vol VII: Notes
2013
Notes
[Notebook: DB 77 Discretion]
[Sunday 29 December 2013 - Saturday 4 January 2014]
Sunday 29 December 2013
Monday 30 December 2013
Tuesday 31 December 2013
[page 38]
Wednesday 1 January 2014
The athletes of the world seem to be getting more and more extreme as time goes by, and suffering death and injury in proportion. Should we who imagine ourselves to be intellectuals follow this example in our thought patterns, or rest quietly with the curation of the body of ideas we have already documented, ie known moves.. . .
Dear Francis,
My previous letters have documented some of the pain induced in me in my youth by the false doctrines of the Catholic Church. I now want to present to you and your staff a new model of God based on our scientific knowledge of ourselves and our world. This model is built on the hypothesis that the Universe is itself divine and not a puppet worked by an invisible God outside. This model is founded in mathematics and physics This letter is a brief formal representation of this model.
In order to argue that the Universe is divine, we
[page 39]
need a model of God that fits both the ancient conception of God developed with Christianity and the experiences of our lives . . .
Previous letters rather personal so they should remain private between us, but this one is on a public scientific subject and so suitable for publication.
Tuesday 31 December 2013
His Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace,
00120 Vatican CityDear Pope Francis,
You have revitalized the Papacy by softening the Church’s opinions about many current issues in human rights and human development. Besides these matters of administration and public relations, however, there does not appear to be much movement in the theological dimension, my area of interest.
I am sorry that you have not found time to answer my previous letters, but recognize that you a very busy man. Nevertheless, I presume you have adequate staff and at least an acknowledgement would have been appreciated. I am, as I have noted previously, a baptized Catholic who has the welfare of the Church at heart despite the radical failings that I have previously detailed.
We are in the midst of a period of radical disillusion with organizations that were once held in high regard. The US has lost a huge amount of credibility through its resort to illegal war, torture, systematic extrajudicial killing and large scale invasions of privacy.
The Catholic Church has suffered a similar loss of moral authority and credibility through its cover up of child sexual abuse, failure to recognise the equality of women and its possible involvement in money laundering. The development of modern communication is making is more difficult for secretive elites to act with impunity. The only defence against loss of reputation is to act ethically and be transparent about it.
This the Church must do, since no matter how good the charitable works and the public relations, if the Church is worshipping a false God, it is leading us astray.
From a practical point of view, the error at the root of the Church's 'history of salvation' is the hypothesis of 'original sin': that human disobedience caused God to disable the newly created Universe and to subject its human inhabitants to work, the pains of childbirth and the myriad other evils that flesh is heir to. This idea is clearly inconsistent with our evolutionary and cultural history as we know it.
The doctrine of original sin places a heavy burden on the human soul. From a very young age I was taught that I am a sinner and that my only hope was to accept the salvation offered to me by the Church.
There is no evidence whatsoever that this teaching is true. In fact, as maintained here, the Universe is as perfect as can be, divine in fact. We have been blinded to this reality by the story propagated by the Catholic Church, which has served to hide God in plain sight.
The Church's business plan is simple. Convince large numbers of people that we hold an infallible monopoly on communication with God. Convince them that it is essential for them to listen to the Word of God as preached by us and convince them to obey this word if they are to avoid an eternity of agony in Hell and enjoy an eternity of bliss in Heaven.
These convictions are false and once their falsity is accepted, a radical reform of Catholic theology becomes necessary. Catholic indoctrination is a monstrous evil, not only because it is essentially false, but also because it is forced on small children well before they develop any critical sense.
The Roman Catholic Church is built on mythology, mystery and miracles, all of which seem to appeal to people more strongly that a scientific understanding of our condition. This may happen because the strongest force for survival is social cohesion, and it does not matter much how this cohesion is achieved.
As a child, I fell for the Catholic story hook line and sinker. I was convinced that only an extreme measure could overcome the sinful enjoyment I found in myself. So I joined a religious order to follow the supererogatory path of poverty, chastity and obedience.
This did not work for me, however. I fell in love with a number of my brethren and learnt, from Bernard Lonergan's book Insight, that the Catholic argument for the absolute transcendence of God is erroneous.
This brought me to the apogee of sinfulness. Morally I was enjoying forbidden love having made a solemn vow of chastity. Intellectually I began to deny the Catholic view that God is absolutely other than the Universe, and that my only access to God is through the Church. Ultimately I was asked to leave the Order, for me both a disaster and a liberation.
