Just Following the Crowd

Sunday, October 12, 2014, I went for the third time to represent Mormons Building Bridges (MBB) in the Atlanta Pride Parade. The first year was an uplifting, eye-opening experience. Mine and my brother's families had a sign made and showed up to join the unknown person who had registered MBB. That person didn't show, but was at least partly responsible for getting us there. Many people along the way were surprised and grateful to see Mormons marching in support of their gay brothers and sisters. Several people watching and participating in the parade told us how they or someone they knew had felt rejected by the church, or even that they had left because the church wouldn't accept that loved one. One man told us how his partner had left the LDS church years before, but he knew his partner still cared about Mormonism and felt the loss, from time to time. He was so sincerely grateful to have someone publicly reaching out.

The second year, we had a couple additional people join us, but with some of our family members sitting out our numbers weren't much bigger. Still, we felt supported and hopeful.

This third year there were a few more people interested in joining us, but sickness, a death, and unknown reasons meant it was just me and my brother, again. We dragged along our little kids, and a couple of the older ones who understood the importance to me and my brother, and had another good year. But if this is just us following the crowd and jumping on the band-wagon of tolerance and support for gay rights, it's the loneliest band-wagon I've ever been on.

I am happy when gays find love and support in just being themselves. As my church has recognized, ". . . individuals do not choose to have such attractions. . . ." (http://mormonsandgays.org/) And, "With love and understanding, the Church reaches out to all God’s children, including our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters." I want to make this true where I live. Right now it's just nice words. So maybe it's time for me to put my shoulder to the wheel on this band-wagon the Church has endorsed, and publicly reach out with love to those three or four or five young people that are growing up in my ward. The ones who are just realizing, or will realize in the next ten years, that they are gay, or lesbian, or transgender, or queer, or some other thing that we only barely recognize exists in our church. Something that they didn't choose, but now have to live with. Somehow those few people need to know that I am their ally.

I don't know how to do it. While I feel Mormon to my core, what people see on the outside borders on barely active. Family and work demands make the kind of activity I used to rely on to let people see my commitment an impossibility. So I not only live on the fringe of my ward intellectually and doctrinally, but now physically, too. I sing with the choir, and I'm intensely sincere (about everything). Plus, there are many loving people in our ward, and we are pretty easy to think of as normal, so we aren't complete outsiders. But I no longer have a regular way to reach out. My calling doesn't involve teaching or speaking. Childcare means I hardly ever participate in classes. I have no natural interactions with the youth, and no intention of forcing issues on people who aren't interested in them. True Mormonism is my crusade, not gay rights, or gender rights, or any other single issue, so I don't want to push something just because I am obsessed with it.

Still, I have to come out of the closet in my home town. I have to let people see me more. How? We will see. I'll give it some time and take more baby steps, but I haven't moved much forward from two years ago. It is time.

Reason, Love, Life, and Choice

For my birthday in 2000, my father gave me one of his favorite books--the Collected Poems of Wendell Berry. I read it infrequently and slowly, but there is a lot of beauty in it. Here is an excerpt from his poem "The Design of a House", followed by one I wrote after coming home from my mission and remembering from before I left. It was a good, but emotional time. I share these now, on the occasion of my third son's birth.

The Design of a House

5.
If reason was all, reason
would not exist--the will
to reason accounts for it;
it's not reason that chooses
to live; the seed doesn't swell
in its husk by reason, but loves
itself, obeys light which is
its own thought and agrues the leaf
in secret; love articulates
the choice of life in fact; life
chooses life because it is
alive; what lives didn't begin dead,
nor sun's fire commence in ember.

Love foresees a jointure
composing a house, a marriage
of contraries, compendium
of opposites in equilibrium.
This morning the sun
came up before the moon set;
shadows were stripped from the house
like burnt rags, the sky turning
blue behind the clear moon,
day and night moving to day.

Let severances be as dividing
budleaves around the flower
--woman and child enfolded, chosen.
It's a dying begun, not lightly,
the taking up of this love
whose legacy is its death.

I think I felt it. . .

1998

I think I felt it then—
It stretched me every way
You can imagine when
It came, and as it lay
Within my breast, and filled
My mind with images
Of hope, and when it stilled
My heart with kindnesses.
Then it died as some would say.
I think it has just moved away
To some other place. And when
It will return we’ll hear again,
Overused, the phrase, “My how
You’ve grown."—I think I feel it now.

