Introducing the divinity of the Universe
to pave the way for scientifically credible theology
Chapter 23: Matter and spirit—representation of spiritual values
Synopsis
We have noted that the pure spiritual God of Aquinas cannot be omniscient because it has no material symbols to represent information. Experience shows that spirit can only be represented by material symbols like the letters in this book. When we examine the Universe at high magnification we find that the the scale of material particles is so small that the world can represent many terabytes of information per microgram. Since it is a truly massive the potential spirit content of the Universe is immense. The ancient belief that spirit is immaterial also supported the idea that it was eternal, since spirit is held to have no parts which could separate and cause death. The claim of an eternity of post mortem bliss is an almost irresistible marketing point for the Catholic Church, but it has no plausible scientific foundation.
Contents
23.1: A theological paradigm change: Judaism to Christianity23.2: Science is a creation of divinity revealing itself
23.3: Do we have a spiritual soul?
23.4: Are we really immortal?
23.5: The spiritual density of matter
23.6: The ordinal number of the Universe
23.1: A theological paradigm change: Judaism to Christianity
Christianity began in the Roman province of Judea about 30 CE. Christianity began as a variant of Judaism. Jesus of Nazareth, and his first followers were all Jewish. The difference was that the jealous God of Israel, who spoke to Moses at Sinai, now had a Son who preached a new interpretation of humanity.
At first the Hebrew Bible was Christianity's main source of inspiration. Jesus knew it well. About a century after Jesus was crucified his followers had grown visible enough to come to the attention of imperial Rome. In the fourth century Constantine arranged for a council of bishops to summarize the new theology in the Nicene Creed. The creed makes no mention of the Christian commandment of love. It is principally a bureaucratic defence against heresy. Constantine used it to provide theological unity for his Empire. This eventually transformed into the military-theological dynasty whose power peaked with the Crusades from 1096 to 1487 CE.
The theoretical development of this site begins with Augustine's treatise on the Trinity, completed about 428 CE. (Chapter 2: God becomes the Trinity).
Augustine's explanation of the Trinity was recast in terms of Aristotelian psychology by medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Unfortunately the Christian interpretation of Aristotle reinforced the Platonic view that matter is the antithesis of spirit and knowledge.
Correction of this error leads us to the conclusion that the structureless initial singularity knows nothing (Chapter 1: Jesus becomes an impossible God). The story so far explains how the evolutionary process of creation develops the material structure within the creator, so revealing the spirit of the divine Universe.
The picture emerging here is that the visible world is both the source of spirit and a record, a living growing book, like the Bible but infinitely greater: not a book about God but actually divine.
23.2: Science is a creation of divinity revealing itself
Aristotle worked rather like a modern scientist. He proceeded by observing phenomena, collecting and criticizing the opinions of others and seeking to find a consistent explanation of the world. He finally arrived at the divinity he describes in Metaphysics (1072b25-31). Our picture of the divine universe has grown immense and complex beyond anything Aristotle could have imagined. The key to our new vision is quantum mechanics and the precision instrumentation to observe the world that it has made possible. Aristotle: Metaphysics book XII: The life of God
A principal issue since antiquity has been the role of the heavens in human affairs. This had two aspects. First, there are the everyday matters of agriculture, navigation and nightlife, which depend on the seasons, the stars and planets and the phases of the moon. Second are deeper issues of human life and politics which are, it was believed, governed by heavenly influences. These matters are the subjects of astrology.
Although their advice may have had no astronomical foundation, the wealthy and powerful paid astrologers well. This benefited the astronomical foundation of astrology by supporting observations and theory to understand and predict heavenly motion. By the time of Galileo this work had arrived at a critical question: Is the obvious fact that Sun revolves around the Earth true, or does the Earth revolve around the Sun?
Aristotle put Earth in the middle, but as often happens with false hypotheses, this caused complications. As seen from Earth against the background of the stars, planets sometimes seem to move backwards in their orbits. This retrograde motion was explained by a complex system of epicycles since theory only allowed circular motion in the heavens. Copernicus saw that the system could be greatly simplified by placing the Sun at the centre but knew better than to say anything to upset the Church. Deferent and epicycle - Wikipedia
Galileo, using his telescopes, saw the phases of Venus which show that this planet revolves around the Sun inside the orbit of the Earth. This Holy Inquisition found Galileo’s opinion heretical and he was forced to recant to save his life. Phases of Venus - Wikipedia, Galileo affair - Wikipedia
Since that incident the Catholic Church abandoned the path pioneered by Aquinas and no longer seeks to support theology with science. In the late nineteenth century it declared itself infallible and has since taken a stand against almost all things modern: evidence based knowledge, human rights, the identity of female and male spirits, the theory of evolution and democratic governance. It has quietly retreated into the shadows, depending for its support on the deception of uneducated people. Infallibility - First Vatican Council: English Text of Definition of Infallibility
A paradigm change in theology is necessary to renew its social licence.
