The Cistaphasmatis by Charles Seper

Update: It's now available at the following Amazon locations in Kindle (mobi) format:

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Epub format in the near future for those who own e-readers other than Kindle.

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This is a novelette I wrote some months ago of around 12,000 words. It's been completely reworked recently and is now available on Horatio Press via digital download for only a dollar.

Book Blurb:
The Cistaphasmatis is about a young man from Nantucket named Clifford who feels compelled to try and contact his deceased girlfriend on the other side of death's door using an age old mirror gazing technique in a home-built viewing chamber called a cistaphasmatis. About this time, he also finds himself becoming quick friends with the sexton at the graveyard his girlfriend is buried at, a retired Episcopal Priest named Bud Buchanan. Clifford soon finds that this priest has knowledge of the way the world works that's rather unique among men as Bud tries to keep Cliff from getting in over his head in "the void."

Excerpt 1

The main branch library in Nantucket has a large number of books on occult subjects, and it was here (unfortunately) that I found the title by Mr. Seagraves. It was called: Visions of the Sybil (seeking advice from the dead). This book held the answer to what I was looking for.

In it he described how the ancient Sybils in Greece used to sit in caves, usually over a fissure where the ground had split open and left a deep gulf. They thought it went down to an underworld that existed beneath the surface of the Earth, and here the dead lived. It was said that those who were deceased had an uncanny ability to see the future, and this is why kings consulted Sybils before going to war. The Sybil would sit in the cave with nothing but a small, dimly lit torch and would stare into the void of that gulf until she began to have visions. Other Sybils would look into a mirror or a pool of water.

I gathered from this book that when attempting to do this it was important to allow your eyes to sort of go numb. It's not so different from the way you look at one of those Magic Eye books to see 3-D objects. If you try to see the objects you never will. The harder you concentrate, the less likely you are to see anything. You have to be unfocussed and allow your eyes be completely relaxed.

The contraption Seagraves invented in 1821 aided him in doing this. It was like a sensory depravation chamber, basically just a wooden box painted black inside and just big enough for a man to sit in comfortably. It was actually a box within a box. He glued blankets around the entire outside of the first box and then nailed a second round of wood around it. The blankets acted like a buffer between the two layers of wood to help keep out sounds. He left an opening for a door, and inside the chamber he had attached a mirror to one wall. He brought one small, solitary candle into the chamber with him and set it on a shelf that stuck out below the mirror. The mirror was positioned above him so that he couldn't see his own reflection when gazing into it, only the blackness of the wall behind him and the dancing flame of the candle just below the mirror. Also, if he wanted to contact someone specifically, he found it helped to bring some small item the deceased person had owned before they died, something that they were very attached to, a wedding ring for example.

I found that other people had built similar chambers since his and referred to them as psychomantiums. Seagraves called his a cistaphasmatis, which as near as I can tell is from the Latin words cista meaning box or chamber, and phasmatis which means ghosts or spirits. His differed in one aspect however, and this I found to be strangely interesting. He claimed that trees had certain properties which the ancients thought of as magical, and that, being living creatures, they held the memories of all that happened on the Earth, not only while they stood, but from the generations of trees before them from which their seeds had sprung. It's possible that all plant life held memories, but trees could grow to be very old. Some had stood for well over a thousand years. He surmised that the oldest trees had absorbed more of humanity into them as well as something of the divine (although the reasons he gave seemed vague to me), and this was why ancient man all over the world worshipped trees, especially the very oldest of the oaks. They made some sort of conduit between man and the spiritual realms. If one were to build a cistaphasmatis, it would be best to build it of the oldest oak lumber you could find.

Fortunately, this is Nantucket, home to some of the oldest whaling ships that ever sailed. The ones from the 18th and the first half of the 19th centuries were made from large oak timbers that must have come from very old trees. Very few of the most venerable whalers are left, but their timbers were reused for all kinds of things.

