I’ve just finished reading Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here, in which he discusses several theories of time. Specifically, he surveys past and current thinking regarding the “arrow of time” and its relationship to entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

I’d recommend the book to anyone who is interested in the concept of time and has a fairly good understanding of physics.

What struck me most about the book was the question that can’t be answered: why was the entropy of the early universe as low as it was, when we wouldn’t expect it to be? As we know from the second law, entropy always increases within a closed system. So we’re left with the possibility that either (1) the beginning wasn’t the beginning or (2) the universe is not a closed system.

This immediately made me think about the higher dimensional membranes (P-branes) that have been suggested by String Theory/M-Theory scientists. The basic idea is that our universe exists on the three-dimensional surface of a higher dimension membrane, and that there are possibly an infinite number of these membranes floating around. This is one variation of the multiverse idea.

It’s possible that our universe was formed by the collision of two membranes. This collision caused the big bang, inflation, etc. The totality of creation is in fact eternal, universes like ours are just local patches of space time that result from collisions between branes; or, as Sean Carroll suggests, baby universes that “pinch off” like bubbles from other universes. This pinching off could result from black holes or wormholes as well, I believe. The collision process or bubbling process occurs over and over again.

These ideas solve some important problems: (1) why was the entropy of our universe low at the beginning and (2) why does our universe appear finely-tuned for the emergence of intelligent observer. The answer could be that we’re just in one of possibly an infinite number of universes, so it’s not surprising. See also The Cosmic Landscape by Leonard Susskind. What this means is that (1) time, and space, did exist before the conventional beginning and (2) the multiverse is eternal. This would be consistent with the second law and the Copernican Principle.

Unfortunately for the religious, this doesn’t leave much room for a creator… the “god of the gaps” is getting smaller all the time. People will always need religion, but invoking it to explain cosmology is going to get harder as we continue to deepen our understanding of the universe.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The more often Americans go to church, the more likely they are to support the torture of suspected terrorists, according to a new survey.
More than half of people who attend services at least once a week — 54 percent — said the use of torture against suspected terrorists is “often” or “sometimes” justified. Only 42 percent of people who “seldom or never” go to services agreed, according to the analysis released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.
White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely to back it. Only four in 10 of them did.
The analysis is based on a Pew Research Center survey of 742 American adults conducted April 14-21. It did not include analysis of groups other than white evangelicals, white non-Hispanic Catholics, white mainline Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated, because the sample size was too small.
The president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Leith Anderson, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The survey asked: “Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?”
Roughly half of all respondents — 49 percent — said it is often or sometimes justified. A quarter said it never is.
The religious group most likely to say torture is never justified was Protestant denominations — such as Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians — categorized as “mainline” Protestants, in contrast to evangelicals. Just over three in 10 of them said torture is never justified. A quarter of the religiously unaffiliated said the same, compared with two in 10 white non-Hispanic Catholics and one in eight evangelicals.

Cardinal Stafford criticizes Obama as ‘aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic’
Washington DC, Nov 17, 2008 / 02:27 pm (CNA).- Cardinal James Francis Stafford, head of the Apostolic Penitentiary of the Holy See, delivered a lecture on Thursday saying that the future under President-elect Obama will echo Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane. Criticizing Obama as “aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic,” he went on to speak about a decline in respect for human life and the need for Catholics to return to the values of marriage and human dignity.

Commenting on the results of the recent presidential election, Cardinal Stafford said on Election Day “America suffered a cultural earthquake.” The cardinal argued that President-elect Obama had campaigned on an “extremist anti-life platform” and predicted that the near future would be a time of trial.

Catholic News Agency, November 17th, 2008
http://catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=14355

Sorry, Cardinal. you’re completely wrong. And you don’t speak for the majority of Catholics.

On a side note, how can representatives of the Catholic Church make political statements such as this and maintain their tax-exempt status? I thought there was a law…

10 points for Catholic citizens to remember

Point #8
So can a Catholic in good conscience support a “pro-choice” candidate?
The answer is: I can’t and I won’t. But I do know some serious Catholics — people whom I admire — who will. I think their reasoning is mistaken. But at the very least they do sincerely struggle with the abortion issue, and it causes them real pain. And even more importantly: They don’t keep quiet about it; they don’t give up their efforts to end permissive abortion; they keep lobbying their party and their elected representatives to change their pro-abortion views and protect the unborn. Catholics can support “pro-choice” candidates if they support them despite — not because of — their “pro-choice” views. But they also need a compelling proportionate reason to justify it.

Point #9
What is a “proportionate” reason when it comes to the abortion issue?
It’s the kind of reason we will be able to explain, with a clean heart, to the victims of abortion when we meet them face to face in the next life — which we most certainly will. If we’re confident that these victims will accept our motives as something more than an alibi, then we can proceed.