Time Is Real, Part I

Time is real. Some of you may be thinking, of course. What's your point? Others of you might be saying, no way. I've studied physics and philosophy, or I've studied theology, and time is just an illusion. It is literally only measured unto men, and there are definitely things that transcend time. As a Mormon, I'm going to add my voice to Lee Smolin's physicist voice, and say that to move forward most effectively we need to give up the idea of things outside of time. The laws of physics are laws inside of time, tied to relationships among matter and energy, and evolving as time progresses and new properties emerge. God is within time, and while we may not fully understand His power or knowledge, God only transcends our current existence in the way that humanity may eventually transcend itself. I know Smolin is a proclaimed atheist, but I am passionately drawn to his ideas, so it's time for a review of another of his books: Time Reborn.

What follows is a summary with some commentary. If my summary doesn't make sense, and you are interested, check the book out from the library. It is very approachable and easy to follow. He doesn't weigh the discussion down with difficult technical details, but he also isn't boring for someone familiar with the history and subject matter. I can also try to answer some questions in the comments.

Summary

Chapter 1

Properties that transcend time and space are attractive to us for explaining the universe, but will never be as productive as explanations limited to within the observable universe, because they can never be tested.

Chapter 2

Isaac Newton made math an amazingly powerful tool for unifying and describing the universe, but time went away in his conception. Newton posited absolute space and time through which everything moved. Relativity got rid of absolute space (but not transcendent time).

Chapter 3

Mathematics is not reality. It is an incomplete representation of reality, particularly because it is timeless. It doesn't include the experience of now. Smolin introduces some loaded language at this point, and possibly a false dichotomy. He calls the person who believes math is reality a mystic (I agree), and the person who views math as an incomplete representation a pragmatist (I agree again). However, I'm not sure either is truly free of mysticism. I suppose we will see how far Smolin gets with this distinction.

Chapter 4

Science by reduction. This is a great, non-technical explanation of how reductionism works and the assumptions it introduces. The idea is that everything can be described as isolated systems where we know the initial conditions and the rules that govern changes. Thus, the whole history (and future) of the universe could be theoretically known if we simply understood all the laws and the initial conditions (or conditions at any time) of the entire universe.

Chapter 5

Determinism is an immense claim. Every aspect of our great-great-grandchildren's future was determined and theoretically knowable back at the Big Bang. A favorite quote from this chapter is about Smolin's relationship with Einstein:

Later I discovered that there's very little in physics to match the conceptual clarity and elegance of Einstein's theories. . . . But because I began with Einstein, his work became my scientific standard and his theories of relativity became my touchstones, their principles as sacred as any text could be to one schooled in the skepticism of science. pp. 54-55

I do wonder about this quote, though. Is it really impossible for someone schooled in the skepticism of science to find things truly sacred? Or impossible for one who believes in the sacred to be correctly schooled in science? I don't believe it, and think Smolin limits himself by taking this stance, but that's not very relevant to the current chapter.

Chapter 6

Special and general relativity are deterministic and they make the present even less special than it was with Newton. We can't even agree on when now is, so time must not be fundamental. Plus, time had a beginning, while the laws of relativity somehow transcend that time, so time is just one more element of timeless spacetime.

Chapter 7

Quantum cosmology (in some forms) says everything is now. We just experience one (collection) of nows, but all of them are real and eternally present. Time is an illusion.

Interlude

At this point Smolin shifts from showing how time was turned into an illusion to beginning his argument for why it is real. I give two quotes:

If science must tell a story that encompasses and explains everything we observe in nature, shouldn't that include our experience of the world as a flow of moments? Isn't the most basic fact about how experience is structured a part of nature that a fundamental theory of physics should incorporate?

Everything we experience, every thought, impression, action, intention, is part of a moment. The world is presented to us as a series of moments. We have no choice about this. No choice about which moment we inhabit now, no choice about whether to go forward or back in time. No choice to jump ahead. No choice about the rate of flow of the moments. In this way, time is completely unlike space. (p. 92)

In other words, science that doesn't recognize the reality of time is very likely an incomplete representation, rather than our perception of time being an illusion. At this point, Smolin lists the arguments that removed time from reality and that he now needs to address to reestablish the reality of time.

