What We Talk About When We Talk About God
Rob Bell
Rob Bell’s bestselling book Love Wins struck a powerful chord with a new generation of Christians who are asking the questions church leaders have been afraid to touch. His new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, continues down this path, helping us with the ultimate big-picture issue: how do we know God?Love Wins was a Sunday Times bestseller that created a media storm, launching Bell as a national religious voice who is reinvigorating what it means to be religious and a Christian today.He is one of the most influential voices in the Christian world, and now his new book, What We Talk About When We Talk About God, is poised to blow open the doors on how we understand God.Bell believes we need to drop our primitive, tribal views of God and instead understand the God who wants us to become who we were designed to be, a God who created a universe of quarks and quantum string dynamics, but who also gives meaning to why new-born babies and stories of heroes and sacrifice inspire in us a deep reverence.What We Talk About When We Talk About God will reveal that God is not in need of repair to catch him up with today’s world so much as we need to discover the God who goes before us and beckons us forward.A book full of mystery, controversy, and reverence, What We Talk About When We Talk About God has fans and critics alike anxiously awaiting, and promises not to disappoint.
EPIGRAPH (#ulink_7c090d5f-0ca7-55bf-853b-c59b6e414299)
Like all great things in the world, women and religion and the sky . . . you wonder about it, and you don’t stop wondering about it.
—Tom Waits
CONTENTS
EPIGRAPH
CHAPTER 1 - HUM
CHAPTER 2 - OPEN
CHAPTER 3 - BOTH
CHAPTER 4 - WITH
CHAPTER 5 - FOR
CHAPTER 6 - AHEAD
CHAPTER 7 - SO
EPILOGUE
RESOURCES, NODS, NOTES, AND A FEW SHOUT-OUTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY ROB BELL
CREDITS
BACK AD
COPYRIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_c8155752-f3ba-51af-921d-811f6fa1b4a7)
HUM (#ulink_c8155752-f3ba-51af-921d-811f6fa1b4a7)
I realize that when I use the word God in the title of this book there’s a good chance I’m stepping on all kinds of land mines. Is there a more volatile word loaded down with more history, assumptions, and expectations than that tired, old, relevant, electrically charged, provocative, fresh, antiquated yet ubiquitous as ever, familiar/unfamiliar word God?
And that’s why I use it.
From people risking their lives to serve the poor because they believe God called them to do it, to pastors claiming that the latest tornado or hurricane or earthquake is God’s judgment, to professors proclaiming that God has only ever been a figment of our imagination, to people in a recovery meeting sitting in a circle drinking bad coffee and talking about surrendering to a higher power, to musicians in their acceptance speech at an awards show thanking God for their hit song about a late-night booty call, when it comes to God, we are all over the place.
Like a mirror, God appears to be more and more a reflection of whoever it is that happens to be talking about God at the moment.
And then there are the latest surveys and polls, the ones telling us how many of us believe and don’t believe in God and how many fewer of us are going to church, inevitably prompting experts to speculate about demographics and technology and worship style and this generation versus that generation, all of it avoiding the glaring truth that sits right there elephant-like in the middle of the room.
The truth is, we have a problem with God.
It’s not just a problem of definition—what is it we’re talking about when we talk about God?—and it’s not just the increasing likelihood that two people discussing God are in fact talking about two extraordinarily different realities while using the exact same word.
This problem with God goes much, much deeper.
As a pastor over the past twenty years, what I’ve seen again and again is people who want to live lives of meaning and peace and significance and joy—people who have a compelling sense that their spirituality is in some vital and yet mysterious way central to who they are—but who can’t find meaning in the dominant conceptions, perceptions, and understandings of God they’ve encountered. In fact, those conceptions aren’t just failing them but are actually causing harm.
We’re engaged more than ever by the possibilities of soul and spirit, and by the nagging suspicion that all of this may not be a grand accident after all; but God, an increasing number of people are asking—what does God have to do with that?
I’ve written this book about that word, then, because there’s something in the air, we’re in the midst of a massive rethink, a movement is gaining momentum, a moment in history is in the making: there is a growing sense among a growing number of people that when it comes to God, we’re at the end of one era and the start of another, an entire mode of understanding and talking about God dying as something new is being birthed.
There’s an ancient story about a man named Jacob who had a magnificent dream, and when he wakes up he says, “Surely God was in this place, and I, I wasn’t aware of it.”
Until now.
The power of the story is its timeless reminder that God hasn’t changed; it’s Jacob who wakes up to a whole new awareness of who—and where—God is.
Which brings me back to this moment, to the realization among an increasing number of people that we are waking up in new ways to the God who’s been here the whole time.
I’m aware, to say the least, that talking about this and writing a book about it, naming it and trying to explain it and taking a shot at describing where it’s all headed, runs all sorts of risks.
I get that.
We’re surrounded by friends and neighbors and family and intellectual and religious systems with deeply held, vested interests in the conventional categories and conceptions of belief and denial continuing to remain as entrenched as those traditional conceptions are. There are, as they say, snipers on every roof. And being controversial isn’t remotely interesting.
But love and meaning and joy and hope?
That’s compelling.
That’s what I’m after.
That’s worth the risk.
The great German scholar Helmut Thielicke once said that a person who speaks to this hour’s need will always be skirting the edge of heresy, but only the person who risks those heresies can gain the truth.
And the truth is, we have a problem—we have a need—and there’s always the chance that this may in fact be the hour.
First, then, a bit more about this God problem . . .
When I was twenty, I drove an Oldsmobile.
Remember those?
It was a four-door Delta 88 and it was silver and it had a bench seat across the front with an armrest that folded down and it fit seven or eight people easily and in a feat of engineering genius the rear license plate was on a hinge that you pulled down in order to fill up the gas tank and the trunk was so huge you could put five snowboards in at the same time or a drum set, several guitar amps, and a body if you needed to. (I’m just messing with you there, about the body.) My friends called it “the Sled.”
