Max Ernst and The Virgin Chastising the Infant Jesus

In Ireland especially we are well used to seeing pictures of the Holy Family, Jesus, his mother etc. Usually these pictures are scenes from the birth of Christ depicted in a stable with mother, child, stepfather, shepherds, a cow and an ox, and maybe an angel or two in the background. If you wait till the feast of the Epiphany (6th January) which celebrates the revelation of God in human form in the person of Jesus Christ then you'll probably have the three wise men thrown in as well.

There are lots of great pictures of the Holy Family painted by many gifted artists through the centuries. Some of these portray the Holy Family itself, some with Christ's birth, some dealing with the flight to Egypt, and some dealing with later times. One of these is the picture by the surrealist artist Max Ernst, The Virgin Chastises the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard, and the Painter. A bit of a mouthful, but it is shown above.

I only came across this picture recently and was taken aback by it. It is not often you see the mother of God spanking her son. He must have been pretty bold as you can see his halo is on the ground. And the more I looked at this portrait, the more intrigued I became as it shows the deep humanity of not only Christ, but his mother also and certainly raises a number of difficult questions on the whole idea of God-become-Man and I suppose the issue of corporal punishment. Frankly on that subject a kick in the arse from my father never did me any harm and today there are a lot of spoilt brats running riot who badly need the hand of their parent. Anyway, I'm not going to get into that now.

I write as an agnostic who rather hopes the whole thing (or at least certain aspects of it) are true, but I think for the purposes of this article, we should agree to suspend disbelief for a moment and accept that God came down as a man in the form of Jesus some two thousand years ago.

Of course Jesus wasn't exactly accepted as fully God and fully Man initially and controversies raged in the early church for the first four centuries as to exactly what the nature of Jesus was. It was clear that he was the son of God, but what did this mean? Was he actually God or just the son of God? Was he created by God or did he always co-exist with God? Some even said that he was a divine being who took on human appearance but not flesh. It took a couple of church councils to clear the matter up, not without a lot of bitterness on opposing sides. In fact some of this bitterness led to downright murder. Certain bishops in those early days weren't averse to bumping off their opponents in the name of their beliefs. The most widely accepted definitions on the nature of Christ were made by the Councils of Nicaea, Ephesus and Chalcedon, this last in the year 451 AD.

Based on these council decisions, Jesus was now fully God and fully Man. However, even though he was a man subject to all the usual temptations, fears and needs of a man, because he was also God he could not commit sin. Which means that Max Ernst's portrait couldn't be true. Jesus couldn't have been bold as a child and there would have been no need for his mother to smack him.

From the new testament we know practically nothing about the early life of Christ as a boy, except for his getting lost in the temple (which was somewhat careless of his parents, he was missing for three days and they didn't even realise he was gone for about a day!). In fact we only meet him again at around the age of 30 when he appeared at the river Jordan and was baptised by his cousin, John the Baptist.

The new testament has four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John which are very familiar to most people. However, these were only the gospels which made it into the bible. There are lots more which were considered by the early church to be non-canonical, i.e. they were suspect and were not considered to have been inspired by God. In fact the early church did their best to suppress these gospels and nearly succeeded. Many of them we knew only because the early church fathers mentioned them in their writings in order to condemn them, others were discovered at various times and places since then. In fact one of the great finds was in a place called Nag Hammadi in Egypt around 1945 where a number of lost manuscripts were found in an earthenware jar by some local farmers.

One of these gospels is the Infancy Gospel of Thomas (not to be confused with the Gospel of Thomas made popular by the film, Stigmata, some years ago) and wasn't one of those discovered at Nag Hammadi. In this gospel we find the boy Jesus up to all sorts of shenanigans. In one episode he makes clay birds and then brings them to life. Another time he was playing with some other boys on the roof of a house. One of the children was pushed off by another and he fell to the ground and was killed. All the children ran away except for Jesus and when the dead boy's parents heard of it and arrived on the scene, they thought that Jesus was responsible and accused him of their child's murder. At this, Jesus leapt down from the roof and said to the dead child to arise and tell who had thrown him from the roof. Accordingly the dead child arose and told his parents the truth.

