God is here now, ready to help us -- a reason for Hope!

As a Scientist I believe in GOD, and a GOD who is right here ready to help us all if we simply turn and tune in and ask for help.   There, I said it, and put my career in Science on the line.

But, I put the word GOD in all capitals because I'm using that word in an uncommon sense, and need to keep reminding my readers that I am doing that.   In today's language,  I am talking about God-2.0,  a new version of God, like a new, improved version of a video game or App.   And there, I said it, so now I have also offended and outraged most Religious communities.

I'm losing friends and "Likes" and followers pretty fast here.    But I press onward, undaunted.

I want to address this post to the people who made it this far in reading it -- those who are willing to believe that our context, our universe on Earth,   is alive, awake, aware of us,  and at least partially responsive to our behaviors, actions, and words.   Maybe it's not Jupiter, or Thor, or some old white guy with a long beard on a throne in the sky, but there is definitely something going on here that rises above simply nature or even a larger term "Nature". 

And this is important because whatever is going on here, I believe,  interacts with us heavily in everything we do and to ignore it is to completely misunderstand why some things we do fail and why others succeed,  and to miss out on opportunities to succeed with way less effort and much greater impact in our daily lives.     We are immersed in and swimming in a sea of "tough love" -- it is not our servant to tap into and order about like some Genie in a bottle or some mystical loving parent, though it can "come through for us" and give us things that we would never achieve unaided.  It also is "tough" because there are some facts, rules, guidelines, restrictions on what sort of things we can get assistance on. 

We have to live by its rules, not expect it to live by ours.  This is no different from learning to live with the Law of Gravity -- it just is a fact we can like, hate, believe in, deny it, but regardless it will "rule" our lives all the same.    We all understand Gravity.   There is no "magic" involved,  just higher mathematics which, fortunately, we can be content to let other people understand.  This is just the way things are.   It is no big deal.    We can adjust to it and live with it.

So we all accept that there are things-like-Gravity,   part of the structural design of the world we live in, that we just have to live with.   A good question, and one that we never really articulate and ask out loud in school is

"How many more things like Gravity are there that we need to know about?"

Very much like the "Artificial Life" that I described in my last post here,  the definition of the term keeps changing as we learn more and more,  as it should.  After all we started with a very weak notion of what Artificial Life could be, and it truly needed updating over time.

Sadly,  just suggesting that we raise the question of whether we have this concept,  the meaning of the word "God" as correct and nuanced as possible, and as helpfully defined as possible,  raises a firestorm of heated outrage from all sides - Science, Religion,  and Atheism!   It is discouraging and I must digress for a moment to reflect upon why that is.

In fact, this digression takes up the rest of this post and I have to defer what I was actually trying to point to to my next post in order to keep this reasonably short and coherent.

Over the last 5000 years, as society has evolved, we learned more about the world around us. We added new concepts to our thinking, and refined old ones.   That is a normal and natural process,  which continues at a dizzying pace today, and we need more of it. 

It seems there are three distinct kinds of "facts" that behave quite differently when we try to update them in our minds and in society.  

There are neutral facts that no one cares if we change;  there are socially-connected facts that rock the boat somewhat if changed, but in a tolerable way;  and there are deeply-rooted-beliefs that set the boat on fire and overturn it if changed, and which trigger violent response, even death,  if even challenged, let alone changed.

No one ever seems to mention this or teach it, but it's a very useful distinction to learn.

So long as Scientists retreated from society and focused on neutral facts, like "momentum" they could play happily and no one really noticed or cared, unless maybe a cool documentary on the Discovery Channel came along to share.  Most of the so-called STEM subjects are in this category, and it is also termed "hard science" ,  a misnomer if there ever was one.

Socially-connected-facts are things like Psychology or Sociology or Economics or, surprise,  Geology and Astronomy.    Groups of people have set up camp around certain exact meanings of these facts,  and become agitated if someone rocks the boat.   The camps take on shape and names and become things like the "Chicago School of Economics".    Groups argue often heatedly about who has the better understanding and meaning of the same words.  But in general no one actually dies.

