Giving Thanks

by Aron Wall Posted on November 22, 2012

Today is Thanksgiving Day (in the United States), a day set aside for us all to remember the things in life we are grateful for.   Fortunately, Nicole and I started the process of gratitude earlier this week when we finished writing and mailing our thank-you notes for the useful and beautiful presents we got by agreeing to spend the rest of our lives together.

All of us have been supported by other people in many ways, or we would not be alive.  All of us should be grateful more often for those things.  Those of us who believe in God have the privilege of also having someone to thank for the blessings of life that don't come from other human beings, such as the sun and moon, stars and trees, happy coincidences, good health and harvests, etc.  Even when the good things come from other people, we can still accept it as ultimately coming from the hand of God, who has, after all, provided those other people with the ability and conscience to help us.

But what about when bad things happen?  Is it consistent to attribute everything good that happens to God, but then turn around and say that God has no responsibility for any of the bad things that happen?  Should we blame God for the bad as we praise him for the good? If religious folk thank God even for the indirect results of God's providence, that are mediated through human choices, why should we not take the same attitude for bad things caused indirectly by God?

Some people say: God does not cause evil, he only permits it.  This idea can be comforting to those who have suffered greatly, because then they don't have to deal with resentment towards a God who inflicts suffering as well as joy.  Others may find this a pedantic distinction, saying that God is equally responsible for the evils he permits.

The Bible, on the other hand, doesn't seem to refrain from attributing sorrowful events to God:

When disaster comes to a city, has not the Lord caused it?  (Amos 3:6)

When the evil comes from other people, this is in one sense a violation of God's will, who has most definitely commanded us to love our neighbors (Lev. 19:18), strangers (Lev. 19:34), and enemies (Ex. 23:4-5, Prov. 24:17-18, 25:21), and who has set a day of judgement in which wrongdoers will be punished.  When a woman is raped, this horrible crime arises not because God approves of rape, but because God allows the will of wicked men to affect other people.

Nevertheless, God does allow it, and the Bible is not shy about describing such things as being (in another sense) God's decision and will.  When the righteous St. Job loses everything, including his children, to a combination of "natural" disasters and bandit attacks, what does he do?

At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
may the name of the Lord be praised.”

In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.  (Job 1:20-22)

Job attributes the disaster to God's "taking away", but he does not blame God by charging him with "wrongdoing".  What gives?  How is it possible for God to do something evil without being evil?  The key is what the patriarch St. Joseph says to his brothers, when he forgives them after they had sold him into slavery:

“Don’t be afraid.  Am I in the place of God?  You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” (Genesis 50:20)

One and the same act can be both evil and good, depending on whose intentions we consider.  The selling of Joseph into slavery is evil as done by his brothers, because they intended to harm him.  It is good as done by God, because God's intentions were different: God did it in order to save lives.  (I am not trying to make any comment about free will here; presumably if Joseph's brothers had freely chosen not to sell him into slavery, then God would also have chosen something different.)  Thus God can condemn what people do, while simultaneously using it for his good plan.

That must be why, after the Apostles were flogged for teaching about Jesus, they were

The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.  (Acts 5:41)

Why on earth did they take this attitude?  St. Paul explains it like this:

We also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.  And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.  (Romans 5:3-5)

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.  (Romans 8:28)

The idea that God does not cause bad things to happen is a superficial teaching.  It evades the cross and forgets the gospel message that we are to rejoice and thank God for everything that happens to us.  That is why St. James tells us to

Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.  Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.(James 1:2-4)

But perhaps James was just copying his brother's idea:

“Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.  Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” (Matt. 5:11-12)

In conclusion, it doesn't make any sense to thank God for the good things in life and absolve him for the bad things.  No, we should also credit the bad things to God, and give thanks for them as well.  Not because the evil is imaginary, but because he intends to use it to build us up into more loving people, for the sake of the salvation of the world.

But perhaps your last year was actually quite pleasant, as mine was.  In that case, let's not forget to thank him for the obvious blessings as well.

Posted in Theology | 9 Comments

Pillar of Science V: Ethical Integrity

by Aron Wall Posted on November 21, 2012

Scientists must have Integrity.

