Fine Tuning

I just read "A Fortunate Universe", which, in a nutshell, explains in great detail how utterly improbable our universe is, and then proceeds to cover the 'what it means' angle surprisingly well.  In particularly, I was very pleased to hear one of the better arguments for the existence of God presented and defended rather well.  One seldom hears the more mature arguments these days, only straw men, so having the "ultimate cause" argument explained and held up as valid was fantastic.  It was even better that it was held up against naturalism, and to see naturalisms flaccid and avoidant nature exposed.

The case for the theism was made strongly, but despite this, the authors drifted off toward the required nebulous conclusion for a book in this genre.  I imagine this is how most of us lose track of God: by drifting away into distraction without ever disproving or refuting the solid, rational arguments we have found, and without denying the powerful feelings of certainty we have encountered.  Rather, we blithely wander off onto some other train of thought and are carried far away from the memory of such things.  After enough stops, we forget that the proofs were convincing or the feelings urgent.

The proof, for those curious enough to want to know but not curious enough to read the book, was simply that everything has a cause, and that the ultimate origin of a thing has to be of a different kind.  Something has to be self-originating, or you never reach bottom.  The example is of what holds us up.  The floor?  The earth's surface holds that up, what holds that up?  Eventually you reach the earth's core, which is a different kind of thing.  In the same way, physical laws are far too specific, too complex, too elaborate and creative to say, as does naturalism, "they just are that way".  To say this is a very ignorant thing to say, a short sighted thing to say.  To say instead that "they arose from other natural laws" leads to the problem of not reaching bottom, and turns out to be a very weak and flabby answer.  The attempt to reduce the cause of what we see, which is amazing, into something less, begins to sound disingenuous.

There is a famous argument which goes something like, you are wandering through the wilderness and you come upon a watch.  Intuitively you are not likely to imagine that it just grew there, but rather that it was made.

Overall, to sum up the proof, the laws of the universe are so elaborate and so perfectly attuned to life, and so utterly improbable, that it is much more likely that they were created.

But the point I wanted to make is a comparison between the fine tuning of physical laws and what I see as their spiritual counterpart.  If you change any physical constant very much at all you end up with a sterile universe in which life is not possible.  Everything is set up so that we can exist, and it is not a simple, or arbitrary thing.  If you increase gravity just a little you get only black holes, for instance.  Similarly, if we step outside of God's spiritual laws, thinking we can do just as well on our own we will quickly find ourselves in a sterile universe, or in other words, in outer darkness.  The light is, itself, infinite and accommodating, but it requires that we stick to what is true.  Varying from truth by even a small amount causes us to fall into the consequences of falsity.

The fundamental error of evil is to try to be gods without God.  This is, of course, the error that modern humanity is attempting to repeat.  Not all of humanity, of course, but enough that it is quite disturbing to watch.

Certainly, a very large part of the population is doing exactly what Lucifer tried to do in a completely overt way, casting aside God, and with Him, all possibility of a successful conclusion.  But we do this more subtly when we attempt to change any of these fine tuned universal constants which God has designed for us to follow: when we imagine that some part of God's laws are outdated and require us to redesign them.

Of course, on first sight, there are many commandments we are unlikely to understand.  In fact it is guaranteed that we will not understand any of them on first sight, or on second sight, or after years of study.  But this is what one might call an asymptotic approach to mystery.  As we strive toward truth we find ourselves growing closer to it, without ever having reached it, per se.  At some point, the truth reaches back in our direction and then we only need to keep moving closer, no longer needing to 'get there' ourselves.

Difficult commandments require that we keep trying to understand them.  We often have to leave incomplete and faulty placeholders in the places where we have failed to understand something, but we must remember we have put our own shoddy creations there as band-aids, and not pretend that these areas are healed.

If one does happen to find that one's stream of theology is muddy, the last thing one should do is attempt to filter the water with one's own unclean hands. 

We have, rather, to dig deeper into the Church, to recover the unsullied waters that flow directly from the source.  I am regularly emboldened in my certainty of this, each time I draw from its "2000 year reading list": there are indeed clear flowing streams which accurately represent the universal laws and commandments which are suitable for our spiritual consumption.  It is still possible to drink from the streams that flow from the rock not carved by human hands.