Category: Science

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Beating Still

Death can be confusing, and confounding. A friend’s brother died very suddenly a few weeks ago—he was sitting, then he was standing, then he was falling. Cardiac arrest. Another friend’s husband died six weeks after she brought him home from assisted care. Probably a stroke. My mother passed away almost 12 years ago, just shy of her 88th birthday, and the cause was never determined. At 88, her body didn’t need a cause. After the first fall she declined rapidly, not wanting to stick around and be a burden to her children, even though we were ready to be burdened. On the last evening, I put my head on her chest to pick up her heartbeat.

I heard the last one, faltering like a footstep seeking purchase. Then stillness.

Through medical science we know when our hearts begin to beat: not to the minute, but definitely to the week, perhaps even the day. But no one knows when his heart will stop—with perhaps one exception.

I think about that sometimes after an early morning run, when I’m winding down and my heart rate it up to a healthy 140. I can feel it in my chest and hear it in my ears and contemplate the many millions of times it has clenched and released. It’s been a steady, reliable little machine for seven decades now. How much longer?

“All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” All the heartbeats, too, and every breath. If he keeps track of the hairs on my head, he must also have a number in mind: 2,575,440,000 . . . 2,575440,001 . . . 2,575,440, 002 . . .  When my heart reaches that predetermined number, it will stop.

Once, in a dusty village called Nazareth, a girl who had never slept with a man felt a baby quicken in her womb. She had been warned it was going to happen, but maybe she hadn’t told anyone yet, waiting to see if the angel’s word would actually come true. Imagine the start, her hand on her belly, a quick breath, the news taking shape in her own body. But even before that the little form was growing, and at some time during the fifth or sixth week, his tiny heart began to beat.

Ke-thump, ke-thump, ke-thump. Quickly slipping into the stream of time.

The angels know. The Father knows. Now Mary knows, and her own heart keeps the little one company.

Ka-thump. Ka-thump. Ka-thump.

Did he know? Was his developing brain somehow aware that it had directed a heart to start pumping, and that it would keep pumping for thirty-three years before grinding to a halt, filling with water, spilling blood when pierced by a Roman spear?

If not then, he would know later. He would know, to the second, when the last drop of blood would fill up the measure and pay the price. His heart would stop once he willed it to stop, after pulling in a last breath and surrendering his spirit.

Then it would lie still in a cold body, wrapped up like a swaddled baby and carefully placed on a stone slab in a tomb. For the next 30-odd hours it would remain still. But then, sometime in the pre-dawn hours of the third day, it started beating again. And all these centuries later, it beats still. For us.

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Emerging on a New World, Part Three: Magical Dysfunction

I review a lot of children’s books for a website called Redeemed Reader. A common theme in children’s fantasy is “magic” as a lost element in a disenchanted world. The protagonist is born with some supernatural gift or sensitivity that no one appreciates, but once presented with a problem he (or she) forges fearfully ahead and discovers calling, power, and purpose. The plot unfolds against a background of skepticism or outright hostility. In the Harry Potter series, muggles provide the contrast to magic, who are often irritating but generally harmless.

In Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials series, the Magisterium, a cartoony stand-in for organized religion, play the villains. I just read a delightful children’s fantasy that followed the Pullman plotline closely (but less dogmatically), complete with a monk-like order of naysayers intent on stomping out all witchery and wizardry.

I’m also seeing a lot of magical realism, where supernatural events occur in a real time and place, among characters with quirky names and personalities. The magic in these stories doesn’t have a source; it’s just there, or it’s somehow passed down through families, coming to rest upon an unassuming protagonist. A common element in all these books is the need to believe—in yourself, in your abilities, and especially in the “magic.”

I’m not sure what the increase in fantasy and magical realism for middle-schoolers tells us, except perhaps that when God goes out the door, magic creeps down the chimney. We have our supernatural yearnings, and need our supernatural fix.

Magic is one thing in literature; another thing in public policy. Some of the most ideological politicians like to claim science as their guide, as though “science” were a magic word. And in a way, it is. “The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins,” wrote C. S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man: “one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse”—that being, to control nature and bend reality.