It took me about twenty years to get back to theological work after losing my vocation. My saving grace was the gradual realization that the hypothesis that God and the Universe are identical is both logically consistent and consistent with all the observable features of the Universe, including my own experience. If the Universe, is divine, after all, all my experience is experience of God.
The formal charge raised against me was that my expressed thoughts were not consistent with some of the twenty four Thomistic theses proposed by Pope Pius X as 'safe directive norms' for the Catholic philosophy. My feeling that it is the Church that is in error has grown so much stronger over the last half century that I am now prepared to challenge the Church, accusing it of worshipping a false God. A God of its own creation with a very limited relationship to reality.
Once we accept that the Universe is divine and all experience is experience of God, theology can become an evidence based science. God is our judge; if we pursue wrong policies we are likely to be punished by the failure of our work, and the consequent loss.
The future of theology seems to require the correction of two errors that have been endemic in Western thought since the first extant scientific literature. The mathematical error is the assertion that a real continuum carries information; the theological error is the assertion that the Universe is not God.
The correction of the these errors begins with some understanding of how they arose. We find the source of the error in the work of the early Greek writers Xenophanes, Parmenides and Plato, and their followers among the Fathers of the Church.
These authors faced a fundamental scientific question: how can we have sure knowledge in a changing world? They decided that such knowledge is possible only if there is an invisible eternal being lying behind the changing world and controlling it. With the invention of Christianity, this eternal creator contributed to the standard Christian model of God.
Since I was brought up a Catholic and trained for the priesthood in the Dominican Order, I came to know the classical Christian God intimately, mainly through the work of Thomas Aquinas.
Aquinas begins the Summa Theologiae with five proofs for the existence of God, the subject of theology. These proofs are pretty much all the same: the world cannot account for itself, so we must postulate some other being to provide the missing explanation. These proofs assume that the Universe does have a cause that explains everything about it. What they seek to prove is that this cause, which we call God, is other than the Universe rather than identical with it.
Following Aristotle's theology, Aquinas concludes that God is pure action, actus purus. From this he deduces the classical properties of God, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience and so on. These ideas come predominantly from the Greek sources of Christianity.
The other input to the Christian God came from the Hebrews, whose history is recorded in the Bible. The Hebrew God Yahweh was a personality who brought the abstract Greek first cause to life to give the Christian God currently worshipped by more than a billion people.
The authors of Christianity combined the Greek and Hebrew traditions into a history of salvation that begins in the Book of Genesis and ends with the Book of Revelation, the final denouement.
Aquinas' version of God seems to be totally unlike the world we inhabit. God is totally simple (omnino simplex), the world breathtakingly complex. The ancients, understandably, though of God and the World a completely different entities.
Recent mathematical developments mean that from a logical point of view this dichotomy is no longer necessary. The first clue is to be found in Aquinas' treatment of the life of God. Aristotle (and Aquinas) define life as as self motion. They define motion as the passage from potential existence to actual existence. So how can God live and move if it is pure act with no unrealized potential?
To solve this problem, Aquinas introduces a new category of motion, proper to God, motion from action to action, not from potential to action. It is axiomatic for the Aristotelian doctrine of potency and act that no potency can actualize itself. We find in modern physics, however, that potential and kinetic energy are exactly equivalent, as we can see in ideal harmonic oscillators like the simple pendulum. In other words, the motion observed in the Universe has the characteristic of the motion Aquinas postulated in God.
We expand this idea using mathematical fixed point theory. Brouwer and others have shown that a mapping of a closed convex set onto itself has at least one fixed point, that is a point that maps onto itself.
We can understand the life of God as the mapping of God into itself. Consequently we might expect to find fixed points. These fixed points are not outside the motion, as Parmenides and others thought, but are part of the motion. We may therefore expect the fixed points that define the complexity of our world to be fixed points in the divine life. These fixed points are revelation of God, that is observable messages from God.
We describe and explain the fixed points of the Universe using quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics has a well established reputation for obscurity, but we can easily make sense of it by seeing is as a way to compute the nature and frequency of messages on a universal communication network.
The manifesto of quantum mechanics, articulated by Heisenberg, is that we only have to explain the observable features of the world, so that any theory that does the job has a chance, no matter how much it differs from previous (and perhaps well established) theories.
In the theological context, this manifesto says that if the assumption that God and the Universe are identical is both self consistent and satisfactorily explains everything that we experience, then we can accept it as a model of God.
Quantum mechanics tells us that the observable features of the Universe are the fixed points, known as eigenfunction and eigenvalues, of the motion described by the quantum wave equation. The fixed points described by quantum mechanics serve as the foundation upon which the rest of remarkable structure of the Universe (which includes ourselves) is built.
