I suppose some of that comes from the illusion of simplicity that Newtons' Three Laws of Motion present. Just three simple short statements. Sure they complicated quickly, but still… there's just three of them. The thing is that they aren't really completely true. The math is only solvable in a few easy cases. And there's no way to account for chaos. As scientists say, "Nature is not easily persuaded to yield its secrets; we have to work hard."

It's the same with faith. And that's a lesson we can hear embedded in the mysterious Messianic secret that is broadly expressed in the Gospel reading today. Why should we expect religious questions to be easy if natural science ones are hard?

It is as my rabbi friend told me. God expects us to search for the Truth.

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But this month’s exhibit is probably my favorite of the six years I’ve been here. It’s a sculpture and painting exhibit that focuses on mathematical forms commonly seen in nature. The exhibition reminds me that there are times when we have our words fail us, and we find ourselves using metaphor to express that which we can’t express.

We talked a bit about that use of metaphor on the retreat I attended in Tucson last week. Science as well as theology often strays into metaphorical language. We seek to explain the things which cannot be easily explained. It’s not unlike the task of a poet I suppose. And so at our retreat, focusing on the fusion of Science and Theology we read a lot of poetry. I imagine if we’d held the retreat here at the Cathedral, we would have used the artwork presently on exhibit.

I’m including some pictures of the objects. If you’re ever here in Phoenix during the month of March I hope you’ll stop by and see them in person. We’re open all day Monday through Friday, 9 AM until 4 PM.

Particulars of the exhibit:

“Flower, Leaf & Metal”
an exhibition of art by
Annie Waters, Catherine Ruane and Kevin Caron
narrating quiet observations of nature’s ephemeral cycles through line, form and color

More info here.

Mary Midgley writes in review of Sheldrake’s book:

“The unlucky fact that our current form of mechanistic materialism rests on muddled, outdated notions of matter isn’t often mentioned today. It’s a mess that can be ignored for everyday scientific purposes, but for our wider thinking it is getting very destructive. We can’t approach important mind-body topics such as consciousness or the origins of life while we still treat matter in 17th-century style as if it were dead, inert stuff, incapable of producing life. And we certainly can’t go on pretending to believe that our own experience – the source of all our thought – is just an illusion, which it would have to be if that dead, alien stuff were indeed the only reality.

We need a new mind-body paradigm, a map that acknowledges the many kinds of things there are in the world and the continuity of evolution. We must somehow find different, more realistic ways of understanding human beings – and indeed other animals – as the active wholes that they are, rather than pretending to see them as meaningless consignments of chemicals.

Rupert Sheldrake, who has long called for this development, spells out this need forcibly in his new book. He shows how materialism has gradually hardened into a kind of anti-Christian faith, an ideology rather than a scientific principle, claiming authority to dictate theories and to veto inquiries on topics that don’t suit it, such as unorthodox medicine, let alone religion. He shows how completely alien this static materialism is to modern physics, where matter is dynamic. And, to mark the strange dilemmas that this perverse fashion poses for us, he ends each chapter with some very intriguing “Questions for Materialists”, questions such as “Have you been programmed to believe in materialism?”, “If there are no purposes in nature, how can you have purposes yourself?”, “How do you explain the placebo response?” and so on.”

The essay goes on to describe some of Sheldrake’s proposed solutions to the problem. Essentially he’s casting about for the next paradigm in a Kuhnsian sort of way that will allow us to break through to the next big organizing metaphor of scientific thought. None of the ones listed seem very compelling to me, but most of them coming out of biological imagery are not familiar to me, so I suppose that’s the reason I don’t warm to them.

I do rather like his idea that we move from the idea of regularities of behavior to habits. Apparently Sheldrake cites Neitsche, Whitehead and James (among others) as proponents of the idea. If I understand it, at least in terms of Whitehead’s thought, it’s sort of similar to moving from localized views of matter to process views of matter. Or thinking about momentum rather than location in a Heisenberg sort of formulation. (Or Hilbert space I suppose.)

But the key take away remains, what we call “facts” are actually much less well defined than we tend to imagine in the common mind. And that’s worth hammering on again and again. That’s the delusion that Sheldrake seems to be pointing out.

A friend pointed out to me that the state of the art thinking about DNA and the genome is that they’re less the blueprints of life as they are the poems from which life emerges. There’s a lot more improvisation going on than we expected. Life is not encoded, it is invoked – would be a way to say it I guess.