That Hideous Strength, Lewis’ fictional exposition of The Abolition of Man, pictures Science going full circle and merging with Magic in order to remake humanity. In his 1945 review of the novel, George Orwell approved the premise of THS, but “On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them.”

Still . . . when God goes out the door, the supernatural creeps down the chimney. In the secular public square, life can’t be seen as a gift, because gifts imply givers. Life is therefore more of a problem, or series of problems, to be solved with facts and stats repeated like incantations. Capital-S Science becomes a religion–even a Magisterium–and imagination retreats into fantasy, e.g., children’s literature and the Marvel universe, offering hope that the world really is a fantastic place and there’s a little magic in all of us.

And you know what? It’s true. “Organized religion,” in the form of Christian doctrine, tells us that the world is fantastic, and humans are spiritual beings as well as physical. But since public policy can’t acknowledge that in any meaningful way, suppressed spirituality comes out in magical thinking via “science,” all the more as it drifts away from traditional forms of religion. In That Hideous Strength, every nation has its own spiritual genius—its “magic,” you might say, that defines its place in the world and calls it back to its truest self. Our truest self combines initiative and altruism in a dynamic that self-corrects as it progresses: at its best, something like the abolitionist movement. At its worst, Karenism.

That’s why, in the United States, I can’t see us either buying in to a massive socialist restructuring, or going back to small-government federalism. We keep drifting leftward while our peculiar American genius pulls us back, so that we’re stuck mid-stream. The pressure of the current will keep tugging our freedoms away, but even as that happens, our resistance may grow deeper roots.

No political solution will work very well. We’re seeing that already, with a patchwork of openings and closings, conflicting data, escalating anger, and a looming election that looks more like a bloodbath. When the smoke clears, I doubt anyone will be happy. This state of affairs will not be fixable by science or magic. But if we can’t fix it, I think there’s a way to navigate it, by a combination of practical thinking and spiritual muscle. And that’s a topic for next week.

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Emerging on a New World, Part One: Doomsday Is Imminent (again)

My husband was raising the alarm early in the 1990s. Even wrote a booklet about it, which he distributed to friends and family. Our government was overspending—there was a hockey-stick graph that showed the federal budget shooting up in the stratosphere (a billion-dollar deficit!!), with certain consequences for the near future. We were in our forties at the time, and did not expect to collect our Social Security. Black Monday, when the Dow dropped by 22% in one day (10/22/87) was just the beginning: once the bond market collapsed, we’d be plunged into another Great Depression. We would have to start saving now: even stock up on commodities like paper products and imperishable food staples. So we built columns of toilet paper until we ran out of room and lost interest. Because nothing happened.

Around 1997, rumors about Y2K began. This would be an unprecedented catastrophe—payback for the hubris of linking the whole world in a network of 1’s and 0’s. Once every electronic clock in the world rolled over to 2-0-0-0 our mainframes would lose their collective minds and crash into incoherence, with planes falling out of the sky and money frozen in cyberspace, life-support machines malfunctioning and millions starving. It sounds crazy now, but I knew dozens of computer-savvy people who took it very seriously, to the point of moving to the country and storing up flour and ammo (like we did). Needless to say, the clock rolled over and nothing happened.

But the damage was done; everybody was hooked up to the internet now, and Doomsday predictions popped out blatting alarms with the regularity of wooden figures on a cuckoo clock. On the left it was Mother Earth crying for help as she was alternatively parched and flooded. On the right it was deep state, Illuminati, global currency reset causing massive social upheaval, stolen elections, martial law. Depending on which newsletter you subscribed to, the powers-that-be would make their big move THIS MONTH or BY THE END OF THE YEAR or SOON. And then, brothers and sisters, hang on, because it’s going to be a rough ride.

So . . . you think maybe it finally happened? Not with a bang, but a whimper?

As good as the postwar modern age has been to us westerners, with its abundant food and comforts and diversions, we seem addicted to unease. It’s almost as though we’re worried about having it too good. Not that there weren’t reasons for alarm. When I was a kid, the US and USSR apparently came very close to a nuclear showdown over Cuba. When I was in high school and college, two major assassinations and colleges literally on fire. In the 70s, a huge presidential scandal, double-digit inflation, an oil embargo, a general sense of “malaise.” That’s about when Paul Simon wrote

I don’t know a soul that’s not been battered; I don’t have a friend who feels at ease.

