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Friday, March 19
To go extinct on Principia?
Last week I finished reading Bill Bryson's most excellent A Short History of Nearly Everything. I heartily recommend this book to everyone, providing you are free from anxiety disorders of the type sensitive to information about the number of bacteria that inhabit your home (or, indeed, yourself), or the likelihood of various cataclysmic disasters. Bronwyn was good enough to gift this collectively to the other three members of our household for Christmas. Well, in the final chapter of this book, Bill writes of Isaac Newton's remarkable Principia (in which his famous three laws of motion appeared), and of the extinction of the Dodo:
We don't know precisely the circumstances, or even the year, attending the last moments of the last dodo, so we don't know which arrived first, a world that contained a Principia or one that had no dodos, but we do know they happened at more or less the same time. You would be hard pressed, I would submit, to find a better pairing of occurrences to illustrate the divine and felonious nature of the human being ― a species of organism that is capable of unravelling the deepest secrets of the heavens while at the same time pounding into extinction, for no purpose at all, a creature that never did us any harm and wasn't even remotely capable of understanding what we were doing to it as we did it.
That was the 1680s, but these words were ringing in my ears last week when I heard two pieces of news that again juxtaposed, uncomfortably, the mysteries of the universe with the depths of human depravity. The Hubble Ultra Deep Field images from the Hubble Space Telescope were released last week, where we can look at light that has taken billions of years to reach us. These images show us what the universe looked like just 400 million years after its original creation, when still in its infancy. These images are older than anything humans have ever seen before, and they were taken with the telescope pointing at a patch of sky that looks basically empty from Earth. Awesome and inspiring.
At that same time, news came through of the horrific bombings in Madrid. I cannot really comprehend this disgusting act, which I was going to call “mindless” but which was of course all too mindful. Madrid feels much closer to home than New York, even though we'd been up the Twin Towers only seven weeks before the events there. And now, the London Metropolitan Police Commissioner has publicly said that a terrorist attack on London is “inevitable”. Well. (Psalm 91.)
Bill Bryson reports Homo sapiens is to date one of the shortest surviving species on this blue planet, yet we are causing innumerable other species to become extinct. And then we see what we do to each other. So the question that disturbs me, while looking at the wonder of creation revealed through the ingenuity of the Hubble Telescope, is whether the heights achieved by humanity even begin to compensate for the depths we have plumbed.
In fact of course I believe we can't. That is the belief that lies at the heart of a Christian understanding of humanity and our broken relationship with God. We are all depraved ― terrorists and teachers, paedophiles and psychologists alike. All have fallen short, and no striving, no excellence on our own part can close that gap with God. Yet he wanted us home when we could never afford the fare. There is a mystery to how Jesus accomplished what he did for us spiritually, through his death on the cross. Yet there is the Christian message — we could not reach back to him, yet he reached out to us.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what are mere mortals that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?
Psalm 8:3-4
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I have edited this post this morning, changing the quote from Psalms to use the translation from the New International Version Inclusive Language edition. Bronwyn pointed out when she read this post that it might be nicer to use an inclusive language version, as that was her first reaction to reading the passage...
I'm strongly supportive of (appropriately-translated) gender-neutral renderings of scripture, but the issues are not simple. (See for instance this conservative viewpoint.) And as with poetry, (and the psalms are poetry, of course), when you've grown up with scripture in a certain translation, those particular words have resonances deep within.
The original entry used the NIV text, which correctly includes the phrase "the son of man", a forwards reference to Jesus... Gender inclusive translations tend to lose this meaning, which scholars say is certainly present in the original Hebrew.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?