Except, that’s not true anymore. Or it hasn’t been at least since the beginning of the 20th century. Science in the 18th and 19th century was based on materialism. And Werner Heisenberg, he of the Uncertainty principle, believed that was a good way to demarcate the shift from one scientific world view to another, was to use the dominate scientific metaphor for matter as boundaries. Science in the 20th century moved from materialism to a quantum field metaphor.

Why the shift and how deeply has the new metaphor penetrated our common thinking? Mark Vernon deals with that question in an essay in the Guardian:

“Of materialism, [Heisenberg] wrote:

“[This] frame was so narrow and rigid that it was difficult to find a place in it for many concepts of our language that had always belonged to its very substance, for instance, the concept of mind, of the human soul or of life. Mind could be introduced into the general picture only as a kind of mirror of the material world.”

Today we live in the 21st century, and it seems that we are still stuck with this narrow and rigid view of the things. As Rupert Sheldrake puts it in his new book, published this week, The Science Delusion: “The belief system that governs conventional scientific thinking is an act of faith, grounded in a 19th-century ideology.”

That’s provocative rhetoric. Science an act of faith? Science a belief system? But then how else to explain the grip of the mechanistic, physicalist, purposeless cosmology? As Heisenberg explained, physicists among themselves have long stopped thinking of atoms as things. They exist as potentialities or possibilities, not objects or facts. And yet, materialism persists.”

That many outside the “academy” are still caught up in 19th century paradigms isn’t just the case in Science of course. In theology and biblical studies, people are still using the atomized bible of the Princeton Method to prove logical assertions about divinity. Even though we know that an atomized reading the Bible is just wrong. The fundamental unit of the bible seems to be the story, not the verse.

It’s striking to me how many of the major culture war battlefields of our present day are ultimately based on the perceived conflict between Science and Religion. The irony though is that most of the conflict seems to be based on using an older interpretation of Science (materialism) or Theology (Biblical atomism) and not on the current broadly accepted scholarly paradigms.

Perhaps one of the first steps in moving people back from the battle lines would be to help spread the meme that Science is no longer based in materialism. (And that Theology is not done by proof-texting too, but I think we can start with Science first.)

Any ideas how to do that? Other than blogging about it of course… Heh.

I’ll probably have much more to say about the organization over time and the new friends I’ve made this week. (There’s something wonderful about being a room with people who are struggling to do the same sort of thing that you’ve been trying to do. Both to discover that there are others, and to learn so many new insights from their journeys.) But I wanted to share the quote from G.K. Chesterton about Fairy Tales. I’m sorry to admit that I’d not known of it previously.

The form I heard this week in one of the meditations led by a society member was:

Fairy tales are more than true — not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.

It’s not Chesterton directly apparently, it’s an epigrammatic form first published by Neil Gaiman in 2004.

But there’s a world of metaphor waiting to be unlocked in it.

So that’s my task today and tomorrow. To contemplate the mystery of the metaphor of the dragons who can be beaten.

N.B.: I’m adding a new category to this blog that I’m titling SOSc – my plan is to use it for posts that discuss the task of integrating Religious and Scientific cosmologies (world views)

We are entering an era in which we are effectively going through a economic phase change. In physics, when we move through a phase change, physical characteristics of the material begin to go “critical” and fluctuate wildly the closer we get to the transition. According to economists, the same thing is happening with oil prices. And it’s not going to stop for a long while.

John Timmer, writing on Nobel Intent points out what follows:

“That has some pretty significant consequences. Of the 11 recessions the US has experienced since World War II, 10 have been preceded by a sudden change in oil prices. The US isn’t alone, either. Italy’s entire trade deficit, which has contributed to its financial troubles, can be accounted for by the rise in imported oil. The world, it seems, has allowed its economies to become entirely dependent upon fossil fuels. “If oil production can’t grow, the implication is that the economy can’t grow either,” the authors write. “This is such a frightening prospect that many have simply avoided considering it.”

And it’s not just oil that poses problems. US coal production peaked in 2002, and the global peak has been predicted to hit as soon as 2025. The last time global coal reserves were evaluated, in 2005, the total was cut by more than half compared to previous estimates. Fracking has boosted the production of natural gas dramatically, but even here the authors find some reasons for concern. Recent reports suggest that shale gas reserves have been overestimated, and many fields that have been in production for a while have experienced large declines in production.