Because Science involves an ethical principle, the love of truth, its practice cannot be unmoored from principles of morality.  A hypothesis can only be put to a fair test by a person who prefers knowing the truth even if it shows that their previous position was wrong (a corollary is that science becomes unreliable when there is political pressure to come to particular conclusions, such as the Lysenkoist biology mandated by Stalin, or the Deutschephysik of Nazi Germany).

This virtue is sometimes referred to as “objectivity”, but this word suggests a sort of dispassionate neutrality which is not actually characteristic of most real scientists—we actually tend to get rather excited about our work, or we wouldn't be doing it.  A better term for this virtue is humility: when doing research the scientist must take the posture towards the universe of a learner, rather than a teacher.  Unfortunately, some effective scientists are conceited and arrogant towards their peers, but when scientists take the same attitude towards Nature, they continue to defend ideas long after they become discredited, and become useless to Science.

It's also extremely common for working scientists to get mailings from laypersons who believe themselves to have revolutionized large areas of science, despite having imprecise, untested, and often meaningless ideas.  This psychotic disconnect from reality is nearly always accompanied by severe egoism, showing by contrast the way that humility characterizes true science.

Of course, humility does not involve taking the view that all knowledge is unreliable and tentative, since this would actually inhibit the discovery of truth!  (In modern times, revolutions in Science usually do not totally invalidate our previous understandings; instead the previous theories survive as approximations.)  The proper attitude of a learner is: “Test everything; hold onto what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

A second virtue of science is honesty.  Scientists must refrain from fudging results or misleading other scientists.  Honesty requires noting the factors weighing against a conclusion as well as those weighing for it.  They must also take precautions against bias, not in the sense of being unbiased (none of us are), but preventing that bias from contaminating their results.  Hence the need for experimentalists to do proper error analysis, use control groups, double-blind tests, etc.  Experiments that show the absence of an effect should be published as well as experiments that show the presence of an effect, even if such results are less likely to result in fame and respect.

I was going to include some juicy long excerpt from Feynman's famous commencement address on "Cargo Cult Science".  But too much of it was relevant to what I'm saying!  You should just go and read the whole thing.

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The Numinous

by Aron Wall Posted on November 18, 2012

A few weeks ago I started to describe what holiness means, and someone requested that I go into more detail.

One way to approach this is through the concept of the numinous, described in the classic work The Idea of the Holy by the Blessed Rudolf Otto.  This book was a significant influence on St. Lewis, who discusses the numinous especially in his introduction to The Problem of Pain.  The concept of the numinous is difficult to explain because most of the language we use to describe it has come to mean other things.  In English, the words "awesome" and "awful" both used to mean the same thing: the feeling of dread, wonder, uncanniness, terror, or reverence one gets in the presence of something you believe to be eerie or supernatural.  As Lewis points out, we use the same word "afraid" when we say that someone is a jungle is "afraid of tigers" as that someone in a haunted house is "afraid of ghosts".  But in the first case, the fear is just for our own safety, whereas in the case of ghosts one is afraid of what the ghost IS, more than what it will do to you.

Please note, I am not claiming that ghosts exist, but rather using them as an example to make a point about human psychology.  Just as we have a sexual instinct which responds to sexual stimuli, so we have another instinct which responds when we believe we are encountering supernatural stimuli.  The hairs stand up on the back of our neck and we feel chilly.  In that sense it feels like fear, even though the experience may be pleasant or unpleasant, and we may or may not be concerned for our physical safety.  Atheists, pagans, and Christians all experience this feeling on certain occasions; the difference is how they interpret it.

In our own minds, we can feel numinous feelings without making any connection to ethical concepts; a pagan or a pantheist may feel that they are worshiping a Spirit which is beyond human notions of good or evil.  However, when ethical concepts do intrude, a special composite feeling arises.  In the case where the object is perceived as Numinous Evil, we call the feeling that arises in us Horror.  This feeling can be excited by natural objects which seem "eerie" such as corpses or creepy insects.  (Lewis claims that there is no survival advantage in this feeling, but it seems to me that avoiding diseased corpses and dangerous insects may well have evolutionary advantage.)  It can also be excited when we read or watch movies about vampires, werewolves, demons etc.  (This assumes that the movies treat the topic seriously, of course.  Monsters that think and act just like regular people are humorous, since we expected a numinous thrill and then it was a false alarm).