It was a magnificent automobile, the Sled, and it served me well for those years.
But they don’t make Oldsmobiles anymore.
They used to be popular, and your grandparents or roommate may still drive one, but the factories have shut down. Eventually the only ones left will be collector’s items, relics of an era that has passed.
Oldsmobile couldn’t keep up with the times, and so it gradually became part of the past, not the future.
For them, not us.
For then, not now.
I tell you about the Sled I used to drive because for many in our world today, God is like Oldsmobiles. To explain what I mean when I talk about God-like Oldsmobiles, a few stories: my friend Cathi recently told me about an event she attended where an influential Christian leader talked openly about how he didn’t think women should be allowed to teach and lead in the church. Cathi, who has two master’s degrees, sat there stunned.
I got an e-mail from my friend Gary last year, saying that he’d decided to visit a church with his family on Easter Sunday. They’d heard a sermon about how resurrection means everybody who is gay is going to hell.
And then my friend Michael recently told me about hearing the leader of a large Christian denomination say that if you deny that God made the world in a literal six days, you are denying the rest of the Bible as well, because it doesn’t matter what science says.
And then there are the two pastors I know who each told me, within days of the other, how their wives don’t want anything to do with God. Both wives were raised and educated in very religious environments that placed a great deal of importance on the belief that God is good and the point of life is to have a personal relationship with this good God. But both wives have suffered great pain in their young lives, and the clean and neat categories of faith they were handed in their youth haven’t been capable of helping them navigate the complexity of their experiences. And so, like jilted lovers, they have turned away. God, for them, is an awkward, alien, strange notion. Like someone they used to know.
And then there’s the party I attended in New York where I met a well-known journalist who, when he was told that I’m a pastor, wanted to know if all of you pastors use big charts with timelines and graphics to show people when the world is going to end and how Christians are going to escape while those who are left behind endure untold suffering.
I tell you about Cathi sitting there stunned and Gary hearing that sermon and me at that party because whether it’s science or art or education or medicine or personal rights or basic intellectual integrity or simply dealing with suffering in all of its complexity, for many in our world—and this includes Christians and a growing number of pastors—believing or trusting in that God, the one they’ve heard other Christians talk about, feels like a step backward, to an earlier, less informed and enlightened time, one that we’ve thankfully left behind. There’s a question that lurks in these stories, a question that an ever-increasing number of people across a broad range of backgrounds and perspectives are asking about God:
Can God keep up with the modern world?
Things have changed. We have more information and technology than ever. We’re interacting with a far more diverse range of people than we used to. And the tribal God,
the one that is the only one many have been exposed to—the one who’s always right (which means everybody else is wrong)—is increasingly perceived to be
small,
narrow,
irrelevant,
mean, and sometimes just not that intelligent.
Is God going to be left behind?
Like Oldsmobiles?
For others, it isn’t that God is behind or unable to deal with the complexity of life; for them God never existed in the first place. In recent years we’ve heard a number of very intelligent and articulate scientists, professors, and writers argue passionately and confidently that there is no God. This particular faith insists that human beings are nothing more than highly complex interactions of atoms and molecules and neurons, hardwired over time to respond to stimuli in particular ways, feverishly constructing meaning to protect us from the unwelcome truth that there is no ultimate meaning because in the end we are simply the sum of our parts—no more, no less.
That all there is
is, in the end,
all there is.
This denial isn’t anything new, but it’s gained a head of steam in recent years, this resurgence seemingly in reaction to the God-like Oldsmobile, the one more and more people are becoming convinced is not only behind, but downright destructive.
I was recently invited to participate in a debate at which the topic was “Is religion good or bad?” Here’s the kicker: the organizers wanted me to know I was free to choose which side I’d take!
How revealing is that?
All of which brings me to Jane Fonda. (You didn’t see that coming, did you?) Several years ago in an interview she gave to Rolling Stone magazine the interviewer said this:
Your most recent—and perhaps most dramatic—transformation is your becoming a Christian. Even with your flair for controversy, that’s pretty explosive.
It’s a telling statement, isn’t it? You can sense so much there, as if there’s a question behind the question that isn’t really a question—that hidden question being what the interviewer really wants to ask her: “Why would anybody become a Christian?”
That’s a question lots of people have—educated, reasonable, modern people who find becoming a Christian an “explosive,” not to mention an inconceivable, thing to do.
In her response, Jane Fonda spoke of being drawn to faith because “I could feel reverence humming in me.”
Reverence humming in me. I love that phrase. It speaks to the experiences we’ve all had—moments and tastes and glimpses when we’ve found ourselves deeply aware of the something more of life, the something else, the sense that all of this might just mean something, that it may not be an accident, that it has profound resonance and that it matters in ways that are very real and very hard to explain.
For a massive number of people, to deny this reverence humming in us, to insist that we’re simply random collections of atoms and that all there is is all there is, leaves them cold, bored, and uninspired.
It doesn’t ring true to our very real experiences of life.
But when people turn to many of the conventional, traditional religious explanations for this reverence, they’re often led to the God who is like Oldsmobiles, the one who’s back there, behind, unable to keep up.
All of this raising the questions:
Are there other ways to talk about the reverence humming in us?
Are there other ways to talk about the sense we have that there’s way more going on here?
Are there other ways to talk about God?
My answer is yes. I believe there are. But before we get to those others ways, I need to first tell you why this book comes bursting out of my heart like it does.
One Sunday morning a number of years ago I found myself face-to-face with the possibility that there is no God and we really are on our own and this may be all there is.
Now I realize lots of people have questions and convictions and doubts along those lines—that’s nothing new. But in my case, it was an Easter Sunday morning, and I was a pastor. I was driving to the church services where I’d be giving a sermon about how there is a God and that God came here to Earth to do something miraculous and rise from the dead so that all of us could live forever.