However, in a more sinister vein, on another day Jesus struck a child dead because he threw a stone at him. It is not recorded whether he brought this kid back to life or not.

Maybe that is why his mother spanked him.

Help, I'm an Agnostic

"Help, I'm a Rock" sang Frank Zappa in the mid sixties. Exactly my time, I was a teenager then going through the Irish Catholic horrors of coming to terms with myself and my sexuality. Everything was forbidden. If you looked sideways at a woman you were hopping off to confession. Really, I'm not joking.

So what has this "song" got to do with anything? Well it sort of encapsulates my feelings today for then and now.

I'm an agnostic. Ah horror of horrors! Why doesn't he get off the fence and make up his mind? Well, I'll tell you why. I can't be a believer and I can't be an atheist. I have been both and here's what happened.

I was a full blown believer in God and Catholicism till I was about 18 or 19 years of age. I'll always remember the day when full of fear I pretended to go to mass, but instead headed off to the seafront and sat on the rocks (there's that rock theme again) looking out at the hill of Howth. What a restful place and as I sat there deciding to become fully atheist, the fear gradually lifted. Suddenly (I'm reminded of St Paul being clobbered by a bolt of lightning, although this was nothing like that, but there were similarities) I felt okay. The fear had gone. I wasn't going to hell. I wasn't going to be blasted out of it by a vengeful God sitting in his heavens with nothing else to do but watch me. "God," says God, "There's Fergal doubting Me! I'll soon put a stop to that!"

I went home and have not been to mass since (except for weddings, funerals and now Easter and Christmas as my partner drags me along - mind you, I don't protest too much).

So now I was a full-blown atheist. Not praying, not even thinking of God. Immersing myself in my music and reading. Reading then was all about science. Now I know how to explain the universe and how it got here without needing the intervention of a divine being. Boy, wouldn't Dawkins be proud of me. So explain it? Okay.

Long, long ago there was something rather than nothing. Why not? One is as likely as another. Some people may want to say God came first, but as Sherlock Holmes always said, the simplest solution to a problem usually turns out to be right. Occam's razor. So rather than postulating a being like God who must be incredibly complex, let's posit a hunk of substance, incredibly simple. Well, at least simpler than God. This hunk of something blows up into a sort of universe (nothing like our present universe, of course, but a blob of spacetime with not much going on, in fact far too simple to support or evolve life). This universe implodes and when it reaches a singularity state (squeezed to infinity) it rebounds on itself and blows up again, this time creating a slightly more complex bit of spacetime. And this process goes on and on through eternity till one day the latest cosmos in this batch of evolving universes produces ours. So complex with the parameters so finely tuned that eventually it gives birth to life and eventually us. And maybe even other intelligent aliens elsewhere.

So that's it. All safely explained and safe. Except it wasn't. Something is missing from this. It is so unsatisfactory. And eventually my atheism started to crumble and I didn't feel so sure about it anymore. This just couldn't be it.

Or could it? Was this not wishful thinking on my part? Selfish and not wanting to die into nothing (not that I'll know much about it if I do). Still, it wasn't satisfactory. So now I had to become that dreaded being called an Agnostic. Sitting on the fence. Well, for me it's the only honest way to be. While I admire a person who has faith, I certainly don't admire blind faith. And being an atheist for me is also blind faith. So I sit and wiggle my toes in agnostic land.

I don't want to be an agnostic. I would prefer to somehow know God. But unfortunately I don't. I've tried to communicate with him, but he never seems to answer. Or I haven't been able to see the answer he gives me.

Peter, the rock of the church, denied three times. I've denied many times. Sometimes, I still do. But today I've taken to praying a little. And that feels good.

