This past May, Martin Gardner, the renowned “recreational mathematics” (an oxymoron if ever one existed) columnist, died. Unfamiliar with his column, I listened with interest to an NPR recount of his life. Known for his enjoyable treatment of mathematical puzzles, paradoxes, and conundrums, he apparently left his mark on popular mathematics. In describing his life, NPR produced footage of someone asking him about matters of faith, given his unusual mind and interest in mathematical puzzles. His response intrigued me. He replied that he counted himself as a “mysterian.”

What in God’s green goodness is a “mysterian?” I mused. He kindly explained. Earth, existence, science, even his beloved mathematics, contained so many mysteries for which he simply found no answer that, in the end, he could dismiss nothing. He found atheism intellectually unsatisfying in light of all the precision of the Universe, Yet, he counted Christianity and all the other religions, at best, unlikely and far fetched. Where did that leave him?
That’s right, it left him a mysterian. He just didn’t know, one way or the other.

Wikepedia defines the “mysterian movement” as a philosophical position proposing that the hard problem of consciousness will never be explained; or at the least cannot be explained by the human mind at its current evolutionary stage. The irresolvable problem is how to explain sentience and qualia and their interaction with consciousness. While not described as mysterian philosophy, per se, I did overhear a scientist once say that the human mind cannot understand itself any more than a lawn mower can understand how it cuts the lawn.

Adherents to the mysterian movement apparently include the likes of Samuel Johnson, Gottfried Leibniz, and Thomas Huxley. Huxley wrote, “How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djinn, when Aladdin rubbed his lamp.”

Is this so strange? Albert Einstein mused that the most inexplicable aspect of the Universe was it very “explainability.” Why did physical laws work so well and precisely to explain physical phenomenon.

The philosopher Pascal offers us “Pascal’s Wager.” Bet that Christianity actually provides the “truth.” What do you lose? If wrong, you’ve led a life guided by tested and sound moral principles. You missed out on a bit of debauchery and fun, but perhaps you’ve avoided hurting a lot of your fellows as well. If right, you’ve inherited the kingdom of heaven to boot. Why not take a chance on Christianity?

This may work for some intellectuals, but others will say this makes no more sense, nor presents no more satisfying path for your life, than believing in the Easter Bunny, Santa, and the Great Pumpkin. As Socrates stated over 2400 years ago, “an unexamined life is not worth living,” and this feels pretty unexamined.

As a thoughtful Christian, how difficult is it to say that this whole “rose from the dead” business seems pretty silly? Easier to say something quite out of the ordinary occurred in Jerusalem 2000 years ago with this Jesus fellow, and then quite a franchise followed in his wake. Must we believe that the immutable laws of science took a holiday for the carpenter from Galilee?

Plainly though, something happened. No other explanation explains the rise of Christianity from nothing. It gives me goose bumps that in the 1950’s most astrophysicists and scientists believed that the Universe possessed no “beginning” but always existed. The Bible said emphatically that a beginning occurred. Fast forward 50 years. Science now confirms that the Bible was right; the 1950’s scientists wrong. The “Big Bang” occurred 15.3 billion years ago, and it all started then—just as the Bible states.

How can the ancient (read outdated) Bible ever be more correct than prevailing science? Something fails to fit here. It feels like a paradox. Ditto for humiliating and crucifying another trouble-maker, something done routinely by the Roman Empire, and now we have one of the world’s great religions based, not on the great Roman Empire, but the target of a standard (for the time and place) crucifixion? Not right. Not rational.

Count me a Mysterian. But count me a Christian Mysterian.

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Philippians 4:4-7 (BIBLE, NIV Version)

Copyright 2010—David J. Carr

Johnny_Cash-Ring_Of_Fire

[Remarks delivered at 50^th birthday party; Zionsville, Indiana]

            I was recently asked if I felt old now that I have turned 50.  I pondered this and thought back to when I turned 24.  It was New Year’s Eve, 1982.  I sat at home in Goshen, Indiana, alone.  My fiancée had recently dumped me, and I sat alone in the living room of my parents’ house, watching Dick Clark’s Rock’n New Year’s Eve Party.  My younger brother was out with his friends, my oldster parents were out at a New Year’s Eve party.  EVERYBODY in the world was out at a New Year’s Eve party.  Pathetically, I called my ex fiancée to see if she’d reconsidered her position.  She was at a New Year’s Eve party and not available.  

            Enough, I thought to myself, I gathered myself, and headed for the true hot spot of Goshen, the Holiday Inn bar.  Any lonely person, no matter how rejected by the world, could at least find some fellow losers at the Holiday Inn bar with whom to fend off the crushing burden of loserdom.   I drove my pathetic green loser Pontiac compact car to the Holiday Inn.  I walked up to the bar’s entrance.  “CLOSED FOR PRIVATE PARTY” read the sign on the door. 

