Infinity II
Infinity is the pause between the words, “Will you go to prom with me?”..... and her response
I wrote an earlier essay about Infinity , which fascinates me. Great minds have considered infinity, so this adds only infinitesimally to that inquiry, if at all. Yet...this great humbler, infinity, seems so important to think about when people of every belief and practice seem to claim they have a monopoly on what is right or wrong.
Infinity is the pause between the words, “Will you go to prom with me?” and her response. It is the distance between the outstretched hand of a child a foot too close to the cliff and her mother’s reach. It is the amount of money you don’t have that it would take to give your father the kind of place he needs to live in dignity in his older years. Infinite is the amount of something – time, distance, number—that stretches, seemingly unattainably, before you or after you, above you or below you, outside your ability to imagine or inside the depths of your soul. So in one sense infinity is a perception that we have, based on our own emotions and situation.
In another sense, infinity is the great equalizer, for nothing – no rhetoric, no posturing, no convenient solution, no arrogance, no prejudice – no “truth” – can withstand the inexorable, inevitable revelation the infinite lays bare. It may not take ten years, maybe not ten thousand years, but sooner or later the infinite will reveal all our secrets, all our weaknesses, those with hidden strengths or unrecognized courage, and every petty act, every violation of body or spirit. If we think Big Brother will inexorably and inevitably be able to track our every move today and uncover our every indiscretion of yesterday, we can surely imagine a future when our very thoughts and intentions, hidden now, will be open to the public. And not just to the public on our “pale blue dot”, as Sagan dubbed our very tiny, quite out-of-the-way planet, but to our universe and the universes beyond them. Whether or not others, trillions of light years out there in space and time, will really care if we ran a red light or worse is another question.
Infinity makes the notion of American “exceptionalism” laughable, for if there are infinite numbers of stars and planets then there are infinite numbers of the United States of America, and some, no doubt, don’t succumb to the hubris that sooner or later makes the exceptional devolve into the mediocre, makes the conqueror into the conquered.
In still another sense, infinity is a scientific concept. One of the Gifford Lecturers was astrophysicist John D. Barrow, who wrote “ The Infinite Book: A Short Guide to the Boundless , Timeless, and Endless ” (Barrow, 2005). He points out, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that “Our experience of space and time is rather limited. We have been to the moon. We have personal experience of just decades or years, have historical records of thousands of years, and can dig up fossil rocks that stretch back a few billion years” (p. 260). Scientists keep discovering galaxies that are billions of light years away. One of the latest galaxies discovered is only 13.2 billion light years distant from Earth. Scientists spotting it today are looking at it how it was 600 million years after the Big Bang, which was 13.8 billion years ago (Howard, 2015).
Here on Earth we are sitting on 2019 CE.
And in a final sense, infinity is a religious and a spiritual concept. Infinity was considered “seditious” (Barrow, 2005, p. 2) for thousands of years. God, and nothing else, was supposed to be infinite. Earth was the center of the universe according to the Bible, and the whole idea of creation, set right here on this planet, just wouldn’t have the same, well y’know, if there might be many places in the universe where worlds with living beings on them might exist. No wonder threats, like Galileo or Giordano Bruno, to the idea that the Earth was the center of the universe were dealt with harshly, Galileo by forced confinement; Bruno by the fire of the stake.
As telescopes got better, the universe got bigger and bigger. And then infinitely bigger. As our scientific knowledge grew so did our abilities to think about time, and space, and numbers as infinite. So if science can explain infinity, does that leave religion anything? No wonder the idea of infinity was considered a threat to the church.
But the interesting idea about infinity is that no one knows, nor can anyone hope to know ever, who or what ultimately created everything. Were there multiple gods creating multiple universes before the Big Bang and we just ended up on this one? And then who or what created them? If time is infinite and there are infinite possibilities for the way molecules will interact in the future, then the odds must be infinitely high that we will live again. If this meta-universe continues on forever, won’t our ancestors or other creatures have the time and technology to figure out every question we have about anything?