I knew of an old farm up for auction not too far away where the owner had claimed that the wood used for his barn came from the wreck of the Sheraton Whaler. The farm was such a mess that no one bid enough to make a sale worthwhile. I contacted the owner and made an offer for the huge barn door. It was off its hinges and laying against the side of the building, and truthfully, the entire barn was slanted to one side so severely that it couldn't possibly stand much longer anyway. They let me have it for next to nothing. The following morning I began construction of my cistaphasmatis in the back of my aunt's garage. I only used the old oak wood for the inside chamber. I used pine for the outside so it wouldn't be quite so heavy in case I had to move it, but it still must have been a little hefty at four feet in height, four and a half feet in length, and three feet in width. Instead of a door, I made the top hinged like a chest lid so I could simply slide over the side to get in and then pull the top back down. I also left a small air hole on the backside for the candle smoke to escape through and stuffed it with a piece of black foam so it would hardly be noticeable. I placed a pair of locks on it to finish the project. If anyone asked about it, I would simply tell them it was a storage bin for some expensive tools. By the following evening it was ready for use.

I waited till Aunt Caroline went to bed before I entered the cistaphasmatis. I wasn't nervous because I didn't particularly think it would work. A couple of weeks had gone by since I had heard Diana's voice at the cemetery, and that's just enough time for a person to forget how real an otherworldly experience can be. By now I had begun to convince myself that the whole thing had been a simple hallucination (whatever those are). Still I lit the candle and waited. Everything I knew of that Diana owned was burnt in the fire. We did, however, each have a copy of a photograph of us together that was taken by my mother last Christmas. This was the closest I could get to bringing an item she owned with me into the box.

According to Seagraves, part of the trick was to blank your mind, and I found this to be much harder than it sounds. It's amazing how little time goes by, just a matter of seconds, before some thought enters your mind or maybe a song, and the next thing you know you're in deep thought again. It must have taken me close to an hour of practice before I could manage to keep my mind free from thought for periods of just a minute or so at a time. This went on for several hours. Seagraves had come up with another aid for this sort of meditation. He used seashells large enough to cover each ear and glued them to a scarf-like strap that he tied around the top of his head to the bottom of his chin. He found that the airy sound they produced helped take him to the trance-like state that was needed. It was easy enough to make a similar head strap, but even though I had brought it into the chamber with me, I was very reluctant to use it. After all, I felt silly enough sitting in this contraption to begin with without having seashells glued to a strap around my head! Eventually, around 3:00 o'clock, I finally gave in and put it on.

I noticed immediately the effects of the shells. It was like focusing on someone else's breathing. Then again I thought it was also like a steady rain. You know, the kind that can lull you to sleep so easily. In only a matter of minutes I started to see something coming into view in the mirror. It was the outline of a woman. The light was so dim around her that I couldn't make out much. She walked with a heavy limp and had a cane or walking stick in each hand. As she came closer to the candle, which seemed to illuminate both our worlds, and although she was still difficult to see, there was no mistaking that face—it was Diana.

Excerpt 2

"Do you think you're the first person to gaze into a mirror and see another world? Man, that stuff's old hat. That's along the lines of parlor tricks any first year adept could do."

"First year what?"

"Clifford, people have been doing this sort of thing since the world began. Diana herself made mention of the Eleusinian Mysteries to you. It's an art that can, and has been, taught since time out of mind. Any fool can jump into the nearest sensory deprivation chamber and have a vision. But not just anyone can have a vision from God Clifford, and that's what I want you to understand. There are visions, and there are visions, just like most people have a dream that comes true at some point in their life, but not all of their dreams."

"So the other million dreams are just hallucinations?"

"I didn't say that. Most are fiction. Maybe being a character in a fictional tale is the best way for us to learn some things. But not all those tales are sent from God. You have to test them."

"And the same goes for the things you see in a mirror I suppose?"

"No; you can never trust anything you see in a mirror Clifford! You cannot force true visions. It just doesn't work like that. Visions have to come to you, and they usually come when you least expect them. I'm not saying that proper meditation in conjunction with prayer is bad or that it can't lead to a true vision. No priest would tell you that. Opening your mind to God should always be a part of prayer. People think prayer is talking to God when in reality you can't tell God anything he doesn't already know. Prayer should mostly be about God talking to you. That's what the true Mystics have always done. You've spent so much time reading all this occult nonsense. Have you ever spent any time at all reading about the lives and visions of the Mystic Saints? If you ever do, you'll soon come to realize that all these goofy theosophists and the like are just children playing as men. They're the biggest know-nothings since the priests of those Eleusinian Mysteries. And what's worse, the leaders among them know it. Oh they'll gladly sell you their books and take your dues, but they themselves have been practicing meditation techniques long enough to know that it all leads to the same dead-end."