But then another problem crops up and that is free will. Is there really free will? For example, I don't decide what interests I have. I had a fascination with science (especially particle physics and cosmology) when I was a teenager (I still have this interest), but if somebody told me then that I'd be devouring books on religious history from my forties onwards, develop an interest in and read the Bible (old and new testaments) accompanied by a massive biblical commentary, I'd have said rubbish. Now I'm sixty-one and looking back on my birthday trip with my sons to the Holy Land last year. Who'd have thought?

I also don't decide what beliefs I have. I didn't pick agnosticism, or Catholicism, or atheism. I didn't pick to be born in Ireland to a middle class family. I don't believe I went out and chose my wife. Out of lots of girls I met and some I dated, she was the one who decided to stay with me. Or did she?

So Help, I don't believe in free will.
Help I'm an Agnostic.
Help I'm a Rock.

The End of the World and the LHC

Before last Christmas the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) recommissioned their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle machine with great success allowing it to collide atomic particles at the highest energies ever achieved in a laboratory. It was then shut down to allow for the winter period.

It has now started up again (Sunday 28th Feb) and the first beams of 2010 have been circulated in each direction. Over the next few weeks, the machine will be ramped up to about half it's design energy and then allowed to run for about 18 months. Then it will be shut down to allow extra work to prepare for bringing it up to it's full design energy.

This delay to full energy, while disappointing, is necessary for various technical reasons. It will mean the LHC will be competitive with the other big accelerator at Fermilab in America. Therefore in my opinion the LHC is unlikely to deliver any exciting new physics while running at this energy level.

So, those who believe that the machine, when running at it's full design energy, will create a black hole which will end the world can breathe a sign of relief.

What is the LHC? Basically it is an underground circular pipe approximately 27 kilometres in circumference through which protons (a member of a family of particles called hadrons) are accelerated and smashed together at four different points where the two rings of the machine intersect. These points are crammed with detection gear to measure the results of the collisions. Two protons smashing together at these incredible energies can produce a huge amount of other particles and the analysis of these collisions help scientists to build their theories of the fundamental nature of matter and the universe.

Machines like the LHC have helped build the theory called the standard model which is a description of how our world is put together at a fundamental level. It shows that there are four forces in our universe: two familiar: electromagnetism and gravity and two not so familiar: the strong and weak nuclear force. According to this model, quarks are the building blocks of matter and forces act through carrier particles exchanged between the particles of matter.

However, there are some things in our universe which the standard model can't explain. One of these is the vexing question as to why we need two very different theories to explain the very small and the very large. Quantum mechanics explains the very small (atoms etc and is the standard model mentioned above) while Einstein's general theory of relativity explains the very large. It has long been assumed that one theory should explain everything, yet these two theories cannot be reconciled. A theory which tries to do so is called String theory, the only problem being that there is not one iota of evidence for it. A beautiful theory with no shred of proof. This is one area the high energies of the LHC may be able to throw some light on.

Another problem is dark energy. Since the creation of our universe (the big bang) which happened about 14 billion years ago the universe around us has been expanding. Naturally you would think the expansion rate would begin to slow as the force of the big bang began to be resisted by gravity. However, a number of years ago this idea was shattered by the discovery that the universe was actually speeding up. So something must be creating an outward force and this was called dark energy. We have no idea what this dark energy might be so this is another area which the LHC will be examining.

How do particles have mass? What gives different particles different amounts of mass which react in different ways to the different forces? One answer is a particle called the Higgs particle (named after a physicist called Peter Higgs). This is a particle we definitely expect to find with the LHC. Of course not finding it means our standard model is wrong and will have to be looked at again. So even if we don't find what we expect, this will be fascinating in it's own right.

When we measure the amount of mass in our universe we find that the matter that we can see (stars, galaxies etc) only comes to a small percent of the total. About a quarter is some other sort of matter which we can't see called, appropriately, dark matter (different to dark energy). Will the LHC elucidate this problem?

