Albertus Minimus

The finger of eternity

Walking home tonight I looked up into the sky. The stars were clear, or as clear as an observer living in London has any right to expect (which brings to mind a previous post where I speculated that the decline in belief in God may be linked to how we have closed our cities to the splendours of the night sky). But the stars are a symbol both of space and time: their motion and the relative movement of the planets with respect to the fixed stars providing the basis for our various calendars through history, and each of these an attempt to understand that mystery which flows from past to future via the present moment.

And it is a mystery: if St Augustine struggled to understand its nature Albertus Minimus can surely admit his own failure in this regard. But there is one thought or image that always returns to me when I try to fathom its depths. For it is a truism that the past is gone and the future yet to be. But what of the moment? I believe the present is the touch of eternity in the book of time. In my more whimsical reflections I like to think of it as like a finger, moving over the pages of a book, underlining one word after the other.

In the present moment we stand naked in God's presence and share in His eternal nature.

Where's ET?

Carl Sagan and IS Shklovskii, in their book ‘Intelligent Life in the Universe’, developed a formula for calculating the number of technological civilisations in the galaxy with whom we might be able to communicate. The calculation depended on some factors which are, relatively speaking, more straightforward to derive, such as the number of stars in our galaxy, the proportion of those with planets and the fraction of these systems with planets that might support life. The latter half of the equation, though, had to derive probabilities for matters that are much more imponderable, including the chance of life developing where conditions allow, the probability of intelligence evolving, the likelihood of intelligent life developing a technological culture capable of communicating over interstellar distances and, finally, the average life span for such a civilisation.

If my memory serves, Messers Sagan and Shklovskii in the end calculated that there are some 100,000 civilisations in the galaxy. Even though the Milky Way is a pretty big place, this number does suggest that we ought to be able to see some evidence of intelligent life out there. But, as the physicist Enrico Fermi asked, where is everybody? Not a whisper of a carrier wave, not a deflection of a gravity beam have we detected. It looks like the universe might be a much lonelier place than Messers Sagan and Shklovskii believed.

So, what was wrong with their equation? I only want to look at one of the factors in their equation now: the probability that intelligent life will eventually develop a scientific and technological culture unless prevented from doing so by environmental factors (such as being aquatic) or physiological reasons (a serpentine culture would probably have difficulty with pipe wrenches) beyond their control. The two Ss decided, and factored into their equation, that the probability of intelligent life producing a scientific culture was 1. That is, a certainty. They based this belief on the evident utility of technology for the survival of any species – we humans are unlikely to be hunted out of existence now by rampaging packs of hyenas, but it was a distinct possibility on the plains of Africa millennia ago.

However, I think their confidence was based in large part on being embedded in such a culture and thus being unaware of the philosophical and religious foundations underlying the whole scientific enterprise. A useful question to ask is why, in the Middle Ages, science was not developed in the Islamic world or China. After all, both were relatively stable civilisations, with long traditions of scholarship, and, famously, both provided some of the building blocks of modern science. For instance, the word ‘algebra’ itself is derived from Arabic, and the vital concept of the zero also comes from the Muslim world. I’m less familiar with China, but I suspect that the points I am going to raise about the House of Islam could also apply, in a modified form, to the Far East.

Now, it is well known how much a challenge the newly rediscovered works of Aristotle and other Classical authors posed to medieval Christendom. What is less well known is that the Classical inheritance were similarly problematic to the Muslim world. Over the course of a number of centuries there arose a conflict between the mutakallimun, who might be called scholastic theologians, whose chief role was to defend the truth of the Qu’ran against those who doubted it and the falasifa, the philosophers, who called Aristotle the first teacher and accepted many of the conclusions of the Greek philosophers as true.

Al-Ghazali was the greatest of the mutakallimun and Ibn Sina (Avicenna as he was known in the West) of the falasifa. In the end though the battle was won by the mutakallimun and the Asharite theology defended by Al-Ghazali became dominant within the Islamic world. This theology emphasised the limits of human reason when speaking of God to the extent, in its more extreme forms, of the denial of secondary causes. Thus when wood burns it burns because God wills it to burn, not because you have put a match to the bonfire. Once this is accepted there is an end to philosophical debate. However, such a conclusion was acceptable within the Islamic world, probably because of the emphasis placed in the Qu’ran on the will of God.

However, Christian philosophy was indelibly marked by the work of St Augustine. In his ‘Confessions’ we read of a man who struggles to bring his thought and life in to unity. For Augustine faith brought with it understanding, a fact attested in his own life, and thus there should be no radical schism between the truths of faith and the truths of reason, and he set himself the task of incorporating within Christianity those elements of Classical learning that were compatible with his faith. For Augustine Christianity contained all that was necessary for salvation but it did not contain a complete understanding of the world. To understand the world, and the glory of God it revealed, it was necessary to develop understanding in the light of faith.

And, crucially, that understanding was possible because a rational God had created a rational world. Thus it was possible to understand how things came about, their efficient causation, without simply saying that God wills it and that’s how it is. From this basic belief flows the possibility of science, for without it there is no point in trying to understand the motion of the planets and the fall of an apple.

