On the Second Day, Part 1: Feeling Gravity's Pull

Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters / and let it divide the waters from the waters” / Thus God made the firmament / and divided the waters which were under the firmament / from the waters which were above the firmament/ and it was so / And God called the firmament Heaven / So the evening and the morning were the second day.
The key word for the second day is “firmament,” an old word you don’t encounter much outside of English class. To explain firmament I think of Perry Como and Bobby Sherman: There’s an old song that starts “The bluest skies you’ve ever seen are in Seattle,” and if you imagine just how solid the blue above you looks on one of those August Seattle days, you can understand the ancient notion that the sky is a big, strong dome above us. (Maybe “dome” for most people and “shell” for the ancients who thought of the world as a sphere – some did, you know.) The firmament was obviously strong, and the ancients supposed it to be made of the strongest thing they knew of, which would be metal. It was also supposed to be the barrier between this world and the next. I can’t report that this ancient conception was scientifically right; but I can tell you is that there are strong things that separate us from everything else (this world from the next one over), and they came about on the second day. It’s not a shell of metal, it’s a shell of blue light, but it’s held together by something that is just as powerful as metal in the long run. When I think of what holds up the heavens, I think of the force that holds the earth together and holds the earth to the sun to keep it from spinning into space. So, on the second day, I’d say God created gravity – and gravity, in turn, created metal in the heavens, rather than a heavens made of metal.


Physicists looking at matter today can see four different kinds of forces, each with different “shapes,” strengths, locations, and other properties. Two of the four are what hold the centers of atoms together, one is the electromagnetism that causes magnets and charged particles to stick together, and the last one is gravity, which it’s not too far wrong to say holds everyTHING together. Gravity is always the odd man out when you talk to a physicist: the two atomic forces and electromagnetism are similar enough that you can see how they go together, mathematically speaking. You can use the same kinds of equations to talk about them (called the Standard Model). Gravity, on the other hand, is so weak that we can’t see it (yet) and can’t fit it together with the other three forces (yet). Mathematically, it’s the problem child. But gravity is special because it’s inclusive: everything that is made of matter can both give and take tugs of gravity on everything else made of matter, and this can be from a significant distance.


Because gravity is so different, it makes sense that it’s the one force that separated from the others first, after the Big Bang. All that expanding matter started to clump up into clouds of dust, and some of the dust started to clump up into bigger clumps. The bigger the clump, the more its gravitational pull and the bigger it became. From this clumping we got stars and galaxies of stars and clusters of galaxies. The dust was very gaseous and nebulous and poorly formed, but gravity pulled it together into spherical stars with the same kind of crisp shape you see in our sun. God set up gravity, at the moment of creation, to shape the stars out of the matter that spilled out of the Big Bang. It’s as effective as if he had rolled the stars out of interstellar Play-Dough, or folded them up like so many boxes, although a little more elegant. When I look at the universe I see that God likes elegance, especially when it comes to the fundamental forces that mold space and time.



Gravity is weak enough that you can defeat it (temporarily) by jumping into the air, even at the young age of three years old. But it is strong, too. Not only did it form the stars, but some stars got so big that deep inside the pressure of all that stuff squeezing down made a furnace where those strong atomic forces themselves start to melt down. Atoms got mashed together so tightly they started to fuse together, making new atoms and a little extra energy to burn (therefore, stars are both hot and bright). The new atoms are more complex, mashed-together versions of the old ones. For example, one atom of hydrogen is made up of two small parts: one proton and one electron. In the center of a star, a bunch of hydrogen gets compressed so tight that the protons start sticking togther, and when two protons stick together, that’s the core of a helium atom. Three protons = a lithium core, and that’s a metal already! In fact, sometimes the stars themselves break down with a huge supernova bang, and the forces from this are so intense that there’s a little mini-creation of very complex atoms bursting out from the site. Metals are complex atoms that may have been formed this way – from weak but persistent gravity overcoming the stronger forces.


The concept of all these stars forming from the amorphous clouds of matter, knit together by gravity, is similar in my mind to God’s word separating waters from waters on the second day. This weakest but most common and least understandable of all forces started to differentiate the fluid universe, creating spiral-armed galaxies, red giants, supernovas, and from these factories we got lithium and carbon and more and more complex atoms. Gravity is still at work today. Here’s a picture of an infant galaxy forming nearby, relatively recently, and you can sort of see gravity pulling it together:




[Image from the Hubble Space Telescope, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hubble_-_infant_galaxy.jpg]

I want to give you a paradox here: God is wholly other and different from his creation, but he is also everywhere, and if he’s everywhere, he is very, very near. If he’s omnipresent, he knows when the sparrow falls, when the hairs fall, and he knows every time gravity knits part of his creation together. Don’t make the mistake of thinking because gravity is consistent and understandable that he must be very far away somewhere, watching us from a distance. On the other hand, don't make the opposite mistake of putting the two things together and thinking he is the gravity, he is not, he is its master. Rather, think of gravity as his tool, his servant that does his bidding and does it very well. Gravity does its job so well, and so consistently, that He lets us use it: we can figure out how it works, give it an equation, and predict where the earth was long ago, and where it will be in the future, assuming its “mission” doesn’t change. These physical forces are messengers of grace for all, like the rain falling on everyone.