23.3: Do we have a spiritual soul?
Aristotle was very interested in life and knowledge. He devoted his book On the Soul to the treatment of the special form (psyche, ψυχή), which he understood to be the principle that gives life to an organic body. His psychology is an extension of his theory of hylomorphism. He distinguished three levels of life, plants, animals and humans, with corresponding souls.
The special ability of the human soul is intelligence, the conscious ability to discern meaning in sensory input, a trait which marks a philosopher, a person seeking wisdom. Aristotle understands intellect by analogy to sense.
An important point about eyes is that they are colourless, not hindered by their own colour from seeing any other colours.
If our intellects are to understand all material things, they must be immaterial so he introduces an active mind or intellect (nous poetikos) which he describes as being separate and unaffected and unmixed, being in its essence actuality. It is also deathless and everlasting. In a word, immaterial and immortal. Christopher Shields: The Active Mind of De Anima III 5
Since the promises of Christianity make no sense if we are not immortal the Church must defend human immortality. This claim is already implicit in the dogma defined by the Nicene Creed: The one Lord Jesus Christ . . . will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end. English versions of the Nicene Creed - Wikipedia
23.4: Are we really immortal?
The evidence suggests that we we really do die because we are an assembly of different parts that can come apart. As life goes on the probability of a fatal error in our system rises as our immune system, situational awareness and ability to move decreases.
While I was coming to terms with being a mortal ex-Catholic I explored the idea of becoming embodied in an executable form in a sufficiently large dynamic memory, perhaps a neutron star. Now that I feel my body weakening, I hope to finish my theological project in the near future. My fear of death mostly revolves around the inconveniences it will cause my friends and family.
My mother held resolutely to her belief in an afterlife when she would meet her dead children again, but I feel that I can safely say that the Roman Catholic promise of eternal life in heaven is totally false.
From my point of view, any reasonable consumer protection law would completely proscribe religions that cannot guarantee the delivery of the benefits they promise. The essence of religious freedom is, of course, to be able to preach anything.
The Catholic Church believes it has a duty to peach the Gospel to everyone. But the modern world expects any corporation promoting itself in the marketplace to deliver value for value. People contributing to the sustenance of the Church and following its beliefs and practices need evidence that they will indeed receive the eternal life promised to them.
23.5: The spiritual density of matter
A brain is a physical organ with incredibly fine detail. It represents information with electrical marks or symbols, like the alphabet of this text. These symbols are always material, so we consider real information to be a material entity. The ancients thought matter was a passive and amorphous, the enemy of spirit. In reality matter is the living bearer of spirit. Alexander Shapson-Coe et al: A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution
We might say that all the spirituality of Christianity is contained in the Bible, about a million words, say 10 million letters. Allowing 8 bits of storage for every letter, the Bible will easily fit into 10 megabytes of memory. So a 1 terabyte solid state memory can hold 100 thousand bibles. A few grams of silicon can store as much information tonnes of books.
The maximum density of information in the Universe may be the nucleus of an atom. At a guess, the nucleus of a middle sized atom with one hundred nucleons contains about a kilobyte of information and weights about 10-21 grams, giving an information density of about a trillion gigabytes per gram.
In other words, we are just beginning to scratch the surface of the information storage capacity of matter. The ancients had no way to examine features of material objects that were too small to see. Early in the twentieth century electron microscopes were invented that use beams of electrons accelerated to thousands of volts to illuminate their subjects. These machines began to show us the detailed interior structure of living cells down to size of molecules. We began to get a clear idea of the enormous complexity of life by looking at the molecular structure inside living cells. Electron microscope - Wikipedia
23.6: The ordinal number of the Universe
We owe the modern era of complex mathematics to the work of Georg Cantor toward the end of the nineteenth century. In the previous section, we measured spirit by information density as we worked our way from a Bible to an atomic nucleus. Controversy over Cantor's theory - Wikipedia
The mathematical description of complexity is Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers which exploits the power of combination and permutation. Cantor wanted to find a way to represent the number of discrete points it takes to make a continuous line. He invented set theory for this task.
Cantor devised two representations of a set. The first is its cardinal number, the number of items it contains. The second he called its ordinal type, an abstract representation of the structure of the set:
Thus the ordinal type of S is itself an ordered set whose elements are units which have the same order of precedence amongst one another as the corresponding elements of S from which they are derived by abstraction. Cantor (1897, 1955): Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers
The key idea here is abstraction. Although real sets contain real physical objects, mathematical sets are not physical but formal. Cantor's formalism opened the way for an ideal mathematical theory of infinity which may be logically consistent, but cannot be physically realized.
