Sunday, 9 June 2013

A deeper Logic behind the Experiment

In the Beginning was the Word.

And that Word was Logos in Greek. Which gives us the word Logic.

And the Logos created the earth, and everything else that goes with it, and holds it in place and goes on and on sustaining it. And the existence of this Logos isn't provable. And the reasonably decent fit of the universal constants that keep us all hanging around here instead of flying apart or smashing together isn't a proof of that Logos - but it's consistent with it. And the fact that it happens if there were a small Universe we would never be here, and if there much more Universe we'd never be here, and there's just about the right amount of Carbon and Oxygen knocking around to enable organic life - and the way things keep on going just the way they're going and it's all kind of predictable and comprehensible - that's not a proof of the Logos, but it's consistent with it.

And this universe may be predictable, but it's not totally nice. There's a chunk of sadness in a creation where to produce carbon-base lifeforms, a star has to die. There's a chunk of cosmic irony in the way that the origins of life on our little blue-green planet depend on the cataclysmic events of the earth - volcanoes, lightning and earthquakes - which deal both life and death. But all, still, with that coherent, faithful logic that holds the universe together and holds the stars in their courses.

And if that were that, as humans evolved the sense to ask the question - why is there something here, not nothing? - then the answer would probably be pretty stark. We are the lab rats of a cold, doomed universe - or, as Frankie Boyle put it, we're a bunch of monkeys clinging to a dying rock. We're the thrown-off debris of a cosmic experiment in beauty and terror. We're here to run through out mazes, while the one who set up the Great Experiment,  the one who makes the rules, inspects the notes on his clipboard and decides that the ones in the middle of the earth don't respond well to a lack of water.

But there's a story that goes, that the Word that holds the Universe together, decided to join the party. That the Logic behind the laws of nature made the rather odd decision to become subject to those laws. In a human body, the Logos joined those of us who grow, wonder at the world, try to understand it, suffer from some unexpected cataclysm - or just fall apart in the normal way. Not in the way that the Olympian gods would prance around, untouched and unharmed by the world. Not even the way Frankie and Benjy mouse hang around the lab, taking notes. No, the great Scientist became a genuine part of the experiment - the observer became the observed - a part of the trial.

And when that decision had been made, and the One who provides all logic became subject to the ones whose logic is all about power and fear, and he'd been in pain like we are, and thirsted like we do, and died like we do - that Logos showed us that there is a deeper logic. And it's a strange logic, that says that against all the one-way signs of entropy that show our world going from order to chaos, from Big Bang to long, slow, fizzle-out - while all nature dies, there's a hope beyond hope. One that says "Catch hold, and I'll pull you up. Cling on and I'll never let you go. Have patience, and I'm coming soon."

I've no idea how that final resolution will be - in this world when it is scoured by fire, folded like paper and laid out anew - when the dark, empty spaces and terrifying depths become the rolling plains of Eden. But it's enough for now to know that the Word's in it here with us - subject to his own deep logic, taking it all on and yet somehow holding it all up. And I'll wait for the day when the lion and the lamb lie down, and the light with which our faces shine is the light of reborn suns, shining with the light of the true Sun.

2 comments :

  1. Can't find words to respond. Simply... Thank you.

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  2. That's exactly what I was going to say. Somehow you capture the poignancy of the incarnation...I too wait for the day when we will shine.

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