Did God Make the World? by Jeffrey H Nicholls

Jeffrey Nicholls

Essay Abstract

Did God make the world? My answer is that God did make the world. But I identify God and the world. The world made itself. This hypothesis, I suggest, has deep epistemological consequences for both physics and theology. The world can create itself without inconsistency because as well as deterministic processes modelled by computing machines, it contains the indeterminate processes predicted by the theorems of Turing and Goedel.

Author Bio

Born 1945, Roman Catholic education, entered a Roman Catholic monastery after school and stayed five years until asked to leave over doctrinal differences. Since then have worked as a builder and handyman while thinking over the theological questions of my youth.

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[deleted]

Jeffrey,

I liked your essay and I think that you should get it published somewhere that deals with the intersection of theology and science. However, I think that it does not properly address the topic, "Which of our basic physical assumptions are wrong?" My interpretation of this question is that a discussion that incorporates God and religion is outside the definition of a "basic physical assumption".

[deleted]

Hi John,

What I am thinking is that the tacit assumption (where it is made) that the Universe is a system constrained by some initial conditions is wrong. Instead I would like to explore a physical world (and its emergent psychology) constrained only by internal consistency.

Jeffrey

[deleted]

Dear Jeffrey Nicholls,

It seems to me that you bought into theoretical physics instead of considering the universe as an un-mechanical effect. By un-mechanical, I mean there is intelligent life to consider. These two grand effects of the abilities of the universe are not part of theoretical physics. I am not sure from reading your essay about your understanding of Darwinism, but, if you think that Darwin was projecting his description of evolution of species as an explanation for the existence of intelligent life, then I question your conclusion.

I did not see where you explained how the 'world' could create itself. I do understand that you feel that you accomplished this. I don't see it in your essy either for the rudimentary mechanical interpretation of the universe as put forward to us by theoretical physicists or by the modern version of Darwinism, where anything is possible so long as it is hidden in the 'fog of complexity' of changes so tiny that we can't reasonably directly follow them, so, the best practice is to assume that the answer has to be there although presently hidden. Modern Darwinists allow for quicker ever more myterious abruptness or evolution, but, can not explain that which Darwin declined to explain. Is that anywhere close to what you think?

Your paragraph: "Let us depart from the notion of the creation of the world by an outside agency and imagine a world that creates itself, constrained only by internal consistency. We conceive of this world as a network, that is a set of memories and a set computers able to change the states of these memories. Let the address space of the memories be Cantors transfinite space, and the computers have the power of abstract Turing machines."

A universe that creates itself out of 'givens'? If you do not start with a real nothing, then you have imagined something for your start. You must explain the existence of that something. I will lay my cards on the table: You nor anyone else needs to believe in anything special, but, each of these free-lunch explanations must give way to the realization that the answer they are seeking to disclose does not exist. You do not know what cause is. Darwin knew he did not know it. Theoretical physics invents it artificially in order to appear to complete the terms of their theoretical equations so that they may advance beyond them without explaining them, but from beginning to end, physicists do not know what cause is. That is what I think.

Thank you for enterring your essay in this contest. FQXi.org is a great place for you to express yourself. Good luck.

James

[deleted]

Dr Nicholls

My essay point out where can find the reconciliation science and religion.

http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1413

[deleted]

Hi Yuri,

Could you please say something here about what is the 'reconciliation science and religion" I would lie to include it in a discussion with Jeffrey H Nicholls should he be interested. Thank you.

James

[deleted]

Dear James Putnam,

As I see it we cannot possibly answer the question "why does the physical world exist" but we may be able to make progress with the question "why does the dynamic world have the particular set of invariant features that we observe?" Were they "put in" at the beginning, or are they the consequence of an evolutionary process that tries everything and keeps those structures that are consistent with its current state.

From a lifetime of trial and error I conclude that my "intelligence" is simply an instance of the overall intelligence of a creative and evolving world. Faced with a problem, I imagine possible solutions and criticize them until I find one that seems to fit the current constraints. I then set out to implement it, often finding (either immediately, or after some time) that my imagination omitted some relevant details and my plan does not work, sending me "back to the drawing board".

[deleted]

Jeffrey Nicholls,

"...From a lifetime of trial and error I conclude that my "intelligence" is simply an instance of the overall intelligence of a creative and evolving world."

So your position is that since it happened without us needing to understand how or why, we can accept that the how and why never were nor are now needed. Afterall, anyone can see that the world is creative and evolving. We watch for effects and say well there is a cause but even though we do not know what that cause is we know for ideological reasons what it cannot be. How about restricting ourselves to learning from empirical evidence. The empirical evidence is that we receive all information as a storm of mixed photons from a myriad of sources arriving at the speed of light and acting extremely quickly to slightly move particles of matter. How do you suppose that we find meaning in that ever changing never repeating wild mixture?

James

[deleted]

Dear Jeffrey, we have already discussed in 2009. May be you remember?

I wrote a paper about a similar topic. The title of my paper: "Taming of the One" - an outline about a modern metaphysics.

I think studies concerning the relationship between religion and science are highly important, because religion is still the only branch of human knowledge that is unenligthened and often irrational.

But in most studies that I have seen up to today the relationship between God and the Universe remains in the dark. No one is seriously investigating the physical meaning of transcendence.

I think if we want introduce GOD as the most fundamental level of the Universe, we have to meet the challenge to deal with such an "outside agency" that conditions everything without being conditioned itself. In a world that creates itself, constrained only by internal consistency, GOD, in particular transcendence, is simply an empty word - without any tangible physical meaning.

