Ancient Truths
by Roger
M. Firestone, 33 KCCH
rfire@jtan.com
http://mastermason.com/rfire
In
Masonry, we are exposed to many symbols and emblems of philosophical content,
accompanied by lengthy lectures on morality and related principles. We are
proud to say that Masonry has existed "from time immemorial" and
trace the legendary history of the craft three thousand years into antiquity.
Perhaps the experienced members of the Craft overlook the question that this
may pose in the minds of newly admitted members: How can philosophical thinking
dating from two hundred and more years ago be of any meaning in this modern and
totally different world? Masonry is not alone in facing this question; it
confronts much of established religion as well. Surprisingly, the modern age is
beginning to develop some remarkable illustrations of the relevance of the ancient
truths we Masons profess, as these examples will illustrate.
A
sage of the Seventeenth Century Jewish sect called the Hasidim ("Righteous
Ones," approximately), said , "Keep two truths in your pocket and
take one or the other out as suits the needs of the moment. Let one be, 'The
universe was created for my sake.' Let the other be, 'I am but dust and
ashes.'" An earlier Jewish scholar, Akiba, once
said, "Everything is pre-ordained, yet free will is given."
Clearly,
the Hasid meant this advice as a counterbalance to his followers' changes in
mood from day to day, aiding them in the task we have all set ourselves of
subduing our passions. Yet he did not call them advice or epigrams, he called
them "truths." Likewise, Akiba intended his
statement to be understood as a representation of the true structure of the
world. How could wise men expect their followers to accept such contradictory
statements as both being true?
From
the philosophical point of view, we can attach symbolic meaning to these
statements and understand their truths in a non-literal sense. We may interpret
that for the universe to have been created for one's own sake, each of us is
responsible for doing as much good as he can during his time on earth. To be
reminded that we are "dust and ashes" is to admonish us against
arrogance and believing that we are better than others, which might thereby
lead us to mistreat them as our inferiors. Akiba's
formulation reminds us that each individual can choose his own deeds, no matter
how fixed the course of events seems. We recall that some ancient members of
the Craft chose to withdraw from a murderous conspiracy, which ultimately
absolved them of their guilt, even though the ultimate design was carried out.
In the modern-day tyranny of Nazism, there were those who took actions to
oppose it and save the lives of others, while dissidents in the
However,
not only can these various statements be given figurative interpretation, they
are in fact meaningful descriptions of the physical universe as scientists have
been able to describe it. As the technical details may be too much to plunge
into at first, it is worthwhile to consider a simpler and more familiar example
or two. Virtually everyone in the Western world is acquainted with the creation
story found in the book of Genesis. In the story of the expulsion from the
Garden of Eden, we read that, as punishment for having eaten from the Tree of
Knowledge, women are to bear children in pain and travail. There are a number
of interpretations of this passage, ranging from the literal fundamentalist
evaluation as actual history to radical feminist ones that view the story as
men creating a justification for oppression of women. From the point of view of
biology and medicine, however, there is nothing surprising about this story.
Physicians have known for quite some time that the primary reason for the
difficulty of human delivery as compared to that of the lower animals is the
comparatively large size of the human head at birth. Why is a baby's head so
large? Because each of us is born with every brain cell that we will ever have
in our lives. A smaller head size would not provide sufficient brain capacity
for the development of human-level cognitive potential. Thus, the ability to
know good from evil, as described in Genesis, is inextricably linked with the
pain and difficulty of human labor. When creating the Garden-of-Eden story, did
the ancient sages realize as much as is now understood by modern medicine but
formulate the story as an allegory so as to appeal to the less sophisticated
members of the community? We can only speculate.
Moving
from biology to physics, we can find a more advanced example earlier in
Genesis. During the Creation, as described there, we read that light was
created on the first day, yet the sources of light we now see, the sun, moon,
and stars, did not appear until later. Students of Scripture were puzzled at
how light could exist without any of the usual light-giving bodies, and many
interpretations were offered. Today, the widely-accepted Big Bang theory of
cosmology tells us that the description in Genesis is precisely the order in
which things occurred. Infinitesimal fractions of a second after the "Big
Bang," the universe consisted entirely of fundamental subatomic particles.
Within a very short time, the unstable ones broke down into the constituents of
today's universe: protons, neutrons, electrons, neutrinos and photons, or light
quanta. For the first several thousand years of the universe's existence,
energy, in the form of radiation, was the dominant element in the universe;
there was light everywhere, without stars or planets to shine or reflect it.
After an event known as "decoupling," matter replaced radiation as the
principal constituent of the universe. Millions of years later, as the universe
continued to expand and the temperature dropped, the primordial soup of
particles began to condense into atoms and they into macroscopic objects, such
as galaxies, stars, and ultimately the sun and moon. To be sure, this process
did not take the Biblical six days, and we can be quite certain that the
ancients who wrote Genesis I knew nothing of modern cosmology. Yet it is
surprising to find how much of this allegory from the distant past is confirmed
by our present sophisticated understanding of science.
The
philosophical paradoxes of later authors are going to require more effort to
comprehend, so let us now turn to Akiba's epigram and
consider the contradiction between free will and predestination. To a
scientist, it would be seen as a striking summation of the confluence of
microscopic and macroscopic worlds of physics. During the late 19th century,
classical physics developed the study of thermodynamics and the kinetic theory
of gasses. By the end of the century, the theory of atoms and molecules was
well-enough developed that the size and number of molecules was appreciated. A
cubic foot of air contains sextillions of molecules of its various component
elements, nitrogen, oxygen, argon, carbon dioxide, water vapor, and so on. The
classical physicists believed that they understood the mathematics underlying
the physics sufficiently that, if the behavior of each molecule could be
computed, the overall behavior of the gas would be known in every detail.
