vol VII: Notes
2014
Notes
[Notebook: DB 77 Discretion]
[Sunday 2 March 2014 - Saturday 8 March 2014]
[page 80]
Sunday 2 March 2014
Happy heretic: the autobiography of an idea
Monday 3 March 2014
Post February letter to Francis, copies to Academy, Curia etc to follow.
Friday 28 February 2014
Your Holiness, Pope Francis
Apostolic Palace,
00120 Vatican CityDear Pope Francis,
This is my fifth letter to you, without reply. I will keep writing to you until you reply, because I know that you will reply when you finally realize the irrefutable truth of what I am trying to tell you. What I am trying to tell you is that there is no evidence for the Catholic hypothesis that God is a mysterious entity entirely distinct from the Universe. Blind faith in this hypothesis is no longer good enough in the modern world since it is not supported by credible evidence. Each of these letters is a restatement of that fact.
I do not deny the existence of God. Instead I propose that the dichotomy between God and the Universe claimed by the Catholic Church has no foundation. The Catholic Catechism assumes the existence of God, and claims that this God is other than the Universe:
34: The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality "that everyone calls God".
How they attest to this fact I cannot see.
This claim is based on the arguments like those for the existence of God presented by Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae. Aquinas’ proofs do not prove the existence of God: that is obvious, since God is simply another name for what exists, and we cannot reasonably deny that we and our world exist. It is not a matter of faith, but experience, as Descartes pointed out.
What Aquinas is attempting to prove is that God is other than the Universe. He does this on the basis of ancient models of both God and the Universe which he shows to be incompatible with one another. His proofs in other words, are model dependent. His model of the world, derived from Aristotle, is, in the light of modern understanding of the Universe, manifestly false.
The Second Vatican Council reiterates the words of the First Vatical Council, that we have natural knowledge of God:
"Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason." (Vatican Council I, Dei Filius 2:DS 3004; cf. 3026; Vatican Council II, Dei Verbum 6.)
The Church claims, however, to have special additional knowledge of God through the Bible, implying that our natural knowledge of God is imperfect. I, contrary to the Church, imagine that the Universe and God are identical.
The Catholic claim reduces us to knowing God through a tiny and unreliable pinhole, the Bible, rather than through the whole magnificent Universe (including ourselves). This is a political, rather than a scientific choice. It is the foundation of the perverse power over human minds and spirits that the Church has used for two thousand years to achieve the position of wealth and influence that it now enjoys.
The days of mind control and dictatorship, are coming to an end, however, and the Church must eventually reform or die. Although the Church has a lot to say about human dignity, its views lag seriously behind the modern civilized view of humanity and human rights. In the face of all the evidence, it claims women to be inferior to men, homosexuality to be ‘unnatural’, evidence based science to be secondary to blind faith.
The Catholic Church remains a guiding light to all the thought police, absolute monarchs and dictators who claim to rule by some sort of divine right. It maintains a dictatorship on belief worthy of the worst of totalitarian regimes in the face of modern views of academic freedom, evidence based opinion and democracy.
The physical sciences escaped from political control around the time of Galileo, but theology remains a puppet of the Church. Although science has exploded since Galileo’s time and contributed mightily to our health and welfare, the Church was able to use its power to threaten Galileo with death and imprisoned him for life. By this example (and many other actual murders) the Church was able to prevent any revision of its doctrines in the face of reality. There is very little theology in Western academia that is not based on the Bible.
To make any substantial progress, theology must rejoin the sciences. This is only possible if God is visible, and that is only possible if God and the Universe are identical. Given this hypothesis, everything we see and experience is a manifestation of a God which is pure dynamism, actus purus.
On the scientific assumption, we do not just know God through a tiny collection of ancient books, but by every experience of every sentient being in the Universe. And we extend the definition of sentient to atoms and beyond. Atoms are sentient: we talk and listen to them with photons, the colours of the world.
There are at present in the world many people who claim to be atheists. The God they are denying is, presumably, the Christian God, and this denial may make a certain amount of sense. We can see the error of their ways, however, if we compare the history of theology to the history of astronomy, which have followed parallel paths since time immemorial. Aquinas’ first proof for the existence of God, for instance, is taken straight from Aristotle’s metaphysics, changing only the name of Aristotle’s ‘first unmoved mover’ to the Catholic term ‘God’.
Aristotle and his contemporaries placed Earth at the centre of the Universe and imagined the Sun, the Moon the planets and the stars to be arranged on invisible spheres surrounding the Earth ultimately moved by the outermost sphere, the first mover. They imagined that these heavenly bodies were made of a special material, a fifth element superior to the four sublunar elements, earth, water, air and fire.
