Miracles--references from The Grail Conspiracies, a spiritual thriller

“You know the story of when Moses went up to Mount Sinai and came
back with the Ten Commandments? Remember what else happened?”

“I’m not sure, tell me,” I said, expecting I was walking into another joke.

“Moses’ people didn’t believe at first that he’d been talking to God, and
demanded proof. Remember what came next? God told him to throw his
staff on the ground, and he did, and the staff turned into a snake.”

I waited for the punch-line.

“Was that a miracle? We don’t know how it could have happened.
Imagine, a stick changing into a snake. Sounds like a miracle to me. But
there are a lot of folks who would say, ‘We can’t explain it, so therefore
it could not possibly have happened.’”

I expect he figured I was one of those people, and he was probably
right. At that time.

“We think of the concept of parallel universes as just some nonsense
from science fiction. But it’s not. It’s actually the most up-to-date thinking
in the field of quantum physics, the idea that the universe is constantly
branching into multiple versions of itself, one for each possible
outcome. The scientists who know about these things tell us that
supposedly every possible alternative already exists, though we only
experience one of them.”

He paused. As if I had any idea how to respond to that.

He went on: “You see, Greg, that’s what we were talking about the other
day, that ‘useful illusion.’ The illusion stems from the way our human
physical apparatus shields us from the reality that’s out there—the
reality that what seems to be solid matter is actually 99.99% empty
space. Nor do we realize there’s a cloud of as-yet unsettled possibilities
out there, and that none of them becomes fixed and settled until we
observe it.”

I couldn’t figure where he was going with this.

As I was soon to learn, though, I’d have been well advised to listen more
closely, as it was about to become very relevant in ways I could never
have imagined.

“This sounds like pretty far-out stuff, I know,” he continued, “but it’s
actually mainstream science—or about to become mainstream. Have
you heard about the quantum computers that IBM and other labs are
working on? They’ll perform complex computations at a speed way, way
beyond any of today’s computers. And you know how they’re going to
do that? By performing calculations simultaneously in several different
universes. The answer you get will depend on which universe you’re in.
How about that! Stodgy old IBM exploring multiple universes!”
“I’m not sure where you’re going with this.”

“The point is that all alternative tracks already exist. We’re beginning to
grasp the implications of that, hence the serious work on the potential of
quantum computers.”

“And Moses and the rod that turned into a snake—how did Moses fit
in?,” I asked. I was intrigued by what he was getting at, and had to
recognize that there might not be another chance to talk again.

He laughed. “Oops! You got me there, I was rambling, drifted off the
point. The skeptics say that since it doesn’t seem possible to them for
Moses’ stick to have turned into a snake, well, then it just couldn’t be.
Narrow-minded dim-bulbs, no matter how many degrees they have.”

He broke off into a coughing spell. Then he said, “You understand, don’
t you?”

“Can’t say I do.” Better to let him tell me.

The explanation is as plain as the nose on their faces. All alternative
tracks exist, so maybe in the blink of an eye Moses side-slipped from a
universe where he was throwing a stick, into a different version of the
universe, where, in that version of reality, it happened to be a snake.”

“That is . . . uh . . . an interesting explanation.”

“It follows on what we were talking about the other day, the different
paradigm. We take for granted that there’s only one way of viewing
things, which is the way we’ve always viewed them. Then something
happens to force us to look in a different way, and from that different
vantage point we see things in a completely different way—reframe
things in a totally different context.”

“Umm,” I replied.

“I probably told you, there’s a saying among the folks who’re working in
this field, ‘Shut up and compute.’ Meaning, nobody understands why
these things work. But they do work, they doyield useful results. So it’s
best to shut up, to quit asking why they work, and just use them. Maybe
someday we’ll understand why, but in the meantime, we need to make
use of them. If it weren’t for quantum physics and these kinds of
discoveries we wouldn’t have transistors, or computer chips, or lasers,
or CAT scans or MRIs or a lot of the other stuff we use every day
without asking why it works. Like other things, it’s best to just take it on
faith. Try it, see if it works for you.”

“All this is from that little book, Joining Miracles?”

“Haven’t you read it yet? ” he asked.