When the object is perceived as Numinous Good, this composite idea is nothing other than the Holy.  (Unfortunately, there's a lack of grammatical parallelism here, in that "Holy" refers to the Object about which we have numinous feelings, whereas "Horror" refers to the feelings themselves.)  The distinctive characteristic of holiness is that ethics itself becomes imbued with supernatural significance.  This experience is not always happy.  As the classic example, consider Isaiah chapter 6:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphs [burning ones], each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:

“Holy, holy, holy is YHWH of hosts;
the whole earth is full of his glory.”

4 At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

5 “Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, YHWH of hosts.”

6 Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. 7 With it he touched my mouth and said, “See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for.”

8 Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”  And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

If you are a nonreligious person, I hope you tried to read that as you would some passage in a fantasy novel, with "suspension of disbelief".  Put aside how you feel about Christianity in general, and just ask how this passage makes you feel, as if it were a fictional work of art.

Doubtless Isaiah knew beforehand that he had ethical shortcomings; perhaps he lied, or berated someone.  But before, it was a matter of merely personal regret, excused by the fact that everyone does it.  In the presence of this astounding vision, his guilt becomes something completely different: a feeling of uncleanness and shrinking before a majestic purity, that even the angels had to hide their faces from.  It was like coming into a formal dinner party stinking, and wearing no clothes at all.

This is a numinous problem, not just an ethical problem.  So it needs a numinous solution.  The coal from the altar makes "atonement" for Isaiah's uncleanness.  That is, it allows Isaiah to become a participant in the numinous, in a way that covers up or removes his guilt.  Only then can St. Isaiah hear God's call to be a prophet, denouncing the sins of others.

It's a mistake to try to argue that Christianity is true before the audience knows what Christianity is.  Before people can understand Christianity, they have to understand the basic concepts in which it is expressed.  Without the concept of holiness, nothing we say about God deserving worship, or about Jesus dying on the cross for our sins, or about love requiring purity—none of it makes any sense at all!

Posted in Theology | 2 Comments

Firewalls

by Aron Wall Posted on November 17, 2012

There's been a huge kerfuffle in the quantum gravity community since this summer, when some people here at UCSB published a paper arguing that (old enough) black holes may actually be surrounded by a wall of fire which burns people up when they cross the event horizon.  This is huge, because if it were true it would upset everything we thought we knew about black holes.

General relativity is our best theory of gravity to date, discovered by Einstein.  This is a  classical theory.  (In the secret code that we physicists use, classical is our code-word for "doesn't take into account quantum mechanics".  Don't tell anyone I told you.)

In my other posts on physics, I've been trying to explain the fundamentals of physics in the minimum number of blog posts.  This post is out of sequence, since I haven't described general relativity yet!  But I wanted to say something about exciting current events.

In classical general relativity, a black hole is a region of space where the gravity is so strong that not even light can escape.  They tend to form at the center of galaxies, and from the collapse of sufficiently large stars when they run out of fuel to hold them up.  A black hole has an event horizon, which is the surface beyond which if you fall in, you can't ever escape without travelling faster than light. The information of anything falling into the black hole is lost forever, at least in classical physics.

In the case of a non-rotating black hole, without anything falling into it, the event horizon is a perfect sphere.  (If the black hole is rotating, it bulges out at the equator.)  If you fall past the event horizon, you will inevitably fall towards the center, just as in ordinary places you inevitably move towards the future.

At the center is the singularity.  As you approach the singularity, you get stretched out infinitely in one direction of space, and squashed to zero size in the other two directions of space, and then at the singularity time comes to an end!  Actually, just before time comes to an end, we know that the theory is wrong, since things get compressed to such tiny distances that we really ought to take quantum mechanics into account.  Since we don't have a satisfactory theory of quantum gravity yet, we don't really know for sure what happens.

Now it's important to realize that the event horizon is not a physical object.  Nothing strange happens there.  It's just an imaginary line between the place where you can get out by accelerating really hard, and the place where you can never get out.  Someone falling into the black hole just sees a vacuum.  If the black hole was formed from the collapse of a star, the matter from the star quickly falls into the singularity and disappears.  The black hole is empty inside, except for the gravitational field itself.