Although this picture is quite satisfying, it was hard to reconcile with the observed motions of the celestial bodies, and was subjected to continual revision as observational data became more precise. Over a period of roughly two thousand years astronomers slowly realized that everything was easier if we put the Sun in the middle. From there Newton produced the theory of universal gravitation and Einstein general relativity, which gives us a picture of the Universe as a whole.
Theology has a similar trajectory, beginning with Gods that were very much like powerful humans and eventually developing the ideas of monotheism, actus purus, eternity, simplicity, perfection, goodness, omnipotence, omniscience, the trinity, creation, and incarnation which we now attribute to God. We are now in a position to take this a step further. Our modern understanding of the Universe is no longer inconsistent with the ancient understanding of God. But first we must overcome the enormous institutional inertia of the Church.
The ancient development of theology reached its apogee in the early middle ages. It has since stagnated as the Church turned its energy to becoming a political and military power, and began the Crusades, murdering Muslims, heretics and other undesirables wholesale. Doctrinal development began to freeze, being laid down with greater and greater precision by successive councils. Vatican 1 established the ultimate dictatorial dream, that the Pope is by virtue of his office infallible when he intends to define dogma.
Pope Pius XII was the first to exercise this power. He infallibly defined that Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory. To me this statement is meaningless and incredible if it is meant to imply some physical motion on Mary's part. If it is simply symbolic, it has meaning within the belief system of the Church, but is not compelling given that that belief system is based on a false understanding of God.
The 'gift of truth' claimed by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Fides et ratio is clearly a delusion. One need look no further than the Church's attitudes to women, sexuality, property and self determination to see that its positions reflect its origins in ancient absolutist, patriarchal societies and are in no way revelations from God. They can only be understood if one acknowledges that the God of Catholicism is a fiction constructed by a literate ruling elite to consolidate their own position.
The whole raison d’etre of the Church is that God is invisible and the Church is the only channel to salvation: extra ecclesiam nulla salus. The basic marketing pitch is ‘believe what we tell you (and contribute some value) and you will possibly be rewarded by an eternity of bliss in heaven, enjoying the vision of God which is better than anything you could ever imagine’. At least that’s what I heard as a child.
It is interesting, though, that the Redemptorist missionaries who came to our school to scare us into not touching our genitals painted extraordinarily lurid pictures of the pains of hell and said next to nothing about heaven. Pleasure to them was the enemy of the good. The net effect of this indoctrination, it seems to me, was to inculcate into us such a sense of shame with respect to our sexuality that the clergy could molest us safe in the knowledge that we would never expose their crimes.
God (the Universe) is the source and environment for the whole of human life. The tragedy of the commons is that it is not managed for the public benefit, but frittered away (‘enclosed’) by the elite. The Catholic Church has stolen (enclosed) our common God and used it for its own purposes.
The legal constitution of the Church, the Code of Canon Law gives you absolute power: ‘There is neither appeal nor recourse against a decision or decree of the Roman Pontiff.’ (Canon 333 para 3). Although this accumulation of power is abhorrent in the light of modern constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers, you are nevertheless in a position to begin the process of correcting the fundamental error at the foundation of Catholic dogma: that God is distinct from the Universe.
Identification of God and the world is a very fruitful application of Occam’s razor. The power of humanity lies in imagination. The Catholic story is a work of imagination. In practical matters, however, imagination must be curbed by reality. This is the role of science.
I see religion as a critical component of the human environment. Sociobiologists can explain why we are nice to our relatives. Religion goes further, enabling cooperation within communities of unrelated people. In a slogan, religion is the art of peace.
For every art, there is a science. As physics underlies engineering, and biology the art of healing, so theology is the foundation of religion. At present the world is beset by conflicting theologies (based on inconsistent texts) and the consequent religious wars.
In a divine Universe, we can go beyond the ancient texts to God itself. Since the Universe is one, it seems probable that careful observers will eventually arrive at one theology, a foundation for religious harmony. We may see the observable Universe as God’s body and accept that all information is encoded physically. We communicate with God through our bodies, sometime quite lusciously, sometimes painfully. This no more limits our dialogue with the Universal God than the ink and paper of Bibles restricts our communication with the Catholic God.
It has taken me a long time to realize that the Catholic Church, for all its magnificence, has feet of clay. The indoctrination I received from the nuns, brothers and priests of my childhood has proved to be very strong. As I have pointed out to you in my previous letters, my trust in the Church has been shattered over the last twenty years by the ongoing revelations of child sexual abuse, and by the extreme means the Church has used to cover up its crimes.