We fell silent for a minute as an endless stream of bicyclists came by, apparently part of some kind of organized event, and I was glad. I needed time to regroup. Once they were out of earshot I was ready to go on.

"There's one problem with all this Bud. I know Diana. I know her as well as I know myself. I can see no good reason she would want me to deliver that small handful of hair to her unless she actually does need it for what she says she does. Who else in any world would care about having that hair for anything? What could they possibly do with it? I guess you'll say they want it for some sort of magic spell."

"First let me tell you that I don't believe you. You say you're sure this is Diana because you know her so well. But didn't you also just get done telling me that she was saying some things and acting in certain ways in that world beyond the mirror that took you by surprise? Wasn't she rather quick to rid herself of all her former religious beliefs on the word of some boy she had only just met?"

"Well, yeah, but—"

"And didn't you tell me that she was suddenly being alluring in a sexual way, a way that made you want to jump through the mirror?"

"But I didn't mean it to sound quite like that."

"Secondly, there's no such thing as magic. At least not in this world, not today. And probably not in that one. But I'll tell you one thing. She was right about the thin places. I know exactly what she's after, but I'll not tell you."

"Why not? Why shouldn't I know?"

"Because you probably wouldn't believe me. And because, if you did, I'm afraid you might try to prove it to yourself, and I'm just old enough that I would like one of my last great pleasures in life to be that of proving it to you."

I shook my head again. "You've lost me. I have no idea what you're going on about. How can you prove anything to me?"

"By letting me be the one who gets in that box tonight."

"It's called a cistaphasmatis, and are you nuts?!"

Excerpt 3

He was a man of his word. Bud pulled up in his pickup truck at exactly two o'clock. I opened the garage door manually as slowly as I could, not wanting the electric motor to wake Aunt Caroline.

"I hope you won't mind if we put these on your invention here," he said as he held up a pair of padlocks complete with hinges.

"No need," I said. "I already have locks on it. But why do you want them on there?"

"Maybe I don't want to be disturbed. Now how about that photograph? And the candle and matches?"

"I keep all that in a bag inside there. You shouldn't need the photograph anyway since you'll be carrying some of her hair. I think we're good to go."

The cistaphasmatis was lighter than I thought it would be, but it was still plenty heavy, and we struggled to get it into the truck. As we pulled away, I still had no idea where he was taking me. I didn't know it yet, but the real struggle was yet to come.

"You look awfully chipper for two in the morning," he said.

"I just don't feel the need for sleep very much lately."

"That's understandable. They say some of the Mystics never slept."

"Is that what I am, a Mystic?"

"Not quite. What you did was for selfish reasons. You wanted to mitigate your conscience after your girlfriend died for having tried to manipulate her for your own lascivious purposes. Don't get me wrong Cliff, I'm glad you still have a conscience and tried to make a wrong right, but that doesn't make you a Mystic. A Mystic has no self. He doesn't meditate to try and contact the dead or to know the mysteries of the universe. He has no motive whatsoever but to seek the face of God."

"Okay, I'll buy that. But what's with the lack of sleep?"

"That's a byproduct of having transcended reality. Everyone does it when they sleep, but it's normally a slow process that can take as long as eight hours or more. The best way I can explain it is that we all have an attachment to another world. Let's think of that attachment as being something like a rubber band."

"Wait, another world?"

"Yes; nearly all religions preach that this world is not our true home. Our bodies may be part of it, but the portion of us that makes decisions and has a will is from much deeper in the heart of God. When we die, that part of us will go back to God in some way."

"What about Hell?"

"There are a lot of differing opinions about that, more than I care to get into at the moment. But the thing to remember is that, the part of us that's the real us was not made for this world and can only stand to be in it for just so long before it has to come up for air so to speak. That's what sleep does. It's like a whale coming up for air. He lives in the ocean, but he was not made for the ocean. The ocean was made for him.

"But let's get back to that rubber band. The bible refers to it as the 'silver cord.' Throughout the day it winds itself tighter and tighter, and the longer we stay self-aware in this world, the tighter it gets. It can only get just so tight before it has to unravel itself. And the only way it can do that is by loosing the ties of consciousness in this world and going back to where it came from."

"Which is where?" I asked.

