Oh, the Irony! Atheists Provide the Best Evidence that God is Real!

Seeking a more logical cosmology.

I've been involved in a lot of discussions lately about the existence of God or, conversely, the folly of faith. Mostly these have been fairly civil dialogues on Soul Pancake or The Great Silent Majority page on Facebook. I recommend either or both to your attention if you think it's fun to think and write about life's great questions with people who are willing to listen politely, even to those they consider to be idiots. I've distilled much of what I've posted elsewhere into this little treatise on why I believe in God and why I do not think this is lunacy.

Atheists like to assert that there is no evidence to support the existence of God. Believers then are held to be an ignorant and superstitious lot who need religion as a crutch to face the crushing realities of a meaningless existence. Or, as comedian, Bill Maher, quipped:

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction. Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do.

Maher is a funny person and a bonafide wit, but he has no more philosophical leg to stand on here than Dr. Stephen Hawking who has suggested that the laws of nature prove that there is no God. According to Hawking the universe 'popped' into existence, in accordance with the rules of quantum physics, as an 'infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense' proton—so small and so dense that it could not admit time. There was therefore no time for a creator to have acted, and, indeed, no need of a creator except to explain all these things before we had quantum physics to take over the task.

For Hawking, Maher, and all the rest whose understanding of our existence is rooted in the physical sciences, God is a construct. They believe that men invented gods to explain the mysteries of the universe. Presumably they believe that, in modern times, Yawheh, Allah, and the Father of Jesus, all the same God, are just more complex and fully realized versions of the same superstitious hokum.

The Big Bang is a theory whose purpose is to explain the existence of the universe without God, and its proponents have made good on its promise. Of course this is rather easier when the theoretical construct was made without any reference to God. When it comes to accepting theory as scientific fact though, in the absence of any as yet complete proof, a certain amount of faith is required even though those who advance the theory would probably deny it.

On the other hand, be He construct or reality, God has always required faith. The faithful already know this—the ones who actually think about it at any rate. There is no conclusive proof of the existence of God. I will submit that there is a lot of evidence, but there is no proof. I'm talking about objective, scientific proof—the kind that can be tested and verified by repeatable experimentation. There will always be some theological wankers about who will quote the Bible as an authority in an argument with an atheist as if Scripture carries any weight with a non-believer. Most of us realize that this is not just an exercise in futility. It is stupid. The Bible does not prove that God exists with any authority except to those who already accept it. This won't work to bridge the chasm between objective reality and the metaphysical plane. For that we need faith.

Faith is bigger than certainty,
but it may still require
heavy equipment.

For the intelligent believer, faith must necessarily contain an element of doubt else it isn't faith at all but certain knowledge. Certain knowledge does not move mountains. Certain knowledge does not even build churches. Certain knowledge is not spiritual, religious, holy, nor full of grace. Certain knowledge, or at least the requirement for it, is the necessary fundamental limitation of the physical sciences. Science requires proof to keep it honest. When science makes an assertion that is not backed up by proof, it is required to keep looking.

Doubt, on the other hand, is the liberating principle of faith and the ultimate foundation of metaphysics. A metaphysical philosopher must ask a question of the discipline that no self-respecting physicist ever would or could ask about physics, and that is, 'Is metaphysics even possible?' Asking this question makes metaphysics at once more honest and analytical than physics will ever be. Why? For the simple reason that it forces the philosopher to consider, with humility, that he might be wrong.

As I've already said, atheists believe that God, or the gods, are a construct of the human imagination designed to explain the mysteries of the universe. I believe that this human ability to conceive of a creator god is the best evidence we have that one actually exists. Here's why.

If you subscribe to Stephen Hawking's idea of the Big Bang—that a prototypical, protean proton 'popped' into existence and exploded, and that all of the untold trillions of selective events that happened between then and now, leading to our current state of evolution and development, were completely natural and godless and random, then what in our experience of this process would lead us to conceive of a creator cause?

Someone once said, 'all art is derivative.' (I've been trying for several days now to find out just who said it first, but it's all over the internet without any attribution. If anyone knows who said this first, please let me know.) What this means is that, even in the arts - presumably mankind's most creative endeavors - nothing is truly original. Everything is built on something that went before. I submit that this is true of everything that men do.