The commentary concludes that we simply can’t rely on any fossil fuel to provide a stable and economic source of energy for more than a couple of decades. And, given the economic shocks that result from rapid changes in energy prices, that’s a serious problem. “Economists and politicians continually debate policies that will lead to a return to economic growth,” the authors note. “But because they have failed to recognize that the high price of energy is a central problem, they haven’t identified the necessary solution: weaning society off fossil fuel.”"

More here.

So what for churches? Big floor-space buildings are going to become increasingly expensive to heat and cool. So are homes. Apparently the era of large homes is over – and for the first time in years, the average floor space of new construction is decreasing.

Episcopal church buildings, built for the most part in the early part of the 20th century (or the latter part of the 19th) are pretty well adapted to an era of high energy prices. They’re small. They have high ceilings and small windows. Sometimes they have thick rock walls. They tend to be in areas where significant numbers of people can get to church without too much transportation expense.

But that’s also a bit of curse. The small size means that average attendance might necessarily be less than 200 people a Sunday – because that’s the most you can seat at one time. But that would put a congregation squarely into a class of congregations (transitional and maybe pastoral size) where the present economics are wrecking havoc with sustainable business models of congregation life. Such congregations can barely afford full-time seminary trained clergy. But with the move to the 1979 prayer book, and Eucharist being the “primary act of Christian worship on a Sunday” the need for regular clergy has increased. It’s those congregations that are feeling the squeeze right now.

But they’re also the most likely to flourish in the new high-energy cost economy. The question is how to move to a new way of providing for the needs of the congregation? I suspect that it’s going to require multiple actions to discover. We’ll need to actively conserve energy costs. Health insurance costs are going to have to be contained somehow. Congregational staffing is going to have to be rethought. Perhaps we’ll move to an à la carte clergy model in some places. I expect congregations will share resources more intentionally both in the diocese and with local ecumenical groups. Stewardship is going to look different too I think. People are not going to know from year to year how much gas and oil are going to cost, and until people can move closer to work that’s going to deeply effect family finances. Maybe endowments will help?

Got any other ideas? ‘Cause the time for ideas is now. We’ve arrived.

iTunes University and other similar tools make it very easy to share world-class lectures. But that’s only part of what’s involved in getting an education. There’s the issue of mastering the material, not just consuming it. And then there’s the issue of demonstrating mastery.

A professor at Wheaton College, Alan Jacobs, talks about this very question in terms of “credentialing” – or giving a student some sort of imprimatur that tells the rest of the world that the student is now the master.

Jacobs writes of how Universities are going to have to unbundle the services they provide:

“But now: unbundling. Clearly, many universities have come, or are coming, to the conclusion that their primary product is the credentialing, and that they can give knowledge away either as a public service or as brand consolidation (choose your interpretation according to your level of cynicism). Those 160,000 students may have learned a great deal about artificial intelligence, and the successful ones received a “statement of accomplishment … sent via e-mail and signed by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.” But in announcing the course the instructors were careful to note that the “statement of accomplishment … will not be issued by Stanford University.”"

Read the rest here.

The problem is particularly acute in theological education. We’ve effectively funded theological education for the past four decades by asking mid-life students to cash out the equity in their homes and use that to subsidize their and younger student’s educations. But the equity disappeared with the recent housing price collapse, and with it the business model of most of the seminaries in the Mainline denominations.

So how do we do education now? Perhaps by using freely available online education materials and asking local diocesan tutors (perhaps centered around diocesan cathedrals) to facilitate regular discussion and seminar classes on the material; not unlike how Community Colleges are using the free lectures being provided by MIT and Yale. The students get the best lecture material and they get the classroom discussions. Good!

The problem is certifying that the student has mastered the material in such a way as to be able to assure another diocese or congregation that the student is ready to be hired outside of the training diocese.

In the Episcopal Church we’ve used the General Ordination Exams to do some of that, but lately there’s been a great deal of dissatisfaction with the exams on the part of seminaries and dioceses. (The sense I hear is that the GOE’s are becoming quirky in what they’re testing.) I wonder if it’s time for the Episcopal Church to have a conversation about rethinking the GOE’s and the work of Seminaries so that working in concert they can manage the issue of certification.

If clergy are going to take on the rabbinical role in the community that is being increasing expected of them, we probably need to be moving in this direction.

Two years ago Arizona passed Senate Bill 1070 (SB1070). It made being in Arizona without proper immigration documentation a State as opposed to a Federal crime. (The Federal Statutes still apply.) The passage was highly contested but never in doubt. The Republican majority in the State Legislature was pretty much uniformly in support of the measure and with a roughly 2/3rds majority there was nothing the minority party could do except complain in the press.

