Making Meaning of a Random Universe
Opening Words
No. 428: “Come out of the dark earth,”
From Singing the Living Tradition
Hymn
No. 190 Light of Ages and of Nations
from Singing the Living Tradition
Children’s Story
“God Comes to Us in Our Dreams”
by Mary Ann Moore
There once was a girl who lived with her family in a small village. It was a very small village, so everyone there knew each other. The girl’s family loved her and the people of the village loved her. When she woke up crying one night because she had had a frightening dream, everyone in the village knew about it and everyone cared.
In the morning, the people of the village asked the girl about her scary dream. “In my dream, I was walking down the path to get some wood,” she recalled. “All of a sudden a tiger jumped down from a tree and got in front of me on the path so I couldn’t go by.” The girl almost started to cry again as she remembered how scary it was. “Then the tiger started coming toward me and it was snarling and growling and showing its teeth, and I was sure it wanted to eat me. I turned around and started to run as fast as I could, but the tiger ran right behind me. Just as it was going to catch me, I turned around and started to run as fast as I could, but the tiger ran right behind me. Just as it was going to catch me with one of its huge paws, I woke up!” The girl went to her mother and hid her head under her mother’s arm. She was still very frightened when she thought of the dream, and she was afraid for night to come when she would have to sleep again.
The elders in the village gathered together and talked for a while about the girl’s dream. Then they went back to the girl, who was still with her mother, and said, “If you want to learn not to be afraid in your dreams, we can help you.
The girl thought for a minute and then said, very quietly, “I do want to learn not to be afraid in my dreams.”
One of the elders said to her, “All right then, try this: Tonight if you dream the same dream and the tiger starts to come toward you, don’t run, but stay where you are and say ‘Hello, tiger. “
“But the tiger will eat me,” said the girl. “I’m too scared.”
“Yes, you may be scared,” replied the elders, “but we believe you will be brave enough to do it. And we don’t think the tiger will eat you.”
That night the girl dreamed of the tiger again. But when the tiger started toward her, she remembered and stood bravely, facing the tiger, and said, “Hello, tiger.” When the tiger got right in front of her, it stopped.
And then a wonderful thing happened. As the girl looked at the tiger’s face, she saw it smile, and as she looked some more, the tiger’s face began to change and she saw there the faces of lots of animals. They smiled at her, too. As she looked some more, the animals’ faces changed into faces of people, and the people’s faces smiled at her. The girl felt a wonderful happy feeling coming over her when she realized that she wasn’t afraid anymore. And then, as she looked again, she saw not only the animals and the people, but trees and earth and sky and water and beautiful colors and beautiful darkness all swirling around and mixing together, and all smiling at her. And she felt a great joy.
The next morning the girl couldn’t wait to tell everyone in the village about her dream. Everyone gathered around, and as she told it, everyone sighed and smiled and shared her joy. Once again the elders went off by themselves for a while to talk about the girl’s dream. When they returned one of the elders said to her, “You were blessed, my daughter. Because you were brave, God has come to you in your dream and blessed you.”
Later that day, as the girl was walking down the path to get some wood, she was still thinking about her wonderful dream. She was eager for night to come so that she could dream again.
Meditation
No. 487: “The bell is full of wind”
from Singing the Living Tradition
Reading
from the Boston Globe
[In wheatfields in south central England, mysterious huge flattened circles have appeared for years. Large numbers of people had come to believe they were put there by paranormal forces or by aliens.]
London. Every summer, the mysterious crop circles, large and intricate patterns of flattened wheat, appear in the fields. And every summer they are greeted by expressions of reverence and wisecracks about little green men.
Now two British artists have offered a new and elegantly simple explanation of the phenomenon: They done it.
Doug Bower and David Chorley, both in their 60s, claim to have created the circles all by themselves.
They said they worked at night, using a ball of string (to keep the circles round), a wire sight attached to a baseball cap (to keep the lines straight) and two long sticks with rope handles (to flatten the crops).
The con men said they came forward because they were tired of people making money off their joke.
In fact, two circle “experts,” Patrick Delgado and Cohn Andrews have made a nice income off the mystery in recent years.
Delgado and Andrews wrote two best-selling books about the subject. They also gave speeches and organized conferences. And they ran a $1.8 million dollar research project for Japanese television, aimed at capturing the formation of a crop circle on film.
The latest news on the crop circle front, that the whole thing apparently was a joke, came to Delgado last week in the cruelest possible way.
With a newspaper reporter and a photographer watching, Bower and Chorley made one of their circles in a wheat field. Then the circle was shown to Delgado, who solemnly pronounced it genuine and explained that no mere mortals could have made such a thing.