So, who knows, maybe Messers Sagan and Shklovskii were right, maybe there are thousands upon thousands of civilisations out there staring into the night sky of their home worlds. But if they are there, they will be looking into an ebony sky untouched by the man-made light that brightens our skies. For, to paraphrase Mr Sagan, the factors producing a scientific culture could only develop in a Christ haunted world.

Will you survive the end of the world?

Well of course the answer is no. But that's if we're talking about the proper Parousia. However, have you ever wondered what would happen if a large chunk of, say, dense rock hit the earth somewhere near your home? Now you can stop worrying about the consequences of that strike by 1,500 kg of metoric iron ore somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic and find out what the real deal would be.

The University of Arizona provide a wonderful little online programme where you can input all sorts of details about that recently discovered comet and find out just what the consequences of it hitting the earth would.

This is the first fruit of the new sites on the blogroll, the link supplied by Dominicanus down under.

You can blame it on Albert

The maxim of the age: it's all relative, innit. Poor Albert Einstein, I wonder if he knew what he was letting out of the bag. Of course, before my intelligent readers inundate me with emails pointing out that the theory of relativity has nothing to do with philosophical and moral relativism, I do understand that.

But of course, ideas have consequences. Arthur Lovejoy in his wonderful book 'The Great Chain of Being' traces the effects of the constellation of notions that formed the Great Chain of Being, from Plato through to the nineteenth century. One of the most interesting aspects of the book is how he shows the way philosophical ideas filter through into the popular consciousness, via novels, poetry, even songs, often being distorted along the way.

Thus when Einstein developed his theory, the name he chose tended to validate quite separate ideas and tendencies in philosophy and morality. Perhaps even Albert was affected at some level by these ideas, since in some ways a better name for his work would be the Theory of Invariance.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century physicists were wrestling with the problem of frames of reference. That is, in order to measure the motion of an object moving at a constant velocity, you need a reference point that is still. We've probably all experienced that ourselves when sitting in a train at a station and then the train on the next platform starts moving. Or is it our own train? It's a strange, disorientating feeling, is it not? The problem is that motion at a constant speed leaves no imprint on our senses. And even with instruments you need something still against which to calibrate them.

Now this was not a problem when we thought the heavens revolved in splendour around the motionless earth, but by the late nineteenth century it was clear that all the planets and stars were in constant motion. So where could astronomers and physicists find that still point against which to measure the motion of everything else?

The candidate at the time was the ether, the substance that was believed to permeate the universe, and the medium through which light waves travelled, rather like the sea is the medium through which ocean waves travel. But then the famous Michelson-Morley experiment proved that there was no ether through which light could travel.

Ah. Then how can we measure anything at all? A young physicist played some thought experiments, imagining himself riding on a beam of light, and he realised that there was a constant, but it wasn't still, it was moving: the speed of light. It remains the same, whether you are running towards the source of the light or running away from it, or even if the light source is rushing towards you very fast and you would expect the light to get a boost from the speed of its source. Not a bit of it. Light (in a vacuum) always travels at the same speed, 186,000 miles per second.

So rather than describing how the motion of objects can be measured relative to the speed of light, Einstein could have highlighted the invariance of light with respect to everything else.

And perhaps, without the reflected prestige of his extraordinary work, other tendencies within Western thought would not have gained such traction.

Search for a star

I was born and have lived all my life in London; something of a problem for a child mad keen on astronomy. When I was about ten my parents bought me a small telescope and I still remember the excitement of standing out in the garden, the breath misting around my face (astronomy seems always destined to be done in cold weather, at least if you are an amateur), and seeing for the first time the craters of the moon, and the crescent of Venus.

But that was about as far as I could go in London. The light and atmospheric pollution here are such as to make astronomy almost impossible. You know the phrase, as countless as the stars of heaven? Well, standing in our garden, looking up at the sky, the countless seemed to amount to about 50 or so. Where were the rest of them? Then, of course, I was too young to understand that the stars were hidden by the light in which we bathe our cities and civilisation. Although there was one night when I was young when, by some freakish combination of atmospheric conditions, the stars blazed out as bright and numerous as at the climax of Isaac Asimov's short story, 'Nightfall'. Then indeed, it was possible to imagine civilisations falling into ruin beneath the glare of starlight in an infinity of darkness.

But now, of course, even darkness is in short supply. The night, at least in cities, is lit a diffused orange. True darkness and the stars that adorn it are confined to country areas, far away from neon lighting. And this has got me thinking. Is it possible that decline in the belief in God is, at least in part, related to the way we have sealed ourselves off from the night and the stars and their reminder of our smallness, but also our preciousness. For beneath the vault of heaven it is almost impossible not to be awed and humbled by the universe arrayed around us, and yet to also see that in some way we are placed at the centre of splendour. For while there may be no geometrical centre to the universe, so far as we know there is only one place within the vast where eyes look up into the sky and see the stars and wonder. So, at least in that sense, we are indeed central to creation.

However, in the midst of our light ridden cities, that is hidden to us. How much easier it is to forget the author of those wonders when we have ensured we cannot see them. So maybe one way to help in the recollection of God would be to turn out the lights and look up into the night.