Worlds...and miracles therein?

For Alexander there was no Far East,

Because he thought the Asian continent

India ended. Free Cathay at least

Did not contribute to his discontent.

But Newton, who had grasped all space, was more

Serene. To him it seemed that he'd but played

With several shells and pebbles on the shore

Of that profundity he had not made.

(Richard Wilbur)

I'm taking a class this semester called "Reality with Physics and Philosophy," an exploration of the physical laws that govern this monster we call the universe and how those might accommodate an active God or exclude an inactive one--or vice versa on both accounts. Now Schrodinger's cat makes sense to me, that the quantum mechanics of the universe suggest a probabilistic universe, even if that flies in the face of intuition and instinct. I understand general relativity as a reworking of the laws of gravitation that become problematic when we leave the earth's atmosphere, and time dilation and length contraction are all understandable in terms of Star Trek analogies (a Klingon ship approaches the Enterprise at warp speed with a photon beam that can only shoot perpendicularly to its target--should Captain Kirk fear for the crew's safety, or is Spock correct in assuring the worried Captain that all will be well??). Hume and Polkinghorne and discussions on miracles, however, are all entirely bothersome to me.

"Suppose," Hume offers, "for instance, that the fact, which the testimony endeavours to establish, partakes of the extraordinary and the marvellous; in that case, the evidence, resulting from the testimony, admits of a diminution, greater or less, in proportion as the fact is more or less unusual. The reason why we place any credit in witnesses and historians, is not derived from any connexion, which we perceive a priori, between testimony and reality, but because we are accustomed to find a conformity between them. But when the fact attested is such a one as has seldom fallen under our observation, here is a contest of two opposite experiences; of which the one destroys the other, as far as its force goes, and the superior can only operate on the mind by the force, which remains. The very same principle of experience, which gives us a certain degree of assurance in the testimony of witnesses, gives us also, in this case, another degree of assurance against the fact, which they endeavour to establish; from which contradiction there necessarily arises a counterpoize, and mutual destruction of belief and authority."

I'll forgive his disgusting overuse of commas and launch right into discontent--a miracle is something with a probability of zero. Lazarus being raised from the dead directly and violently violates of physics and the nature of death. Blind people being granted sight before Jordy's goggles even planted that idea in modern audiences' minds SHOULD NOT HAPPEN. Can the superior experiences of those who have died staying that way apart from our mythologies, of those born without sight forever resigned to encounter this world differently (not inadequately, just differently) be contradicted by Hume's opposite experience of a miracle...and win? Are there miracles? I had lunch with a professor I trust very much and asked him this question. "My daughter giving birth," he said, "was a miracle." Personally, my uncle was shot over 90% of his body and given less than a 1% chance of survival. To this day he professes the miracle of healing. But he wasn't dead. Have miracles been downgraded in our scientifically-advantaged times? Are they simply "cool things that happen," or are we actually having experiences with the divine? Have miracles been "prepared for," a thoughtful God writing their possibilities into the fabric of time and space, even if we don't understand their physics?

I suppose you can infer my real question--does God interact with the world he supposedly set in motion? I wish I could say yes, but I'm afraid that more and more I lean the other way...I want SO BADLY to believe in the God who cries over our suffering, and admits no design for it in creation but works against it in our sin, but I listened to a radio broadcast with a rabbi a while ago who has struggled heartbreakingly with the death of his son forty years ago of progeria (rapid-aging syndrome) and says he and God have reached "an accommodation with each other," recognizing each other's weaknesses and yet caring deeply for each other. Do miracles even matter, then? Some churches have the official stance that miracles were limited to the apostolic age, but then I think some working definition of miracle is necessary (of course it has been from the beginning, but even more so when drawing comparisons to Jesus' ministry and ours). Is it a phenomenological one, trying to explain events? Is it an epistemological one, trying to understand facts that don't quite fit our notion of truth? Is in an ontological one, trying to understand why things are the way they are?

So Polkinghorne (who only allows one miracle: the Resurrection) and Augustine (who preaches the presence of God at all times) don't really get along. And I can see how non-Christians might see miracles as evidence of a discriminating God. But again--the first thing we need is a definition. Perhaps all things can be explained in hindsight--hands healing back, only being able to read Scripture, the Red Sea parting for the Israelites...but perhaps the timing of such events matters more than we know. Perhaps the natural processes of this world can result in phenomena, but perhaps it is the timing that has been prepared for by God--those "one in a trillion" chances--that lay the foundation for God's dealings with humanity, and allow us to struggle with the ways we think he interacts with a fallen world that claims no need of him...