The nine arguments fall into three classes:  
Newtonian arguments (that is, arguments stemming from Newton's physics or Newton's paradigm for doing physics):

• The freezing of motion by graphing records of past observations (Chapter 1)
• The invention of the timeless configuration space (Chapter 2)
• The Newtonian paradigm (Chapter 3)
• The argument for determinism (Chapter 4-5)
• Time-reversibility (Chapter 5)

Einsteinian arguments, stemming from the theories of special and general relativity:

• The relativity of simultaneity (Chapter 6)
• The block-universe picture of spacetime (Chapter 6)
• The beginning of time in the Big Bang (Chapter 6)

Cosmological arguments, stemming from extending physics to the universe as a whole:

• Quantum cosmology and the end of time (Chapter 7)

Now it's on to part II of the book--just as soon as I finish reading it.

A Fatherhood Manifesto

Maybe an overblown title for this post, but here is a favorite quote of mine that has shaped how I view fatherhood and life. From The Emperor’s Embrace: Reflections on Animal Families and Fatherhood, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Pocket Books, 1999, pp. 203-209

We evolved (this means that historically we come from an ancestral environment where it was adaptive to do certain things that have had an impact both on our biology and on our psyche) to share a bed with our infants. . . .
We evolved to feed our infants whenever they are hungry. . . .
We evolved to respond quickly to the cries of a baby. . . .
Fathers evolved to stay with their children throughout their entire childhoods, eighteen years or longer. . . .
We evolved (especially fathers!) to play with our children on a daily basis. Prolonged play (many hours of it every day) is good for the baby, good for the father, good for the mother (it gives her a break), and provides essential stimulation. Even more important, play provides memories of touch and sensation that give the infant feelings of happiness and playfulness that, if missed, can never be made up for by any amount of later physical pleasures.
We evolved to travel with our children. No other animal species posts signs warning that an establishment is for adults only; no other species holds parties for which the invitation states that children are not welcome. . . . We did not evolve to have the family broken up for anything but a fraction of the day. . . .
We evolved to be in the natural environment. . . . No wonder children get bored when they are confined indoors. . . . Research has shown that babies are happiest when they are carried while the parents are walking at a speed of three to four miles per hour. . .
. . . we appear to be the only species that can consciously choose how involved we want to be as fathers.
We can learn to be less like bears, lions, male elephants, and Hanuman langurs, and more like penguins and mallee fowl, wolves and foxes, beavers and sea horses, marmosets and tamarins, prairie dogs and tropical frogs.

No Higher Authority

Graduate Student Expertise

Sometime during graduate school, I became the expert. No, I did not understand everything. I still felt small, inexperienced, and sometimes quite dense around brilliant and experienced thermodynamicists, structural biologists, molecular biologists, crystallographers, and various other specialists. But at some point, after studying, experimenting, analyzing data, writing, and doing them all again and again, I knew a handful of things better than anyone else in the world. When something went wrong, I could go to my adviser, or to one of my associates, and ask for advice, encouragement, or even help, but I couldn't ask for answers. They didn't have them. No one did. I was the expert. I knew more and had better answers than anyone else on this very narrow, arcane subject. I had to trust myself.

I'm sure graduate school isn't the only place where a person can become an expert, but it's important to note the kind of expertise I'm talking about. It may not be a very important expertise--who cares about the preferential interactions of trimethylamine-N-oxide with potassium glutamate? Besides me, that is. Yet original research can result in a different kind of expertise than is typically acquired in professional programs where there is a relatively well-defined body of knowledge that everyone is expected to acquire to be called expert. It's like getting part way through law school and being asked to make a ruling for the Supreme Court. Way less important, but you are it. There is no higher authority to turn to for a decision. This is why graduate school is only the beginning for research scientists. Yeah, it's cool that you got through and got your PhD, but that's just permission to venture out on your own, not proof that you are a competent scientist. A PhD means you just might have picked up that skill of becoming your own ultimate authority on subjects where no one knows the answers.

So I have a PhD, and maybe I'm a scientist. Mostly, I'm a teacher, but I do occasionally help other scientists with their research, and I help a few undergraduates with some little projects when I can. But I did at least once have this amazing (and sometimes traumatic) experience of asking questions and digging at them until I became the expert.

