{"id":94259,"date":"2022-02-20T14:32:47","date_gmt":"2022-02-20T21:32:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=94259"},"modified":"2022-02-21T10:37:17","modified_gmt":"2022-02-21T17:37:17","slug":"picture-yourself-in-a-boat-on-a-river-somebody-calls-you-you-answer-quite-slowly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2022\/02\/picture-yourself-in-a-boat-on-a-river-somebody-calls-you-you-answer-quite-slowly.html","title":{"rendered":"Picture yourself in a boat on a river.  Somebody calls you.  You answer quite slowly."},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_39447\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-39447\" style=\"width: 378px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2017\/01\/idaho-falls-temple-lds-83003-gallery.jpg\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-39447\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2017\/01\/idaho-falls-temple-lds-83003-gallery.jpg\" alt=\"George Albert Smith's temple\" width=\"378\" height=\"447\"><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-39447\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Idaho Falls Idaho Temple, on the Snake River<br>(LDS Media Library)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><strong>***<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Back in 2005, I was invited to write a little mini-essay for the Church\u2019s official website. \u00a0Here it is:<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org\/ldsnewsroom\/eng\/commentary\/everyone-else-makes-such-lonely-heavens?fbclid=IwAR1KUz42SkP7x9Uuba2XjLayZ3XLjDPygOZQ5LSELphLiYO2q6UqHgobvsI\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">\u201cEveryone Else Makes Such Lonely Heavens\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I thought of it because of a complaint against the Church that I saw recently, and that I\u2019ve come across several times over the past few years.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I find it exceedingly odd.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Roughly, it goes like this: \u00a0The <a href='https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/library\/mormonism' target='_blank'>Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints<\/a> is to be condemned because it cruelly threatens people that their marriages and families will be broken up at death if they don\u2019t join the Church, fork over at least ten percent of their incomes for the enriching of the Brethren, and get themselves sealed in a temple owned and operated by LD$ Inc.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The complaint seems to presume that every other church teaches and has always taught that families will be together forever <em>without<\/em> temple sealings, and that it\u2019s a heartless Latter-day Saint innovation to come along and say that that\u2019s not true.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But traditional Christianity has <em>long<\/em> taught that marriage and family relationships will be terminated at the grave.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Read Dante\u2019s \u201cDivina Commedia,\u201d for example, to get a glimpse of historic Christian orthodoxy on this matter: \u00a0To the best of my recollection \u2014 and I\u2019ve read it several times, though not, now, for at least several years \u2014 there isn\u2019t a single intact married couple or family group anywhere in that great, long compendium of medieval Catholic doctrine and commentary. \u00a0Not in the <em>Inferno<\/em>. \u00a0Not in the <em>Purgatorio<\/em>. \u00a0And not even in the <em>Paradiso<\/em>. \u00a0Nowhere. \u00a0Everybody in it, whether damned or saved or in between, is a lone individual, a social atom (as it were).<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s a sampling of the relevant phrases from mainstream Christian wedding services:<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cas long as you both shall live\u201d (Episcopal, Methodist)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cso long as you both shall live\u201d \u00a0(Unitarian)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cuntil we are parted by death\u201d \u00a0(Episcopal, Methodist)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cas long as we both shall live\u201d \u00a0(Presbyterian)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cso long as we both shall live\u201d \u00a0(Quaker)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cuntil death parts us\u201d \u00a0(Lutheran)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cas long as we live\u201d \u00a0(Lutheran)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cuntil death do us part\u201d \u00a0(Catholic, Eastern Orthodox)<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201ctill death us do part\u201d \u00a0(Anglican [Book of Common Prayer])<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201call the days of my life\u201d \u00a0(Catholic)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Nor can I think of any other major religious faith or tradition that teaches anything other than the effective rupture of marital and family ties at death.\u00a0 (There\u2019s a\u00a0nice passage at the very end of the tragic tale of <span id=\"Leyli_o_Majnun\" class=\"mw-headline\"><i>Leyli o Majnun<\/i>, as told by\u00a0<\/span>the twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, that seems to hold out a satisfying hope in one particular case.\u00a0 But that romantic poem is scarcely representative of mainstream Muslim theology or doctrine.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>And, needless to say, atheism doesn\u2019t exactly promise an eternal companionship for spouses and families, either.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>This weird objection \u2014 that, somehow, we Latter-day Saints have come along and threatened people with divorce in the next life unless they surrender to us and fork gobs of cash over to us \u2014 strikes me as rather like a situation in which someone is drowning in a swiftly moving river. \u00a0A huge waterfall looms. \u00a0A benevolent onlooker grabs a life preserver and throws it out to the drowning person, who shows no interest in it whatever. \u00a0The hopeful rescuer reels it in and tosses it out again. \u00a0However, the drowning person, \u00a0rapidly moving toward the roaring cataract, ignores it a second time. \u00a0Increasingly worried, the would-be benefactor runs along the river bank, pulls the life preserver in a third time, and throws it out once more to the drowning person. \u00a0\u201cGrab it!\u201d he admonishes. \u00a0\u201cIf you don\u2019t take hold of it, you\u2019re certainly going to die!\u201d \u00a0\u201cHow immoral of you!\u201d responds the soon-to-be-dead person in the river. \u00a0\u201cNow you\u2019re threatening me with death unless I accept your precious little flotation device!