"To the timeless void, the great sea which is God and which is everywhere and nowhere, the place from which all things have their first form (as Plato would have put it). Before anything was anything, it was a thought in the mind of God, and it still is. 'In Him we live and move and have our being,' Epimenides said, and he couldn't have been far wrong even if his own concept of God and reality was a bit skewed. There are probably many worlds. A creator is always about the business of creating. But he not only creates, he sustains what he creates or there'd be no point in creating it. Think of all the worlds, however many there are, as horses on a carrousel ride and God as the hub in the middle to which they're all attached and which continually spins because he makes it so. The void is the closest thing to the imagination of God we can conceive of (and we can't conceive much). It's a place where anything can become anything else just as a particle can become any other kind of particle in the material world after it first enters the place scientists call 'nonlocality' where time and space cease to exist, and even that I surmise is just another word for the void. But even that world, the void, is not without its rules, though I suspect many of its inhabitants don't know them, and their dreams and visions are as false and phony as the church doctrines which came from the sword-tip of Constantine.

"They say that St. Francis, and others like him, never slept. When a man transcends the material world, it's as though he unravels that rubber band in the blink of an eye—that same rubber band that most people have to sleep all night to loosen. It's not only holy men who do this, but only the holy men find the Divine during their moments of transcendence. You'll find more instances of it in the bible than just about anywhere. Men to whom the heavens were opened, and the light of God filled them with a lifetime of truth in an instant."

"That's quite a sermon," I said, not knowing how much of it, if any, was accurate or simply conjecture.

"That's what you get for inviting a priest to come along."

"The priest invited himself, but I'm glad you're here just the same."

He had no sooner said this than we pulled up onto a sandy beach. I had been listening so intently to him that I hadn't paid any mind to where we were going. I had to spend a moment taking in my surroundings before I realized Bud had driven us clean out to the other side of the island, out to Coskata Pond.

Why The Bible Is Different

About fifteen years ago I began to read a lot of writings from the Mesopotamia. I also read a lot of American Indian myths and quite a bit of Hindu writings. After a year or so of this little journey, one thing became abundantly clear. There is nothing like the bible despite its faults.

The first thing I ever read by Plato was The Republic. Two things struck me about it. The first was that Plato actually chastised the writings of Homer and others who had presented the Greek gods as being corrupt. He actually suggested changing them! (The stories—not the gods). The second was that Plato believed in the gods, but didn't seem to believe much at all that had been written about them. You'll find this is true of most Greeks from his time and the later Romans as well. Almost none of them believed their mythology to be non-fiction, let alone journalism. They knew the stories were made-up. They had festivals and celebrations based around these stories at times because they enjoyed the parties. The wine ran like a river at them. No wonder they had such respect for so detestable a character as Bacchus! Their mythology was nothing but fun and games for them. It was like reading comic books. They just weren't taken seriously.

We might say something similar concerning Plato's writings about Socrates. I doubt that anyone believed these stories about Socrates were anything other than Plato's own tales being put into the mouth of his hero and teacher. It might be true that Socrates said many of the things Plato wrote, but obviously Plato invented the bulk of the dialog that went with it. Of course no one could put down from memory long conversations that took place between people years earlier, so Plato had to invent most of the conversations and probably many of the settings and characters as well. Nobody minded this because this was the way stories were passed down in those days. They got the gist of things right more often than not, and that was all that was important. Virtually 90% of everything you'll ever read from ancient authors that involved real people was heavily embellished and fictionalized. In fact, if other of Socrates' peers hadn't also written about him, most of us today would probably think he never really existed at all and was just a character Plato invented from scratch.

CS Lewis said that part of what convinced him of the truth of Jesus was that the stories about him in the four biblical gospels read more like a person's diary, and at times even outright journalism. The writers seemed to just be reporting the facts of what they saw and heard. That doesn't mean there wasn't any sort of embellishing of those stories. They weren't written until decades after the Resurrection. I doubt very much if any of the early churchmen took the stories and all those long conversations, such as the sermon on the mount, as being told verbatim. Like Plato, the gospel writers probably had to invent some of the dialog. They obviously couldn't remember long conversations from decades gone by, and since no one's memory is perfect, this accounts for their versions of certain events all being at least slightly different. It's probably also true that later writers like Mathew and Luke took the earlier gospel of Mark/Peter for reference in their own writings. John's gospel is of course very different from the others. And it may be that some things in those gospels were simply made-up. This is especially true of Mathew's gospel. We don't know for sure. Did the virgin birth really happen? I've personally always doubted it. I think it's quite possible that Mathew and Luke both invented this to keep up with the Romans around them who had many heroes that were said to have been born of a union between a god and a mortal. Could it be that these writers were only human and caved in to peer pressure? After all, aside from Mathew and Luke, no other NT book makes mention of the virgin birth at all. My question is, does it matter? Can't we be happy and live the lives God wants us to live whether the virgin birth story is true or not? What possible effect could that have on my life? None that I can think of. But embellishments aside, the gospel stories mostly do not read like fiction. They mostly read like true stories about real people. You simply don't get the impression of "fiction" when you read them.