This consistency means that I can do an experiment today, and tomorrow I can do the same experiment and get the same result. If something is different, I can’t blame gravity or electromagnetism changing on me (at least as a biochemist I can’t – most biochemical forces boil down to force #3, electromagnetism). Also, if I see light coming to me from across the universe, I can assume it came to me straight, according to the rules set down at creation. I don’t have to worry about it hitting any “pockets of irrationality” that alter it on its way to earth. I can assume that the universe is wholly rational and obeys the same laws everywhere, and everything we see sure reinforces that idea. When scientists look at the universe and can see things billions of light-years away, we see that everything is consistent with this underlying rationality. If God didn’t make the universe, there’s no reason it should be rational, or understandable at all (side note: I’m going to apply Ockham’s Razor to shred the multiple-universe counterargument). Yet everywhere we see, if not order, then the underlying order of rationality. This is a subtle argument, to be sure, but I think it’s a strong one that we live in a rational universe, the consistency of which is a pointer to God. The very rationality atheists spend so much time defending, in their minds against the evils of religion, is really a gift of grace. In a sense there’s a distorted witness to the truth in their strident arguments about justice and rationality.
I think God's nearness in the universe comes out most clearly in times of solitude. This may be a result of my introverted nature, or it may be more common than that -- I just hope you can find your way to see God all around. For me, in college, I lived next to a large athletic field that was dark and empty at night. I would walk back and forth across that field, sometimes thinking, sometimes praying, sometimes neither, and somehow no one ever called security on me. I could see the stars bright and the rest of the earth in shadows, no one else around, and I would get a sense that God was near. The flat field of grass seemed holy, burning but not consumed, "charged with the grandeur of God," to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins. In that boring, open, clear field, I saw God's hand. I also knew that the grass was made of carbon atoms and water molecules, and that all those stars were very, very far away, and if I tripped in a hole that I would fall in the dark, because gravity was still doing its job. God's nearness negated none of those facts. The God that was faithful to carve out all this, and to give us a universe where we could reliably repeat events, as much as we wanted, that God was closer to me than anything else, and yet different, An Other, at the same time. From these observations of a regular, repeatable world, you can conclude one of two things that are ultimately opposite to each other: (1) God is either distant "upstairs" somewhere, dead or close to it; or (2) he is close, faithful and consistent in the midst of these elements, upholding all these forces by his word. I choose to conclude the latter. Much of the Bible is the story of working out what God's faithfulness actually means.
So time passed after the Big Bang. Waters continued to separate from waters. In the spiral-arm corner of one nondescript galaxy, a spinning disc of dust started to collect around a massive collection of matter. The center of this became a yellow star, and eight smaller spheres started to form from the disc, all more or less in the same plane, moving in the same direction. The third of the eight spheres developed a relatively large, single moon (possibly from something else coming along and whacking into it early on), and became our planet Earth. The sun’s gravity keeps it in place, the sun’s light keeps it warm, the moon’s gravity keeps it from wobbling too much, and somehow it had liquid water and a richness of the chemicals needed for life.

This is what happened. The question is, when did it happen? How long did it take after the big bang for these events to take place? How old is this dirt we’re standing on? That’s something I want to give you some data for, and data takes time (surprise), so I’ll continue with the question of time in part 2.

On the First Day, Part 2: Point of Origin

[continued from Part 1]
Being able to see single stars in other galaxies wasn't just good for proving that galaxies were far, far away. It also proved just how far away they are. Some stars don't burn with a steady light, but they wobble bright, then dim, then bright, then dim, so regularly that you could set your watch to the oscillations. It’s almost as if the stars are breathing in and out. The first person to notice this was a computer: one named Henrietta Swan Levitt to be precise.

(A hundred years ago, Harvard College Observatory hired roomfuls of technicians to process and catalogue the photographic plates that came from the telescopes. Most of these “computers” were women because an early director found they could do the job as well or better than male assistants, and, unjustly, for half of the going rate as the men. Part of Harvard's reputation today must be attributed to the work of these unsung heroes.)

