Introducing the divinity of the Universe
to pave the way for scientifically credible theology
Chapter 24: Cosmic theology—the divine world we need to love
Synopsis
Theology divides the world into two camps: Believers who follow the words of the Second Vatican Council and believe that:
Through divine revelation, God chose to show forth and communicate Himself and the eternal decisions of His will regarding the salvation of men. That is to say, He chose to share with them those divine treasures which totally transcend the understanding of the human mind. Second Vatican Council (1965): Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation: Dei Verbum
and Sceptics, who see this theology as mythological dreams. For me divinity, and therefore theology, exists. For me the Universe plays all the roles of the old God, Creator, Saviour and Judge. Many believe that the benevolent old God will look after us no matter what we do (even though they had their Son made human tortured to death for their own satisfaction). In my picture, we are responsible for our own future. We have the power to destroy the world with thermonuclear war. We are even now well on the way to destroying our habitat with over consumption and carbon dioxide poisoning. Many, clinging to old beliefs, do not want to face this reality. We are being judged: If the believers have their way, we will all suffer with them.
Contents
24.1: Writing creative fiction24.2: A conservative approach to paradigm change
24.3 Naked gravitation contains the divine Universe
24.4: Matter ≡ spirit; physics ≡ theology; particle ≡ god
24.5: Lust for life: the cognitive universe
24.6: The origin of the velocity of light
24.1: Writing creative fiction
Creating fiction is one of the most visible industries in our world. We don’t think much about the people who bring us food, water, electricity, health, security, and electrical appliances, the infrastructure of our world, but we are always on the lookout for interesting stories, amazing feats, beautiful creatures and plain old gossip. We feed on Hollywood, Bollywood, the tabloids and the internet, our neighbours and our friends.
The fundamental infrastructure of our lives is the real natural system which created us and makes life possible. All those things that work by themselves after billions of years of meticulous testing. The Roman Catholic Church sees us a strangers in a strange land, defective sinners in world damaged by sin. They also think they have got the answer. Human sacrifice. The murder of Jesus by his own Father has fixed everything. At the end of time everything will be made perfect again. The Roman Catholic Church claims a cosmic role in the fate of the Universe. This looks to me like dangerous delusion. Catholic Catechism, p1, s2, c1, a1, p4: III. "The world was created for the glory of God"
The world is not a toy created by a distant god so that we the creatures can worship, praise, and grovel before them. It is very real and self sufficient, the source of our life and spirit. It is divine, in no way the slave of an invisible transcendent being. This chapter summarizes my approach to the reality of divinity, partly because it has been necessary for me to demolish the faith into which I was born in order to survive; and partly because I feel so much better replacing the old fictitious god with someone I can touch and feel. My basic sensation of divinity is gravitation.
I am dragging myself out of the self hatred promoted by the Church into my proper self, a real child of a magnificent divinity that surrounds me almost to infinity. Galileo changed the world with the little telescope he used to observe the phases of Venus. We have huge terrestrial and orbiting telescopes to show us cosmic images of the outer world. We have powerful microscopes to see the infinitely complex infinitesimal systems that execute our lives. The two pictures are complementary, running from the tiny quantum of action to the huge Universe. I want to grow big enough to embrace this glorious magnificence.
24.2: A conservative approach to paradigm change
When I began this project I wanted to preserve as much as I could of the Catholic theology that dominated my first forty years. I’m no pilgrim in an alien world, I am here for life and I love it. In the Church I wanted to be like my hero Thomas Aquinas. He converted the Church to Aristotle in the Middle Ages. I wanted to do the same job using modern science to update theology for the (then) twentieth century. The Hierarchy of the Order detected heresy and (thankfully) threw me out.
This left me with the conviction that the whole business of the Holy See is a fraud on both humanity and reality. For me the only possible solution to this horror is the fiction that the Universe is divine. I like to call it a hypothesis.
I identify the initial singularity with naked gravitation. I feel it now as my bum gets sore from hours sitting writing. The Universe has no plan. Gödel and Turing showed that even God cannot plan the future. Because it is completely ignorant in the beginning, this agent can only act at random. Consequently it tries everything and occasionally finds stable structures that can reproduce themselves. Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia, Turing's Proof - Wikipedia
24.3: Naked gravitation contains the divine Universe
Scientific theology requires visible divinity and a consistent interface between science and theology. We began with a singularity identical to the God of Aristotle and Aquinas. Our Universe has evolved within this singularity. Random possibilities have been exhaustively tested for durability and their ability to reproduce themselves. Those that are inconsistent with existence do not exist.
Our experience with science illustrates this fact. Every time we come across an apparent contradiction further study reveals a consistent picture. The history of science is a history of revision forced by fictitious dead ends.
