Trinity, Matter, and Time

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Guide to that larger paper in which he posed some like devil advocate questions. Expected challenges and this is one expected challenge he found is not Father, son and Spirit the proper and exclusive name of God? Are not all other designations at best metaphors or worse, arbitrary efforts to name God in ways that please us or seem au courant? God forbid. He goes on to answer these objections, except the one about the name, the proper exclusive name of God. He said, that's complicated. And theologians have fought about that. And he punted. I'll make it simple. These are not names. These are roles or titles. The one thing everybody agrees about are the begotten. The father and son begotten is it's not the same as human parent child relationship. It's like and a parent child relationship. So this name father and son is already an analogy. It's an analogy to a relationship we don't understand. These terms are not names that are already analogies. So in my view, that clears the way to consider the other terminology that Migliori introduces. This from that PCUSA paper, Creator, redeemer and sanctifier. In Faith Seeking Understanding the textbook, you'll find source, the medium and the effective promise. When Professor Migliori retired from the seminary, they did a press release and his own remarks referred to a triune God who is creator, reconciler and redeemer. And that order seems a little not conventional. And Migliori says you can put them in a different order and cites the benediction we're all familiar with the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Little bit different order in everything I have seen, though I have never seen the Holy Spirit get top billing. But not subordinate. Okay, so these are other alternate terminologies one can use Augustine with no shortage of his own analogies in his massive work. Really the whole second half the book is about evenly divided between meticulous analysis of Scripture. There's not a guy to use one word 100 would do. And the second half of the book is really an early work in cognitive psychology. He keeps finding yet another Trinity in the mind. Each of these is a section of of the 15 sections. Each of these is a section of his work. But these are not the same kind of analogy. If you look at these Migliori terms, these are kind of job descriptions or roles, if you will, of the Trinity. That's not what Augustine's doing, what he's doing here, looking for analogies to explain the three in oneness, like common illustrations of the three in oneness. Is phases of matter. Water can be ice or liquid or steam. These are those kinds of illustrations. How do you explain three in oneness? So he's looking for a way to describe that. So why does he need five of them? He keeps going and looking for yet another trinity in the mind, not just for illustration. He is looking for the way in which we are in the image of God. The way in which we are in the image of God is not having five fingers and five toes. Presumably the way we would be in the image of God, different from other creatures with five fingers and toes. And there's a lot of them is in our mental faculties. So in our mental faculties must be how we're in the image of God. And our mental faculties must be in the image of a trinity. That's what he keeps looking for and settles principally on this one. Memory. Understanding. This is the third callback. Well, I should have told you. The incomprehensible. The second Augustine callback. This is the third. I cheated a little bit. This painting is technically titled St. Jerome. It's in the same. They look at each other across the nave of the same church in Florence. This is Ghirlandaio. The other one's Botticelli. I figured nobody would notice. The giveaway is the red robe. Jerome was a cardinal and Augustine only made bishop. But I figured, why not? I like it. Don't. All right, let's jump to the 20th century. Back to the 20th century. Another philosopher who dwelt had a threefold division of understanding how our mental faculties relate to the world. Karl Popper is rightly famous. He's the most prominent philosopher of science of the 20th century. Rightly famous for the idea of falsifiability as the measure of a good scientific idea. Meaning when an experiment is done, it never proves one idea is right. An experiment can disprove ideas that are wrong. And the more often you disprove ideas that are wrong, the more confidence you gain in one idea that you think is closer to being right but is never proven. So that's why Karl Popper is significant. But he also did a significant work in his later life publishing on a threefold division of the world, physical matter. And he made an important sub world. He called it plants and animals. The mental or psychological state is a middle world to itself. And then thirdly, the products of the human mind, the totality of human culture. And Popper suggested all this long before we were all awash in digital information, also products of the human mind. So Karl Popper's this scheme has influenced my thinking since my long ago college