One of the more important discoveries that came from my reading ancient texts was how honest the Jewish writers seemed by comparison. I recall a guy named Peter that I mentioned this to one day, and I really think it was the biggest part of what made him re-evaluate his life and get back into the Christianity he had known as a boy. Pete was very interested in all things Egyptian. He had even been to Egypt a few times. He, like a lot of people, was convinced that the Egyptians were an advanced race just like those fables of Atlantis. I mentioned to him that the biblical writings seemed the most truthful of all ancient manuscripts to me because the bible actually told you all the bad things the Jews ever did right from the beginning. Adam and Eve messed up. Solomon built temples in the "high places". Cain killed Able. David and Bathsheba. Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. On and on. Kings and Chronicles will tell you not only the great achievements of Israel's kings, but they'll also tell you every little thing they did wrong. I've yet to come across any other ancient writings anywhere in the world that did that. I told Pete to go and read all the Egyptian priestly writings and then come back and tell me all the bad things the Egyptians did. He thought about that for a very long while and realized he obviously wouldn't come back with very much. There's simply nothing about them that seems realistic. And it's the same with their gods. Who on earth would read the stories about Horus, Osiris, or Isis and believe them to be anything but fiction? If you read those writings along with those from the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Akkadians and others, they read as though they had never lost a war and how all the peoples of the Earth were subject to them. We know they're dishonest because their neighbors wrote entirely different accounts about them (and the writings of all their neighbors matched). Where do other ancient texts tell you all the bad things they and their forefathers did? I've yet to come across such a book.

The Jewish writings were simply like nothing else on earth. That doesn't mean they're completely accurate or that God inspired them all. But where we find truth, we find at least a glimpse of the Divine, and you simply won't find that kind of honestly where people are actually self deprecating in any other ancient work. Homer and Virgil probably came closest, but it was seldom the actions of their own people they condemned. It was the actions of their gods!

At any rate, this has been one of the more effective arguments I've used for years when talking about Christianity to people. The self deprecating honesty of the Jews sets their writings apart from all other ancient peoples. I don't think anyone said it before me fifteen years ago, though someone certainly may have. But you're welcome to take this argument and make it your own just as several people already have.

Three Rabbis

This is an excerpt from Orson Scott Card's novel, Speaker for the Dead. It's a quote from an imaginary character in the story named San Angelo who started a Catholic Order centuries earlier. I thought it was good.

A Great Rabbi stands, teaching in the marketplace. It happens that a husband finds proof that morning of his wife's adultery, and a mob carries her to the marketplace to stone her to death. (There is a familiar version of this story, but a friend of mine - a Speaker for the Dead - has told me of two other Rabbis that faced the same situation. Those are the ones I'm going to tell you.)

The Rabbi walks forward and stands beside the woman. Out of respect for him the mob forbears and waits with the stones heavy in their hands. "Is there any man here," he says to them, "who has not desired another man's wife, another woman's husband?"

They murmur and say, "We all know the desire, but Rabbi none of us has acted on it."

The Rabbi says, "Then kneel down and give thanks that God has made you strong." He takes the woman by the hand and leads her out of the market. Just before he lets her go, he whispers to her, "Tell the Lord Magistrate who saved his mistress, then he'll know I am his loyal servant."

So the woman lives because the community is too corrupt to protect itself from disorder.

Another Rabbi. Another city. He goes to her and stops the mob as in the other story and says, "Which of you is without sin? Let him cast the first stone."

The people are abashed, and they forget their unity of purpose in the memory of their own individual sins. "Someday," they think, "I may be like this woman. And I’ll hope for forgiveness and another chance. I should treat her as I wish to be treated."