There is nothing man has accomplished that is not rooted in something else that already existed. To be sure there are materials that exist today that did not exist at the dawn of time, but every one of them is comprised of stuff that did. There are concepts and designs and theories that seem new and wondrous, but all of them are derived from and built on the foundations of the past. Even at the height of its power, humanity is not capable of producing anything from nothing. Everything humanity has done is derivative. Science does not beget; it discovers. Or, as Ecclesiastes has it:

What has been will be again,

what has been done will be done again;

there is nothing new under the sun.

Beatific vision or
atmospheric pollutants?

If we are nothing more than the sum total of all the random electro-chemical responses that have flowed into our genetic makeup, how did any of us come to conceive of a creator at all? If there is no God then there could be nothing in our naturally-selected history upon which we could begin to assemble this concept. If God doesn't exist, we couldn't possibly have made Him up. What I think instead - no, what I choose to believe - is that we are predisposed to believe in God because we were imbued with a spark of divinity by the creator.

I believe this because it has been given to me to do so. I am not a fool, and I am not insane. I know full well that I had to make a choice to get to this state—a choice that is not supported by any objective, scientific logic, but one that nevertheless makes perfect sense to me.

There is a word in ancient Hebrew, 'ruach.' It is usually translated as breath or spirit. We first encounter it in the Genesis account of creation. I am not offering this as any kind of proof. I am offering it as an explanation as to why I believe what I believe. I am not getting into an argument of Genesis vs. evolution. I believe in evolution, and I accept science, as far as it goes, as demonstrably true. I also believe Genesis—not as a literal account of creation, but as a lovely, poetic allegory for the metaphysical reality of man's place in it.

There are famously two accounts of creation in Genesis. They are different from one another, our first clue that the Bible, even for believers, is not meant to be taken literally. As to the origins of man, the thing I mean to consider here, Genesis 1:27 says, 'God created man in His image, in the divine image He created him, male and female He created them.' In Genesis 2:7 it says, 'the Lord God formed man out of the clay of the ground and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.'

These two accounts are different, but they are meant to be taken together. They are two different ways of looking at the same thing. The Aramaic word for 'breath of life' in chapter 2 is 'ruach.' Its parallel in chapter 1 is 'the divine image.' God breathed His divine self-image into mankind, male and female, and made of us something entirely new. This is the only reason I can fathom that we are even able to conceive of things beyond our knowing.

Pondering imponderables.

Were it not for this ruach, we would not be able to ponder infinity. We would not be able to embrace divinity. We would not be able to approach holiness. We would instead be imprisoned by our mere chemistry. Without the breath of divine life we would be incapable of bridging the gap between the physical and the metaphysical. We would be the pinnacle of mammalian existence, but we would be incapable of imagining anything else.

This for me is the best evidence that God exists. It doesn't have to be in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition. Virtually every religious tradition has its own creation narrative, and they all presuppose some sort of relationship between mankind and the divine. My point is that, no matter the faith tradition, somewhere, somehow God has enabled us to know something of Him, and had He not done so, had He not intervened in our evolution, we would not be able to think Him up on our own. Of course I rely on my faith to tell me this...so I could be wrong.

Steven Hawking Shouldn't Quit His Day Job

I watched the inaugural episode of Discovery Channel's new series, Curiosity, the other week. (Sunday August 7, 2011) In it Dr. Steven Hawking, noted theoretical physicist, postulated that the immutable laws of nature 'prove' that there is no God. I do not doubt that Hawking is a brilliant man who has contributed vast new insights in the fields of physics and cosmology, but, after watching this show, I have to conclude that he has left a lot of air in these particular postulations, and most of that air is hot.

I can't help but think that the show itself was designed to advance the notion that gods in general, and the modern concept of one, true creator God in particular, are mere fanciful concepts of ignorant people rooted in superstition and prejudice. Fully half the show was given over to demonstrating that the ancient Norse gods were invented to explain natural phenomena like solar eclipses, and that the Christian Church of Rome spent centuries frustrating the advancement of science by branding luminaries like Galileo as heretical.

