Hawking--science, not sport

According to Stephen Hawking, the brilliant scientist and mathematician, there is no God. Defending the faith isn't the subject of this post. Hawking's opinion doesn't offend me, and I don't think God has anything to fear from it or any other opinion. But I was especially struck by two statements Hawking made during his Discovery Channel series, Curiosity.

First, he said something about human beings feeling pleased with themselves for having figured it all out, i.e., how things work, how the universe was created and the laws that govern it. (My paraphrasing is subject to correction, and maybe I mistook the context of his words. I don't believe I did.)

I'd find the idea amusing if it didn't astound me, coming from someone like Stephen Hawking. Figured it all out? All? Just in the last fifty years, scientists have figured out a mind-boggling amount of stuff. They've done experiments and made observations of atomic and subatomic particle behavior, etc. They've theorized a great deal more. But a claim everything has been figured out strikes me as--oh, I don't know--arrogant? Mistaken? Has the scientific community not only figured out, but also proved everything in strictly empirical terms? Hawking didn't say so, though he implied it.

The second thing to get my attention was Hawking's opinion that God doesn't exist because before the Big Bang, time did not exist. The matter and energy released at the Big Bang were compressed like a black hole, or so scientists theorize. How can one prove such an event, much as the evidence may imply it? Anyway, inside such a singularity, nothing moves. No energy is produced; matter doesn't interact. Essentially, nothing exists, including time. Hawking says:

You can’t get to a time before the big bang, because there was no time before the big bang.  We have finally found something that does not have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in.  For me this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed.  Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything.

Hawking assumes God needs time to exist. Human beings do. We use time. It serves us. St. Augustine of Hippo, a greater thinker on this subject than I, described God as an eternal present. God said:  "Before Abraham was, I am." It's hard to wrap a human understanding around the concept of timelessness. Some of the most brilliant minds through the ages haven't been able to conceive of existence outside time, I suppose because they can't prove it with math and science.

St. Paul wrote that if we had proof of what we believed right in front of us, we wouldn't need faith. Those without religious faith probably call that a very convenient philosophy. I suppose it is.

But I'm not debating faith versus science--I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I do think probing the secrets of creation and the depths of the universe requires as much humility as faith does. In that sense, and in my slightly obsessive-compulsive quest for accuracy, Hawking's statements sound careless for a mind as brilliant as his and trained, as his must have been, in careful, experimental proof.

Do you ever . . .

. . . get tired of blogging? I'd like to know!

And, no, that isn't my youngest grandbaby. :) But he's a cutie.

The odor of love

Came home from a recent trip to visit grandkids reeking of baby spit-up. The perfect scent for a grandmother. Baby got fed, handed off to me, and oops. No amount of burp cloths can save you. Oh, well. New blouses I can buy. Baby cooing on my shoulder--priceless.

So is watching 3-year-old go through her booger-eating phase. Oh, yeah. She did it last night while we were Father's-Day Skyping! When she isn't indulging the phase, she's learning to swim more fearlessly than her daddy, who had to be coaxed into the water. And learning Spanish. And just in general being her wonderful, bright, articulate, and opinionated self.

The baby got pretty opinionated one evening during our visit. She doesn't usually full-out cry, but one night, while her mom was running a 20-minute errand, Baby decided to prove she's got lungs. She'd been fed an hour before, but I guess she decided it hadn't been enough. Fortunately, there was pumped breast milk for emergencies. I popped a bottle of it into her screaming mouth and listened to the immediate quiet.

I tend to think she just wanted to show us she had the lung power if she ever chose to exercise it. Our two girls--they'll set the world on fire one day. They've got ours ablaze already.

One terrific letter

Do you want to know what kind of query letter makes an agent swoon? I'll let Janet Reid, aka Query Shark,  tell you in her own words HERE. How to write the novel to go with this great kind of letter is another query altogether.

