May 5, 2005
Up
Ascension Day is as good a day as the next if not better to talk about string theory, mostly because I don’t really understand either one of them. But I do have an idea, if not the foggiest, at least foggy enough to confuse us both.
Brian Greene, the string theorist, is talking about science, of all things, as a metaphor. We churchers have been in the metaphor business all along, so we might at least give him an ear, even if few scientists ever much gave us one. He writes about the universe as “elegant.” If Genesis be correct, that’s pretty much what God thought about it all along.
Heaven, back when Jesus was in the flesh, was always “up.” That’s, of course, when we only had the three dimensions — up, down, and around — as about the only notion of space (which, remember, is now known as space-time) anybody could even think about, let alone understand. Now, the stringers suggest we might really have as many as eleven dimensions to fret over and maybe even a parallel universe “out” there. If so, that puts a whole new perspective on the Ascension, like, which way did he really go?
Well, that he went is what’s important, for he said his going was the condition for our getting the Spirit, and there wasn’t enough room for the both of them. We need the Spirit, he said, to get enough chutzpah to become a church, which we haven’t done all that well so far, and also to add the necessary dimension so we could have that puzzling doctrine. Trinity is really God’s business, anyway, even if we don’t understand that, either, and if that’s the way God chooses, it’s elegant enough for me.
Come to think about it, what if there’d been eleven dimensions back in Jesus’ space-time instead of only three? Whatever, just a thought to string this out a bit.