While these are indisputable historical facts, presenting them in this way in this particular show did nothing to advance Hawking's cosmology, but rather served to to cast that cosmology in a light of courageous departure from conventional thinking that was likely to embroil him in controversy. And so it has, not because Hawking has advanced cosmological thinking to new frontiers, but because he has made some leaps of faith in science that would make a televangelist blush.

Hawking seems to relish the role he has scripted for himself. He claims, for instance, that when he attended a Vatican conference on cosmology in 1985 Pope John Paul II admonished the attendees not to 'ask questions about the origins of the universe because that is the work of God'. Hawking has made this claim several times before, but it turns out not to be true. The complete text of the Pope's remarks at that conference and the preceding one in 1981 contain no explicit proscription against investigating the origins of the universe. In fact he seems to welcome such inquiries on the premise that such knowledge advances our understanding of our place in the universe.

To be fair, the Pope does warn against undertaking such queries using the physical sciences alone. He asserts that such investigations without benefit of the metaphysical disciplines would be perforce limited in their usefulness. He does not forbid questions of origin, however, and he certainly does not threaten the kind of 'trouble' that Hawking intimates he will get into for undertaking to answer these questions anyway. Hawking's posturing as a scientist victimized by religious prejudice is little more than self-serving bunkum. It is Hawking's slipshod logical progression that is his undoing, not any fundamental Christian bigotry.

Notwithstanding, I am sure there is plenty of religious bigotry to go around. A lot of it has already surfaced on the Internet in response to Hawking's claims on the show. A lot of it is just as riddled with ignorance and superstition as Hawking says, although, again to be fair, so are the in-your-face celebrations of fundamental atheists worshipping at the altar of Hawking's so-called proofs. As Albert Einstein once quipped, 'The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer'.

Hawking's points are summarized below. Except where noted, these are direct quotes from the show, taken in the order in which they were presented. Brackets indicate paraphrasing by me.

1. The universe is a machine governed by principles or laws, laws that can be understood by the human mind.
2. The discovery of these laws is humankind's greatest achievement...for it is these laws of nature, as we now call them, that will tell us whether we need a god to explain the universe at all.
3. Physical laws, as well as being unchangeable, are universal.
4. If you accept...that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn't take long to ask what role is there for God.
5. To make a universe you need only three ingredients: matter, energy, and space.
6. Energy permeates the universe, driving the processes that keep it a dynamic, endlessly changing place.
7. [Because, as Einstein discovered, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, mass and energy are essentially the same thing, so you really only need energy and space to make a universe.]
8. Space and energy were spontaneously created in an event we now call the Big Bang.
9. The laws of physics demand the existence of something called negative energy.
10. When the Big Bang produced a vast amount of positive energy, it simultaneously produced the same amount of negative energy. [The positive and negative energy in the universe always add up to zero.]
11. If the universe adds up to nothing, then you don't need a god to create it.
12. [At the sub-atomic level] you enter a world where conjuring something out of nothing is possible. That's because at this scale particles such as protons behave according to the laws of nature we call quantum mechanics, and they really can appear at random, stick around, and then vanish again to reappear somewhere else. Since we know the universe itself was once very small—smaller than a proton in fact—this means something quite remarkable. It means the universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence without violating the laws of nature.
13. The laws of nature themselves tell us that, not only could the universe have popped into existence like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that nothing caused the Big Bang.
14. At the instant of the Big Bang time itself began...because inside [a] black hole...time doesn't exist. And that's exactly what happened at the start of the universe. The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is...the final key to removing the need for a grand designer and revealing how the universe created itself.
15. As we travel back in time toward the moment of the Big Bang, the universe gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it finally gets to a point where the whole universe is in a space so small that it is in effect a single,  infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense black hole. And, just as with modern day black holes floating around in space, the laws of nature dictate something quite extraordinary. They tell us that, here too, time itself must come to a stop.
16. You can't get to a time before the Big Bang because there was no 'before the Big Bang'. We have finally found something that doesn't have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. [So] there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed.
17. Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything.

