This is a post that ties together a 2,000-year-old book written under a pseudonym and an archangel whose identity is largely unknown with Chaos Theory (aka the Butterfly Effect) and the near miss of an asteroid that passed Earth last Monday. Whew!
In this post, I would like to briefly discuss the ancient book known as I Enoch, which introduces us to an archangel named Uriel who, among other responsibilities, holds the specific task of keeping the stars burning and the planets orbiting within the parameters set by our Creator. What makes this ancient portrait of Uriel remarkable is how well the author of I Enoch anticipated a problem that modern physics has only recently quantified. Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle established that at the quantum level, physical reality contains genuine unknowability built into the structure of matter itself. Some thirty-five years later, Edward Lorenz’s Butterfly Effect established that at the macroscopic level, even deterministic systems governed by fixed laws are exquisitely sensitive to infinitesimally small perturbations. Together, these two principles simultaneously similar and dissimilar applying to the visible world and the invisible domain describe a universe that is neither clockwork in precision nor random or reckless. It is a creation that requires, at every scale, something to hold it on course, or, in the case of the feature photo, nudge a planetoid off course, thereby sparing Earth. The ancient author of I Enoch, writing 2,000 years or more before Heisenberg or Lorenz, apparently was given to believe as much.
About I Enoch
This almost certainly was not written by the Enoch of Genesis, who was translated, that is, taken bodily into heaven (Genesis 5:24). But the intention of the author or authors of I Enoch was not to perpetrate a fraud or forgery on the reader so much as to identify with the person of Enoch. This was a common literary practice of that era and we saw it in the eighteenth century when Hamilton, Madison and Jay used the name “Publius” in their defense of the U.S. Constitution. The book of I Enoch has never been considered Scripture by Catholics or Protestants, though the book of Jude in the New Testament quotes a passage from it directly. Some have wondered whether Jude encountered the verse elsewhere, but Jude specifically attributes the words to Enoch himself, and the passage does exist, nearly verbatim, in I Enoch. A deeper study of the parallel verses is even more convincing. If you have ever seen a YouTube video or a History Channel presentation on the so-called “Missing Books of the Bible,” I Enoch is almost certainly included. Yet the book has always been largely ignored by the Church, and the text is not particularly riveting to Christians and Jews (yet alone to nonreligious readers, who often cannot make much sense of it either).
About Uriel
Perhaps one of the “busiest” angels is the Archangel Uriel. He is the warden of the supermax prison at Tartarus where the Watchers (i.e., the fallen angels) are kept. Among other responsibilities, Uriel holds the specific task of keeping the stars burning and the planets orbiting within the parameters set by our Creator.
For the signs, and the times, and the years, and the days, were showed to me by the Angel Uriel whom the Lord of Eternal Glory has placed in charge of all the Lights of Heaven. In Heaven and in the world, so that they might rule on the Face of Heaven, and appear over the earth, and be leaders of day and night; the Sun, the Moon, the stars, and all the serving creatures who revolve in all the Chariots of Heaven.
Uriel is first introduced in I Enoch as an archangel. He does not appear by name in any of the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible, nor in the Apocrypha. His name means either ʾŪrīʾēl, the more common form, meaning “God is my flame” or “fire of God” or ʾÓrīʾēl, an alternate spelling, sometimes rendered Oriel, meaning “God is my light.” The confusion may stem from the fact that the two forms are so similar in spelling and pronunciation, but either meaning is theologically fitting. As a general rule, an angel’s name ends with “el” (referring to God) while the root of the name identifies the angel’s function or association. Gabriel means “God is my strength” and Raphael derives from “God heals.” Angels in Scripture are rendered exclusively in the masculine gender, with the possible exception of one particular angel. The Bible and the early Church Fathers do not mention Uriel by name, with the notable exception of 2 Esdras, also known as 4 Ezra, which Jerome included in the Vulgate. Some of the ante-Nicene Fathers, such as Tertullian, cited I Enoch liberally without commenting specifically on Uriel. Others, such as Clement, Barnabas, and Ignatius, were familiar with I Enoch but did not cite it directly or mention Uriel.