And it was expected that I would do this passionately and confidently and persuasively with great hope and joy and lots of exclamation points. !!!!!!!
That’s how the Easter sermon goes, right? Imagine if I’d stood up there and said, “Well, I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and I gotta be honest with you: I think we’re kinda screwed.”
Doesn’t work, does it?
I should pause here and say that when you’re a pastor, your heart and soul and paycheck and doubts and faith and hopes and struggles and intellect and responsibility are all wrapped up together in a life/job that is very public. And Sunday comes once a week, when you’re expected to have something inspiring to say, regardless of how you happen to feel or think about God at the moment. This can create a suffocating tension at times, because you want to serve people well and give them your very best, and yet you’re also human. And in my case, full of really, really serious doubts about the entire ball of God wax.
That Easter Sunday was fairly traumatic, to say the least, because I realized that without some serious reflection and study and wise counsel I couldn’t keep going without losing something vital to my sanity. The only way forward was to plunge headfirst into my doubts and swim all the way to the bottom and find out just how deep that pool went. And if I had to, in the end, walk away in good conscience, then so be it. At least I’d have my integrity.
This book, then, is deeply, deeply personal for me. Much of what I’ve written here comes directly out of my own doubt, skepticism, and dark nights of the soul when I found myself questioning—to be honest—everything. There is a cold shudder that runs down the spine when you find yourself face-to-face with the unvarnished possibility that we may in the end be alone. To trust that there is a divine being who cares and loves and guides can feel like taking a leap—across the ocean. So when I talk about God and faith and belief and all that, it’s not from a triumphant, impatient posture of “Come on, people—get with the program!” I come to this topic limping, with some bruises, acutely aware of how maddening, confusing, frustrating, infuriating, and even traumatic it can be to talk about God.
What I experienced, over a long period of time, was a gradual awakening to new perspectives on God—specifically, the God Jesus talked about. I came to see that there were depths and dimensions to the ancient Hebrew tradition, and to the Christian tradition which grew out of that, that spoke directly to my questions and struggles in coming to terms with
how to conceive of who God is
and what God is
and why that even matters
and what that has to do with life in this world,
here and now.
Through that process, which is of course still going on, the doubts didn’t suddenly go away and the beliefs didn’t suddenly form nice, neat categories. Something much more profound happened. Something extraordinarily freeing and inspiring and invigorating and really, really helpful, something thrilling which compels me to sit here day after day, month after month, and write this book.
Which leads me to two brief truths about this book before we go further.
First, I’m a Christian, and so Jesus is how I understand God. I realize that for some people, hearing talk about Jesus shrinks and narrows the discussion about God, but my experience has been the exact opposite. My experiences of Jesus have opened my mind and my heart to a bigger, wider, more expansive and mysterious and loving God who I believe is actually up to something in the world.
Second, what I’ve experienced time and time again is that people want to talk about God. Whether it’s what they were taught growing up or not taught, or what inspires them or what repulses them, or what gives them hope or what fills them with despair, I’ve found people to be extremely keen to talk about their beliefs and lack of beliefs in God. What I’ve observed is that while we want more of a connection with the reverence humming within us, we often don’t know where to begin or what steps to take or what that process even looks like.
So if, in some small way, this book could provide some guidance along these lines, I’d be ecstatic. In saying that, I should be clear here about one point: this is not a book in which I’ll try to prove that God exists. If you even could prove the existence of the divine, I suspect that at that moment you would in fact be talking about something, or somebody, else.
This is a book about seeing, about becoming more and more alive and aware, orienting ourselves around the God who I believe is the ground of our being, the electricity that lights up the whole house, the transcendent presence in our tastes, sights, and sensations of the depth and dimension and fullness of life, from joy to agony to everything else.
Now, about where we’re headed in the following pages.
This book centers around three words. They aren’t long or technical or complicated or scholarly; they’re short, simple, everyday words, and they’re the foundation on which everything we’re going to cover rests.
These three words are central to how I understand God, and if I could CAPS LOCK THEM THE WHOLE WAY THROUGHOUT THE BOOK, I would; or write them in the sky or etch them in blood (on second thought, maybe not) or graffiti them on the side of your house (let’s not do this either, though I’d love to see what Banksy would do with them), because they’re the giant, big, loud, this-one-goes-to-eleven idea that animates everything we’re going to explore in the following pages.
They’ve unleashed in me new ways of thinking about and understanding and most importantly experiencing God. They’ve made my life better, and my hope is that they will do the same for you.
But before we get to those three words, we first have two others words we’re going to cover. (Nice buildup, huh?)
It’s these two words that will set us up for the three words that form the backbone of the book.
First, we’ll talk about being open, because when we talk about God we drag a massive amount of expectations and assumptions into the discussion with us about how the world works and what kind of universe we’re living in. Often God’s existence is challenged in the conversation about what matters most in the modern world because haven’t we moved past all of that ancient, primitive, superstitious thinking? We have science after all, and reason and logic and evidence. What does God have to do with the new challenges we’re facing and knowledge we’re acquiring? Quite a lot, actually, because the universe, it turns out, is way, way weirder than any of us first thought. And that weirdness will demand that we be open.
So first, Open.
Then we’ll talk about talking, because when we talk about God, we’re using language, and language both helps us and fails us in our attempts to understand and describe the paradoxical nature of the God who is beyond words.
First open,
then Both.
And then, after those two words,
we get to the three words,
the words that will shape how we talk about God in this book. The words are (I feel like there should be a drumroll or something . . .)
With,
For,
Ahead.
With, because I understand God to be the energy, the glue, the force, the life, the power, and the source of all we know to be the depth, fullness, and vitality of life from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows and everything in between. I believe God is with us because I believe that all of us are already experiencing the presence of God in countless ways every single day. In talking about the God who is with us, I want you to see how this withness directly confronts popular notions of God that put God somewhere else, doing something else, coming here now and again to do God-type things. I want you to see both the irrelevance and the danger of that particular perspective of God as you more and more see God all around you all the time.
