Beloved, let us love
one another: for love is of God; and every one that loves is born of God, and
knows God. He that loves not knows not God; for God is love.
|
|
A. Cosmic Love
(1) Before the daystar, I begot thee[i]
On December 25th of each year, Christians celebrate
the birth of Jesus Christ. It is not the precise date of his birth. However, it
does give Christians, at least, cause to celebrate in the face of the
tightening grip of Winter (at least in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway).
Among the hymns sung Christmas is the French hymn Canitque Noel (O Holy Night). It
captures the mystery of the night and its enduring message of Jesus birth in
these words:\
“Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
till he appeared, and the soul felt its worth.”
Chapter 15 identifies the soul with the reflective consciousness
described by Teilhard. It also identifies “original sin” as selfishness, one of
the driving forces of evolution. Before humanity evolved with a reflective
consciousness, there was no sin. Metaphorically, the first sin was Cain’s
murder of Abel, an angry selfish response to God’s favor being bestowed on his
younger brother that Cain thought should have been his.
The “sin and error” which the caused the world to pine were the bitter
fruits of selfishness which, like the paths of glory, lead but to the grave.[ii]
Christian theology describes
Jesus as the Son of God, the second person of a Holy Trinity of Father, Son and
Holy Spirit (One God in three persons). Having been taught from an early age
that we can never truly understand this divine mystery, I will not try to
explain it here. However, I have asked myself, if we are made in the image and likeness
of God, where is the holy trinity of our
personality?
I came up with some tortured metaphors,
if not answers. There is human psychological dysfunction of multiple personalities
demonstrated in the 1957 movie The Three
faces of Eve. Freud found three aspects to human personality: ego, super
ego and id. How far of a reach is three persons in one God?
As Chapter 15 demonstrates,
nothing appears as it seems in the Newtonian universe. The concepts of Quantum
Mechanics including Quantum Information have turned traditional macro physics
on its ear.
On January 4, 2005, The New
York Times published the answers of a several scientists to the question: “What
do you believe even if you can not prove it?”
Richard Dawkins, who in the Introduction to this book was anointed the
“Atheist Pope” replied
“I
believe, but I cannot prove, that all life, all intelligence, all creativity
and all “design” anywhere in the
universe, is the direct or indirect product of Darwinian natural selection. It follows that design comes
late in the universe, after a period of Darwinian evolution. Design cannot precede
evolution and therefore cannot underlie the universe.”
There is one problem. Certainly, the laws of physics both
Newtonian macro and Quantum Mechanical micro were formed within a microsecond
of the Big Bang. For Dawkins to hypothesize a role for the application of “Darwinian
natural selection” to that infinitesimally small microsecond would be nonsense.
It’s safe to say that Darwinian natural selection played no role in the
creation of the basic quantum forces of our existence and the rules of physics
that govern ‑ and design ‑ our existence. At the quantum level, consciousness
plays a role. There is no role for consciousness at any stage of Darwinian
Natural Selection,
Rosenbaum-Kuttner in Quantum
Enigma quoted the answer of cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman to the same
question:
“I believe that consciousness
and its contents are all that exists. Space-time, matter and fields never were
the fundamental denizens of the universe but have always been, from their
beginning, among the humbler contents of consciousness, dependent on it for
their very being.”
This book has defined God as the primordial consciousness which birthed
the cosmos. In attempting to unlock the mystery of creation of both the
Universe and our own consciousness, we have to rely on such objective facts as
we can ascertain and the inferences and conclusion we can draw from them. The
written Gospels are in themselves material facts whatever their veracity. So
too is the Shroud of Turin. Can these material facts help us untangle the Gordian
knot of our own existence. Do they in fact verify each other?
Jesus claimed to be the Son of God. He claimed to offer a way to
the eternal life: that way was love. In the Introduction, it was stated that a
Tennessee Williams remark ‑ that most important moments of life are when we
break out of our own egoistical shell and really sense the presence of another
person ‑ was in fact a definition of love.
Is such a definition real – or practical?