Cantor wrote:
The concept of "ordinal type" developed here, when it is transferred in like manner to "multiply ordered aggregates" embraces, in conjunction with the concept of "cardinal number" or "power" . . . everything capable of being numbered that is thinkable, and in this sense cannot be further generalized.
Cantor applied set theory to the study of the number of points in a line. He found no clear answer to his question but set theory took on a life of its own and became a foundation of mathematics.
It is clear, from their method of development, that the higher transfinite numbers are enormously complex. As Cantor notes, they can be placed into correspondence with anything enumerable, so that we may envisage, for instance the transfinite ordinal corresponding to the arrangement of the trillions and trillions of atoms in a human being, or to the whole system of the Earth, including all its life forms.
In the years after its publication set theory was discovered to harbour a number of paradoxes which led to refinement of the theory. Cantor was very interested in theology and thought that the transfinite numbers brought us close to the absolute divinity. This brought him to Cantor's paradox. As long as this theorem that there is always greater cardinal number is correct, there can be no absolutely greatest transfinite number, so no absolute divinity.
Nevertheless Cantor's ideas show us that there is a logical route to very large cardinal numbers associated with very complex structures that can be created by combinations and permutations of elements. Consequently these large numbers of points can represent large volumes of information.
An alternative definition of continuity would follow Aristotle's idea that entities are continuous if they have ends in common. This leads us to the notion of logical continuity which is commonly found in communication and quantum systems. Machines (and everything else) communicate with one another by reading from and writing to shared memory locations. This approach to continuity is embodied in quantum theory as we have seen in Chapter 20: Measurement—the interface between Hilbert and Minkowski space, where we study the interaction between two particles in the tensor product space of the wave functions corresponding to the particles.
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Notes and references
Further reading
Books
Cantor (1897, 1955), Georg, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers (Translated, with Introduction and Notes by Philip E B Jourdain), Dover 1895, 1897, 1955 Jacket: 'One of the greatest mathematical classics of all time, this work established a new field of mathematics which was to be of incalculable importance in topology, number theory, analysis, theory of functions, etc, as well as the entire field of modern logic.'
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Links
Alexander Shapson-Coe et al, A petavoxel fragment of human cerebral cortex reconstructed at nanoscale resolution, ' To fully understand how the human brain works, knowledge of its structure at high resolution is needed. Presented here is a computationally intensive reconstruction of the ultrastructure of a cubic millimeter of human temporal cortex that was surgically removed to gain access to an underlying epileptic focus. It contains about 57,000 cells, about 230 millimeters of blood vessels, and about 150 million synapses and comprises 1.4 petabytes. Our analysis showed that glia outnumber neurons 2:1, oligodendrocytes were the most common cell, deep layer excitatory neurons could be classified on the basis of dendritic orientation, and among thousands of weak connections to each neuron, there exist rare powerful axonal inputs of up to 50 synapses. Further studies using this resource may bring valuable insights into the mysteries of the human brain.' back |
Aristotle: Metaphysics book XII, The life of God: 1072b14 sqq, 'Such, then, is the first principle upon which depend the sensible universe and the world of nature. And its life is like the best which we temporarily enjoy. It must be in that state always (which for us is impossible), since its actuality is also pleasure. . . . .If, then, the happiness which God always enjoys is as great as that which we enjoy sometimes, it is marvellous; and if it is greater, this is still more marvellous. Nevertheless it is so. Moreover, life belongs to God. For the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and the essential actuality of God is life most good and eternal. We hold, then, that God is a living being, eternal, most good; and therefore life and a continuous eternal existence belong to God; for that is what God is.' back |
Carissa Wong (2024), Cubic millimetre of brain mapped in spectacular detail, ' Researchers have mapped a tiny piece of the human brain in astonishing detail. The resulting cell atlas, which was described today in Science1 and is available online, reveals new patterns of connections between brain cells called neurons, as well as cells that wrap around themselves to form knots, and pairs of neurons that are almost mirror images of each other. The 3D map covers a volume of about one cubic millimetre, one-millionth of a whole brain, and contains roughly 57,000 cells and 150 million synapses — the connections between neurons. It incorporates a colossal 1.4 petabytes of data. “It’s a little bit humbling,” says Viren Jain, a neuroscientist at Google in Mountain View, California, and a co-author of the paper. “How are we ever going to really come to terms with all this complexity?” Slivers of brain The brain fragment was taken from a 45-year-old woman when she underwent surgery to treat her epilepsy. It came from the cortex, a part of the brain involved in learning, problem-solving and processing sensory signals. The sample was immersed in preservatives and stained with heavy metals to make the cells easier to see. Neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues then cut the sample into around 5,000 slices — each just 34 nanometres thick — that could be imaged using electron microscopes. back |