Questioning Mormonism

I have lived my life with a brand of Mormonism that loves questions. Questions have been there since the very beginning. Asking has been the command since before I cared about knowing for myself and not relying on parents or teachers. Since I was a teenager I've bridled at implications that there are questions that shouldn't be asked, or things that should just be accepted without trying to understand the reasons, or that there are unimportant questions (just because someone else thinks they are trivial). I felt like people with those attitudes didn't really understand Mormonism, and I willingly joined the quote wars to show that my viewpoint was supported by scripture and General Authorities. Now I tend to fight on my turf and worry less about differences, but there are times and places where the tension still causes me distress.

I'll mention a fact that almost doesn't need mentioning--in the LDS church, only the president of the church can speak with conclusive authority on any matter of policy, doctrine, or theology. Until you are the prophet, there is always a higher ecclesiastical authority who can overrule your answers. And even then, God can overrule the prophet. So until you are God, there is always a higher authority. So what's the purpose of learning to find answers for yourself? Why take the risk of being wrong and being corrected or even abused? Yes, it feels good to find answers, but I think there is eternal purpose to learning to be the expert.

God is in the business of making independent creators. It seems likely to me that the cosmos is so vast and varied that even God, with his life and knowledge reaching toward eternity, can never know everything that is or will be. If this is the case, then God is bent on making us the experts. He will raise us up until we are learning things that not even the Gods know, yet. We can turn to each other for advice, encouragement, or even help, but there will be no higher authority.

Shame in the sight of the all-seeing eye

I grew up with the idea of God seeing everything we did. It got even worse thinking about dead ancestors and future children in the spirit world viewing our successes and failures--hoping we would marry the right person or seeing if we would keep the commandments and end up in heaven with them. That's what you get with my Mormon belief that the spirit world is right here, around us. It was a particularly shaming thought when I would be masturbating as a young man. It was bad enough thinking about some relatively abstract, but generally benevolent, God knowing I was "sinning", but to think about my sometimes judgmental Grandpa (I'm pointing out a flaw, but he was on the whole an amazing friend and mentor for me) watching my mistakes was really disturbing, and it appears that I couldn't even imagine a female relation seeing what I was up to. I guess I figured my guardian angels would all be men. A few different scenarios went through my head. One was that the good spirits left when they saw where I was headed so that they wouldn't have to see me sin. I would leave if I came across someone watching porn or about to masturbate. But later I decided that they would just have to be more charitable than many people in the world around me. If they are going to be exposed to my mistakes all the time, and still care about me, they will have to love me for some reason besides my perfection. This is what I think is real, now. The good spirits that haunt my life--if they are really haunting me--view me with a completeness that is much more than my mistakes, my weaknesses, or even my sins. They see my weakness without shame, without harsh judgment, and without trying to take advantage of it. Maybe they can't take advantage of it, but this is what I want to talk about.

More and more in our world, everything we do is being recorded. Every click of a mouse leads to targeted advertising guaranteed to make money for somebody playing on our desires. It's not about providing us with needed services, or even services that substantially enrich our lives, for the most part. There are the exceptions, and I'm completely in favor of those, but they are exceptional. We are also aware of the abuses of governmental security agencies collecting data on everyone. Our employers' IT departments, and our internet service providers can know all the websites we visit, and could probably learn more if they cared to. The effectiveness of search algorithms is going to make learning our online life histories (and eventually offline for any activities that get caught on camera and linked to the web) more and more trivial. The amount of truly private information is going to continue to shrink. Research into how the mind works will give advertisers even more power to control our lives. We will only be safe from government scrutiny by being uninteresting to governments, but even that safety will shrink as the ability to respond to various people and situations becomes automated and can be delegated to computers. It really isn't much of a stretch to imagine a future where we real human beings are a lot like the spirit relatives of my youthful imaginings. We will be able to see and know the sins of our neighbors, if we really want to. We will have evidence on which to judge one another just a spoken search query away, and only innocent children will be free of reproach.

