AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT: Existence, Faith, and Atheism

[What follows is drawn from a comment I made at Debunking Christianity in response to an essay, "The Cost of Atheism." I was sharing my thoughts with a person from Illinois and Wisconsin who writes under the lovely screen name, GoPrairie. Our exchange was fun and gracious.

I've used this argument -- it is really more a puzzle, perhaps even a proof -- many times before. I have used it on the web several times; and it played a central role in Part 1 of a book I wrote (still no publisher). In April, it appeared in an exchange I had with atheist-novitiate Luke Buckham at his blog, O Machine.

I thought that some of you would find it fun, though some of you may find it frustrating. Those of my readers given to debates about theism might find it helpful, for it "proves" a very serious thing. I'll let you read for yourself what that thing is.]

[UPDATE, 12.5.07: Because what follows was originally drafted as a comment -- submitted in a discussion elsewhere -- it was hastily written and edited. As a result of some confusion, and some of my own disappointments with the piece, I am emending it to more closely resemble a well-written essay. Thanks. BG]

FOR FUN: THE SPEED OF LIGHT AND YOUR EXISTENCE

Let me note this: If the speed of light is finite, and yet it is the "fastest thing" (186,000 miles/sec) in the universe, then it follows that there is no present, there is no "present tense." Every perception MUST be delayed; we only know the past, irrespective of how quickly light reaches our eyes. From object to eyeball, from fingertip to wine glass, there is a delay; even the body's neurology operates at a finite speed. Hence, we only know a present by inference; but such an inference is rooted in faith. †

Let me go with this further. If the speed of light is finite,†º then know that when you look at the stars in the night sky over Wisconsin none of those stars "exists." Only their light "exists;" their fiery furnaces may have gone out long ago. Every single one of them may be gone, burnt out and dead in some distant explosion or some crushing implosion. We CANNOT "know" they are there, we can only know that they once were there, or so we induce from the light we see.

Now, go with me even further. All your life light has been bouncing off of you, traveling about the earth. Imagine for a moment that the light from your skin travels out from the earth and into space. Assuming that you are only about 40-years-old, then you are, in a very real sense, 40-light-years old, too. What does this mean? It means at least this: to the overwhelming majority of the universe, YOU DO NOT EXIST. Anyone 100 light-years away CANNOT know you exist. But, and here's the rub -- YOU DO EXIST. So, alas, we have a problem: Most of the universe cannot even know that life on earth exists -- and yet it does. Nearly every quadrant of the universe could never -- ever -- be shown ANY evidence of your existence, and yet you are in fact a very real being. What does this say about our sense of knowledge? What does this say about our demands for proofs for the existence of God? For if you exist and yet the universe cannot and does not "know" it, then perhaps God exists and you cannot know it -- or do not know it -- yet.

Surely I can at least make this concession: if it is extremely hard for me to prove my own existence to myself,† and if it is hard for me to prove my existence to you, then surely it would be hard for me to prove God's existence at all.

But you do ask for "proof " for God's existence, and I have none. But what if I said that the sun is God? You might counter that the sun is nothing more than a fusion reactor where the helium atom is smashed about. But what if I said this: How do you know God is not a fusion reactor? How do you know God is not a big ball of gas? What I am saying is that just because science has "explained something," it does not follow that science has not described the evidence which points to God; a thing explained is NOT God explained away. God may be proved by my pointing to a prairie dog. How do you know that such evidence is not evidence?

†[To explore this further, please see my essay, "A Letter to Christopher Hitchens;" therein I examine the impossibility of the self proving its existence -- to itself. The main examination occurs following the sub-head, The Transcendental Ego.]

†º[It should be noted that if the speed of light is instantaneous, then there is no delay except that between our senses and our perception. But let's assume that there is no delay even here. With that said, light that is instantaneous removes from us the ability to determine the age of the universe.]

_____________________

I would like very much to thank Chris from "Sorry We're Open" for his kind support and many encouraging words over the last several days. He particularly liked this "proof," and so I felt obliged to share it with the rest of you. If you hate what I've written, well, then direct your ire at Chris. Of course, I jest. But I'd surely love to know what you think.

_____________________

This New York Times piece by physicist Paul Davies is interesting -- especially if you draw your worldview from science. See? Faith is not so bad.

