Dear Edwin,
I made two more responses to your thoughts in my own blog, and continue here on the connection between science and religion, which is touched on both above and below in your blog. It seems that we are ultimately driven to religious issues when we try to sort out the meaning of life.
[Note that my concerns that one of my responses to you had "disappeared" prove to be false, (or, at least, it reappeared) so ignore my comment in the second article about the previous one disappearing .]
As I have already said, I am hindered from fully understanding your essay because I do not understand the meaning of your equations, etc. But hopefully I can sense the direction you are working and raise meaningful issues and comments.
There are three major religious or metaphysical options, I think: the biblical, the secular, and the pagan views. Our natural tendency seems to be toward the latter two (which have a similar general pattern), not the biblical. And indeed, the Hebrew community, and then the Christian, have tended to slip continually back into a secular or pagan mode of believing. Yahweh is quite pointedly described as a "jealous" God, chastising us for wandering away from faithfulness to Himself. That would make sense only if the biblical view were true and the others false.
I remember being surprised when Carl Sagan indicated that he leaned toward Hinduism for his cosmic inspiration. Others in this contest have shown similar proclivities. My assumption up to the 1960's that paganism was dead proved to be quite in error. Secularism, I think, has proven to be the least stable of the three - being too impersonal and thus depersonalizing. The original Buddhism was atheist, in a way "secular", no personal gods, but people yearned for personality, and so ended up inventing thousands of them.
The question I want to address is whether one of the three cosmological options (pagan, secular, or biblical) has a better chance at making sense of life, with a reasonable cosmos in which science would make sense and flourish. It seems to me that the biblical worldview has the best chance at winning that cup.
Five reasons: (1) Pagan philosophy never produced a flourishing science of the empirical world because it inherently favored the intellectual world of abstract reason - Platonism, neo-Platonism, etc.
(2) Although the Greeks produced the science of epistemology (thinking about how to think), it tended to shun using that to understand the world of time and space, which they wanted to transcend - because it seemed to them too chaotic and unfriendly to invest time and energy to understand.
(3) Also Eastern religions, with their drive to transcend the violent and sad world of time and space never produced anything like empirical science.
(4) The empirical sciences took off only under the biblical worldview during the late Middle Ages.
(5) The cosmological argument for God provides a way to integrate the major issues of metaphysics, such as: possibility, existence, causality, epistemology, truth, personhood, community, the meaning of life, etc. I suspect that those things cannot be integrated outside the biblical worldview.
Your intent has been expressed as making no claims about original beginnings, though your comments tend to be Eastern-religion-friendly. I think that will happen whenever philosophy of science tries to find its own stability from within the circle of phenomenal existence. So, I do not think one can separate metaphysics (first beginnings) from physics - if metaphysics is the undergirding and explanation of physics, as I understand it to be. Your notion of gravity having awareness would itself raise metaphysical issues and have metaphysical implications, would it not?
So, my essay is a very foreshortened version of my explanation for that aspect of the biblical view of things, providing a metaphysical explanation for the rise of science, and thus whether its or bits are more fundamental. My answer is that neither are really fundamental, they both presuppose the biblical creator ex-nihilo, and that there is no way to reasonably explain either the cosmos or science (which requires the reasonableness of the cosmos) apart from the biblical cosmos.
One can restrict the field of inquiry to the secular view, as you do, for the sake of convenience, but the wider issues will assert themselves nevertheless.
I hope to get more into the discussion (before things close up) on whether things like gravity can be "aware". I am absolutely delighted at the spirit of the essays and authors generally, an attempt to find the truth of a serious matter before us, all with a good spirit and willingness to learn from each other.
BTW, I have mentioned a few times another website, "Common Sense Science", at www.commonsensescience.org. They believe themselves to be doing (with all the math included) a fundamental adjustment of relativity and quantum mechanics to fit a more traditional view of physics. I heartily recommend folks like yourself who understand the math taking a look at it. I would like to get responses as to whether they are doing a credible job or not. Their stuff would impact on the issue of this contest very directly, I would think. Philosophically, at least, I think they are doing well, addressing concerns I have had for a long time about the direction of physics (as indicated by the question of this contest).
Blessings, Earle
