This morning as I lay in bed with my sinuses draining the Amazon River down my throat, I read about naked singularities in my most recent issue of Scientific American Magazine and how if you fell into one you would be flung out somewhere else along the energy stream from the singularity.
Naked singularities are collapsed super stars that have lost the concretions of the vent horizons around them that would normally trap all matter and energy that fell into them and cause them to function as a black hole from which nothing escapes.
In the stream of a naked singularity space/time does not exist.
Now ain't that a theological wonder.
Is there any Faith system or religion that does not require space and time?
In the beginning .....something.
It is a strange world isn't it when people believe in things much stranger than anything in the Bible and yet such a belief is not based in Faith at all, but in mathematics and science. Even stranger, when you consider that all of the black holes, naked singularities, stars, planets and other objects in space or energy impacting what can be seen actually only comprise 4% of existent universe or cosmos.
And God, knows and controls and is it all.
Of course there are a number of Republican pundits and U.S. Senators and well, others, who wouldn't believe what's said in Scientific American any way. So when the "Star Gate" budget comes up for reauthorization they will probably work against it.
Read it for yourself:
8 comments:
Some schools of Buddhism are a faith system (taking faith system as an ideology that posits divinty as opposed to philosophies that need not have a divinity).
But certainly there are schools of Buddhism, and Hinduism from which it inherited the idea, that reality is ultimately an illusion of perception, or unreality - and this would include space and time.
On the other hand, Christianity entertains the thought of two periods without time and at least the first one is without space.
The first is the life of the Godhead before space and time existed. We even have it stipulated in our creed: "We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father." The importance of "begotten, not made" is in part to nail down the idea of the Son's co-eternality with the Father. If "made" then the Son enters temporality.
The second, in a word, is the faith in Heaven. God does not require time and space and, from whenever they were made, the angles no longer require time. Can't say about space.
Not only that, but also the redemption of the cosmos - when creation will be made perfect and all that is made will continue in perfect communion with God forever - will be from that time forward, endlessness. In the East, they call this the eighth day and it will have no end.
What is more, in as much as the Eastern Church (and many in the West who have been influenced through the centuries by the theologians important to Orthodox theology) holds that because of Christ we can co-participate in divine nature and take part in and move toward our own deification, it has been natural also to suggest that we can mystically commune with eternity - as that is what we are made to reach eventually. We can "experience" endlessness.
Also because of Christ's work, those preceding the incarnation are now perfected, living in endlessness, and "yearn" on our behalf before God and the angels. Thus our prayers to them as well.
So this is faith that we, even now, can mystically experience punctuated timelessness.
Can't say about space as we understand space. But corporeality has always been vastly more important to monotheistic faiths than time.
I'm not sure it's accurate to say we believe in something like a naked singularity, but that we postulate it. If we don't find any such thing, or if new mathematics suggests that one would never form, it would go way of the four humors and ether. Science is science because it can be wrong. String theory might one day be an artifact, a complete blind alley.
Strangeness, though, is an interesting question. It seems to me unlikely that molecular carbon-based creatures at a spatial and temporal point somewhere between the micro and the macro would have the ability to perceive - much less intuit or understand - everything at the far ends of the scales, if the scales have an end. In a theological universe, strangeness is also an interesting concept. If the Human Comedy of salvation and damnation is the point of it all, it's conceivable that everything is explicable until the final ontological mystery. But that's not the only way to imagine it.
Now see both you guys have already exceeded the space/time understanding of 99% of the religious people in the world and 90% of the theologians.
With further thought, I don't think Christianity needs space, either, if by space we are talking about what we understand as space: three dimensions.
God, the angels, the saints in heaven need not exist in our three dimensions, theologically speaking.
To TStockmann, I'd say that I think a mystical response would be that things at the far or endless ends of the scales can perhaps comprehend us and communicate in their way. Perhaps loss of comprehension/perspective comes precisely because we are somewhere in the mid-term of the scale. Like being in the middle of the Washington Mall on Inauguration Day where evaluation of scope was useless, unlike, I propose, being at one end looking down the whole length.
F said: "With further thought, I don't think Christianity needs space, either,..."
Me neither, or maybe Christianity takes in all space, or both. After all, time, in eternity, can never be other than now. God, being time and space when it is needed, would still be God without it.
Unfortunately which Sunday School shall we attend to learn any of this?
Sunday School for adult christians: The New York Times.
Too dangerous. My wife is a compulsive reader. The Sunday Times would be a threat to her health.
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