Stirring things up with Secular Shows, Characters and Issues

By Gary Berg-Cross

Between the new Noah movie and the new Cosmos series espousing the scientific method over faith-based belief we've seen some  conservative Christians howling about the culture.  Cosmos provides a real presence of secular-scientific values and thinking infused into the culture as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson genially poo poos creationist arguments about intelligent or the Jewish testament-based, fundamentalist claim that the Earth is about 6,000 years old. 

In a recent WAPO article called ‘From ‘The Good Wife’ to ‘Cosmos,’ a good moment for atheists and scientists on TV’ Alyssa Rosenberg noted atheist (and pretty normal but strong) character Alicia Florrick (played by Julianna Margulies) standing up to her teenage daughter Grace’s  fervent conversion to Christianity. In the aftermath of the death of a major character there was this exchange as Grace pushed the idea of heaven. She got push back.

“What does that mean, Grace? He’s in heaven? With angels and clouds?” Alicia demanded when her daughter told her that Will was “with God.” ”What does it mean if there is no God? Why is that any better?” Grace asked of her mother. “It’s not better,” Alicia responded. “It’s just truer. It’s just not wishful thinking.”

As noted in Voices, when Alicia more or less “outed” herself as an atheist to a reporter last season despite the political impact, it outraged some fans. 

'One upset viewer wrote on ReligiMedia blog that many “good wives” had identified with Alicia but now found her “far less sympathetic and frankly a tad bit revolting.”'

These shows follow movies like The Ledge by atheist writer and director Matthew Chapman (see trailer) which was a recent talked-about films with an openly atheist “heroic’ character who philosophically contemplates suicide.   Such movies confront some of the easy assumptions about the religious basis for morality. Earlier I'd blogged about the movie Agora which features the last Alexandrian librarian Hypatia. BTW, there’s even a Facebook page for Atheist Movies but it mostly covers books and other media.

Now there is a new movie in that vein by Baltimore-based  independent film maker and theorist Erik Kristopher Myers. His first feature film, ROULETTE, released on Thanksgiving 2013 to positive critical reviews, includes a negative portrayal of Christianity and its examination of Pro-Life vs. Pro-Choice. It’s led to some outraged response from viewers, film festivals, and potential distributors alike.

Myers will be discussing the film and his attempt to dramatize a balanced examination of the cause and effect of a religious upbringing at the April 19^th (2-4) WASH meeting held in the Rockville MD library.  He will talk about the personal consequences of his endeavor in the face of an industry that shies away from perceived anti-Christian commentary.

See http://www.meetup.com/humanism-218/events/175208882/

Talking Space and Time with Yahweh

By Gary Berg-Cross

I noted in an earlier blog on cosmic views that one of the ironies of modern life is to live simultaneously in a rich culture alive with scientific advance while also stewing in a conservative, religious culture denying much of that science and limiting its sights to old visions. 

For example, there was a recent story called “The Oldest Star in the Universe? --A Primeval Dwarf Galaxy Sucked into the Emerging Milky Way") which has an age close to the universe's calculated age of about 13.8 billion years.  

That got me thinking about the contrast of views of the universe that science gives compared to religious view such the Genesis story (well there are really 2 conflicting stories) of the Hebrew Bible. Those storied adopted from Sumerian tales in effect are the cosmic image Yahweh supposedly dictated to humans about the Universe. This is what you need to know. There we have no deep spacer or time which is so awe-inspiring to many of us.  So I thought “What if we might supply some very simple math to see how the Yahweh-religion view compares to the contemporary scientific view?  How much revelation do we get?

