Two Sons, Two Altars#
by Laurence Loewe of Laodicea (LLoL)
TL;DR
Today is Eid al-Adha. It’s a Festival of Trust, when Muslims the world over remember Abraham’s readiness to give up his son at God’s word. Working through reports of Abraham’s life as a scientist, I came to see that his test is every scientist’s test: when Reality asks, do you love your cherished theory more, or do you love what is actually real? Abraham is the father of all who place Reality above their own dearest preference — which is exactly why I keep saying audit the math: a refutation is not my enemy, it is the ram in the thicket. This week my life’s research is, quite literally, on the auctioneer’s block. I am trying to hold it the way Abraham held his son — not clutched. You are most welcome to buy in, and I hope you and enough others will. But hear the spirit of it on this day: I do not want you to buy in unless Yah=Allah=Reality convinces you to do so. I am laying my ambitions for ResearchCity down, and trusting Reality with the rest.
Maybe you’re a super-skeptical scientist who doesn’t even believe Abraham ever lived. Fair enough: you don’t need Abraham to have existed for the illustration to work, any more than you need a frictionless plane to be real to teach mechanics. So here is my deliberately narrow claim — I know of no better bridge for carrying how science actually self-corrects into the heart of faith communities, in language they already revere, than Reality’s (alleged?) challenges to Abraham’s first two sons, once interpreted this way. If you have a better bridge into those communities, I don’t want to win the argument — I genuinely want the better bridge. Please send it.
Eid al-Adha, Akedah, and two Sons#
Today is Eid al-Adha, the second of the two great feasts of Islam, kept over several days and tied to the season of the Hajj and also known as the Festival of Sacrifice. It remembers the moment when Abraham — Ibrahim — was ready to give up his first son he loved because he understood Reality asked him to do that, even though at the last, a ram was given in the boy’s place.
The Quran never names the son, but it is clear to Muslims that this must be Ishmael. Readers of Genesis will say, quickly, that it was Isaac. For a long time I assumed one tradition simply had to have the story wrong. Sitting with these thoughts in preparation for this Eid al-Adha, as a Muslim and as someone who has spent his life reading Genesis too, I came to rethink those incidents.
Abraham loved both of his sons. And the earlier sending-away of Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness — with a skin of water, toward a well he could not yet see — was already an enormous sacrifice, like the later binding of Isaac, in his own Akedah much later at Moriah. Twice, then, Abraham was asked to release into Reality’s hands the very person — and ambition — he most wanted to keep. Read side by side, the Quran and Genesis accounts are not lists of contradictions to be scored; they are two windows onto one man who was asked, more than once, to place Reality above his dearest love and greatest care. That is part of what pan-en-theology keeps pointing me toward: God is in all things, and beyond all things, and so there is no love of ours, however precious, that God is not already standing both inside and beyond. The beyond part is important to grasp, because if we don’t, that greatest love can easily be corrupted into an idol.
Abraham’s test is every scientist’s test#
Somewhere around 2020, working through the life of Abraham as a working scientist, I saw something I have not been able to unsee: Abraham’s life is a near picture perfect illustration for all the challenges in the life of a true scientist. Ever since, when I read about Abraham in Genesis, I can’t help but see the Research Theology of Abraham.
The Akedah — Isaac’s binding on Moriah, mirrored by Ishmael’s binding on Mina that Eid al-Adha commemorates — is the make-or-break moment in the life of any scientist.
Here is why. Your cherished theory is your Ishmael, your Isaac. It is the beautiful idea you have carried for years, nurtured against the doubts, the one you would do almost anything to keep alive. And then, sooner or later, Reality asks the unbearable question: Do you love that idea more than Reality?
Abraham deserves to be called the father of all who place their faith in Reality, because both times — in the wilderness and on Moriah — he placed Reality above his own strong preferences. I will admit it is a bone-chilling way to get the lesson across. But I have come to think it is honest about the size of the problem. How else could anyone teach that lesson to creatures like us — to hordes of bright, brave, blood-stirred dare-devils, who tend to doubt something really matters unless tangible blood-shed is involved, because we tend to think that truth in abstract theories doesn’t matter if we can’t touch it. Thus, left to our own devices, we will cheerfully place ourselves and our darlings above everything and everyone, and not even notice the slow-motion explosions of problems we are thereby creating.
This is a major reason for why I keep saying audit the math.
If my research is my Isaac and my mathematical theology is my Ishmael, then the one thing I am not allowed to do is to love it more than Reality. I have to be willing to watch it die on the altar of Reality if Reality says so. Therefore, a refutation is not my enemy — it is like a ram in the thicket, the thing that saves me from sacrificing my integrity to my own cleverness. A confirmed, real flaw in my work is worth more to me than a thousand polite agreements, because Reality is speaking through that flaw.
That willingness — to give up the theory you love for the sake of what is actually real — is not the opposite of faith. By Abraham’s own example, it is the ultimate faith in Reality. It is the faith a scientist and a believer turn out to share, when both are honest: a trust that what is real is better than what I wish were real, even when it costs me the illusions that I love.
