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Unitarian Universalist Church of
Ogden
A light in Utah
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Lessons
From The Earth – Geology and Spiritual Growth
William R. Hackett
February 25, 2007
The Unitarian Universalist Church of Ogden
The Musical Reflection from the Karelia Suite of Sibelius has great
meaning for me. I first heard it around thirty years ago while studying
volcanology overseas. The New Zealanders had adopted it as a kind of
national theme song, for its rousing evocation of the Scandinavian
fjords and mountains, a glistening, spectacular landscape that was
newly emergent from beneath the cover of Ice-Age glaciers. The
landforms of the New Zealand Southern Alps are virtually identical, and
the New Zealanders take an overt pride in being the inhabitants of this
green, mountainous and geologically active country, the kind of country
that would inspire great naturalist composers like Sibelius and
Vaughn-Williams. I listen to this composition every few months, and it
runs through my head as I schuss down the slopes of Snow Basin or gaze
at the Wasatch Mountains from my back deck.
I suppose all geologists must feel energized by the raw physicality of
the land, must experience a strong sense of place, especially here
along the Wasatch Front, which has to be reckoned as one of the most
spectacular geographic settings in North America. Brigham Young and I
have at least one thing in common, for I also declare that “This is the
Place”.
When I began studying geology in the early 1970s, I soon realized that
I was being given a tremendous gift, a gift of knowledge that I would
take everywhere for the rest of my life. It is my purpose this morning
to reveal the essence of the gift. The gift has taken more than thirty
years to unwrap, and it continues to unfold. You may be surprised to
learn that the task has been challenging for me. I could stand for
hours giving geologic facts, and have done so many times. Knowledge of
the subject is not the challenge, here. The challenge is to give a
clear revelation of spiritual insight arising from that knowledge.
Like the gold, frankincense and myrrh of the Scriptures, I believe the
spiritual gifts of Geology are threefold.
The first is an ability to Read the Landscape. Those of you who’ve
taken an introductory earth science course in high school or college
have gotten, within the context of this “reading” metaphor, the
equivalent of a basic phonics or grammar course. But of course the more
reading you do, the better you get at it, and eventually you are able
to read novels and even to appreciate poetry. And of course it is the
story that matters, which goes far beyond the ability to recognize
individual words with their individual meanings. So as I look from my
back porch, southward along the Wasatch Front toward Salt Lake City, an
internal dialog begins and goes something like this. “The Wasatch
Mountains in post-Pliocene time have undergone several kilometers of
cumulative uplift along segmented normal faults, marked by faceted
spurs and fault scarps along the mountain front. Quaternary slip rates
are estimated to be a few millimeters per year. Uplift has exposed
early Proterozoic metamorphic rocks of the Farmington Canyon Complex
along the west-facing base of the mountain front, overlain by several
thousand feet of Proterozoic and early-to-mid-Paleozoic clastic
sedimentary strata, mainly quartzite. Along the base of the mountain
front at about 4,000 to 5,000 feet elevation, abandoned wave-cut
shorelines and longshore bars of Quaternary pluvial lakes are present,
together with associated deltaic sediments from superposed first-order
streams having large catchments in the mountainous terrain to the east.
To the west lies Great Salt Lake, the dried-up remnant of the pluvial
fresh-water lakes.”
Sorry. Maybe you’ll like this version better. “Few places in North
America can rival the spectacular scenery, geologic features, mineral
wealth and soil quality along the western slopes of the Wasatch
Mountains, which present the marriage of Rocky Mountains and Great
Basin. The area has attracted human inhabitants for thousands of years.
