My dog just doesn't get my fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage

I am about to present a rather substantive quote from the February 20, 2009, issue of THE WEEK, a magazine among whose charter subscribers I am proud to number myself. I'd also like to attest, wholly voluntarily and free of compensation, to the accuracy of the ambitious claim made by THE WEEK's masthead:

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS

I provide this up-front endorsement as a preemptive measure, because I have not obtained THE WEEK's permission to reproduce the passage below, and am hoping no one there will get pissed off with me once they see how heavily I'm trying to promote the rag gratis.

Now to the substantive quote:

It's hardly Star Trek, but scientists have taken one small step toward the process of teleportation, says The New York Times. Utilizing the almost-magical properties of quantum physics, scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland were able to transport information instantly across several feet of space, from one atom to another. With a microwave pulse, scientists "wrote" quantum information onto one atom. They induced both atoms to become "entangled." Entanglement is a mind-boggling quantum phenomenon in which two bits of matter somehow instantly affect the other across space, as if they shared a single identity. After the entanglement, the second atom had the same information that was written on the first atom, even though no information had traveled between them.

Did you get that "entanglement" business? Me neither. Stuff like that is why theoretical physicists and logicians go bonkers at a disproportionate rate.

Now, a lot of people think I'm Godless. They just don't know me well enough to know I'm not. Sure, maybe everything, including Darwinian evolution, got rolling with the Big Bang; but I firmly believe something or someone had to have been swinging the granddaddy of all mallets that day, and it's perfectly fine by me if we call the swinger "God."

But the gnawing thing for me about God is, I'm not sure the human brain is ever going to develop enough to fully understand what he or she or it had or has in mind. Not when a mind of that grandeur can whip up concepts like "entanglement" as a warm-up for the complex stuff.

In truth, I think the ultimate truths about God and the universe will probably forever elude human grasp. They'll remain as inherently and intractably incomprehensible to our pea brains as "30," "year," and "mortgage" will to my dog's.

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