Then for, because I believe God is for every single one of us, regardless of our beliefs or perspectives or actions or failures or mistakes or sins or opinions about whether God exists or not. I believe that God wants us each to flourish and thrive in this world here and now as we become more and more everything we can possibly be. In talking about the forness of God, I want you to see how many of the dominant theological systems of thought that insist God is angry and hateful and just waiting to judge us unless we do or say or perform or believe the right things actually make people miserable and plague them with all kinds of new stresses and anxieties, never more so than when they actually start believing that God is really like that. I want you to see the radical, refreshing, revolutionary forness that is at the heart of Jesus’s message about God as it informs and transforms your entire life.
Then ahead, because when I talk about God, I’m not talking about a divine being who is behind, trying to drag us back to a primitive, barbaric, regressive, prescientific age when we believed Earth was flat and the center of the universe. I believe that God isn’t backward-focused—opposed to reason, liberation, and progress—but instead is pulling us and calling us and drawing all of humanity forward—as God always has—into greater and greater peace, love, justice, connection, honesty, compassion, and joy. I want you to see how the God we see at work in the Bible is actually ahead of people, tribes, and cultures as God always has been. Far too many people in our world have come to see God as back there, primitive, not-that-intelligent, dragging everything backward to where it used to be. I don’t understand God to be stuck back there, and I want you to experience this pull forward as a vital, active reality in your day-to-day life as you see just what God has been up to all along with every single one us.
All of which leads us to one more word to wrap it up: so. So what? So how do we live this? So is the question about what all this talking has to do with our everyday thinking and feeling and living.
To review, then:
Open,
Both,
With,
For,
Ahead,
and so.
One more note about notes: all of the places where I cite Scripture verses, as well as credits for other sources for information and suggestions for further reading, are included in the endnotes, organized there by theme or key phrases.
It’s a fair bit of ground to cover, and my hope is that by the end you will say,
“Now that’s what I’m talking about.”
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_c5e1d8fb-e1c1-59b4-b572-e8e0b4b26e0f)
OPEN (#ulink_c5e1d8fb-e1c1-59b4-b572-e8e0b4b26e0f)
One time I was asked to speak to a group of atheists and I went and I had a blast. Afterward they invited me out for drinks, and we were laughing and telling stories and having all sorts of interesting conversation when a woman pulled me aside to ask me a question. She had a concerned look on her face and her brow was slightly furrowed as she looked me in the eyes and said, “You don’t believe in miracles, do you?”
As I listened, I couldn’t help but smile, because not long before that evening I’d been approached by a churchgoing, highly devout Christian woman who’d asked me, with the exact same concerned look on her face, complete with furrowed brow, “You believe in miracles, don’t you?”
It’s as if the one woman was concerned that I had lost my mind, while the other woman was concerned that I had lost my faith.
There’s a giant either/or embedded in their questions, an either/or that reflects some of the great questions of our era:
Faith or intellect?
Belief or reason?
Miracles or logic?
God or science?
Can a person believe in things that violate all the laws of reason and logic and then claim to be reasonable and logical?
I point this either/or out because how we think about God is directly connected with how we think about the world we’re living in.
When someone dismisses the supernatural and miraculous by saying, “Those things don’t happen,” and when someone else believes in something he can’t prove and has no evidence for, those beliefs are both rooted in particular ways of understanding what kind of world we’re living in and how we know what we know.
Often in these either/or discussions, people on both sides assume they’re just being reasonable or logical or rational or something else intelligent-sounding, without realizing that the modern world has shaped and molded and formed how we think about the world, which leads to how we think about God, in a number of ways that are relatively new in human history and have a number of significant limits.
So before we talk about the God who is with us and for us and ahead of us, we’ll talk about the kind of world we’re living in and how that shapes how we know what we know.
First, we’ll talk about the bigness of the universe,
then
the smallness of the universe,
then
we’ll talk about you and what it is that makes you you,
and then
we’ll talk about how all this affects how we understand and talk about God.
This will take a while—so stay with me—because the universe is way weirder than any of us ever imagined . . .
I. Welcome to the Red Shift
The universe,
it turns out,
is expanding.
Restaurant chains expand, waistbands expand, so do balloons and those little foam animal toys that come in pill-shaped capsules—but universes?
Or more precisely, the universe?
It’s expanding?
Now the edge of the universe is roughly ninety billion trillion miles away (roughly being the word you use when your estimate could be off by A MILLION MILES), the visible universe is a million million million million miles across, and all of the galaxies in the universe are moving away from all of the other galaxies in the universe at the same time.
This is called galactic dispersal, and it may explain why some children have a hard time sitting still.
The solar system that we live in, which fills less than a trillionth of available space, is moving at 558 thousand miles per hour. It’s part of the Milky Way galaxy, and it takes our solar system between 200 and 250 million years to orbit the Milky Way once. The Milky Way contains a number of smaller galaxies, including
the Fornax Dwarf,
the Canis Major,
the Ursa Minor,
the Draco,
the Leo I and the not-to-be-forgotten Leo II,
the Sculptor, and
the Sextans.
It’s part of a group of fifty-four galaxies creatively called the Local Group, which is a member of an even larger group called the Virgo Supercluster (which had a number of hit singles in the early eighties).
And happens to be traveling at 666 thousand miles an hour.
(So be careful out there, and look both ways before you cross the supernova.)
Back to our original question:
Expanding?
Around a hundred years ago, several astronomers, among them Edwin Hubble, he of telescope fame, and Vesto Slipher, he of awesome name fame, observed distant galaxies giving off red light. Red is the color galaxies emit when they’re moving away from you, blue when they’re moving toward you—hence the term “red shift.”