Further, I have come to see child sexual abuse as the tip of a much more sinister iceberg, which I call child mental abuse. Much Catholic teaching clearly contradicts modern scientific observation, yet the Church persists in teaching little people that they are sinners in need of salvation, filling their heads with tales of snakes and apples, of sin and punishment, global floods and the salvation of the virtuous, the fiery destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
They are taught that God murdered his own Son to appease himself for some ancient sin. It is telling that this sin is recorded in the Bible as 'eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil (for when you eat of it you shall ertainly die)' in other words of seeking an education will be fatal. It has always been the first task of dictators to destroy education, to murder intellectuals, to close Universities and to police artistic and literary expression to make certain that people do not deviate from the doctrine of the regime.
Some of this might be acceptable if these stories were presented as the fairy tales that they are, but this would not suit the Church's purpose, which is to indoctrinate the newborn well before they develop any critical faculties.
The Church is now, to my mind, a criminal organization like the Communist Party of China, interested solely in its own power and wealth at the expense of the people it wishes to control. It has built an enormous castle in the air which has no foundation in reality. It has feet of clay (Daniel 2:31-33). It is an empire of lies, constructed for no other reason that the welfare of its elite, giving themselves the gift of truth, the right to control the minds of everybody else.
You have the power to correct these errors. From a theological point of view, all you need to do is change the phrase 'God is not the Universe' to God is the Universe. All the other necessary changes follow from this.
The layered network model which I have proposed in previous letters sees the structureless initial singularity suggested by the general theory of relativity, the vacuum postulated by quantum field theory, and the isolated quantum system that lies at the foundation of quantum mechanics as formally identical to the classical omnino simplex God proposed by Aquinas and others.
Since God is a living God, and, as Aquinas says, the life of God is motion from actuality to actuality, we can apply mathematical fixed point theory to show that the existence of static structure in the Universe is consistent with the simplicity of God. Parmenides and his followers right up to the modern Church believe that motion and stillness are absolutely opposed. Fixed point theory suggests that this is not so: that under certain conditions stillness (ie fixed points) is a necessary feature of motion. This removes any logical necessity to distinguish the Universe from God.
If the Universe is Divine, all human experience is experience of God and theology can became a real science. We can study divine dynamics in a manner analogous to Galileo’s pioneering studies of physical dynamics. This will bring the Church further into the modern world of evidence based policy making, which appears already to be a feature of your Papacy.
At present Catholic theology papers over its logical inconsistencies by the claim that God is a mystery beyond human ken. This is to me simply an example of the ancient practice, still very common, particularly under totalitarian regimes, of elites maintaining their power by secrecy. Such elites (of which the Church is the prime example) claim that they know things that the rest of us don't, and give themselves the right to murder anybody who does not accept their point of view.
Galileo wisely recanted to save his life. Fortunately those days are past in the Catholic Church, and the most violent sanction available to it is to deprive those who disagree with of it a living. This happened to me when I was expelled from the Dominican Order. I have lived in relative poverty since then, developing the ideas outlined here which will eventually lead to the reform of the Church that attacked me.
If the Church is ever to become universal and fit into the modern civilized world, it must ‘abjure, curse and detest’ its ancient false opinions and found itself on the divine reality that we all experience.
I repeat once again that I am, under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights a human being of strength and dignity, a manifestation of God, entitled to be treated as such. Your contempt of me manifested by you failure to answer my correspondence gives the lie to all the Church’s claims to respect human dignity.
I am also young and articulate, and gradually becoming more radicalized by the evils that I see in the Church. For this reason, I am making this letter and its followers public. I am aware that a century is a short time in religion, but I can see that pressure for reform will build up over the coming decades until a radical revision of theology becomes necessary.
Throughout the world we are seeing people demonstrating against corruption, arbitrary power, violations of human rights, torture, and all the other sins common to powerful elites. The Church, although it claims to stand for the poor, is part of the problem, an elite that denies human rights, denies evidence based science, denies reality and worships a false God.
The Church should be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, and your actions since you undertook the role of Pope suggest that you are sympathetic to this idea. The childish view that some invisible God does all for the best must be abandoned in the face of the view that what we see is what we get, that the laws of our divine ecosystem must be obeyed, and that our future is in our own hands. Since you have no real political power, only exemplary power, you can afford to move the Church into the scientific and democratic era without causing too much death and destruction.
As Einstein noted, the deepest of physical laws and the one least likely to be revised is the second law of thermodynamics, which expresses the fact that God is eternally creative. The attempt to prevent diversity and bind everyone to the same ancient beliefs implicit in the definition of infallibility flies directly in the face of this divine reality.
