I’ve been wandering recently in the unreal estate of mathematical infinity, where ‘recently’ has zero meaning. In fact infinity may be an alternate way of thinking about God. Among other things, it’s a conceptual space where multiple mirror universes are not only possible, but inevitable. So it seemed rather perfect when I surfaced for a gulp of air this week to find that Adit, a reader in Indonesia, honored me last year by putting me into The Sims. Or rather, an alternative representation of me: an avatar.

The Sims, says Wikipedia, is “a strategic life simulation video game series.” Since I had to go to Wikipedia, it’s clear I’m no gamer, but I’m guessing you might think of it as an alternative universe which may or may not be related to this one.  Which might mean that I may or may not be related in an alternative kind of way to Virginia Woolf, looking all cool and austere and maybe just a little bit fey.

It’s heady stuff, this simulation business. As is infinity. But it looks like my avatar just made a safe landing in a Virginia-Woolf-era plane — thanks, Adit! — so I’m hoping real life simulates the simulation:

This came in as a comment from someone called Bob.  It seems to be a response primarily to my previous post, Guilt By Drone, and the earlier Armed to the Eyeballs.  I’m running it as a separate post with a kind of wondering bemusement at its rather low level of literacy and humanity, and its rather high one of piety and righteousness.  Am particularly intrigued by his saying “too many guns and killing of children by drones, and all I see are complaints,” and by the almost delightful non sequitur of his concluding with “thank you and God bless.”

I read some of the posts like guilty by drone and armed to the eyeballs and I thought, wow are these people serious, to much of an military to many guns and the killing of children by drones and all I saw we’re complaints. Well if your not happy with the free, great country America than why don’t you leave I mean come on your lucky to have such a dedicated military like ours and truly I don’t know if you’ve realized this but the only way to gain peace is through war I’m sorry but that’s basically how no doubt about it. Our military keeps this country safe and under our lord and savior and keeps us the nation we are. No ones perfect and we can’t make everyone happy in this world sorry, and what are we just gonna sit back and watch our country get attacked like 9/11 saying o please don’t hurt us let’s make peace well wake up not everyone wants that and the reason we send drones and kids die is because unfortunately that’s how it has to be why I don’t know and neither do you but each decision we make has a impact and is for the greater good so give thanks to who we are and how great of a military we have and how much you and I have. Thank you and God bless

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Later:  novelist Michael Gruber posted a brief but cogent analysis of Bob’s thinking on my Facebook page.  Here it is:

“The statement arises naturally from the characterization of 9/11 (which we owe to Mr Bush) as an act of existential evil, rather than as a political act with its own logic. The man’s premises are that the USA is an exceptional nation under the special protection of Christ, and thus any attack against it is not a political act but a move in a cosmic contest, in which an apocalyptic response by the American military is not only justified, but required.

“The logic moves from the legitimate desire to punish the organizers of the attack, to the desire to punish those who are “like” the attackers, which results in killing those associated with those who are like the attackers, to, ultimately, the punishment of the societies who produce those who are like the attackers.

“A similar progression characterized WW2, in which the world was shocked when the fascist nations bombed cities, after which it was considered legitimate to bomb the cities of the fascists into rubble. This at least had the amoral logic of tit for tat. But in the present situation, some militants kill their own people in pursuit of sectarian triumph, and we drone kill the militants and their kin, so that . . . And here we lose the last scraps of logical policy. At some level we [I’m assuming he means US policy-makers — LH] sort of agree with this bozo.”

Hey,  I know time is supposed to have speeded up recently – the Web, mass connectivity, and all that.   I know everything seems to be going faster than we can keep up with.  But this fast?  Turns out we’ve gone and created our very own geological era — entirely human-made.  Goodbye, Holocene.  Welcome to what scientists now call the Anthropocene era.

Yup, a whole new geological era created not by glaciation, mass extinction, or the impact of giant asteroids, but by us, by human impact on  the planet.  And we’ve done it in record time:  a mere two hundred years.  Which is less than a blink of an eye in geological terms.  In fact it’s a blink of an eye within a blink of an eye.

The latest issue of the Royal Society’s journal ‘Philosophical Transactions’ (in Brit-speak, that ‘philosophical’ actually means mathematical, physical and engineering sciences, but please don’t ask why) is devoted entirely to this astonishing  development.  It calls the Anthropocene “a vivid expression of the degree of environmental change on planet Earth.”  Human activity, it reports, beginning with the start of the Industrial Revolution, has so altered the atmosphere that it has created a whole new geological period.

Howzat for achievement?  We’ve sped up geology.  In fact we’ve turned it into a dinosaur.  Forget waiting for millions or billions of years.  Who has the time?

