Relativity
Few things can be as interesting – or should I say frustrating? – as watching a debate between the Richard Dawkins self-righteous atheists and the Religious Right, right, infallibly right. Anyone with an open mind and a safe distance of objectivity will quickly see what these contentious adversaries would never admit themselves, that they resemble each other far more than they differ.
The inability to get along between people with too much in common is a story as ancient as the first sibling rivalry. The old adage says that you are your own worst critic, but that uncanny acquaintance who resembles you in so many ways is more likely your thorniest fault-finder of all. We could deconstruct our fragile psyches and reflect on the difficulty of introspection ad infinitum, and certainly we should, but first I’d like to consider another source of infinite irony, one that binds our religious fundamentalists and concrete materialists as tightly as a pair of interdependent binary stars.
On the surface, these two unwavering camps appear to disagree on every point. It’s as if they are running full-speed ahead in opposite directions, while the real answers remain somewhere on the middle ground between them. So with their backs to the truth, they run faster and further, like brothers in arms, gazing only at the shadows on the cave walls.
Onward they go, plunging ever deeper into the mysteries and closer to the boundaries of the cosmos. And as they do so, their conclusions grow increasingly riddled with the paradoxes of infinity, contradictions of eternity, and oxymorons of omnipotence. Skeptics will ridicule believers for accepting a Creator who is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-forgiving, in the face of a real world that crawls with vice, injustice and malevolence. “Didn’t He know that Adam would sin?” they ask. And why on Earth would He create a race of sinners and then oblige them to spend their lives in supplication, lest they be punished with eternal damnation for being sinners?
Meanwhile, the sensible rationalists build bigger telescopes and stronger microscopes, clawing their way ever closer to the concrete foundation that underlies our reality. And as they draw closer and closer to the immeasurably vast, the incomprehensibly small, and the speed of light, they too become entangled in contradictions. The elegant logic of their superior reasoning simply collapses.
In the absence of a timeless, limitless, all-powerful cosmic architect, they posit a finite universe that has no boundaries, or maybe an infinite universe that is ultimately knowable. Today in the field of cosmology, m-string theory represents the pinnacle of rational thinking, but m-strings, black holes, big bangs and quantum mechanics have hardly accomplished the goal of replacing irrationality with air-tight Aristotelian logic. Their cup of inconsistencies runneth over, and it all starts to sound a lot like theoretical mumbo jumbo, requiring more than a few quarks of blind faith to accept.
Hard-headed skeptics love to invoke the words of Galileo: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Conversely, one can just easily claim that Evolution would not have granted us such vivid imagination, powers of intuition and other means of irrational thinking, were we not meant to employ them as well. Indeed, the tools at our disposal are diverse and all worthy of consideration.
Infinity is a peculiar idea, especially intriguing in that scientific and theological reasoning are both confronted — and confounded — by it. It seems essential to our understanding the truth about our cosmos, and yet it hovers over us, just beyond our rational understanding, seducing us with its sense of unbounded freedom. But the reality of the infinite is simply too fantastic: the center cannot hold, because infinity has no center.
The more I contemplate this conundrum, the less it looks like an infinitely expanding cosmos, and the more it feels like standing between two parallel mirrors, where the reflections seem to go on forever; and no matter how hard I try to see the back of my head, my face keeps getting in the way. It looks like infinity wrapped in an enigma, but it’s just a simple trick. Yet we are drawn to it in the same way we are drawn to an Agatha Christie mystery. We’ll never solve the murder, because she’s withholding some vital information until the big climax, and we know it. But we love the ride.
Of course, this puzzle of infinity is but one mask worn but the enchanting cast of eternal mysteries. At their core, every great tradition of Truth rests on a foundation of paradox. Buddhists are driven by the burning desire to live free from desire. The Vedas teach that everything is God, with the Orwellian corollary that some things are more God than others. And Taoists insist that the Tao which can be spoken is not the true Tao.
Maybe it’s just that the cosmos, in all its intelligence — divine or otherwise — has provided us with just the right degree of consciousness to be amazed by the cosmic order, but not quite enough wisdom to grasp and define it. And with that slight deficiency, we remain trapped in a cul de sac of perpetual paradox, spinning our wheels always faster, but getting nowhere, and forgetting to admire the flower beds blooming on the median.
This week’s exercise: The Mobius Bagel, whose surface knows no bounds.
