Friends,
Happy February 15. Across the country, flowers are quickly withering and floors are strewn with empty chocolate boxes. Many single people are breathing a collective sigh of relief, and many others are trying to ignore the impending feelings of how ephemeral romance is.
In light of this, I wanted to blog about romance. I've already given a supposed manifesto (pep talk) on being single, a vehement rant about inconsiderate online rejection, and my airtight case for the impossibility of male-female friendship. These are all my main talking points when it comes to romance, or at least the phase of it I'm in now (prolonged singleness).
Well, all my main talking points except for the one that's too personal and requires too much honesty -- why being (seemingly always) single sucks and how I deal with it.
The main reasons I've never given this area a Tangent are:
A. I want this blog to be funny. Wrestling with singleness isn't funny.
B. I want this blog to be about things that have little or nothing to do with me. I want a random person to be able to come here and have a thought-provoking read and some laughs without necessarily knowing me or liking me in real life.
C. Those rare times when I touch on my personal life, I want it to be something like a rap video, not a heartfelt issue that seems to beg for pity or commiseration.
And yet, in the event that some of you had a tough time this Valentine's Day, maybe my experience and lessons can be an encouragement. [If not, hey, you would have just spent this 15 minutes scanning facebook or twitter anyway, right?]
What I've learned about being single
In addition to "it sucks"
A few months back, my singleness hit me like a ton of bricks. I had been doing okay with it, even enjoying it at times, but you know how it is (unless you're one of those people who's always in a relationship or who got married when you were 21): more friends get engaged and married, more girls reject me, more rain and snow pour down on this dreary city...
Then God mercifully brought me to the point of such aggravation that I just had to turn off my activities and take a night to be with Him and listen to Him. I pulled out my journal and my Bible and said, "Teach me whatever I need to learn. Say whatever I need to hear. I need You to help me."
What followed in the next few hours has shaped my outlook on -- and my day-to-day struggle with -- this "season of life God has me in." God showed me things in my heart and mind that were crippling my ability to follow Him or to have any measure of contentment with my life.
These lessons were so significant to me that, hey, why not share them with a bunch of people online? I'm not sure of the best way to organize these thoughts. Sorry if I've failed to do so optimally. Here's the gist of what I wrote down last November:
1. I feel lonely. Why?
Ultimately, because I don't experience God's love. Something in me fails to connect with Him emotionally or refuses to believe that He really does love me. Because I'm not receiving this love that I so deeply need, I want desperately to receive it from a woman.
Response: believe God loves me, spend time with Him, cling to the truth of Eph 2:4 and Zeph 3:17, pray when I struggle to believe these things
2. How has this loneliness been affecting my faith?
Among other things, it has caused me to be bitter toward God. How could I possibly feel this way? Well, I think lurking somewhere below the surface of my faith is the ridiculous notion that if I follow Christ, I'm ENTITLED to receive whatever blessings I want. "If I want a wife, then as long as I'm following Christ, I deserve to have one promptly." When this ugly, miles-from-realistic expectation isn't met, bitterness ensues.
Response: focus on trusting His goodness and wisdom, pray for patience, be willing to forsake everything to follow Him
3. How have I been viewing myself?
Somehow I've tied my self-worth to my desirability to women. This is pretty much nothing but a complete lie spoon-fed to me by pop culture. The reality of my worth flows entirely from what God thinks of me, not what I've done or what any person thinks of me.
Response: be vulnerable with others about this, cling to the truth of Eph 1:4-14 and Heb 7:25, be thankful for God's many blessings
In the months since, this has crystallized to a very simple regimen:
1. Believe that God loves me
2. Trust His plan more than mine
3. Pray for patience
Anytime I feel sad or lonely or sense any bitterness, I try to "check myself" right away with those three steps. If I need a more thorough spiritual treatment, I go to some of the more detailed thoughts or responses above.
Thanks for reading!
If anyone made it this far
Well, there it is. Maybe none of you struggles with singleness the way I do. In fact, I sincerely hope that none of you does. But, for the sake of not wasting your time, if you didn't find this helpful, I hope you at least found it interesting.
If you're willing to join me in some vulnerability, I'd love to hear what some of your fears or lies are in romance and how you deal with them. If you'd rather not, I understand. I'll come back soon with something silly and fun.
Jon
Well-known physicist Stephen Hawking just co-wrote a book called The Grand Design. In this pop-science best-seller, he and his pal make the argument that we need not call upon God to explain the origins of the universe, because the theory of multiple universes is satisfactory. I will now attempt to summarize and criticize/debunk this brilliant scientist's work, which I've never read.
You might be thinking, "Jon, you're pretty smart, but you're no Stephen Hawking." Agreed. Your next thought might amount to, "You haven't even read the book." Correct. But what I have done is pretty significant -- my friend scanned a couple chapters and summarized them for me, and I read the book's wikipedia page. I rest my case.
No, no, I'm not qualified to talk about cosmology or physics. But I have a brain, and it usually works, so I'm qualified to talk about my thoughts.
My first thought is that this argument is ooooold, but by leaking to the press that the book would denounce God and using the ethos of Hawking's name, Bantam Books and Hawking were able to recycle it and make tons of money.