Now, call me a nerd, but I love geology.  In fact anyone who’s spent any serious amount of time in the desert has to love geology.  The desert is the one place where you see the earth naked, stripped bare — no loam or trees or buildings to hide the bedrock of existence.  It’s the one place that reminds you how petty the human scale of time is – the one place you can see the span of time on an infinitely greater scale than the human, which has to be why the desert is so often a place of mystical experience.

I once spent a year wandering the Sinai desert, and in that year, rock — the one thing we think most solid — became fluid.  I could stand on a rise and see the bands of different layers of rock, let my eye follow the patterns they made as they pushed up, lifted, bent, tilted, even tipped over.  In the rock, I could see billions of years:  the warp of time treating solid rock as though it were fluid, weaving and bending it with immense power.   I could actually see time, that is — see the physical manifestation of vast geological forces.

I could feel it too.  I could pick up a stone and realize that I was holding hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of years in my hand.  I could climb to the top of Mount Sinai (yes, this is Mount Sinai, on the right) and realize that I was standing on a huge piece of lava that had been thrust up through red granite from deep inside the earth, with a force so great it split the granite apart.   So the mountain forced an extraordinary realignment of my whole concept of time, human and geological.  Not much distance, you might say, between the geological and the theological.

But now I have to realign my concept of time all over again.  What we’ve done is  force geological time into the inordinately briefer span of human time;  we’ve actually compressed time, forced geological magnitude into a little over two human lifespans.

Talk about playing God.

For the last two weeks, I’ve been deeply engaged in what I know to be a futile pursuit.   It’s called writing:  in this case, part of the biography of Muhammad I’m working on.   Specifically, this agnostic Jew has been trying to ‘understand’ the pivotal gnostic moment of Islam – what happened the night on Mount Hira, outside Mecca, when Muhammad had his first Quranic revelation.  In other words, I’ve been trying to fathom, in words, the unfathomable, or what is beyond words.

I was fully aware that this might be a pretty good definition of the absurd, yet even so, I kept trying.  That’s an essential part, for me, of being an agnostic:  that faith in inquiry, in not acknowledging boundaries, in pushing the envelope of exploration.  This may be hubris or chutzpah (or maybe just plain dumb), but it seems to work, at least so far.

Others, though, seem to find it confusing, especially if their image of an agnostic is of someone who can’t make up her mind — someone so bullied by the loud shouts and louder certainties of those who claim to know (both theists and atheists) that she feels guilty for her uncertainty.

So let this be the first in a series of posts, over time, that I’ll call an agnostic manifesto.

For a start:  That wishy-washy hang-dog I-don’t-know-ness is not agnosticism at all.  On the contrary, agnosticism is a solid intellectual position.  I see it as a recognition of human limitation.  A position of great integrity (go on, accuse me of hubris!).  And a fine safeguard against the inhumanity of certainty.

Unless you are under the illusion that the bearded old man up on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is anything other than a visual metaphor, no matter how good his musculature, you really have no idea exactly what God might be.  You might have a sense of it (yes, it, not him or her – let’s stop the anthropomorphism right now), intuit it, occasionally even catch a glimpse of it.  On a mountaintop at sunset, for instance.  Or when listening to music.  Or on a psychedelic drug, or in meditation or prayer, or in the most common “oh God” moment of all, orgasm.  Any of these and more are moments of what Freud called “oceanic consciousness,” of being lifted out of your separate self into a feeling of being without boundaries, part of something greater.  Call them intimations of the divine, perhaps.

You recognize such moments as going beyond your everyday human existence, and thus think of them as metaphysical – literally beyond physics.  Beyond comprehension.  Magical.  Mysterious.

But despite all the attempts of mystics great and small, we have no language for mystery.  We’re stuck with words and images, and so words and images tend to become the thing itself, and this grand intuition of mystery, however you might conceive of it, is reduced to the dismayingly literal.

Being human, that is, we cut our sense of divinity down to size.  (Just think a moment of that small, short name in English, God.  I’ve begun to think of it as “the TLW” — the three-letter word – a disappointing shorthand, almost a pet name, that doesn’t even reverberate on the tongue as does the musical name of Allah in Arabic.)

And I refuse to do this.  The first step in that refusal is to acknowledge not just the limitations of my own knowledge, but more important, the concept of unknowability.   We’re talking (absurdly) about the untalkable, the unknowable.   That’s the mystery of it.  So I don’t say this out of any fake sense of humility or modesty.  No way:  I say it out of pleasure.  I enjoy unknowability.

Some people might think of this as a deeply religious stance, while others might see it as an utterly pragmatic one.   Me?  I feel no need to define it.  I may be engaged in a futile pursuit, but hell, it’s a splendid one.