The Butterfly Effect
Edward Lorenz was a meteorologist at MIT who, in 1961, was using an early computer to model and predict weather patterns. After running one simulation, he reran it — but to save time, he rounded off the numeric values he inputed and restarted mid-sequence rather than from the very beginning. Instead of getting the same result, he arrived at a completely different outcome. It turned out that running the program using six decimal places but then rerunning it with numbers rounded to three decimal places produced an entirely different weather pattern. This suggested that an imperceptible difference — a fraction of one-thousandth of a value — could, over time, produce a dramatically different outcome. He originally published this as Predictability: Does the Flap of a Seagull’s Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas? However, eventually it was eventually truncated to nonlinear dynamics, or the butterfly effect. Here is an example of how it might work:
In Beijing, China, a butterfly flaps its wings, creating a tiny pocket of disturbed air. The pressure around the butterfly changes in a way imperceptible to human senses. This causes a slight increase in temperature within that pocket — a tiny fraction of one degree. A small breeze is altered by the marginally different temperature, and as a result, a rain cloud forms and releases precipitation, cooling the surface temperature minutes earlier than it otherwise would have. This modest change nevertheless bends the Pacific jet stream by incrementally shifting the weather pattern across the Pacific. As this altered pattern reaches and crosses North America, it pushes a high-pressure system slightly southward, blocking a cold front that would otherwise have moved through. As the pattern continues off the eastern coast of North America, it interacts with a tropical depression, allowing it to intensify and ultimately generating a Category 5 hurricane. All because of a butterly on the other side of the world.
Heisenberg decades before Lorenz was also noting that little things add up as Konstantin Batygin & Gregory Laughlin affirm in their article On the Dynamical Stability of the Solar System:
It therefore appears that the Solar System may ultimately be dynamically unstable. If one waits long enough (ignoring drastic overall changes such as those wrought by the Sun’s evolution or close encounters with passing stars), the planets may eventually find themselves on crossing orbits, which may lead to close encounters, ejections, or collisions.
Think of an asteroid the size of a large house, with a mass of many tons — in zero gravity, of course. Then think of an ordinary supermarket grape being fired at the rock. You have nothing to show for it except a smashed grape. But fire millions, billions, trillions of grapes at the rock continuously over hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years, and you begin to see a barely perceptible motion from the solid asteroid in response to the relentless barrage. Now that asteroid has become something of a free agent.
The Uncertainty Principle
A popular Hollywood notion found in apocalyptic movies involves some rogue meteor glancing off a larger object such as an asteroid and changing the asteroid’s orbit to place it on a path that intersects with Earth’s. This suggests that some sort of cosmic billiard game is to blame. But while this is always a possibility, things in space are usually more subtle than that. In fact, 2026 JH2 may have been “prepped” for a detour to our planet many centuries ago.
Four forces
At the moment, we know of four fundamental forces in our universe. The first is gravity, which we are all very much acquainted with, some of us painfully so. The second is electromagnetism, something we were introduced to in high school science classes. Then there is the weak force, which mediates the nuclear reactions that initiate fusion in our sun and other stars, and the strong force, which serves as glue to hold quarks together with protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei. We can see the agency of God here.
The fact that God remains actively involved in His creation through cosmic laws, sovereign intervention, or angelic agents such as Uriel is mentioned in Scripture (Colossians 1:16–17, to name just one citation). The verb Paul uses in the phrase ‘. . . in Him all things hold together’ says as much. The Greek verb συνέστηκεν (synestēken) means to cohere, to be held in a standing state. This verb is perfect tense, indicating a completed action with ongoing results — the cohering has been accomplished and continuously holds. So,
what might we call God’s power here, or what may God have given Uriel to manage as far as the universe? The Strong Force? The Fine Structure Constant? The Cosmological Constant?