Those
physicists recognized that no such computation would be possible. Even the
computers of today, which can perform over a billion calculations a second,
would require many billions of years to predict the behavior of each individual
molecule in a roomful of air for even a fraction of a second. Yet the overall
properties of the behavior of gasses was known quite well nearly a hundred
years ago. In a sense, each molecule has "free will" while the gas as
a whole follows precise physical laws.
The
modern theory of quantum mechanics takes this one step further. The Heisenberg
Uncertainty Principle introduced indeterminacy into physics in a fundamental
sense. No longer was it merely our inability to perform the computations that limited
our knowledge, but rather the basic laws of physics themselves. Even when
dealing with a single molecule, atom, or subatomic particle, its behavior is
predictable only in a statistical sense. Nonetheless, the Bohr Complementarily
Principle makes it possible for everyday physical laws to continue to predict
behavior of the universe, just as they did before quantum mechanics was
discovered. Thus we see that much is predictable on a large scale, while
freedom or indeterminacy continues for the individual particle a singular
reflection of Akiba's statement.
So,
too, can it be said that we are dust and ashes. Current thinking in cosmology
and astrophysics is that the only atoms created by the process of the "Big
Bang" were hydrogen and helium, along with a ferocious torrent of
radiation. Yet we are clearly made of more substantial stuff. Where did the
carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements that make up our bodies and the
world around us come from? Astronomers believe they came from inside stars created
earlier in the history of the universe. These massive stars, far larger than
the Sun, burned their hydrogen atoms to helium by nuclear fusion. Much of the
helium, too, was likewise consumed, creating heavier atoms all the way up to
iron, the most stable nucleus. Without further fuel, there was no energy to
support the star's outer layers and the star collapsed, leading to a gigantic
explosion known as a supernova, such as the one that occurred in 1987 in the
sky of the Southern Hemisphere . The energy released in the explosion served
both to "cook" elements heavier than iron and distribute those
elements into interstellar space. These heavy elements were later condensed
from the interstellar dust by the formation of new solar systems, such as ours.
So we are literally composed of the "dust and ashes" of the explosion
of previous stellar systems, whose expiration made our existence possible.
Can
the universe really have been created for our sake? At first, this seems too
self-centered a notion to be entertained. From ancient times to the early
Renaissance, Aristotle, Ptolemy and their successors believed that the earth
was the center of the universe, and the sun, moon, planets, and stars all
revolved about it. The Copernican Revolution put an end to that. We no longer
believe that the Earth, the Sun, or even our own galaxy is the center of all
Creation. However, 20th century physics brought us both quantum mechanics and
relativity, and one curious feature of both these theories is that the observer
plays a critical role in determining what is observed. One famous "thought
experiment" of quantum mechanics ("Schršdinger's
cat") illustrates that the role of the observer can literally be a matter
of life and deathÑa cat in a sealed box can be
considered neither alive nor dead in any real sense until the box is opened and
the actual fact observed. (Here is a parallel to Masonry: No one can be made a
Mason passively, by communication; he must observe the degrees as a participant
to achieve enlightenment.)
Recent
thinking about the role of the observer in quantum mechanics has led to what is
known as the Anthropic Principle. Succinctly, it
states that the universe is the way we see it because we are here to make that
observation. In other words, a universe created differently (that is, with
different values of the fundamental constants of physics, for example) might be
a universe devoid of life. Perhaps there have been many creations, these
cosmologists reason, but only this one has the "recipe" correct for
there to be human beings alive in it. In this sense, we can see that indeed the
universe might have been created just for each one of us.
These
are not the only examples to be found. Nearly every religion expounds a Golden
Rule that advocates a balance between our behavior toward others and that of
others toward ourselves. How often have we found that a kindness to another is
returned to us through some unexpected means? In physics, we find that one of
the most powerful set of laws is that pertaining to symmetry and conservation.
There are dozens: Laws of conservation of energy, conservation of momentum,
conservation of charge, time-reversal symmetry, and so on. The realm of human
behavior as revealed thousands of years ago appears to be governed by just such
laws, as well.
At
first, we may be surprised that these ancient truths can find confirmation in
the theories of modern physics. Perhaps we should be less astonished when we
remember the words of Carlyle: "The universe is but one vast symbol of
God." The ultimate Source of Truth has many ways to reveal that Truth. We
should not be at all surprised to find that those different ways lead to the
same truth, whether through the philosophical and allegorical revelations
available to the ancients who lacked our knowledge of science, or through
modern-day understanding of the physical universe. But how much more should we
believe and follow these ancient doctrines when they are confirmed to us
through the science of a skeptical age!
Related
Reading
Wallace,
Malcolm P. "We Are Dust," The New Age, vol. XCIIII, #5 (1985 May), p.
53.
Misner,
Charles W., Thorne, Kip S., and Wheeler, John Archibald. Gravitation. W. H.
Freeman & Co., New York (1973). pp. 1272-3.
This
article originally appeared in the October 1988 issue of The Royal Arch Mason
magazine.