First Americans once camped along the grassy, wave-cut shores of
fresh-water lakes during past ages of wetter climate. The largest was
Lake Bonneville, formerly the size of Lake Michigan. Today its parched
offspring is the Great Salt Lake. The Wasatch Mountains are young and
are still forming. Most of the time they are still and mute, but large
earthquakes - the birth-pains of mountain building – are felt here
every few centuries. Each quake is caused by the deep fracturing of
rock somewhere along the fault system, each large quake leaves a scar
along the foothills, each large quake lifts the mountains a few feet
and settles the valley by about half that much. Over the past five
million years or so, thousands of earth-shattering tremors have thrust
the Wasatch Range into the sky, where it has been carved by glaciers,
flushed by streams, and has shed its mantle of rocky debris in the form
of landslides and mudflows. Within the bedrock, there is a story. It is
said that geology is the study of mountains, for these uplifts bring
rocks from deep in the earth up onto to the surface, and the rocks
contain a record of earth history that would otherwise remain
undiscovered. Much of what we know about the geologic history of North
America during the past three billion years has been learned by reading
the rocks and landforms of our western mountains.”
(Use laser pointer to show mountain stratigraphy on pillar at front of
sanctuary.)
A second spiritual gift is the Appreciation of Deep Time. Deep time has
undoubtedly been appreciated by millions of people through the ages, as
they gazed at the starry sky. But geologists have the privilege of
actually laying hands on direct evidence of Deep Time, being curious
creatures of the land who go around climbing mountains, breaking
stones, making maps and writing about it. Writings of the ancient
Romans, Leonardo and a few others show us that people have long noticed
such curiosities as marine fossils exposed in high mountains, several
thousand feet above sea level. But it was not until around the time of
the American revolution that a Scottish physician by the name of James
Hutton made a systematic study of the hills around Edinborough, and in
so doing developed an appreciation for how the earth was made. Known as
The Father of Modern Geology, Hutton is an unsung hero today, but at
least he shows that the Scots can not only make fine whisky, swear with
an amusing accent, and be incredibly handsome, but they also
contributed greatly to The Enlightenment. In an age when most people,
based on biblical reference, thought the earth was around 6,000 years
old, Hutton was the first to bravely gaze into the abyss of Deep Time,
as revealed by the record of the rocks themselves. Several catchy
slogans, destined to become the founding principles of geology, were
created by Hutton and his followers. One of these phrases reflects his
understanding of Deep Time, by declaring that the rocks reveal “No
vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” By this Hutton meant
that no matter what you saw in the rock record, there was always
something older to be seen or inferred. And when Hutton noted real-time
processes, such as rivers flowing with water and sediment, he inferred
from the rock record that similar processes had operated in the past.
This led him to declare the Principle of Uniformitarianism, or “The
present is the key to the past.” Such a statement may not seem like a
big deal today, but it must be remembered that in Hutton’s time it was
thought that the earth’s crust and landforms had been formed by a
single catastrophic event, the Biblical Deluge. So in my view, Hutton
was a scientific genius of the first magnitude. Half a century later,
Charles Darwin would study geology, and as he developed what would
later become the Theory of Evolution, Darwin recognized that enormous
lengths of time - millions of years - would be required for the
evolution of new species. Nearly a century later, in the 1950s, the
instrumentation for precisely measuring the isotopic abundances of
elements in minerals became available, and this formed the basis of
radiometric age dating. As a result, it is now known that the earth is
about 4.5 billion years old, and the oldest rocks that have been dated
were formed about 4 billion years ago.
A useful way to think about Deep Time is in terms of walking. The human
pace is about one yard, so if we call each step a century, a walk back
to the time of Christ is to walk twenty yards, about the width of the
church parking lot. Keeping this scale in mind, to walk back 5 million
years to the time of ape-human divergence is to walk twenty-seven
miles, the length of a marathon. At one century per step, to walk to
the origin of the first hard-shelled animals at the dawn of the
Cambrian Period, 600 million years ago, is a walk of some 3,000 miles,
or a stroll from New York to San Francisco. And to go back to the
origin of the earth, 4.5 billion years ago, would require a
century-long trek around the girth of the entire planet.
But geologists have taken a different sort of walk. Like Hutton, they
experience Deep Time directly, through studying the rock record,
measuring the ages of rocks, gauging the motions of tectonic plates,
observing the eruptions of volcanoes, the flowing of rivers, the
grinding of glaciers, and so on. It’s a grand occupation.
The third spiritual gift is what I call a Sense of the Mysterious.
