Yesterday, we discussed the predicament of those who try to avoid the rather strong inference of a universe made by You Know Who via recourse to the so-called “Multiverse” theory. This theory accounts for the extraordinary fine tuning of the universe by positing an infinite number of other universes in which physical laws are all different. Ours just happens to be the lucky one where the 1 in 10137 odds of everything making you and me possible happen to have panned out.
Believe it or not, some people are so eager to get rid of God they will buy those odds. However, most people don’t. And so most people don’t need to be convinced of the existence of what we call the “supernatural” beyond the visible world of time, space, matter and energy.
The difficulty, as we noted yesterday, is that in a universe that is built like a skyscraper with an unknowable number of floors, “supernature” can refer to many things besides God, but we often have a tough time distinguishing those things from one another much as an amoeba might have trouble distinguishing a child, an adult and a redwood as anything other than “huge”. Looking up to Heaven, we human amoebas likewise use “supernatural” to describe not merely the Uncreated God, but also creatures such as stars, planets, big rocks, powerful forces of nature, and lots of other things from other floors in the skyscraper, like angels. Angels are higher in the order of creation than we, but they are still as distinct from God (and even from each other) as they are from us and as we are from beetles.
Partly this confusion is due to natural ignorance. Revelation tells us only what we need to know for the good of our souls. Just as Scripture is not particularly interested in questions of geology, cookery, political science, or physics except insofar as they happen to have to do with the Real Story–God’s plan of salvation in Christ Jesus–so it is only interested in angels when they have something to do with that basic story. So revelation tells us angels are real and that they serve God and us for our salvation and for the praise of his glory. Periodically, they turn up in their capacity as “messenger” (the very meaning of the word “angel”) and that’s about all we know. We are like children who now and then glimpse the postman and call him “Mr. Postman” because that is the totality of our knowledge of him. We haven’t the slightest idea of the other 99% of his life, loves, activities or relationships. In the vast majority of cases, biblical angels never even tell us their names. And on the three occasions they do (Michael, Gabriel, Raphael) the names themselves are totally referred to God and are intended for our benefit. It would be like asking the postman his name and being told, “I am He Who Glories in America’s Free Exchange of Information”. Angels are not about themselves. They live existences utterly referred to the glory of God and whoever God tells them to serve.
Such utterly referred existences can confuse us fallen creatures. It’s interesting to note that the amoeba problem goes way back with us. In the Old Testament, even the inspired writers have a difficult time telling the difference between an angelic messenger and the One who sent them. Frequently, the angel speaks the word of God in an odd mixture of first and third person, leaving the reader to wonder if this is a theophany (a manifestation of God himself) or just an angel. By the time of the New Testament, however, confusing the angelic messenger with his Lord is worthy of rebuke (as John discovers when he prostrates himself before an angel in his Revelation). Angels work in the life of the believer to help us, defend us, and guide us. Always, they are about the work of bringing each person and the world closer to the Triune God revealed in Christ Jesus.
Unfortunately, many Americans are now back to a pre-Mosaic understanding of angels. Much New Age spirituality appears to resemble something like religious methadone treatment: a sort of fuzzy devotion to “angels” as pretty much the whole show, coupled with a curious aversion to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Such “angels” tend to show up in gooey self-help books that affirm us in our okayness, promise us health and wealth through positive thinking, and assure us that the old tired message of sin, guilt, repentance, death, sacrifice, redemption, and obedience to Jesus Christ is passé.
I expect that a lot of these reported encounters with angels are just fiction (as indeed, most reported encounters with “orthodox” angels are). But whether such Christ-denying angels are figments of the imagination or not they fit the bill for Paul’s warning about angels of light.
The truth is this: the point of the spiritual life is not angels any more than the point of driving is traffic signs. An angel who directs you to himself or to your self-sufficient wonderfulness is a devil in disguise. True angels know it’s not about them. They love us and rejoice in our love, but they don’t want us to love them more than we love God. They are creatures who are completely ordered toward the love of God and the love of his creatures. In the order of nature, they are vastly greater than we are. But because, through Christ, we fallen humans have been joined with the life of the Blessed Trinity, the glory of all true angels is that they now look up to us and are not envious. Since the Incarnation, even a mighty archangel like Gabriel is now less than the least in the kingdom of Heaven, because by grace we have been given something the angels can only admire: participation in the divine nature by baptism.
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All humans desired above all other things one: Immortality.
The dread of finality of death is real.
Immortality for ancients was a simple concept and was entirely conflated with old age. Human lives were shorter, so anyone who lived to be so old as to outlive their own generation and the next, was considered effectively immortal: hailing from time before time and heading towards endless time. But they all died eventually. So the concept of immortality was simple: somebody ageless who doesn’t die. Who, at some point, stops aging, or so it’s thought because there’s nobody to compare them to: nobody else is old enough to have remembered the Methuselah ten or twenty years prior.
