"The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God"

I've been embarking on a new journey. It's one that, in some way or another, every person needs to go on. It's one that searches for the origins of the very fabric of our makeup, where we come from, and where we're going.

I've begun a book by the often controversial, always brilliant, late Carl Sagan. Before he died in 1996, he was professor of astronomy and space studes at the Lab for Planetary Studies at Cornell. He played a leading role in many NASA programs, including the Mariner, Viking and Voyager spacecraft expeditions. He received a Pulitzer, as well as an Emmy. He was the first to alert the public to the possibility to global warming and the potential consequences of nuclear war. Every since the age of ten, he's been wrestling with truth, grabbing it from every direction, both from religion and science.

His book (my title) is about his detailed thoughts on the relationship between religion and science and describes his personal search for the origin of life and the sacred in the vastness of the universe. So far, it's made me cry, humbled me, frustrated me, and helped me get an inkling of the shear size of the universe we live in. Can I let you in on what I've been learning? Ok, let's go.

I believe in order to truly worship our Lord, we must first understand what kind of creator He is. First, look at the image on the right. This is an artist's rendition of the what's called the Oort Cloud. The dimension of this cloud of planets and stars is a hundred thousand astronomical units (AU). For hundreds of years, we have not had the necessary instruments to see this, but now we do. Let me give you a little perspective of what you're looking at. The total number of worlds (that we know of) is somewhere in the ballpark of a trillion...that's a one followed by twelve zeros, of which Earth represents just one, all of in the family of the Sun. And our star, of course, is one of a vast multitude. This is just a scale of one of our neighboring star collections. Wow.





The next image (right) is just here to show what a magnificant imagination and intricacy our Creator has. It's one of the many nebulae, large clouds of interstellar gas and dust. The red color you see is actually glowing interstellar hydrogen. The black parts is so dense here that it can literally crush entire stars. This, however, is the beginnings of a totally new planetary system. Cool, huh?








The image to the left is called a supernova remnant, which is a star that has violently exploded. Anything close to this (and by close I mean a thousand million light~years away) would have surely been destroyed also. In fact, in about 5 billion years from now, our own Sun will become a red giant star like this and engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, and Earth and then would be inside the sun, and some of the problems that face us on this particular day will appear, by comparison, modest. It's a long ways off, but I would say that it has some serious and quite interesting theological implications.





The image to the right is one of just a smidgeon of the total galaxies (yes, galaxies) there are in our universe. Let me paint you a picture...put this in perspective. The center of this picture is the constellation Sagittarius. In this part, the sky is rippling with suns, altogether making up a couple hundred thousand million suns, making up our milky way galaxy. As far as we can tell, our Sun is no different from another shown here. There are more galaxies in the universe than stars within the Milky Way Galaxy, that is, at least in the thousands of millions. So what's my point? If you multiply out how many stars that means, it is some number--let's see, ten to the...it's something like one followed by twenty-three zeros, of which our Sun is but one. It is a useful calibration of our place in the universe.

Ok. So we've begun to see the scope of what we're dealing with here. What's my point? What am I trying to convey to you, the reader? Let me read you a quote from Carl Sagan.

If a Creator God exists, would He...prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would he prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship.

In my opinion, if God has given us the gifts of curiosity and intelligence to explore our universe and come closer to understanding just what kind of god we're dealing with...I think it would be unappreciative to suppress that passion. The enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science (my limited knowledge of it); it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species. Hope this has challenged your thinking a bit...

Pandemic

The Truth:

• Over 22 million people have died from AIDS.
• Over 42 million people are living with HIV/AIDS, and 74 percent of these infected people live in sub-Saharan Africa.
• Over 19 million women are living with HIV/AIDS.
• By the year 2010, five countries (Ethiopia, Nigeria, China, India, and Russia) with 40 percent of the world's population will add 50 to 75 million infected people to the worldwide pool of HIV disease.
• There are 14,000 new infections every day (95 percent in developing countries). HIV/AIDS is a "disease of young people" with half of the 5 million new infections each year occurring among people ages 15 to 24.
• The UN estimates that, currently, there are 14 million AIDS orphans and that by 2010 there will be 25 million.
• The disease has only existed for 24 years.

