"natural theology > notes > 2017

vol VII: Notes

2017

Notes

Sunday 1 January 2017 - Saturday 7 January 2017

[Notebook: DB 80: Cosmic plumbing]

[page 283]

Sunday 1 January 2017

Searching for the edge of reality. In practical terms the edge is death, beyond this point there is no life and no consistency. To cross the edge is to be annihilated. This edge is the most interesting fixed point in theology because it bounds the power of God. Aquinas, consistency. Aquinas, Summa I, 25, 3: Is God omnipotent?

We live close to this edge, often trying things that do not work because they are not consistent with local conditions, as when I try to drive a nail and it bends, probably due to a mis-hit.

Logical confinement: an inconsistency ipso facto cannot exist, so we claim that God cannot be locally inconsistent, ie inconsistencies cannot exist in contact.

The fundamental operation, wait, do nothing. It is in principle unobservable being identified only by the statement 'nothing happened'. The end of the wait is an event. The bus comes.

Gods can be quite demanding, particularly the ones embodied in the founders of extreme orders that demand poverty, chastity and obedience with added self denial, abegnation and self deprecation, On the whole, none

[page 284]

of these demands contribute much to fitness except by encouraging the faithful to give to the mendicants in the hope of acquiring grace and virtue.

Scientific world view: grace.

Authenticity is the name of the game, not easy to discern in the clouds of spin emerging from the fertile imaginations of politicians. Of course the greatest [fiction] is the Catholic history of salvation, the greatest fiction ever foaled, the culmination of many millennia of development, like the other great theologies of the world, all framed as human drama rather than scientific theology and evidence/theology based religion. Salvation History - Wikipedia

Monday 2 January 2017

Tuesday 3 January 2017

The times are perhaps becoming aligned for a scientific theology to put the human world on a real rather than an imaginary footing. If Trump can rule the world, so can I!

We are biassed toward belief, confirmation bias, my way or the highway, Benedict XVI. Joseph Ratzinger, Tarcisio Bertone: Declaration "Dominus Iesus" on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church

noosphere: public opinion. Internet is part of the backbone of the noosphere which embraces all human communication. Teilhard de Chardin: The Phenomenon of Man

Power (eg wealth) can create false situations in which agents are not exposed to the consequences of their actions, these consequences

[page 285]

being externalities ranging from genocide to any injustice, however, minor, whose existence is shielded by power.

In a digital world things do not always happen all at once, but the frequency of an given event tends to change. We see this at work in the design of quantum systems, where the goal is to increase the frequency of beneficial events (like the establishment of superconductivity , the onset of lasing etc) at the expense of not so beneficial. . . . US presidents are swinging between two poles, and we would like to se the peaceful pole predominate. Trump will effectively act at random, rather than polarized toward the rich and powerful or the poor and helpless (maybe). This will happen because he is rather ignorant of political history and the policies that it has entrenched. Mark Beeson, Superconductivity - Wikipedia

To be, to feel: esse = sentire, opinari

To be is more than just feeling, but feeling is the consciously observable aspect of existence which has deep roots in God.

Murphy: the art of the deal, ie diplomacy, can easily overpower military violence with peaceful trade The basis of peace is the wise use of resources, and the first and wisest move, sanctioned by the thermodynamic criteria of stability [is maximizing ratio of entropy to energy]. Chris Murphy: Marshall Plans, Not Martial Plans

'Today the Defence Department has more military band members than the State Department has diplomats.'

Resources are the repository of the fundamental software of peaceful human life.

[page 284a]

An historial anachronism is the preoccupation of the ruling classes with military glory to the detriment of business.

Teetering on the edge of reality, between consistency and inconsistency.

Wednesday 4 January 2017

My plan is to follow the same path as Aristotle, from the sensible world to God. He used the doctrine of potency and act. I am following Lonergan's psychological interpretation of Aquinas, who follows Aristotle, using the the translation insight = transformation to local axes, ie explaining the new phenomenon in terms of known transformations, ie looking for the software algorithm that executes the transformation [using known subroutines]. Eg explain the construction of a house in the environment of a city, nation and planet, using the transfinite network.

