I've updated my linky-love list on the side there. This isn't even all the blogs I read. Just the ones that are, for whatever reason, really doing it for me right now. There are others that do it for me in other ways, but you can only do so much. Some of them are preachers, some are aspiring, some are people of faith finding their way in the world. Some are Catholics, a couple are Methodists like me, there's at least one Unitarian in there, and as to the rest, who knows? Who cares? I tell you that our similarities matter far more than our differences. The common thread that joins them is that they are all seekers after a mystery. None of the sites you'll find over there to the left are representative of the holier-than-thou, the self-righteous, the smugly "saved." That's what I like about them.

Physics has a way of calmly receding from scientific inquiry, much like Barth's God on the other side of an infinite sea. Scientists sometimes think they've "got it", as Max Born did when he speculated in 1928 that "physics as we know it will be over in six months." The quantum equation for the electron had just been deciphered by the taciturn Paul Dirac, and it looked as though all that was left was to elucidate similar equations for the proton and the photon and then that would be it.

Unfortunately, things weren't quite that simple. Turned out there were also neutrons and then positrons and then a whole cavalcade of other little bits of stuff. W and Z bosons, gluons, gravitons! And oh, hell, they're all made of quarks! Oh, and leptons! And there are twelve different kinds of them! Oh, and did I mention superstring theory? Oops, I mean M-Theory?

You would be forgiven for believing that God isn't quite ready to let us figure it all out just yet. Thank God. When Hercule Poirot sits everyone down in the parlour and explains who bludgeoned the Major-General with the bust of Queen Victoria, the story is over. Everything else is taxonomy.

Faith, I like to think, is like that as well. Just when we think we've got it all figured out, God finds some way to slip sideways out of our grasp. God, like the physical world, is bigger than us, and we are contained within both the Universe and within God.

Kurt Goedel discovered a very unsettling thing. He was a mathematician who worked in the early part of the last century and who discovered, much to the chagrin of other mathematicians, that no formal system can ever describe itself fully. Specifically, he showed that there are statements in formal mathematics that can be shown to be true but which are undecideable within formal mathematics. This is called Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem. Another way of looking at it is that it implies that there is always something more to figure out, always something new to discover. Anytime we enclose the world of knowledge within boundaries, Goedel tells us that there is something--there must be something--outside those boundaries.

We are in for quite a ride. Go click on some of those links over there. You'll be glad you did.