Levitt discovered this regular pattern of star-breathing when she was looking at the constellation Cepheus, so this special kind of star is called a Cepheid. The oscillations are so unnervingly regular they can be used like marks on a ruler to measure how far away each star is. This is how, for instance, the size of the Milky Way was figured out, which so impressed everyone at first, but turned out to be the mere tip of the iceberg. Hubble used Cepheids in distant galaxies to calculate the exact number of “reallys” you have to put in front of “really far away” for his galaxies (assuming a conversion factor of 1000000 kilometers per “really”, of course). This, even more than actually seeing the stars, is what convinced everyone that these clouds were massive and far away, not just splotches of dust.

If you can learn a lot about the size of the universe from looking at the intensity of light, imagine what you can learn from looking at its color! Once bigger and better telescopes allowed us to look at colors of galaxies farther and farther away, these colors started to tell us something hugely important. The farther away the galaxy, the redder it appears, without fail. This is strange, because galaxies should be pretty much the same color, or perhaps if they differed they'd be mixed up in color like a jar of assorted jelly beans. But they only differ based on distance.

An important clue for how this could be comes from Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Don't be fooled by the name: this is actually a theory of absoluteness, because everything in it springs from the one statement that nothing can go faster than light. There is an absolute speed limit to the universe, set to the speed of light itself. (We’ll get to the “relative” part in a few paragraphs.) Light’s speed is absolute, everywhere, everywhen. As a result, if you’re moving away from something that’s glowing, the speed of the light won’t change but its color will. Specifically, it will look reddish, and the faster it’s moving away, the redder it will look. (You’ve never observed this effect in person because, no matter how fast that 1978 Toyota I bought you goes, you’ve never come close to moving at the speed of light. Try and you're grounded.)

This “red shift” is amazingly consistent. When we look around ,we see all galaxies outside of our local cluster running backwards, away from us. The farther away from us, the faster they're going. It’s a bit like being at a crowded party and then realizing that everyone is inching backwards away from you (if it’s any comfort, everyone is also inching away from everyone else). Or as if you’re standing in a room, and you look north, south, east, west, up, and down, and every wall is rushing away from you. Think the entry rooms to Disney's Haunted Mansion on a grand scale.


This gave the scientific community an immediate sense of vertigo. No wonder they developed a sense of nausea. Hubble played a role in putting together the data, and got his name put on the observed “red shift,” but he didn’t really put it together to figure out what it all meant; it was just too weird for him. It took a priest with a Ph.D. from MIT named Georges Lemaitre to say what's probably occurred to you already, “So if everything’s moving away from everything else, doesn’t it follow that at first everything was together, at a single point?” This is just a case of playing “connect the dots” with galaxies and realizing all trajectories meet at a single point. Lemaitre called it a “primeval atom," which, as Dave Barry would say, sounds like a great name for a rock band. The universe is an inflating balloon, with the galaxies as specks painted on its surface. And it’s still blowing up and out. (Sam, there’s your balloon, as promised.)

The very idea that the universe was once mashed down into a single point seemed preposterous to scientists brought up on the Greek idea of a static or flat universe. Fred Hoyle, a brilliant scientist in other respects but one of the leading proponents of the “Steady-State Theory” that insisted something else must be wrong, scornfully called this primeval explosion the “Big Bang.” But the name stuck, and is now the name everyone uses!

It's important to keep in mind that this has all changed in the last hundred years. More experiments in the 1960’s helped the case of the Big Bang theory. Two scientists from Bell Labs were trying to use microwaves to carry phone messages, but they heard a constant annoying static buzz below everything. No matter what they did to clean out their system, the buzz persisted. Then they talked to some astronomers down the road: it turns out one of the predictions of the Big Bang theory is that there should be a constant, low-level “echo” of microwaves in the universe. That is what they were hearing. You can see some for yourself if you tune a TV to an unused channel: about 1% of the static you see is from this background radiation. The exact properties of the static they measured matched what the Big Bang model said we should "hear" at that frequency. (Their measurement is the blue bar on the left side of the blue-and-pink graph below, by the way.) But it was just one point -- and it would take a satellite to measure many more.

The microwave static helped to cement the case for the Big Bang, but the Bell Labs experiment could only see a fraction of the radiation that the Big Bang caused. A satellite was designed called the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) that could better observe the shape of the radiation, from its vantage point in orbit far above the interfering veil of the atmosphere. It was able to systematically scan microwaves from every part of the sky that had never been compared before. A simple event like the Big Bang should produce a simple pattern of microwaves, evenly spread out through the sky. What it saw was this, colored from red to blue over a span equivalent to four degrees Celsius:





Hmmm. Looks pretty simple to me. The reasons for this are pretty complicated, but basically, a big explosion that started the universe should leave a big, even residue of microwaves spread across the universe. And that's what we see!

