Saturday 5 March 2011

Black holes and faith

The analogy of a black hole is somewhat limited since few people seem to understand them, but they provide a combination of all mysteries - consciousness, time, and gravity, and so require a certain faith that great scientists like Hawking have 'understood' the workings of reality (which I doubt they have any more than any other creature to whom reality lends these three mysteries).

So where do they come from:
Let us now suppose the particles of light to be attracted in the same manner as all other bodies with which we are acquainted; that is, by forces bearing the same proportion to their vis interiae; of which there can be no reasonable doubt, gravitation being, as far as we know, or have any reason to believe, a universal law of nature. John Mitchell (written 1784) cited here.

Now for hell - the supposedly conscious poets of ancient time, touched by the eternal weight of glory we know as election or anointing, have much to say about destruction of wickedness in the hearts of others as well as their own.  In short, there's plenty of hell in the psalms, but, like black holes, it may not be the linear temporal model, nor is it removed from the weighty problem of consciousness. Jesus reads the psalms and learns from them that he will give his life for the life of the world. The hell I understand is the suffering and death of Jesus for the life of the world, a one-time event still emitting Hawking radiation and still effective when applied in real time to intractable problems.

"A black hole is a body which has such a great mass that not even light can escape from it due to it's gravitation."

So it is that the light that is darkness within us can be transformed into a new creation via a wormhole that creates new things from old when the conscious person submits him or herself to this everlasting ying of the eternal submission of Christ Jesus in his death. As one poet said of his birth, eternity shut in a span, so we have the remarkable mystery of his death whereby death is destroyed by its own power and eternal life in the Spirit is come to be known in its glorious appearance through his resurrection from the dead.

These things are apprehended in time by beings subject to decay - things fall apart. Yet they know an invisible life that works against such increasing entropy by the God who is from the beginning a source of information.  Information, by the way, is negative entropy.  Stafford Beer, the father of operations research, defined God as such: a store of negative entropy.

Each of us in turn can be a miniature black hole, absorbing in our own persons the facts of evil and becoming in the destruction of the same, more and more like the archetype of our faith, the one who in the words of the psalms, is for ever (psalm 45 cited in Hebrews).

stimulus John Hobbins on hell and Doug Chaplin aka clayboy on metaphor.

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