days and was a reason why I organized things in a set of three. I gave a talk here two years ago about the physical world and my understanding of it. And particularly three discoveries made all within 20 years of each other. All involving new ways of seeing things. The 100 inch telescope installed on Mount Wilson just outside Pasadena, California, that demonstrated the world to be far, far astronomically larger than anybody had reason to expect. Whole galaxies outside our realm and galaxies moving away from us. An expanding universe, not a static universe. The ancients looked at the stars and saw. They saw physical examples of eternal and unchanging anything but. Stars explode, new stars form, galaxies collide. Anything but eternal and changing out there. A microscope instead of a telescope demonstrated the physical basis of heredity by visualizing chromosomes lining up in pairs to separate its cell division. Chromosomes lining up in pairs is the physical basis of Mendelian inheritance in genetics. It was a phenomenon recognized but not understood. And it's still another 50 years before the mechanism of storing information on chromosomes would be understood. And finally, also microscopes and cell staining techniques established neurons. Single cells is the basis of brain function, not microflow of fluids. Individual cells. Though it would be 50 years before many could understand how those cells communicated with one another. So with this threefold separation, I'm going to modify Popper's world by moving plants and animals out of the first world into a level by themselves, the realm of all living things. To me, what recommends this scheme versus Pauper's is one can draw a bright shining line between those things. Living and nonliving. Nucleic acid based life forms all have the perpetual propensity to propagate. And rocks don't do that. It's easy to separate them. But that would make a crowded second world. So I got to move mental states in the third world with the products of the human mind. Honestly, I don't see how you can separate them. So let me clean up this diagram a little. Oh, sorry. I just let you know I'm doing my homework. There are different threefold schemes. Teilhard de Chardin separately, Vernansky looked at the world as a geosphere. A biosphere is the origin of this term. And a noosphere, their noosphere is the same as Popper's World 3, the realm of human knowledge. But it's kind of a weird word. And world three sounds like it means something else. They mean the same thing. The realm of inherited knowledge, the totality of human culture. So I would reorganize those three worlds I still I don't like Popper's term, but to me world means planet Earth, but I can't change it. Matter, life being what we know to be nucleic acid based life forms and representation I'll take to be everything that's contained in nervous systems. This is a realistic reconstruction of a single pyramidal cell from human frontal cortex and all of the fibers which make contact with it. This is a technical achievement along the lines of what I showed before of identifying single neurons. It's a realistic depiction of one cell, but unrealistic in that one tree has been separated from the forest. This cell is in fact packed in with thousands of other cells and all of their other fibers. But for illustrative purposes they pulled one neuron out so we can identify it. And I would say that's the basis of representation in general, which is separate from other life forms. So here's where I'll get controversial and rename these things creation, incarnation and inspiration. Be a couple slides before I justify that term incarnation, but think word made flesh, representation. I wish if I get to the end, I'll say more about this, but I'll give you a short version and why I would go so far as to call that not just representation, but inspiration. In the human realm, the nervous system has to not just reflect the past, but have a model of the future. Nervous system isn't any good unless the animal has a model of what might happen, what could happen for humans, what should happen. There are patterns that are reflected in the human mind before they get it manifest in the physical world. The inspiration is why I justify that term. So in terms of justifying terms, I'm so bold as to call this a trinity. It's not a trinity yet. This is a hierarchy. I got to connect this third level back to the first level, which is that all we know about that physical world has to get represented on this substrate. Anything. I'm not saying everything in the outside world can be represented in our brains. Probably not. But anything we do know about the outside world must be implemented here. This is an observation going back to Plato. Plato says we don't see reality, we see our perception. We see the shadow on the cave wall, not the real thing. It's taken on more pointedness in the 20th century, particularly subatomic world, the quantum world. Physicists have to reckon with the fact that they cannot separate themselves as observers from the world they seek to observe. Prominent Princeton physics professor used this evocative diagram