{"id":227,"date":"2017-11-12T00:12:34","date_gmt":"2017-11-12T00:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/?p=227"},"modified":"2019-10-30T00:22:13","modified_gmt":"2019-10-30T00:22:13","slug":"the-best-future-possible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/?p=227","title":{"rendered":"The Best Future Possible"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The best future once possible is probably no longer possible.\u00a0 Somewhere along the way creation took a turn that opened up some possibilities but closed others.\u00a0 We have to build from where we are.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

66 million years ago, or about the time Donald Trump became President, an asteroid crashed into earth and set off a series of events that resulted in the extinction of three quarters of all of the species then living on the Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bad news for the dinosaurs, which had been the dominant form of life on the planet for 160 million years.\u00a0 But good news for small, furry, nocturnal animals called mammals.\u00a0 With the dinosaurs out of the way, mammals became dominant, leading eventually to humans, and you and me, and Donald Trump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

160 million years.\u00a0 And then one asteroid and bam! The dinosaurs are done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And what bad luck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only is an asteroid of that size hitting the earth an exceedingly unlikely event.\u00a0 But some scientists now believe that if the asteroid had hit the earth in just about anywhere on the planet except where it did, that the asteroid event wouldn\u2019t have had the consequences that it did and the dinosaurs might have survived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You see the dinosaurs weren\u2019t hit by the asteroid directly.\u00a0 At least not many of them.\u00a0 Instead, the asteroid hit the earth at a location that is today the northwest corner of the Yucatan peninsula.\u00a0 The crater is centered on a small town called Chicxulub, so it\u2019s called the Chicxulub crater.\u00a0 This particular location, just happened to be rich in deposits of sulfur, hydrocarbons and organic deposits, like those we think of today as \u201cfossil fuels\u201d such as oil and gas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you drove to church this morning, you know that when that kind of material gets set on fire it burns.\u00a0 The impact of the asteroid provided enough energy to ignite the fuel.\u00a0 The fuel burned, throwing massive amounts of soot into the atmosphere.\u00a0 The soot then blocked out the sun and lowered planetary temperatures for hundreds of years.\u00a0 Plants, deprived of sunlight died.\u00a0 Animals deprived of plants for food starved to death, and so on, and so on, and well, here we are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here\u2019s the \u201cAw Jeez!\u201d part of that story.\u00a0 Only the Yucatan peninsula and about 13% of the rest of the surface of the earth had sufficient carbon deposits to cause the kind of chain reaction catastrophe that resulted in\u00a0the Cretaceous\u2013Paleogene\u00a0extinction that killed the dinosaurs.\u00a0 If the asteroid had landed in the deep ocean, or missed the earth entirely, the biggest threat to the dinosaurs might have been the La Brea Tar Pits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So that we are here at all is an incredibly random circumstance.\u00a0 Fortunate or unfortunate depending on how you look at it, and whether you\u2019re a dinosaur or a human, it\u2019s just luck that our planetary history followed the path that it did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And the asteroid is only one, spectacular example of what could have happened, and did; or might have happened, but didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that asteroid only hit 66 million years ago.\u00a0 The universe is actually more like 13 and a half billion years old.\u00a0 That\u2019s an incredibly long time frame for something to happen that then caused something else to happen that then caused something else to happen, that either resulted in this morning looking like it does, or more likely, far more likely, looking like something entirely different.\u00a0 One path with us standing here at the end of it, and thousands of millions of other paths that didn\u2019t happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So imagine then, that we are standing, somehow, on the side lines, at the occasion of the \u201cBig Bang\u201d. The creation event when all the material that ever has or will exist is compressed into a single location, and then with a gigantic explosion is violently thrust apart in all directions creating space and time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At that moment, actually before there even are \u201cmoments\u201d, but at that first event before anything yet had ever actually happened, if we could look far off into the future, say 13 and a half billion years later, we could have seen, trillions and trillions of possibilities for what might happen:\u00a0 good\/bad; terrible\/awful; best possible\/worst possible.\u00a0 Actually an incalculable number of what might happen.\u00a0 Actually, if we\u2019re talking about the moment just before \u201cmoments\u201d began, there would be an infinite number of possible futures.\u00a0 Because until the Big Bang gets things started there are no limits at all to what might happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, the Big Bang does happen, and suddenly a lot of the formerly possible futures instantly become impossible.\u00a0 This is because as soon as creation happens, not only does a lot of stuff get created in a particular way, but also the laws of physics get created in a particular way.\u00a0 The actual laws we got, like electromagnetism, the weak and strong nuclear force and gravity, and the specific ways they relate to each other, define some stuff as possible, and a lot of other stuff as impossible.\u00a0 Right from the start.\u00a0 Before we even get to the first second of existence an amazing amount of stuff happens, subatomic particles are created and their associated anti-particles are created and most of the pairs immediately annihilate each other, but just enough matter remains that everything that now exists is left over.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As every moment passes vast numbers of possible futures became impossible.\u00a0 They won\u2019t ever happen.\u00a0 We\u2019re still left with further vast numbers of possible futures, but every moment that goes by more and more of them become impossible, too, at an astounding rate.