Fast-forward to 1964, to two physicists working for the Bell Telephone Company, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. These men were unable to locate the source of strange radio waves they were continually picking up with their highly sensitive equipment. As they searched for the source of these waves, cleaned the bird droppings (which Penzias called “white dielectric material”) off their instruments, and shared their findings with other scientists, they realized that they were picking up background radiation from a massive explosion.
An explosion, it’s commonly believed, that happened a number of years ago—13.7 billion, to be more exact.
Apparently, before everything was anything, there was a point, called a singularity, and then there was a bang involving inconceivably high temperatures, loaded with enough energy and potential and possibility to eventually create what you and I know to be life, the universe, and everything in it.
The background radiation from this explosion, by the way, is still around in small amounts as the static on your television. (And you thought it was your cable company.)
Now when we get into sizes and distances and speeds this big and far and galactic and massive, things don’t function in ways we’re familiar with. For example, gravity. Jump off the roof of your house, drop a plate on the floor in the kitchen, launch a paper airplane and you see gravity at work, pulling things toward our planet in fairly consistent and predictable ways. But in other places in the universe, gravity isn’t so reliable. There are celestial bodies called neutron stars that have such strong gravity at work within them that they collapse in on themselves. These stars can weigh more than two hundred billion tons—more than all of the continents on Earth put together . . .
and fit in a teaspoon.
And then there’s all that we don’t know. A staggering 96 percent of the universe is made up of black holes, dark matter, and dark energy. These mysterious, hard to see, and even harder to understand phenomena are a major engine of life in the universe, leaving us with 4 percent of the universe that is actually knowable.
Which leads us to a corner of this 96 percent unknowable universe, to the outer edge of an average galaxy, to a planet called Earth. Our home.
Earth weighs about six billion trillion tons, is moving around the sun at roughly sixty-six thousand miles an hour, and is doing this while rotating at the equator at a little over a thousand miles an hour. So when you feel like your head is spinning, it is. Paris is, after all, going six hundred miles an hour.
Earth’s surface is made up of about ten big plates and twenty smaller ones that never stop slipping and sliding, like Greenland, which moves half an inch a year. The general estimate is that this current configuration of continents that we know to be Africa, Asia, Europe, etc. has been like this about a tenth of 1 percent of history. The world, as we know it, is a relatively new arrangement.
Every day there are on average two earthquakes somewhere in the world that measure 2 or greater on the Richter scale, every second about one hundred lightning bolts hit the ground, and every nineteen seconds someone sitting in a restaurant somewhere hears Lionel Richie’s song “Dancing on the Ceiling” one. more. Time.
Speaking of time, here on Earth we travel around the sun every 365 days, which we call a year, and we spin once around every twenty-four hours, which we call a day. Our concepts of time, then, are shaped by large, physical, planetary objects moving around each other while turning themselves. Time is determined by physical space.
No planets, which are things,
no time.
We have calendars that divide time up into predictable, segmented, uniform units—hours and days and months and years. This organization into regular, sequential intervals that unfold with precise predictability has deeply shaped our thinking about time. These constructs are good and helpful in many ways—they help us get to our dentist appointments and remember each other’s birthdays, but they also protect us from how elastic and stretchy time actually is.
If you place a clock on the ground and then you place a second clock on a tower, the hands of the clock on the tower will move faster than on the clock on the ground, because closer to the ground gravity is stronger, slowing down the hands of the clock.
If you stand outside on a starry night, the light you see from the stars is the stars as they were when the light left them. You are not seeing how those stars are now; you in the present are seeing how those stars were years and years and years in the past.
If you stand outside on a sunny day, you are enjoying the sun as it was eight minutes ago.
If you found yourself riding on a train that was traveling at the speed of light and you looked out the window, you would not see things ahead, things beside you, and things you had just passed. You would see everything all at once. You would lose your sense of past, present, and future because linear, sequential time would collapse into one giant NOW.
Time is not consistent:
it bends and warps and curves;
it speeds up and slows down;
it shifts and changes.
Time is relative, its consistency a persistent illusion.
It’s an expanding,
shifting,
spinning,
turning,
rotating,
slipping and sliding universe we’re living in.
There is no universal up;
there is no ultimate down;
there is no objective, stationary, unmoving place of rest where you can observe all that ceaseless movement.
Sitting still, after all, is no different than maintaining a uniform approximate constant state of motion.
There is no absolute viewpoint; there are only views from a point.
Bendy, curvy, relative—the past, present, and future are illusions as space-time warps and distorts in a stunning variety of ways, leading us to another matter: matter.
The sun is both a star that we orbit,
and our primary source of energy.
It is a physical object,
and it is the engine of life for our planet.
The sun is made of matter,
and the sun is energy.
At the same time.
Albert Einstein was the first to name this, showing that matter is actually locked-up energy. And energy is liberated matter.
Perhaps you’ve seen posters of the Swiss patent clerk sticking his tongue out, with the wild hair and the rumors of how he was supposedly such a genius that he would forget to put his pants on in the morning. And then there’s his famous E = mc
formula, which many of us could confidently write out on a chalkboard even if we couldn’t begin to explain it.
Beyond all that, though, what exactly was it that he did?
What Einstein did, through his theories of general and special relativity, was show that the universe is way, way weirder than anyone had thought. I realize that weirder isn’t the most scientific of terms, but Einstein’s work took him from the bigness of the universe to the smallness of the universe, and that’s when a string of truly stunning discoveries were made, discoveries that challenge our most basic ideas about the world we’re living in.
II. Who Ordered That?
For thousands of years people have wondered what the universe is made of, assuming that there must be some kind of building block, a particle, a basic element, a cosmic Lego of sorts—something really small and stable that makes up everything we know to be everything. The possibilities are fascinating, because if you could discover this primal building material, you could answer countless questions about how we got here and what we’re made of and where it’s all headed . . .
You could, ideally, make sense of things.
