Foreword

     On a Friday afternoon in May of 2017, during a lull period in my Aircraft Design class, I scribbled out an essay for the journal Aletheia. I gave it the name “Playing with Infinity.” It was to encapsulate an ephemeral moment in my life, when the impassable limits of human experience and the escape from its infinite regress had first crystallized before my eyes.

     So when adult advisors from Cal Poly’s Cru and Veritas Forum clubs started to nitpick at its theology six months later over winter break, arguing to me as Editor-in-Chief that my article would not be published unless it was censored according to their homemade evangelicalism (not to mention nearly all the other articles as well), it meant more than an attack on what I was saying. It was an attack on my free thought and the cosmic juvenescence which I was portraying.

     In some ways it was a taste of my own medicine: I had in earlier times woven a long daisy-chain of compulsive outbursts authorized through an evangelical vocabulary, the corrosiveness of those former ways being on my mind when I wrote “Playing with Infinity;” and the same grace that loosened those entrapments in me was what allowed Aletheia to exist in the first place. We founded Aletheia as an ecumenical and contemplative Christian journal, not to be a magazine primarily for Christian apologetics and proselytizing. From the time that I joined the journal to the time I became Editor-in-Chief, I went from believing I might be the only team member among the divine elect all the way to protecting my authors and their plethora of views (ranging from Reformed Evangelical to Liberal Mainline Protestant to Nondenominational to Catholic to Greek Orthodox to Mystic). The journal could only exist as such if Christ himself was treated supervenient to his doctrines, if personhood preceded property and love exceeded knowledge. (By “property,” I’m talking about somone’s qualities, not their possessions.) So to have older evangelicals rudely come crashing down with accusations of dogma and threats of pulling funding at the last minute was not only upsetting on its own, it was to face my old self (who was not too far off from my present self) rising from the devilish shadows ablaze, tempting to wrap his fiery whip around my soul before plummeting into the certain abyss (yes, that’s a Balrog/Gandalf reference).

     The threads of grace I had suffered so much to untangle were at stake. I was already wounded and weakened and lonely from a life in spiritual transit. The trouble is that to unwrap dogmatism—to really loose oneself of it for good—it is necessary to tease the dogmatism out to its full extent, where the shift from its modes of behavior can be made permanently. (Or at least it would seem to be so when one is amid the throes of escape.) Christ came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it—and at the same time one cannot patch an old torn cloth with a piece of new cloth, nor hold new wine in old wineskins. The way of the Spirit is not immaterial, i.e. it is not a loathing of the body—the way of the Spirit is otherworldly, operating in a categorically different manner than the compulsive idealism that defines what St. Paul calls “the way of the flesh.” To be good, one need not forsake the forms of the body, its ideals, its rational concepts; it is possible to resurrect these seemingly “totally depraved” entities from their compulsions. This is enabled by integrating the love, the immediate, the process, the intuition, the periphery into their respective forms. And therefore in those emails and phone calls over that journal-defending winter break, I refused to fight fire with fire. I would not write them off; I had to suffer with them talking through it if the journal (and my soul) would proceed on a healthy course.

     In some ways, I was relieved. To be increasing in the Spirit is to become foul in the sight of Pharisees. Their anger reflected that I had grown as a person and might not be doomed to a life of obsessive religiosity. In other ways, I was distraught. My article was launched like an arrow of tenderness at the infinite regress that lurks along the limits of human reason. In fighting on behalf of the journal’s open-mindedness, I knew exactly what I was looking at, in vivid scientific detail. The demons that had fueled my guilt and shame and that I had been expunging were now clawing at me through other people. I saw my old bondage in their bondage, in their attempting to rechain me to their lifestyle under supposed “truths.” I could not hate them for it, because I had been in their shoes, yet they were exciting the deepest pains I knew. To balance along that knife’s otherworldly edge proved to be the real prophecy of my article. Without further ado, here it is, “Playing with Infinity.” Note that after the article, I will offer a little commentary. (It can be viewed in context of the magazine on our website, < https://aletheiaacademic.wixsite.com/aletheia/past-journals >.)