An important caveat
For those readers who love science as much as I do but who resist unwelcome theological intrusion or misinterpretation of the Bible for the purpose of confounding science and consequently confusing people, let me say this. The Bible is not a science book. But by its very nature it perhaps unavoidably makes at least casual scientific observations. For example, Psalm 102:25–27 and Isaiah 51:6 speak of the effects of entropy and progressive decay. Job 36:27–28 describes the cycle of evaporation and precipitation and so anticipates the eventual study of hydrology. In Psalm 8:8, David speaks of “paths” (i.e., currents) in the sea, most of which such as the Gulf Stream were yet undiscovered.
Job 38:31 speaks of the Pleiades star cluster as somehow “bound” in a way that Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, the three stars that form Orion’s belt, are not. In fact, the stars of the Pleiades are locked in some gravitational dynamic while Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka are not. Was this just a lucky guess? Would it have been helpful when God, while speaking to Job, had tried to explain the math and the physics of gravitational binding? So, to say that (as in Colossians 1:17) God in Christ holds everything (including the various quantum particles and atomic particles) together, Paul is not promoting, predicting or explaining a theory of quantum chromodynamics. Rather, Paul is making a statement about the coherence of matter.
The other point I want to make is that this post includes several different disciplines. It is not exclusively theology, nor exclusively physics. Interdisciplinary approaches to discovery are becoming increasingly popular and useful today. It may involve brain activity or what, if anything, a patient experiences twenty minutes after cardiac arrest. In that sense, the tension is subjective versus objective. There are some biologists who still insist animals (e.g., dogs) are not capable of understanding or expressing human emotions. Communication majors disagree. In fact, that ship has sailed. We know now that dogs understand love, anger, jealousy, loyalty, grief, even altruism, and so on.
About Near-Earth Objects (NEO’s)
The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs defines a Near-Earth object as:
. . .an asteroid or comet which passes close to the Earth's orbit. In technical terms, a NEO is considered to have a trajectory which brings it within 1.3 astronomical units of the Sun and hence within 0.3 astronomical units, or approximately 45 million kilometres, of the Earth's orbit. NEOs generally result from objects that have experienced gravitational perturbations from nearby planets, moving them into orbits that allow them to come close to the Earth.
A number of factors such as the speed, angle of approach, composition and mass of an asteroid ass factor into determining whether we are just treated to a spectacular display of heavenly lights or an extinction level event. So in 1999 the International Astronomical Union adapted the Torino Scale (below) in order to classify the potential threat from known and unknown objects.
2026 JH2
Last Monday, traveling at approximately 20,000 mph (32,000 kph), asteroid 2026 JH2 passed the Earth. At its closest point it passed 91,000-92.000 km (56,000-57,000 miles). That is within the orbits of some sixty artificial satellites. Until we have all the data, it is difficult to approximate what the damage might had been had it not broken up or landed in the ocean.
We know that in the future an asteroid named Apsinthos (Ἄψινθος) in Revelation 8:10–11 will strike Earth. The Bible is quite clear on that. But what of the threats in the meantime?
We have built-in safeguards thanks to the placement of Jupiter. The gravitational attraction of Jupiter makes it more vulnerable to collision from dangerous comets and other debris. Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, also known as D/1993 F2, approached Jupiter, and the first fragment slammed into it on July 16, 1994, at a speed of 35 miles per second. The Galileo spacecraft monitoring the event measured a fireball from the explosion that reached 23,700 °C (42,700 °F). Twenty-one fragments impacted Jupiter in six days, some fragments roughly a mile and a quarter in size. Had the largest fragment hit Earth, it would have been a planet killer, depending on where it hit. So, Jupiter provides a shield for the inner planets. Except — the paradox is that a comet or asteroid of no threat whatsoever to Earth can just as likely be “nudged” in our direction by the same gravitational field. And unless we have a way of detecting and destroying such a fragment, or unless God intervenes and sends Uriel, we may very well find ourselves toast.