Time is a simple way to start. We have all heard of the creation story days of creation. One religious source by Dr. Jason Lisle debunks the most widely accepted teachings about an old universe and summarizes the Biblical view this way:

 

 The Bible teaches that the entire universe was created in six earth-rotation days (Exodus 20:11 ). Furthermore, the Bible provides the age differences between parents and descendants¹ when listing certain genealogies. From these kinds of biblical references, we know that the elapsed time between Adam and the birth of Christ was roughly 4,000 years. From other historical records, we know that Christ was born roughly 2,000 years ago. Since Adam was created on the sixth day of the creation week, we can conclude that the earth, the entire universe, and everything in it were created approximately 6,000 years

OK, so the universe is about 6000 years old, let’s call it 10⁴ ,this is closer to the upper range found in The Bible and Science give very different Ages for the Universe. This contrast with the 1.38 x 10¹⁰  modern science concludes from data, principles  and models. So the portion of the now known universe and the Old Testament version of about one millionth of the time (10^-6).

Space provides an even larger discrepancy.  The old world the Hebrews 

wrote about covered perhaps 10% of the earth’s surface. Let’s be generous and say it applied to 10% of the spatial volume of the earth. A NASA earth fact sheet lists its volume as (1010 km3). So the biblical account, 

throwing the Garden of Eden and such in, would be (109 km3).  

Compare that to the volume of the solar system.

The radius of the Solar System is perhaps a million times that of the earth. This is the point where the Solar Wind (from the Sun) meets the Interstellar Wind. And thanks to Voyager 1 we have that distance to the heliopause. (http://www.solarviews.com/eng/solarsys.h... and see http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/ for a measure of where Voyager 1 is right now. 

This gives a volume 4/3 times the cube of 1 million or about 10¹⁸ bigger than earth.  Volumes grow large quite fast with the cube power. We could stop there and say that Yahweh was holding back a bit of info from the ancient Hebrews.  Multiplying space and time we have Yahweh’s biblical coverage as 10^-6 x  10-¹⁸ or about 10^-24th of the solar system.  That is a million, million, million, million times too small. Of course this is still only a small part of the spatial story.  There are star systems to consider. Yahweh held out on much of the beauty of the galaxy.

The volume of the Milky Way is 

estimated at about ~3.3×1061 m3. That’s 1051 bigger than the Earth (and over 1024 of the solar system. 

And we might note in passing that the approximate volume of the 

observable universe (see Orders of Magnitude) is 3.4 ×1080 m3 or

 bigger by a factor of 1030 or so. 

Putting it all together we would have to imagine that our cosmic engineer 

Yahweh who would have designed electrons,quarks and black holes saw

fit to pass on a non-quantum and very local bronze age message covering only 10-100 or so of the potential story.  And here I am leaving out all of 

the great objects and such we might discuss in this volume over time. 

Yahweh left out dinosaurs too along with the simple idea of atomic theory or the quantum realm of the natural order! Just a hint about the speed of 

light or a Plank length would have been so enlightening.

One may go a bit farther considering that we seem to live in an expanding universe (Bang) so the size of the universe or is observable part expands over time, something it would have been nice to know back in 1400 BCE.  Then there is the even more interesting ideas that may be true such as this universe being part of a much larger system, as Brian Greene elucidates in his Hidden Reality. There are many possible universes that modern Physics suggests are possible.  Yahweh might have outlined these, but instead we've had to do it ourselves:

• Quilted Multiverse - Space is infinite, therefore somewhere there are regions of space that will exactly mimic our own region of space. There is another world "out there" somewhere in which everything is unfolding exactly as it unfolds on Earth.
• 
  
• Inflationary Multiverse - Inflationary theory in cosmology predicts an expansive universe filled with "bubble universes," of which our universe is just one.
• 
  
• Brane Multiverse - String theory leaves open the possibility that our universe is on just one 3-dimensional brane, while other branes of other number of dimensions could have whole other universes on them.
• 
  
• Cyclic Multiverse - One possible result from string theory is that branes could collide with each other, resulting in universe-spawningbig bangs that not only created our universe, but possibly other ones.
• 
  
• Landscape Multiverse - String theory leaves open a lot of different fundamental properties of the universe which, combined with the inflationary multiverse, means there could be many bubble universes out there which have fundamentally different physical laws than the universe we inhabit.
• 
  