Peace.

Bill Gnade

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

The religious left is no less threatening (A letter to the editor)

[This essay is a letter sent to the editor of the Peterborough Transcript, a small NH weekly. It is in response to comments made retired Franklin Pierce College professor, author and political activist Taylor Morris, who lives nearby. It is related to my "God Bless You Please, Mr. Robinson."]

Criticisms of the religious right, expressed in sundry letters to local papers and the audacious remarks of Bishop Gene Robinson of the NH diocese of the Episcopal Church, strike me as wildly hypocritical at worst and misinformed at best.

Taylor Morris, for instance, in his letter, How to define freedom? (Transcript, 4/14), fails to even consider that there might be a religious left equally bent on establishing a theocracy in America. Imposing religious ideals and principles in the public square is hardly a right-wing activity. The religious left has been doing it for decades.

One need only glance at Unitarian Universalism to rightly conclude that there is hardly a more strident and politically active religious institution in America. Its involvement in shaping society and politics in its own religious image is not only part of its foundation; it is its pride. If the religious right is against gay marriage, for example, the Unitarians are all for it. In other words, the legalization of gay marriage by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts was a decision that promoted and affirmed the religious ideals of Unitarians everywhere. In fact, the two ministers who performed the first 'marriages' in New Paltz, NY, marriages now deemed illegal, were Unitarian ministers. Does anyone think that those two ministers performed those ceremonies because their church opposes gay marriage?

Moreover, the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) is nearly monochromatic in its political views. Find a Unitarian Universalist who is a conservative Republican, and I say you've found a miracle. (In contrast, the Roman Catholic Church, at least politically, is infinitely more diverse than nearly any Unitarian society on the planet.) The UUA in America endorses almost every political position held by the Democratic Party; and it rarely, if ever, supports one ideal that could be found to the right of that party.

Remember that the "religious right" is not a church. Unitarian Universalism, however, is very much a church.

Mr. Robinson's recent remarks at Franklin Pierce College, germane to this discussion in their hypocrisy, no doubt received applause by his liberal peers. But is there a more troubling irony than a man using his religious office politically in order to censure religion in politics?

And is it not hypocritical that Mr. Robinson would sow fears of theocracy by claiming that 'God is horrified' (Robinson's words) by the things being done in God's name by the religious right? For Robinson claims to know God's mind, a claim that should sound alarms in liberals the world over: Robinson assumes he not only knows what horrifies God politically; he knows what doesn’t horrify God. And what doesn't horrify God? Apparently the political views of Mr. Robinson, whose views are unsurprisingly identical to the Democratic Party platform.

Lastly, one wonders how Mr. Robinson can use his religion in politics to beat back religion in politics when the Book of Common Prayer, without flinching, expects fervent prayers in which weekly, if not daily, Episcopalians petition their Lord Jesus Christ to guide the 'President, Congress and Judiciary' so that they will perform, not some secular act, but God's very will. Perhaps Mr. Robinson would have me skip over that part of my Prayer Book.

The theocratic ambition of the left is also a real threat to the separation of church and state. Messrs. Robinson and Morris apparently hope to protect that separation. I pray they will.

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved

Technorati tags: Religious Left, Religious Right, Gene Robinson, Episcopal Church, Episcopalianism,ECUSA, Unitarianism, Unitarian-Universalism

Some Americans just don't get it

This morning's New York Times once again reveals the ignorance, or, at best, the intentional neglect, of the facts of Catholicism by those who would write about that sacred faith.

In "Pope May Color Debate in U.S. Over 'Life' Issues Like Abortion", writer Robin Toner (one dare not call her a reporter), leads with this inscrutable remark:

"The election of an unstintingly conservative pope could inject a powerful new force into the intense conflicts in American politics over abortion and other social issues, which put many Catholic elected officials at odds with their church."

That the Holy Father is described as "unstintingly conservative" is like calling the New York Yankees "unswerving in being a baseball team". In other words, it's tautological. It's surprising that it wasn't reported that the papal conclave had elected a Holy Father that was "unstintingly male"; or that the College of Cardinals had foisted upon the waiting world a Pope who was "surprisingly Catholic."