There are many mysteries and wonders to be contemplated, and I will
choose just a few, ranging from big to small. Anyone who has studied
and understood Earth history must at some stage become curious about
the Cosmos. About 15 billion years ago, the known Universe was created
and the laws of physics began to operate. It required several
generations of stars, with the immense temperatures and pressures that
only exist in stellar interiors, to fuse the nuclei of lighter
elements into the heavier elements of which the earth and the inner
planets are made. Earth is the offspring of a mid-life Cosmos. It
required ten billion years, and several cycles of star formation and
destruction in order for Earth to form. Our sun is a medium-sized,
mid-life star, expected to burn its hydrogen for another 5 billion
years. If the Universe keeps expanding, it will eventually reach a
state where matter can no longer coalesce, stars will no longer form,
and the Cosmos will become cold and dispersed. But if gravity wins out,
the current expansion somehow reverses and cosmic contraction begins,
the Universe may collapse into a singularity like the Everything Seed
of 15 billion years ago. Another cosmic cycle may begin. Hutton would
be right, in a Big way – “No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an
end.”
Another wonderful and mysterious gift has sprung from my appreciation
for the special place Earth holds in the Cosmos, in terms of all of us
being the offspring of a mid-life Cosmos. This has to do with the
earth’s special composition and physical situation within the solar
system. I touched upon this during my Global Warming presentation last
fall – the idea that Earth has just the right composition to have
differentiated into a core, mantle, crust, hydrosphere and atmosphere,
has enough mass to hold onto its atmosphere and hydrosphere, is just
the right distance from the sun to have retained its volatiles in the
form of solid, liquid and gas, has just the right heat production to
drive the motions of lithospheric plates but not cover everything in
red lava… In short, has just the right conditions for life as we
know it. I have come to think that the development of life on this
planet was inevitable, given its ideal conditions. The Earth and its
Life are One – this is the foundational paradigm of the Gaia
Hypothesis. My spiritual response to all of this has been Deep
Gratitude, the subject of our guided meditation earlier in the service.
In a probabilistic sense, it seems unlikely to me that earthly
conditions, and therefore earthly life, are unique to our own solar
system, given the billions of solar systems that must exist in the
Universe. Although extraterrestrial life probably exists, it seems
unlikely that we would be able to communicate with others, given the
vast distances of the Universe and the (perhaps) transient existence of
intelligent life at each location in the Universe.
Another wonderful and mysterious gift was the circumstances under which
I first studied geology in college. This was back in the early 1970s, a
period as tumultuous for the earth sciences as the Copernican
Revolution had been for astronomy a few centuries earlier. This was a
time when Continental Drift and Plate Tectonics were being seriously
debated as the unifying paradigm of the earth sciences. The idea of
Continental Drift had been around for about forty years, but few
scientists took it seriously because no mechanism had yet been
identified that could move the continents around. In the late 1960s and
early 1970s, following several decades of post-war geophysical
investigations of the world’s ocean basins, all of this came to a head,
and I was right in the middle of it. The implications of the new
paradigm were huge. First of all, geology and geophysics were changed
from frumpy, descriptive disciplines that were useful for finding oil,
ore deposits, and so on, into a set of related disciplines with a
powerfully predictive underlying paradigm, Plate Tectonics. The hows
and whys of earth history could now be understood in terms of global
processes, driven by convection currents in the earth’s mantle. In
addition, the breakup and drift of continents, and the volcanic birth
of new ocean basins between the continents, had enormous implications
for the origin and evolution of life on Earth. Earliest life on Earth
probably formed around hydrothermal vents of the ocean floor, at the
birthplaces of new ocean basins. Phytoplankton and more complex marine
animals with external skeletons were able to evolve in the shallow,
nutrient-rich seas along continental margins, following the breakup of
larger supercontinents. Many millions of years later, a tool-using
hominid would evolve and would learn to tap the energy of this ancient
sunlight.
(Use laser pointer to show the globe with internal flame, on central
pillar of the sanctuary.)
