For the Love of Charges
Thinking through my first lecture on Solid State Physics, I realized I could use a different metaphysical picture other than Naturalism to account for the Telos (end or purpose) for physical events, In this case subatomic particles. (Metaphysics is the study of being, for something to be.)
Naturalism, according to the dictionary, is:
Any system of philosophy which refers the phenomena of nature as a blind force or forces acting necessarily or according to fixed laws, excluding origination or direction by a will.
So, in essence, it denies the mind. It is the defacto philosophy of most natural science today. But it’s showing its cracks. There are other better articles that explain naturalism’s problems. I just want to view the interpretation of the Science from a different angle, the angle naturalism denies: The mind.
There is an old way of viewing the cosmos, in which it moves and changes due to it’s love for it’s creator. All it’s rhythms are cosmic liturgy in praise of God. It’s usually only in church we hear the statement “The heavens declare the Glory of God, the sky proclaim the works of his hands” (Psalm 19:1), but it’s weird anywhere else. I wonder how many times we think about how electrons move because they Love their Creator.
But in that lecture, I saw it. It made sense. If nature is the product of infinite mind, and we are the thoughts of Trinitarian Love, then all movement is an act of Love. The negative charge moves in love towards the positive, in predictable ways, because Love is Liturgy. Repetitive Patterns like those in churches that happen in everyone’s lives, Done for purposes that end in Love.
I’m not sure I can explain the feeling of solving a beautiful math problem, equation or otherwise that describes physical events, or even no event. It’s like a flowing river of satisfaction from one step to the other. It’s a glimpse of the liturgy that is named Creation. A liturgy so immense, it makes you actually feel Psalm 19 in your bones.
There is a tendency among the charismatics and Pentecostals to shun Liturgy as “vain repetition”, and value spontaneity. But God isn’t confused, and all spontaneous acts are the start of new orders of repetition. Not all repetition is vain (or else your daily life is vain, as it is filled with repetition that is meaningful). There is no way out of Liturgy, not even Pentecostals can escape, your search for spontaneity is itself a repeating process, a Liturgy.
We are to move “in tune” with the Universe, not in the sense that popular pseudo-spirituality does it, which is just individualist selfishness masked as faith, but by actually doing what the Universe does: To Praise, to Love. It’s not about you, it’s about Him. Lose yourself to find you, as He said. It is in the Electron’s unyielding love for the Proton that it is truly an electron, and vice versa.