Locally we can understand a hydrogen atom as a countable set of routines which perform the various electronic transformations that give hydrogen the properties that we observe.

What I am waiting for is the desire to finish the book about all this. At the moment I appear to be rerunning the story so far and tweaking it in the direction of consistency and completeness.

Klein, Human Career. Klein

Thermodynamics, pressure and temperature / momentum and energy.

Thursday 5 January

Friday 6 January 2017

[page 285a]

st05_network_model

The principal development since the peace lectures is the connection of the transfinite number to the network layers, giving a new scale of entropy information and meaning to carry us from the 'material' to the 'spiritual' wols. The defining characteristic of this transition if the (transfinite) ratio o entropy to energy. : A Theory of Peace: Lecture 1: Mathematical theology

Physics imagines that entropy comes from nowhere. This may be a consequence of creation theory, which sees no problem in God creating vast numbers of independent particles from nothing. These particles are sustained, not by any relationship to one another, but by their direct relationship to God, conceived as outside the world, creating and controlling it according to some divine plan. If we are inside God, however, it becomes axiomatic that this divine plan is evident in the Universe from its simplest state on up. This seems to imply that entropy and meaning, ie a dynamically consistent structure, spring into existence in union, a la Misner, Thorne and Wheeler. The Universe creates itself by procession from itself, and this procession is the source of both entropy and meaning. It is the 'meaningfulness' of structures that keeps them in existence, ie their ability to reproduce. Good things reproduce,

[page 286]

bad things die out. The meaning in the universe comes from God and is expressed in the events of the Universe. It is up to us to work out the patterns in the events we see and use this to guide our lives. Misner, Thorne & Wheeler: Gravitation, page 71, Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 1: Is there procession in God?

Joseph: The Crest of the Peacock
'Like the crest of the peacock, like the gem
on the head of a snake, so is mathematics
at the head of all knowledge.

Vedanga Jyotisa (C. 500 BC) George Gheverghese Joseph

Saturday 7 January 2017

I do not compete. I just do things. Would I do things better if I was competitive? Depends on the competition, speed, creativity, quality. Not interested in speed, and as for quality read and write all the time and so might expect my writing to be guided (or misguided) by my [reading].

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

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Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, and Ivor A Richards (editor), The Portable Coleridge, Penguin USA 1977 Contains The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christable, Fears in Solitude, Kubla Khan and most of the shorter poems; major sections of the Biographia Litteraria; selections from STC's letters, literary criticism, notebooks, political essays, and philosophical writings.
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Joseph, George Gheverghese, The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics, Princeton University Press 2010 'From the Ishango Bone of central Africa and the Inca quipu of South America to the dawn of modern mathematics, The Crest of the Peacock makes it clear that human beings everywhere have been capable of advanced and innovative mathematical thinking. George Gheverghese Joseph takes us on a breathtaking multicultural tour of the roots and shoots of non-European mathematics. He shows us the deep influence that the Egyptians and Babylonians had on the Greeks, the Arabs' major creative contributions, and the astounding range of successes of the great civilizations of India and China.'
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Klein, Richard G, The Human Career : Human Biological and Cultural Origins , University of Chicago Press 1999 Review: 'The Human Career describes one of the most spectacular changes to have occurred in our understanding of human evolution. The once-popular fresco showing a single file of marching hominids becoming ever more vertical, tall and hairless now appears to be a fiction. . . . For most of the past four million years several species of hominids coexisted, sometimes in limited geographical areas. The eventual peopling of the planet with a single homogeneous species of hominid is shown to be exceptional on the geological timescale. . . . If you could have only one book that deals with human evolution, this is definitely the one to choose. ' Jean-Jacques Hublins, Nature. 403:364 27 January 2000.
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Lane, Harlan, The Wild Boy of Aveyron, Harvard University Press 1976 Amazon reader reveiw: 'Harlan Lane, in this book which is already a little bit old but remains a masterpiece, gives us a complete picture of education movements starting with Itard's attempt at educating the wild boy of Aveyron and going through to Montessori's school of pedagogy.' Jacques COULARDEAU
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Misner, Charles W, and Kip S Thorne, John Archibald Wheeler, Gravitation, Freeman 1973 Jacket: 'Einstein's description of gravitation as curvature of spacetime led directly to that greatest of all predictions of his theory, that the universe itself is dynamic. Physics still has far to go to come to terms with this amazing fact and what it means for man and his relation to the universe. John Archibald Wheeler. . . . this is a book on Einstein's theory of gravity. . . . '
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Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Phenomenon of Man, Collins 1965 Sir Julian Huxley, Introduction: 'We, mankind, contain the possibilities of the earth's immense future, and can realise more and more of them on condition that we increase our knowledge and our love. That, it seems to me, is the distillation of the Phenomenon of Man.'
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Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, The Phenomenon of Man, Harper Perennial 1975 'Marks the most significant achievement in synthetic thinking since that of Aquinas.' -- Bernard Towers, Blackfriars
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Links

