The Darkness and The Light

In a movie I saw recently, one character was an Apache witch. He had a line that struck me as very insightful about human nature. He asked the question, ‘You have two dogs fighting inside of you, one good the other evil…which one wins?’ The protagonist answered: 'The one you feed the most'.

I don't believe there's a battle between good and evil in the universe. That presumes goodness and evil are equal but opposite. Good and evil are not equal. God allows evil to exist as it suits His purpose. In the human heart it’s a different story. We are at ground zero for our own battle between good and evil. We can understand those that do evil because we know the evil in ourselves. We all draw from the same nature. We take that nature with us where ever we go. For that reason there can never be a Shangri La or a Utopia. We would take our nature, who and what we are, with us there and it would eventually destroy what we hoped to find. We can pass laws to try and reign in our nature. We can look to our heroes for their examples of how they have overcome. The battle still belongs to every human being and the fight is still a personal one. The battle between good and evil in the human heart is a battle that must be fought in every human heart. Those that win in conquering their own evil can’t conquer it for anyone else. Every newborn child is a new battleground.

Incidents like the recent slaughter of 31 innocent people at Virginia Tech make it clear that some people give themselves wholly over to evil. The most ironic thing in our modern American culture is that the very things that serve to constrain the evil in our hearts are being slowly eliminated from our national consciousness. Our sacred writings declare that there is a Creator and it is He who endows us with our human rights. Dark forces, in the name of the separation between church and state, are attempting to erase all mention of that Creator from our national consciousness. They are promoting the concept of cultural relativism, the idea that there isn’t one standard of right and wrong but many depending on the time and place they are conceived. The same forces deny even the existence of evil. These dark notions are destroying the strongest safeguards we have against the evil that is among us. Those behind the ideas know that when light shines into your life, it doesn't just make the road ahead more clear, it reveals your own dark places too. And, it is in our nature to want to hide our own darkness. That's the very reason we need the light so badly. That light can only come from God.

It isn’t so important that every individual in our society believes in God so much as it is a cultural value. We need to have something to look up to. We need someone to answer to. We need a common value to give us purpose. Without that we are finding ourselves in a moral free fall. We need to recognize that there are some things that are right and some that are wrong and they always will be. We need to recognize that evil exists. It is among us. It is in us. To erase those very ideas from our national consciousness is to cloak ourselves in darkness. To deny those truths is ultimately to commit suicide.

As a Christian, I have a firm faith that God is; that He is watching and that He cares about His children. My faith gives me hope for a better future. God gives me a clearly defined moral value system. He defines what is right and wrong. God is my light in the darkness...even my own darkness. God gives my life purpose. I believe that God will prevent us from destroying ourselves one day. He will change our very nature one day so that our utopian ideals will be realized…in His Kingdom. If I didn’t have my faith, and the hope that comes with it, I sometimes think I would succumb to a sense of emptiness and meaninglessness. I look around our culture and see that many, many others have done so.

Knowing that I will stand before God one day scares me a little. It makes me feel the need to change; to work on being better than I am now. That makes me uncomfortable but it also makes me a better person. I don’t insist that anyone believe what I believe. I don’t ever try to convert anyone. I don’t use my faith to judge others. I am guided by my faith to see my fellow man as the children of God, made in the image of the living God. I am guided by my faith to love them as I love myself, to forgive them when they wrong me, and to serve them wherever I can. Without that, I honestly don’t know where I would be or what kind of person I would be. That’s a part of what knowing God has done for me.

It is the dog we feed the most that wins out. Character is built, brick by brick, by what thoughts we give power to. Every time we do the right thing we strengthen that part of ourselves. Every time we give in to our darkness we fall a little deeper into the pit. The darkness is closing in to be sure. But in the darkness I see the light. It is the desire of my heart to share that with my fellow man. All I can do is try, to the best of my ability, to be a conduit of the light in a dark world. I have no doubt, whatsoever, that the light will prevail!

God Spoke and...

We live in an amazing time in human history. We make strides in knowledge and understanding about our world and the universe in which we live almost daily. We're beginning to understand things about our universe that would have sounded like science fiction a few years ago. Like Einstein, I think the most amazing thing about our universe is that we are capable of understanding it. We are a part of the universe. We are a microcosmic reflection of the greater whole. To come to understand it is to come to understand something about ourselves…and vice versa.

I’ve always had an interest in the sciences and in Physics in particular. Physics gives us insight into how the universe works; it uses the tool of mathematics to do so. There have been many noted scientists that have believed knowing the natural laws that govern the universe give us an insight into the very mind of God. They are the framework upon which God has designed and now sustains His creation. To be able to utilize mathematical formulae to predict the orbit of a planet around its sun or to calculate the distance to another star are amazing feats but, they’re only the beginning of what we're learning.

One of the most simple, yet profound, mathematical formula that predicts and directs some of the natural order around us was discovered by an Italian mathematician named Fibonacci centuries ago. I imagine that he was just playing with numbers one day and found that if you add consecutive numbers together, then add the last two numbers used, the series of numbers they produce predicts a specific relationship in many natural phenomenon. 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8, 5+8=13, 8+13=21 and so on. The numbers this produces are: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 etc. These are now known as the Fibonacci sequence. The relationship between 3 and 5 is almost the same as that between 13 and 21 and so on. That relationship is about 1:1.618. We now call it the Golden Mean. It’s a very simple proportional relationship found many places in nature. From the design of the human body the curl of a nautilus shell this relationship is found over and over.

On a related front, fractal geometry is teaching us something about the formation of non-Euclidian geometrical forms. It seems that nature doesn’t so much give every detail of how things like clouds and shorelines are formed so much as it follows mathematical formulae that dictate such things. One such formula produces the ‘Mandelbrot set’, the most famous series in fractal geometry. From a simple mathematical formula repeated over and over one can find complex forms that trail off into infinity.

In the field of Physics, scientists have believed for decades that they can find a Unified Field Theory or ‘Theory of Everything’. Such a theory will unite the various other theories into a single, harmonious ‘One’. Newtonian physics were considered the be-all, end-all word on the subject until about four hundred years later when Einstein came along and demonstrated that Newtonian physics only explained one element of the way the universe works. Quantum physics then came along and Einstein’s theories were found lacking in explaining the physics on the sub-atomic level of reality. The ‘Theory of Everything’ will have to harmoniously unite all of these.

The most promising candidate for a Theory of Everything, at the moment, is Super String Theory or ‘M-Theory’. In a nutshell M-theory explains the workings of the various levels of reality by postulating super small strings that vibrate at different frequencies to produce different physical phenomenon. One string vibrates at a frequency that creates an electron; another vibrates at a frequency that produces a proton etc. The theory dictates that there are multiple dimensions in which the strings vibrate. They exist in our universe and outside of it at the same time. It's really quite a fascinating explanation. It is, at one time, very simple and immensely complex. The mathematics to flesh out the theory are still being worked out .

From a Christian perspective M-theory is especially captivating. Scriptures teach us that God spoke and the universe existed. That is somewhat akin to the Hindu creation story wherein it is believed that sound was the first energy in the universe. It was Gods use of sound, or more precisely, standing vibrations that created everything. If M-theory proves to be ‘The’ theory of everything it would fit in nicely with Biblical theology.

All of these things point to mathematical formulae that dictate the shape and functioning of our universe. Mathematics seems to be the language of God 'The Architect'. We, ourselves, are a product of it. The Word of God is written into the very fabric of the universe. And we are capable of understanding it! Just think about that for a moment...we can know the Mind of God!