Playing with Infinity

     T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven—Main Engine Start—five, four, three, two, one, zero, and liftoff!” Within 8.5 minutes, the Space Shuttle uses 7.8 million pounds of thrust^[1] to travel from a launch pad in Florida to 3200 mph at 37 miles altitude, exits the atmosphere at Mach 25, and enters Low Earth Orbit. After the mission duration, the shuttle begins its hypersonic reentry glide, where the ceramic tiles of its heat shield must endure tempera­tures exceeding 2800˚F.^[2] Descending through the upper atmo­sphere, it performs a sequence of four S-turns to burn off speed. 5000 miles from the start of reentry, the pilots land the shuttle “dead stick,” either on a runway at Cape Canaveral or on the dry lakebed of Edwards Air Force Base.^[3]

     It has been said the Space Shuttle is the pinnacle of human technology. Immense knowledge stands behind its design, rep­resenting millennia of human thought and experimentation. But why is science so special to us? Why are we such curious, inventive creatures?

     Consider our study of gravity. Until Isaac Newton, gravity lacked a formal name. Astronomers like Kepler and Copernicus improved models of planetary trajectories to a point whereupon Newton’s laws of motion could accurately explain orbital mechan­ics in light of gravitational forces. Yet anomalies, such as the pe­culiar orbit of Mercury, remained a mystery. Relativistic effects, which are fundamental to modern conceptions of gravity, were not even imagined until the early 20th century with the work of Einstein. And it is quite certain that our present knowledge of gravity, while extremely accurate, is similarly incomplete. Could it be that many, if not all, of our current scientific theories fall short of some deeper knowledge? Is the complexity of the universe like that of a magnificent fractal, with reaches of infinite detail we will never fully grasp? What meaning, therefore, do our current scien­tific models have?

     To answer this, let us consider children at play. Children, in their games, explore the world through a process of trial and error, of imagination and realization. Good parents do not scorn their children’s silliness–rather, they love it, because they know it all serves the grand purpose of developing a good, mature human be­ing, able to explore the world further and deeper than any childish dream could ever attain. Thus, play is good.

Is this not quite like science? We hypothesize and experi­ment, observe and analyze. We create theories, advance them, and eventually replace them. Yet, this scientific process is good be­cause, through it, we become better able to explore the universe. It is apparent that whatever was responsible for the forma­tion of the universe made us hungry for knowledge. We were made to play with the cosmos, hardwired to seek the very truths under­lying our existence. However limited and flawed our present un­derstanding may be, our scientific endeavors are justified: while they often provide only temporary beliefs, they are our vehicles for engaging with truth. Without them, we flounder; with them, we make space shuttles.

     Suppose God viewed our science with the loving eyes of a parent. Among the Abrahamic monotheistic religions, Christians have a tradition of calling the Creator “Father”. The Christian God is ascribed a deep, unconditional love toward his children that “works in all things for the good,”^[4] one that “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,”^[5] one that is undeterred by human shortfalls. Contrary to what is frequently believed, moral error is as natural to the Christian faith as failed experiments are to science. Christianity teaches that through Je­sus, God is accessible to us regardless of how limited and flawed our present state may be. God’s lavish love toward sinners pro­vides an algebra by which the discrete and frangible can con­nect with the Boundless and Immortal, a process whereby little creatures, as we, are allowed to cross the threshold to the “grand throne room” of Heaven. We need not scale the towers of Heaven’s castle ourselves, but can enter freely through whatever meager steps we offer. Thereby, we are invited to explore God’s mysteries “further up [and] further in” ad infinitum.^[6] And is this not quite like science? If this were true, then the welcoming nature of such a God would propel our science into the immeasurable cosmic fron­tiers with childlike eagerness and humility.

     Toddlers manage to create all sorts of things through their toddling. As they grow, their toy block towers become pillow-forts, their pillow-forts become go-karts, and their go-karts, one day, become space shuttles. God, in his wisdom, made us to play, so let us play.