I think there are two types of choices we can make to be happy and safe in a world where nothing we do outside our heads is private. Reality is we probably have to make both, but I think only the second will lead to the ultimate flourishing of humanity. The first is regulating the information that can and may be accessed by people or organizations in positions of power. But let's face it, most of us like it that Google and Facebook tailor our searches and feeds to our particular interests, and we don't mind losing some hypothetical privacy, as long as there isn't obvious abuse of our trust. Regulation isn't going to get us to our perfect world--at least not regulations designed to limit and control. I think Pandora has opened the box, and we might as well let Hope out, too.

I believe Hope is a fundamental change in ourselves and our societies, but not simply a utopian ideal. The ultimate goal is a Zion society, where there are no rich or poor, and everyone is of one heart and one mind. In the past this has happened after great upheaval, and it's very likely that no rich or poor meant everyone was poor by modern standards. It meant the cities and states were isolated, and without large, central governments, which meant in turn that life was essentially subsistence living, with limited trade, commerce, and specialization, and that farming practices only had the ability to support relatively small populations. The happiness and peace experienced were good, but life spans were short, all the perils of nature still remained, and knowledge of the world extended at most a few hundred miles. For good or ill, medicine, modern transport, modern agriculture, and Wikipedia came out of that same Pandora's box that has given us NSA wiretaps and surveillance drones. We don't really want to go back, even if we might be sent there the next time Yellowstone decides to explode. So the question is, can we mimic the key aspects of Zion in our wealthy, modern world? Or do we have to return to the ages of early death and living at the immediate mercy of nature? I hope that we can become Zion, and I believe science can help bring out our better natures. It won't save us, but there is no reason not to use it to speed God's work of salvation.

To begin, we have to focus on the key aspects of Zion that we might measure. I can see three pretty clearly:

• Wealth and power are not centralized. Concentrate one and you concentrate the other, and there is no way to have the economic equality that can be described as no rich and no poor. Thus the ultimate fall of Communism--lots of power to a few to force equality among the rest. This will be the downfall of any economic system which promotes and maintains unhealthy differentiation among God's children--haves and have nots, contributors and dead weight, rulers and governed, instead of fellow citizens (Eph. 2:19), brothers and sisters (Rom. 8:14-17), and friends (D&C 84:63).
• Knowledge and learning are provided to all, as much as each is able to claim. Otherwise, we again have the creation of unnecessary class distinctions.
• Abuses of vulnerability are eliminated. Without a deep sense of safety one with another, can we imagine becoming of one heart and one mind? Nature may rage against us, but it is our hearts and minds that prevent Zion, not the natural ills of this world.

I'll admit Capitalism and Democracy are huge leaps forward over Tribalism, Feudalism, Monarchy, and other governmental and economic systems the world has seen thus far. And I'm sure other people could write lists of ways that technology is diffusing wealth and power--micro-loans, more effectively targeted charitable donations, crowd-sourced capital, and empowered and globalized grassroots activism. The free resources for democratizing knowledge and learning are astounding, to the point of threatening my livelihood as a teacher if I'm unwilling or unable to change with the times. It is the third area where many of us are surprised to learn that science can help us advance, yet these are the advances that must be the foundation of sustained success in the realms of wealth, power, and knowledge.

You may ask, what science is going to help us feel safe with all the strangers that can shape our lives in this global, technologically empowered world? My partial answer is: science that will help us restructure our organizations, our communities, our friendships, our families, and ourselves--our very ways of thinking and reacting. This brings us back to where I began. Am I afraid of others knowing everything I do? Is an all-seeing God an object of fear? How about when we find that the all-seeing god is a whole bunch of people like ourselves? Will I be ashamed? Will I be afraid of how others will abuse their knowledge of me? I now believe any spirits watching over me either don't care, or view me with more love than I even view myself, and it doesn't matter if they are watching or not. I'm not that confident as regards the judgments of other mortals. One of the best known researchers in the field of shame and vulnerability is Brene' Brown. I started out thinking I would review some sections of her book, Daring Greatly, but one long blog post later, I'm going to give you just a taste. Here is her Leadership Manifesto, since it relates most closely to this post:

The Daring Greatly Leadership Manifesto

To the CEOs and teachers.  To the principals and the managers.  To the politicians, community leaders, and decision-makers:

We want to show up, we want to learn, and we want to inspire.
We are hardwired for connection, curiosity, and engagement.
We crave purpose, and we have a deep desire to create and contribute.
We want to take risks, embrace our vulnerabilities, and be courageous.