As they opened their hands and let their stones fall to the ground, the Rabbi picks up one of the fallen stones, lifts it high over the woman’s head and throws it straight down with all his might it crushes her skull and dashes her brain among the cobblestones.

"Nor am I without sins," he says to the people, "but if we allow only perfect people to enforce the law, the law will soon be dead, and our city with it."

So the woman died because her community was too rigid to endure her deviance.

The famous version of this story is noteworthy because it is so startlingly rare in our experience. Most communities lurch between decay and rigor mortis and when they veer too far they die. Only one Rabbi dared to expect of us such a perfect balance that we could preserve the law and still forgive the deviation. So of course, we killed him.

-San Angelo
Letters to an Incipient Heretic

The Big Blue Castle

Stephen Hawking made some big waves last month upon the release of his latest book: The Grand Design. You've probably heard about it already, but indulge me. For the record, I haven't read the book yet and have only browsed the internet for quotes from it.

In The Grand Design Professor Hawking syllogizes (his hypothesis is based on both M-Theory and the Big Bang Theory) an argument for a self-creating universe. You may have heard lately that Hawking has stated that the universe was not made by God. Well he hasn't actually said this. He does, however, come very close to it. This seems to stem from an article in last month's Wall Street Journal where they printed an excerpt from the book. The excerpt was titled: "Why God Did Not Create the Universe (There is a sound scientific explanation for the making of our world—no gods required)." Then below this it says: "By STEPHEN HAWKING And LEONARD MLODINOW." This makes it appear as though Hawking and his physicist writing partner had written the excerpt and the title of it. Obviously a guy like Hawking does not send in articles to publications like the WSJ. Of course the excerpt title was given by a staff member there.

But Hawking does say something very disturbing: "As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist."

That sure sounds like an atheist talking to me. This genius professor has never professed a belief in any kind of God, but in his past books he always seemed open to the possibility of a mind in the mix of things. What happened? Hawking is now 68 years old. With Lou Gehrig Disease, it's amazing he's lived this long. He's made some amazing discoveries throughout his career. It seems to me, however, that he's losing his perspective on what science is actually capable of achieving.

For instance, he says, "According to M-theory, ours is not the only universe. Instead, M-theory predicts that a great many universes were created out of nothing."

Really? Out of nothing? Undoubtedly he's knowledgeable about primordial matter—that small bit of stuff which has always existed and from which our universe sprang. The only thing that comes from nothing is nothing. Something had to have always been here. According to Big Bang Theory, in the beginning the universe was a very tiny place indeed. There was not in it the four forces of energy we know so well today, but instead one super-force. Was there matter? We have to remember that all energy has matter, and all matter has energy. It's very much like the way a particle can also be a wave. Therefore we have to think of this super-energy as being matter also, but not yet in a material state so to speak. The super-energy would remain in an energy state for a an unknown period of time before it changed into matter, so we should probably think of it more as potential matter. At the very least we can say that the energy has always been here. Energy is not "nothing." But I am certainly not telling you anything Mr. Hawking does not know himself and know better than I, so why he states that universes were created out of nothing is curious. He even mentions primordial elements (what that energy turned into) at one point in the book and goes on to list many of the things that had to have taken place to the nth degree for a place like Earth to exist where life can thrive.

The tale of how the primordial universe of hydrogen, helium and a bit of lithium evolved to a universe harboring at least one world with intelligent life like us is a tale of many chapters. The forces of nature had to be such that heavier elements—especially carbon—could be produced from the primordial elements, and remain stable for at least billions of years. Those heavy elements were formed in the furnaces we call stars, so the forces first had to allow stars and galaxies to form. Those in turn grew from the seeds of tiny inhomogeneities in the early universe.

Even all that is not enough: The dynamics of the stars had to be such that some would eventually explode, precisely in a way that could disperse the heavier elements through space. In addition, the laws of nature had to dictate that those remnants could recondense into a new generation of stars, these surrounded by planets incorporating the newly formed heavy elements.

By examining the model universes we generate when the theories of physics are altered in certain ways, one can study the effect of changes to physical law in a methodical manner. Such calculations show that a change of as little as 0.5% in the strength of the strong nuclear force, or 4% in the electric force, would destroy either nearly all carbon or all oxygen in every star, and hence the possibility of life as we know it. Also, most of the fundamental constants appearing in our theories appear fine-tuned in the sense that if they were altered by only modest amounts, the universe would be qualitatively different, and in many cases unsuitable for the development of life. For example, if protons were 0.2% heavier, they would decay into neutrons, destabilizing atoms.