Secondly, I'm thinking his argument doesn't give us any more explanatory power than a creation hypothesis. One classical argument for God's existence is as follows:
- Everything that has a beginning has a cause (or complex series of causes).
- The great host of physicists agrees there was a "Big Bang," an actual event that occurred a certain number of years ago, at which point matter and time first came into being. In other words, our universe had a beginning.
- Therefore, our universe had a cause outside of our universe -- something or someone that made matter and time emerge from nothing.
Hawking basically agrees with this argument, but says that "m-theory" (the latest version of string theory that identifies 11 dimensions in our universe) with an understanding that our universe is just one of many, provides a valid alternate hypothesis to the idea that God is the universe's cause. Hawking specifically states that the properties of gravity would make the spontaneous generation of our universe possible.
But what gravity does he mean? It can't be the gravity of our universe and its 11 dimensions. That property didn't exist until after the Big Bang, like all other physical properties in our universe. So Hawking must be referring to a "supernatural" (i.e. "outside of our nature or universe") gravity. This is a gravity in one of those other many universes that we've never seen, felt, or experimented on. Sounds pretty... unscientific.
My third thought is an attempt to understand the idea fully. We can study our gravity. We learn its properties and infer how a gravitational force might operate in a completely different universe. We make some prediction, and (this is the point in the book at which Hawking humorously says there is ample scientific evidence to support the theory) we find that yes siree, if the gravity of another universe were such-and-such a force, it could cause an entirely new universe to form.
Fourthly, I ask myself the many, many questions that stem from this line of reasoning:
- Why is it more reasonable/scientific to assume there is some other universe out there completely separate from ours that somehow -- via pure gravitation -- gave birth to ours (but remained completely separate from us), than to believe there is intelligence outside our universe that caused it to exist?
- What caused that universe to exist? Another universe with the same sort of gravity? What about that one? If we never trace back to an uncaused cause, we eventually have an infinitely old chain of infinitely many universes. But since all of these apparently have different sets of natural laws (and Hawking admits only a very few could conceivably support life, let alone intelligent life), what laws dictate which universes will have which properties? Wouldn't you need some over-arching "meta-laws" that are unchanging and eternal that determine this infinite chain of universe-spawning? And -- hammerstroke -- where do these meta-laws come from?
- How is any of this testable? Provable? It's nice that you predicted that a parent universe would have a certain gravity, and then coincidentally those properties theoretically would allow the generation of a new cosmos. But it sounds, to me, a lot like the natural theologian's exercise of predicting (from nature, human experience) what a Parent Deity would be like, and then coincidentally it's precisely that kind of Deity who would create a universe that supports intelligent life.
The fifth thing going through my mind is how many critics of The Grand Design -- including many who are in no way sympathetic to creation hypotheses -- have shared my first four thoughts (you can make the case that this is no surprise, since I already read their thoughts before writing this post. Touche.).
One Columbia physics professor said a few weeks ago, "I'm in favor of naturalism and leaving God out of physics as much as the next person, but if you're the sort who wants to go to battle in the science/religion wars, why you would choose to take up such a dubious weapon as M-theory mystifies me."
The Economist -- deciding to review a pop physics book? -- slammed it as well, pointing out that "the authors’ interpretations and extrapolations of [m-theory] have not been subjected to any decisive tests, and it is not clear that they ever could be. Once upon a time it was the province of philosophy to propose ambitious and outlandish theories in advance of any concrete evidence for them. Perhaps science, as Professor Hawking and Mr. Mlodinow practice it in their airier moments, has indeed changed places with philosophy, though probably not quite in the way that they think."
Renowned scientific journalist John Horgan said that if we believe the book's claims that we've reached a trustworthy explanation of the universe's origins, "the joke's on us."
Sixthly (<-- nice), I'm realizing how tired I am. I really need to get some sleep. So I'll move on to thought seven:
Stephen Hawking is a brilliant man. Maybe the most brilliant man in the world when it comes to physics and math. I'm sure I couldn't ever grasp the full breadth of most ideas in his book, and that what I've done above is almost certainly attacking a straw man. But I can't help but wonder about his motives -- or others', like Dawkins -- for coming out with a public attack on God's existence.
Of course there are the typical reasons you could imagine. They simply don't believe, and they want others to see the world the way they do. Sure. Maybe they see a lot of hypocrisy, or even evil, done in God's name, and since they don't even believe in Him, it seems like the world would be better if no one else did. Okay. Or the grandest of them all -- perhaps they are so convinced of atheism that, in the spirit of the world being educated and knowledgeable, it would only be right for the world to be enlightened and atheistic as well.
But why, then, are their attacks so full of anger and based on bad logic? Dawkins is almost unreadable to me because he is so full of condescension and underlying rage toward anyone who's a theist. Even Hawking is willing to imagine this multi-verse universe-popping scheme and then claim that it's supported by empirical evidence!
I guess I just suspect that in many cases, the crusade to refute God is not an educational or purely intellectual one, but a deeply personal and emotional one. Or possibly a greedy one (the book in question hit #1 on Amazon the day it was released).
I don't know how to best generate conversation about this, except that I would love to hear any and all thoughts regarding the book (if you've read it... or skimmed wikipedia), the existence of God, and the above arguments for and against God's existence.