Better than colors, let's use numbers. If you draw a graph, you can put the prediction of the Big Bang theory on it as a line, and the measurements that we’ve got can be put as points near that line. The better they line up, the better the theory. See for yourself (blue dots are from COBE, and see how they match the pink line exactly):

[both pictures from http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/NatSci102/lectures/bigbang.htm]

The blue points match the pink line as if they belong there. Therefore, the Big Bang is currently one of the best-proved theories in physics. Since COBE, physicists have learned to accept it.

So we’ve established that there was a Big Bang event. What does it mean? It means if we run the film backwards, we see the birth of the universe, and this expansion started from a point. So all this bigness was contained in something smaller than small. It was nothing.

There was a void. God said let there be light. And there was light. That’s not a bad description of what happened. The universe was wound up like a clock, and exploded like fireworks, or the beginning of Star Wars theme music. There was a starting line to a grand race of galaxies when everything was compressed like a tiny springy snake in a peanut brittle can, waiting to be unleashed. I can try with mixed metaphors like these, but I can't improve on what I hear in the Bible, with ears and eyes that have taken in what science has to give me. I really think that knowledge of Genesis 1 allowed Lemaitre to see what the data meant, and to name the beginning of everything.

By everything, I do mean every thing. Don’t forget that we may be talking about the beginning of space, but we’re also talking about the beginning of time. It’s easy to think of time the way the ancient Greeks thought of the universe: constant, static, even flat. But that is a mistake. According to physicists, time is a fourth dimension that goes along with the three space-dimensions of height, width, and breadth. "Our instinct is to regard time as eternal, absolute, immutable -- nothing can disturb its steady tick. In fact, according to Einstein, time is variable and ever changing. It even has shape. It is bound up -- 'inextricably interconnected,' in Stephen Hawking's expression -- with the three dimensions of space in a curious dimension known as spacetime." -- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p. 126. If the three other dimensions had an origin in the Big Bang, then time did as well.

In the Theory of Relativity, Einstein said if the speed of light is always absolute, then other things have to change, time and space in particular. (This is your mind-bending physics nugget for this post; why should time be able to change when light cannot? The key is that you can't work out the math for light changing, but you can for time changing. Weird, huh?) When I hear “let there be light,” I imagine light as the absolute into which everything else, even time, must fit. It is the laser level against which the universe is squared. The “relativity” that Einstein talked about forces us, humans looking at the past of the universe, to understand that time and space are relative (while light was not) and were compacted in a single origin, so that light itself may remain unchanged, insurpassable, framing the universe and giving us the chance to see things as they are: 10,000 galaxies in a speck of sky flying away so fast they've turned red.

In the past century, science has earned its Creation Myth: it tells us "And there was light." Space and time had an origin. In Genesis 1 we hear the words "Let there be light" and as Christians, we hear the Originator, birthing the universe with his word.

So there was light. There was evening, and there was morning. The first day was done.

[to be continued with Day 2]

A Theological Objection to CCM

I enter into posting this with fear and trembling, not only because I have to put "theological" into the title, but also because the points I want to make can seem kind of stogy and killjoy. But I hold them deeply enough that I become incapable of separating out thinking from feeling. My feeling shapes my thinking and vice-versa, when it comes to music. So there's a great big "IMHO" flag over all this. Yet this is a real argument that I'm trying to wage independent of arbitrary tastes or ephemeral fads. It gets pretty "ranty" so if you aren't interested in debate, don't take me too seriously, because I don't really take myself seriously either.

So I'm here to tell you why there's something deeply wrong with the CCM (Contemporary Christian Music) world, the CDs and radio stations that peddle it. My objection is not even to the style itself -- the overly produced, simply conceived, ABABCB song structure -- because once in a while that can serve its purpose, and that is obviously a matter of taste. My objection is not to the happy mood often found on CCM, at least not on a song-by-song basis. Nothing wrong with celebration, and I like to point out that one of the goth-rock-type bands most known for being depressing (The Cure) put out one of the happiest songs about being happy ("Friday I'm In Love"), as well as the fact that "Dance Stop" by Daniel Amos is one of the best excuses to dance, anywhere. In the mid-90's, some genuinely good artists were at work in CCM: Rich Mullins and Charlie Peacock immediately come to mind (where did this caliber of creativity go?). But now I'm bored by the whole thing, and it's not just taste that's at issue.

CCM has evolved into its own beast, and it is driven by money. It's a strange, restrictive profit motive, because not only does CCM need to sell records to be successful, but also it has to adhere to the industry-wide "Jesus-per-minute" standard, it has to avoid a whole list of taboo subjects including pretty much anything specific about life, and it has to have either a raspy-voiced male lead with a guitar or a shiny-voiced floppy-haired toned-down female lead with something that might have once been a guitar but has been polished by post-production into something that sounds more like a synth. (Synth-full music!) You can tell immediately that you are on a CCM station by listening for about 2 seconds -- you don't even need to hear a melody, you just hear the production. The closest thing to it is New Country music, which coincidentally enough is another big seller, just with fewer taboos and JPMs.