Then he was informed that two mere mortals had made it. The man was shaken.
“I was taken for a ride like many other people,” Delgado told reporters. But by yesterday, he tried to mount a recovery. When Bower and Chorley made yet another circle, this one for British television, Delgado gave it a firm thumbs down.
“This is not a genuine crop circle. It’s totally different from the real thing,” he said firmly.
Bower and Chorley claimed they started making their circles in 1978. At first, no one noticed. There was no media coverage. But then Delgado saw his first circle. And the mystery took off.
The hoaxsters said they did not get truly committed until they heard Delgado talking on the radio about the involvement of a “superior intelligence.”
“We laughed so much that time we had to stop the car,” Chorley said.
Sermon
“Making Meaning of a Random Universe”
by the Rev. Jane Rzepka
There was once a man who lived in England and preached Universalism. The year was 1770, his life was working out badly, he landed in debtor’s prison, his wife and baby died, he was called to task for his theology in London. He decided to sail for the New World, much relieved that he would never have to preach again. His name was John Murray.
At the same time, an elderly man, Thomas Potter, sat in his farmhouse in Good Luck, New Jersey, and thought up a Universalist theology on his own. He was so enthused about this new religion of his that he built a little church building there on the farm. He figured, “If God wants my church to succeed, he’ll send me a preacher.”
Meanwhile, John Murray’s ship encounters some peculiar winds, and lo and behold, it goes aground at Good Luck, New Jersey, right there at Thomas Potter’s farm. Murray finds Potter just waiting for him to show up. Murray prays for the winds to shift, and fast, but they don’t. Obviously, God has sent Murray to Potter’s meetinghouse; Potter and Murray decide that Providence was clearly at work, and Murray winds up preaching Universalism for the next 35 years, thus starting the Universalist Church in America.
This story is nonsense. At least that’s my opinion. Sure, John Murray did wash ashore at Good Luck, New Jersey at Thomas Potter’s farm and all that, and what a great coincidence that was, but we really have no reason to believe that God meddles much in nitty-gritty day-to-day affairs down in New Jersey.
But we’re human beings. It would be so nice if the events in our lives made sense. But for us, meaning is not pre-figured by somebody else; we create it. If Potter and Murray want to start a new American religion, good for them. They have given their lives meaning. Just as if in our own lives a car goes out of control on 128 and nearly hits you but doesn’t, you can decide that yes, this is the day to finally tell your sister you really love her in spite of everything, and you will have made meaning of your near miss. Or say your teaching job gets axed, you decide you will find a way to get your MBA, which you had wanted to do in the first place. You have created meaning. Or you win the Mega-Bucks, you get yourself a new car, but you also donate a room to an AIDS hospice, and you have taken a random event and made meaning. We make the ‘promises we keep.’ We choose our own stars.
Our minister in San Francisco, Victor Carpenter, has a daughter, Gracia, age thirteen who operates at the level of a one-year-old. He finds that people frequently try to tell him the “purpose” for this tragedy; they want to explain why it makes sense that Gracia is the way she is; why this had to happen. Victor says, “We all want a world that is orderly and predictable and will conform, at least in the main, to our standards and expectations…. [Well,] Baloney! It is our ability and our willingness to deal with reality on its own terms that makes reality meaningful, us wise, and life endurable. I am continually amazed by the prevalence of [people] who always stand ready to offer “purposes” for Gracia (complete with silver linings). Cathe and I have been told that Gracia was sent to us in order that we might be better prepared to give comfort and solace to other people who were ‘afflicted’ with similar children. Or that she was sent because we were strong enough to learn from her and provide for her without breaking. Or for reasons God chooses not to vouchsafe but, nonetheless, we’ll discover one day. Such attempts to discover some kind of purpose are inappropriate because they always start at the wrong end of the situation. They start with some pre-established ideal of ‘purpose,’ then attempt to fit reality to that purpose rather than start with the reality.” (Stations of the Spirit, p.84)
You probably remember the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, where Kushner says, “Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us. They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly. But we can give them a meaning. We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them. The question we should be asking is not, ‘Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?’ That is really an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be ‘Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?’ (p. 136)
We have to be careful. Because ambiguity is hard for most of us to tolerate, because an unpredictable universe is difficult to live with, because we find inherent meaninglessness unsatisfying, most human beings are prone to spot meaning where there simply is none, and we see patterns in randomness. Where there are stars, we see constellations.