The idea here is that instead of being faced, like modern scientists, with the enormous complexity of a quasi-infinite fourteen billion year old Universe, we use the mystical insights of ancient theology into the nature of divinity to bring the problem down to a manageable size. There is little to be said about an eternal structureless entity. Its not transcendental. It’s just nothing but pure power.
The second idea is that because we are intelligent beings created by the Universe, it must itself be intelligent. The authors of Genesis knew this when they wrote So God created mankind in his own image (I:27). We should therefore use ideas from knowledge, epistemology and cybernetics to model the world rather than simple arithmetic. So I call this site cognitive cosmogenesis. This idea is consistent with the modern interpretation of quantum mechanics as a theory of computation and communication rather than simple physics. Nielsen & Chuang (2016): Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
In this story the Minkowski space is a structural addition to naked gravitation consequent upon the emergence of quantum mechanics and particles described in page 17: Gravitation + particles = Minkowski space: Identical spin ½ particles isolate themselves quantum mechanically from of one another to create space, while communicating through spin 1 bosons that flock together.
This development has the selective advantage that leads to the structure of the Universe containing a vast number of elementary particles which connect into complex networks like ourselves and our planet (see page 22: Network: cooperation and bonding). We see this happening all round us and we know that the invisible action is managed by quantum mechanics.
24.4: Matter ≡ spirit; physics ≡ theology; particle ≡ god
The Universe begins from an initial fully symmetrical state represented by the heading of this section: matter ≡ spirit; physics ≡ theology; particle ≡ god. The process of differentiation into the world we inhabit has repeatedly broken these symmetries. We assume that the underlying symmetries remain intact, so the initial singularity maintains the unity of the whole system. This idea is discussed on page 15: Potential + kinetic = zero energy Universe. There I propose that quantum mechanics breaks naked gravitation into potential and kinetic energy.
The mathematical foundation of quantum mechanics emerged fully formed in the abstract Hilbert space described by John von Neumann.
The first applications of this formalism were interpretations of the eigenvalues observed by spectroscopists. Recently we have learnt understand this formalism by analogy to the Turing machine which we see as a universal computer capable of computing anything computable.
We assume that the computational power of quantum mechanics is equivalent to a Turing machine, although many would maintain that it is greater. We can be relatively certain, that the power of quantum mechanics has been sufficient to deal with all the problems the Universe faces in creating itself. It is, in fact, a theory of everything. John von Neumann (2014): Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics
In Chapter 3 I quote Bernard Lonergan:
If the real is completely intelligible, God exists. But the real is completely intelligible. Therefore God exists.
As a loyal servant of the Church, he tried to show that the Universe is not completely intelligible, but is is and it is Divine. Every tiny detail has been tested by evolution which says what does not work cannot continue to exist. To exist is to have meaning.
Although biological evolution provides us with a story explaining the enormous variety of species that inhabit and have inhabited the Earth, we remain relatively ignorant of the detailed evolution of elementary particles that we observe. We may be confident, if the world had a completely simple beginning, that we will eventually understand. Modern physics is only a few centuries old.24.5: Lust for life: the potential universe
The look of love alarms
Because 'tis filled with fire;
But the look of soft deceit
Shall win the lover's hire.
William Blake (1966): The Complete Writings of William Blake with variant readings; Oxford Standard Authors 1966, page 182
The driving force of the Universe is the omnipotent initial singularity. The first step in the differentiation and evolution of the Universe is logical or mathematical described in Chapters 11 to 14. These treat the formation of Hilbert space and the emergence of quantum mechanics which selects stationary states from chaotic Hilbert space. These abstract states are made into real particles using energy from gravitation described in Chapters 15 and 16, and we guess that these particles build Minkowski space described in Chapter 17.
Every particle in the Universe is a child of the initial singularity and is capable, like the initial singularity, of having children of its own, populating Minkowski space. This process may serve as a backstory to the creation of particles by the big bang. Associated with each particle is the vector that defines its nature and behaviour. In Minkowski space we see a second round of selection similar to the Darwinian selection we see in the living world. Identical fermions in Minkowski space relain aloof from one another due to the exclusion principle. They interact through massless bosons that travel at the speed of light on null geodesics in this space. Here the Minkowski metric implements the special theory of relativity that connects mass and energy and enables the networking of particles to create atoms and molecules and larger structures like ourselves and planets. A kinematic process is a puppet, driven by forces outside itself. A dynamic process has its own life and energy and drives itself, it has potential, that is lust. Potentials move unless inhibited. The traditional theological virtues are faith, hope and love. They are cultural prescriptions for dealing with the uncertainties arising from creative evolution. A persistent feature of operations in our evolutionary milieu is that things rarely work well the first time. Hence the ancient recipe for success: you don’t succeed on your first go, try again. Faith and hope embody this idea. Love enters when a procedure is perfected and can be profitably shared in works like creating a family.