The funny thing about musical popularity is that the money acts like a rock tumbler with its stars and tunes: everything comes out shiny and pretty and pretty much the same. The playlist shifts, but there's not enough variation to warrant different shows on the radio at different times. In a word, it's monolithic. And that's what bothers me most of all.

Monolithic music implies a monolithic theology. Is it any wonder that when Jerry Falwell spoke, the news media thought he was speaking for all Christians, when it's clear that "Christian music" has its own radio station and its own sound, 24/7? Is it any wonder that because the Left Behind books sell like hotcakes at Costco and Wal-Mart that people outside of the church assume those represent the views of everyone inside? Why are evangelical leaders making a big splash just to write joint letters in recent months stating that a.) it's good to take care of the environment, maybe we could take some steps to reduce pollution and b.) everything the current political state of Israel does is not necessarily OK? (Two recent letters made headlines because it was such a surprise that Christians have internal debates about these things -- the real headline was "Christians are not as monolithic as we thought"! This is not to side with those leaders but to point out that the publication that "theologically-based thinking is diverse" is a good thing -- "good news" of a sort.)

A monolithic system is not a stable or fruitful system. Our computer systems are nearly monolithically PC now, and that's part of why they're vulnerable to a single well-coded virus, and why Microsoft and academia have spent money and energy to have scores of people dedicated to the swift detection of and erdication of viral threats. Here's the nub: despite what Richard Dawkins may tell you, Christianity has never been monolithic (nor Judaism, for that matter). Before Jesus died: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, John-the-Baptists, God-Fearers, etc. After Jesus rose, the church was inaugurated, empowered, inspired and sent forth, and almost immediately became divided into the "Jerusalem church" and the "outside of Jerusalem church." 1st generation: Paul, James, John, Peter, each was different. 2nd generation: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, each different. Acknowledging this diversity requires that I acknowledge that I myself don't have it all down,* and sometimes God is going to speak to me from someone else. The more superficially monolithic Christianity becomes, the more it has forgotten God; after all, God Himself is a diversity of three parts. When is the last time a CCM song really looked into the mystery of the Trinity, or even dealt with any mystery at all? Sarah MacLachlan does a better job of mystery than CCM, and that's embarrassing. Our ancient creeds and the Lord's Prayer do a better job of handling complexity than CCM. Rich Mullins made a memorable CCM song by just setting the Apostles Creed to music!

The last time a CCM song bolstered someone's perception of God was if that person needed healing, needed to know that God is love, or needed to know that Jesus is God. Those are wonderful points (and in a sense, they're everything you need to know -- but you need to apply them and integrate them with your whole life if they are to change you). I don't denigrate CCM for spreading light in this way. The problem is this is all it does, when music/art can and should do so much more. There is a time for joy, but there's also a time for grief. There is a time for milk, but there is a time for meat.

So I listen to KEXP, even though its own brand of secular pretension and musical homogeneity sometimes gets on my nerves. There's actually a Christian or two who get airplay there, although it can be hard to detect. And my own brand of pretention is probably getting on your nerves by now any case! Well, that's what comments are for. I'm sure I've made a few errors in my statements above -- if you point them out to me, I won't take it personally. After all, a diversity of opinion is what the Internet is all about, no?

Oh, and my solution? There's already a ton of diverse, interesting, and good-sounding music made by Christians out there. If I ran a CCM station, I'd expand the playlist. There's a Christian Irish quartet with a two-character name that I hear is selling some records. Black gospel, singer/songwriters, old country, some of that rock music (you know, for kids!) late at night, maybe even the blues, why not? (Blues always took place in a Christian context, even if the blues singer himself did not always sing from a Christian standpoint!) Specific shows could be themed for specific people who were looking for specific things, like with KEXP. Most of all, the diversity of Christianity would then be authentically broadcast, and that would be a witness to the expansive grace of a triune God.


* I realize the irony of taking a certain tone to declare one's own uncertainty. Did I mention I like irony too?

On the First Day

Dear Sam and Aidan,


As I write this, Sam, you're almost 5, and Aidan, you're just above 3. It's hard to believe that (assuming you'll go to college at 18) Sam's time at home is almost 1/3 done already. Thirteen years from now you'll be more or less on your own, and I can already tell that you both will face many of the same questions and challenges I did growing up. So I want to write you these letters for you to read someday, for that day when you're at college and learning new things left and right (maybe even some of them in the classroom).