Or maybe the questions'll just keep on comin'. That's my guess.
Scientists view the natural laws, which seem to transcend time and space, as inviolable. These laws are the rock upon which these geniuses stand, and it’s a pretty solid rock for our little universe. But what if these laws are moot or work differently or are replaced by something completely different in a pre-Big Bang or post-current-universe world? So much for their rock. So…infinity can be a threat not only to religious beliefs but also to scientific beliefs. Which is why infinity humbles - or should humble - both the wisest of the scientists and the wisest of the theologians. When we come to terms with the indisputable argument that we human beings cannot know everything, then no one of us can claim to possess “Truth”. I mean really, given infinity, how can anyone claim that any of our religious traditions or denominations or sects or cults – here on this little Earth in this tiny, tiny, tiny speck of time – are the one and only truth in the universe? That our human-made dogma, and doctrine, are the ONLY realities, the only path, in a trillion trillion trillion (and so on…). stars universe?
C’mon.
The same is true of the scientific method,
behaviorism, astrophysics, cosmology, and every other “science” that purports
to convey truth. Scientist know they can’t prove anything, but can only get
closer to what might be truth. But all bets are off, even with those claims, if
we consider infinity.
So this is, as it should be, humbling. It would be easy to get lost in infinity and immobilized when considering that we are standing on unending sand. That is why I think Richard Rohr’s advice is important. Rohr was sharing a series of daily meditation about his “wisdom lineage”, those writers, writings, and traditions that have influenced the development of his own thinking. And in that process he shared a range of influences. In one of these meditations he encouraged, following the wisdom of James Finley and Thich Nhat Hanh, among others, people to:
"Find your practice and practice it. Find your teacher and follow him/her. Find your community and be faithful to it. Otherwise, you will tend to float around with no accountability system for what you too easily "believe" in your head. Your own ego will end up being the decider and chooser moment by moment" (Rohr, 2015).
This is certainly is important to me. I am a United Methodist. I have been all my life, my parents were (though my mom grew up Baptist), and my grandparents were. I don’t know further than that, but I do know that my grandfather had the loudest voice in Sunday service, especially when we sang songs like the Old Rugged Cross. He went to Boston Divinity School to become a preacher – he’d started before that preaching in the oil fields close to our homestead in southern Kansas – and had to drop out of school to make a living when my dad was born. I grew up in a Methodist family. I am Methodist, and it’s a religion and denomination that I love and feel at home in.
That doesn’t mean that I limit myself – in beliefs or practices – to Methodism. In recent years I have felt a strong resonance with the Catholic faith and Buddhist practices. A few years ago I was introduced to paganism, and it was a rich learning experience as well. Judaism, in the writings of Heschel and the practices of the kabbalah, draw me powerfully too, though I have barely scratched the surface of any of these.
Barrow (2005) helpfully lists ways in which we might consider infinity:
- The idea that time has no end
- Cycles
- The Supreme Being
- Unending Space
- Counting
- Subdivision
- Patterns
- Possibilities
Considering any one of these could boggle the mind, but considering all of them can only confirm that infinity connects us to awe and wonder and, therefore, to reverence; inevitably, to the irreverence which tests all claims of truth; and ultimately to more profound, yet never complete, wisdom.
References:
Barrow, J. D. (2005). The infinite book: a short guide to the boundless, timeless, and endless (1st American ed.). New York: Pantheon Books.
The Gifford Lectures: Over 100 years of lectures on natural theology.). Retrieved 7-12-15, from http://www.giffordlectures.org/
Howard, J. (2015). Astronomers Discover Most Distant Galaxy Yet. Huffpost Science. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/most-distant-galaxy_55c26147e4b0f7f0bebb6662?utm_hp_ref=science&kvcommref=mostpopular
Rohr, R. (2015). Jean-Pierre de Caussade Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation. Retrieved from https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#search/rohr/14eed0ced062c4f2
Sagan, C. (2006). The varieties of scientific experience: a personal view of the search for God. New York: Penguin Press.
