Earlier today I had a conversation with a fellow from Wellington, New Zealand. He’s a less-active member (“not-yet-converted member”, said his wife of one year … second marriage for them both) of the Church waiting for his wife to do a session at the Laie Hawaii Temple. He has a small software company in Wellington doing telephone-related software for large companies and government entities that need customization for their phone systems. We had a great technical conversation. This is the first time since we’ve been here that I’ve had any kind of a deep technical discussion related to software, database design, and development methodologies. It was quite a lot of fun, and for him as well.
Then our discussion turned to doctrine. He had a number of questions where what he understood from science doesn’t seem to fit very well with what Church members tell him is “the truth”. The discussion centered around the scientific concept of entropy and the 2nd law of thermodynamics… that over time entropy always increases and eventually devolves into equilibrium. Simply stated, the 2nd law posits that this universe where we currently reside must eventually cease. He wondered how that fits with the Church’s teaching that we have no beginning and have no end. I’ve given a lot of thought to the concept of time, such as why does time go forward? It isn’t constant, so what are the real attributes of time? Theoretical physicists like Stephen Hawking have put a lot of attention to this subject and there is much more unknown than is understood. I explained to him what I currently think related to his question.
That is, that “time” exists only in our current estate. We have another estate where time doesn’t exist and we left that estate to come here where we became subject to a lot of physical laws, such as time, that were not part of the previous estate. At some time we’ll cease to live in this estate and will eventually (perhaps at resurrection) return to our previous estate. And, because time is a part of this estate, entropy is increasing, and this estate will eventually cease to exist as energy equilibrium is reached. To me, that’s consistent with what we teach and believe. Now, what I’ve just written may or may not be completely true, but in general it seems to fit. He hadn’t thought of time in that way, and left with a lot more to think about and ponder.
His wife came into the Center after finishing her session at the Temple and asked about Kolob in relation to what her husband and I had been talking about. Abraham 3 talks about Kolob being the place near to where God is. I suggested that “where God is” would be the estate from which we descended and where we will eventually return. It would be “outside” this estate. So, to me Kolob being “near to God” probably means “near in time”. What if, I suggested, Kolob were the first “thing” that emerged from the Big Bang (given that theory is correct), then Kolob would be nearer in time to God than anything else. It’s kind of a wild idea, but it makes sense to me given what little I know and how much is unknown.
They left having made a commitment to rethink some of the science in terms of an eternal God and us as eternal beings, to first assume that is true and then work through the implications. I told him he’d find that there is much more commonality and agreement between Mormanism and science than any other religious belief system. I hope that’ll make a difference for him and his activity in the Church. Who knows … someday we may get to Wellington, New Zealand and meet again!
In six and a half months our mission will become history. At this moment, that seems to be far too soon.
Aunt LaRella’s funeral and burial was today. I read in Twitter that there was a massive power outage in southeastern Idaho and western Wyoming. I hope that didn’t impact the funeral and burial. A number of years ago I attended my Aunt June’s funeral in Tooele, Utah. Just before the funeral, the city cut the power to that entire part of town because of a transformer problem. That meant no lights in the chapel, no organ, no microphone system. The funeral went forward, though. A fellow brought a generator over in the back of his pickup to make the sound system work and get a few lights working in the chapel (which had no windows). It all worked out in the end.
‘Til next time … ta ta for now.