What Hawking has attempted is to explain how the universe could have come about without a creator. This much he seems to have done, at least to his own satisfaction and that of the giddy atheists who were waiting for a brilliant cosmologist to tell them they don't have to worry about judgment in a nonexistent afterlife. That is, he has succeeded if you accept that a theoretical prototypical black hole with no existing matter or energy from which to draw would behave in the same way as a proton, which can pop into existence willy-nilly in the midst of a whole universe of preexisting stuff. Personally, I think this is a leap of faith.

Beyond that is Hawking's short-shrift treatment of the laws of nature upon which he rests his case. Where did they come from? He doesn't say. I suppose you could argue that when the universe exploded onto the scene it came complete with the laws that would govern its dynamics and processes. All the matter and all the energy contained therein would just behave according to their natures, and these natures would, in essence, constitute the rules of behavior. I find this a little problematic, but then I am not a theoretical physicist. I am an unemployed accountant. What the hell do I know?

So here is my question for Dr. Hawking. If the Big Bang initially produced a single, infinitesimally small, infinitesimally dense proton, which is essentially the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, complete with its own rules for being and acting, what did that hydrogen nucleus fuse with to create helium? How did helium then know how to behave? Where did gold come from? And rabbit fur, and patent leather, and Donald Trump's hair?

Ostensibly all of these things proceeded organically one from the other over billions of millennia until we end up with this immense complexity of matter and energy all behaving according to immutable laws of nature for which we have no source. How is this a more simple explanation than a creator god?

And that's another thing: the creator god, or God. Hawking asserts there couldn't have been one because there was no time for one to have acted. This is the limitation of physical sciences about which John Paul II tried to warn us. If physical science can't observe time before the Big Bang, then it must not have existed. But what if it existed someplace else? Like, for instance, a place where the prototypical proton existed before it appeared here?

Physical science also apparently requires its creator god, if in fact it can conceive of such a thing at all, to have mass and to occupy space and time. Hawking says there was no time for God to have acted. The metaphysical notion of God does not have these limitations. In fact, most of us who believe in God believe that he emphatically does not exist in time or space, nor does he have any mass. We have convenient metaphorical expressions to explain God's presence and attributes, but on the conceptual plane we think of God as timeless intellect, pure spirit, an overarching ideal containing the essential nature, the rules if you will, of everything we are able to observe and experience.

This is ancient stuff. God's own name for himself in the ancient Hebraic texts is 'I am'. He is not before or after creation. He just is. Always. This is not an observable kind of thing. This is therefore not something that can be proven or dis-proven with science. You can call bullshit if you want, and many have, but that doesn't make it so.

Hawking makes a lot out of our 'need', or more specifically the lack thereof, for a creator. His idea of God is of a construct invented to explain the otherwise unexplainable. Accordingly, as we are able to explain more and more of our physical universe, we need God less and less. Science has its own artificial constructs though. Black holes and the Big Bang are two such. They are theoretical events that were invented to explain the otherwise unexplainable.

The Big Bang especially is a theory whose purpose is to explain the existence of the universe without God, and Hawking has made good on its promise. Of course this is rather easier when the theoretical construct was constructed without any reference to God. When it comes to accepting theory as scientific fact though, in the absence of any as yet complete proof, a certain amount of faith is required.

God on the other hand, construct or reality, has always required faith. The faithful already know this—the ones who actually think about it at any rate. There will always be some theological wankers about who will quote the Bible as an authority in an argument with an atheist as if Scripture carries any weight with a non-believer. Most of us realize that this is not just an exercise in futility. It is stupid.

For the intelligent believer though, faith must necessarily contain an element of doubt else it isn't faith at all but certain knowledge. Certain knowledge does not move mountains. Certain knowledge is not spiritual, religious, holy, nor full of grace. Certain knowledge, or at least the requirement for it, is the necessary fundamental limitation of the physical sciences. Science requires proof to keep it honest. When science makes an assertion that is not backed up by proof, it is required to keep looking.

Doubt, on the other hand, is the liberating principle of faith and the ultimate foundation of metaphysics. A metaphysical philosopher must ask a question of the discipline that no self-respecting physicist ever would or could ask about physics, and that is, 'Is metaphysics even possible?' Asking this question makes metaphysics at once more honest and analytical than physics will ever be. Why? For the simple reason that it forces the philosopher to consider, with humility, that he might be wrong. I don't think this notion has entered Stephen Hawking's mind. As a man of faith I have to grant that he may be right, but I don't believe it for a minute.

