The Good Books
Some call the Tanakh and Gospels, the sacred scriptures of the Jews and the Christians, the Good Book. And it is a very good book, one that might be considered among the best of books, because it teaches us to do good things like care for the poor, protect the defenseless, love our neighbors, and forgive transgressions. Any book that helps people do good things is worth respecting, studying, and cherishing.
Some say that the Bible is the word of God, that God wrote it. That’s also true, because the human hands that wrote it are God’s hands, the human eyes that read it are God’s eyes, and the human voices that call out its verses are God’s voices. It is as Jesus said when he shared his good news, the kingdom of God is within us and the kingdom of God is among us. God is in, God is a part, God fills every one of us. We are all part of God and when we die and slough off this mortal form we remain part of God, resorbed into God, remerged with God. Moreover, the courage of a lion is the courage of God, the fleetness of a cheetah is the fleetness of God, and the song of a nightingale is the song of God. And the dark side, the terror and destructiveness of tsunamis, earthquakes, and firestorms are the darkness, terror, and destructiveness of God as well.
Yes, the Bible is a Good Book among many other sacred scriptures like the Avesta, the Lotus Sutra, the Gnostic Gospels, and the Qur’an. But other books like the Principia Mathematica, Origin of Species, Liber Abaci, and Astronomia Nova are also Good Books amidst a multitude. And all of these books are different ways of reading the best book of all, Divine Nature herself.
Read as the divine, her truths have been revealed to Moses, Siddhartha Gautama, Jesus of Nazareth, Muhammad, and other god-mad saints and prophets. Read as nature, her features have been explored by Kepler, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, and other awe-struck scientists. The divine spark glows brightly in saints and scientists alike.
Deus sive natura, 'God or Nature.'
Spinoza meant by this phrase that God and Nature are different names for the same infinite and eternal essence and that religion and science are complementary ways of seeing the same sacred reality. He saw that the divine, what some call God, charges and suffuses the universe the way that lightning fills the sky with light and opens currents of sacred flow.
The divine saturates nature the way the sea seethes through beach cobbles.
"God created mankind in his own image" (Genesis 1:27) is widely misunderstood as its converse, as though it said that God exists in the image of humans. And this leads into the trap of idolatry. It is flattering to think of humans as made in the image of God but a horrible abuse to cram and confine the infinite and eternal into the form factor of a mortal human being with a left and right side, a personality with a strong and sometimes vengeful will, with a chosen people, a specific gender, and a once-living biological son. The worship of a golden calf described in the thirty-second chapter of Exodus is not meaningfully different from this error, both are forms of idolatry that confuse the infinite and eternal divine with a materially and temporally limited form.
The mistake of idolatry extends to the attribution of the triplet omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence to God. Of course, if God and Nature are one, God is omnipresent. And if intelligence is universal and omniscience is divorced from self-awareness, then 'omniscience' would be something like proprioception; nature might be said to 'know' the disposition of all her parts without conscious awareness. But to say that God is omnipotent, that He has a will and intentions, that He listens to prayers and answers them, that He acts motivated by the emotions of love or retribution, is to project onto God the limitations of what it is to be human. This mistake also gives rise to the Problem of Evil; if God were omnipotent and omnibenevolent, why would there be calamities and suffering?
In our view, God could only be said to be omnipotent for the Planck time tP, a brief moment (5.39×10−44 s ) at the Big Bang when there was a choice of the values of the universal constants of nature: the velocity of light in vacuum (c); the charge of the electron (e); the mass of the electron (me), the Planck constant (h); the Boltzmann constant (k), the gravitational constant (G), and the fine-structure constant (α). The choice of these values is open-ended; one can conceive of universes in which they are different. However, in most possible alternate universes, life could not exist. The anthropic principle refers to this constraint; only in a universe with constants taking approximately the values they have in this one could an intelligent observer exist to measure them. Of course, it's more likely that there was no choice at all, that there are as many universes in the multiverse as possible combinations of parameters, and that humans are lucky enough to exist in this one. God and Nature span all of the multiverse.