But the Feds took action after the law was passed and through the courts blocked most of the implementation portions. There have still been some economic repercussions (though mixed admittedly) and we’ve seen a lot of national attention (mostly bad).

The biggest consequence of the passage of SB1070 and the way it was passed was the awful effect it has had on the way people in Arizona talk to each other. The Democrats here have promised to do all in their power to repeal the law. The Republicans who still hold a majority, but have seen their primary sponsor of the bill, who was the President of the State Senate, recalled and defeated in a special election, are insisting fervently that they will defend the law and protect the state against the ILLEGALS. (Note that the rhetoric has reduced the families who were invited to come to the state decades ago to provide cheap non-unionized labor are no longer people or neighbors, they’re illegals.)

Yesterday there were a series of rallies at the State Capital. The Latino community joined by the Democratic caucus held a rally complaining about SB1070 and the way it has harmed the state and “poisoned” relationships. The Republicans promised to resist all efforts toward repeal. The new State Senate President is quoted as saying to effect, “Any bill that I receive to repeal SB1070 is going into a special drawer in my desk. And it’s not coming out.”

In other words, the minority can expect no hearing of their concerns by the legislature. They should not expect the government to act in their interest. It will only act in the interest of the majority.

And thus can die the belief in democratic government. Perhaps that’s why the Founders insisted we were a Republic.

That statement by the new Senate President encapsulates much of what I think is happening here now, and soon to happen across our country. The present majority is refusing to govern for the Common Good, to seek consensus, and instead is using their majority to dismiss voices they disagree with. It’s the learned behavior of the “Echo Chamber“- turing the dial away from a dissenting voice to one we agree with.

The problem for the present majority is that very soon, perhaps in less than a generation, they will cease to be the majority. They are going to become the minority, and I fear the new majority will want revenge. (Unless a saintly voice such as Arcbishop Tutu arises as he did in South Africa after the fall of Apartheid.) The people in the present majority here in this state know this, and I believe, fear it. That’s what leads us to the sort of rhetoric and inflammatory politics we’re hearing and seeing.

Don’t for a moment imagine this fear isn’t present in the Church as well. Much of the anguish felt within the various branches of Christendom here in the United States has to do with the passing of one majority voice for another. Sometimes it’s happening gracefully. Sometimes it’s not. And sometimes the new majority learns from the old majority how to use their new found power to oppress others the same way they were oppressed.

What’s the solution?

I don’t know. But I know that the sort of rhetoric and the unwillingness to seek consensus and broad Common Good is going to make the inevitable demographic transition worse for all. Worse for the new minority. Worse for the souls of the new majority.

I suppose the best we can do is to create small communities of reconciliation anywhere we can. Because knowing each other, recognizing each other’s common humanity is probably the only way to escape.

As one of the Hispanic children here at our Cathedral said unguardedly to his Anglo Sunday School teacher; “I hate white people. But you’re okay.” And then looked at his face with something close to wonderment.

What does Jesus say? “Make friends for yourself by means of unrighteous mammon…”

What about us?

We've started a weekly parish Evensong at the Cathedral. When we preach at the service, there's more time to fully develop an idea. In this particular sermon, in the first part, as I introduce what I mean by the idea of "reverse cropping" I talk at a bit of length of the history of this blog and the meaning of the image at the top of this page.

If you've ever wondered about such things, hopefully you'll find your answer.

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Between email subscribers and the 200 or so of you who read my posts by RSS subscription, and the 200+ people who just load this page the old fashioned (in their web browsers) there’s quite a little community going. Thank you for that. I learn more from your comments than I imagine you do from my posts. Some of you have been instrumental in helping me think through theological issues, or have pointed out something to me about the implications of an experiment that I totally missed.

And that fact that so many people are willing to have my natterings clog up their email regularly is quite humbling.

But in case you don’t visit the web page very often, I should probably tell you that I share much more than appears here on the blog. I link to lots of articles, that are interesting, but, for whatever reason, not “bloggable” via my twitter account. (http://twitter.com/wnknisely)

There’s a similar number who follow my twitter account as who subscribe to the blog via email, but I’m thinking those are two roughly non-congruent sets of folks. So, if you want more, now you know where to find it.

And thanks for reading. Seriously. I’ve been quiet here for a while mostly because of a bad case of writer’s block. But that seems to be clearing for a whole bunch of reasons. Knowing you’re here helps.