Some other questions remain. Why is there more matter in the universe than antimatter? Are there more than 4 dimensions (three of space, one of time) in our universe? String theory for example exists in 11 dimensions (depending on the version of the theory). And of course, as these questions get answered, you can be sure they will give rise to lots more questions, some of which we haven't even thought of.

Now, let's get back to those who tried to stop the LHC being switched on because they said that the energies of this machine are so great they will give rise to a black hole which will destroy our planet in seconds. I like to refer to them as "end of the world" guys because they are just another in a long line of doomsday prophets who have been with us throughout history.

If you read the gospels you will find that Jesus himself fully expected the world to end if not within his own lifetime, then shortly thereafter. After all he did say "there are some here who will not die before they see the kingdom of God coming with power" (Mark 9:1). Of course some say that this is a literal interpretation and Jesus didn't mean that at all. Whatever the case, St Paul among many other disciples certainly seemed to believe that the end of the world was nigh.

There are tens if not hundreds of different predictions of the end of the world since New Testament times. For example around 1000 AD, there were many who were convinced that the Antichrist was about to arrive and usher in the end of days. The black plague of 1346 seemed to many to signal the last days. Just google end of world predictions to find many of these prophecies.

And in our own time we are all awaiting December 2012. Interestingly this is beginning to tie in nicely with the LHC black hole producer. As this machine will only run on half energy for the next 18 months, this brings us up to September 2011. Only 15 months or so to go till December 2012. So the machine may run longer on half energy and then be shut down for a little longer than expected. So it starts up again at full energy in December 2012 in good time to agree with the Mayan calendar prediction of the end of the world.

However, just as all the other predictions of the end of the world were wrong, I have no doubt that not only is the 2012 prediction a load of cobblers, but the possibility that the LHC will produce a black hole to swallow us all up is also wrong.

And in case you are worried, the energies of some cosmic rays striking our atmosphere every day have been measured as way in excess of anything the LHC could generate. And they haven't produced any black holes. Yet!

Leaving Planet Earth

Planet Earth is now approximately 4.5 billion years old. It was formed as part of our Solar System consisting of the Sun and 9 planets (some say only 8 planets, as Pluto was demoted). As our planet needs the Sun which supplies all it’s energy in one form or another, when the Sun begins to die, then it’s curtains for Earth. Of course this is not expected to happen for at least another 4.5 billion years. So why worry?

Well, no need to at the moment, but with man’s hunger for exploration (and I really believe that this hunger is one of the driving forces behind the animal called Homo Sapiens and if it couldn’t be satisfied we would atrophy) we will explore the Solar System and beyond. Then we will colonise and live on new planets orbiting strange new stars (of course it is to be hoped that we will have been able to bring our intelligent and emotional aspects into line so we won’t butcher other peoples or races in order to do this).

But the real interesting question is how are we going to get there? Distances in space are so vast they are practically incomprehensible. Four and a half light years to our nearest star Alpha Centauri. That means it takes light four and a half years to reach us from that star, our nearest stellar neighbour. Light travels at approximately 186,000 miles per second. That places Alpha Centauri about 26 million million miles away. That number is simply not graspable to the human mind; it’s just enormous. But travelling at the speed of our Voyager spacecraft (38,000 miles/hour) it would take about 80,000 years to get there. Even if we were able to build spacecraft which could go faster than this it would take many human lifetimes to reach our nearest star. And once we got there, it is almost certain that we would find no suitable planets for us to colonise. In fact we would have to go much further into space to find suitable habitats.

