After church today before we went to eat, Koenig had to stop at the book store again. He is making it into a weekly ritual which is not good for my pocket book. On my own I try to do my best to avoid the book store. This week I managed to keep it down to only a few books, mainly because after I had picked up a few a flatly refused to even look at the shelves anymore. One of the books I managed to restrain from buying even after perusing it was a book titled “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson. An author I first met in “Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid” which is your classic growing up in small town America, playing hide and seek on the streets, and running around in underpants pretending to be a superhero book. I don’t remember for sure where that book takes place whether or not it was actually in a “small town” but it certainly gives you the same nostalgia for an America that barely existed and yet seems to have become the symbolic perfection of everything that is “America.”
In this book, “A Short History of Nearly Everything,” I just read a few paragraphs that were speaking about fossils. Here Bryson makes a remark to the effect that the fossil record is really messed up. He writes to the effect that fossils keep appearing where they shouldn’t and not appearing where they should. He gives the example of some animal that apparently appears all over the world, EXCEPT South America. Why should any animal appear on absolutely every continent including Antarctica, but not in South America? My thought was I wonder if the Lord isn’t just messing with us a little.
I had a similar thought when reading through “A Brief History of Time.” There Stephen Hawking is talking about the great unifying theory in Physics. That is an explanation for the way that all things act that would tie together the four forces of the Universe and explain it all. Or you could also call it the one great cause, the reason that everything acts the way it does. In discussing this he mentions four distinct possibilities: 1 – There is such a unifying cause and we are going to find it 2- There is no such unifying cause and the four forces simply are the way they are 3 – There is such a unifying cause but we are not capable of finding it 4 – There are an endless number of causes each underlying the last. It was this last one that caught my attention. The basic idea here is that no matter how deeply into space or atoms we look there will always be something deeper. For example if one asks: What is matter made of? We find the answer is atoms. But then what are atoms made of? Electrons, protons, neutrons. Those in turn are made up of other smaller particles, and those of smaller, and those of smaller, etc. Hawking hypothesizes that maybe the forces of the universe are the same way. If we were to find something underlying the four forces, we would find something under that, and something under that, and so on. Thus in the end we would be chasing an endlessly receding answer, like the donkey with the carrot strapped to its head, or the cat that chases it tail. Of course like the donkey we would never know what we were doing. We would always think just one more layer this time we will find it. We would be like that guy in Greek mythology who spends eternity pushing the rock up the hill only to have it fall down again just before he reaches the summit.
For romantic reasons I like this last hypothesis of Hawking, even though he himself doesn’t think it is true. It suggests to me the same thing as the fossils that exist where they shouldn’t. Something to the effect that God is messing with us in a manner of speaking. It is like He is saying, “Okay you can spend your life chasing the carrot or you can just listen to me.” It’s like God purposely designed the whole Earth and Universe including where and when certain animal species would live in order to scream, “You can’t find the answer here! Why don’t you just listen to the Lord who has already given you the answer?”
Live From Chennai,
Matthew Ude