Some of what you learn will challenge and surprise you. It wouldn't be much fun learning if it didn't. You've already found out that many people "don't believe in God" anymore, although I don't think you've heard that at the moment I'm writing this. I don't think you know just how strange your Dad is. (You'll find out in a few years, don't worry.) A lot of people don't think faith and science can even be in the same room, much less in the same head. What I want is for you to know why I believe what I do, in the hopes that you'll be able to take some of it along yourselves. I don't know as much as I want to about most of these things, but I'll tell you what I have heard, and what I think right now. Some of it will change or become obsolete or embarrassing over time, but some of it is true with a capital T.

And this is not to assume you will be interested in science. Sam, just the other day you told me you wanted to be a scientist. Of course, since then you've let me know you changed your mind and want to work in a balloon factory. If you're saving up for that factory down payment now, let me tell you, balloons do have something to do with this. In fact, everything has something to do with this. But balloons are specifically important.

This is on the level of most blogs, that is, one person's perspective unimpeded by the constraints of editing or grammar. I think of it like the bulletin boards for "Lost" (oh, let me tell you about the television show Lost sometime, because you're not allowed to watch it yet) or "Harry Potter", where people spout their crackpot theories about how everything fits together, and eventually the show or book, if it's any good, explains everything in a way that's somewhat predictable and somewhat surprising. I wouldn't have an unfolding narrative of mystery turn out any other way. I think the world is a little bit like "Lost," with an underlying narrative and mystery about free will and fate, and that's one of the reasons why I spend about an hour a week on it.

I want to pass on what I see, so you can absorb it in a single chunk, not as occasional questions over dinner or during commercials. I know of no better, more lasting way to make a complex argument than in a letter. So happy high-school graduation (plus or minus ten years) and here's part of what I have to tell you about the world.

(Just a side note before we start: If you're choosing between two colleges, look at the "tuition" line and pick the one with the smaller number. Just an idea.)

So what do I want you to know about this world we live in? Everything takes place between two simple, pliable phrases: at first, it was "Let there be light." Later, it's "Fear not." These are two points on a line that define everything inbetween. It's not a straight line ... in fact, if I continue to describe it as a line I'd have to say it's multi-dimensional and sometimes hidden from sight. But it defines everything else. And it doesn't start with you, or with me, or anyone, or everyone. It starts from somewhere else entirely.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth / The earth was without form, and void / and darkness was on the face of the deep / And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters / Then God said, “Let there be light” / and there was light / and God saw the light, that it was good / and God divided the light from the darkness / God called the light Day / and the darkness He called Night / So the evening and the morning were the first day.

There's a lot of things that you just can't know. The size of the universe is one of them. You might be able to calculate it, but what you get is only a number with a lot of zeros behind it. How about 28 billion light-years? That works if you have a good intuitive sense for the speed of light, but, well, I don't. Trying to fit that number into my head gives me the same sensation as standing at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and trying to drink it all it. It's too much for these neurons. If the concept of the Trinity is hard to fit in your head, well then, so is the distance to the Orion nebula.

More on the size thing in day two, but for now, trust me, the universe is big. About a hundred years ago scientists knew the universe was really big, and really old. (Now we can put a few more reallys on there, but they were basically right. Really.) There was so much stuff and it had been around for so long that they assumed that it had always been this way, that we lived in a static, flat universe of rocks and gas clouds and comets running around, occasionally smashing into each other and burping out small life forms or whatever, but essentially What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get for the big picture. The Creation Myth of science was that there had been no creation. They were very comfortable with that idea.

The problem is, they kept collecting data, and they found out they were wrong.

The first hint of trouble came when galaxies were discovered. All astronomers knew from looking at the sky that stars are sharp points of light, but if you look hard enough you find many blurry clouds of light, the photogenic nebulae, which are glowing poofs of dust. Some astronomers thought that a few of these nebulae could actually be clouds of stars that were so far away they looked like dust. Other astronomers thought the Milky Way was already so unimaginably big that it was unreasonable to imagine that the universe was too much bigger. In the mid-1920's, the biggest telescope yet opened at Mount Wilson in Arizona, and this was so powerful you could look at some of the closer galaxies and make out the individual stars in them. The first person to do so was a former track star and Rhodes Scholar named Edwin Hubble. That effectively settled the debate: the universe had galaxies upon galaxies. Now we can make out clusters of galaxies, and maybe even clusters of clusters.
Here's one of Hubble's original photos, so you can see for yourself. It's a negative, so the stars appear black:
(photo from http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/NatSci102/lectures/galaxies.htm)


Hubble was in the right place at the right time, and for this and other accomplishments (see below), he got a space telescope named after him. Do you ever wonder what would happen if you took the most powerful telescope we have and trained it on the same blank piece of sky for a long time, letting it soak up more and more light and look deeper and deeper into the universe? Here's what you'd see:


(photo from http://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/starsgalaxies/hubble_UDF_prt.htm)

This what NASA calls its Ultra Deep Field experiment, and just in that one "blank" speck of sky near the Big Dipper, they found 10,000 very distant, dim, and old galaxies. 10,000 star-clouds like the Milky Way. Before the original Deep Field experiment, some people thought that you wouldn't be able to see anything and it would be a waste of money and time on the telescope. Now, no one thinks 10,000 galaxies was a waste of time.