to say we as observers are intimately integrated into the universe. We Seek to observe and we can't be separated from it. But that only gets us halfway there. Need a crossbar across the top to make a proper trinity out of it. And I'll go to Roger Penrose for this. I don't know how many of you know his name. He is legitimately a heavyweight and he proposed a threefold understanding of the world that was physical, mathematical and mental and the interrelationship between them. He could have cited Popper's work on separating the mental from the physical, but he didn't. He could have also cited Boethius. Boethius was like he came one generation after Augustine. Hillary is before Augustine, Boethius is after Augustine. And like Augustine, Boethius is mostly known in the modern world for one big best seller. But also wrote a substantial work on the Trinity called On the Trinity. And he separated things into physics, mathematics and theology. The three speculative sciences as he saw them 700 years later. Aquinas wrote a commentary on Boethius. Aquinas commentary was three times longer than Boethius original work. But he said that he got this right. He said there are three speculative sciences and there is not a fourth one. So Boethius has physics, mathematics, theology. Penrose says physical, mathematical and the mental. I say tomato potato. Interesting sign. Light on Penrose before his Nobel Prize winning career on working with Hockingen. Whatever they did when he was 26 years old, his first publication with his father as the only co author. His father was a big deal in the British psychiatric world. They published this image in a British psychiatric journal under the title An Impossible Shape. It's been since come to be called the Penrose Triangle. Some of you may recognize it as the original diagram of the Google Docs logo. They've since modified and simplified it. But this is the basis of that original logo. And it makes a pretty good illustration of the paradoxes inherent in the Trinity and clearly influenced Penrose later illustrations from his first publication to his later life publications. Though as far as I can tell he has never suggested there's anything trinitarian about what he's working on. Okay, I got a triangle shape that I can use now to arrange these same figures. And this is where I'll justify incarnation. You may all be familiar. The DNA code is read off in sets of three letters. Coincidence? Yeah, coincidence. Sets of three letters are turned into amino acid. Words turned into protein paragraphs. Protein paragraphs are assembled into books of organisms. Organisms are organized into societies of libraries. But it starts with code. Code is turned into protein. Sounds to me like word made flesh. That's why I would call all living life, living matter, an incarnation of a code. You may have noticed I've changed the illustration here of creation and the Big Bang. First, to make the point that I have no more than a cartoon level of understanding of this topic. I have to believe what they tell me. I can't master it. But it also makes the point that there is a great deal unknown in this topic. This is not all wrapped up with a bow. From what I understand, it's a legitimate point of discussion whether this event. I know two things about the Big Bang. It wasn't big and it wasn't a bang. That's the end of what I know. But the serious discussion of the idea that an event like this has happened an infinite number of times with infinite possible outcomes that gets seriously discussed. Our understanding of this 50 years from now may be as different as our understanding today is. Our understanding of that static universe has changed since 100 years ago. It is definitely in flux. So now I'll apply that terminology to these same images. Creation, incarnation and inspiration. As I would have it. And here's the first Augustine callback. These are one and the same substance, meaning life is the same elements and atoms that make up everything else. Joni Mitchell put it best. We are stardust. It's not the matter that's different, it's the same substance. There's a layer of information that organizes the molecules that makes it different. Likewise, neurons are not different kinds of molecules than liver cells or something else. There's information layered into it that makes it different. And here I've borrowed work from an artist. This is the same realistic depiction of a human cell. But I overlaid this evocative image to show the nucleus at the center of the cell that's running everything to make clear there's no separation between those in terms of matter. This image looks a little murky. Doesn't is. It's an overlay of two images to make the point again how much this layer influences this layer, their intimate relationship between them. Nobody sees this when you look through a telescope. For the most part, people don't look through telescopes anymore. This is the result of a large amount of theorizing and calculation and the data collection. I hope you can see this. These individual little mechanical elements are what's collecting the data, not a telescope. In the old days, all we knew was