A Refusal To Mourn?

The murder of Fr. Jacques Hamel has once more sharply crystallized for me the problem of pain and suffering in the universe. Here was a man in his 80s who had spent his life as a priest in the service of others, of his community, and of God, and that service has now been repaid by his brutal murder by two psychotic thugs, ironically acting out of what they would have said were “religious” motives. How could this be allowed, in a world created, curated and loved by a benevolent and loving creator?

We have to take an initial decision at this point, and that decision is whether to even bother trying to make some sense of this, or whether to just throw up our hands in despair and disgust, and just walk away, denying that there is any logic, order, sense, justice or compassion in the universe. In short, there is no God, and very bad things happen at random to good people, for no reason whatsoever.

I choose to try and make sense of it, for reasons primarily connected with some experiences in my own past which I can only describe as mystical. It would take me an additional 10,000 words at this point to explain fully what I mean by these, and even then you may well still feel I am deluding myself. So for now you will have to take my motives at face value. I’m going to try and make some sense of it, even though it leads to some conclusions I’m not exactly comfortable with.

But first we need to look at definitions: what is this “world” which we believe should contain logic, order, sense, justice and compassion. I suppose we mean, by this, reality.  The issue is, though, that reality, the things I can see, hear, feel, smell, or touch, is not what it seems. As modern physics tells us, nothing in reality is “real” in any objective sense.  Everything is electromagnetic energy.  Plus, it only exists when we look at it. Furthermore, modern physics tells us that even time itself, in certain circumstances, does not behave in a linear manner. In certain weird circumstances, when mathematically analysed, time can seem to stand still, or even go backwards!

And also, we need to consider what we mean by “God”. The personage who allegedly “allows” all these bad things to happen. One conclusion I’ve come to, over the years, is that God, if it is anything, is not an old white bloke with a beard who sits on a cloud, judging the quick and the dead (although we might come back to judgement later on, as well).  God, as C. S. Lewis has written, is outside of time. I would go further and say that God might even be the antithesis of time. God is limitless eternity, a concept which I find hard to comprehend. Time, on the other hand, is what limits us, what makes us human, makes us mortal.  Whereas, when we feel the most in tune with the divine, the infinite, we often describe our experience as being “timeless”. All of the experiences I mentioned earlier were of that nature.

This is where we come back to modern physics. You’ll have to bear with me while I assemble this.  John Gribben, in his book, Schrodinger’s Kittens, has posited a theory that what we call reality is actually a very small part of everything that ever was, is now, and shall be.  If I was traditionally religious at this point, I might add, “world without end, amen” at this point.  Over this vast and endless tapestry, we run our small lens, the little magnifying glass of time-bound consciousness, propelled by time. But in fact, if we could but step back and take our noses away from the individual threads we are following, we would see all around us, stretching away in every direction for ever, what God sees, what God knows.  We would become part of eternity, we would become one with God.

The interim conclusion of this direction of thought takes me to an initial implication: that an infinite entity, which is outside of time completely, and contains everything, is clearly going to encompass concepts of logic, order, sense, justice or compassion which will be completely alien to our own human ones which we are attempting to graft on to it.

Since Gribben wrote his book, physics has also moved on, as well.  We now have, literally, added dimensions.  I haven’t the skill, the language, or the maths to explain this fully, because I was such a dumbass at school in those subjects, but to explain this fully, you need to understand the uncertainty principle, and the collapse of the wave function.  These are concepts you will really need to go away and look up, but basically they relate to the choices we make, and the fact that, until you observe something, you don’t really know where it is.

If you have something that could be in one of two places, it remains potentially in that state until you look for it. Once you find it and measure its position, all the other probabilities of its fate vanish, and your reality then proceeds from that point.  And so it proceeds, choice by choice, millisecond by millisecond. For every choice you make, physicists can write an equation, a “wave function”, which shows the probability of that choice’s outcome.  Once you make your choice, the wave function for all the other options collapses, closing off all the other alternatives.

