MODELING GOD
By Romana Annette
07/14/2007
Modeling God, as a practical attempt to define a notion of God, is pretty much a forbidden activity in our culture, frowned upon by the religious and non-religious alike. Such an endeavor is usually left to philosophers such as myself, someone who is considerably off-center.
Why would anyone want to do this? It is because of the following events and findings of recent history:
· Advances in science have been increasingly at odds with the teachings of tradition religion.
· Evolution has removed human beings from their assumed privileged position in the scheme of things.
· Modern physics has become very philosophical, destroying forever any ideas about a straight-forward, Cartesian reality.
· While neither religion nor science has proven or disproved the existence of God, modern evil, especially in the form of the Holocaust, has led many thinkers to ponder the true nature of God and reality.
Based on what I have learned up to this point in my life, and based on my personal speculation, I will define a particular model of God.
At this point, I need to speak about premise. A premise is all about why? Human beings tend to answer the question using teleological arguments: the underlying reason for creation was destined to create us as an end product, if only a temporary product of our ongoing evolutionary journey. Rationalists, such as myself, tend to use eutaxiological arguments: there is a functional plan in natural processes, that created us in a non-predicted manner, based non-determined random options, followed by periods of determined consequences.
I support the Buddhist belief that Mind and Matter always go together, but Mind will always seek to have a body with which to experience reality. However, this is not just any body, but the best body possible. This is where the intelligence comes into the biological evolutionary processes: random processes are no longer wholly random when organisms become smart enough to influence their own evolution.
I will speak a lot about chaos. In this context, chaos is the total lack of any form, and the total lack of any processes. Chaos can contain information, but information is subjective, so chaos turns out to be far more subjective, than objective. Chaos is considered to be the precursor to any kind of reality.
Real processes are the opposite of chaos. Once any root process has been created, it and its descendents are known as entities. Entities can be part of objective reality, or subjective reality.
If one could imagine a great state diagram defining all reality, it is people like me who note that the standard diagram not complete, nor can it ever be complete. This is because diverse reality-states often offend people’s sensitivities, seem (culturally) improbable, or have not even been imagined.
As a transwoman who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, who therefore practices a form of extreme rationality, I certainly qualify as someone whose personal view of reality is much different than average. Conforming to any kind of orthodoxy is not my style. Therefore, while I will describe God as a subjective process, and therefore an entity, I will resist defining God as a being, a person, or having any particular image.
As a student of Process Philosophy and Theology, I subscribe to the set of five standard principles:
· God is not a cosmic moralist.
· God is not unchanging, and not passionlessly absolute.
· God is not a controlling power.
· God is not a Sanctioner of the status quo.
· God is not male.
Process Philosophy and Theology also add dualisms to the list of improper concepts. Dualisms incorrectly attempt to isolate us from the rest of reality, by setting up artificial barriers. Mind versus Matter is the ultimate dualism, which can be compared to Man versus God. Conceptual distinctions are merely a form of convenience for (our) reality to function; they should not be viewed as absolutes.
Attempting to create a model of God, while at the same time attempting isolate God from the model, would be a project doomed to generate endless irrational paradoxes. Process Philosophy and Theology always speak of a fully-related God.
Now, I want to go back to the very beginning; at least, to a typical beginning, since the concept of time is meaningless before there was any time. At this point, I have to use Buddhist terminology. Before there was any conditioned reality, there was only unconditioned reality, a stateless state, which Buddhists often refer to as Nirvana. Nirvana is a peaceful place to visit, but nothing ever happens there; certainly, no one lives there.
[Note: Buddhism still denies that there is any dualism, by stating that Samsara (phenomenal or conceptual existence) and Nirvana are an essential unity.]
While Nirvana is unconditioned, it does contain the possibility for creation. Random ideas can lead to the creation of a bubble of conditioned reality. More correctly, Buddhism says that desire, the desire for the experiences that a real body can provide, is the reason for this creation. This logic claims that totally abstract experience is never satisfactory.
[Note: this concept of creation has corollaries in modern physics (2,3,) specifically in relation to quantum fluctuations and vacuum energy.]
This type of creation is not a violation of the laws of physics, since the bubble is a temporary structure that eventually will contain the laws of physics.
The bubble initially contains totally pure chaos; mind and matter are one. Here is where the theists are probably right. With no physical laws whatsoever, the only way that the first processes could have started was by the will of God.
[Note: this brings up an interesting speculation, that God might have influence over any instance of chaos, since chaos implies the absence or pre-formation of physical laws.]
However, once physical processes were under way, those processes, and all their child processes, became beyond God’s control.
[Note: the objective processes, the transcendent aspect of God, follow unchanging rules, while the subjective processes, the immanent aspect of God, follow constantly changing rules. This is not a dualism, but a polarity, the necessary tensions of which keep all of reality running.]
Modern physics (2,3) considers chaos to always precede the first state, whether it be for a multiverse or for a reflexively contained universe. Form can appear out of the chaos; the possibilities are essentially infinite, with 10500 options, to quote a figure from modern physics. Thus was our multiverse, an incomprehensibly huge array of structures, developed out of the chaos. The major structures are called branes (2,3,) which are n-dimensional planar-structures, and there are possibly endless number of sub-bubbles (3.)
Somewhere in all this lies subjective reality, possibly in the common structure called the bulk (2,) that binds all the pieces together.