• Quantum Multiverse - This is essentially the Many Worlds Intepretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics: anything that can happen does ... in some universe.
• 
  
• Holographic Multiverse - According to the holographic principle, there is a physically-equivalent parallel universe that would exist on a distant bounding surface (the edge of the universe), in which everything about our universe is precisely mirrored.
• 
  
• Simulated Multiverse - Technology will possibly advance to the point where computers could simulate each and every detail of the universe, thus creating a simulated multiverse whose reality is nearly as complex as our own.
• 
  
• Ultimate Multiverse - In the most extreme version of looking at parallel universes, every single theory which could possibly exist would have to exist in some form somewhere. (from  a review of The Hidden Reality by  Andrew Zimmerman Jones)

  
  

  
  

  
  
  We think of the Big Bang as creating our universe, but as we have studied the Big Bang in more and more detail, the math is suggesting that the Big Bang may not have been a unique event. There may be many Big Bangs that happened at various and far-flung locations, each creating its own swelling, spatial expanse, each creating a universe -our universe being the result of only one of those Big Bangs....
  
  For instance, in the multiple Big Bang version that gives rise to different universes, it's possible that the different universes, as they expand, could collide with one another, sort of like - think of a bubble bath. Each of the Big Bangs gives rise to one expanding bubble in the cosmic bubble bath. Those bubbles can smash into each other.
  
  
  And if they did, if our universe got hit by another, had a fender-bender with another universe, that would send ripples going through the cosmic microwave background radiation - heat left over from the Big Bang. And astronomers are now looking for patterns in the microwave background radiation that might suggest that we did have that encounter in the past with another universe. That'd be a very direct way of establishing that other universes are out there. From a NPR interview

You can interpret this discrepancy between the Hebrew stories and modern science views many ways, but to it me it provides astonishing odds that the Yahweh story is just that, a local, home grown Middle Eastern creation story. People may admire the Genesis prose, but I’ll take the poetry of the scientific view of the Univserse by a factor or 10100 or so.

Differing Views of our Place in the Cosmos

By Gary Berg-Cross

One of the ironies of modern life is to live simultaneously in a rich culture alive with scientific advance while also stewing in a conservative, religious culture denying much of that science and limiting its sights to old visions.

It seems like every month, if not every week there is a major new discovery of our place in the cosmos. Just in early June there was an update measurements by Astronomers of the Hubble parameter, the rate at which the Universe expands.  And  Voyager 1 traveling at at 38,000 mph &  11 billion miles from the sun, is the remote outpost on human exploration of space as it still beams back data to Earth. Voyager 1 will be the first manmade object to travel beyond the outer edge of our Solar System.  There are always discoveries on such scientific advents and Voyager I sends evidence that there isn’t a sharp boundary to the solar system aka the heliopause.

What a contrasting vision of complexity to an old, faith-based view of the cosmos such as seen in the ornamental engraving called the Flammarion woodcut. This has an simple world view illustrated by a Pilgrim (carrying a pilgrim's staff ) peering through a sky curtain at the edge of the mundane world of things.  There is little effort to represent physical reality. The pilgrim’s search is for the ethereal world beyond the curtain. And what to do we know of that?  All we see are some vaguely hidden, absolute Aristotelian metaphysical entities that one supposed underlie the workings of universe.

As explained in Wikipedia the

“engraving bears a strong resemblance to traditional pictorial representations of the "wheel in the middle of a wheel" described in the visions of the prophet Ezekiel….The caption in Flammarion's book translates as "A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touched..."

The image accompanies a text which reads, in part:

 "What, then, is this blue sky, which certainly does exist, and which veils from us the stars during the day?" The print is often described as being medieval due to its visual style, its fanciful vision of the world, and to what appears to be a depiction of a flat Earth.