visible light. Now we have to include infrared X rays, gamma rays. Beyond those, we can only see what we know to look for and huge amounts of calculation. And theorizing has to go into assembling a picture of what's out there, because we can't see what's out there. And we know there's stuff out there we don't know how to see. We may eventually, but as we go along, it's clear we only know to theorize and visualize what we know to understand currently what is comprehensible to us. All right, I'll clear it up further and just put the headlines on it and go for the second Augustine callback. Another local boy made good. Albert Einstein said the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. So I looked this up. This is a real. I mean, I verified this. It's not like a fake Einstein quote about, you know, don't believe what you see on the Internet. But I think things have changed. I think this was the attitude we say since the days of Newton that with the right instruments and with the right calculations, there's nothing in all creation beyond our understanding. I think that has changed largely since Einstein's day and others like that. I could fill this with quotes. I won't. It would get messy. Fill this with quotes of people at the leading edge to say we should no longer make the assumption that the world is comprehensible to us. It is so vast, so weird. What we can comprehend is our limit of what we can comprehend. But we should not assume that is the totality of what's out there. Okay, so Einstein and Augustine had another favorite topic, which is time. I promised this in the title the and so we'll make a brief sojourn into time. Augustine's bestseller Confessions is where he deals with time that past and future created and issues from that which is always present. Threefold division of what we know about time. I saw this in a bumper sticker at a music festival. It was in North Adams, Mass. I saw this in bumper sticker and said, that's a pretty good summary of Augustine's position that the present equals the past plus the future. Somewhat mysterious, but a threefold division of what we can understand. Why am I talking about this? Refer to our own theologian, philosopher Mark Edwards in his book said Christ makes the hinge of time. And the ancient prayer, glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, aligning the Trinity with our threefold division of time. Well, how far can we press that? What if I tried to align time and my conceptions of physical world? So here's where I say align representation of the future with inspiration to make clear the way in which I should have done this on the previous diagram. But when you get nervous systems interacting with nucleic acid and with the outside world, shorthand, nature and nurture. The nervous system has to adapt to a world that makes no sense. I'll give you a simple example. Everybody's familiar with the idea that lab rats can be trained to do almost anything. And if a lab rat is in a situation in which a red flashing light means you must seek shelter or you will get shocked, they'll learn it pretty fast. They will adapt to it, though nothing in its experience would tell it that. Nothing in all the rats in history's experience would tell it that. It makes no sense whatsoever. And yet it is true. If the red light is flashing, you must seek shelter. And it can adapt to a world that makes no sense. It has to have a model of the future. If the red light's flashing, I will get shocked, or could get shocked, might get shocked. And that's where we transition to the human realm. What should happen? We can alter the future with patterns that occur to us in our brain, separate from the outside world. The alignment of the past with creation. I do not mean to imply that what we would call the first component of the Trinity is relegated to the past, or kind of a has been. Though I think that's somehow kind of treated in our theology these days. It seems modern people relate better to the junior partners of the outfit. And the old man seems semi retired, maybe involved in some of the big decisions, but doesn't really get involved day to day. That's not what I'm implying. Because the past is in fact, quite dynamic. Every single individual solitary instant, more past gets created, more past just got created. It is right behind us and is very dynamic. And from all evidence of the physical world, creation is just getting started. So I don't mean to imply that that is the boring part of things. So this is a kind of static image. What would happen if we tried to arrange this in three dimensions? What if we put matter on one dimension, time on the other dimension, and the Trinity is the third dimension? What would populate these squares? I'm not sure this is what I'm still puzzling over. But once you start looking for threes, you see them everywhere, I'll tell you. And I put a few examples here. I can't think of a better definition of the present tense than listening to music. To me, that defines the mystery of the present. All right. By now, some of you may be willing to quote Miles Davis to me. Why are we going through all this? Why are