Splinter of the Mind

I recently read the book Escaping the Matrix, written by theologian Greg Boyd and counselor Al Larson. I know what you're thinking: "A book about the recent Matrix movies! How timely!" The original Matrix film was released in 1999, its sequels in spring and fall of 2003. To be fair, the book was written in 2005 and I'm reading it 4 years after that. Still, one might have hoped the release of the book would be prior to or coinciding with the release of the film, as John Piper did with his book "The Passion of Jesus Christ", which came out a month and a half prior to the film it played off of: "The Passion of the Christ", all the way back in 2004.

So back to the question at hand: why on earth am I reading a book about a movie that came out 10 years ago? I mean, it was a good film, but aren't there more relevant books to read and things to do? Probably. But my interest here concerns the cosmological argument of the existence of God.

Okay, if you're still with me, I'll summarize that argument: Basically logicians determined that you can't get something from nothing. The chair in your kitchen wouldn't exist if someone hadn't built it, and that someone had the tree to construct it from. Now, there may have been machines and tools involved, but someone had to build them too. Something must come from something else. Scientifically, you can posture the First Law of Thermodynamics here:
"Energy can be transformed (changed from one form to another), but it can neither be created nor destroyed."

But the Conservation of energy isn't the question here; we're not asking if the chair used to be a tree so much as who or what caused the chair. Presumably, a human constructed the chair using wood from a tree. But where did the human come from and where did the tree come from? Science tells us that man evolved from primates who evolved from decreasingly complex organisms. Believe that or not, bear with me. The tree, likewise, (scientifically speaking) was originally a seed that grew, and the seed fell off another tree, and this goes back through time were less complex plants.

Science holds that one goes back in time long enough, and all these simple plants and organisms are wrapped up in an earth that was shot out of a cannon filled with all of the energy in the known universe, all of which contained in a space the size of a pinhead. This is the Big Bang theory. Everything was in this tiny space...everything. At some point, something initiated a massive explosion which kicked off everything we now know in the universe.

The Big Bang theory is widely accepted as the beginning of our story. But like any story based on science that takes place in the vacuum of outer space, the people want a prequel, even if they aren't good and have Jar Jar in them. So one might ask, "where did the pinhead come from" and "what caused the pinhead to explode." While some have speculated, the consensus is, we just don't know. It just was and it just did. For my inquisitive mind, this isn't good enough. Something caused that pinhead to be there, and something caused it to explode. I suspect that something was more than the vinegar getting to close to the baking soda in that pinhead.

The other side of the coin, the Creationist view, would hold that God created everything. This leads to the same questions though. Before the heavens and the earth came into being, and God was just there, where did God come about from? Using the same human logic, something must have evoked God into being, right? No, my religious friends are just as obstinate about this as my scientific ones. They say, no, God just is. His scale of time does not coincide with ours, that He also was and is, and is to come. He is the beginning and the end. What? This is just as unhelpful in my question as saying the pinhead just one day deciding to explode into the known universe. The question being, if God started all this....where did He come from? Is there some uber-god that created Him into being, and if so, that's the guy I want to be looking for. But then the question is, where did that uber-god come from? The same logic would hold that he had his roots with somebody else. Maybe the forerunners of God have died off or are on vacation in some tropical region of the multiverse, leaving God in charge. Don't miscontrue my questioning for irreverence; Jesus implored his disciples to have the faith of a child, but anyone who has spent time with a small child knows that they like to ask 'why'. This is me believing, but also asking why.

Detractors of the cosmological argument assert that the argument stops at God. Everything has an explanation for being except when we reach God's level, then He just is. This would seem to be an exception from which the whole logical argument is based on; I would attest that the argument makes sense if we continue the logic. Where did God come from? "You will never know" they tell me, "God is an incorporeal entity for which the laws of space and time are irrelevant and inapplicable." Perhaps we cannot be able to understand this. I can't help but think that there must be some inkling of comprehensible explanation that we could derive about God's purposeful existence.

This leads me back to one of the precepts of the Matrix. Throughout the movies the idea of existing in a sort of Russian Nested Doll structure, where one goes inside of a slightly larger one, which goes inside of an even larger doll. Just as electrons spin around a nucleous to form an atom from which humans are comprised, perhaps we humans are but tiny electrons "spinning" around the nucleous of the earth's core. From there you could equate the earth itself being one of the planetary "electrons" orbiting the nucleous of the sun, making our star system one of many 'atoms' that make up a much larger galactic something. That galactic structure might well be spinning around some focal point in the universe, and our universe may be orbiting some point of reference in the multi-verse, if you are inclined to step out so far.

So I picked up the book "Escaping the Matrix" hoping that it would touch on this concept of the Russian dolls as it pertains to we the people, as this might illuminate some of the concerns I have with the formation of an almighty God. This book has nothing to do with that.

Escaping the Matrix is however, good on its own merits. The concept here is that in the mind we have structured a matrix of how we perceive memories, good, bad and otherwise. The Bible indicates that Christ imbues us to renew our minds, and break out of conformity to the nature of the earth. The authors posit that in a fallen world with powers and principalities abounding, we are given to misinterpretation through these matrix structures of our minds. This is where phobias and other psychological issues derive from as it pertains to minimal but poignant past memories. We construct them in our minds as being a certain way and this hinders our lives. As we control our minds, we have the power to reshape our memories; re-construct them slightly differently such that they are not as detrimental to us. The example is given of a woman with a phobia of insects. By reshaping the memory which instigated this phobia she was able to overcome it. How does one reshape a memory? By changing it, the way a director would put a yellow color filter on the lens, or use camera 2 for this scene, putting different music in the memory, things like that. There are lots of interactive exercises in the book, and these suggestions are very plausible.

Think for a moment about a happy time, but focus on it, noting all the senses - sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound, and what emotions you might have. Focus on each one of these senses briefly. Now continue focusing on that same memory, but change the senses. Change the camera angle of the memory...instead of looking through your eyes, you're in 3rd person, or the other way around. If you hear something, change it; put happy music into a bad memory, and the bad memory doesn't seem as terrible; things like that. Its an interesting concept, based on biblical teachings which, the authors indicate has been able to produce results in the people they have helped through this technique.

So Escaping the Matrix was good, but not quite what I was hoping for. I mean, it was really really good, and I'd recommend reading it. The church Greg Boyd pastors, Woodland Hills church hosted a seminar back in 2005 surrounding this idea and they have audio files from that event on their website here. I haven't listened to these, but I'm sure they are similarly profound as the book was. But, it looks like I'll have to keep searching for my answers.

Matt