Greek philosophers—among them Democritus, who lived twenty-five hundred years ago—speculated about this elemental building block, using a particular word for it. The Greeks had a word tomos, which referred to cutting or dividing something. Out of this they developed the concept of something that was a-tomos, something “indivisible, uncuttable,” something that everything else was made of. Something really small, of which there is nothing smaller. Something atomos, from which we get the word atom.
Imagine what we’d learn if we could actually discover one of these atoms! That was the quest that compelled scientists and philosophers and thinkers for thousands of years until the late 1800s, when atoms were eventually discovered.
Atoms, it turns out, are small.
About one million atoms lined up side by side are as thick as a human hair.
A single grain of sand contains 22 quintillion atoms (that’s 22 with 18 zeroes).
An atom is in size to a golf ball as a golf ball is in size to Earth.
That small.
But atoms, it was discovered, are made up of even smaller parts called protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons are in the center of the atom, called the nucleus, which is one-millionth of a billionth of the volume of the atom.
If an atom were blown up to the size of a stadium, the nucleus would be the size of a grain of rice, but it would weigh more than the stadium.
The discoveries continued as technology was developed to split those particles, which led to the discovery that those particles are actually made up of even smaller particles. And then technology was developed to split those particles and it was discovered that those particles are actually made up of even smaller particles. And then technology was developed to split those particles . . .
Down and down it went,
smaller and smaller,
further and further into the subatomic world.
The British physicist J. J. Thomson discovered the electron in 1897, which led to the discovery of an astonishing number of new particles over the next few
years, from
bosons and
hadrons and
baryons and
neutrinos
to
mesons and
leptons and
pions and
hyperons and
taus.
Gluons were discovered, which hold particles together, along with quarks, which come in a variety of types—
there are up quarks
and down quarks
and top quarks
and bottom quarks
and charmed quarks
and, of course,
strange quarks.
When an inconceivably small particle called a muon was identified, the legendary physicist Isaac Rabi is known for saying, “Who ordered that?”
By now somewhere around 150 subatomic particles have been identified, with new technology and research constantly emerging, the most impressive example of this happening at a facility known by the acronym CERN, which is near the Swiss–French border. Workers at CERN, an international collaboration of almost eight thousand scientists and several thousand employees, have built a sixteen-mile circular tunnel one hundred meters below earth’s surface called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). At the LHC they fire two beams at each other, each with 3.5 trillion volts, hoping that in the ensuing collision particles will emerge that haven’t been studied yet.
Physicists have talked with straight faces for years about how with this unprecedented level of energy and equipment and billions of dollars and the brightest scientific minds in the world working together they might be able to finally discover that incredibly important, terribly elusive particle called the . . .
Higgs Boson.
(Which they did. Go ahead, Google it. It’s incredible. Even if it sounds like the name of a southern politician.)
Now, the staggeringly tiny size of atoms and subatomic particles is hard to get one’s mind around, but it’s what these particles do that forces us to confront our most basic assumptions about the universe.
Many popular images of an atom lead us to think that it’s like a solar system, with the protons and neutrons in the center like the sun and the electrons orbiting in a path around the center as our planet orbits the sun.
But those early pioneering scientists learned that this is not how things actually are. What they learned is that electrons don’t orbit the nucleus in a continuous and consistent manner; what they do is
disappear in one place and then appear in another place without traveling the distance in between.
Particles vanish and then show up somewhere else, leaping from one location to another, with no way to predict when or where they will come or go.
Niels Bohr was one of the first to come to terms with this strange new world that was being uncovered, calling these movements quantum leaps. Pioneering quantum physicists realized that particles are constantly in motion, exploring all of the possible paths from point A to point B at the same time. They’re simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.
A given electron not only travels all of the possible routes from A to B, but it reveals which path it took only when it’s observed. Electrons exist in what are called ghost states, exploring all of the possible routes they could take, until they are observed, at which point all of those possibilities collapse into the one they actually take.
Ever stood on a sidewalk in front of a store window and seen your reflection in the glass? You could see the items in the display window, but you could also see yourself, as if in a fuzzy mirror. Some of the light particles from the sun (called photons) went through the glass, illuminating whatever it was that caught your eye. Some of the particles from the sun didn’t pass through the glass but essentially bounced off it, allowing you to see your reflection. Why did a certain particle go through the glass, and a certain other particle not?
It can’t be predicted.
Some particles pass through the glass;
Some don’t.
You can determine possibilities,
you can list all kinds of potential outcomes,
but in the end, that’s the best that can be done.
The physicist Werner Heisenberg was the first to name this disturbing truth about the quantum world: you can measure a particle’s location, or you can measure its speed, but you can’t measure both. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, along with breakthroughs from Max Planck and many others, raised countless questions about the unpredictability of the universe on a small scale.
As more and more physicists spent more and more time observing the universe on this incredibly small scale, more truths began to emerge that we simply don’t have categories for, an excellent example of this being the nature of light.
Light is the only constant, unchanging reality—all that curving and bending and shifting happens in contrast to light, which keeps its unflappable, steady course regardless of the conditions. But that doesn’t mean it’s free from some truly mind-bending behavior. Because things in nature are either waves or particles. There are dust particles and sound waves, waves in the ocean and particles of food caught in your friend’s beard. That’s been conventional wisdom for a number of years.
Particles and waves.
One or the other.
Particles are like bullets;
waves are spread out.
Particles can be only in specific locations;
waves can be everywhere.
Particles can’t be divided; waves can.
But then there’s light.
Light is made up of particles.
Light is a wave.
If you Ask light a wave question, it responds as a wave. ask light a particle question, and it reveals itself to be particles.
Two mutually exclusive things, things that have always been understood to be either/or,
turned
out
to
be
both.
At the same time.
Niels Bohr was the first to name this, in 1926, calling it complementarity.
Complementarity, the truth that something can be two different things at the same time, leads us to another phenomenon, one far more bizarre, called entanglement.