24.6: The origin of the velocity of light
The metric of Minkowski space shows that massless bosons travelling at the speed of light move on null geodesics. There is no spacetime interval between their creation and their annihilation and so they can carry quantum states unchanged from their source to their destination.
Here we might invoke the idea of zero sum complexification again. A particle on a null geodesic is in effect independent of space and time, and so we may consider it to be part of the symmetry we know as Hilbert space. This symmetry is broken by identical fermions, which require three spatial dimensions, like massive fermions such as motor vehicles, to be able to move freely in the euclidean 3D component of Minkowski space. We may consider the speed of light as being simply the relationship between space and time which facilitates the symmetry breaking which the enables the existence of Minkowski space.Thus the essence of this postulate may be clothed mathematically in a very pregnant manner in the mystic formula
3 × 105 kilometres = i [√–1] seconds.
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Notes and references
Further reading
Books
Blake (1966), William, and Geoffrey Keynes (ed), The Complete Writings of William Blake with variant readings Oxford Standard Authors 1966, Oxford UP 1966 ' The Complete Works of William Blake, with all the variant readings is edited by Geoffrey Keynes. Some of the works that appear in this volume include Blake's poetical sketches, Songs of Innocence, The French Revolution and A Song Liberty. William Blake was an English poet, painter and printmaker who is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age.' back |
Einstein (1924), Albert, and Lorentz, Weyl, Minkowski. Translated by W. Perrett & G. B. Jeffery, Notes by A. Sommerfield, , , Dover 1924 Amazon.com reader review: 'This book is a collection of the most important lectures given by Einstein, Lorentz, Minkowski and Weyl that led to the formulation of the theory of relativity in its two parts. The first part is the special theory, which studies the inertial and moving reference frames without considering the effects of gravity. The second part, the general theory, explains the nature of gravity.' Reinaldo Olivares
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Nielsen (2016), Michael A., and Isaac L Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge University Press 2016 Review: A rigorous, comprehensive text on quantum information is timely. The study of quantum information and computation represents a particularly direct route to understanding quantum mechanics. Unlike the traditional route to quantum mechanics via Schroedinger's equation and the hydrogen atom, the study of quantum information requires no calculus, merely a knowledge of complex numbers and matrix multiplication. In addition, quantum information processing gives direct access to the traditionally advanced topics of measurement of quantum systems and decoherence.' Seth Lloyd, Department of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Nature 6876: vol 416 page 19, 7 March 2002.
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Links
Catholic Catechism, p1, s2, c1, a1, p4, III. "The world was created for the glory of God", '293 Scripture and Tradition never cease to teach and celebrate this fundamental truth: "The world was made for the glory of God." ' back |
Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia, Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Gödel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems capable of doing arithmetic. The theorems, proven by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are important both in mathematical logic and in the philosophy of mathematics. The two results are widely, but not universally, interpreted as showing that Hilbert's program to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for all mathematics is impossible, giving a negative answer to Hilbert's second problem. The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an "effective procedure" (i.e., any sort of algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the relations of the natural numbers (arithmetic). For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.' back |
John von Neumann (2014), Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, ' Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics by John von Neumann translated from the German by Robert T. Beyer (New Edition) edited by Nicholas A. Wheeler. Princeton UP Princeton & Oxford. Preface: ' This book is the realization of my long-held intention to someday use the resources of TEX to produce a more easily read version of Robert T. Beyer’s authorized English translation (Princeton University Press, 1955) of John von Neumann’s classic Mathematische Grundlagen der Quantenmechanik (Springer, 1932).'This content downloaded from 129.127.145.240 on Sat, 30 May 2020 22:38:31 UTC back |
Second Vatican Council (1965), Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, 1. Hearing the word of God with reverence and proclaiming it with faith, the sacred synod takes its direction from these words of St. John: "We announce to you the eternal life which dwelt with the Father and was made visible to us. What we have seen and heard we announce to you, so that you may have fellowship with us and our common fellowship be with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ" (1 John 1:2-3). Therefore, following in the footsteps of the Council of Trent and of the First Vatican Council, this present council wishes to set forth authentic doctrine on divine revelation and how it is handed on, so that by hearing the message of salvation the whole world may believe, by believing it may hope, and by hoping it may love. back |
Turing's Proof - Wikipedia, Turing's Proof - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Turing's proof is a proof by Alan Turing, first published in January 1937 with the title "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem." It was the second proof of the assertion (Alonzo Church's proof was first) that some decision problems are "undecidable": there is no single algorithm that infallibly gives a correct "yes" or "no" answer to each instance of the problem. In his own words: "...what I shall prove is quite different from the well-known results of Gödel ... I shall now show that there is no general method which tells whether a given formula U is provable in K [Principia Mathematica]..." '. back |