Or does it? Because we now have the “many worlds” theory. There’s now an idea that when you make your choice make your measurement, or whatever, all the other options and their wave function, as the maths would have it, don’t in fact collapse, but carry on in another of many, indeed, of an infinite number of, alternative universes, where every other possible permutation of events and choices is played out, but because we, as humans, as mortals, are time-limited, we can’t see them.

We’re back again with John Gribben and his vast tapestry of everything that ever has happened, is happening now, and will happen, but now it’s multiplied by an infinite number of slightly different tapestries, relating to slightly different worlds, created by slightly different choices of events. An infinite number of universes, in fact, including one where Hitler was killed in the First World War and never actually became Fuhrer. I can't do umlauts (see also Schrodinger).

But we are bound by time. Why is this? If I were religious, at this point, I’d say the limitation of the process of enduring things in time is the mark of a fallen universe. Heaven knows no time, and there was no time in Eden. And, talking a neo-platonist view of the issue, those moments, those moments when we feel closest to the divine, are the ones where we feel most timeless.

What does all this mean for God, though. Well, even though we can’t work out why things have to be this way, and it makes no sense in human terms, any God that can create, inhabit, sustain, and be this infinite many faceted thing that I can’t even begin to describe must, by definition, have very different ideas of logic, order, sense, justice or compassion to those we have, as I said above.

In this universe, Fr. Hamel was brutally, cruelly, and unjustly murdered, but in other universes, he lives on still. In another universe, in fact, he may be the Pope. And so on. I’m not intending to be flippant here. His death was, by any definition a tragedy, especially the one which says that tragedy is a waste of good. In this reality, the time-bound reality we all inhabit, his death was an abomination. A senseless abomination.

To a God who sees the bigger picture, though, this seemingly-senseless tragedy may be cancelled out in some way by Fr Hamel’s life in other universes. While this is superficially comforting, and strangely akin to the well known Henry Scott Holland sermon on “Death, our King of Terrors”, where he talks about death being just as if someone had gone into the next room, it does have disturbing implications.

If there is an infinite number of alternative universes, it also implies a world where Fr Hamel was run over crossing the street as a child, one where he died in the war, one where his father was late for a date and never even met his mother, and so on.  In fact, if there is a world, an alternative universe where what we might call our consciousness is united with what we call God for all eternity after our physical death, once removed from the shackles of time, then there also may be a universe where that consciousness is permanently excluded from God, from the infinite everything. If I were religious, I might call the first one heaven, and the second one, hell.

But the idea that the infinite number of universes must contain absolutely every possible permutation of everything is maybe again an example of us trying to impose human ideas of symmetry and logic on the infinite universe. If God is God, whatever it is, it has the power to mould infinity in a way beyond our understanding. In the same way as we edit our own reality in this world by making choices and moving on, perhaps once we have left time behind, that editing process is done on our behalf, done for us, by the abiding and eternal entity behind everything. How could God, an infinite good, allow any evil optional universes. But this is where I came in: here I go again, with my limited human concepts of what “good” and “evil” means.

If it is the case, though, I don’t believe that this editing is done on the basis of how “moral” or otherwise we’ve been in this life. I don’t believe in “one size fits all” morality.

I’ve strayed well beyond physics here. If anyone wants a friendly, approachable, easily understandable, yet non-condescending explanation of some of the concepts of the physics behind this, you could do a lot worse than reading Teaching Quantum Physics To Your Dog, by Chad Orzel.

Meanwhile, back here in this dimension, of course I am not refusing to mourn the death of Fr. Hamel. I do take some comfort from the possibility that somehow, somewhere, he goes on, but then I have to deal with the implications of that, and meanwhile, his death in the real world has massive and profound implications for the way we all live. We’re currently fixed in a spiral of violence and nobody can tell where it will end. The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity, as Yeats put it in The Second Coming.

I’ve got to the end of this now, and I am still not sure what I was trying to say, or indeed if I managed to say it.

If one of the possible universes is one full of limitless, eternal light, though, I wish the soul (another debate is to be had there, about what we mean by that) of Father Hamel to rest there in everlasting bliss, whatever else may result from any other outcomes.

Requiscat in Pace.