Communication as we understand it always involves a signal of some sort—your voice, a telephone, a wire, a radio wave, a frequency, a pulse—something to transmit whatever it is from one place to another. Not so in the subatomic realm, where particles consistently show that they’re communicating with one another with no signal involved. Wolfgang Pauli identified this truly surreal property of subatomic particles in 1925 with his exclusion principle. Pairs of quantum particles, it was discovered, demonstrate an awareness of what the other is doing after they’ve been separated. Without any kind of signal.
The universe in its smallness presents us with a reality we simply don’t have any frame of reference for:
A single electron can do forty-seven thousand laps around a four-mile tunnel—in one second.
Protons live ten thousand billion billion billion years, while muons generally live about two microseconds—and then they’re gone.
If you’re sitting in a chair that spins and I turn you around, I have to turn you 360 degrees to get you facing the same direction again. Electrons have been discovered that don’t return to the front after being spun 360 degrees once; for that to happen you have to spin them twice.
Imagine playing tennis and discovering that sometimes you were able to hit the ball with your racquet, and other times the ball went through your racquet as if there were no webbing. You would immediately assume that there was some reason for this unexpected behavior of the ball and the racquet, and so you would work to figure out why this was happening. You’d take into account speed and force and the characteristics of the various materials: plastic and rubber and metal. All under the assumption that there was an explanation for the ball’s action. You’d apply basic laws of physics and motion, and you’d think about similar circumstances involving similar speeds and sizes and shapes.
You’d be doing what scientists have been doing for a long time: operating under the assumption that the universe functions according to particular laws of motion that can be known.
But in the subatomic world,
things come and go,
disappear and appear,
spin and leap and communicate and demonstrate awareness of each other,
all without appearing to pay any attention to how the world is supposed to work.
Niels Bohr said that anyone who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what was being said.
It’s important to pause here and make it clear that quantum theory is responsible for everything from X-rays and MRI machines and superconducting magnets, to lasers and fiber optics and the transistors that are the backbone of electronics, to computers. It’s staggering just how many features of the modern world as we know it come from the contributions of quantum theory. The Nobel Laureate physicist Leon Lederman and the theoretical physicist Christopher hill of Fermilab believe that quantum theory is arguably the most successful theory in the history of science.
Which is all rather interesting, of course, but I’m assuming by now that you have a question, something along the lines of
What does any of this have to do with what we talk about when we talk about God?
Excellent question.
Three responses, then,
beginning with
energy,
and then moving to
involvement,
and then a bit about
surprise.
Energy,
involvement,
surprise.
Let’s begin with your chair, because odds are that you’re sitting in a chair while you read or listen to this book. It’s probably made of metal or wood, foam, cloth, maybe leather. A few nuts and bolts, a screw or two, some paint, perhaps some nylon or plastic as well. If we were to take that wood or steel or cloth and put it under a high-powered microscope, we would see the basic elements and molecules and compounds that comprise those materials. And if we kept going, farther and farther into those basic materials, we would eventually be at the subatomic level, where we’d discover that the chair, like everything else in the universe, is made of atoms.
And atoms,
it turns out,
are 99.9 percent empty space.
If all of the empty space was taken out of all of the atoms in the universe, the universe would fit in a sugar cube.
An atom, in the end, is a thing. But a thing that is made up mostly of empty space, which is commonly believed to not be a thing. So what exactly are you sitting on?
A chair—a tangible, material, physical object—is made up of particles in motion, bouncing off each other, crashing into each other, coming in and out of existence billions of times in billionths of a second, existing in ghost states and then choosing particular paths for no particular, predictable reason.
Your chair appears to be solid,
but that solidity is a bit of an illusion.
It has weight and mass and shape and texture, and if you don’t see it in the dark and stub your toe on it, that chair will cause your toe great pain, and yet your chair is ultimately
a relationship of energy—
atoms bonded to each other in a particular way that allows you to sit on that chair and be supported. Things like chairs and tables and parking lots and planets may appear to be solid, but they are at their core endless frenetic movements of energy.
I talk about all of this red shifting and dark matter and uncertainty and particle movement because most of us were taught in science class that ours is a hard, stable, tangible world that we can study and analyze because it’s there, right in front of us, and we can prove it in a lab.
Which is true.
But often another perspective came along as well, the one that declared that there is a clear distinction between the material world and the immaterial world, between the physical world and the spiritual world.
What we’re learning from science, however, is that that distinction isn’t so clear after all.
In other words, the line between
matter
and
spirit
may not be a line at all.
In an article about physicists searching for the Higgs Boson, Jeffrey Kluger writes in TIME magazine that they’re “grappling with something bigger than mere physics, something that defies the mathematical and brushes up—at least fleetingly—against the spiritual.”
Now obviously there are scientists who would bristle at any suggestion that this field of study has anything to do with the spiritual, pointing out that it’s not mystical at all but very straightforward science, but for others, brushing up against the spiritual is a great way to put it because the primary essence of reality is energy flow. Things, no matter how great their mass is or how hard or solid or apparent their thingness is, are ultimately relationships of living energy.
This energy isn’t destroyed or created—it simply changes form as it’s conserved. If you’re reading this book in printed form on paper and you were to burn it, the sum total of the book’s energy would not change; it would simply go off and be other things than this book.
The amount of actual energy in the universe would stay the same.
And you wouldn’t find out how the book ends.
Now, from energy,
let’s move to involvement.
In the common view of the world most of us grew up with, there was a clear division between the subject and the object. Think of the stereotype of the objective scientist, standing cool and detached behind a glass wall, jotting observations onto a clipboard about whatever it is being studied. There is nothing wrong with this image; in fact, we owe this kind of thinking and practice a huge debt for the stunning array of technologies and inventions and luxuries we benefit from every day.
Somebody figured out how to fit a thousand songs in our pocket. Well done there.
But this image of detachment,
standing back at a distance,
watching and examining and analyzing things from a perceived place of noninvolvement, lives on in a number of ways that aren’t true.