Latent in the writer's commentary is a fundamentalist liberal (dare I say, American) notion that someday the Catholic Church could have a progressive Pope - a liberal Papa - who, in fact, could so transform the backward Church that maybe, in the not-too-distant future, the world could applaud the election of a female Pope (commonly known as a "Mope", I believe).

That the NYT writer implies that the Church could have elected a Pope other than an "unstinting conservative" reveals that far too many people view the Church's rôle as entirely human (lacking any divine inspiration or guidance); democratic and politically malleable, bending with the currents of modernity.

Moreover, that one of my belovéd family members should grieve that Pope Benedict XVI is in the "same vein" as John Paul II, indicates that even Catholics - American Catholics - fail to understand that ALL Popes are to be in the same vein. There is no "zeitgeist pope"; there is no Pope for today, another for tomorrow. Each Pope is the Vicar of Christ, the earthly stand-in for the Divine Savior of the world, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

That outsiders to the Faith particularly should chide the Church for being nothing other than itself - a bulwark against the whims of a capricious humanity - should remind us, not of the inflexibility of the Church, but of the instability of its critics.

(In other news, kudos to NYT columnist David Brooks for his astute commentary regarding Roe v. Wade. "Trenchant" comes to mind when considering his analysis.)

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

Technorati tags: Pope Benedict XVI, Catholic Church, David Brooks, New York Times

The excoriation begins

Less than 24 hours after Benedict XVI's election to the Holy See, critics began to strip him of his skin. Whether it be the life-long Catholic who served me lunch yesterday, or members of my family, or Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Pope Benedict is not really God's man for the job. He's more likely the devil's.

Representative of this are comments by the likes of Boston's Mike Barnicle, who yesterday during his radio talk show chided the Church for lacking the "transparency" of an American election. This morning on Imus in the Morning, Tim Russert suggested that American Catholics wanted a Pope that would preach the "gospel as presented in the Sermon on the Mount", emphasizing the care of the poor and one's neighbors; and not a Pope like Benedict, who's caught up in divisive issues, "like abortion", and homosexuality. And Maureen Dowd (it's hard to believe she's won the Pulitzer Prize) implies this morning in her column that Benedict is little more than the Inquistion with new letterhead.

That Barnicle (and most Americans) miss the paradox of freedom is understandable, largely because Americans have come to view democracy in profoundly stupid terms. The paradox, of course, is that for freedom to thrive, there must be things that are not free; there must be darkness if we want transparency. For example, if the Oval Office in the White House was to be truly open to the people, one would discover quite quickly that America was no longer open to anyone. Similarly, if the Constitution were a transparent and elastic document, open to the revision of all truly free people who claim to have a voice in such matters, Americans would awake tomorrow morning to a world where the Constitution suddenly turned invisible. The paradox of freedom is just that: that something must be afixed - permanently - for freedom to exist at all.

If my meaning is yet not clear, think of it this way. The only reason we have an open society is because there are some things that are not open, like the Oval Office. The moment the Oval Office becomes transparently open to all is the very same moment the open society would close, close in tyranny, chaos or both.

That Barnicle believes the Catholic Church should be as transparent as an American election reveals that he understands neither the Church nor elections. For there is secrecy at the heart of every American election. Imagine if, in the interest of the pop idols "transparency" and "full disclosure", every citizen voted under public scrutiny. That Barnicle suggests this is clear, as is the result of such "clarity": voting as we know it and the freedom voter secrecy provides would cease.

Transparency at the level that needs to be obscure breeds death to freedom.

Russert's remarks are just plain foolish, suggesting that abortion is not related to caring for either the poor or one's neighbors. He would pit those who advocate a social gospel against those, such as Benedict, who advocate a total Gospel, one that deals with the social dimensions of the world in light of the personal, moral life of each individual; a gospel that rebukes the heresies that destroy those individuals' souls and the societies such individuals create.

But Russert's remarks also reveal that the Americans to which he refers would prefer a Pope that would do what "most Americans" want for him to do, which is to submit to democracy.

And Dowd, whose work reads less like a reasoned argument and more like verbal gas pains, is simply absurd. She bemoans the fact that the Church is a heirarchy and not a democracy like the New York Times (wait a minute, the NYT is not a democracy either. Well, perhaps I misrepresent her feelings about her employer, which, come to think of it, would not be a member of the free press if everyone, from the crankpot on the loading dock to Ms. Dowd herself - each equal in Dowd's small world - had control over that press. But I digress.)

