Trevelyan > Quotes

“And if we must take historical blunders in our stride, how will we cope with flat-out contradictions? Did Mary Magdalene at the empty tomb of Jesus see an angel of the Lord [Matthew 28:2] or merely a young man in white [Mark 16:5]? Or was it two men in shining garments [Luke 24:4]? Or two angels [John 20:12]? And how do we deal with the omission of pivotal events? Did Mary see Jesus himself near the tomb, at first mistaking him for a gardener [John 20:14-15]? Surely a sighting of Jesus is critically important evidence of the resurrection, the central mystery of the Christian faith. Yet the encounter at the tomb is mentioned only in the Gospel of John. How could Matthew, Mark and Luke have missed such a crucial point? Historical scholars, and most theologians, recognize that the authors who penned the ancient documents were doing the best they could with the sources available to them, writing in the traditions and expectations of their time, more concerned with presenting a coherent message than with precise historical accuracy. Some biblical scholars, however, even to this day maintain the inerrancy of scripture. They see the Bible as the Word of God, divinely inspired and supernaturally protected from error down the centuries. Unless one reads without comprehension (a distressingly common affliction), a belief in biblical inerrancy demands considerable mental gymnastics. Adherents typically construct a unified account of the gospel stories, not by resolving conflicts, but by adding together all the elements from the different narratives. Thus, Mary Magdalene visited the tomb several times, seeing the different combinations of divine presences on different occasions. For some inscrutable reason, God chose to drop the accounts of those visits into different gospels instead of presenting them logically in a single document.”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics

“The opening verse of John is probably the most quoted in scripture: In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Unfortunately, it is also the most blatant mistranslation in the whole of the Christian canon. It sounds from the English (and also from the Latin of Saint Jerome’s Vulgate) as if the reference is to the Word of God, meaning the teachings or message of God. But the Greek in the source documents is logos. In Greek philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus of Ephesus who flourished around 500 BCE, the logos is logic or reason, the universal principle by which nature is governed and all things are interrelated. In the original Greek text of the Gospel of John, Jesus is the logic of the universe – a far more powerful conception than merely the word, or spokesperson, of God. Sadly, we can probably blame the influence of the Latin Vulgate for this linguistic vandalism. Latin has a rather small vocabulary compared with modern English. The Latin noun verbum can mean word, but it can also mean idea, concept, point of view, thesis… Translating the Greek logos as the Latin verbum was probably excusable – Saint Jerome agonized over the translation – but taking it back into English as word was a scholarly sin of the highest order.”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics

“The ultimate problem with the Multiverse idea, however, is that it simply does not qualify as a scientific hypothesis.”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics

“Stepping beyond the domain of our best model, with its tantalizing mix of solid evidence and troubling difficulties, we enter the realm of speculation. Why is our universe just as it is?”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics

“Only in the last few years, however, have we been able to penetrate to a deeper level. Information is no longer seen as an emergent property of matter and energy: the roles are reversed. Dualism can be laid to rest, not by explaining ideas in terms of matter and energy, but by realizing that the material world is an illusion, itself emerging from an ultimate construct of information.”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics

“To do this, we must abandon the natural idea of a universe made of objects and instead see reality as made up of happenings – events and processes. This conception has come into focus through the work of theoreticians welding gravitation into the framework of quantum mechanics.”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics

“Many who burnt heretics in the ordinary way of their business were otherwise excellent people.”
― Trevelyan

“And everything we know about time, everything we can know about time, comes from the study of clocks. Time, Clocks and Relativity   There are many popular books attempting to explain Relativity. In general, they take the same approach that we do with university undergraduates, revisiting the angst of physicists in the late 19th century as they struggled with the idea that the speed of light would remain constant even for a moving observer. Stripped of the math, for the benefit of the lay reader, the arguments become rather hollow. Instead, we will look at relativity as it is today: the practical engineering of transferring time signals from clocks on the lab bench, to clocks in GPS satellites and spacecraft”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics

“The longstanding worries about the “interpretation” of quantum mechanics are now settled: we are dealing with information, packets of bits, rather than particles and waves with weird, counter-intuitive properties.   Placing information at the root of existence resolves a number of longstanding puzzles, in domains as far apart as quantum mechanics and philosophy.”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics

“Einstein was distrustful of elaborate mathematics, odd as that sounds for a mathematical physicist. There was, Einstein considered, too much math around, and one could waste far too much time on it. His talent, despite the image in popular culture, lay not so much in mathematics – which he always found difficult – but in exceptional clarity of conceptual thinking. Einstein was never seduced by the easy flow of equations: he came to the hard labor of the math only when convinced the quest would be worth the effort.”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics

“Information is essential to your continuity as a biological entity and sentient being. You are the same person, minute after minute, year after year, decade after decade. But you are not the same atoms, the same molecules. Tissues replace their constituent molecules over months and years. Even the mineral in bone turns over slowly. Cells in every organ die – mostly to be replaced by new cells of the same type. Like an intricate machine which is constantly being rebuilt with new components, your body eventually contains practically nothing of the original materials. Yet you are still you.”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics

“But science is telling us that the reality underlying the material world is in fact an abstraction: information, the stuff of minds, of souls. Information turns out to be the substratum of space, time, matter and energy. We live in a universe not of atoms, but of the abstract essence which underlies consciousness.”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics

“No longer need we seek a mechanism by which the abstract becomes an emergent property of a material world. Instead, the material world is emergent from a universe of information. Reality is the illusion. The consequences of this leap in understanding are profound. Their scope is astonishing. They enable us to venture outside the domain of ontological questions into fields which have always seemed to lie far beyond the reach of any reasoning founded in the sciences.”
― Trevelyan, Eternity: God, Soul, New Physics