When we see meaning in the meaningless we can be in some danger. For example, a fraudulent stockbroker gets some fancy letterhead and sends out 32,000 letters to potential investors. In 16,000 of these letters he predicts the index will rise, and in the other 16,000 he predicts a decline. No matter whether the index rises or falls, a follow-up letter is sent, but only to the 16,000 people who initially received a correct “prediction.” To 8,000 of them, a rise is predicted for the next week; to the other 8,000, a decline. Whatever happens now, 8,000 people will have received two correct predictions. Again, to these 8,000 people only, letters are sent concerning the index’s performance the following week: 4,000 predicting a rise; 4,000, a decline. Whatever the outcome, 4,000 people have now received three straight correct predictions. This goes on a few more times, until 500 people have received six straight correct “predictions.” These 500 people are now reminded of this and told that in order to continue to receive this valuable information for the seventh week they must each contribute $500. This fraudulent broker knows that a number of us are willing to ascribe meaning and predictive powers to what has in fact been random success. (Paulos, p. 32)
Most of us believe a number of things that aren’t true: We may not necessarily believe that a stockbroker has a corner on the future of the market, or that God sent John Murray to New Jersey, or that crop circles were made by aliens. But a large majority of the general public thinks itself more intelligent, more fair-minded, less prejudiced, and more skilled behind the wheel of an automobile than the average person. This phenomenon is called the “Lake Wobegon effect,” after Garrison Keillor’s fictional community where “the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” (Gilovich, p. 77)
If you think you are above these kinds of pitfalls, if you think you are rational, you might have fun with a couple of books that are out. One is Innumeracy (John Allen Paulos, 1988), and the other is How We Know What Isn’t So, by Thomas Gilovich (1991).
We all know, for example, that men and women who cannot have biological children and subsequently adopt, are more likely to then conceive a baby than couples who can’t conceive and don’t adopt. On-lookers figure that after having adopted, there’s less stress associated with the child-bearing issue, and the woman gets pregnant after all. I can think of a half dozen couples in this church who began filling out adoption papers and at some point went on to have biological children.
The thing is, the phenomenon is simply not true: If you are a couple who cannot conceive, it makes no statistical difference at all whether or not you adopt. Some of you will go on to have a biological child, and some of you won’t. It’s just that we tend to notice the pregnancies more in families who have adopted children. (Gilovich, p. 31) There’s no connection here, no causality, no meaning. Sometimes what we’re observing is simply probability theory at work, our high school math books come alive.
Just now there’s a lot of interest out there in randomness, in chaos theory, and in probability, partly because these mathematical theories demonstrate that our intuition often leads us astray. Part of this renewed interest was caused by a little teaser in Parade Magazine in September of 1990, the magazine that comes with the Sunday paper. You mathematicians know it as the “Monty Hall Problem.”
For 27 years, Monty Hall hosted the TV game show “Let’s Make a Deal.” Contestants are faced with three doors. Behind one, say, is a sports car. Behind the other two are goats. Monty Hall knows what’s behind each door. So you, the contestant, choose a door-let’s say Door Number 1. Before he opens the door you chose, Monty Hall opens a different door and shows you that one of the goats is behind it. Then he says, “Do you want to stick with the door you picked, or do you want to switch to the other closed door?” The question is, should you switch?
Most people’s instincts tell them that it doesn’t make any difference, that either way they have a fifty-fifty chance of winning the car. But they are wrong. If you switch, you will double your chances of winning.
Here we go. When you chose Door Number 1, your chances of winning the car were one in three. Monty Hall reveals a goat behind Door Number 3. He’s not back there moving goats and cars around, so the chances of the car being behind Door Number 1 haven’t changed any-you still have a 1 in 3 chance that the car is behind Door Number 1. But Monty has eliminated Door 3 altogether. Therefore, if Door 1 only gives you a one third chance of winning, Door 2, the only one left must give you a two thirds chance. If you switch to Door 2, you will double your chances of winning. What we want to believe, what we think we know, just isn’t true. (If you want to try it yourself, get three playing cards and try it twenty times or so.)
In American culture today, it is popular to want to nurture and cultivate “the intuitive” part of one’s personality. Intuition is seen to be somehow warmer, or more spiritual, than “cold rationality.” But what I’m working toward this morning is a reminder that fact and scientific truths have their place in our religion. Scientific fact helps us guard against outright fraudulence, to be sure. But perhaps more important, mathematical science can be its own miracle, and when we recognize that miracle, we have available to use a kind of “warm rationality” that also deserves a place inside us.