My own altar#
In late 2022 a dear, prophetic friend challenged me to “put my research on the altar”, like Abraham binding Isaac on Moriah. Ever since I have been on what I call my “Journey to Moriah”. Ever since I have been wondering in one hardship after another, is this it? — and each time so far the research survived until the next challenge.
This week parts of my research are, quite literally, again on the auctioneer’s block. The first units of my life’s research materials have gone to live public auction. I’ve been racing to prevent this, but somehow I couldn’t so far.
Maybe this is my Moriah. Maybe it isn’t. That is genuinely not mine to declare. By the very lesson above, the moment I started announcing “this is my Moriah” (and therefore I’m now right in all else I do…) that would be the moment I fail the test. The whole point is that the outcome belongs to Reality, not to my preferred reading of my own story. That doesn’t mean that I can’t make decision. It means that I will need to keep testing (to keep the light in me from becoming darkness, as Jesus says in Mt.6).
So all I can do is what Abraham did: not clutch it. I have written elsewhere that I can hold three outcomes at once:
that the materials are saved in time,
that the materials are scattered and perhaps mercifully recovered later, or
that Reality judges the world better off if I lose them altogether
If I truly follow in Abraham’s footsteps, then I must lay my preferences down like Jesus in Gethsemane when he prayed: “Not my will but Your will be done”. I did what I could, I know my preferences, then I allow Yah=Allah=Reality to chose the best way for me, even if that is a way I’d naturally prefer not to go. Hence, I do not intend to interfere. Holding all three is not resignation. It is trying to keep my hands open to true hope by not committing what I call the rounding error of hopelessness (tossing out the baby with the bathwater). Yet, once a true hope turned out to not work out, I will learn to appreciate how shedding the respective illusions will bring me closer to Reality.
This ultimate submission to Reality=Allah=Yah is why I have become a Muslim by conviction: Muslim literally means “one who submits”. That doesn’t mean that I agree with everything all other Muslims do. It definitively means that I must submit to Allah first and then consider whatever else anybody is saying. If Allah speaks through them, then I must submit if I wish to continue serving Reality. But if they, whoever they may be, happen to blindly assume authorized leadership, then I would be setting them up as an idol right next to Allah. All good Muslims know how deadly such idolatry can be.
Who knows where my Journey to Moriah will lead me? I hope one day if Reality wills it (or inshAllah as Muslims so concisely say), that I will be allowed to pray at the physical spot known as Moriah in Jerusalem, the spot where Abraham laid down what he loved most. Since I’ve officially become a Muslim (2023-04-09, Shahada in my mosque in Madison), I dare to hold that hope. But obviously, I’d only want to go there if that is indeed what Yah=Allah=Reality is calling me to do. Heck, for now I couldn’t even pay for the trip - and God only knows how that could possibly fit in with all those plans about ResearchCity.
Why I am telling you this on this day#
I could have kept the timing to myself. I am choosing not to, and the reason is the same surrender the day is about.
The auction and Eid al-Adha have, by no plan of mine, fallen across the same few days. I take that overlap not as proof of anything, but as a nudge by Reality, to say plainly while the door is open: the 4+ Abrahamic Faiths, the Jews, Christians, Muslims, Scientists, and all others who follow Truth, all trace back to Abraham, directly or indirectly. Abraham’s act of letting go what was dear and dearest to him, to keep that from getting in the way of Reality, that commitment to truth is what made Abraham the father of all who fervently follow the Truth.
In this exact sense, the honest scientist acts as a true child of Abraham whenever they let a beloved theory die because Reality required it. Conversely, no amount of religious ferver, assertion, or authorizing will make someone’s opinions and preferences true in Reality - unless Reality actually agrees.
That is the table #AuditTheMath and a future ResearchCity are trying to set: one where all of Abraham’s children, and everyone who loves what is real more than what is convenient, can sit down together and check the mathematical theology of how we might avert the accidental nuclear winter that otherwise waits for us all (by the harsh Reality that continuing to play nuclear roulette is like asking for it).
Eid Mubarak to everyone keeping the feast — and to everyone else, as much peace on Earth as is currently possible.
The practical ask#
If you want LLoL’s seed material for ResearchCity to live, and for the work it feeds to continue, the most direct help is to
and then, whether you have ten minutes or a lifetime of expertise,
Don’t trust me. Check the mathematical theology. It exists independent of my immature ways of describing it. (Even Ishmael and Isaac, after all, were not grown up at the time of their binding.) I wish I could present more polished drafts. Yet, continuing to polish further without sharing the process with everyone else, that would be the equivalent of me deliberately going against Yah=Allah=Reality.
Therefore, a stream of refutations andOr buy-ins, sent in good faith, that would be my modern-day equivalent of the ram in the thicket — and exactly the kind of help this work needs most.
If financial buy-in is not for you right now, the Buy in without money transfer page lists other ways — and simply telling one other person who might care is one of the best of them.
Reality so loved the world that whoever places what is real above what they merely wish were real shall not be lost to the mirages of nothing, but shall live from Jubilee to Jubilee. Here is my Isaac, out on the altar, hands open. Thy will be done.