Agence France-Presse in Berlin, German Police quansh Breitbart stpry ofmob setting fire to Dortmund Church, 'German media and politicians have warned against an election-year spike in fake news after the rightwing website Breitbart claimed a mob chanting “Allahu Akbar” had set fire to a church in the city of Dortmund on New Year’s Eve. After the report by the US site was widely shared on social media, the city’s police clarified that no “extraordinary or spectacular” incidents had marred the festivities.' back

Alan Liu, London Times, Sept. 10, 1792, 'British Newspaper Coverage of the French Revolution: The September Massacres' transcribed by Alan Liu, Univeristy of California, Santa Barbara back

Amber Jamieson, Rebecca Ferguson says she will play Trump inauguration if she can sing Strange Fruit, 'First recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939 and covered by Nina Simone in 1965, Strange Fruit is one of the nation’s most famous songs about racism. The lyrics by Abel Meeropol graphically describe the lynchings of African-Americans: Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees' back

Aquinas 160, Summa: I 27 1 Is there procession in God?, 'Our Lord says, "From God I proceeded" (Jn. 8:42).' back

Aquinas, Summa I, 25, 3, Is God omnipotent?, '. . . God is called omnipotent because He can do all things that are possible absolutely; which is the second way of saying a thing is possible. For a thing is said to be possible or impossible absolutely, according to the relation in which the very terms stand to one another, possible if the predicate is not incompatible with the subject, as that Socrates sits; and absolutely impossible when the predicate is altogether incompatible with the subject, as, for instance, that a man is a donkey.' back

Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 1, Is there procession in God?, 'As God is above all things, we should understand what is said of God, not according to the mode of the lowest creatures, namely bodies, but from the similitude of the highest creatures, the intellectual substances; while even the similitudes derived from these fall short in the representation of divine objects. Procession, therefore, is not to be understood from what it is in bodies, either according to local movement or by way of a cause proceeding forth to its exterior effect, as, for instance, like heat from the agent to the thing made hot. Rather it is to be understood by way of an intelligible emanation, for example, of the intelligible word which proceeds from the speaker, yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith understands procession as existing in God.' back

Chemi Shalev, Analysis ?? Trump's Appeacement of Putin Rattles His Presidency Before It Even Starts, 'One thing is for sure, if Obama or any other Democratic president would react towards Putin in such blatant efforts to appease the Russian leader, after Moscow stands accused of grossly violating U.S. sovereignty, shades of Munich and echoes of Neville Chamberlain would have been dominating the airwaves long ago. And Republican lawmakers would have been standing in line to start impeachment procedures against the incoming commander in chief.' back

Chris Murphy, Marshall Plans, Not Martial Plans, "Even after Iraq, American foreign policy and military elites still cling to the notion that military intervention can bring political stability, somehow, to the Middle East. This is a fallacy. . . .But what the United States is doing — using its military to try to bring about political change — isn’t working. Restraint can feel counterintuitive, even cruel, but the alternative is doomed to failure at a far more cruel cost. The most humane, and effective, policy is to spend money up front to prevent catastrophe. back