we trundling through the cosmos like this? That's a valid question. One of the topics I left off that was in the Migliori book is the attributes of God. Not my favorite topic except one. The attribute of God most often cited in the Hebrew scripture is the hesed. The NRSV gives us as steadfast love. I prefer the King James, the loving kindness, the most often cited attribute of God in scripture. And if somebody tells me they're talking about God, I am inclined to say, show me the hesed. Where's the loving kindness? If you're talking about God, there's got to be loving kindness number one. And I asked that about myself and what I've presented here. I looked at this and said, am I talking about God? If so, where is the loving kindness? And I will try to show it to you, but it'll require a little bit of another excursion into a sideline topic if you all would afford me that much. And it starts with this image which I mostly feel compelled to show you because it is so beautiful. This is the latest, greatest picture of the entirety of the universe outside the Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way galaxy is kind of a smudgy pancake that we can't see through, but we can see above and below. So where the Milky Way galaxy is blacked out, this is everything above and below the Milky Way galaxy. This is the real image. They give you a blow up of just that much of it. This is the filamentary network of galaxies. I'll zoom it up twofold to emphasize that every single individual speck is a galaxy on the order of the size of the Milky way galaxy. Exactly 100 years ago when the Mount Wilson Observatory opened its hundred inch telescope, the question was is there anything outside the Milky Way galaxy? The answer was yes. How much more is mind boggling that if there were other people out there looking back, the Milky Way galaxy would be one of these average sized SMECs relative to the entirety of what's out. You may recall the good Lord challenged Abraham, count the stars if you think you are able. We can't count the galaxies. Far from that. It's not like the scientists say, that's it, now we've got a full picture. Oh no. The scientists working on this would say all we have learned is how much we don't know. How much more vast and complicated and incomprehensible it is in reality. Remember, nobody sees this. This Is all those mechanical instruments, individual data collecting things, synthesizing huge quantities of data to get a picture that is mind boggling. Why am I telling you this? What's a poor soul to do? Who's trying to comprehend the universe with a simple model and a universe that just gets more vast and complex all the time? What I try to do. I read recently that there have been in history there have been 100 billion humans, give or take. And then, give or take, there are 100 billion neurons in a human brain. So if I try to achieve some degree of unitary consciousness, I imagine myself as one neuron out of that hundred billion copies of what it has meant to be a human in relation to humanity. And so I'll eventually recall that there is deep knowledge knit into our DNA. I'll give you a simple animal example. Everybody has seen two birds in flight. One bird follows the other bird. First bird makes a rapid change of speed and direction and the second bird matches it, meaning visually. That second bird calculates what should be changed to its own speed and velocity to match the new one and changes its wings and feather arrangement to match that new velocity. Like that. Meaning our pilots have expert working knowledge of aerodynamics acquired through books, through World3Repository of human knowledge. Birds don't do that. Neither do birds do this by trial and error. Birds have a working knowledge of aerodynamics knit knit into their DNA. All the birds do. And if our maker can knit, even into bird brains, a working knowledge of aerodynamics, how much more can be knit into our own brains? Consider an example. How often have you seen someone swoon in an infant's first smile? Oh, every time. It is knit into our hearts and minds from before we were born to respond with love to the smile of a child. That is where I find the loving kindness in this scheme I've laid out to you. And this is how, considering one more idea. These things kind of look similar, don't they? There are about as many synapses in the human brain as there are galaxies in the universe by current estimates. So if I seek to contemplate that idea and follow Augustine's advice to say in contemplation of the Trinity, you can get better and better. I'll leave you all to be the judge of that. As how I have approached that, I thank you for your attention. And Ned, I'll turn it back to you. Am I on time? Right? Is the goal? [00:29:04] Speaker B: Yeah, we will try that. I just want to see if I can it now. It's all right. And we don't have Feedback. And you guys can hear me, right? All right, so we will take. We don't have a lot of time, but we will certainly take questions, if anybody has any. Does anyone have a question? Yes. Great. [00:29:32] Speaker C: I wonder. We've been brought up and there's some catechism that mentioned