within an electrical wire to exchange electrons in such a way that electrical current flows through a motor with sufficient force to open the door. In either case (or in any case, for that matter) there has to be a physical interaction between the observer and the door before it will open. It is the basic intuition that all of us have regarding everything around us; there is a linear and sequential series of causalities that leads-up-to and proceeds-from any given happening. It is an intuition called ‘locality.’

Within a local universe, every cause and every effect can be observed and measured, and thereby we can understand the mechanics of existence; this is the basic assumption of the scientific method. It is also a purely rational assumption and as such it eschews the irrational and the non-local. Albert Einstein, who did more to define our understanding of locality than just about anyone that has ever lived, once said of maintaining its integrity: “If this axiom were to be completely abolished… the postulation of laws which can be checked empirically in the accepted sense, would become impossible.” As such, the presence of non-locality would not only be irrational and counterintuitive, it would be deeply unsettling to our understanding of the universe. God is by definition a non-local element; and at a very basic level this is why the concept of God (and metaphysics in general) has been dismissed from intellectual thought since the time of the Enlightenment. It is a simple matter of Epistemology: if it can’t be understood then it is not worth knowing.

There is, however, a flaw in this reasoning, and the more we investigate it the more significant it becomes. Our seemingly local universe is comprised entirely of non-local elements. As the field of Quantum Mechanics has progressed it has become more and more apparent that sub-atomic particles, the tiniest constituents of existence, behave with no regard for things like space and time. Physicist Werner Heisenberg (formulator of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle) concluded that we can either know where a sub-atomic particle is or where it is going, but we can never definitively know both. Physicist Neils Bohr insisted that “it isn’t that we don’t know the facts about these particles’ locations, it’s that there AREN’T any such facts.” Physicist Dennis Overbye says of the behavior of sub-atomic particles, “they must be regarded as being everywhere and nowhere at once.” According to science writer David Albert, “The problem is not epistemological (about what we know) but ontological (about what is).”

There is another complication presented by this ontological problem: as observed, it directly contradicts Einstein’s special theory of relativity which is one of the essential foundations of modern physics. Special Relativity relies on the assumption of physical locality. The great unanswerable question in science right now is ‘How do we reconcile Special Relativity with non-locality?’ and Cosmologists, String Theorists, Quantum Field Theorists, and Configuration Theorists have put forth a number of interesting explanations. At the core of each of these explanations is the idea that reality as we know it is a small part of a highly dimensional ‘actual reality;’ parts of which completely transcend our ideas of space and time. As humans we can only experience our three spatial dimensions and linear time, because that is all that our causality informed minds can fathom. The problem is not epistemological, but ontological.

I believe we are living in an era that, like the Enlightenment of the 18th century, will see drastic changes in our perceptions of the world around us. Already, metaphysical speculation has become not only common place, but depended on in the realm of scientific thought. From a logical standpoint, the idea of a deity that transcends space and time is less preposterous than at any time in history. Evolutionary Biologist and stalwart atheist Richard Dawkins even conceded in a recent Minnesota Public Radio interview, “I could imagine a good case being made for a deistic god, a fundamental intelligence at the beginning of the universe that laid down the laws of physics.”

Colossian 1:17 says of God, “He is before all things and in Him all things consist.” The problem is not epistemological, but ontological. He is.

If you go straight long enough, you end up where you were.

The New Positivism and Phenomenalism- An Editorial 

Is knowledge truth? Is truth objective?

