Dimensional Perspective

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I really like this particular cartoon from the webcomic xkcd, to which I am linked by a cousin from time to time. It shows what could be extrapolated to us about higher intelligences than we, and shows the folly of concluding that just because we can't find it that it must not exist.

The limit of science is in the mind of those who design its experiments. People must first be able to conceive of a way to investigate a question and secondly devise a means with which to detect what they wish to measure. Frequently, as the ants, we use what we know, our 'common types of pheromones', and finding nothing conclude that it must not exist. As I told my students a few Fridays ago, frequently the outliers are the most interesting subjects for future study.

We don't investigate thoroughly enough. Partly, this is practical. It's exhaustive to use every technique and standard of which we know. It's also extremely expensive to run some of the machines available to us. Furthermore, graduate students want to graduate, and so they are disinclined to stay in school earning $20,000/year to boost the resume of their professors for year after year after year. Yet, we often ignore the things that are most important or that might be most important to a specific individual.

For years and years, I heard talk about how most of our genome was 'junk' DNA. As I studied and investigated in graduate school myself, I learned that most of it is necessary for the scaffold of use. God went to a great deal of trouble to built this intricate scaffold to make sure that things were activated when appropriate to the appropriate levels and in the appropriate context/tissue/event. What we once ignored is now a central focus of investigatory research. What might be more immediately visible is how when scientists pointed the Hubble at the darkest part of the night sky, they found tons and tons of galaxies in a part of space that previously went completely ignored.

If there is a God, or anything else between him and us intellectually and maturationally speaking, and I know this to be true, it could easily obscure its existence from us if it chose. What is perhaps more interesting is that God sometimes does communicate his presence to us, and how, because it is often to people or in ways that make very little sense to us. That our science hasn't found him is our fault. God isn't dead, we're just looking for him in ways that are not common to us both.

I believe in God as I believe in the noon-day sun, not that I can see it, but that by it I can see everything. --CS Lewis