Yours sincerely,
copies:
President, Pontifical Academy of Sciences,
Prefect, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
Cardinal George Pell,
The Editor, L'Osservatore Romano,
The Editor, National Catholic Reporter,
The Editor, The Tablet,
The Editor, Vaticanology.net
Tuesday 4 March 2014
Thinking about 'Happy heretic'. In a way my task now seems to be to reap some reward from a lifetime of capital investment in an idea, encapsulated in the simple slogan 'the Universe is Divine'.
What can we say about the Ukraine / Russia situation. There are two forces at work in the human world, and everywhere
[page 81]
else, the power of the individual and the power of the commune, whatever it may be, a fiction created to unite people in a common endeavour. The smallest and most natural commune is the family. Families, through the historical forces of kinship, unite into tribes. Tribes beget leadership and leaders find that they can become wealthy by taxing the membership as a charge for the peace and good government that might flow from their leadership. Like all deals in trade, both sides are out to do the best for themselves, but the system is very lopsided, since the leaders often arrogate to themselves the police and military power necessary to impose their will on their members. How do we redress this imbalance? The constitutional best answer is democracy, but as many have noticed that democracy, at least as it is practised, is the best of a bad lot. Elections can be bought and rigged, and a democratically elected government can easily turn absolutist and begin to act as a dictator. We need something other than voting to make communities work and this ingredient is cultural, a term that includes all the shared sciences and arts as well as theology and religion. Since the ancient religions have all disgraced themselves with sectarianism and immorality, it is time for new theology, rooted in reality: back to the hobby horse., but I feel that it must be done and I have finally got my religions vocation back on my own terms after half a century of job hunting / creation. If we are to live in peace we must learn how God works and learn how to keep away from the dangerous places. Christianity is a sectarian and militant religion owing allegiance to a divine warmonger and so is not capable of fulfilling this task.
Every measurement is a time integral, ie a measure of action.
[page 82]
Wednesday 5 March 2014
There are no 'pure spirits'. All information is encoded in physical states. The biography of an idea is the biography of a person. Angels are the equivalent of software, but they must run on hardware, as I do. So the ancient idea that we are angels in a material body can be accepted as true. Each of our personalities, like each angel, is formally different, a distinct species as Aquinas claimed. We see these forms as stationary (multi-dimensional) points in he dynamics of the Universe whose root is God actus purus which we undertand abstractly to have no fixed points.
I came to this position from metaphysical considerations, looking for a model to embrace everything I experience, This is the transfinite network. Now we ned to make the transfinite network incarnate, using the principle that all information is represented physically.
The purpose of this book is to cut a path from mysticism to physics. The mathematical [theory] that does this is fixed point theory. We make our path using fixed point theory as a tool, as a procedure for translating ((transforming) one language into another, Transformations are constrained by a metric; translations constrained by a meaning, s set of relationships something like a dictionary which defines in the worlds in itself using the words in itself (and symbols, but word is generic, a string of symbols).
The book has to be a personal word of god as well as a cosmological and ethical world. Ethics defines the personal response to cosmulogical realities.
[page 83]
Cosmology = physical theology
The unemployed are responsible for there being no jobs. Blame the victim, ie the poor, disenfranchised, homeless etc etc.
Justice = symmetry, measured by scales.
Letter 6: Catholic misogyny—Mary is a Barbie Doll, sexless, without a personality, a cipher in the story, subject to fantastic miracles.
A word of god, both symbolic and real. General relativity has a duality of covariant and contravariant tensors, which combine to give an invariant metric.
The symmetry of a symbol; if there is going to be personal responsibility, it must be universal. Jeremy Moss
A first person theologian, since the evidence for theology is personal experience.
I may be that fixed points always appear in pairs covariant and contravariant, ie duals of one another that are created and can annihilate one another [particle and antiparticle]
Momentum = data There are seven billion human beings on Earth and all of them have to be introduced to the new religion. How long will that take. [depends on the force acting for adoption which will depend on whether the religion is seems as the answer to potential disasters]
E.C. Bentley Trent's Last Case Pan, 1965 page 31: ' "Life is quite full," my dear Trent, said Mr Cupples with a sigh, "all of these obstinate silences and cultivated misunderstandings" ' Bentley: Trent's Last Case
Thursday 6 March 2014
Friday 7 March 2014
It is essential for the Church to distinguish erotic love from spiritual love because for it pure lust was a product of the fall rather than the desire for knowledge - carnal knowledge, physical knowledge, real knowledge, ie experience.
The closest you can get to truth without making it is to be exactly wrong. If the truth is p, the nearest you can get to it is not-p
Saturday 8 March 2014
The notion that we can build effectively deterministic quantum computers sounds a bit like the banks securitizing loads of bad loans and using statistical mumbo jumbo to give the result an AAA rating.
