natural theology

We have just published a new book that summarizes the ideas of this site. Free at Scientific Theology, or, if you wish to support this project, buy at Scientific Theology: A New Vision of God

Contact us: Click to email
vol VII: Notes

2012

Notes

[Sunday 25 November 2012 - Saturday 1 December 2012]

[Notebook: DB 74 Creation]

[page 3]

Sunday 25 November 2012

Why do I feel so hopeless even though everything seems to be going like a charm. As Pinker describes, peace has pretty well broken out. Personally I have plenty of work and the stock market it beginning to pick up. A series of breakthroughs seem to have put my idea that the world is divine on a sound footing. All my family appear to be well and happy, although my parents are getting very old. So what is the matter? The subconscious is up to something, but what? I cannot press it, but must wait for the denouement. Perhaps I need a holidy, but I will still be there,. Yet maybe I

[page 4]

am trying to motivate myself from quiet rural contemplation to some action in the wider world., to get involved after a long period of retreat. After all I do feel that the cure for depression is action, but the question is what action? Constructing the physical infrastructure of a small community no longer seems enough, and the completion of the last few jobs I have taken on cannot come too soon. Maybe it is just the process of building up courage to do something coupled to the uncertainty that I am capable of doing anything to repay the 'debt to society' that I have run up during my years of retreat.

Pinker page 333: Increase Mather 'thank God " that on this day we have sent a hundred heathen souls to Hell. " ' Pinker

Monday 26 November 2012

Maybe my main problem, (emphasized by Pinker) is that everything is going to well there is nothing to get excited about. On reflection, however, the need to establish scientific theology (or at least to publicize its existence) remains and I should do something about it. 'Theological Spring' to Eureka Street.

Tuesday 27 November 2012

Spacetime is the basic universal communication medium, ie the physical layer on which all other observable signals are written. Beneath this layer are the amplitudes of quantum mechanics which perform all their operations by the addition of dualistic quantities represented by complex numbers (un the assumption that multiplication i equivalent to repeated addition).

[page 5]

We are seeing God from the inside. From the outside (if thee were such a thing) God would look just like the ancients thought, a totally simple featureless unfathomable infinity. From the inside it is different. I will explain the difference by working through the classical Catholic exposition of God written by Thomas of Aquino in the thirteenth century CE.

Wednesday 28 November 2012

Pontifical Academy of Sciences: Scientific theology.

Many things to do but much reluctance to do them and I wonder at myself, a conscious spark guided by a cosmic phenomenon over which I seem to have little control. I have learnt, however, to follow my self, and find that the results are just as good as if I try to put myself under pressure, and since all appears to be going well am happy to wait until the urge to do the next thing becomes apparent. In a sense I am learning to accept my own potentials as 'the will of god' and not force myself to go off 'half-cocked'. This is a version of Socrates 'know thyself' which might be interpreted 'follow thyself'. Jesus is reported to have said

Thursday 29 November 2012

Religions are partly about control as Claudius emphasizes. One means of control is to maintain the subjects in a juvenile condition. This may be a connection between child sexual abuse (which is a matter of control, ie rape) and the mental and physical abuse of dissidents and the prevention of free debate among theologians and other people.Graves

[page 6]

Politics - inertia
ideas - force
The force prevails by annihilating the status quo and creating a new state. So we use invariance with respect to complexity to make the connection between quantum field theory and the interaction of nations.

The rate of penetration of a new idea is probably related to the clarity and universality of the idea, so that it exerts a great intellectual force on those who take the trouble to understand it.

COMPLEXIFICATION DEFEATS ERROR SUPPORTS COMPLEXIFICATION

The creation theorem, the effect of the 'Cantor Force' [which creates new stationary points while leaving the underlying dynamics as pure action].

The spread of an idea depends upon its clarity.

The Universe is divine. To overcome the contrary position is a political task. The basic skill needed for human survival is the ability to be convinced by facts and observations rather than fantastic dreams.

energy <—> angular momentum.

[page 7]

Le Carre, Single privilege —> money

Prospectus to raise venture capital - a not-for-profit.

My mind is a superposition of ideas which I observe one at a time or in various combinations.

Each step forward is accompanied by the conviction that I have got it all, followed by seeing the next gap.

Letter to Pontifical Academy
Unreasonable effectiveness revisited.

I am a fixed point. Because my lifetime is short, my fixedness is somewhat uncertain and I can change. From an intellectual point of view, the biggest change I have made is Universe ≠ God to Universe = God, where Universe and God may be construed simply as mathematical symbols, shorn of their vast cultural overlay that gives them very great momentum = inertia (action and reaction are equal and opposite, F = dp / dt. I am a fixed point in the divinity, and since from information theory we learn that the information carried by a point is equal to the entropy of the space in which the point resides, so I am an image of God.

We have to start with something they know, and in the first instance we take that to be Aquinas in the conception of the head office, which [is] where energy must be

[page 8]

directed.

Teillhard de Chardin popularized the term complexification. Let us assume that the rate of growth of the transfinite cardinal and ordinal numbers represents the maximum rate at which things can complexify. Then we may hypothesize that there are certain physical constraints on this formal measure of complexification, and it is these constraints (fixed points) that physicists strive to identify. One of the tools is symmetry and continuity, features imprinted on the Universe by its genetic and evolutionary nature. Christianity is a set of genes (memes). So are all the other big religions. The Universe has its own set of memes (genes) eigenfunctions, that is computable functions.