A final Mysterious and Wonderful gift that I would offer this morning,
has to do with the workings of the human mind, and the nature of
genius. The mathematician Mark Kac has said, “There are two kinds of
geniuses, the ordinary and the magicians. An ordinary genius is a
fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many
times better.” But for the second kind, he says “even after we
understand what they have done, the insight that led them to the answer
is completely dark...” During my training and my professional life, I
have worked with several geniuses of the first type, and have read
several of the second type, including Feynman and Einstein. I find
their philosophical writings to be even more interesting (and more
readily digestible) than their science, and I only wish some of their
influence would rub off.
At last, I want to offer some thoughts on my personal theology, which
is still evolving. Many of you, and particularly our brothers and
sisters who follow traditions of Earth-Centered Spirituality, will be
comfortable with the ideas we’ve explored this morning. It just so
happens that I have entered the discussion as a scientist, with all of
the advantages and the limitations that science brings. Science cannot
answer such questions as “Should I marry this person?” But if you want
the definitive answer to a specific technical question, such as whether
light is a particle or a wave, just ask any physicist…
Some of these spiritual ideas have been around for quite a while. The
Upanishads, written several centuries before the Common Era, contain
foundational Hindu beliefs, including the universal spirit Brahman -
the absolute infinite existence - the sum total of all that ever is,
was, or ever shall be. Brahman has no limiting characteristics, not
even those of being and non-being.
Pantheism expresses the idea of an immanent God - the idea that “God is
All” - that the Universe, Nature and God are equivalent.
Religious Naturalism, as expressed this morning in the writings of
Ursula Goodenough, calls us to be grateful and “to revere the whole
enterprise of planetary existence, the whole and all of its myriad
parts as they catalyze and secrete and replicate and mutate and evolve.”
And what of geology? It is said that geology is the study of mountains.
“First there is a Mountain, then there is no Mountain, then there is.”
The child – innocent, naïve, untutored – sees the awesome mountain
at face value, unfettered by knowledge of how it came to be.
The young man studies the earth under the guidance of sages, teaches
others what little he knows, helps people to find gold, identifies
dangerous volcanoes and how they work, certifies the burial-ground of
nuclear waste.
The mature man finds spiritual awakening, a personal theology that
places a warm glow around his scientific knowledge. The Mountain
appears again, close at hand, touchable, and offering many mysteries.
First there is a Mountain, then there is no Mountain, then there is.
Amen.
Blessed Be.
Go In Peace.
Selected references (used in preparation for this worship service)
Baxter, Stephen, 2004, Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of
Deep Time, Forge Books. ISBN 0765312387 (hb)
Bhaumik, Mani, 2005, Code Name God, Crossroad Publishing Co., New York,
222 p. ISBN 0-8245-2281-8 (hb)
(Written by an applied physicist who developed laser eye surgery; the
author returns to his spiritual roots, armed with a deep understanding
of physics and the cosmos.)
Chronic, Halka, 1996, Roadside Geology of Utah, Mountain Press Pub Co.,
Missoula, 326 p. ISBN 0-87842-228-5 (pb)
(A useful, elementary, well illustrated summary of Utah geology and
landscape features, described as seen from highways during car trips.)
Einstein, Albert, 2006, The World As I See It, Citadel Press, New York,
125 p.
ISBN 0-8065-2790-0
(Originally published in German during the author’s lifetime, this
translated collection of his writings is intended to give a picture of
the man.)
Goodenough, Ursula, 1998, The Sacred Depths of Nature, Oxford
University Press, New York, 197 p. ISBN 0-19-512-613-0 (hb)
(A work of scientific and spiritual genius. One of the best books I
have read in the past twenty years. Gives brief, clear and concise
descriptions of the origin of the universe, earth and life, followed by
meditative discussions of the spiritual significance.)
Lightman, Alan, 2006, A Sense of the Mysterious – Science and the Human
Spirit, Vantage Books, Random House, New York, 211 p. ISBN
1-4000-7819-9 (pb)
(An engaging collection of articles by a theoretical physicist and
gifted science writer about eminent scientists, their lives,
accomplishments and legacy.)
©
Copyright UUCO, 2003-2007
©
Copyright William R. Hackett, 2007
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