3. Uncertainty

Dear children,

My brother, your great uncle, God rest his atheist soul, used to say to me that this god-thing is purely a god of your gaps. When we can explain things, who needs a god?

You'll notice that I switched to a lower case g instead of a capital G. That indicates that something is afoot in human thinking. Is G more important than g? No. This is a convention in writing and printing. The Hebrew manuscripts have different conventions. They are all capitals and there are no vowels. (Well, mostly.) Humans are always communicating - compulsively, if not to others, then to themselves.

There is nothing certain about conventions. The danger, if we are sure of something, is that we will force our certainty on others, and hurt the life and the bounty and the beauty we can find around us. Remember, we will not force a puzzle piece, is one of our rules.

When you were younger, you loved to walk on walls. First, with a helping hand, and later, on your own. We all walk, in our time, balanced between our experience and our ignorance. Our reality presses in on us. Our senses say, This is good, or, This is not.

We have learned to extend our senses so that we can see beyond what our eyes can see from invisible light to the very very small, and we can reason in empty space to hundreds of degrees below zero and control things at a distance of millions and millions of kilometers away. We humans have some knowledge of where and when we are, but we are still ignorant.

We have discovered that for all the solidness we seem to have in our bodies and on the earth, we are largely empty space. Matter, the stuff we are made of, large and small molecules, composed of elementary particles, atoms, which we have inferred and named and modeled, themselves composed of leptons, gluons, mesons, bosons, quarks and a zoo of other strangely named things. And while we think we know something, 95% of matter and energy is unaccounted for in our models. We call it dark - we have to name everything - but calling it dark means 'we do not know'.

And at the base of this empty space filled with fast moving connections, is a fundamental uncertainty even when measuring the things we think we know. We know there are measurements we cannot know and when we measure a part of them, the other part locks in and in a sense, at the instant we measure it, it is created. We know our models work because we have produced massive explosions with our theories - we have converted mass to energy. The relationship between those things is this: energy is mass times the speed of light times the speed of light. (In short e=m*c*c, where c is the speed of light, about 3 million km per second. I think I mentioned that there is no passage of time if you are travelling at the speed of light.)

Chance, it seems, is also governed in time by measurement. I haven't time at the moment to talk about thermodynamics - the study of heat and movement, but that is another concept that is easy to grasp - that things fall apart. The universe - everything - seems to be moving downhill - towards more and more disorder. There's a few billion years left in its life - but no one knows what will be its end. (You can study astrophysics to find out more.)

But, when we look back at the ancient texts, when humans first began to write, and chose to write about light first, and then about the visible cosmos and visible life, we find we are doing what we were created to do. We, created in the image and likeness of that mystery we call God, are also creating and naming things and learning about the place in which we find ourselves. We are exercising our ability to think, to plan, to get feedback, and to control our surroundings. 

It's really rather remarkable that we have any knowledge or feeling or taste or sense at all. The ancient poet is right when he writes: Senseless said in its heart, God - nothing. If we say this we become senseless. And since we are not senseless, it follows that we cannot say that God is of no account.

Having got through this difficult mental sludge, let us return to the real issues.

In that first chapter of Genesis, God says to humanity: "Be fruitful and increase, and fill the earth and control it." Four commands in one sentence. Other translations use different words particularly for the last verb. Instead of "control it" they say: "subdue it" or "be masters of it" or "conquer it". Conquer and subdue are not good translations, in my opinion. There are other Hebrew words that would have been used if either of these ideas was required.

What is the thought of these ancient writers that humanity should be "in charge" of the earth and all its life forms? It's curious that the word used for control has the same letters in Hebrew as the word used for a young lamb, c-b-w. Maybe the nature of our control is not to be one of bossiness or total domination, but more like responsibility, or the gentleness of a young lamb.

We have done some very hard puzzles together. You know that pieces must match on colour and shape even when the shades of colour may be hard to see as in that Hogwarts puzzle. The best light is required - like when the sun shines in the evening on your puzzle table. And we have a process. We first try and find the edges. And we turn all the pieces right side up so we can see the colors and shapes. And when it becomes really hard, we do some sorting by shape and knob and hole count as well. We know we can finish a puzzle if we haven't lost any pieces. We believe they have been well cut. (Note that word believe - it too is the foundation of science.)

Hogwarts - finishing the puzzle.

What about doing a puzzle where we can't find the edges? Or what if there was no box and no picture? What if some of our pieces are not even visible? What if the pieces change shape over time and bulge out or shrink? What if we turn over a piece and it changes as we turn it? We still keep going.

One of the hardest puzzles I ever tried was to translate the Hebrew Bible into our English language. This puzzle has over 300,000 pieces. It took me about 10 years to get to a first complete draft. Those pieces are slippery because they are words. And words carry multiple senses. And their uses change over time. And they have power to make us and others take action. That's a bit frightening. I was and remain uncertain in many ways even with this almost manageable project. 

I did this translation because when we have a book like the Bible, we need to question how we read and use it so that we do not come to believe what is false. 

For instance, we are invited in the Bible to believe God - and it's a long invitation - by no means obvious or trivial. What kind of a God is this: angry? destructive? capricious? jealous? Turn over the piece and you may find these things. Then turn it again and again for everything is in it. 

Or is this God kind? I will be (whom we call Yahweh, spelled i-h-v-h and known through the title, the Lord, or Hashem the Hebrew for the name) is described like this: 

the maker of the heaven and earth, the sea and everything in them, consistently truthful, doing judgment for the oppressed, giving bread to the hungry, releasing the prisoners, giving sight to the blind, uplifting the disturbed, sheltering the guest, relieving orphan and widow, subverting the wicked. 

That's a summary of a few verses of a poem about Yahweh (Psalms 146).

Your father told me I could write as long as I wrote in Hebrew. Here's the poem. (In fully spelled Hebrew simulated with Latin lowercase letters, SimHebrew for short. y and a are not like English. They are gutturals carrying the vowel next to them or a schwa. w=sh, sometimes just s. x is ts. i behaves as a vowel towards the end of a word and as a y in other instances. Where two consonants are adjacent, usually a schwa will do between them.)

yowh wmiim varx

at-him vat-cl-awr-bm 

hwomr amt lyolm

yowh mwp't lywuqim

notn lkm lrybim 

ihvh mtir asurim

ihvh poqk yivvrim

ihvh zoqf cpupim 

ihvh aohb xdiqim

ihvh womr at-grim

itom valmnh iyodd 

vdrç rwyim iyvvt

This God cares for the poor. I think if we listen, we too will find strength to do what is good. There are tough places we find ourselves in - filled with uncertainty, false ideas, poor actions, and so on. You know some of these things. You know about disability in your close relations. You know about things that are broken. These are situations that God cares about. 

Here are some of the many pieces I need to turn over: I will start with holiness, then safety, trust, truth,  and after that I don't know yet, but I need to consider things like courage, faithfulness, money, business, discipline, persistence, completeness, love, integrity. I have talked to you about some of these. As we look at each of them, we will find they interlock even in their shifting shapes, a bit like the knobs and holes, and shapes of jigsaw pieces. And a bit like the strands of Charlotte's web.

My brother, God rest his atheist soul, was faithful to the end to his unbelief, and, I suspect, to a large dose of anger as well. I remember him even though he did not want to be remembered, for himself, and for what he taught me.

I can't yet make this easier. But your father will be able to read it. We have a long way to go. I will continue while I have breath.

till the next letter...