[Note: it is not clear whether our universe is a brane or a sub-bubble within a brane. The multiverse is huge to guarantee that some processes will produce (subjectively) meaningful structures; however, there is a definite lack of symmetry, since some structures end up being more meaningful than others. While time might not be present or the same everywhere in the multiverse, the equivalent of trillions of years could have passed prior to the creation of our universe.]
In this model, I equate subjective reality to God. However, initially this version of God did not know anything, because S/He was surrounded by chaos, and S/He did not have a body. Knowledge is based on experience, but there was initially nothing to know. If God were initially an omnipotent, totally omniscient being, there would only be an annoying paradox, not a developing multiverse with an overwhelmingly huge range of possibility.
Chaos eventually gave way to physical processes, and in turn, branes and sub-bubbles developed physical laws. Later, these structures collided and created composite structures with even more complex sets of physical laws. Objective events were occurring everywhere, so there was finally something to know.
In isolated enclaves, life is able to develop and explore subjective reality. Not only could objective events now be judged, but abstract questions could also be asked about reality itself.
Thus, in this model, God became the beneficiary of all these events, both objective and subjective. Knowledge is power, so God became the most knowing, and therefore the most powerful, force or entity, in the multiverse.
Fourteen billion years ago, our universe was created when two three-dimensional branes collided. About four and a half billion years ago, our solar system and our planet, the Earth, were formed. Five hundred fifty million years ago, after a long period of meteor bombardment, life finally developed beyond single cells and evolved into nearly countless complex variations.
Our ancestors began separating from the rest of the animals about three million years ago, but the first ancestors that we would call really human appeared about 50,000 years ago. However, humans have only left significant historical marks in the last 5,000 years.
While there has been much discussion concerning the Anthropic Principle, why the Universe is favorable to life as we know it, we currently have no knowledge of life anywhere else, let alone the scope of all possible forms of life in all environments.
Since I am autistic, I have a poor connection to any larger subjective reality. However, when I study non-autistic people, especially those who seem well-connected, I notice that they often think there is a God, which fact makes their lives feel important.
It is not just people! I have noticed that nearly all living things conduct their lives as if these lives were very important, regardless how brief these lives might be. The question can be asked: do we often feel that our lives are important because of a connection to a higher reality?
There has been much speculation about connecting to God by Process Philosophers and Theologians in a kind of two-way connecting process. The following quote sums it up a Process view of God-relatedness:
What has been said of the divine incarnation in the world, the derivation from God of the initial aim toward enjoyment, and God as the organ of novelty, shows that our prehension of God is an essential part of all experience. There are not actual entities that first are self-contained and then have accidental relations to God. God-relatedness is constitutive of every occasion of experience. This does not restrict the freedom of the occasion. On the contrary, apart from God there would be no freedom. If we could think at all of a world apart from God, it would be a world of repetition lapsing into lesser and lesser forms of order according to the principle of entropy. What happened in each occasion could only be the declining outgrowth of what had happened before. It is God who, by confronting the world with unrealized opportunities, opens up a space for freedom and self-creativity. (Page 29, reference 1)
Factors concerning this God-relatedness might be:
· Like the force of gravity, this relatedness may weak for us, but very strong in another dimension.
· If our connection to God creates a feeling of great importance in our lives, then this same God feels that our lives are important.
· It is safe to say that we are created in God’s image, but the converse is not true.
· There may be a timing problem. Our clock and God’s clock may be poorly synchronized?
· Do we connect to God as an entity, or do we just receive a certain baseline of historical information that might be useful for us?
· Is this how God gains objective power: by influencing beings such as ourselves, who can manipulate real objects?
How can such a connection be made?
· There are high volumes of energetic particles shooting back and forth through our bodies every second.
· Studies of black holes have indicated that much information can reconstructed even after objects are subjected to the force of overwhelming chaos.
This model supports the standard Process notion that God does not use coercive power, only persuasive power. It also indicates that God and reality are not separate, but are constantly developing together. The question why seems relative, even for God. The purpose for reality seems to be the enjoyment of experience, especially new kinds of experience. Perhaps in the really distant future, the multiverse will evolve so that God can have a body too; creation would then be complete.
However, these creative processes can likely go on forever, or until the dissolution of the original bubble. This model also supplies a source of immortality, at least objective immortality, if the essence of our lives becomes part of God’s own experience.
Objective reality operates mindlessly; it can generate naturally favorable conditions for us, called natural good, but it can also generate naturally unfavorable conditions, called natural evil.
[Note: natural evil is just frustrating events like hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, accidental injury and death, and so forth. These are often referred to as Acts of God, even if God is blameless.]
While objective reality is highly predictable, and therefore logical, its structure is nearly incomprehensible. It appears to have been designed by endless committees, or by the endless collision of separate branes.
On the other hand, the structure of subjective reality seems more straightforward, as energetic harmonics on top of objective reality, but the resultant processes often end up being totally irrational. There is a lot of subjective good, which can improve the quality of our lives, but there is also a lot of subjective evil, which can disrupt or even end our lives. Worse yet, there is often a lot of debate over the difference between subjective good and subjective evil!
The notion of God, as defined here, will not please a lot of people, since this God cannot objectively interfere with any running processes that qualify as entities. This God starts everything, but finishes nothing. Prayers can only be answered in the form of advice, not miracles. Despite how overwhelmingly powerful this God might be, people still expect Him/Her to help them out of life and death situations, but then, otherwise, to leave them alone.
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Lisa Randall
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Landscape
String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design
Leonard Susskind
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