If one assumes that a few hundred million years in stable orbit is necessary for planetary life to evolve, the number of space dimensions is also fixed by our existence. That is because, according to the laws of gravity, it is only in three dimensions that stable elliptical orbits are possible. In any but three dimensions even a small disturbance, such as that produced by the pull of the other planets, would send a planet off its circular orbit, and cause it to spiral either into or away from the sun.

The emergence of the complex structures capable of supporting intelligent observers seems to be very fragile. The laws of nature form a system that is extremely fine-tuned. What can we make of these coincidences? Luck in the precise form and nature of fundamental physical law is a different kind of luck from the luck we find in environmental factors. It raises the natural question of why it is that way.

Many people would like us to use these coincidences as evidence of the work of God.

In reality he hasn't even begun to list all the things that had to happen for us to be here. That life exists anywhere is a miracle beyond any proportion the mind can conceive. There are billions of biological evolutionary steps that had to happen and happen in just the right way at just the right time, all while the cosmological setting of our planet maintained a near perfect orbit for billions of years in just the right conditions. Professor Andrew Watson from the University of East Anglia, a mathematician, says:

If we learned the planet would be habitable for a set period and that we had evolved early in this period, then even with a sample of one, we’d suspect that evolution from simple to complex and intelligent life was quite likely to occur. By contrast, we now believe that we evolved late in the habitable period, and this suggests that our evolution is rather unlikely. In fact, the timing of events is consistent with it being very rare indeed. ... Complex life is separated from the simplest life forms by several very unlikely steps and therefore will be much less common. Intelligence is one step further, so it is much less common still....

He goes on to say that the probability of each step occurring at all is less than 10% and that the probability of intelligent life occurring is less than .01% over 4-billion years. Also, each step must happen in a precise order, and this is even less likely.

Professor Hawking invokes the atheist magic dust of infinity to account for all this. M-theory predicts nearly an infinite number of universes to have coincided with the Big Bang. He believes that with an infinite number of universes anything and everything will eventually happen—possibly more than once. Some people actually believe that infinity could eventually produce an exact duplicate of Earth somewhere in some world—perhaps many copies with doppelgangers of each one of us.

Now I ask you, if you were to roll one die, what are the chances of that die coming up on a number you predict? One in six of course. And the chances of two dice coming up on the same number is much greater than that. If you had a trillion dice, what do you think the chances are of every one of them coming up on the same number? It will likely never happen did you say? Every time you add more dice your odds get worse—not better. The number of particles that had to be aligned just so in such a way to get an Earth and intelligent life on it is immeasurable. It might as well be an infinite number. To think this would ever happen again is the stuff of such madness that only a conspiracy theorist of the highest order would entertain such a notion. I've heard similar imaginative ramblings from professors who claimed that if you tossed a box of sand in the air enough times, the grains would eventually land on the floor in a perfect outline of the Mona Lisa along with every other piece of art ever created. The fact is that this has been attempted several times with computer generated random graphics, and not once has it ever exactly duplicated any recognizable artwork.

Here's something else to consider. I mentioned before a trillion dice all coming up on the same number as probably being impossible even given an infinite length of time. Let's say they all had to come up with the number-3. That atheist magic dust of infinity also works the other way. If you want to say that anything is possible given an infinite amount of time, then it's just as possible that a trillion dice could all land on the number-4 every time you threw them till the end of time... (Wonderful how a tiny ellipsis can represent something as large as infinity isn't it)?

I'll tell you how I view this world of ours. Suppose you had a bush pilot fly you to a remote part of Alaska that wasn't on any map. Someplace where there exist mountains, valleys, and lakes that no man has ever seen or set foot on. And after hiking through this barren landscape for several weeks you climb to the top of a mountain and find there a large blue castle luxuriously furnished with all the requisites for life—a refrigerator full of food, running water, a bed and chair that seemed tailor-made for you, a furnace to keep you warm, a thermostat set at the exact temperature your body desires, electric lights along with a hydro powered generator outside perfectly placed by a waterfall to keep them on, and every other modern convenience you could ever desire. If it's a matter of odds, which would seem more likely to you: that this big blue castle and everything in it "just happened" to be produced by mere chance? or that someone created it?