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Surely one of those futures would have been better than this one, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At any point between the beginning of time and space, and the present moment, a divine observer, like God, for instance could have looked at every possible future that was then possible at that particular point in time.\u00a0 And this divine observer, God for instance, could have then judged all of the possible futures according to some divine criteria, like total happiness, or beauty, or peacefulness, or artistic brilliance or technological genius, or animals with the ability to fly, or the optimal balance between personal freedom and social responsibility, or whatever God thinks is worthwhile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then God could have arranged all of the possible futures for the universe into a single line with the futures judged the worst off to one side, and the futures judged the best off to the other side.\u00a0 And way over there, on the furthest far side of the line, there would be the one future that at that particular moment was judged to be the best of the best, the best of all possible worlds, the very best future possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To actually get to that particular future, 66 millions years later, or 13.5 billion years later, would require tracing the thinnest of lines over countless changing circumstances with everything happening just so:\u00a0 just the right proportion between quarks and anti-quarks, an asteroid hitting in just the right spot on the northwest corner of the Yucatan peninsula, and then, eventually, animals like humans making choices to do one thing or another, trillions and trillions of choices everyday from what to have for breakfast whether to drive or take the train, what to buy and where to shop, to call your congressman, or march in the street or vote or not, and which candidate to choose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so, you can probably agree with me, that the future we actually got, the present we are in, the world we inhabit, is almost certainly, in fact as certain as certainly can ever be, not the best future possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Certainly there was a future where Clinton is our President, not Trump.\u00a0 Or Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren, or whomever you like.\u00a0 A future where John Lennon wasn\u2019t assassinated, where Hitler was assassinated, where Los Angeles still had street cars instead of freeways.\u00a0 A future where the Earth was a little closer to the sun, or gravity was a little lighter, or I hadn\u2019t said what I did, or I wrote that check that I meant to write but never did, or Dodo birds ran a little faster than the people with clubs that killed all of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Surely this, beautiful and terrible planet isn\u2019t the best of all possible worlds.\u00a0 It\u2019s equally unlikely that this is the worst of all possible worlds.\u00a0 But somehow that truth doesn\u2019t provide sufficient comfort to balance this indisputable truth:\u00a0 things could have been better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The world could have been better, but this one, the one with Kim Jong Un and Kim Kardashian, and facebook and fake news is the one we got.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Darn.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now assumed in what I just gave you was a bit of theology that you may have missed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a lot of churches this morning there are a lot of preachers telling their congregations exactly the opposite of what I just told you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A lot of preachers will tell you that this is the best of all possible worlds, because in fact this is the only possible world.\u00a0 And the theological difference that gets you to that statement is that I told you a theology in which there are trillions and trillions of moments in which events could have happened a different way.\u00a0 And a lot of religions will tell you that, no, everything had to happen exactly this way because God is in control and God made the world precisely to be exactly the way it is.\u00a0 I told you a theology of probabilities and choices:\u00a0 a 13% chance of an Asteroid hitting a location on Earth with sufficient carbon deposits to create an extinction level event, a world where 7 billion people make independent free decisions about their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But a lot of people would say to me, and not just religious people but scientists, too, what do you mean the Asteroid \u201ccould have\u201d hit somewhere else?\u00a0 Asteroids follow trajectories defined by physics.\u00a0 Human beings are controlled by genes, and social systems, and unconscious urges.\u00a0 Once things got going in a certain way, once creation got created in a certain way, every material thing from asteroids to humanity simply followed the one path that was possible given the rules, given the \u201claws\u201d of physics and nature.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Religious people who believe in what I call the \u201comni\u201d God (omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and eternal) believe that God, with total freedom, made the world and everything in it exactly as He intended.\u00a0 Six days to get started, a day of rest, a foolish couple named Adam and Eve and since then God is still in charge of every event, large and small.\u00a0 Everything happens for a purpose.\u00a0 We may not understand why God needs to cause the terrible suffering and violence that sometimes happens in our world, but we have to trust that God has a plan.\u00a0 And because God is good, this world He created must of course be the best one possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Science, on the other hand, would say that the universe knows nothing of \u201cgood and bad\u201d.\u00a0 There is no divine judge who can say \u201cbetter or worse\u201d.\u00a0 We just get what is.\u00a0 What had to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Call it the hand of God, or call it blind luck, or call it \u201cthe mystery,\u201d or call it a cold and uncaring, impersonal universe, the world is what it is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether you believe in the absoluteness of physics, or God, or believe, as I do, in the freedom of human choosing, in either case you get to this morning with the facts of the world surrounding you.\u00a0 This is what it is.\u00a0 As a person who tries to live and teach a reality-based religion, that\u2019s a good place to start.\u00a0 I urge you to look around, and see what really is.\u00a0 Because this is all we have.\u00a0 Regrets aren\u2019t useful.\u00a0 Might-have-beens don\u2019t help.\u00a0 This is where we are.