So conventional spacecraft don’t seem to be a viable option. What else then? What about a matter/antimatter engine? Antimatter is in very short supply and it’s not easy to make (besides it costs about $25 billion per gram). It is mainly used in big physics experiments using machines which collide particles at nearly the speed of light in order to study them. The property of antimatter which interests us is the fact that if you collide a particle of matter with a similar particle of antimatter they convert their total mass into energy with close to 100% efficiency. Such a matter/antimatter engine could bring us to more than 90% of the speed of light which is a considerable improvement. It means we could probably arrive at the Alpha Centauri star system (three stars, in fact) in less than 5 years. But we don’t want to go there! We need to find a solar system with an earth like planet. Current estimates say such a system may be as close as 20 light years away. So that means a trip of about 22 years. That’s a long time travelling in space in close proximity with your travelling companions. Would the human psyche be up to such a journey?

So we need something faster and now we go into the realms of Star Trek. What about a warp engine? Now that would be some invention, but in theory possible. As Einstein’s relativity theory says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, then there is no way a spacecraft made of matter can break the light barrier. So we have to somehow reduce the distances. Warping space is one way to do this. Don’t ask me how this can be done as nobody knows (even if it’s actually possible), but let’s assume for a moment that it is feasible. In fact if it’s not possible, it doesn’t hold out much hope for interstellar exploration in the short term. We’re just going to have to go the long way round: hibernation techniques, or building huge craft capable of carrying thousands of people and taking many human generations to reach the stars. But let’s not get into that now.

According to general relativity (Einstein’s gravity theory) two points incredibly far away in real space can be brought very close together by warping the space between them. Actually by warping the spacetime between them, but let’s not complicate matters. If we can warp the space by creating what is termed a wormhole between the two distant points, we can travel practically instantly between them. Such technology, while nowhere within our grasp today, may not be so far off. I would estimate less than a thousand years. Which is quite annoying really, as I expect to be long dead by then. Ah well, you can’t have it every which way.

Infinity

Watching a recent BBC Horizon programme on infinity, put me in mind of when I was a child and I used to think about infinity a lot. I remember believing that when you went to heaven it was forever. So I'd lie in the field and look up at the infinite depths of the blue sky above and think about being in heaven. This was pleasant for a while as I'd imagine myself sitting up there and it was millions of years in the future and I'm still there. Then it would be millions more years and I'd still be there. And then I'd be overcome with a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach, a sort of queasy sensation which wasn't particularly nice at all. I'd stop thinking about it and then start all over again.

So is infinity real or just a figment of our imagination? Like we can imagine things that aren't real, like unicorns.

But infinity must be real, mustn't it? I mean, just start counting: 1, 2, 3,... infinity. The problem is that it doesn't stop at infinity (or the largest number you can think of). You can simply add 1 more.

Some guy on the Horizon programme said that he wasn't comfortable with infinity and postulated that there was a largest number which when you added 1 to it equalled 0. So you were back where you started. Like starting at a point on the earth's surface and walking in a straight line until you circumnavigated the globe and arrived back where you began. That was an interesting concept but I don't believe it.


But the concept of infinity leads to strange results. Take the apparently simple question of which is bigger, the set of natural numbers (1, 2, 3,...) or the set of even numbers (2, 4, 6,...). The obvious answer is the set of natural numbers. But that is incorrect. They are both the same size. How can this be so? Well, if you believe Georg Cantor, a German mathematician (1845 - 1918) who developed a branch of mathematics called set theory, you have to deal with infinity as a one-to-one correspondence. So taking the two sets of numbers you match 1 (in the first set of natural numbers) with 2 (in the second set of even numbers). Then you match 2 with 4, 3 with 6 and so on. Now for every number in the set of natural numbers you can match it with a number in the even set. Just double it. So the two sets are the same as you can always find an even number to correspond with a natural number.

This leads to all sorts of weirdness with infinity. Take Hilbert's hotel (he was another mathematician from the same era). This is a hotel with an infinity of rooms. You arrive at the hotel and ask for a room only to be told that the hotel is full. But hold on, the manager comes to your rescue and moves all the guests. He puts the guest in Room 1 into Room 2, the guest in Room 2 into Room 3 and so on. Now Room 1 is empty and you get your accommodation after all.