At the quantum level, to observe the atom is to affect it. The particle is a cloud of possibilities until it’s observed, and then it chooses a particular path. The question you ask light determines whether it will answer as a wave or a particle.
In the view many have been taught,
the world is out there,
stationary and unmoved,
unaffected by us.
But in the quantum world,
observing changes things.
Matter is ultimately energy, and our interactions with energy alter reality because we’re involved, our world an interconnected web of relationships with nothing isolated, alone, or unaffected.
Even when there is an actual glass wall—
as helpful and accurate as traditional scientific
understandings are—
there is no glass wall in the end.
Central to the isolated, detached, common modern worldview is the assumption that things exist in empty space. Us outside, looking in. Studying, analyzing, standing at a distance—observing the world that is out there in empty space.
But the quantum world teaches us that space is—what’s the best word here?—alive. Particles can be found in what appears to be empty space. The invisible substance between us and the things and people around us actually contains something.
We are enmeshed in the world around us, not outside looking in, but inside looking . . . inside.
It’s all energy,
and we’re all involved.
These two truths,
the one about energy and the one about involvement, lead us to a third truth, this one about surprise.
Your toaster doesn’t do what it’s supposed to. Seriously.
As things heat up, they register different colors, each new color representing an increase in temperature. And so, according to the standard assumptions about heat and corresponding color, your toaster should glow blue.
But it doesn’t;
it glows red.
Why?
No one knows.
Which particle will pass through the glass in the shop window,
and which will reflect back? Where will that electron disappear, and when will it reappear—and where?
We can predict,
and we can identify patterns,
but at the most basic level,
we don’t know.
The world surprises us.
And it surprises scientists too,
on a regular basis.
Energy,
involvement,
and
surprise.
I talk about all of this because when people object to the idea of God, to the idea that there is more beyond our tangible, provable-with-hard-evidence observations and experiences of the world, they aren’t taking the entire world into account. A brief reading of modern science quite quickly takes us into all sorts of interesting and compelling places where the most intelligent, up-to-date, and informed scientists are constantly surprised by just how much more there is to the universe.
III. You Dirty Star, You
Which leads us to you,
right there in the middle of it all.
Actually, we are in the middle of it all, with a human being (roughly a meter tall on average, kids included) halfway between the largest size we can comprehend, the width of the known universe, and the smallest size discovered thus far in the universe.
And you,
you are fascinating.
You lose fifty to a hundred and fifty strands of hair a day, you shed ten billion flakes of skin a day,
every twenty-eight days you get completely new skin, and every nine years your entire body is renewed.
(This dead skin we shed makes up 90 percent of household dust. So feel free to vacuum more.)
And yet your body, in the midst of this relentless shedding and dying and changing and renewing,
continues to remember to be you,
strand by strand,
flake by flake,
atom by atom.
Your body is made up of around seventy-five trillion cells, every one of those cells containing hundreds of thousands of molecules with six feet of DNA in every cell containing over three billion letters of coding. These cells are a potent blend of matter and memory—bones and hair and blood and teeth and at the same time personality and essence and predispositions and habits.
You are an exotic combination of matter and memory, with a fine line in between.
Millions of cells, drifting through the universe, assembled and configured and finely tuned at this second to be you, but inevitably moving on in the next seconds to be other things and other people.
The atoms that make you you in this very second may have earlier been part of a stork,
or Mars,
or a mushroom,
or a squid,
or a coconut,
or Ohio,
or Buddha,
or Cher.
Imagine that your uncle died and in his will he left you his beloved old wooden boat. You love your uncle and out of respect for him you decide that you’re going to fix up his old boat, making it good as new. And so you start with the hull, replacing the old boards with new ones. But as you work rebuilding the hull, you realize that the deck needs replacing as well. And so the next year, you remove all of the boards on the deck and replace them with new ones, plank by plank, until the boat has an entirely new deck. But spending all that time working on the deck convinces you that the hardware isn’t reliable; you’re not sure which pieces would work if you were to actually launch the boat, and which would snap with the slightest strain. And so you set out to replace all of the hardware. . . . If you keep this up, at some point you will have replaced the entire boat, and yet when you take your friends out for a ride, you will tell them that this is the boat your uncle left you in his will.
The enduring reality of the boat, then, is in the pattern, not the planks.
The planks come and go, but the pattern remains. You are a pattern, moving through time, constantly changing and yet precisely consistent. Some have said we’re like “light at the end of a spinning stick.”
The basic elements of life are actually quite common—hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and a few others. The dirt below us, the sky above us, the sun, moon, and stars, we’re all made of the same stuff.
You share over 60 percent of your genes with fruit flies, you share over 90 percent of your genes with mice, and you share 96 percent of your DNA with the large apes.
So when you read about aging singers or actors or politicians who used to be stars—well yes, of course they were . . . we all used to be stars.
One of my sons recently had a loose tooth that was driving him crazy. He’d sit at the table while we ate dinner, hand in his mouth, moving the tooth back and forth, trying to loosen it enough for it to come out. Day after day, talking about it and fussing with it and telling us just how badly he wanted it to come out. And then it came out—while we were at the beach. He started jumping up and down in the sand, celebrating, doing one of those dances that only an eleven-year-old boy can do, hoisting his now-removed tooth above his head, victorious.
He then turned to me and asked: If he threw it in the ocean, would he still get something from the tooth fairy? I said yes, feeling free to speak on behalf of the tooth fairy, who happened to be sitting next to me in a swimsuit.
And so he ran up to the waterline,
cocked his arm back,
and threw his tooth into the ocean.
I tell you this story because at some point today you will eat. You will eat for several reasons, chief among them being survival. If you don’t eat, you die, because your body needs food. And food comes from the Earth. It’s planted, watered, cultivated, exposed to the sun, and then harvested, transported, prepared, and placed on your plate. Between the sun and the rain and the nutrients in the soil, that food received what it needed to keep you alive.
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