There is no space here to be rigorous, so please let me wave my hands. ,/p>

As far back as Aristotle, scientists have known that the Universe is driven by pure action. Aristotle arrived at this conclusion from his axiom that n potential can be actiualized except by an existing act.

'Money is the best general purpose tool in the world. Le Carre Single and Single page 363. le Carre

A computer can do anything a wave function can do because all wave functions are computable functions and vice versa.

Friday 30 November 2012
Saturday 1 December 2012

Copyright:

You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.


Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Feynman, Richard, Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, Westview Press 2002 Amazon Editorial Reviews Book Description 'The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation are based on notes prepared during a course on gravitational physics that Richard Feynman taught at Caltech during the 1962-63 academic year. For several years prior to these lectures, Feynman thought long and hard about the fundamental problems in gravitational physics, yet he published very little. These lectures represent a useful record of his viewpoints and some of his insights into gravity and its application to cosmology, superstars, wormholes, and gravitational waves at that particular time. The lectures also contain a number of fascinating digressions and asides on the foundations of physics and other issues. Characteristically, Feynman took an untraditional non-geometric approach to gravitation and general relativity based on the underlying quantum aspects of gravity. Hence, these lectures contain a unique pedagogical account of the development of Einstein's general theory of relativity as the inevitable result of the demand for a self-consistent theory of a massless spin-2 field (the graviton) coupled to the energy-momentum tensor of matter. This approach also demonstrates the intimate and fundamental connection between gauge invariance and the principle of equivalence.' 
Amazon
  back
Hawking, Steven W, and G F R Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time , Cambridge UP 1975 Preface: Einstein's General Theory of Relativity ... leads to two remarkable predictions about the universe: first that the final fate of massive stars is to collapse behind an event horizon to form a 'black hole' which will contain a singularity; and secondly that there is a singularity in our past which constitutes, in some sense, a beginning to our universe. Our discussion is principally aimed at developing these two results.' 
Amazon
  back
le Carre, John, Single & Single, Scribner 1999 Amazon editorial review: Amazon.com Review On a Turkish hillside, ex-Communist mobsters shatter the skull of a corrupt English lawyer. In a sleepy English village, the authorities ask a lonely children's magician how come £5,000,030 sterling just got anonymously deposited in his baby daughter's bank account. With machine-like logic and soulful literary magic, John le Carré links these two events in Single & Single, a stay-up-all-night thriller. . . . Ex-spy le Carré was there when the Berlin Wall went up, and his spy craft is legendarily realistic. His female spy/love interest is less so--the opposite of a femme fatale, she might be termed a "deus sex machina." But the book's crucial father-son relationship is quite real, because, like the irresistible villain of A Perfect Spy, Tiger is based on le Carré's own con-man dad. The cold war is over, but le Carré is hot. And he will endure.' --Tim Appelo 
Amazon
  back
Longley, Clifford, and Edited by Suzy Powling. Foreword by Lord Rees-Mogg, The Times Book of Clifford Longley, HarperCollinsReligious 1991 Jacket: 'Clifford Longley is perhaps the best known religious journalist working in Britain today [1991] and surely one of the most accomplished in the post-war period. ... This anthology, the first ever of Longley's work, contains a wide selection of columns published since 1988. Together they make up a colourful and engrossing account of a period when Church affairs have been marked by high controversy, and have regularly hit front pages.' 
Amazon
  back
Pinker, Steven, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Viking Adult 2011 Amazon book description: 'A provocative history of violence—from the New York Times bestselling author of The Stuff of Thought and The Blank Slate Believe it or not, today we may be living in the most peaceful moment in our species' existence. In his gripping and controversial new work, New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows that despite the ceaseless news about war, crime, and terrorism, violence has actually been in decline over long stretches of history. Exploding myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly enlightened world.' 
Amazon
  back
Reese, William L, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought, Humanities Press/Harvester Press 1996 'The present volume ... has many encyclopedic features, including analyses of the thought of all major philosophers and religious leaders. ... One of the key features of the volume is the extent of its cross references. ... The reader is thus encouraged to undertake his own explorations of the themes, movements and thinkers important in philosophy and religion.'  
Amazon
  back
Links
Mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics - Wikipedia Mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics - Wikipedia - the free encyclopedia 'The mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics is the body of mathematical formalisms which permits a rigorous description of quantum mechanics. It is distinguished from mathematical formalisms for theories developed prior to the early 1900s by the use of abstract mathematical structures, such as infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces and operators on these spaces. Many of these structures were drawn from functional analysis, a research area within pure mathematics that developed in parallel with, and was influenced by, the needs of quantum mechanics. In brief, values of physical observables such as energy and momentum were no longer considered as values of functions on phase space, but as eigenvalues of linear operators.' back

www.naturaltheology.net is maintained by The Theology Company Proprietary Limited ACN 097 887 075 ABN 74 097 887 075 Copyright 2000-2020 © Jeffrey Nicholls