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"color: #800000;\">***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Some time back, I read a book by Brian Clegg entitled <em>Are Numbers Real? The Uncanny Relationship of Mathematics and the Physical World<\/em> (New York: St. Martin\u2019s Press, 2016). \u00a0It deals with a really interesting topic that, in my view, may suggest the falsehood of materialist\/reductionist views of the universe.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ll share just a few passages from it:<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cWould numbers exist without people to think about them, or are they just valuable human inventions, the imaginary inhabitants of a useful fantasy world?\u201d \u00a0(1-2)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cSimilarly, when mathematicians played around with an idea like the square root of a negative number, called an imaginary number, they were initially simply enjoying a new direction to take their mathematical game. \u00a0But, as it happened, because of the rules they decided to apply to this magical class of numbers, it became a hugely useful tool for physics and engineering.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cNo scientist or engineer ever said prior to the introduction of imaginary numbers, \u2018What we want is the square root of a negative number. \u00a0They would really help us with this problem we\u2019ve got.\u2019 \u00a0Similarly, no one in mathematics thought, \u2018How can we solve this particular problem that the physicists have?\u2019 before dreaming up imaginary numbers. \u00a0The mathematicians just played with the implications of their new concept and the set of rules attached to it. \u00a0The applications emerged later.\u201d \u00a0(7-8)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cSome scientists, such as physicist Max Tegmark, go so far as to suggest that the universe is mathematical. \u00a0That numbers aren\u2019t just real, but are what make everything happen.\u201d \u00a0(10)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">The Pythagoreans, whose motto, carved on the lintel of the door to their principal school, was \u201cAll is number\u201d: \u00a0\u201cThey were of the opinion that everything in the universe was structured on\u00a0numbers \u2014 that numbers were not merely a human creation, but provided the underlying architecture of reality.\u201d \u00a0(30)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #800000;\">\u201cYou could . . . say that mathematics is an agreed fiction, a shared mental world that mathematicians agree to collectively inhabit. \u00a0But their world isn\u2019t allowed the looseness of literary fiction, because here all the rules have to be pinned down and agreed. \u00a0As long as a piece of mathematics is consistent with those rules it is acceptable, whether or not it has any parallel with the physical universe. \u00a0Yet we keep coming back to the fact that a sizable subset of mathematics not only has parallels, but has an uncanny ability to mirror what the real world can offer. \u00a0It could just be because so much of the essential structure that mathematics is built on \u2014 like the nature of whole number arithmetic \u2014 started as a reflection of the real world.\u201d \u00a0(52)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Brian Clegg is looking at the same general issue as that raised by the Nobel-laureate physicist Eugene Wigner in his famous 1960 paper <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">\u201cThe Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The English physicist, astronomer, and mathematician Sir James Jeans (d. 1949) had perhaps been thinking along similar lines when he remarked, in his 1944 book <em>The Mysterious Universe<\/em>, that \u201cThe stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. . . . \u00a0we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><strong><span style=\"color: #800000;\">***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>My wife and I had dinner last night \u2014 Indian food \u2014 with Royal Skousen and his wife and daughter.\u00a0 He is one of the greatest and most committed scholars in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and his wife\u2019s contributions to his work have themselves been significant.\u00a0 Dinner was followed by fascinating conversation about books and art.\u00a0 I\u2019m blessed to have such friends, and such experiences.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 \u00a0 *** \u00a0 Back in 2005, I was invited to write a little mini-essay for the Church\u2019s official website. \u00a0Here it is: \u00a0 \u201cEveryone Else Makes Such Lonely Heavens\u201d \u00a0 I thought of it because of a complaint against the Church that I saw recently, and that I\u2019ve come across several times over the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15234,13180,1727,28116,1381,1809,1378,14791,2592,2601,13970,1008,2905,1812,1815,1011,16257,1191,69,788,55,1667,7236,16801,28122,28119,24683,24689,24686,15129,28113,2046,5358,7641,1384,11383],"class_list":["post-94259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-after-death","tag-after-life","tag-afterlife","tag-brian-clegg","tag-celestial-marriage","tag-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints","tag-eternal-marriage","tag-eternity","tag-eugene-wigner","tag-god","tag-hereafter","tag-immortality","tag-latter-day-saint","tag-latter-day-saints","tag-lds","tag-life-after-death","tag-life-after-life","tag-marriage","tag-mathematics","tag-mormon","tag-mormonism","tag-mormons","tag-numbers","tag-plato","tag-platonic","tag-platonism","tag-pythagorean","tag-pythagoreanism","tag-pythagoreans","tag-real","tag-rellgion","tag-royal-skousen","tag-sealing","tag-skousen","tag-temple-marriage","tag-wigner"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Picture yourself in a boat on a river. 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Somebody calls you. You answer quite slowly."}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/","name":"Sic et Non","description":"","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/#\/schema\/person\/77113e9b09701bd1599fa272c4f65045","name":"Dan Peterson","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/5ed1a72d26805e35a503e3167599df7c?s=96&d=mm&r=g","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/5ed1a72d26805e35a503e3167599df7c?s=96&d=mm&r=g","caption":"Dan Peterson"},"description":"\"Life was very unsatisfying until I discovered Dan's blog, which gave me a reason to live.\" (gemli, 7 November 2019)","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/author\/danpeterson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1019"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}