That is at least my opinion.

Kind regards

Helmut

[deleted]

Hi Helmut,

My underlying point is that God is not an outside agency but identical with the system we inhabit. The ancients conceived God a pure dynamism -- Aristotle and Aquinas would say "pure act" with no extended spatial static structure like the world we experience. My new point, since our previous discussion, is that dynamic systems that map onto themselves have fixed points which are part of rather then outside the dynamics. We might say that physics studies fixed points that are (as far as we can tell) relatively permanent, like, perhaps the general theory of relativity. Other fixed points, like ourselves, large stars and radioactive nuclei have a limited lifetime which we can explain in terms of more durable fixed points.

Jeffrey

Wilhelmus de Wilde

Dear Jeffrey,

I see that we were raised in the same smell of incense, only I did not enter a monastry. I can appreciate your text, but have some remarks :

First of all it is my opinion that the IDEA of GOD or GODS is a result of the human consciousness, and not an external "eternal existing creature".

If you could take a little time to read ""THE CONSCIOUSNESS CONNECTION", you can see my perception of what you are calling GOD.

There are in the thread also questions about the Theological results of this way of thinking. Indeed I also introduce the so called "TOTAL SIMULTANEITY", which is a non causal chaos of all possible probabilities, including the non causal consciousness part, which is in fact part of ourselves (the causal part of consciousness , the "I"). "God created humanity in conformity with his own image". Only I do not interprete it as a "creation" but as the collapse of a wave probability and the resulting entanglement in our causal universe, which cannot be other as fine tuned to our existance in this way.

The second problem with the "GOD" perception is that the religions that are created by us around those ideas have "DOGMA'S" that cannot be discussed, a little bit the same as in science where there are "LAWS" which certain scientists also say that the cannot be discussed, that is why we are now participating in this specific contest: "QUESTIONING THE FOUNDATIONS" .

Hope to hear from you here or on my thread, good luck with the contest, but I think that for you just as for me participating is already a great chance to be heard.

Wilhelmus

[deleted]

I must apologize for the frequency of my typos.

Two ruin the sense: page 1, paragraph 3, line 2: "because" should read "became";

page 5 in "7. A network world" para 2, line 3, "out" should read "put"

[deleted]

Dear Mr. Nicholls,

I have read your terrific essay and in my opinion it does belong in this contest. The reason it belongs here is that physics is only a religion with numbers. Your insertion of comparative factual information about fractious scientific theories and unifying Godly belief clearly shows that all scientists have historically ignored the most important finding of religion, yet they have sheepishly repeated the second most whopping flaw about God, and by adding numbers to it they have rendered reality unintelligible.

In my essay Sequence Consequence, I have taken the trouble to explain what reality is. One real Universe can only be perpetually occurring in one real here for one real now ensconced in one real dimension once. All real stuff has to always remain in one real dimension. There is only one real 1.

Unfortunately, God is an abstraction and as such God is unreal. The idea propounded by Aquinas of there being three abstract natures involved in one abstract God was used by Hegel to describe abstract human thought processes, and by Freud to describe abstract human consciousness, and by Albert Einstein to erroneously explain how the Universe operated.

According to Einstein, An abstract ever expanding Universe can appear in a unified three abstract space/time dimensions. That is unreal. How is the abstract stuff distributed? Does the heavy abstract stuff helpingly congregate in abstract space/time dimension A, abstract medium mass stuff gather in abstract space/time dimension B, and the abstract light matter stuff only convene in abstract space/time dimension C. It is like the old graphic puzzle where you have to draw three separate lines representing water, gas, and electricity piping all going into three separate houses without any of the lines crossing.

Mathematics exults in sameness. All abstract numbers are identical and all abstract numbers equate. All abstract odd numbers are odd. All abstract even numbers are even. 1 is the oddest number of all because it is deemed the most important yet accorded the least whole value. There is only one real 1 of anything. There is only one real 1 of everything. You can do anything with abstract numbers. The only thing you can do here and now is live.

While I know there is no God, I cannot discount the remorseless suspicion that there could indeed be a Goddess at any moment.

Sergey Fedosin

If you do not understand why your rating dropped down. As I found ratings in the contest are calculated in the next way. Suppose your rating is [math]R_1 [/math] and [math]N_1 [/math] was the quantity of people which gave you ratings. Then you have [math]S_1=R_1 N_1 [/math] of points. After it anyone give you [math]dS [/math] of points so you have [math]S_2=S_1+ dS [/math] of points and [math]N_2=N_1+1 [/math] is the common quantity of the people which gave you ratings. At the same time you will have [math]S_2=R_2 N_2 [/math] of points. From here, if you want to be R2 > R1 there must be: [math]S_2/ N_2>S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] (S_1+ dS) / (N_1+1) >S_1/ N_1 [/math] or [math] dS >S_1/ N_1 =R_1[/math] In other words if you want to increase rating of anyone you must give him more points [math]dS [/math] then the participant`s rating [math]R_1 [/math] was at the moment you rated him. From here it is seen that in the contest are special rules for ratings. And from here there are misunderstanding of some participants what is happened with their ratings. Moreover since community ratings are hided some participants do not sure how increase ratings of others and gives them maximum 10 points. But in the case the scale from 1 to 10 of points do not work, and some essays are overestimated and some essays are drop down. In my opinion it is a bad problem with this Contest rating process. I hope the FQXI community will change the rating process.

Sergey Fedosin