Deeply-rooted-beliefs, as I mentioned above, set the boat on fire and capsize it if challenged or changed.   Not just small camps, but entire nations or cultures argue heatedly over who is right and often are quite willing to go to war, killing or being killed in great numbers, to protect their own understanding of certain words and concepts.    Protestants go to war with Catholics in Ireland.  Sunni Muslims go to war with Shiites in most of the Middle East.   Christian Crusaders invade and attack all of Islamic civilization in the Middle Ages.    Scientists like Galileo, suggesting the Earth is not in fact the center of the solar system,  risked death if they did not recant.

But these deeply-rooted-beliefs are not just about religion, or culture, or the role of women in society, or differences between races and racial identity.    So called Scientists also become emotionally attached to and even ardent defenders of certain understandings.    Revolutions and changes in "paradigms" such as Quantum Mechanics,  Plate Tectonics, or the nature of "disease" ( invisible tiny organisms living inside us? Really?!!!) were fiercely denounced and resisted and proponents of new ideas excluded from funding or mocked and shunned.

Heck, even the guy Ignaz Semmelweis who realized that women were dying in childbirth in the hospital because surgeons were not washing their hands, and tried to tell them that,  was driven out of practice and put in a mental institution where he quickly died. 

There are things that some people do not want to hear.

Anyway,  where all this was going is that the subject of the nature of GOD is one of those live-wire, hot-button topics that typically causes much heat and no light to emerge from a discussion or attempt to study and grasp the kernel of truth out of the shell of attached meanings of old.

I've spent most of my life believing that there is, indeed, something, some kernel of Truth that matters to me,   buried in and tangled up inside this bundle of meanings attached to the word GOD.  Yes, most of the simplistic meanings are just laughable and can be dismissed out of hand.  There is no dude in a white robe sitting on a throne running or ruining our lives.

But on the other hand, there are some aspects of reality that are as important as the Law of Gravity,  but equally invisible, that still change the outcome of what we try to do as surely as they change the trajectory of a ball we throw upwards.

It is just plain wrong not to try to investigate, in a clear-headed, skeptical but curious manner,  what those structural laws and design features of the world around us might be.  In my book, that is precisely what Science is all about and we should not be deterred by skulls on stakes and big signs that say "Forbidden territory -- all hope abandon ye who enter here!"

Heck with that.  Let's go see what is over there on the other side of the police tape.

To be continued in my next post!

One Common Faith

The booklet title One Common Faith , prepared under the supervision of the Baha'i central administrative body (The Universal House of Justice, 2005) has been recommended for group study. The starting point is this:

Ancient sectarian conflicts ... have re-emerged with a virulence as great as anything known before... A world... is warned that it is in the grip of civilizations whose defining character is irreconcilable religious antipathies. (page 7)

I want to bring some concepts from science to the discussion, and show how they fit with the theological and sociological arguments that are in the booklet. In some ways, this is a translation, as best I can, at first pass, of the document into "scientific" terms. It will be imperfect and I'm hoping that, with comments from you, dear reader, it can be improved. Hopefully, the discussion will not cause any additional hostility. ("First of all, do no harm!")

To that end, let me state that I'm going to look at some apparently depressing facts, but the end of the story will be optimistic, hopeful, and action oriented. My take on life is that, despite all the gloom and doom, some aspects of the global community have never been better, and, with the use of the web and instant global communications, we have an opportunity to improve the process that no generation in history has ever had before. This by itself is astounding, and means the past cannot be used to predict the future.

Part of the reason for the resurgence of religion is described in the booklet as the "bankruptcy of the materialist enterprise itself" -- the failure of various efforts whether secular, humanitarian,
social and economic development, modernization, globalization to make good on their promise to improve life for most of us. The promise of "freedom from want [and] fulfilment for the human spirit" has not been met.

I'd note that not only is the gap growing between rich and poor, as has been well document elsewhere, but even within the USA, as I described yesterday, the "economic miracle" seems to be sinking. Gasoline hit $3.59 a gallon in my town yesterday. Housing foreclosures are at record levels. Layoffs abound. Personal savings has gone negative and hit a rate not seen since 1933 in the "Great Depression". Obesity, depression, diabetes, asthma are rising rapidly. And so on while people seem, individually and collectively, numbed into a type of helpless-hopeless passive despair, as I described in "A Patient Dies in Los Angeles" , occasionally breaking out into extreme violence, and resurgences of anger, blame, hate crimes, and racism, individually and collectively. Why isn't this economic model working?