We don't know how to describe full-blown quantum gravity, but we have something called semiclassical gravity which is supposed to work well when the gravitational effects of the quantum fields are small.  In semiclassical gravity, one finds that black holes slowly lose energy from thermal "Hawking" radiation.  This radiation looks exactly like the random "blackbody radiation" coming from an ordinary object when you heat it up. Here's the important fact: You can prove that the radiation is thermal (i.e. random) just using the fact that someone falling across the horizon sees a vacuum (i.e. empty space) there.

The Hawking radiation comes from just outside the event horizon.  It does not come from inside the black hole, so in Hawking's original calculation it doesn't carry any information out from the inside.   Nevertheless, for various reasons I can't go into right now, most black hole physicists have convinced themselves that the information eventually does come out.

As the black hole radiates into space, it slowly evaporates, and eventually probably disappears entirely (although knowing what happens at the very end requires full-blown quantum gravity).  If the outgoing Hawking radiation carries all the radiation out, then for a black hole at a late enough stage in its evaporation, the radiation must not be completely random, because it actually encodes all the information about what fell in.

The gist of what Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully argued, is that if we take both of these statements in bold seriously, then it follows that the black holes are NOT in the vacuum state from the perspective of someone who falls in.  Instead you would get incinerated by a "firewall" as you cross the horizon.  (It's not clear yet whether this is only for really old black holes, or if it applies to younger ones too.)  That's if we still believe there is an "inside" at all.  The argument shows that semiclassical gravity is completely wrong in situations where we would have expected it to work great.

If this is right, then it's devastating to the ideas of many of us who have been thinking about black holes for a long time.  As a reluctant convert to the idea that information is not lost, I'm wondering if I should reconsider.  At the end of this month, I'm going to Stanford for a weekend, since Lenny Susskind has invited a bunch of us to try to get this worked out.  Exciting times!

 

Posted in Physics | 9 Comments

Pillar of Science IV: Precise Descriptions

by Aron Wall Posted on November 15, 2012

Science involves Precise Description.

To be capable of being confirmed or ruled out at the high levels of reliability associated with Science, a hypothesis must be stated in a way which is precise enough to do definitive tests.  Even if a scientific hypothesis may not be experimentally testable at the present time, a precise formulation helps indicate ways that it could be tested in the future.  If experiment is capable of making everyone eventually agree on whether the idea worked or not, then the words it is expressed in shouldn't mean different things to different people.

Mathematical models of the physical world are the most precise form of description available, because they can describe complicated systems with perfect exactitude.  In theoretical physics, this kind of quantitative description is the usual way to make things precise.  We like to think about systems that are simple enough to describe mathematically (of course, this requires first making certain approximations).  In fact, fundamental physics is so mathematical that, even when there are no or few experiments, one can often make progress just by demanding that the model be logically consistent, and that it conform to known physical principles.  (Known, because they have been tested in other situations where we can do experiments.)  Mathematical consistency is nearly our only guide in speculative fields like my own (quantum gravity); however, it cannot completely substitute for observations, since no matter how consistent or beautiful your model is, Nature could always do something else when you finally are able to take a look.

So Math is great when you can get it.  Nevertheless, systems which are less regular, more complex, or less well-understood (such as biological life) cannot always be described mathematically, but may still be described through technical vocabulary that minimizes imprecision, without removing it altogether.  I'm not a biologist, so I'm probably not the best person to ask how this usually works, but I didn't want to give the impression that math is the only way to make ideas precise.  Even in physics, at one time it was possible to describe everything in words.  The great experimenter St. Faraday (whose work helped established the concept of the electromagnetic field), once wrote a letter to St. Maxwell (who wrote down the equations for electromagnetism) expressing surprise at Maxwell's need to translate everything into mathematical equations.  Yet no one could accuse Faraday's journals of being imprecise.

But not all concepts will do.  Ideas that are apprehended in words or images rich with heavy associations or mottled with variegated meanings—in short, using the common language of humanity—such ideas are excluded from Science.  Not because it is impossible to discuss and test these ideas; if that were true, then it would be impossible to think accurately at all about most matters of ordinary human concern.  Rather, it is because they involve elements of human and holistic judgement which are unsuitable for scientific inquiry.  The question “Is xenophobia a frequent cause of war?” could be given an informed and accurate answer by a historian, but it does not become a scientific question until the terms “xenophobia”, “frequent”, and “war” are given technical meanings sufficiently precise that a social scientist can do a statistical analysis.

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