When learning and working are dehumanized–when you no longer see us and no longer encourage our daring, or when you only see what we produce or how we perform–we disengage and turn away from the very things that the world needs from us: our talent, our ideas, and our passion.

What we ask is that you engage with us, show up beside us, and learn from us.

Feedback is a function of respect, when you don’t have honest conversations with us about our strengths and our opportunitites for growth, we question our contributions and your commitment.

Above all else, we ask that you show up, be yourself, be seen, and be courageous.  Dare Greatly with us.

You can download some other summary quotes here. One message I take away from Dr. Brown's shame and vulnerability research is that we can become people, and create organizations, where vulnerability flourishes and shame doesn't last. There are actionable choices we can make and policies we can develop or support that favor interconnection and take away the power of shame and abuse. At this link you can find her rightly famous TED talks, and some other interviews. I hope you find time to enjoy them.

Some people might say that conflict is hardwired into us as humans, and we will never overcome it, since it is part of our biology. That may be true, but the work of Brene' Brown and others suggests that we might yet become less violent and competitive and more wholehearted through our "social technologies" (not her phrase). By restructuring our relationships--within government, community, church, and the workplace, as well as our personal relationships--we can change how the world works. Our biology actually thrives in safely vulnerable environments. That doesn't mean vulnerability is easy or comfortable, just that it is healthy and productive. As we overcome the culture of scarcity (and perhaps even move into a future of plenty, but we don't have to wait until then), we can become more fulfilled, more creative, more loving, more innovative, and more resilient in the face of hardship. We don't have to become superhuman first, we just need to help each other become more fully and richly human. Then, as our powers increase, they will not threaten the well being, or even existence, of humanity, but will aid us in building Zion. And we will know it because we will be of one heart and one mind.

The Universe Chose to Be

I believe in Free Will. I also believe that nearly everything that happens in our observable universe is determined by very strict laws of nature, and that these laws even govern how thoughts happen in our minds. But I'm not interested in the debates about whether or not we have non-deterministic free will. I want to understand the free will I do have. I want to know what choices are really mine so I can stop wasting time on trying to choose things beyond my abilities. I'm not about to try to become a professional athlete. There is no set of choices I could make at this point in my life to make that a productive reality. I may, however, be able to make a string of choices that will lead to my being healthy, strong, flexible, and energetic for many years to come. But even that will require little choices, like just being active every day, even if I can't (or can't get myself to) run or bike several miles a day. I want to know what I can choose and what is out of my power to choose. It constantly changes as our abilities change, but I want to stop deluding myself. I want to make choices that will really lead to the goals I have for myself and the world rather than wasting my precious resources telling myself I can just be happy if I decide to (or pretending we can solve the worlds drug abuse problems by throwing black people in jail for marijuana possession, or that government foreign aid is about helping the poor and not about consolidating economic interests, or . . . ).

I also think the Free Will Theorem makes sense. Even if it ultimately is shown to be flawed, it won't surprise me if there is another way to prove its main conclusion--if I have Free Will, everything down to the smallest particle has a limited degree of free will. I've been extrapolating from this conclusion, and I'm interested in discussing some religious implications of it. Here is the creation I'm imagining.

Far in the past--perhaps unimaginably, or impractically far--some eternal stuff of nature existed. It existed because it always has and always will. I don't know how much of it there was, nor how long it existed for, because it was at least outside of our time and space, so it was effectively unmeasurable to us, and perhaps simply unmeasurable. It was without form and void, because form implies relationships among things, and there were no relationships as yet. What this stuff of nature did have was an ability to choose. The choices were limited, but bits of this stuff could choose to form relationships--very elementary ones--with other bits of this stuff (I know this idea is reminiscent of one a few thousands of years old). As long as the bits of stuff continued to choose these relationships, new properties could emerge.

I am assuming new properties would emerge, and that those properties could result in the emergence of even more complexity, but this isn't really much of an assumption. A single hydrogen atom isn't really that interesting. A third year college physics student knows enough to describe all of its properties mathematically. Add it to an oxygen atom and then another hydrogen atom and you have a water molecule. This is already too complex for our current state of theory to predict all of its properties, so we have to use numerical approximations calculated on fast computers (like the one you might be sitting in front of). Put that together with more water molecules, and our fastest supercomputing clusters can only approximate the many properties of a small glass of water. A pond of water has even more properties, and from an ocean of water even more new and interesting behaviors emerge, like waves and currents and tides. None of these properties belong to a water molecule, but they emerge as the system increases in size and complexity.