Let’s look at basketball. The books I mentioned both talk about basketball. You know the feeling: You dribble, you shoot, you sink the ball. You dribble, you shoot again. Swish. Another shot, another two points. You’re on a roll. You’re confident. You’re hot. The players, the coaches, and the fans all know that the player has a “hot hand.” Almost everybody believes that players tend to shoot in streaks. In fact, 91% of the people asked believe that a player has “a better chance of making a shot after having just made the last two or three shots.” (Gilovich, p. 14, Paulos, 46)
Not true. If you actually study the games, if you record the numbers and do the math, you find that players are not any more likely to make a shot after making their last one, two, or three shots than after missing their last one, two, or three shots. There’s no such thing as a hot streak. If you have a hypothetical player who sinks a shot 50% of the time, pure chance would predict runs of 4, 5, or 6 baskets in a row, just as flipping a coin results in predictable long streaks of heads or tails.
Certainly, hot streaks, if they actually existed, would be amazing, exciting, miraculous. But to me, the hard, so-called “cold reality,” is even more amazing, exciting, and miraculous. What I like about it is this: A great deal in life seems random. Will the basketball sink into the net? There’s no telling for any given shot. None. But over time, what seems utterly unpredictable falls into a dependable pattern. That’s what “chaos theory” is all about. (see Chaos, James Gleick, 1988) Who knows whether any given coin flip will turn out to be heads or tails? But over a long enough period, you can count on the fact that it’ll be heads about half the time, and tails about half the time. So do we live in a random universe or is it predictable?
We human beings are funny. We seem to like feeling amazed, even when the chances of the event Occurring weren’t all that unlikely. Take birthdays. There are 366 possible birthdays. So if you have 367 people in a room, you know for sure that at least two people in the group have the same birthday. What if we wanted to be just 50% sure that two people in the room would share a birthday? How many people would have to be in the room? The answer is 23. Half the time that twenty-three people are gathered, two or more of them will share a birthday. To be truthful, if I were with 22 other people and two of them had the same birthday, I would think that was some special coincidence. But the truth is, the miracle is not in coincidence, but rather in the marvelous, dependable, predictability of the universe, that in a small room of people, one would reasonably expect that two people may have the same birthday.
I was once a high school exchange student for a year in Australia. While I was there, I knew another American exchange student. Years later, I ran into this fellow in a youth hostel in Denmark. I’ve always thought this to be an impressive coincidence; “What were the chances of my running into him?” But after reading these books, I’ve come to realize that the chances were much greater than I would have thought, that what’s impressive is that almost everyone can expect to have some kind of “it’s a small world” story. To my way of thinking, the logical response to what seems to be an amazing coincidence is not a belief in Providence, or synchronicity, or fate, or that something was “meant to be,” but simply to recognize the world as a pretty neat place, just on the face of it, just as it ordinarily operates. Myself, I was never very big on math. But I have learned some things this week. I have learned that one can expect a whole constellation of things to happen-to just happen. That one can expect some of us to get cancer, some of us to get a phone call from a kid selling magazines, some of us will win a trip to Disney World, some of us will get a grocery cart with a wheel that doesn’t turn right, some of us will die too young, some of us will inherit money from an unknown relative. I have learned that if the universe is operating in its usual random way, I can depend on all that.
And I have learned that we can decide to make meaning of the cancer, or the trip to Florida, or anything at all. Will I make something of my life, of this week, of the rest of the day? I decide.
And finally, I have learned that living in the midst of all that happens, the good things are abundant. John Murray lands in New Jersey. Or in that championship basketball game, you make a whole string of baskets in a row. Or you do get pregnant after all. Or you run into an old friend in a youth hostel in Denmark. We can expect all that.
May our eyes be open, and our hearts, and may we glory in the wonders that most certainly are ours.
Amen
Hymn
No. 345 With Joy We Claim the Growing Light
from Singing the Living Tradition
Closing Words
No. 694: “May the Love which overcomes all differences”
from Singing the Living Tradition
Questions for Discussion
by Joy D. Gasta
- This sermon is on the same general theme as Jane Rzepka’s sermon, “Is Anything Meant to Be?” How would you express her ideas about God? In what ways are her ideas like and unlike your ideas about God?
- Some people say they have trouble knowing how to exist in a world which is as random as Jane Rzepka’s. Do you? Why or why not? What helps you find moral order? What helps Jane Rzepka?
- In general, most UUs can tolerate more randomness and ambiguity than members of more fundamentalist denominations. How do you explain your views to them and to children, including your own?
- Our Religion - July 1, 2015
- Do you believe in God? - December 1, 2014
- The Glove in the Subway - May 1, 2014
