The number of God is 137

Douglas Adams famously told us in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything is 42, but another opinion has emerged.

I have just learned that the number of God is 137.

Stay with me. I have not gone bonkers.

Yet.

A number of years ago I stumbled upon a website called InternetMonk (IM for short) and have been reading it off and on ever since. In spite of the name, it is not a Roman Catholic place. In fact, it was begun by a Southern Baptist man named Michael Spencer, who was a high school teacher in Kentucky, as a place for people wandering in what he called "the post-evangelical wilderness". After his death, IM continued with Mike Mercer, who is both a hospice chaplain and the pastor of an ELCA church in Indiana, at the helm. (For those who don't read alphabet soup, ELCA stands for Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.) All sorts of people read and comment on IM. Unlike other religious blogs, the conversation in the comment section remains civil but can get a bit snarky at times. A lot of the readers wandered in the post-evangelical wilderness for a long time; some have found a home in Eastern Orthodoxy; a few fundamentalists (ex- and otherwise) show up now and then; it is an eclectic group. It is a real community where not everyone agrees but everyone can have a place at the table.

On Thursdays, a Canadian man who calls himself Mike the Geologist presents a variety of interesting scientific stuff that is usually above my pay grade, including a nine-week series earlier this year that was an extended review of the book Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship by John Polkinghorne. Mike writes in an engaging style, but (as I mentioned) his subjects are usually above my pay grade.

This week's offering, The Number of God, is worth a read. It is not filled with religious mumbo-jumbo and hocus-pocus, it is filled with scientific mumbo-jumbo and hocus-pocus (I'm kidding) like Planck's constant and Grand Unified Theory (GUT) and fine structure constant and even -- yes, friends -- the beloved Fibonacci sequence.

It's well worth a look. Mike the Geologist calls 137 "another one of those 'lucky coincidences' that seem to propel science forward". I hope you will click on the link.