Stubborness in the Face of the Abstract

Decent article on Christianity and the Multi-verse here. Key quote:

Catholic particle physicist Stephen Barr writes and lectures on how physics demonstrates evidence of god, yet he builds some of his own research on multiverse theory. “There are physics reasons why the multiverse has to be taken seriously as an idea. It absolutely is not kooky,” says Barr. When speaking at Christian universities and churches, he often fields questions on multiverse theory from a largely receptive audience. He says their questions tend to focus on the scientific details, not the religious consequences. Yet there are books by some Christian intellectuals, like Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt’s A Meaningful World, which Barr admits dismiss the multiverse too carelessly: “It seems to me very stupid for religious people to go around and attack ideas like the multiverse because they think it somehow hurts a religious argument. It may turn out someday demonstrable that it’s true, and it’ll backfire on them . . .Page insists that undercutting one argument for god does not defeat the whole case for divine creation. “The multiverse is not an alternative to design by god,” he says. “God could have designed the whole thing.””

The entire article is worth checking out. It's not very long and features some great intersections of science, religion and nerdiness. Two Three things stand out to me immediately:

1. Why do we (we as in "humans") insist on knock-down, drag out wars concerning the nature of things that are beyond our understanding at present and beyond our control eternally? The effort to disprove the idea of the multi-verse so that such a theory cannot be used as a potential weapon against the existence of God is at best an attempt to construct a massive wheel of circular logic.

The whole idea of trying to 'nip an "inconvenient truth" (sic) in the bud' is silliness at the utmost. Why not write a legal brief against gravity?

2. Modern philosophy is way, way out there when compared with how things were back in the day. I don't know if it's because a lot of the good stuff has already been said as best as it can be said or if people are simply accepting consensus around lots of larger questions, but the intersection between philosophical constructs and everyday life seems like it is pretty small right now. Then again, in Ancient Greece they didn't have Twitter.

3. The last sentence --- is it weird to anyone else that the image of God as a resplendent older gentleman sitting atop a throne somewhere persists so strongly? The constant compulsion to anthropomorphize (I don't know if that's a word, in fact, I'm pretty sure it's not) something that clearly goes beyond the confines of the anthropological seems like something we never quite shake from our childhoods. Really, it's a vision of a god that belongs in a Pantheon with the likes of Santa Claus, Paul Bunyan and Spider-man. I'm not saying I've got the inside track or tremendous insight as to what the right construction does look like, but I would say that some of our current conventions could use a little work (and now we're back to point 2).