Christopher Shields (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy b), The Active Mind of De Anima III 5 , ' After characterizingnous the mind (nous) and its activities in De Animaiii 4, Aristotle takes a surprising turn. In De Anima iii 5, he introduces an obscure and hotly disputed subject: the active mind or active intellect (nous poiêtikos). Controversy surrounds almost every aspect of De Anima iii 5, not least because in it Aristotle characterizes the active mind—a topic mentioned nowhere else in his entire corpus—as ‘separate and unaffected and unmixed, being in its essence actuality’ (chôristos kai apathês kai amigês, tê ousia energeia; DA iii 5, 430a17–18) and then also as ‘deathless and everlasting’ (athanaton kai aidion; DA iii 5, 430a23). This comes as no small surprise to readers of De Anima, because Aristotle had earlier in the same work treated the mind (nous) as but one faculty (dunamis) of the soul (psuchê), and he had contended that the soul as a whole is not separable from the body (DA ii 1, 413a3–5). back |
Controversy over Cantor's theory - Wikipedia, Controversy over Cantor's theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In mathematical logic, the theory of infinite sets was first developed by Georg Cantor. Although this work has become a thoroughly standard fixture of classical set theory, it has been criticized in several areas by mathematicians and philosophers. Cantor's theorem implies that there are sets having cardinality greater than the infinite cardinality of the set of natural numbers. . . . Cantor's set theory was controversial at the start, but later became largely accepted. In particular, there have been objections to its use of infinite sets.' back |
Deferent and epicycle - Wikipedia, Deferent and epicycle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In the Hipparchian, Ptolemaic, and Copernican systems of astronomy, the epicycle (from Ancient Greek ἐπίκυκλος (epíkuklos) 'upon the circle', meaning "circle moving on another circle")[1] was a geometric model used to explain the variations in speed and direction of the apparent motion of the Moon, Sun, and planets. In particular it explained the apparent retrograde motion of the five planets known at the time. Secondarily, it also explained changes in the apparent distances of the planets from the Earth.' back |
Electron microscope - Wikipedia, Electron microscope - Wikipedia, the free encylopedia, ' An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of accelerated electrons as a source of illumination. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times shorter than that of visible light photons, electron microscopes have a higher resolving power than light microscopes and can reveal the structure of smaller objects. A scanning transmission electron microscope has achieved better than 50 pm resolution in annular dark-field imaging mode and magnifications of up to about 10,000,000× whereas most light microscopes are limited by diffraction to about 200 nm resolution and useful magnifications below 2000×.' back |
English versions of the Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, English versions of the Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Nicene Creed, composed in part and adopted at the First Council of Nicaea (325) and revised with additions by the First Council of Constantinople (381), is a creed that summarizes the orthodox faith of the Christian Church and is used in the liturgy of most Christian Churches. This article endeavours to give the text and context of English-language translations.' back |
First Vatican Council (18 July 1870), IV: Concerning the Infallible Teaching of the Roman Pontiff, ' . . . we teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the church, irreformable.' back |
Galileo affair - Wikipedia, Galileo affair - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Galileo affair (Italian: il processo a Galileo Galilei) began around 1610 and culminated with the trial and condemnation of Galileo Galilei by the Roman Catholic Inquisition in 1633. Galileo was prosecuted for his support of heliocentrism, the astronomical model in which the Earth and planets revolve around the Sun at the centre of the Solar System. ' back |
Infallibility - First Vatican Council, English Text of Definition of Infallibility, 'We teach and define as a divinely revealed dogma that when the Roman Pontiff speaks EX CATHEDRA, that is, when, in the exercise of his office as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, in virtue of his supreme apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine concerning faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he possesses, by the divine assistance promised to him in blessed Peter, that infallibility which the divine Redeemer willed his Church to enjoy in defining doctrine concerning faith or morals. Therefore, such definitions of the Roman Pontiff are of themselves, and not by the consent of the Church, irreformable. So then, should anyone, which God forbid, have the temerity to reject this definition of ours: let him be anathema.' back |
Phases of Venus - Wikipedia, Phases of Venus, Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia, ' The first observations of the full planetary phases of Venus were by Galileo at the end of 1610 (though not published until 1613 in the Letters on Sunspots). Using a telescope, Galileo was able to observe Venus going through a full set of phases, something prohibited by the Ptolemaic system that assumed Venus to be a perfect celestial body. In the Ptolemaic system, the Sun and Venus circle the earth, with Venus orbiting around a point on the Earth-Sun axis, so that Venus is never on the far side of the sun. One could never expect an alignment Sun-Earth-Venus or Venus-Sun-Earth to occur, so that a full Venus could never be observed.' back |