Did I mention the universe is big?

Edwin Hubble's job wasn't done yet. He had seen lots of stars in other galaxies, but just from that it's not clear how far away the galaxies are. Obviously tape measures aren't much good -- but Hubble figured out a way to use the light from these galaxies as a cosmic tape measure, and when the numbers came in, the scientific community was in for a fundamental shock.


To be continued ...

Harry Potter and the Christian Allusion (spoiler warning)

(I will do my best to avoid specific spoilers regarding the seventh Harry Potter book, but I can't avoid GENERAL SPOILERS with this post. I won't tell exactly how it ends in any case, who lives/dies, but ... if you don't want to know anything about the book, go ahead and read it already! Incidentally, I hear that in parts of India the first question anyone asks on hearing that you've seen a movie is: how does it end? They want to know the ending so they can judge whether they want to see it or not. So suspense is a cultural phenonemon!)

After reading Harry Potter and the Dealthy Hallows, I can firmly announce that J.K. Rowling has finally shown her true colors. All these years of stories about good witches and potions and secret tomes and treasures and unicorns were a front for something far more important lurking behind them. Behind it all, she lived a closeted existence. And now she finally comes out, like Voldemort from the shadows, to tell us what we should've known all along:

She has a Christian worldview.

Hide the children!

I've suspected something was up for a while now, and JKR herself hinted that the seventh book would make her opinions about God clear. And, to me, it did. The only thing missing from this book is the name of Jesus (it does actually quote him, but unattributedly). In every other way he shows up on every page, in actions rather than words.

I won't talk specifics (although comments are welcome), but here's what I saw, beyond the normal motifs of truth, love and friendship that have already taken center stage in the story:

Baptism: In a wonderful conflation of Arthurian legend and Christian symbolism, Harry sees a silver cross and must go underwater, dying from his own sin-nature. He is pulled out not by his own power but by an external power, and is literally saved.

JRR Tolkien reference: Speaking of that sin-nature locket, it's a golden thing that you wear and warps your perspective, and it's difficult to destroy. Also, when it's time to destroy it, an intense personal struggle is required (probably my favorite "Ron" scene, by the way).

CS Lewis reference: The last chapter, after Harry returns from King's Cross, compare to the climax of the first Narnia book. Because of the personal connection of who's carrying Harry and the unusual usage of "nails pierced", this may even be better than Lewis' depiction in certain ways. Lewis' depiction always seemed a bit wooden. Here the sense of loss was (to me) more real.

Choices and struggles: Several times Harry and friends are literally lost in a forest, wondering why they have so little to go on and why the memory of Dumbledore is so distant. This is the classic Western "Where is God" kind of moment. I just read an article by a disillusioned former Christian who lost his faith because of his assignment as a religion correspondant for the LA Times (that's another whole topic). His struggles and the struggles of Harry Potter are very similar. Hopefully he reads this book, and sees he's not alone.

Graveyard scene: Not only does the warmth and color of the church come out in this scene, but two direct scriptural quotations are found on tombstones. Harry and Hermione puzzle over them, and never really solve them. But talk about a clue that leads you outside the book to a real-life mystery! Hermione attempts some typical exegesis, which doesn't really work (it doesn't really explain the quote) but it's OK as far as it goes. Not to mention, if you told me I'd be critiquing exegesis in the seventh HP book, I would not have believed you for a second.

Is there anything I'm missing? I realize many people have not had the chance to read the book yet, but I get excited when the last volume answers so many questions, including "How does the author think about the world?", in such a positive way. Just as she's maintained all along, the witchcraft is not really witchcraft. It's kind of a substitute for science. And boy am I glad the poor "chemistry professor" played a major role in the resolution of all this!

The Criminal Isomer

One of my readers has pointed out that most of my news posts seem to be about food. Since it appears I've found my voice in that respect, here's another food-related news item: it seems our county (King County) is considering outlawing trans fats. This makes about as much sense as banning all liquids from airplanes. (Oh, wait ... ) The worst of it all is it may change how local institution Dick's Drive In makes their fries:

http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=transfat10m&date=20070710&query=trans+fat

Let me just make one simple point here. If trans fats are so bad that they must be outlawed, why is it that Dick's Drive In has prospered selling these things for decades? Why force them to change? Is the cost that hidden? Or are we making mountains out of molehills?

I don't doubt that trans fats are bad for you, but I doubt they're so bad for you they require government intervention.