Turning the Other Cheek

Turning the other cheek: not for the faint of heart.

There are plenty of troublesome passages in the Bible. I'm not talking about stuff that's hard to believe. I'm talking about stuff that's hard to do, even for true believers. One such passage comes from the Gospel according to Matthew:

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)

Another, in much the same vein, comes from Luke:

But I say to you who hear, love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. Whoever hits you on the cheek, offer him the other also; and whoever takes away your coat, do not withhold your shirt from him either. Give to everyone who asks of you, and whoever takes away what is yours, do not demand it back. (Luke 6:27-30)

People are not predisposed to act this way—not even Christians—and so mostly they don't—again, not even Christians. It would take an enormous amount of courage to return only love, forgiveness, submission, and prayers to one's persecutors, knowing full-well that one was going to receive only more persecution, cheek plucking, and pants stealing in return.

It would take an even more enormous amount of faith to presume that God would see to it that things turned out otherwise. God makes no such guarantee. God only promises eternal life to those who believe and keep his commandments, and it seems, based on these two troublesome passages of Scripture at any rate, that He makes the same promise to our tormentors. Who in their right mind wants a deal like that? I think the answer is obvious—tormentors and persecutors.

I bring this up because I have been thinking about my tormentors these past few days. I have four principal nemeses, and I have written extensively about them in this blog. They are, in reverse chronological order:

1. Bill Clifton – division president at my last job – the guy who fired me.
2. Fritz DelMonte – corporate CFO at my last job – the guy who had me fired.
3. Quentin Parks – CFO at Albatross – the philandering smoothie who not only let his girlfriend influence company policy, but also to weigh in on the list of candidates for a sweeping final reduction in force.
4. Rod Chandler – director of accounting under Parks – the anal retentive self-promoter who initially proposed me as a candidate for lay-off because he saw me as a threat to his continued ascendancy in power and influence.

Often better when someone else does it.

I still think about them all with some regularity, although, thankfully, with less frequency than when all their tormenting was still manifest in fresh wounds. Two weeks ago, The Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time according to our Catholic liturgical calendar, the passage from Matthew that I quoted above, was included in the readings at Mass. Our pastor preached his homily on it, as he was supposed to do, and drove home the necessity of praying for one's enemies with some force. As a devout believer, one who doesn't think that religion is all about feeling good or making easy choices, I was forced to consider it.

I considered it for two days, and then started doing it. It wasn't easy. I didn't expect it to be, but neither did I expect it to be so wrenching. Still I managed. I prayed for Bill and Fritz and Quentin and Rod by name every day. I added them to my morning regimen of thanksgiving, reflection, and supplication. I asked God specifically to bless them, to prosper their endeavors, to heal their afflictions, and to lead them to heaven. I did allow that if He felt the need to smack them around a little in the process that would be okay, but it would be entirely up to Him, and He certainly shouldn't feel so compelled on my account. I may attempt heroic levels of holiness on occasion, but I am not perfect. This was the best I could do.

Five days later I got a call from a recruiter about a job opening. It wasn't a particularly good job—low pay, long hours, insufficient resources, and supervisory management that was, in the words of the recruiter, 'a bunch of thirty-year-old type-A's with Big Four accounting backgrounds who really think they're hot you-know-what.' Oh boy! Was this my earthly recompense for praying for my enemies? Was this my God adding wholesale to my blessings because I undertook to be perfect as He is perfect? Was I getting an advance on the reward I assumed would come due in the afterlife? The jury's still out, but I think not...and here's why.

The recruiter wanted some references to forward to his type-A clients. He didn't want the ones I'd already given him. I'd given him friends and peers, department heads I'd worked with who thought I was bright and personable and a good team player, people who had come to me for accounting related decision making support and got good service from me. The recruiter wanted direct supervisors from my last job. He wanted the guys who had fired me. I didn't want to give him the guys who'd fired me because I suspected they would not be the kind of references that I would need, even though they had promised after a fashion that they would do me no wrong.

