October 24: Great Thought, "The Neverending Story," Miracles

Sir James Jeans, British astronomer and physicist, suggested that the universe was beginning to look more like a great thought than a great machine.  Humanists seized on the expression, but it was hardly news.  We knew, looking around, that a thought branches and leafs, a tree comes to a conclusion.  But the question of who is thinking the thought is more fruitful than the question of who made the machine, for a machinist can of course wipe his hands and leave, and his simple machine still hums; but if the thinker's attention strays for a minute, his simplest thought ceases altogether.  And, as I have stressed, the place where we so incontrovertibly find ourselves, whether thought or machine, is at least not in any way simple.

Such an interesting argument.  Is the universe some great machine put into motion by God like some divine mechanic firing up a generator?  Or is it a notion, like Einstein's relativity or Hawking's black holes, spawned in the unknowable mind of the Supreme Being?  In the former, God can take a break, walk away from his creation as it hums along.  In the latter, if God takes a break, the universe ceases to be.

I don't know why this particular paragraph jumped out at me tonight.  I have been sitting in my university office, lesson planning, searching for teaching videos.  I have not spoken to or seen another person for close to three hours.  That kind of isolation makes me a little reflective.  Paranoid even.  For example, I just had this vision of God "taking a break" and the world outside my closed office door simply vanishing, like The Nothing eating up The Neverending Story.  When I open the door, I will be confronted by a void.  Emptiness.

Yes, I get in weird states when I work for extended periods of time by myself.  It's productive, but it also fuels the Stephen King lobe of my brain sometimes.  I know that there is still a hallway outside my door.  I just heard a couple of graduate students talking and laughing.  However, the idea of the universe being a machine does not appeal to me; I don't relish the thought of creation running on autopilot.  I prefer a more hand's on vision of the universe--God always attentive, tinkering, creating, throwing a miracle at us every once in a while.

I haven't experienced any miracles today.  Then again, I haven't been around a whole lot of people.  Perhaps, when I go to pick up my daughter from the dance studio, I will encounter something miraculous.  A unicorn crossing the street in front of my car.  A rainbow circling the moon.  A teenage daughter who is actually in a good mood.  It could happen.  Bob Dylan said, " . . . I've always thought there's a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there's a world to come."

Saint Marty just hopes that, in the world to come, teenage daughters make their beds and are nice to their little brothers.

I don't think I've ever been an agnostic. I've always thought there's a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there's a world to come.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/bob_dylan_4.html

I don't think I've ever been an agnostic. I've always thought there's a superior power, that this is not the real world and that there's a world to come.
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/b/bob_dylan_4.html

The Nothing is right outside the door