There is an Indian fable about three blind guys and an elephant (obviously I’m referring to Indians from India, hence the elephant, which we can assume is an Indian elephant and not an African elephant, but metaphysical speculation should be avoided… I digress…). So, there’s this fable about these three guys (it should be noted that it’s not always three, in some versions it’s 10 or 12, in a famous poem written by a British guy it’s 6… I digress…)

So there’s this fable about these three guys. As you may well remember, they’re blind, and in the course of their sightless travels they encounter an Indian elephant, which isn’t as big and impressive as an African elephant, but to a blind guy in a sari it’s still pretty memorable. Blind guy number 1 runs up to the elephant, briefly grabs the elephant’s trunk and runs away again. Number 2 runs up, touches one of the elephant’s tusks, runs away. Number 3 is a little more zealous than the other two, runs headlong into the side of the elephant and falls over backwards. From that day on, 1 would attest that an elephant is like a giant snake, 2 would attest that an elephant is like a giant spear, and 3 would attest that an elephant is like a giant wall.

Somewhere within this tidy little allegory is some interesting insight into the ideologies of positivism and phenomenalism. Both attempt to weigh what is perceived against what is real, both try to differentiate between what is meaningful knowledge and what isn’t; and most interestingly (from a significantly wider scope), both are largely ignorant-of and dependent-on an outside observing entity, without which, the story breaks down.

In the case of the story about the blind Indians, the most important element isn’t the blind guys or even the elephant; it’s the omniscient third-person narrator that provides the fabric to which these seemingly disparate experiences are pinned. In the absence of the narrator, we’re left with three blind guys with incomplete assessments of elephants. However, within the finite reality of a given blind Indian, there is no ‘rest of the elephant,’ there is just the part that he experienced and one would be hard pressed to convince him otherwise (after all, he nearly soiled his sari just to touch that part…I digress…).

Positivism (and subsequently, Empiricism) and Phenomenalism both embrace and largely depend on the idea of a finite reality. Things like God, eternity, cosmology, metaphysics, etc. are to be avoided at all costs in favor of things that are immediately rational, tangible, and provable. Things are real if we can see them and touch them, they are meaningful if we can measure them and understand them. They are explained in the language of logic and mathematics.

The irony is that Logical Positivism and Phenomenalism rose to prominence in the time leading up to and just after World War 2, the same period of time that saw Newtonian Physics become obsolete and gave rise to Relativity and Quantum Theory. Those in the highest intellectual echelons were hypothesizing and eventually proving that our concepts of space and time, and our experiences therein, were incomplete and inaccurate. Logic and mathematics were now being used to show the things we can’t know and understand, including the idea that we somehow exist in an infinite reality full of things that we can’t measure, or see, or hear, or touch.

Both Positivism and Phenomenalism tend to break down once ‘reality’ is not a finite set. Since an infinite universe can never be fully understood unless one were God, Positivism falls victim to circularity; and since an infinite universe has no irreducible elements that can be experienced, Phenomenalism falls victim to Infinite Regress. Both end up being incomplete assessments of elephants. Enter the Infinite Omniscient Narrator who provides a fabric to which all these seemingly disparate ideas are pinned.

In my opinion, the most profound concept to emerge from Phenomenalism is the idea that the things we experience only exist as “data-bundles” somewhere within our consciousness. To some extent this is true- everything we experience is processed through a series of chemicals and electrical impulses in our brains, without which there would be no awareness; but on a much grander scale, EVERYTHING that EVERYONE experiences exists as a “data-bundle” within the consciousness of an omniscient third-person narrator.  As a person of faith, I call this narrator God.

I think it’s interesting to note how as our society evolves (to use a Comte coinage), we can look deeper into the universe, our math equations continue to grow more complex and revelatory, and those “highest intellectual echelons” that I mentioned earlier are beginning to discount God less and less. Stephen Hawking, the father of modern cosmology, leaves open the possibility of God in his famous rhetorical, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?” Brian Greene, one of today’s leading quantum physicists and outspoken atheist, concedes that given the infinite nature of time and space, the existence of some kind of higher power is not only possible, but mathematically probable.

Paul writes in Romans 1:20, “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead” Just as an artist is understood by his or her artwork, the way to understand God is to understand what He has made, realizing with humility that we can never have more than a finite understanding of an infinite God.

Is knowledge truth? Is truth objective? Yes, but only if you’re God I’m afraid.