That the Church is a heirarchy angers Americans - particularly Dowd - for no other reason than that Americans believe that "anyone can make it to the the top" (although there is no top in a democracy, is there? See how confused this all gets?). What Ms. Dowd really believes is that she, and her other infallible cohorts, should be allowed to elect and create a Pope who's in their own image. It's a sort of spiritual nepotism, where one elects and supports one's ideological clone.

Of course, if there is a God at all, agnostics and theists alike must submit that equality is a myth, and that heirarchy is at the very core of Being. But that sort of reasoning is just too Papal.

Here's a fun physics question for Messrs. Barnicle, Russert and Ms. Dowd. When a car freely travels down the highway, what part of it is not free to move at all all? The answer strikes directly at the heart of the role of the Papacy.

If there is nothing fixed in human life, nothing moves in human life.

Pope Benedict XVI, particularly his office, is precisely that still point where the rubber meets the road. Without that traction, one is not free to move, skidding helter-skelter or just spinning in the same tired rut.

Watch over the coming weeks whether it is the "Papists" or the press who convene the Inquisition.

Contratimes

©2005/Bill Gnade - All Rights Reserved.

Waiting for smoke

Deep in the heart of Christendom, in the core of the Christian legacy, an old adage will once again prove true: Where there is smoke, there is fire. Soon, in fact, there will be smoke drifting over St. Peter's Square and the Sistine Chapel. The fire of the new Bishop of Rome will be kindled.

It's amazing how fascinated the media are with this conclave, held above a false floor in Michelangelo's gallery; and with the group of religious gathered therein so wholly intent on maintaining tradition that counter-espionage measures have been taken to thwart that very techno-crazy media gathered outside. Have not the last days of Pope John Paul II and this present conclave all seemed so important to the media that it would be crazy not to suggest that the newsgatherers have proven the divine importance of the Vicar of Christ? Has any vacancy and succession of any office been more analyzed; more scrutinized to the very edges of sanity? Why this fascination?

Perhaps it's because the Catholic Church has for centuries stood in the way of human excess. Oh, sure, there are those who scoff at the Church's calls for sacrifice and humility when it is adorned with gold and encrusted with gems. But only the reckless speak thus, forgetting, or ignoring, the curious fact that even in the manger, the stable of the only royal birth, there was gold, frankincense and myrhh. Jesus was and is a king, and his kingdom will have no end. Truly it's OK to manifest the glory of God with the sacraments of art and craft; of precious metals and hallowed frescoes. What else to do with such things than to point heavenward?

But the Church's longstanding resistance to "progress", that ever elusive, seemingly capricious idol; and its criticism of "traditions" that debase and oppress others; give the Church's detractors much to decry. For Rome, particularly in the last papal term, has held firm ground against the spirit of the age, whether it be the inhuman optimism of utopian socialists; or the idolatry of unfettered capitalists; or the licentiousness of the sexually maniacal West. The Church has indeed fought against the idolatries of conservatives and liberals, of heartless moralists and snickering anarchists; and it has fought well. For this reason the world watches and waits; for this reason the media obsess and wonder, and in some cases, even worry.

Doesn't it strike you as strange how many papal "experts" have crawled out from under every rock and paten on the planet? Never before have there been so many experts. Even many non-Catholics seem infallibly articulate on what John Paul II's successor must do, and what he must be like as man and pastor. In fact, every one of these voices sounds, well, infallibly papal. The question thus comes to mind: with this many experts walking the streets, who needs a pope at all (a very liberal wish, no doubt)?

That liberals pray for a liberal, conservatives for a conservative, combined with the grotesgue democratization of everything in America (where everyone is equally expert); all make a fascinating and irresistable story.

But let's skip the punditry (its own sort of idol), and let's have faith (at least those who have it) that God will use men (yes, men) to bring to Christendom another bold and bright flame that burns the skin when held too close, and yet warms the soul when held close enough.

And may the Vatican religious choose another leader who can help guide us home when we have wandered far into those cold and lonely places where our idols love to dwell.

©Bill Gnade 2005/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.