            Sad, but not hopeless.  Goshen’s twin city, Elkhart, boasted an equally hopping Holiday Inn bar.  Elkhart, while being a bit more seedy and blue collar than Goshen, actually possessed a more “cosmopolitan” atmosphere (by Indiana Mennonite standards anyway), and so braced to bite off an even bigger slice of life at the wild, urban Elkhart Holiday Inn, I drove on into the night.  A twenty minute drive later, I faced another sign:  “CLOSED FOR PRIVATE PARTY.”

            Now officially crushed, I returned to the living room, and Dick Clark’s rockin good time.  As I sat there, it occurred to me that I felt “old”—old to the core.  This is what it feels like to be an old person, sitting alone, with no friends, no purpose, nothing to look forward to but further old age and death, nothing to look back on but being a loser.  I don’t imagine that I could ever feel more old—24 years OLD.

            Now I look at 50, and I think of my two favorite movies:  Apollo 13 and It’s A Wonderful Life.  I mention Apollo 13 because at 50 it would be easy to look at your life and identify all of the ways you have fallen short.  I am not a billionaire, I am not a professional athlete, I haven’t gotten my manuscript published, and oddly enough, I am not ruler of the Western Hemisphere. 

            In the movie, James Lovell, the commander of the space craft, who never got to step on the Moon, but successfully returned the crippled space craft to earth with no fatalities, referred to the mission as a “successful failure.”  I look at my own life and my meager accomplishments, compared to my goals, and say, yes, my life is also a successful failure.  Many childhood goals remain unfulfilled, but I look at my three successful children, my beautiful and vibrant wife, and pleasant home with no holes in the roof, and say it hasn’t been a complete bust.

            This brings me to my second movie, It’s A Wonderful Life.  At the end of the movie, after George Bailey had thought his life a failure, he is surrounded by friends who come to his rescue in the nick of time.  As he ponders this, he receives a message from his “guardian angel,” Clarence.  Clarence’s message:  “No man is a failure who has friends.”

            So tonight, surrounded by about 80 friends, my three children, and wonderful wife,  I reject any impulse to consider myself a failure or a loser.  In fact, tonight, in sharp contrast to that 24^th birthday, I do not feel 50 years OLD; I feel 50 years YOUNG!

            Thank you all for coming tonight, and may God bless you in the year ahead!  Happy 2009, and God bless us all, every one of us!

Copyright 2009—David J. Carr

This I Believe Essay

I believe in the undiscovered.  I never cease to be amazed at the overpowering arrogance of prominent, well-educated citizens as to their omnipotence.  If I spend much time listening to the media or academics, it seems easy to come away with the impression that current civilization knows just about all the important stuff; that no significant mysteries remain.  The current laws of nature and logic explain all, reveal all. 

Except they don’t.

Science still struggles to explain the absence of a “Grand Unification Theory.”  Such a theory would harmonize our scientific laws for very small objects with the apparently inconsistent laws for very large objects.  As Stephen Hawking still searches, he notes in A Brief History of Time that there seems too little matter in the universe to prevent it from flying apart.  This missing “dark matter” remains a theoretical mystery.  A the other end of the spectrum, quantum mechanics tells us that there is a one in a billion chance that you could walk through a solid wall.  How magnificent!

Shakespeare spoke of the “undiscovered country” as the future.  Yet, we today live in an “undiscovered country.”  While popular culture leads us to conclude that anyone clinging to any spiritual notion qualifies as a rube or wishful thinker, one of the world’s top molecular scientists, Francis Collins, the leader of the U.S. Genome Project, finds the “Language of God” in the DNA code of the human genome.  He fully embraces both the science of evolution and the scientific possibility of God.  C.S. Lewis speculated over 50 years ago that Jesus Christ represented a new direction in evolution, a curious mix of science and spirituality.

Physics now shares with us that according to “String Theory” there may be as many as 14 dimensions to reality, even though we perceive only three (height, width, depth) in addition to the passing of time.  Gravity may only “partially” be in our reality, and this explains why it is such a weak force compared to, say, electromagnetism.  What might exist in dimensions we can’t perceive?  How fanciful!  Yet, is this any stranger than the binary number system which has now evolved into the coursing streams of billions of bytes of ”on-off” signals  that make up the wonders of the Internet?  Those who worked with computers in the early 1960’s surely didn’t imagine what would ultimately be discovered in computer science by the early part of the 21^st Century.

As so much remains to be discovered, I retain both my sense of awe, and my realization that wild claims and beliefs remain potentially realized as tomorrow’s scientific fact, and logically inescapable reality.  This makes me humble, but also supremely joyful.

Copyright 2009—David J. Carr