Christopher Lamb, Exclusive: Cardinal Burke and Grand Master Festing Defied Wishes of Pope by Sacking Grand Chancellor, 'Cardinal Raymond Burke and the Knights of Malta’s leader defied the wishes of Pope Francis and the Holy See when they sacked a senior figure in a row about the distribution of condoms. Letters seen by The Tablet reveal that Francis specifically requested no one be dismissed in a dispute that saw Albrecht von Boeselager thrown out as Grand Chancellor and then suspended from the Order. The respected German Knight was sacked on 6 December by the Knights’ Grand Master, Matthew Festing, in the presence of the Order’s patron and prominent conservative critic of Francis, Cardinal Burke. Both of them had claimed that the dismissal was in “accordance with the wishes of the Holy See”.' back

David N Green, This Day in Jewish History // 1970; Physicist Who Would Overcome Own teacher, Nazis, to Win Nobel Dies, 'Born won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954, but many of his peers felt that he should have at least shared the prize 22 years earlier, when it went to his student Werner Heisenberg, for the discovery of quantum mechanics. Any disappointment Born might have felt, however, did not prevent from carrying on with his brilliant career, even after the Nazis forced him to leave Germany.' back

Gideon Levi, How Israeli dettlements won best ever deal from Netanyahu, 'Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last time, the strongest political pressure group in Israel, the one that has terrorised Israeli governments for ages now, blackmailing successive administrations and terrifying even the military’s echelons, has once again proved how potent it remains. Far from waning, its strength grows continually in confrontations with the most nationalist and religious right-wing government in the country’s history, opposed by the feeblest leftist bloc ever, while Israeli public opinion remains totally indifferent.. back

Grateful Dead, Knockin on Heavens Door" 25 February 1990, Oakland, CA, back

Johan Hari, Is Gideon Levi the most hated man in Israel or just the most heroic?, ' “My biggest struggle,” he says, “is to rehumanize the Palestinians. There’s a whole machinery of brainwashing in Israel which really accompanies each of us from early childhood, and I’m a product of this machinery as much as anyone else. [We are taught] a few narratives that it’s very hard to break. That we Israelis are the ultimate and only victims. That the Palestinians are born to kill, and their hatred is irrational. That the Palestinians are not human beings like us… So you get a society without any moral doubts, without any questions marks, with hardly public debate. To raise your voice against all this is very hard.” ' back

John H Lienhard, No 410: Coleridge and Newton, Today, Romantic poets set the stage for Victorian science. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. Here's an odd letter by the poet Coleridge. He's 29 and writing to his friend Tom Poole. " ... deep Thinking," he says, is attainable only by a man of deep Feeling ... all Truth is a Species of Revelation. back

John Paul II, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, 22 May 1994, '4. Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless considered still open to debate, or the Church's judgment that women are not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely disciplinary force. Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.' back

Joseph Ratzinger, Tarcisio Bertone, Declaration "Dominus Iesus" on the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, '14. It must therefore be firmly believed as a truth of Catholic faith that the universal salvific will of the One and Triune God is offered and accomplished once for all in the mystery of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of the Son of God. . . . Above all else, it must be firmly believed that “the Church, a pilgrim now on earth, is necessary for salvation: the one Christ is the mediator and the way of salvation; he is present to us in his body which is the Church. He himself explicitly asserted the necessity of faith and baptism (cf. Mk 16:16; Jn 3:5), and thereby affirmed at the same time the necessity of the Church which men enter through baptism as through a door”.' back

Justin Gillis, Weak Federal Powers Could Limit Trump's Climate-Policy Rollback, 't. . . he middle of December, after investors had had a month to absorb the implications of Mr. Trump’s victory. The federal government opened bidding on a tract of the ocean floor off New York State as a potential site for a huge wind farm. Up, up and away soared the offers — interest from the bidders was so fevered that the auction went through 33 rounds and spilled over to a second day. In the end, the winning bidder offered the federal Treasury $42 million, more than twice what the government got in August for oil leases — oil leases — in the Gulf of Mexico. Who won the bid? None other than Statoil, the Norwegian oil company, which is in the midst of a major campaign to turn itself into a big player in renewable energy.' back