The use of the term 'God' invites a misconception of the sacred; it lures one into the idolatry described above. In the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis, God is referred to as ר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים, 'Ruach Elohim', meaning divine wind or breath. This is a better metaphor for the divine, something felt rather than seen. The term יהוה, 'YHWH', unpronounceable but usually transliterated as 'Yahweh,' can be seen as a succinct expression of this metaphor; its sound is best rendered as the sharp intake of breath. ר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים can be strong enough to blow you over but is invisible and unsubstantial. Instead of using the word "God," it is safer to avoid the trap of idolatry by using alternative words. I usually refer to this revealed aspect of Deus/Natura as "the "Divine" or the "Sacred," but will sometimes refer to "God" in deference to the conceptions of others.
God is revealed to saints as an absolute truth, often suddenly, like a landscape illuminated by the risen sun.
The revelations are intimate — between an I and a Thou — between a Moses on the mountaintop facing a luminous cloud alone. The absolute truth revealed to one saint may be independent of and very different from that revealed to another. Each saint's truth is no less absolute than those revealed to saints before or after. No yardstick allows us to measure whether Jesus of Nazareth's revelation improves on Siddhartha Gautama's or Muhammad's on Moses'. It is left for the prophets' disciples to fight with each other over whose truth is the most absolute.
Saints strive for solitary epiphanies just as kingfishers catch fire and dragonflies draw flame.
Nature is discovered by scientists piecemeal, observation-by-observation. Scientists never learn the absolute truth, they only reach their best understanding so far. Progress is slow but cumulative; scientific understandings improve over time. Scientists build on each other's work like ants constructing a colony.
Scientists and saints alike confront the unity of infinite Nature and the eternal Divine.
Many recognize that saints seek communion with the timeless and infinite. Here I want to show how scientists also embark on a sacred mission and journey on a path leading to a deeper understanding of the Divine.
The Grand Canyon
The study of geology transforms the way one sees the world, converting rock faces to sequences of strata, each with its own history and distinctive fossils.
A walk down the Bright Angel trail in the Grand Canyon takes you through the Kaibab Limestone, the Toroweap Formation, the Coconino Sandstone, the Hermit Shale, the Esplanade Sandstone and the rest of the Supai Group, the Red Wall Limestone, the Muav Limestone, the Bright Angel Shale, the Tapeats Sandstone, going ever lower and back in time down through the Precambrian Proterozoic, to the crystalline basement — the Vishnu Schist.
Your descent takes you a mile down in space and two billion years back in time, from just before the Permian's Great Dying to long before the evolution of multicellular life. You traverse the script of a sacred play, one with the most ancient of characters — the land and the sea.
The drama is written in the rocks of the canyon; the strata laid one on top of another are its pages, depicting the struggle of those old antagonists over hundreds of millions of years. And those pages have been turned and revealed one after the other by the Colorado River as it has flowed, scoured, and sliced its way ever deeper through Earth’s history. The limestones were laid down in deep water when the sea had advanced and swept over the land, the sandstones were laid down when the land struggled back and the sea retreated, and the shales, siltstones, and other mudrock were laid down in muddy estuaries when the land and sea wrestled to a draw.
It is an origin story much more complex than the tidy sequence of the first chapter of Genesis in which Elohim dispassionately divides light from darkness, waters from waters, and heaven from earth. Instead, it is more like the Babylonian creation myth, Enûma Elish, which recounts the chaoskampf of the culture hero Marduk (𒀭𒀫𒌓) against the primordial sea goddess Tiamat (𒀭𒋾𒊩𒆳).
Both are narratives of struggle. The Babylonian saga begins with the mating of Tiamat, goddess of the salt sea with Abzû, god of fresh groundwater. When Abzû is overthrown by their offspring, his mate Tiamat retaliates by unleashing a horde of monsters against Marduk. (There is an echo of this in the Greek creation myths of the overthrow of Uranus by his son Cronus and of Cronus by his son Zeus.) It ends with Marduk's butchering of Tiamat, fashioning the vault of heaven from her ribs, the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates from her weeping eyes, and the Milky Way from her tail.
The Grand Canyon's story does not begin at the beginning; instead, it starts 12 billion years after the origin of the universe and 3 billion years after the formation of the Earth. Unlike the Babylonian epic, it lacks a fixed beginning or a final chapter but continues to be written. And instead of being inscribed on clay tablets by ancient Mesopotamians, it is written in stone by Nature herself.