I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees . . .

In the 1980s, I was old enough to grouse about Kids These Days, but that was a pretty sunny decade except for media scares about nuclear holocaust and the ozone layer. Then came the 90s, when broadband access pulled us deep into the conspiracy weeds.

To my knowledge, though, nobody in the Alex-Jones fever swamp or the Greta-Thunberg eco-horror show predicted that a virus—mere scraps of DNA—would cut us off at the knees. Now I’m wondering if the collapse I always half expected has finally arrived. Time to head for the country, plant a garden, start sourcing a supply of meat from stock-raising neighbors?

Has dystopia finally come for us?

Probably not. And yet, there are some disquieting features about this crisis that I’ll have to work through in the next post.

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The Good Infection

By now we’ve all received a crash course in infectious diseases and our hands are raw from soaping and sanitizing. (Have we ever been so aware of our hands before?) I’ve been combing the web for news, all the while reminding myself that nobody knows nothin’ yet, but I came across this bit of information that started the wheels turning in my head. I wheeled from science to theology, which is not as disjointed a track as some would think.

COVID19 is called a “novel” virus not because it’s fictional, but because it’s new. New to humans, that is; not to animals. Animals have their own viruses and are equipped to develop their own immunities, just as humans are.  As human populations adapt to the peculiar RNA sequences that make up seasonal flu, so animals adapt to their own bugs and blights. These viruses almost always stay within species. But sometimes one will jump.

That’s what apparently happened in a Wuhan “wet market,” a place where live animals are sold, and often killed and eaten on the spot. A bat virus jumped to a human carrier and—in unscientific terms—dug in. Because the human immune system didn’t recognize the RNA sequencing of the foreign invader, the human became infected. And before he (let’s assume he) even knew he was sick, he had infected a number of others, and they went on to infect others, and the thing grew and grew and some people died. 

One person. From just one person fever spirals out into the world, multiplying sickness and death and panic and enforced isolation and grim speculation about how many more millions will die before we acquire the immunity we need.

What makes this hyper-vigilance necessary is that the COVID19 virus is very quick: quick to spread and quick to mutate. Every flu develops singular strains, and so does this one: only quicker than most. Already it has developed at least two strains. The other cause for alarm is that it attacks human lungs and solidifies mucus, blocking air passages and causing asphyxiation. That’s why smokers, asthmatics and COPD sufferers are at particular risk.

Are you scared yet? Don’t be. Or, as beings better than I have said, Fear not. For behold, I bring you good news. We’ve already been infected by the most benevolent virus possible.

Take a deep breath. In the beginning we received our breath from God himself. And then we wrecked that ideal origin: “from one man sin entered the world.” The virus of sin is 100% contagious and in all cases fatal.

But after this had gone on for a few thousand years, long enough to prove beyond any doubt that the disease was not curable, a good contagion intervened. You might say that divine RNA jumped from heaven to earth, from God to man, just as an alien germ somehow bridged the gap animal to human in Wuhan.

The good contagion infected a handful of followers. Then a few hundred more. Then 3000 on one day. Eventually it spread, as fast as human feet and wheels and trains and planes could  take it, to the ends of the earth.

I’m optimistic by nature, and at the moment I’m hopeful about how long the present crisis will last. But optimism may not be warranted; those grim predictions about millions of deaths around the globe may come to pass. But this remains: “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.” Death may be sown even in my small circle. But this remains: No malevolent virus can overcome the strain of divine life that infects a believer in Christ. So take heart, and believe.

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Who Needs Air Conditioning?

Seen on the Federalist website: “I Gave up Air Conditioning this Summer to Live within My Means.  America Should Try That.”

Good for you, pal.  He’s in his twenties, vigorous and healthy and feeling great after a camping trip during which temps got down in the forties at night and high eighties during the day.  I’m in my sixties and I just got back from a camping trip during which it got no cooler than 73 with something like 100% humidity, and I feel pretty good, too.  (Did you catch the discernable trace of conservative virtue-signaling?)