Footnotes

1. Lew, Colin. “Thrust Of A Space Shuttle.” The Physics Factbook, Hypertextbook. com, 1998, www.hypertextbook.com/facts/1998/ColinLew.shtml.
2. STS-133 The Final Launch of Space Shuttle Discovery including T-5 Hold. Dir. Spacevidcast. YouTube. YouTube, 09 Mar. 2011. Web.
3. Pinniped. “The Physics of Space Shuttle Re-Entry.” Blog post. H2g2 – The Hit­chikers Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition. Not Panicking Ltd., 23 Jan. 2006. Web.
4. Holy Bible. New International Version, NIV, 2011. Romans 8:28.
5. The Holy Bible. English Standard Version, Crossway, 2001. 1 Corinthians 13:7.
6. Lewis, Clive Staples. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle. N.p.: Scholastic, 1995. Print.

Epilogue

     What I love about this article is its deceptively simple path. I start by mentioning the evolution of scientific paradigms, I spin that into a theological conversation, and I end by implicitly suggesting the best response to nihilism is for love to incarnate into reasoning. It’s not an elaborate argument, it’s not a dogmatic assertion of faith. It’s dastardly precise in uncovering a universal challenge and yet it does so without forcefulness or sophisticated proofs. In its very form, it shows the solution needed for the problem at hand. I don’t spoonfeed the reader an answer, I make them dialogue with me. (My obscurity also reflects that at the time I didn’t quite know how to convey the underlying ideas I was getting at.) Reading this article about the fractal-like complexity of the world and the gentle call of knowledge “further up and further in” embodies that very process. I was gentle and obscure, even as the world and world-spirit are toward us. To understand what I was really saying requires that one enact within themself what I was really saying. This humble little piece is a fractal! It jumps the boundary of thinking and action by reflexively being what it is. It also jumps the boundary of object and subject in that it is simultaneously a thing (words on paper) and a thing about the process of observing it, so that when you read it it lives in you and you exist in it. This is a work of magic!

     Now that I have gotten the eagerness out of me, I will be more straightforward about what I meant in the article. Here is the argument in brief. If we keep changing our theories about the world, what are we supposed to take as true, as real? Well, the fact of the matter is that we actually can do things with our limited theories. We can go to the moon. But we also cannot be sure about our limited theories as final. Here, the philosophy of science converges on something more heartfelt, on an enormous ethical and existential problem: how are we supposed to live with uncertainty?; what are we to tell ourselves?; how should we feel about it? Do we get scared and coil up into a corner like Descartes or John Calvin? Do we get cocky and say we are positive about what we know? Do we get squishy, saying nothing is really knowable and everything is relative, or get all saintly saying that what really matters isn’t physical? (Notice the irony in that latter point: what matters isn’t matter. There is a contradiction afoot.) Do we raise our banners high in spite of our ignorance? If we take our theories seriously, we admit the risk of being wrong (and therefore potentially destructive) in edge cases. But if we resent every theory, we will not have the wonder to continue exploring, and we will also overlook the miracle that we can be right even though we are wrong.

     What I show in “Playing with Infinity” is that the process of science undergirds the theories of science, and therefore the truth of any scientific judgment is contextual. The truth of a theory depends on the scale of a theory, whether we are in the world of absolute Newtonian forces or the more macrocosmic world of Einsteinian relativity. In human terms, when we can know something and yet not understand it, we might be inclined to think of personal relationships. For in knowing someone by name, we know them without necessarily knowing about them. Of course this isn’t exclusive to human relationships: whenever we walk past a bush we don’t have a name for or know anything about other than what we see right there before us, we are experiencing something of the transcendent. We know the bush without knowing about the bush. The greater wonder is that even the botanist who knows the bush’s name and everything about it is not guaranteed to know it completely or perfectly. Yet the botanist can make do with the shortcoming; and it is not unlikely the botanist has affection for the bush. It is this ineffability of certainty that leads us back to our hearts when we try to know something. For even when we are wrong about what we know, if we appreciate that the thing we know is somehow more than what we know about it, then we can love the thing. There remains the risk of being wrong and thereby hurting it, but this does not make it impossible to cooperate with it in what we do know and seek it in what we don’t.

     Thus, we are better off to understand science as a process of love, of interaction between the human and the environment, and that the theories we use provisionally are steps in a great cosmic dance, up and up through the worlds of worlds. I would go so far to say that we are dancing with God when we try to know the truth.


March 26, 2020
San Luis Obispo