Some pages of the Canyon's text have been lost through erosion; we call these elisions unconformities, the greatest of these found by Powell in 1869. That Great Unconformity was part of a loss of more than a billion years of history across the continent as Proterozoic strata were eroded and weathered away, a process ended only by the submerging of most of Laurentia in the late Cambrian. It was one of the sea's transient triumphs.
And at the bottom lies the Vishnu Schist, forged from marine sediments and lava flows that were pulled deep into the bosom of the earth, heated and squeezed by the crushing weight of 15 miles of crust, only to come out transformed, metamorphosed, the whole fabric of its being changed by the Earth’s hot embrace, just as humans can be in each other's clasp.
It's no wonder that Clarence Dutton, the geologist who accompanied Powell, was god-smacked by the vistas. He recognized the canyon as sacred space and initiated the practice of naming the points and buttes after deities encountered all over the planet: Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Krishna, Rama, Deva, Manu, Buddha, Ra, Isis, Osiris, Set, Horus, Thor, Wotan, Freya, Jupiter, Juno, Vulcan, Venus, Vesta, Diana, and Apollo. Sages, scientists, and god-mad saints also get their due; there are features named after Zoroaster, Solomon, Confucius, Mencius, Newton, Darwin, and Huxley
It's clear that as Dutton studied the geology of the canyon, he recognized that he was reading a divine drama, one that gave him a glimpse of the sacred and a glance at the divine spark, and that the text written in the stone is holy scripture.
Uncertainty
The study of physics transforms our understanding of the unseen. One learns from Heisenberg that there is a limit to human knowledge of the structure and dynamics of reality. Heisenberg showed that the uncertainty in the measurement of the position of a particle times the uncertainty in the measurement of its momentum has to be greater than or equal to Planck’s constant h divided by 4 π.
Although the constant is minuscule with a value of 6.62607015×10−34 joule-hertz−1, it defines inevitable error no matter how careful the measurement. The error does not arise from human incompetence but instead is woven into the fabric of reality.
Δ x Δ p ≥ h/4π
This uncertainty allows for the quantum chaos that looms large when the scale is small. It defines a realm where particles dance in and out of existence, black holes glow, and electrons travel backward in time. In this realm, reality shimmers like a mirage in the desert and empty space seethes, a froth of phantom particles.
It is an elegant irony that imprecision can determined precisely and that we can know the exact amount of what we cannot know.
This uncertainty fissures space-time to open room for the sacred; it allows the world to be charged with the grandeur of God. Heisenberg revealed another glimpse of the sacred and glance at the divine spark. And his article is a chapter of a Good Book, it's sacred scripture and holy writ.
Evolution
There are whole libraries of chemistry books and physics books, biology, ecology, and geology books; each of them is a Good Book. But one book among the many stands out, one that can guide the way to a deep understanding of life and a broad realization of human kinship with all living things, united by the divine spark that fills all. I’m talking about Charles Darwin's Good Book, The Origin of Species.
Darwin and his followers point to our place in the Tree of Life and the mammalian radiation. They show how all humans are our brothers and sisters, all mammals our cousins, and all life our kin. This genealogy is not written on paper but is instead inscribed in our DNA. It’s written where it always has been and continues to be written since life began, spelled out in base pairs of our DNA. Only now, after billions of years of evolution, have humans arisen to learn to read this holy text.
Darwin clears the scales from our eyes and allows us to see God and Nature aright. He said it best at the end of his Good Book, the Origin of Species.
It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. ... There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Origin of Species, like the Gospels, is among the best of books because if you read it closely and carefully, it can lead you to good acts and good understandings. It can teach us to see ourselves in holy fellowship not just with other humans, but with all of life and all of nature. It can motivate us to strive to save the planet and each other, to fight iniquity and greed, ignorance and violence, to raise us from our fall from grace, and to end our alienation from Nature and the Divine. It is a Good Book that allows us to gaze at the divine spark in all of nature and see that the text written into flesh by descent with modification is sacred scripture and holy writ.
The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Henry Thoreau