Marina Hyde, Distinguished envoy or sneering shock jock? Its no-brainer for Farage, 'For all his faults, Farage has always been a quick study. He has learned the short-term lesson of an age hopelessly hooked on the short term: those who want to get on in Trump’s world should aspire to jobs that run on the same fuel the president-elect does – conflict and the emotional incontinence that is the best route to repeatedly sparking it. Consequently, Nigel Farage will be taking your calls.' back

Mark Beeson, Two cheers for Barack Obama, 'The massive spending – and deficits – required by Bush’s ruinously expensive war in Iraq contributed to America’s economic problems. But the efforts of the Bush administration to wind back a painstakingly constructed, largely effective, regulatory framework that exercised some degree of control over the banking system and its self-destructive pathologies was another entirely avoidable incidence of self-harm on an epic scale.' back

Michael Forsythe, China Aims to Spend at Least $360 Billion on Renewable Energy, back

Owen Jones, Americans can spot election meddling because they've been doing it for years, 'For the US is a world leader in the field of intervening in the internal affairs of other countries. The alleged interference is far more extensive than hacking into emails belonging to unfavoured political parties. According to research by political scientist Dov Levin, the US and the USSR/Russia together intervened no less than 117 times in foreign elections between 1946 and 2000, or “one out of every nine competitive, national-level executive elections” ' back

Roger Cohen, Australia's Death by Numbers, 'Since July 2013, Australia has herded more than 2,000 desperate people into these island prisons. There has been no “process” in centers housed in poor countries paid by Australia to do its dirty work. Human beings have been left to fester, crack up and die, as I observed on Manus during a five-day visit last month. Draconian nondisclosure contracts have gagged staff, although the whole system is beginning to crumble under the weight of its iniquity.' back

Salvation History - Wikipedia, Salvation History - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Salvation History (German Heilsgeschichte) seeks to understand the personal redemptive activity of God within human history to effect his eternal saving intentions.
In the context of Christian theology, this approach understands events such as "the fall" at the beginning of history (Book of Genesis), the covenants established between God and Noah, Abraham, and Moses, the establishment of David's dynasty in the holy city of Jerusalem etc. as seminal moments in the history of humankind and its relationship to God; namely, as necessary events preparing for the salvation of all by Christ's crucifixion and resurrection.' back

Samuel Osborne, British Government was warnd about Tienanmin Square 'bloodshed' two weeks before Beijing massacre, '"The Chinese government has decided that there is no way to avoid bloodshed," Sir Alan Ewen Donald wrote on 20 May, 1989. Communist leader Deng Xiaoping declared martial law on the same day and mobilised up to 300,000 troops to Beijing. Sir Donald also included information from his lunch with American sinologist Stuart Schram, who said his Chinese contacts had reported Mr Xiaoping saying: "Two hundred dead would bring 20 years of peace to China." ' back

Sanny Hakim, Scientists Loved and Loathed by an Agrochemical Giant, 'Looking back at his interactions with the company, Dr. Cresswell said in a recent interview that “Syngenta clearly has got an agenda.” In an email, he summed up that agenda: “It’s the varroa, stupid.” For Dr. Cresswell, a Birkenstock-wearing 54-year-old, the foray into corporate-backed research threw him into personal crisis. Some of his colleagues ostracized him. He found his principles tested. Even his wife and children had their doubts.' back

Steven Rattner, 2016 in Charts. (Can Trump Deliver in 2017?), 'Lost in the Trump tsunami was the strong economy that President Obama will be leaving him. Unemployment is down to 4.6 percent, the lowest since August 2007 and a stunning decline from the 7.8 percent when Mr. Obama took office. The economy has expanded by nearly 15 percent (adjusted for inflation), the stock market has nearly tripled, auto sales have notched records, the federal deficit has been cut by more than half and house prices nationally are above past peaks. Even real median incomes ended marginally higher.' back

Superconductivity - Wikipedia, Superconductivity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Superconductivity is a phenomenon of exactly zero electrical resistance and expulsion of magnetic flux fields occurring in certain materials when cooled below a characteristic critical temperature. It was discovered by Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes on April 8, 1911 in Leiden. Like ferromagnetism and atomic spectral lines, superconductivity is a quantum mechanical phenomenon.' back