The answer given in One Common Faith, to paraphrase, is that we have "thrown out the baby with the bathwater." Observing the abuses and downside of religious thinking and warfare, our society attempted to break free of those problems by discarding religion and God and adopting a "scientific" and materialistic model where "competition" and "free-markets", it was argued, will produce the best possible social outcomes. Exactly how and why that was supposed to work was vaguely described as "The invisible hand of Adam Smith" or some version of "survival of the fittest", although I can't recall ever seeing a simulation model showing that individual unbridled local self-interest produced the maximum benefit for all and a stable society. (If you know of one, please comment.) And, regardless what any model might show, the actual outcome was described yesterday, and looks more like economic and social ruin than "The Great Society."

On page 12 it is argued that "global integration" has only perpetuated and intensified gross inequities, resulting in

a questioning of all established authority, no longer merely that of religion and morality, but also of government, academia, commerce, the media, and, increasingly, scientific opinion. (p12)

and

Loss of faith in the certainties of materialism and the progressive globalizing of human experience reinforce one another int he longing they inspire for understanding about the purpose of existence. Basic values are challenged; parochial attachments are surrendered; one unthinkable demands are accepted. (para 16)

Despite the tremendous accomplishments of religiously inspired actions in the past, the question is raised as to why people are not turning to that spiritual literature for guidance today - or, if they are turning to it, not finding relevant guidance.

The problem is, of course, twofold. The rational soul does not merely occupy a private sphere, but is an active participant in a social order. Although the received truths of the great faiths remain valid the daily experience of the individual in the twenty-first century is unimaginably removed from the one that he or she would have known in any of those ages when this guidance was revealed. ... In large part therefore, loss of faith in traditional religion has been an inevitable consequence of failure to discover in it the guidance required to live with modernity successfully and with assurance.

A second barrier to a re-emergence of inherited systems of belief as the answer to humanities spiritual yearnings is the effects already mentioned of global integration. Throughout the planet, people raised in a given religious frame of reference find themselves abruptly thrown in close association with others whose beliefs and practices appear at first glance irreconciably different from their own. ...

Each one of what the world regards as independent religions is set in the mould created by its authoritative scripture and its history. As it cannot refashion its system of belief in a manner to derive legitimacy from the authoritative words of its Founder, it likewise cannot adequately answer the multitude of questions posed by social and intellectual evolution. Distressing as this may appear to many, it is no more than an inherent feature of the evolutionary process. ...

The dilemma is both artificial and self-inflicted.
(para 21 and 22)

There are several familiar threads in this section I'd like to


highlight, and bring the experiences of some other fields to bear on. The concepts I'd focus on are these:

1. The idea that "truth" depends on context.
2. The idea that context changes over time.
3. The question of how what should change over time so as to preserve "truth".
4. The question of sliding the respective "truths" of different religious founders across time and comparing them to see how much they agree, after correcting for the distortions produced by context shifts.

I focus on those because those are actually the core issues that are pondered and completely solved in the entirely "scientific" area of "General Relativity" - which is the study, basically, of how to make measurements and think and operate in a world in which context (space-time) and content (matter and energy) interact bidirectionally and affect each other, producing many "fictitious forces" that are artifacts of the accidental details of each careful observer's reference frame in which they are inextricably and invisibly embedded. (See my earlier post on Context versus Content, Silos and the Electronic Health Record. )

In other words, I'm saying that the concepts necessary to understand what is happening to religious truth over time have already been developed in science, but never been brought to bear on the problem in theology.

This is not surprising, because the concepts have an aura of "complexity" that "only Einstein" would be able to understand, because they are so "alien and unfamiliar".

Well, I've scouted out that territory, taken a good, solid graduate-level course in General Relativity, solved those equations, and can report back that this material is not at all that scary if you hide the math in the calculator and just use the results.