As time went on and there were more and more elderly, people realized that people do age, so it’s not possible to just live endlessly. And so you get the concept of perpetual youth. And what is associated with youth? Joy and pleasure. And as such, the idea of a life without worry in a timeless paradise.
This must have come with the realization that the Earth ages and passes. Natural disasters demonstrated that even long-standing places are not to be taken for granted. Long before science declared that the Solar System has an expiration date and long before they realized that life on Earth would be gone even before Sun burns out (due to constantly increasing solar output), people realized that this Earth is not going to last forever.
By the time of Jesus, this realization was finally complete. It was only a century or two earlier that the concept of resurrection of bodies after death was formulated as necessary for eternal life. In the Book of Maccabees, it was still a very fresh concept, and in times of Jesus, Sadducees would still deny its compatibility with the Jewish faith.
The idea that we must die to experience eternal life is completely alien to every living person. This is what makes us cling to this world even more than all the riches, knowledge and power that we can gather here.
And people don’t want to lose that.
Science tells them it’s impossible, so people make up realities purportedly built on science, which science cannot disprove — pretty much like religion, but they want to make it as religion-unlike as they can.
New Age fad mutates all the time. It took the concept of reincarnation as an easy way in which people would guarantee immortality for themselves, but without taking the entirety of it: Reincarnation is a curse and the goal is to break out of it and achieve nirvana, not endlessly enjoy creation!
People invented the idea of quantum time travel at death where their consciousness would be brought back to the moment of their birth or conception and could relive their lives as many times as they like, to fix all their mistakes and relive all their pleasures, as sort of a scientific sould.
And infinite multiverses support the idea of immortality by sheer random chance: sure, the chance that your exact experienced consciousness is here and now is infinitesimal, but there are infinite multiverses, so once you die, that consciousness will get transported — by pure chance — to another one of infinite multiverses where you will continue to experience life and senses — however different they will be, but you will learn your new form there.
If the multiverse proposition is impossible and there is only one reality, there still exists the argument for universe ex nihilo — a “universe from nothingness” so to speak — which, through some incredible conflation of random chance, will occur from nothingness — all matter will be created in another Big Bang and the total sum shall be equalized to zero by negative energy.
The problem of this proposition is that we would observe this happening.
With an infinite universe, it’s impossible for any to be *the* first. There would be an infinite number of universes past and future, there would be an infinite number of them springing up every instant in random locations across all reality and we would observe both ancient and new traces of outside of *our* observable universe — because those universes would had sent us their dying light from beyond that time.
But it is the scientific fallback on the possibility of The Big Bounce — that our universe will collapse unto itself and another Big Bang will occur. This was a prevailing theory at some point, but Hawking radiation proves it’s impossible — black holes emit matter as radiation which devolves into nothingness and with even a single proton missing, radiated away, the conditions for the Big Bang are no longer met. Two other theories that are considered incompatible with our understanding of physics are heat death of the universe (where all fissionable matter would devolve to iron and all fusible matter would fuse to form iron) and accelerated expansion (where universe expansion will continue to accelerate until nuclear forces binding elementary particles together will be too weak to prevent them from falling apart into constituent quarks and those quarks will immediately undergo dissipation). The only remaining theory, now prevalent, is the continued devolution of the universe, with stars dying and all matter eventually being absorbed by black holes over trillions of quadrillions of millennia, with the black holes slowly but surely radiating away into nothingness.
What science cannot ever begin to explain is why our universe exists at all and why our universe has a final fate. It cannot be explained without that science being theology.
I don’t appreciate my guardian angel enough. 🙁
My grandfather is sure he met a guardian angel. My uncle was flying a plane for doctors without borders. My grandfather was there to translate. They were flying into a remote part of Mexico to do surgeries to remove cataracts from poor campesinos. They flew into a remote area and picked up an older, blind man who needed surgery. He was being tenderly escorted by a tall, young man with red hair. After the campesino was operated upon, they looked around for the young man that had accompanied him, assuming he was a friend. He was gone. When asked, the old man said he didn’t know who he was or where he came from. Their location was very remote.
As long as I’m on a roll…I once met a very jovial Irish priest, Fr. Shanley, who served many years as a missionary in a remote part of Africa. He told us that he suffered a devastating car accident, and woke up in the hospital. The hospital workers described a very handsome man who strode into the hospital carrying Fr. Shanley. Nobody knew who he was, and he hadn’t been seen in the area before or after. He was convinced his guardian angel brought him.
It’s interesting that in both of those cases the men who showed up to help, didn’t blend in with the population.