I could do without A/C if I had to.  We did do without it for years, partly for economy’s sake.  I’ve spent summers in Texas without A/C—all of them, while growing up, and one while I was pregnant.  We’ve lived through summers in Tennessee and Kansas and rural Missouri without it, sweating out a few uncomfortable nights and very long afternoons.  Survival takes some strategic planning, such as

  • Put a couple of feet of insulation in the attic, along with an attic fan.
  • After sundown, turn on the attic fan and open the windows.  In the morning, turn off the fan, shut the windows and pull down the shades.
  • Fill up a one-to-two-gallon thermos jug with ice and cold water in the morning and drink from it during the day to save the fridge.
  • If you bake or can (I used to do both), wait until the attic fan is on   You’ll be up late, but that will give you an excuse to sleep late.
  • Use your outdoor grill for some of your cooking and a toaster oven, electric skillet, or hot plate for the rest, plugged into the electric socket on the porch.
  • Don’t use your drier—put up a clothesline.
  • Do most of your outside work in the morning and save indoor sedentary tasks for the afternoon, under the ceiling fan with bottomless ice tea.
  • Adjust.  Your body is made for it.

Though grateful for the A/C now—mostly—I still kind of dread the day in late spring when it goes on, because it won’t go off until early fall.  That groan when it kicks on, the steady rumble while it’s going, the barrier that blocks the summer night and fresh air, the nervous rattle of loose objects on the stove—I don’t like any of that.  I don’t like the dependency.  I don’t like being boxed.

These are personal preferences, and maybe some pokes at first-world guilt. At first glance, Air Conditioning appears to be one of the few technologies with almost no downside.  The title of an American Heritage article from 1984, “How Air Conditioning Changed Everything,” is only a slight exaggeration.  A/C made Florida and Las Vegas possible (a mixed blessing?), along with summer movie blockbusters, indoor sleeping, and year-long factory production.  It leveraged hospital deaths and ameliorated tropical diseases.

But it also created isolation and dependency.  We no longer get to know our neighbors by strolling at dusk and stopping to chat at the porch or stoop.  And when the grid shuts down it can be devastating.  Does anybody remember the Chicago heat wave of 1995?  Most of the 700+ deaths were due to older people “air conditioned” to stay inside, and so accustomed to confinement they were afraid to go out.  With the benefit of life-changing tech, we forget how to cope, and we forget a little more with each succeeding generation.  I can survive with A/C but not without electrical power.  My kids in Clark County, Nevada, would be seriously threatened is their A/C went out, but they could get by without their smartphones.  Will my grandchildren be able to cope without their phones?  Maybe, but research about phone addition indicates it might not be easy.

Technology gives and it takes away, the saying goes.  As the pinnacle lifts us higher from earth and its earthy problems and joys, I have to wonder if we’re jacking ourselves up for a big fall.

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Big Data, Big Tyranny

In the future, people will be controlled by data accumulated by the ruling class.

Citizens will be assigned a social credit number at the age of maturity—or perhaps even at birth.  Every purchase, business transaction, and social media post will be tracked and valued according to government notions of virtue.

Actions like taking care of an elderly parent, speaking well of an official or a law, and volunteering at an approved charity, will raise an individual credit score.  Unworthy actions and attitudes will lower it. The higher the score, the greater the privilege: discounts on utilities, preferential treatment for housing or school, even a wider pool of potential marriage partners.  The lower the score—well, go low enough and you may not even be able to buy an airline ticket.

Does that sound scary to you?  Then this will sound even scarier: in China, the future is two years away.

2020 is the target year for instituting a nation-wide social credit system.  In one sense, it’s a dream come true: throughout human history, unruly citizens have been controlled by threats.  It’s not very efficient and it breeds resentment.  But if a nation’s citizens could be controlled by rewards, they would voluntarily act in the public interest, whatever the government determines the public interest to be.

The program has been test-running in selected Chinese cities.  In Rongcheng, a city on the northeastern coast with a population of almost 700k, residents have willingly embraced it.  Pictures of so-called “civic heroes” are displayed on electronic bulletin boards.  Citizens have even taken it on themselves to police each other, debiting their neighbors for “illegally spreading religion,” for instance.  Writing in the online magazine Wired last October, Rachel Botsman compared China’s social credit system to a vast rewards program or video game: “It’s gamified obedience.”

Roncheng proudly displays its “civilized families.”