Given this new foundation for theology, we may imagine that it is time for a theological renaissance, and I think you are the man to initialize this rebirth. It is time for theology to break free from political and institutional control by governments and churches and join the other sciences in the free world of uncontrolled exploration.
Such a break is a natural consequence of the hypothesis proposed here that God and the Universe are identical, rather than absolutely distinct, as Catholic dogma maintains. If the Universe is divine, theology can become a real science because every human experience becomes experience of God.
Western academic theology is largely controlled by the Christian Churches, particularly the Catholic Church. The Church locates itself in a history of salvation documented in the Bible. The Bible is literary fiction. From a scientific point of view, it is an hypotheses in need of testing.
Unfortunately the Catholic model of reality precludes such testing. There is no way to decide whether the Catholic story is true or false, since Catholicism holds God to be invisible and its ways mysterious and far beyond our understanding.
The Catholic Church claims a monopoly on communication with this God, and a monopoly on the interpretation of such communications. We must accept this without evidence. We are bound by faith alone, which is fortunate, since so we can untie ourselves simply by changing our minds.
Catholic Canon Law says that the Pope ‘enjoys supreme, full, immediate and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he can always freely exercise’. Not to mention that he can be infallible if he so chooses.
How can we deal with such an establishment? The answer, as in all politics, is to produce a platform which will attract the support of a majority of citizens.
The Catholic Church currently divides reality into heaven and earth and claims that it alone is privy to the divine plan. The alternative is to bring God down to Earth. God is not an alien. On this hypothesis, each of our personal worlds becomes part of the life of God.
This hypothesis changes just one bit of information in theology, albeit an important one. It changes the sentence God is not the Universe into the sentence God is the Universe. It is rather like the bit in our global nuclear control system which encodes the dichotomy bomb them / don’t bomb them.
Once one has made this change of perspective, one can begin the critical transformation of traditional theology into natural theology (think natural science). We just have to learn to see God from the inside rather than the outside. This work is already well in hand. If the Universe is divine, all science is part of theology, the theory of everything.
Like the traditional God, this divine Universe is responsible for itself, there is no outside influence. We no more know where the Universe comes from than we know where the traditional God comes from, but we know we are in it. Like the old God, the Universe is our judge. Some things work, others don’t. Our survival depends on knowing God well enough to invest in things that work.
Like the traditional God, the divine Universe is one. It is an article of scientific faith that apparent inconsistencies can be resolved with sufficient understanding. The scientific method is designed to lead us to true models of reality. We can therefore expect a theology founded on the scientific method to evolve toward global unity, as we see in other scientific disciplines,
As we evolve spiritually toward a unified view of the human condition, we should expect to learn how to live peacefully and sustainably on the Earth.
Is this idea true? This is the question. Can we reconcile our observed Universe with ancient ideas of God? The notion of differentiating God and the World enters history in the work of Xenophanes and other Eleatic philosophers. They felt that only invariants could be truly known. From the notion that motion cannot be truly known, they saw the moving world as an inferior form of being.
Modern mathematical physics undermines this view. The theological development of the Christian God reached its high point in the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas defined God as pure action, actus purus. This is consistent with the vacuum of modern physics, the sea of action from which observable reality emerges.
Nor is there any longer a problem reconciling the absolute simplicity of the traditional God with the complexity of the world we inhabit. The ancients thought motion and stillness were opposed. Mathematical fixed point theory suggests that dynamic systems have fixed points which are part of the motion, not apart from it. We, and all the observables around us, may be modelled as fixed points in the divine dynamics.
Here, I feel, is a line of thought worth pursuing by the theologians of the Catholic Church. It cannot be pursued within the current environment, however, where Catholic theologians and academic institutions owe individual and institutional fidelity to the Church. It within your power to remove this impediment and let theology flower.
Finally, here I am addressing the role of the Papacy. None of the hard words I have to say of the Church and its government have are meant to reflect on you as the person currently executing that role.
Yours sincerely,
Copies to President, Pontifical Academy of Sciences; Prefect, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith;
Thursday 2 January 2014
Friday 3 January 2014
Saturday 4 January 2015
.Today sit at home writing and reading the news, collecting data perhaps for fit the model to the world. The notion of spreading the model through the Catholic Church, particularly Pope Francis, seems sound. The next letter may gain some traction with scientifically minded theologians.
What is the difference between Facebook and the NSA? The Facebookers are volunteers to be spied upon. The NSA spies on anyone it can.
The complex numbers in quantum mechanics point to the cyclic process in computation. What quantum mechancs is computing is the coincidence / non-coincidence of computational events.