So while choice is a fundamental property of this stuff that existed before time, the kinds of complex choices we experience are an emergent property of the increased complexity generated through chosen relationships among the immeasurable (or simply unmeasured) stuff of nature. Most of the simple relationships will result in nothing like our universe. It takes vast amounts of stuff agreeing to follow certain sets of relationship laws to result in a universe. It's possible this universe of relationships could be seeded by a small group of relationships recruiting other bits in a very natural and unconscious way, but what the Free Will Theorem implies is that these bits have to all choose the relationships. If they don't choose the relationships, the universe won't happen. If they stop choosing the relationships, the universe will end. So the very existence of the universe is a massive act of will of all of the stuff in it to maintain the relationships necessary to its existence.

Does this imply that the universe could fall apart, or lose random pieces of itself because some pieces suddenly choose to stop playing by the rules? I suppose it does in theory, but in practice I think it far less likely than that you or I decide to reject all rules of civil society and attempt to make humanity vanish from existence. It's not in the nature of this stuff that has now been playing by the rules for at least 14 billion years to suddenly cease to do so. Thus, in the very act of choosing to make a universe (or choosing the simple relationships which, in aggregate, eventually foster the emergence of a universe), near total determinism emerges. Unpredictability and chaos cannot sustain a structure as complex as a universe. Only by agreeing to certain natural laws (as yet unspecified) can the complexity of conscious intelligence eventually emerge.

Yes, there is little rigor in these speculations, but I find in them emotionally satisfying answers to some seeming dilemmas:

• The universe is very nearly determined, but I experience Free Will. That's OK because free will is fundamental to my very being, and not just choices I make at certain moments. Still, a high degree of determinism is mandated by the need for our universe to exist as a coherent entity. It is not free will that is the exception, but the nearly deterministic universe that is the miraculous oddity. Order out of the natural chaos. We see something like this in the regular order that arises from seemingly random quantum events going on in all of our atoms all the time.
• Gods are understandable as more complex and advanced emergent entities within Nature, not as ultimately inconceivable beings who differ from humanity in very essence. We are of a type with the Gods with potential to become like them.
• Gods can create universes by learning to persuade or invite more of the stuff of Nature to agree to enter relationships bound by laws of nature that result in universes. This may appear or function as control or command, but it is only possible when some of the stuff of nature chooses the relationships. After that it may be shaped or controlled by more complex entities who understand the laws more consciously, but it is impossible without that minimal (and continued) consent of the foundational stuff.
• Gods can have immense power, including power to predict much about the future, but that power cannot take away the choices that are fundamental to our very nature and being. Gods are also bound by the laws and relationships that enable their being. Should they choose to violate those laws they would cease to be Gods, and could potentially cease to be.
• It's conceivable that the only Gods who could have initially come into existence were ones who were committed to preserving constructive relationships, very much like we think of love. Anything destructive would have resulted in eventual dissolution of their very existence as complex, emergent entities, so an evil God could have never come into existence unaided. Thus any first, or natural God would be a being committed to preserving enduring relationships among all the stuff of existence. It might even be thought that the will to destroy or dissolve relationships is contrary to the nature of the stuff Gods are made of, since the stuff had already chosen to enter and maintain relationships.
• We don't simply end at death (at least) because we are made of chosen relationships. The only ones who ultimately die are those who reject enduring relationships and pass into outer darkness (and perhaps dissolution into primordial chaos). The possibility of this choice must be allowed because it belongs to the very stuff of existence and cannot be taken away.
• Evolutionary principles which themselves are the consequences of emergent properties in complex systems can be used to understand more about the nature of Gods, even if only giving us a little glimpse.
• We can seek out and partake of the binding relationships (atonement) that are a gift to us both from the stuff that makes us and the Gods who would empower us to endure in these ever expanding relationships.

So here is how I make some sense of my very body crying out to belong, to love and be loved, to lift up the world. It's a choice I began before time. It's more complex, now, but I think vastly beautiful. Imagine what it will be as we emerge into even grander relationships.