I can see how this might work there; China is traditionally a much more ordered society than ours.  But how far-fetched is the possibility of a similar program here?  Private entities like Amazon, Google and Facebook already have vast amounts of data on everyone who makes a purchase, enters a search term, or posts a picture.  They’ve used the information to sell targeted advertising, and in the process have become fabulously rich and powerful.  They’ve also come under fire for abusing that power.  Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, testifying before Congress last April, said he would welcome government regulation of Facebook to curb exploitation of data.  Whether he realizes it or not, what he’s proposing is the marriage of big tech to big government, and the vastly-expanded capacity for exploitation.

Throughout history power has been the rule, freedom the exception.  The freedom promised by the “information highway” thirty years ago turns out to have a cost when that very information can be used to manipulate us.  The biblical call to “renew your minds” takes on a new urgency for Christians: to know what we believe, and why.  Hold fast to the truth, and it will keep us free.

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A New Creation?

About twenty years ago, a close friend learned that her youngest son had Duchenne MD, the worst form of Muscular Dystrophy.  It meant gradual weakening, teen years in a wheelchair, and an early death, perhaps by his mid-twenties.  She told me it changed everything: how she thought, how she planned her day, how she cleaned, how she cooked.  The only hope for that boy, then as now, was gene therapy.

Earlier this year, the scientific world buzzed with news about a method of gene therapy called CRISPR.  Without getting too technical, CRISPR uses an enzyme at the molecular level to cut harmful genes out of a subject’s DNA; “gene editing” is an accurate description.  The effect not only alters the subject, but all of his or her descendants.  CRISPR is not yet approved by the FDA for test purposes in the USA, but that hasn’t stopped scientists in Asia and Europe—or even here in the USA.

A few weeks ago this headline from the New Scientist website grabbed me: Biohackers are using CRISPR on their DNA and we can’t stop it.  It seems that one Josiah Zayner , a kind of science auteur, wowed multitudes on Facebook by injecting himself with the Cas9 enzyme that will theoretically alter his muscle mass.  And you can do it, too!  He’s published a DIY Human CRISPR Guide online and will sell you a kit to get started.

Well—that was fast.

Zayner’s enterprising spirit sounds like the good ol’ American hustle.  More seriously, Brian Hanley of Davis, California, got approval from a UC academic review board to test a self-designed gene therapy.  He didn’t tell them he planned to use it on himself, but . . . too late now.   Just last week, at Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco, a 44-year-old with a rare genetic disease became “The First Man to Have Genes Edited inside His Body” using a procedure similar to CRISPR.

All these experiments may or may not succeed: the record of science is roughly two steps forward, one step back, with casualties strewn along the way to progress.  But it’s still progress, right?  Isn’t it good news that genetic diseases like Duchenne will, in all likelihood, be eliminated?  And if that’s so, why do we feel so nervous about it?

Granted, some people aren’t nervous at all.  The coming age of transhumanism can’t get here fast enough (provided we’re not overtaken by robots first).  But for the rest of us, what exactly is a bridge too far?

On the plain of Shinar, a people long ago proposed to build a tower to the heavens—the first application of technology to human progress (post-flood, anyway).  Observing this, the Lord noted, “This is only the beginning—nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”  He wasn’t ready for that, so he broke up their communication, forcing them into ethnic groups that separated from each other.  That pretty much did it for science, for the next 2000 years—the great strides that began in the Scientific Revolution came as a result of shared information across national boundaries.  That communication continued and shows no signs of slowing down now; in fact, it’s sped up exponentially.  But where will it end?

Back to Babel, and “nothing they propose to do will be impossible for them.”  The Lord seems to have a higher opinion of our abilities than we do, and I guess he should.  He knows what we’re capable of, both the positive and the negative.

It remains to be seen if 21st-century science can change the very nature of humanity, or if unintended consequences will overwhelm any real gains.  But even if we could change the nature of humanity I still wonder if he’ll let us get away with it.  Mankind is his image—will he put up with altering the image?

I don’t think so.  I think he’ll stop it, by somehow confounding our communication, or hoisting us on our own petard of unintended consequences.  Or—he’ll stop everything.

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Power & Light

Time hurtles on.  We swoop through space on our little teeming rock, already forgetting the news that was everywhere two weeks ago.  Just two weeks ago . . .