"I don't care if you eat French fries," said Seattle City Councilmember Sally Clark, a member of the health board. But when they're fried in trans fat, she said, "I end up paying for your heart disease. It's costing us money."

My question in response is, how do you really know, and how much of an extra economic burden can be traced to trans fats? There's a hidden cost to government regulation, especially if it's of something that doesn't need to be regulated. And I don't want my council members turning everything into a monetary calculation. If you want to get down to that, the atoms in each human body is worth, what, 93 bucks or something? Just because you can put a number on it doesn't mean you've correctly assessed risk.

What's next? The ATF becomes the ATFTF (Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Trans Fats)?

The chemistry behind this is that trans fats are artifically formed isomers of real fats: they're real fat twisted just a bit. Flipping a real fat (a cis fat) into a trans configuration actually only takes a small amount of energy, the amount required to break and re-form a carbon-carbon double bond. In fact, even in wholly natural substances, regular heat is enough to flip a few of those bonds. Therefore, a trace amount of the unsaturated fats will have isomerized and turned into trans fats. Depending on how the ban is worded, we could be outlawing ... pretty much everything with fat.

Come on, then. We all need some fats for our cell's membranes. Or as a friend of mine used to say, we need enough cholesterol to make sure our arteries don't start collapsing from lack of wall structure.

All I can say practically is, I will be watching very closely how any ban is worded, and I will vote accordingly. Scary, I know. Oh, and I can blog about it. That should at least lower my blood pressure. Thanks, blogspot. Think of how much money that just saved the community at large!!

The Scientist's Favorite Psalm

I belong to an organization of Christian scientists called the American Scientific Association (ASA). When I say that, I always have to carefully point out that I don't mean Christian Scientists/Mary Baker Eddy (although I must say, they had a very interesting habit of just numbering their churches, so you'd often see the seventh or eighth Christian Science "church," for example -- very scientific of them!). Rather, it's an organization of a bunch of practicing scientists who are also Christian. It's very ecumenical, both in denomination and in science-faith philosophy. There's a few young-earthers and flood geologists, a larger number of intelligent design types, but I'd say the majority are (for lack of a better world) theistic evolutionists. Francis Collins (head of the Genome project and perhaps the association's most famous member) proposes in his book The Language of God that a better term for "theistic evolution" would be BioLogos, with logos referring to the active word of God ala John 1. Would that make an adherent of that view a biologician?

One of the things you notice about the ASA in a very short time is the number of times Psalm 19 is quoted. It happens at least once a newsletter:

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handiwork.

Scientists love that stuff, at least verses 1-6. It's part of the reason why we do science, the universality, grandeur, and regularity of the scientific method. This week's sermon was on "Inhale: Creation" and the chosen text was, you guessed it, Psalm 19. The interesting thing is if you just went from the way the psalm was quoted in the ASA newsletter, you'd probably think the psalm was just 6 verses long. But that's not the half of it. After a stirring description of the sun and the stars, verse 7 seems jarring to the scientist:

The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul/
The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.

And on it goes through verse 9, extolling the virtues of the Torah. The second half of the psalm centers around the revealed Law rather than the natural Law, Karl Barth rather than Rene Descartes. My own internal sensors cause me to read through this faster, because it seems less central to my life.

But the two halves do go together, and are deliberately related. Reading this psalm as a whole is important, just like the points I made about intergration of faith and science in the post "Introduction Part 4." To put that into practice, here's just a few things I see in relating the first half to the second:

The second half is more personal, but it still extols the universality, grandeur, and regularity of the Torah. "Nothing is hidden" = universal, like the sun's light or the heavens' declaration.

Verse 10 explicitly compares Torah to nature, and check out who "wins":

More to be desired are they than gold, yes, than much fine gold/
Sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.

If the Psalmist must pick, he'll pick Torah over nature (or at least nature's consumables) any day.

The universality and regularity of the Torah quickly lead to the realization that, oops, it's more righteous than I am. This reminds me of the transition from Romans 1 to Romans 2. In Psalm 19, verse 12 is a confession, and verse 13 is a remarkable request:

Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins/
Let them not have dominion over me

This essentially is saying "save me from myself" -- the light of God's revelation, the sun of the Torah, clearly illumines all my inadequacies. I can't even control myself, and sin eventually takes away even my own choices about myself. Verse 14 completes the thought with hope and a return to eyes on God:

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart/
Be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord/
My strength and my redeemer

The overall movement is from creation to revelation to confession to redemption, starting at the cosmos and zooming in to the choice centers of the brain (Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from secret faults), returning at last to a reliance on God's ability to save from anything. Even myself.

A God who created a good creation has not abandoned it, and can save. He can save us, and he can save it. That's a good thing to hope for, while working in the lab and investigating the regularity and intricacy of nature.