Archbishop Charles Joseph Chaput
Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver
Archbishop’s Column, Week of January 16, 2008, Denver Catholic Register
http://www.archden.org/dcr/news.php?e=454&s=2&a=9553

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is probably the “authority” on the subject, has made the following statement, which does not really differ from Chaput’s view:

“A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism, if the voters intent is to support that position. In such cases a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil. At the same time, a voter should not use a candidates opposition to an intrinsic evil to justify indifference or inattentiveness to other important moral issues involving human life and dignity.”

Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility from the Catholic Bishops of the United States
United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
http://www.usccb.org/faithfulcitizenship/FCStatement.pdf

My take on this:

These statements are instructive, because they tell us that while it would be wrong to support a candidate because he or she is pro-choice, it is acceptable to support a candidate despite being pro-choice, as long as your conscience tells you that the candidates views on other moral issues are just as important. The bishops tell us that to support a pro-life candidate only for that stance, if that candidate fails to address other critical moral issues, would also be wrong.

So, in other words the “single issue” approach to voting that revolves around “choice” or “life” is not valid. By the way, I’m not Catholic, but I’m married to one and many of the people I know are. I hope that Catholics, and Christians of all denominations, will come to realize that issues such as health care, poverty, justice, environmental stewardship, war and the death penalty are just as important as that other issue. We have to consider our moral obligations to those of us who have actually been born, as well as the unborn.

“L’intento dello Spirito Santo, nell’ispirare la Bibbia, era insegnarci come si va al cielo, non come va il cielo”.

Roughly translated, this means “the intent of the Holy Spirit, in inspiring the Bible, was to teach how one goes to Heaven, not how Heaven goes”.

Apparently, Galileo was paraphrasing Cardinal Baronius… I don’t know who he was, but this is a great way of reminding us that the Bible is not intended to answer scientific questions.

“The challenges we face today — war and poverty, joblessness and homelessness, violent streets and crumbling schools — are not simply technical problems in search of a 10-point plan. They are moral problems, rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness, in the imperfections of man. And so the values we believe in — empathy and justice and responsibility to ourselves and our neighbors — these cannot only be expressed in our churches and our synagogues, but in our policies and in our laws.”

Barack Obama, St. Louis, July 5th 2008

Pope Benedict XVI told participants in the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue on June 7, 2008:

“It is the love of Christ which impels the Church to reach out to every human being without distinction, beyond the borders of the visible Church. The source of the Church’s mission is Divine Love. This love is revealed in Christ and made present through the action of the Holy Spirit. All the Church’s activities are to be imbued with love.”"Thus, it is love that urges every believer to listen to the other and seek areas of collaboration. It encourages Christian partners in dialogue with the followers of other religions to propose, but not impose, faith in Christ who is the way, the truth, and the life”.

When I read this, my first reaction was, “this is huge”… to me it is clear that the Pope is clearly rejecting forced conversion and heavy-handed evangelization. If you consider yourself a Christian (or at least, a Roman Catholic) then it’s not your job to try to force your beliefs and your religion on those who belief differently. Instead, you should use dialog and reason to make the “Jesus proposition”. And make it in a way that is consistent with brotherly love, and respect.

“I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute–where no Catholic prelate would tell the President (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote–where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference–and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish–where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source–where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials–and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

Finally, I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end–where all men and all churches are treated as equal–where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice–where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind–and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.

That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe–a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.”

John F. Kennedy
September 12, 1960
Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association

I just finished reading The Language of God by Francis Collins.

Collins, who headed the Human Genome Project, presents his theory of “theistic evolution” or “BioLogos”. While the book does have some logical inconsistencies, and tends to be preachy at times, it’s worth a read for people who are interested in the current conflict between science and religion.

Collins roundly rejects young earth creationism and intelligent design, and exhorts his fellow believers not to fear science. His stresses that Biblical texts, especially the Genesis creation stories, should not be read as history but rather as moral allegory or myth. He also encourages scientific thinkers not to reject religion.

Collins defines the basic tenets of theistic evolution as:

1. The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago.
2. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.
3. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.
4. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required.
5. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.
6. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout our history.

The only point that might make scientists uncomfortable would be the last one. That obviously requires a leap of faith . The knowledge of right and wrong, and the search for God, may one day be explained by physiology. Altruism has been observed in other species, and so shouldn’t be used as an argument for man’s higher nature. That’s a sort of “god of the gaps” argument that I find troubling.

The Language of God is an easy read and despite its flaws provides a convincing argument that religion and science need not be at odds.

“Somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us.

At every opportunity, they’ve told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage; school prayer and intelligent design.

There was even a time when the Christian Coalition determined that its number one legislative priority was tax cuts for the rich. I don’t know what Bible they’re reading, but it doesn’t jibe with my version.”

Senator Barack Obama
United Church of Christ
Hartford, Connecticut, June 23, 2007