Campers and vans were already clogging two-lane roads in Oregon and hysterical headlines were predicting traffic nightmares in Nashville and St. Joe MO.  But when Monday arrived we were on the road by 8:30 a.m. and encountered no complications on the two-hour to the “path of totality.”  After reaching the mid-size Midwestern town of our destination we found a city park, stretched out legs, watched the kids run around the playground, spread our blankets for a picnic and kept an eye on the sky.

I don’t need to describe a total eclipse of the sun: enough has been written already.  To me, it was both greater and less than anticipated.  I expected darkness but it was more like a bright moonlight or even a very heavy cloud cover (like before a tornado—I’ve seen that too).  I expected more stars, but we only saw Venus (I think) glowing wanly as though embarrassed to be waking up so early.  Totality was indeed spectacular: when the round disk of the moon slipped over the sun a gasp went around the park and a cry went up, as though we were cheering some great accomplishment.  Which was true enough.  The sun was suddenly, indescribably, a void—a hole in the sky surrounded by a writhing circle of subtly-colored rays, like nothing ever seen in all creation.

All the more astonishing when compared to only a few moments before.  We’re so accustomed to the sun: glorying in it after a long winter, sweltering under it during a long summer; joyfully welcoming it after days of rain, desperately wishing it would hide its face after weeks of drought.  But I never really appreciated the power of the sun until I watched it whittled down to almost nothing: a sliver, 5% or less of surface exposed.  And still as bright as day, forbidding as death, fully capable of singeing your eyeballs.  All its power present in every part or portion of it: if it could be cut in pieces, every piece would burn just as bright as the whole.

St. Francis addressed it as Brother Sun, bringing the flaming chariot of the gods down to human level.  And he wasn’t wrong.  Our immortal souls will outlast that ball of gas in the new heavens and new earth, where God Himself is our Light.  But it doesn’t do to get too cocky.  If the sun is a brother creature, he’s a big BIG brother, bending us under an elbow one minute and affectionately tousling our little heads the next, for the rest of our earthly lives.

Less than a week later, the sun hid its face from the Texas coast and thousands of people had their lives dramatically changed.  Anyone I know?  Not personally, but friends of relatives and relatives of friends.  The stately dance of the heavens is forgotten when calamity strikes close to home—down here where wind and clouds stomp around like rowdy kids.  Nobody was looking up (certainly not with NASA-approved paper glasses) except to pray desperately for the rain to stop.  Disaster usually comes from the sky, where the storehouses of wind (Ps. 135:7) and precipitation (Job 38:22) occasionally bust open and let us have it.  All for a reason, say the faithful.  No reason at all, just blind lunacy, say the skeptics.  To both sides, it’s proof of whatever they already believe.

As for me, I believe in Power.  And Light.  Specifically, I believe they have a Name, and that Name knows my name, and because of it I can lie down in safety.

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Where Does Darkness Come From? Creation, Day One

(For the first post in this series, see “In the Beginning“)

When children in Sunday School learn about the six days of creation, they usually don’t ask why the only thing created on Day One was light.  In other creation stories, solid “things” come first: rocks or water or a surging mass of elements, or the back of a very large turtle.  Ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Africans, Meso-Americans and indigenous tribes the world over would have been quite puzzled at the idea of speaking light with no obvious light source.  God doesn’t get around to creating the sun until Day Four—is this not an anomaly?  So I asked, when old enough to understand what “anomaly” was.

We’re told that God is light; in him is no darkness at all (I John 1:5). The radiance of God is not something He whistled up to chase away the darkness, but something he is.  So why say Let there be light, when light already exists, in Him?

And (a more perplexing question) where does the darkness come from?  How can there even be darkness, in that blinding dynamo of Father, Son, and Spirit?  Whence the cold, endless blackness that we call outer space?

And darkness was over the face of the deep.  An artist has an idea for a painting.  His idea includes not just the subject and composition and paint medium, but also the physical size.  If he is a hands-on, muscular type, he will stretch his own canvas: purchase the stretcher boards (or make them, mitering the corners at a precise 45 degree angle), cut the fabric, staple one side of it to the center of a bar, and start pulling and stretching and stapling until the painting surface is tight enough to bounce a quarter.

