The People’s Revival

The description available from within a reality need not exhaust the reality producing the phenomenon.

Read that again.

Because I think there’s a door hiding in it.

Imagine a creature that lives in only two dimensions.

Not metaphorically.

Its entire universe is a flat sheet.

Length and width.

No height.

Now draw a circle around that creature.

As far as it is concerned, you have built an impenetrable wall.

There is no route from outside the circle to inside the circle that does not pass through the wall.

None.

Its mathematicians can prove it.

Its physicists can demonstrate it.

Every experiment ever performed in its universe confirms it.

And they are RIGHT.

Then you reach down from the third dimension and put your finger inside the circle.

You didn’t cross the line.

You didn’t break through the wall.

You didn’t violate a single law governing movement within its universe.

You approached from a direction that creature does not possess.

Now imagine you’re that creature.

Something has just appeared inside a completely enclosed space.

What do you call it?

Impossible?

Supernatural?

A violation of natural law?

A miracle?

Or did something perfectly lawful just happen whose complete geometry cannot be described from inside your reality?

That question has been fucking with me.

Because now we move everything up one dimension.

Carl Sagan used Flatland to illustrate this problem.

A three-dimensional being could theoretically interact with the inside of a two-dimensional body without cutting through its perimeter.

Think about that.

From the perspective of the 2D creature:

There is something wrong inside its body.

Then something acts upon it.

Then the problem is gone.

But NOTHING crossed the boundary.

The effect is observable.

The cause is real.

The spatial pathway between them is inaccessible.

A lower-dimensional observer can witness a genuine causal event while being fundamentally incapable of observing the spatial route by which the cause reached the effect.

And suddenly I have a very uncomfortable question about miracles.

I know the world I come from.

I could take this back into the Word of Faith movement, preach it as a revelation about divine healing, put a Bible verse on it, take offerings and probably live pretty fucking comfortably.

No.

I’m not interested.

I’m coming at this from the back of beyond.

I want to know what happens when you follow the question all the way down.

What if we’ve misunderstood the miraculous because we’ve assumed that every cause acting upon our world must originate within the dimensional structure accessible to our world?

Because that assumption would be completely natural.

The Flatlander makes exactly the same assumption.

And he is completely wrong.

Not about the laws of his universe.

About the size of reality.

That distinction is enormous.

Maybe the mistake was defining a miracle as the suspension of natural law.

Maybe nothing was suspended.

Maybe nothing was violated.

Maybe what we call a miracle could be dimensional intrusion rather than suspension of natural law.

Read that one twice, too.

I am NOT saying physics proves divine healing.

It doesn’t.

I am NOT saying a fourth spatial dimension has been demonstrated to be God’s operating room.

It hasn’t.

I’m saying something much more interesting.

The absence of an observable causal pathway does not logically require the absence of causation if the observer does not possess access to all of the dimensions through which causation can occur.

And before somebody starts yelling heresy from one side and “quantum woo” from the other, calm the fuck down.

I’m Gen-X.

I’m a Skin.

We used to read books because there wasn’t a goddamn algorithm around to tell us what to think.

I’m not asking you to believe me.

I’m asking you to fucking THINK.

Read Sagan.

Read Flatland.

Read physics.

Read philosophy.

Read theology.

Read people who piss you off.

Put ideas beside each other that nobody gave you permission to put beside each other.

Stop asking every new idea to identify itself as Christian, atheist, liberal, conservative, scientific, spiritual, orthodox or heretical before you’ll allow it through the fucking door.

LOOK AT IT.

Because here’s the part I can’t get away from:

A Flatlander could spend his entire life studying his universe and correctly conclude that there is no possible way to enter that circle without crossing its perimeter.

He could have equations.

Peer review.

Two thousand years of philosophy.

A denomination built around the fucking circle.

And then—

a finger comes down from above.

His science wasn’t necessarily wrong.

His observations weren’t necessarily wrong.

His description wasn’t necessarily wrong.

It was incomplete.

Because the description available from within a reality need not exhaust the reality producing the phenomenon.

And maybe that’s what we keep doing.

Religion draws a map and calls it God.

Materialism draws a map and calls it Reality.

Everybody starts fighting over whose map is right.

And almost nobody stops to ask:

What if reality extends in a direction none of our maps can point?

Maybe a miracle isn’t where natural law breaks.

Maybe it’s where our map runs out.

The laws weren’t broken.

Maybe our description of reality was simply incomplete.

Can you see it?