Something even stranger: if we live in an infinite universe, then there must be an infinite number of identical copies of you and indeed everybody else. Now that's a hard one to get your head around.

Look at it this way: let's assume you have many billiard balls and each ball can have only one of 2 colours. That means there are only 16 different ways these balls can be grouped together on a billiard table in a square pattern of 4 balls each. So no matter what combination of 4 balls you choose to place next on the table, it has to be a copy of one of the already existing 16 patterns. Similarly in an infinite universe there are only a certain number of atoms and only a finite way these can be put together. Therefore there has to exist copies of you and everybody else somewhere in the infinite universe. Now that's scary.

Of course, the universe may not be infinite. Besides, the concept of infinity may only exist in our minds.

Fergal
www.uglythump.ie

Why so uptight about the ten commandments?

Channel 4 are broadcasting "The Bible: A History" at the moment. I watched some of Episode 3 which had Ann Widdecombe (English Catholic and conservative MP) talking about the ten commandments. I found her point of view very interesting and very positive. She basically was saying that the ten commandments were a good thing and it was a pity they weren't followed more closely in today's society.

What surprised me during the programme was the explosive anger displayed by both Stephen Fry and Chistopher Hitchens, both atheists. For the record I am agnostic.

Stephen Fry when asked by Ann Widdecombe what was wrong with the commandments, like "honour your father and mother", "don't kill", he interrupted vehemently and demanded to know where was the commandment against slavery. Hold on, did I miss something? He was asked a simple question but he evaded giving an answer. I don't pretend to read his mind, but was this because he didn't want to say there was nothing wrong with them?

He also got particularly upset at the notion of commandment, "How dare you command me..." What's wrong with commanding people not to kill each other? Okay, we can get into the whole notion of killing in self defence etc. but over all we really shouldn't be killing each other. Stephen also went on to say that the commandments have suppressed, tyrannised and bullied. Suppressed who? Tyrannised who? Bullied who? The church may have done this. Kings and tyrants may have done this. But the commandments themselves did not. In fact if the church and company followed the commandments they would not have suppressed, tyrannised or bullied anybody.

Christopher Hitchens, similarly, couldn't seem to answer straight up on the ten commandments. Instead he insisted that we read the next chapters of the bible and all about the cruelty therein. He then seemed to march out of the room.

Why do these guys get so incensed by the notion of a moral code which comes out of the bible? Okay, it may not be perfect and certainly doesn't address certain modern day issues. But it seems to me that they do address the core issues. And the fact of the matter is if people followed the ten commandments today, then I doubt society would be in the mess it is. Forget about religion. Forget about God. Taking the ten commandments in isolation, they are not a bad moral code at all.

Fergal MacAlister
www.uglythump.ie

A Dog with Two Names

Today Joan and myself took the decision to end our dog's life. Although this was a sad decision, it was kindness to the dog to relieve his continued suffering. What made the decision even harder for me, was the question as to who or what gives us the right to take his life. This power which I don't want was thrust on me. I hate this god like decision over another's life. But we took it anyway.

We know something which even Timmy doesn't know. The date and time of his death. Like an execution. 9am Friday 5th February 2010. He is 12 years old. So he can have some chocolate now if he likes. He can lie on the good rug, what the hell, the hairs can be hoovered up afterwards.

But he has two names. We call him Timmy while others insist on calling him Jimmy. He doesn't mind, he answers to both.

When he was about a year old, we went on holidays and left him with my two sons to mind. Naturally, they were looking forward with great excitement to looking after this little bundle of mischief. Of course, my elder son decided to play a trick on the younger and tell him the morning of the great day he was to arrive, that Dad had called to say that Timmy wouldn't be along as somebody else would be looking after him. However, as soon as Andy saw the consternation on Dan's face, he quickly said, "But his cousin Jimmy will be coming instead".

And hence the dog with two names will die this Friday. God rest him.