Bill might be an okay reference because he'd told me that he would miss me when I left. He'd also told me that I was one of the smartest people he'd ever met. That kind of thing wouldn't sound too bad unless he also felt compelled to say that he thought I was weak-kneed and lilly-livered when it came to enforcing policy or that he'd like to snatch me out of my car at a traffic light and beat the crap out of me, either one of which was a distinct possibility given Bill's proclivity for overstating his case.

Fritz, on the other hand, probably thinks that I am a dumbass. He never said so, but then Fritz is not the kind of person who says exactly what is on his mind. Fritz uses subtlety to get other people to understand what he thinks so that they can relate it back to him in more forceful terms. Then he tells you what the other people said as if it were evidentiary. Fritz may think I'm a dumbass, but that is a kindness compared to what I think of him. Too bad the type-A's aren't going to rank my references according to what I think about them.

When it comes to references, you can be wronged by an ill-timed pause or a poor choice of words. You can be culled from the herd by accident, so it's an easy matter for somebody who wants to do you injury to nuance a response to accomplish just that. Nobody has to say exactly what they think. They just have to hem and haw a little, or drop a hint. When there are hundreds of applicants for every available job, it doesn't take much to take you right out of the running. I didn't want to give the recruiter Bill and Fritz as references, but I didn't see where I had a choice in the matter.

Occasionally...way better.

By praying for my enemies, I had turned the other cheek, something that God apparently wants me to do, but something I hadn't really intended. 'Be careful what you pray for,' a good friend once warned me, 'because when you get it, you will be tested.' By asking God to bless Bill and Fritz, and to prosper their endeavors, I had in effect asked Him to increase their influence over me. I had given them another shot to ruin my life, as if the wreck of their first go-round hadn't been enough. I haven't heard back from the recruiter, so it remains to be seen how they do.

Another thing that remains to be seen is whether or not I continue to pray for Bill and Fritz. It was a hard enough thing to do before. Realizing that they still had power over my circumstances was like feeling someone's dank breath on the back of my neck when I thought I was alone. The trouble is that I don't know if I created this situation by trying to be a better person or if the whole matter is just coincidence. Am I being tested...or just screwed? Do I stop praying and make it go away, or do I continue to pray and perhaps get a better seat at the beatific vision? It's not an easy choice. If it were easy, there would be more saints than sinners.

Day 269 – Lean Chops and Blind Faith

Mid 30's Lincoln V12 Victoria. Greyhound hood ornament detail. Lean to be sure, but not a product of lean manufacture.

          Danish philosopher and theologian, Soren Kierkegaard, once said, “Faith is a state of ultimate doubt.” At least he said something very like it. I heard it in college, and, as my attention at the time was mostly attuned to a plump, spooky co-ed named Pat Hillman, I’m not sure I got it exactly right. Now, when I want to know a little more about it and I want to be able to quote the quote with some authority, I find that I can’t find the quote. I find a lot of paraphrasing, which is okay, but I’d really like the quote for this piece, which is about lean manufacturing.

Kierkegaard had a lot to say about the relationship between faith and doubt, and whatever the point my professor was trying to make 40 some years ago, either about faith or about Kierkegaard, the quote, as I remember it, has stuck with me. I think there is a range of possible interpretations of the quote, from ‘faith is committing to something for which you have no objective proof’ to ‘faith and doubt exist in tension in the human soul.’ Somewhere in the middle is the idea that doubt ultimately defines faith. Without doubt there is no faith. There is instead certainty. Certainty does not require or inspire faith. Mark Twain’s spin on it: “Faith is believing something you know ain't true.”

          It is hard to be a believer—in anything. Belief is demanding. Knowing is not demanding. Knowing is just knowing. When someone wants to get up in your face about what you know, you just trot out your proofs and you are done.

Believers like to act as if they are certain. Certainty is held in high esteem by believers, and believers sometimes attempt to trot out what they believe are proofs. Mere knowers will call them on the scantiness of their proofs, and the believers will be undone. You can’t tart up proofs that don’t prove anything and expect anyone who wants to know to take them at face value. You can’t make proofs without legs attractive enough to get knowers to cheer for their undressing. The believers won’t know that they’ve been undone, of course, because they don’t really rely on proofs. They are believers. It’s when you are a believer but you think you might also like to know a little bit that believing becomes such a bitch.