Happy writing!
--

The soundtrack of your life

Have you ever tried years to identify a piece of music? No? I'm the only weird one? (I doubt it.) If you've got lyrics, you can plug them into a search engine and usually get some ID. Most of the music I can't identify is classical. No lyrics, only melodies that haunt me.

Sometimes, though, I get lucky. Like this:

It's one of 3 pieces by Erik Satie, Gymnopédies, and I've heard it a hundred times without knowing what it was or who by. It isn't exactly sad, more slow and thoughtful. All three pieces take nine minutes, something nice to help me relax. If you watched the movie The Painted Veil (Edward Norton and Naomi Watts), you're familiar with this other work by Satie, Gnossienne--there are 2 or 3 of those too. This is the one played in the movie:

I sometimes wish written material had sound tracks. Maybe they do on some digital readers. Anyone know? I feel like my life has a soundtrack. When I'm trying to settle down, I listen to things like the Satie music. When I'm sad I listen to Rolling Stones--the music is so mean and in-your-face it picks me right up. When I want to get prayerful, I have favorite John Michael Talbot hymns. If I want to stimulate my brain, I turn on Mozart. For working out, anything fast.

If you had to pick music to suit your current work-in-progress, what would it be?

Keep in touch

Between a recent trip to Austin to visit grandkids :) and fighting effects of sinus infection and possible touch of bronchitis :( , I hadn't written anything in a couple of weeks. That's nearly 14 days of not being able to call myself a writer. As someone I read recently pointed out, you can only call yourself a writer on those days when you write. Although I guess a blog post does count, so 1 day out of the last 14 I was a writer!

Miserable as I was, though (with the sinus problem, not the kissing and hugging grandgirls part), I kept in touch with my characters. "If I were going to write a scene today, what would I write?" Not perfect. Maybe even lame. But I love those guys so much, and I felt like I kept an emotional bond. They were out of sight, so to speak, but not out of mind or heart.

And today I wrote a scene that made me cry -- so good, so bad? Who knows? This part of the book is hard in several ways. For one thing, writing is hard. For another, writing about systematic hate and violence, especially against women and children, is heartbreaking. Fortunately, this is the only part of the book I have to deal with violence head-on. I'm not sure what I'd do with something like the Holocaust -- how did Herman Wouk and Leon Uris, for example, deal with it? I can't imagine.

What's the most distressing thing you've had to write about? How did you deal with it? And how do you deal with not being able to write for periods of time due to illness, vacation, etc.?

The original gotcha question

Reading Mark 12:13-17 the other night sparked a practical as well as spiritual response. In that part of Mark's Gospel the Pharisees and Herodians asked Jesus a question:  should they pay taxes to the Romans? I imagine they gave a lot of time and effort to this query and came up with what they thought was a yes-or-no proposition. If Jesus said, "Yes, pay the tax," they'd say something like, "Oh, so you expect us to support the Gentiles who oppress us and want to destroy our faith!" If Jesus said, "No, don't pay it," they could say, "What? If we don't pay the tax, the Romans will crush us!" Either way Jesus answered, they thought, he'd be wrong.

What Jesus did first was ask why these people wasted their time and their considerable tradition, wisdom, and learning to come up with such a question. "Why are you testing me?" His words imply he thought they'd spend their time better being honest and direct. If you want to trap a fool, ask sensible questions. It doesn't usually take much and can be as simple as asking "How did you like your tour of Paul Revere's house?"

Then Jesus answered the trick question. But he didn't say "yes" or "no." The ingenious question the Pharisees and Herodians wasted time on did have a third answer. Jesus didn't even have to think hard to come up with it. He just thought differently. He stepped outside the box, i.e., the trap set for him.

The Pharisees and Herodians showed what many of us, including me, are guilty of when it comes to such things as faith, problem-solving, and writing. We think literally and in a linear fashion. We don't see the verdant pastures of creativity and what-if that stretch out on either side of the narrow, well-worn path of mediocrity.

Dark Tichondrias at en.wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], from Wikimedia Commons