Imagine what might have happened had Jesus chosen a different time in history to appear! He could have been trapped in the ground instead of laid restfully on a stone slab! Would he have still been able to resurrect?

So, here’s the question: Did God recognize and seize the opportunity during that short century, or did God poke around inside the heads of Jews during this time suggesting that they start leaving bodies unburied for a while? Or was Jesus just lucky?

And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

//What a brilliant idea! If you want to make something like something else, make it out of that something else. If you want to make something like yourself, make it out of yourself.

God took of piece of Adam to make Eve. Adam, he formed out of the dust of the earth. But where did the dust of the earth come from?

Most believers assume creation ex nihilo, a Latin phrase meaning “from nothing.” God started with nothing and made something. The Bible never directly claims that God made everything from nothing, but many read Hebrews 11:3 to imply this: “By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made of things which are visible.” We take this to mean that the universe came into existence by divine command, rather than being assembled out of preexisting matter or energy.

But is this a valid interpretation? Does the verse in Hebrews instead say that God made everything out of the Word of God? (Do not think of Word as a spoken command; Jesus, for example, is the Word of God according to John’s Gospel.) Does this explain where God’s building materials came from? Did God take a piece of himself and create the universe from it? Is that how mankind wound up in the image of God?

This wouldn’t be pantheism, per se, but rather a flavor of panentheism … the idea that God both pervades and transcends the universe.

★★★★

In case you misread the subtitle, that’s physicists, not psychics!

I’ve seen them myself: arguments from modern physics that prove the existence of the Spirit (or some metaphysical phenomenon that justifies our spirituality or transcendentalism). I’ve seen the opposite, too: arguments from modern physics that debunk spirituality.

So Wilber’s book should be a hit. What do our best minds—the people who actually understand the physics of Quantum Theory, Relativity, and more—have to say on the topic? You’ll recognize a lot of the names in this book: Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Eddington, Pauli, Plank and more. This is a collection of essays by these men, with brief editing and an introduction by Ken Wilber.

Wilber culls the writings of these great minds to uncover their opinions, and discovers that they are virtually unanimous in the opinion that modern science can offer no support for mysticism in any variety. And yet they are all mystics of one sort or another! They simply do not believe modern physics can fully describe the universe we live in. Modern physics isn’t in opposition to spirituality, it is simply indifferent to it. Eddington explains: “We have learnt that the exploration of the external world by the methods of physical science leads not to a concrete reality but to a shadow world of symbols, beneath which those methods are unadapted for penetrating.”

If I had to choose a favorite essay, it would be “In the Mind of Some Eternal Spirit” by Sir James Jeans. Science is not yet in contact with ultimate reality, Jeans insists, and this is no surprise. Any meaning that the universe as a whole may have, would entirely transcend our terrestrial experience and so be totally unintelligible to us. The universe is a mathematical construct but—and don’t eschew the profundity of this claim—“the mathematics enters the universe from above instead of from below.” Jeans pictures the universe as consisting of “pure thought.” While Jeans may be the most daring of the bunch, the dualism of mind and matter is nevertheless a common theme.

Fascinating book which starts a bit slow (after a great introduction) and builds from there.

2. Luke 2:7 speaks of Mary “bringing forth her firstborn son.” This implies she had further sons later.

3. Various passages mention the brothers and sisters of Jesus, giving no hint that they do not refer to biological family.

It’s a doctrine that never did make much sense to me.

So here’s a question: If Mary was a “perpetual virgin,” why did she need purification? Today’s verses seem to suggest that Mary and Joseph went through the usual period of purification after the birth of Jesus before they took him to the temple.

Did the Catholic Church miss this little detail?