          This brings us to lean manufacturing. Lean manufacturing philosophy is a religion among its believers. Lean proponents want to adapt lean principles to everything. They keep expanding the Gemba—the place where stuff happens, the area to which one applies lean principles in order to make it lean. It used to be that the Gemba was the plant floor where things got made. Now we have the concept of the lean enterprise. The Gemba has grown like the blob in the movie of the same name, swallowing up territory as it expands. The Gemba now includes the offices—the place where, historically at least, stuff mostly does not happen.

I’m not sure this makes any sense. At its roots lean is about the elimination of waste. Lean wants all activities to add value. A place like an office, specifically a management office where nothing happens, does not add value. The natural inclination of lean is to eliminate offices. You only need to attend one Kaizen event to realize that this is true. When everyone is focused on the creation of value and the elimination of waste, everyone wants to get rid of the paperwork.

The record-keeping function does not add value. The record keepers and transaction recorders who get invited to these events find themselves trying to justify their existence. Kaizen events put a fear into them that they have not experienced before. They realize suddenly that they don’t do anything of value and they need to be eliminated. They will go to great lengths to concoct alleged proofs whose only purpose is to justify the existence of a certain amount of waste as necessary. That this often works is testament, not to the lucidity of the proofs, but rather to the obfuscation offered by the arcane and difficult terminology of the office environment. (We have accountants to thank for this. Luca Pacioli invented double-entry bookkeeping and included a treatise on it in his book, Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita, in 1494. Since then accountants everywhere have used ever more difficult terminology to make what they do seem magical.)

True lean believers want to extend the Gemba to their homes, their hobbies, their sports teams, and their government. I point this out because I would like to know a little more about how this is supposed to work before I start orchestrating Kaizen events around family meal preparation or cleaning the bathrooms. I don’t want to have to overcome a lot of sensible objections with scantily clad proofs about how much better my household is going to be for the implementation of a family-wide lean philosophy. I am not a believer.

          I have pretended to be a believer. I have even tried to be a believer. The fact is though, after three failed organization-wide lean initiatives, I want a little proof. I’d like to see lean work…just once. I’d be happy if it was just on the plant floor, the Gemba where stuff gets made. I’d like to see it work in the place for which lean was originally intended before I start trying to export lean principles willy-nilly to places where believers are in short supply and everyone, reasonably I think, expects some proof before they will follow you off the preserve.

          I know why lean failed at Albatross, twice. The first time it was because the change agent who got the initiative launched didn’t actually have any idea what he was doing. He didn’t know anything about lean beyond cleaning the place up and organizing the work spaces. This much had some impact to be sure. Common sense tells you that it would. Cleanliness is next to godliness. This is an easy faith to keep. However, 5-S (Sorting, Straightening, Shining, Standardizing, and Sustaining) does not make a lean initiative. It is a good idea but it is not sufficient to philosophy. It is not enough to get a truly lean result. When we stopped at the end of 5-S at Albatross because we didn’t know what else to do, we stopped lean. We didn’t see any results falling to the bottom line so we stopped 5-S as well. Lots of us wanted to be believers, but none of us wanted to make a messiah out of the idiot who got us started but couldn’t follow through. He didn’t have the lean chops. Hell, he couldn’t even access his own e-mail account without help from the people who reported to him.

          The second time lean failed at Albatross, it was because everyone was distracted by another initiative. Management launched strategic sourcing, and enlisted virtually everyone with any supervisory capacity into the project to justify the enormous consulting fees. They did this at the same time that they had actually handed over the lean process to someone who understood how it was supposed to work. The new lean champion was suddenly a lone voice crying out in the wilderness, and feasting on locusts and honey. Eventually this baptizer’s head was served up on a platter to someone’s secretarial Salome.

          Lean also failed at my last job. That one is more of a mystery to me. I thought they were going to get it right. They had focus and commitment across the board. They put incentives in place to get everyone, not just trained, but indoctrinated in lean principles. They had a schedule. They had truly high-caliber consultants to shepherd the process. Still the exercise fell on its face in the end. I think it’s because they started in the wrong place. (More on that tomorrow)