Thanks to: **http://www.until.org/statistics.shtml**

Bertrand Russell

I have been reading some Bertrand Russell, and I came upon this poem that summarizes my "panoramic perspective" of life right now. It delves deeply into three distinctive, yet very crucial understandings of life. See what you think...

Three passions have governed my life: The longings for love, the search for knowledge, And unbearable pity for the suffering of [humankind].

Love brings ecstasy and relieves loneliness. In the union of love I have seen
In a mystic miniature the prefiguring vision
Of the heavens that saints and poets have imagined.
With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of [people]. I have wished to know why the stars shine.
Love and knowledge led upwards to the heavens,

But always pity brought me back to earth;
Cries of pain reverberated in my heart
Of children in famine, of victims tortured
And of old people left helpless.
I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, And I too suffer.

This has been my life; and I found it worth living.

~Bertrand Russell

The Transfigured Life

"If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." 2 Corinthians 5:17

"What idea have you of the salvation of your soul? The experience of salvation means that in your actual life things are really altered, you no longer look at things as you used to; your desires are new, old things have lost their power. One of the touchstones of experience is - Has God altered the thing that matters? If you still hanker after the old things, it is absurd to talk about being born from above, you are juggling with yourself. If you are born again, the Spirit of God makes the alteration manifest in your actual life and reasoning, and when the crisis comes you are the most amazed person on earth at the wonderful difference there is in you. There is no possibility of imagining that you did it. It is this complete and amazing alteration that is the evidence that you are a saved soul.

What difference has my salvation and sanctification made? For instance, can I stand in the light of 1 Corinthians 13, or do I have to shuffle? The salvation that is worked out in me by the Holy Ghost emancipates me entirely, and as long as I walk in the light as God is in the light, He sees nothing to censure because His life is working out in every particular, not to my consciousness, but deeper than my consciousness."

~Oswald Chambers, Devotion for November 12

Ignorance Is Bliss

In the course of a hundred days in 1994 the Hutu government of Rwanda and its extremist allies very nearly succeeded in exterminating the country's Tutsi minority. Using firearms, machetes, and a variety of garden implements, Hutu militiamen, soldiers, and ordinary citizens murdered some 800,000 Tutsi and politically moderate Hutu. It was the fastest, most efficient killing spree of the twentieth century.

A few years later, in a series in The New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch recounted in horrific detail the story of the genocide and the world's failure to stop it. President Bill Clinton, a famously avid reader, expressed shock. He sent copies of Gourevitch's articles to his second-term national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. The articles bore confused, angry, searching queries in the margins. "Is what he's saying true?" Clinton wrote with a thick black felt-tip pen beside heavily underlined paragraphs. "How did this happen?" he asked, adding, "I want to get to the bottom of this." The President's urgency and outrage were oddly timed. As the terror in Rwanda had unfolded, Clinton had shown virtually no interest in stopping the genocide, and his Administration had stood by as the death toll rose into the hundreds of thousands. Why? Why have we, as mankind, not learned out lesson? Did Hitler's regime not convince us? That's barely history...it's recent history; we've already forgotten. Why is this continuing to happen on our watch?

In short, the same forces that work against democracies going to war work against intervening to stop genocide. For one, it is not perceived at the highest levels to be in our national interest. Second, the cost of intervening with American troops, or even careful high altitude bombing, are seen to exceed the political costs of possible casualties, or those imposed by the always present opposition. Third, such intervention runs counter to the prevailing world view of the State Department, commentators, and the foreign policy establishment, which is real politics (stability, don't rock the status quo, our national interests are the dominant consideration). Third, the U.S. would probably have to intervene alone (not even the UN will provide political cover). Lastly and most important, the American public is uninterested, unmoved, and doesn't care.

When the public has become aroused, and the media is screaming for action, Congress and the administration hear it. Then there were the massacres and genocide in Bosnia. We stayed out of it, until public pressure was such as to make the political costs of nonintervention unacceptable.

President Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, according to classified documents made available for the first time. Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene. Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president had been told of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter reached its peak.

Here's my concern. My concern is not with President Clinton (although he was wrong on many occasions, especially here). My concern is not with our government and the United Nations not becoming more involved (even though they should). My greatest concern is of the Church and its inactivity towards the rest of the world. Can the Church stop genocide? No, probably not. However, we could prevent it. Think about it...