Light

Light is a funny thing in our universe, and I think it represents a funny thing pertaining to our universe as well.

Light is funny in the sense that it is a wave and a particle. Not in the sense that it behaves like both a wave and a particle, mind you; it exists in these two normally mutually exclusive states at exactly the same time. The nature of light as we perceive it depends entirely on how we detect it, with some instrumentation showing that light is a particle and other instruments showing it as a wave.

It could be said, then, that light is either inherently dualistic in nature, or has no nature at all until we apply one to it.

Clearly, this post is now about religion and the nature of the divine!

Light, in my estimation, is a very good way to try and grapple with the issue of the transcendent. It could be said that light is the closest thing in the material universe to transcendent matter. What I mean by this is that light, as much as we try to group and explain everything scientifically, light appears to inhabit a category by itself.

As far as we're aware, light is alone in the universe. Nothing, or nothing we're yet able to observe, moves as quickly as light does. Light (and some other very small things) progresses through spacetime as we do and yet experiences no effect of aging as we would understand it. Light is everywhere and nowhere to our ordinary perception; we experience a vibrant world filled with shape and color, but we have no sensation of receiving the light responsible. Small wonder there are cultures that worship(ped) the Sun; aside from being a thing of great physical majesty and the driving sustenance of most life we are familiar with, I think the cultures in question intuitively tapped into something about the nature of light with their inclination to pay homage to the source of light.

I may have been a little disingenuous when I said light is a good way to try and imagine the transcendent, the divine, or whatever you want to call it. In fact, it doesn't matter what you want to call it, because you can't call it anything. Even my use of the ambiguous word "it" is invalid when referring to divinity, because "it" denotes a "thing" or a "concept," and divinity simply does not work in terms such as those.

The atheists, or the secular humanists, and that field of people, maintain that God does not exist, or that divinity does not exist, or whichever phrasing. This is a huge catching point for debate between believers in such things and the atheist movements, as we all know. I'm going to be frank here; this debate strikes me as incredibly stupid.

On the one side, we have the atheists and secular materialists, who posit that God does not exist, and never did. To most of them, God is a concept created and perpetuated by human authors, for purposes that are too many and varied to discuss here. This may surprise you given that I have previously professed to be Christian, but it is my belief that the atheists are absolutely right.

On the other side are the theist camps, who maintain both that a) God exists and b) they, in various ways, know and can quantify what God is. Again, perhaps surprisingly, I claim that the theists are absolutely wrong.

To explain: the atheists are right that God does not exist. This is because existing is a physical and mental state. God, or whatever handle you call him/her/it by, is held to be beyond space and time. I struggle to even write this, because there is no expression in English to say that something "does not be." It's nonsense, it's gibberish, and it's the best way I can come up with to try and describe how divinity must be.

The theists, in my estimation, are wrong in maintaining that God is something identifiable and quantifiable. Another long-standing debate is about how we represent God, whether it's a racist and hegemonic act to represent him with a fatherly old white man, or where the line between appropriate statuary and sacrilegious idolatry lies. I have long been flabbergasted, since I gave the matter serious thought, by the human assumption that God is something we can represent accurately in any terms at all. There are no terms.

The thing people cite frequently is that God "made humans in His image," and so we represent God as a human form. Consider, however, a photographic portrait of a person. This thing was made in that person's image, and can have depth and implication, and all the things described when we discuss art. It is, however, both a separate thing in and of itself and at best a pale, fragmentary imitation of the original subject.

Another feature of debates about God is the inevitable human binary system. This one gets me every single time. The debate is to whether God is good or bad, or masculine or feminine, and so on. The binary is evident in an old Christian issue, as to the nature of Jesus; whether Jesus was man, God, half-man and half-God, part of God, fully God, fully man and fully God, a creation of God, and so on is a major deal. (Relatedly, read about the Arian heresy, because it's interesting.)

In my opinion, the binary way of thinking about the divine is incredibly narrow-minded. Binaries are material, and crucially they are human; we perceive things as different or separate based on opposing them in a binary with all others. I will say no more about it, other than to reiterate that binaries are a human invention, and I do not think it is valid to hold such an earthly lens up to the indescribable.

I'm going to cut myself off here, because I could write books and volumes about this topic (and probably contradict myself on several different tangents) and I feel I'm getting off topic or too complex. It comes down to an old saying: "The best things are impossible to describe, transcendental of language. The second-best things refer to that which cannot be named directly. The third best are what everyone talks about."

Instead of a TL;DR as normal, I would like to throw a plea at your feet, dear reader. Please consider what I've written, and feel free to form an opinion as to whether I'm wrong. Tell me that opinion or keep it private as you wish, but consider. Feel free to show this to your friends or family if you think it's worthy, or tell me if it isn't, or paint a picture of a unicorn, or whatever. Thank you.

P.S. I will probably post more about this, elaborating on the various subsections of what I talked about briefly here and making my muddy thoughts more clear, so if you liked it, huzzah! If you didn't, uh... apologies in advance, but I have been struck with an inspiration. My daimon is talking, as Socrates might have said.

P.P.S. I realize these haven't been particularly about UC Berkeley lately. Apologies. We are all about deviating from established guidelines here, is the lame-duck justification I'll throw out. :P