What a contrast to the nuanced and complex view of what people like Robert Ingersoll had at the end of the 19th century. A good summary is in his " Suicide N Sanity" 
 where he states what he believes in and what he doesn't which ends this way:

 I believe in the uniformity of nature; that matter will forever attract 

matter in proportion to mass and distance; that, under the same circumstances, falling bodies will attain the same speed, increasing in exact proportion to distance; that light will always,under the same circumstances. be reflected at the same angle; that
it will always travel with the same velocity that air will forever
be lighter than water, and gold heavier than iron; that all
substances will be true to their natures; that a certain degree of
heat will always expand the metals and change water into steam;
that a certain degree of cold will cause the metals to shrink and
change water into ice; that all atoms will forever be in motion;
that like causes will forever produce like effects, that force will
be overcome only by force; that no atom of matter will ever he
created or destroyed; that the energy in the universe will forever
remain the same, nothing lost, nothing gained; that all that has
been possible has happened, and that all that will be possible will
happen; that the seeds and causes of all thoughts, dreams, fancies
and actions, of all virtues and all vices, of all successes and all
failures, are in nature; that there is in the universe no power
superior to nature; that man is under no obligation to the
imaginary gods; that all his obligations and duties are to be
discharged and done in this world; that right and wrong do not
depend on the will of an infinite Being, but on the consequences of
actions, and that these consequences necessarily flow from the
nature of things. I believe that the universe is natural.

   From http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/robert_ingersoll/suicide_n_sanity.html

We now have an even richer view of the Universe coming from a n inflationaryBig Bang. This is a realexpanding universe beyond our real sky curtain made up of remarkable structrures like Black Holes, galaxies and neurtron starts. A very nice, (zoomable) modern  modern map of the Universe with 600,000 scientific items is called “Mapping the Universe: Space. Time. Discovery!” A zoomed up version of it, with some labels is shown below.  Like the woodcut it is a geo-centric view, starting with earth at the center of Space &Time, but this is a much, much more detailed view of them along with the Humanist view of when and who made discoveries about cosmic phenomena.  

The Map is from  the 3^rd Places & Spaces Mapping Science exhibit and has too many wonderful multi-dimensional elements to cover here, but note that it uses a geo-centric orientation to focus us on the familiar We are Here and then we can zoom through space and time to see discoveries unfold. It has legends and a log-scale, info boxes and charts supplement our visual journey. There is spiral showing science candidate areas for growth. In the distance at the edges of the map in blue we see filaments of galaxies and beyond that early universe quasars in red.

Below is a more detailed View of a section of the Collaborative product created by scientists Chen et all.  You can zoom to this on the Map Exhibit site. 

As we zoon in for details we see the time scale of discovery & their type as legended items. Besides asteroids (grey circles) and exo planets (yellow circles) we have items like “The Great Attractor.”  This is something our pilgrim didn’t know. Turns out that the Milky Way is being pulled  towards a concentration of mass now called the Shapley Supercluster which lies ~ 500 million light-years away.  That’s a long way for a pilgrim’s voyage, but science reports on these frontiers.  At the edge we see the Sloan Great Wall,  a structure approximately 1/60 of the diameter of observable universe which is located approximately one billion light-years from Earth. 

Finally this astro science map also uses science citations to note (red star markers) discovery work that is “bursting” that is, where our scientific knowledge is advancing rapidly. You may see them just below the caption. What a better view of the cosmos and our place in it than that old woodcut-pilgrim image. How good it is to continue the human search for our place in the cosmos.  An how strange, it seems to me, to be surrounded by slumbering fellow citizens who care little for such maps telling of cosmic explorations and who little value the accompanying contextual voyages of self-discovery they allow.

Images

View from Earth: http://www.fromquarkstoquasars.com/earths-place-in-the-cosmos/

Mapping the Universe: Space. Time. Discovery!: http://scimaps.org/maps/map/mapping_the_universe_61/

Flammarion engraving: http://neptunefountain.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-flammarion-engraving.html