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (by William Carlos Williams, ecphrastically on Pieter Brueghel's painting of the same name)

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

you should go outside

...but not before listening to this song by Joanna Newsom.

DO IT.

all creation groans

I’ve a strange fascination with death, especially so as trying to understand it from a Christian perspective. We know of no thing that does not die, or, at least, nothing apart from “inanimate” objects. Our entire classification of what differentiates a living from a non-living organism centers on the fact that the former will, inevitably, have to face death. All evolutionary theories (and sociological theories, and psychological theories, and political theories, and culture theories, etc.) have as their underlying assumption the idea that our world longs to contradict its impending entropy, that we want to outrun death, that we want to survive. This world, with its limits and balances, sees death on all sides, and our existence as one large response to those boundaries.

Was our world created—was life created—with death in mind? Or have we just learned to adapt surprisingly well to it? Or are we even asking the right questions? Can we take the liberty of interpreting death (or facing it at the very least) in theological terms? If God foreknew that man would fall and yet still created us, is death the punishment for our ensuing sin, or is it, perhaps, the final show of His great love, a demonstration that there is a way out of this Paradise Lost, a promise that even the fall can be redeemed?

stuff white people think

In 2006, Smirnoff's viral video "Tea Partay" became one of youtube's most-watched videos. A satire of the New England "preppie" culture, it features P-Unit, a cohort of three pastel-colored polo shirt upper-middle class "old money" white rappers talking about their Ivy-league educations, croquet games, yacht rides and Martha's Vineyard vacations. An undeniably hilarious commentary, it exposes quite a startling truth, and raises an often unasked question: what, exactly, is white culture?

One of comedian Daniel Tosh's routines combats this quite bluntly. It's easy, he says, to imitate the "hispanic," "asian" and "black" stereotypes, or at least create a caricature that is fairly recognizable and understood as somewhere along an ethnically appropriate continuum. What is the white stereotype? Is it the plaid-clad hillbilly? Is it the glasses-wearing young intellectual? Is it the yuppie? Is it the American? the European? the Australian? the South African? Is white culture, perhaps, the most difficult to pin down? Is there an advantage in struggling to establish some identity of race and ethnicity, and how do we go about actually establishing it?

History would appear to comment on this in a tongue-in-cheek way; it was occurrences such as the slavery movement of pre-Civil War America, the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s and 60s, apartheid in South Africa, the Holocaust, the establishment of Native American reservations, etc., that seem to have been most influential and formative to that end. The effects of British, French, German, Dutch and Spanish imperialism don't seem to have extended so far into the present day lives of white people nearly as much as they have for those in Rwanda, the Phillipines, South Africa and Haiti, to name a few. Is the most accurate box to check in the ethnicity portion of a census questionnaire for a caucasian, then, "other?"

The Atlantic Monthly ran an article in January of 2009 called "The End of White America?" by Hua Hsu, a professor at Vassar College. The article included the following commentary from Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University. "[These students are in the midst of a racial-identity crisis.] They don't care about socioeconomics; they care about culture. And to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, 'I don't have a culture.' They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture...They feel disadvantaged, and they feel marginalized." Commenting on the self-deprecation which whites often employ in order to avoid external lambasting (Smirnoff's video as one example), Wray notes that "the best defense is to be constantly pulling the rug out from underneath yourself...You're forced as a white person into a sense of ironic detachment."

So it would appear that white culture is not so much bland as it is "unmarked." Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai explains unmarked culture to be "a virtually open-ended archive of differences" and marked culture to be one in which "particular differences are emphasized as constituting the defining features of group identity" (from Diaspora, identity, and religion: new directions in theory and research, by Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso). America's pride as the "melting pot" hasn't so much left it bereft of white culture as much as it has allowed white culture to be touched by all others, leaving its borders undefined and its constituents, well, in somewhat of a retro-diaspora.

All this to say, enjoy the two linked videos...thoughtfully, ironically and responsibly.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTU2He2BIc0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-q-4XKTHJGs&feature=related