the personhood of the Trinity, three persons in one God. So I'll float that idea. And then the other thing I want to get into is to Teilhard de Jardin. You mentioned Jardin. Now, he is an interesting cocktail of understanding, but. Yeah, right. But this notion of movement evolving towards the Omega [00:30:14] Speaker A: point. [00:30:16] Speaker C: So I don't know, they're complex things to explore in this time. But if you go ahead, [00:30:23] Speaker A: Persons, I will take up. I think that has all just been misleading language from the beginning because person. And everybody thinks, well, I know what persons are and whatever these divine components are, are not persons. So I think that's a language baggage. That's my answer to that. Tear the shut in. The only thing I don't like about that, if evolution toward an Omega, I just don't see that you can say things will end up at just one point or we are at the stage of history where we can see what that single one point would be. I don't see any evidence of that. But yes, I have just scraped the surface. Only know that he's out there and need to go further into that topic. [00:31:29] Speaker D: I think the only slide that I really understood was the one that said, so what? [00:31:42] Speaker A: Well, it's a good point, isn't it? [00:31:44] Speaker D: I have always said that this is a difficult pulpit because you've got to preach to the professors at the theological seminary and you've got to preach to the great unwashed like me. How? And this is a serious question. How do you simplify this so that we great unwashed, those of us who attend Nassau Presbyterian Church, can really understand in simple terms what I can take away from that. It's not a criticism, but it was a great presentation. I'm just trying to understand it. [00:32:32] Speaker A: Well, I'll give you three answers. How about that? A, I'm not preaching, so I don't have to motivate you on how to live your life. But that's a good question I posed to myself. I said, why am I going to talk about this? Does it mean anything? It means something to me. Because the last points I made in contemplating all that second, give up hope on understanding it. And that's where every work on the Trinity starts by saying it will remain eternally mysterious. So there was A third one. Yeah, well, right. So that's honestly my reaction to, I tell you, full libraries, arguing about the Trinity as if one day we're going to get it right. Nonsensical to me. [00:33:31] Speaker E: Sorry. I just wanted to say, I don't know if this helps, John, but I just wanted to say thank you for the slide that had the cell with the DNA and the neuron that was extracted for us from the trees and the cosmos that I think has been so helpful to me. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. [00:33:59] Speaker A: You're very, very welcome. [00:34:03] Speaker F: Thank you so much. Really interesting talk. So, two questions, one on the energy, life and the representation. Particularly on the representation I didn't quite understand. Do you mind actually elaborate more [00:34:17] Speaker A: on that? In what way is a nervous system a representation of the physical world? [00:34:21] Speaker F: Yes, [00:34:21] Speaker A: well, in two inheritances, the DNA inheritance that tells you what to expect out there in terms of seasons, the accumulated understanding of what a physical world is that an animal will have to go out and encounter, and a representation of how the reality you run into is different from what you expected from your inherited understanding of the world. The nervous system exists to model the world as it is and as it will likely be. That's what I mean. [00:34:59] Speaker F: Okay, second. Era we are in right now. So I want to understand given latest AI things and particularly really significantly increased that we have now. How actually that. Well, [00:35:22] Speaker A: I'll repeat this for the recording. The question I didn't want. Where does AI fit in this? I'll give you only two answers instead of three. I have had brief interaction use of AI in my workplace. My reaction to that is it's like artificial sweetener. It might have its uses, but it's not as good as the real thing, is my short answer to that. But some of the images I showed you are AI generated images. I think it's very clever for that. And so in terms of why I do this or what I'm going to do, it may be that that cube I showed you at the end scattered a bunch of threefold kind of topics along that cube. Maybe what I'm going to do is just populate each of those with an image. Because some of these images you saw are worth 10,000 wor. So maybe all I need to do is populate that cube with images that I don't have to be an artist to make an evocative image anymore. So to me that has very interesting power. Some of them end up kind of cheap looking. You can tell an AI after you do a couple. You can see the AI image from a mile away. But that hamster running through the cosmos. It took me five seconds to tell a computer to make that. Sorry, [00:36:42] Speaker B: we're going to have to stop, I think. Thank you all very, very much, and thank. You.