Think of darkness this way: a surface, cut to precise measure and stretched over the four corners of length, width, depth, and time. The darkness is not God, for in Him there is no darkness at all.   The darkness is not the absence of God, for he made it and broods over it in the person of the Holy Spirit.  The darkness God creates is not the absence of light, but rather the canvas which will show light for what it is.

He is not it, but it is inconceivable without him: In his light, we see light (Psalm 36:9).  (Also, He makes both dawn and dark, Amos 4:13).

Light is rich with metaphor, even when thinking about it scientifically.  Isaac Newton, that great conceptual thinker who took apart and reassembled theories as some children tinker with watches, analyzed visible light as a blend of waves traveling at different frequencies.  The “frequencies” are patterns that indicate how many wave crests will travel between two points in a given period of time.  From his experiments with prisms, Newton theorized that six frequencies, from infrared to ultraviolet, determine the range of visible light.

Like scientific thinkers before and since, Newton could describe light but couldn’t explain exactly what it was.  Though his wave theory was an improvement over the earlier “corpuscular” idea (light as tiny packets of glowing particles), it was incomplete.  Waves of what?  Pieces of what?  The questions went unanswered for another 200 years while cutting-edge science was consumed with electricity and magnetism.

Michael Faraday, a self-taught physicist from humble Evangelical stock, proved in the 1850s that the two were related—that, in fact, a changing magnetic field produced electricity.

Soon after, James Clerk Maxwell theorized that vice should be versa: i.e., a changing electric field should produce magnetism.  These two basic forms of energy might actually be manifestations of the same thing: electro-magnetism.  Electromagnetic waves are linked in electromagnetic fields that travel through empty space and provide the energy for all kinds of chemical and physical reactions.  Using known quantities, Maxwell calculated the speed of those hypothetical waves.

The result turned out to be the known speed of light.

So visible light, as nearly as we can determine, is an electromagnetic wave, like X rays and gamma rays and radio waves.  They are all of the same stuff: energy.  And, roughly 300 years after Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein proposed that matter and energy were interchangeable.  It’s not too great a leap to say that what God brought into being on the first day was not just visible light.  Let there be electromagnetism! lacks drama and wouldn’t have meant much to the ancient world.  Still less would this:

(Been there, done that, get the t-shirt)

But that’s the scientific description of what happens when electrical charges convert to magnetism and vice versa: energy!  What happens is not just visibility or radiance, but the stuff of stars, air, rain, wind, soil, cloud, leaf, stone, and living cells.  Einstein said E=mc2 (energy and matter are interchangeable).  God said, Let there be light, and energy flooded the dark void that we would one day call the universe.  It doesn’t come from the sun; it comes from Him.  So there was no need, I can assure my sixth-grade self, to make a sun first.  He would get around to that.  What we get first is what we need first: matter and energy to roll into stars and cool into planets and sweep across the barren surfaces as a fertile wind.

How interesting that science agrees.

In other words, if “light” includes the entire spectrum of electromagnetic energy, Genesis 1:3 can be seen as a scientific statement.  But it’s also a philosophical one: the first requirement of creation is also the first requirement of creativity, and that is vision.  By his light we see light.  Next, he will begin to create things to see.

Day Two – In Which Not Much Happens?

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  1. Spend some time in a very dark room, such as a walk-in closet with the door tightly shut.  Stand or sit without touching anything.  Try to imagine “nothing.”  Is this possible?  Now try to imagine light as a physical phenomenon (which it is), invading the darkness and not just illuminating but creating the objects around you.  When you open the door or flip the switch, do you see things any differently?
  2. Ecclesiastes 11:7: Light is sweet, and it is pleasing for the eyes to see the sun (HCSB).  Does this verse have more relevance after you’ve spent some time in pitch-darkness?
  3. If you could draw light, what would it look like?
  4. “I believe in God as I believe in light: not because I see Him, but by Him I see everything else.”  This is a variant of a famous C. S. Lewis quote.**  What does it mean to you?  Can you write your thoughts in a journal or a poem?

 

*  “A situation or surrounding substance within which something else originates, develops, or is contained,” American Heritage College Dictionary

**  “I believe in God as I believe the sun has risen . . .” The last sentence of “Is Theology Poetry?” (1947)