Furthermore, it is not at all "alien." In fact, we are born being comfortable with these ideas -- such as the fact that, in general, the volume of a liquid depends on its shape -- and then, as Piaget showed, we have these beaten out of us by "education" and finally "learn" that volume doesn't depend on shape, and that the tall, skinny glass of juice has the same amount as the short, wide glass it was just poured from. The problem is that, THEN, when these students reach grad school, trying to teach them that volume does, in fact, in general, depend on shape except on small, cold, rocky places like the Earth, they find the idea that was native and "came with the unit" to now be "unthinkable."

I have to wrap this up for the day and will continue working my way through "One Common Faith" in the next few days, tying it into the related scientific concepts that help understand it.

Let me close by at least pointing out that the idea that things change shape as they are slid through space or time is captured in the concept from General Relativity (or Hilbert Space mathematics) called "parallel displacement" or "vector transplantation."

In "curved" spaces, which are common on cosmological scales, the way things change as you slide them across space and time can be exactly computed, and therefore it can be "backed out" of the equations and corrected for. Seemingly inconsistent observations, such as two observers each seeing the other's clock run more slowly than their own" can be completely explained, predicted, and corrected for, revealing the beauty of an underlying, absolute reality, the perception of which was distorted by each observer's invisibly distorted reference frame,
and the attempt to measure straight lines with curved rulers.

Fascinatingly, the key concept comes down to what paths light travels, or "geodesics", as light's path pretty much defines "straight." That should be of particular interest to Baha'is, as the word itself means "light of God."

What is really fascinating is to imagine taking all the great religious prophets of time, assuming that they are all saying the same thing (plus noise in the reporting), and computing whether a single consistent curvature of space-time could be applied to bring them all into perfect alignment. Or, if not perfectly aligned, the "transported versions" of them could be tweaked slightly to fit the shared truth great grand estimate, then the process reversed and the "tweaks" transported back to the original context, and assessed to see if those would in fact be legitimate and acceptable small changes in concept of the source religious doctrine or not.

I'm not exactly sure how to do it, but the very fact that science does say that such a thing is conceptually possible is really important to grasp - that there are techniques to figure out what properties transport over time as "constants" and which ones transport over time as "invariants" and which as "covariants" and what properties will be preserved regardless and which ones will appear to change, due to the change in context.

If we don't even use that basic level of mathematics to compare two religions it's hard to know how we expect to tell whether, at the core, they agree with each other or not. We will be overwhelmed with accidental changes due to reference frame changes that look like they matter, but that, in the final analysis, add up to exactly zero difference.

It's time to cross-breed these scientific and religious issues. Quoting from my old textbook,
Introduction to General Relativity (Adler, Bazin, and Schiffer, McGraw-Hill, 1965), on page 16,

In order to make these general and rather abstract considerations more specific, we shall have to develop an elegant notation and proper mathematical tools which are provided by the theory of tensor analysis. The basic problem of tensor analysis is the determination of those constructs and concepts which are independent of the accidental choice of the coordinate system employed.

This, in my mind, is exactly the same problem that is involved in showing that all the world's major religions have, at their core, exactly the same constructs and concepts, underneath the apparent differences due to the "accidental choice" of reference frame in which those constructs had to be expressed at that time and place by the religion's Founder.

Science and Religion are on the same quest, trying to look through the surface complexity and noise, and see the constant Beauty behind and under it all. Science is starting at local details and working upwards, Religion is working at the global scale and working downwards, and, when they meet in the middle, if we've done our sums correctly, the two large pieces should mesh perfectly and the larger picture be revealed.

How neat is that!

Tomorrow (I hope) I'll expand on the phrase quoted above "The rational soul does not merely occupy a private sphere, but is an active participant in a social order" and explore what the current evidence in public health and social epidiology teach us about changing concepts of the nature of "an individual" and why we need a larger concept to explain the very solid biomedical data from the majority of studies that show that "connectivity" of an individual to society is the major predictor of biomedical outcomes - disease, poverty, death, heart-attacks, obesity, violence, suicide - you name it. This whole area of very robust and solid scientific data from public health forces us to change the way we think about what it means to be a "person" and "an individual" in "society."

See: The hierarchy of life
and Key Findings from Public Health
for more information on what the data actually show about how "separate" we are from each other.

Photos of the "same" Earth from various viewpoints and times are from NASA.