\u00a0 Exactly this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The difference between the two theologies I described are immense:\u00a0 not in where we are, but in where we go from here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Omni God theology, or the anti-theology of cold physics, we are told that this is the only world we can have.\u00a0 You could say it\u2019s the best possible world, but only because it\u2019s the only possible world.\u00a0 And thus with all the world\u2019s manifest flaws there isn\u2019t any better one available.\u00a0 This is all you get.\u00a0 Bad news if you\u2019re a victim of violence, or poverty, or a species about to be made extinct by asteroid or human-caused climate change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Darn, to say the least.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even worse is that the Omni God theology and cold physics will also tell you that the next world we get is also the only one we will get, because just as the past could ever only be one thing:\u00a0 commanded by God\u2019s law or forced by natural laws, the next moment is equally, entirely, pre-determined.\u00a0 There is nothing for us to do but wait and watch and hopefully flourish, but quite possible suffer.\u00a0 There is nothing in this theology that human beings can add to creation.\u00a0 Nothing we can do to fix a flaw or to divert the path toward the future slightly more in the direction of love, peace, and justice.\u00a0 If the US Congress will ever enact a reasonable gun control law it will be because God makes it happen, not us.\u00a0 If human history ends as dinosaur history did with an asteroid and a cloud of soot, then that date with death has been set since the beginning of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the theology I believe, a theology of trillions and trillions of branching paths, and choices and options and probability events at the subatomic scale and decisions at the scale of human consciousness tells a very different story of our past and future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We start where we are.\u00a0 But where we go is up to us.\u00a0 Of course there is something we can do to make a better future.\u00a0 Of course our decisions and our doings are important and meaningful.\u00a0 The universe is not following a single path toward one predestined future, like a bowling ball thrown down a lane with those bumpers put down on either side that force the ball into the pins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The universe is made by choices and choosing.\u00a0 Human beings have free will.\u00a0 We make free decisions that alter the direction of the future, toward better or worse. The best future ever possible is probably long vanished from our choosing, but certainly we can choose better than this!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every individual in existence has freedom to do or decide between different open options according to their level of consciousness.\u00a0 Animals clearly make choices.\u00a0 Try to tell me a house cat\u2019s decision to go in and out the door you just opened for them isn\u2019t a free choice.\u00a0 Even subatomic particles behave in ways that cannot be predicted except in terms of probabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Freedom is fundamental in the universe.\u00a0 We feel it.\u00a0 We believe it.\u00a0 Even those who deny human freedom act as though they are free.\u00a0 We can\u2019t help it.\u00a0 We make choices.\u00a0 And we believe that our choices make a real difference in the world.\u00a0 God is not all-powerful because we have power, too.\u00a0 The natural laws don\u2019t control reality; they describe reality.\u00a0 Within the boundaries of what is possible quite a lot of different realities could happen.\u00a0 We get to choose:\u00a0 carelessly throw a gutter ball, or skillfully throw a strike.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We must choose.\u00a0 To help or to hurt.\u00a0 To turn toward or away.\u00a0 To participate or to ignore.\u00a0 To create or destroy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As we sang in the hymn before the sermon, \u201cLate in time, may we, forsaking all our cruelty and scorn, see a new tomorrow breaking and a kinder world be born.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are the product of a cosmic history seemingly leading to us, but only because we look back from where we are.\u00a0 If we instead could look forward from that long ago beginning, the place we are now would be nearly indiscernable amid all the other possibilities.\u00a0 As Joy Atkinson wrote in the words we used for our Chalice Lighting.\u00a0 \u201cThe womb of stars embraces us; remnants of their fiery furnaces pulse through our veins.\u00a0 We are of the stars, the dust of the explosions cast across space.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So this then, this morning, is where we have come to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Likely not the best world we could have created, but, no regrets.\u00a0 This is what we have to work with. \u201cAll are architects of fate, working in these walls of time\u2026\u00a0 For the structure that we raise time is with materials filled; our todays and yesterdays are the blocks with which we build.\u00a0 Build today, then, strong and sure, with a firm and ample base; and ascending and secure shall tomorrow find its place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not the end.\u00a0 We haven\u2019t arrived at the final future yet.\u00a0 The story continues.\u00a0 This morning for good or ill is where we are but not where we stop.\u00a0 We must step off from here.\u00a0 But from here we can go many places. Right or Left.\u00a0 Right or wrong.\u00a0 Correcting past mistakes to the extent we can.\u00a0 Healing old wounds.\u00a0 Learning to accommodate the burdens of the past we cannot undo. But keep going.\u00a0 \u201cBe that builder trusting good, bitter though the test may be:\u00a0 through all ages they are right, though they build in agony.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And from here, we commit to building, as much as we can, the best world possible now.  \u201cBuilding up a world, I\u2019m gonna let it shine.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The best future once possible is probably no longer possible.\u00a0 Somewhere along the way creation took a turn that opened… Read more The Best Future Possible<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sermons","category-writing"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=227"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":228,"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/227\/revisions\/228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rhmcd.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}