Christian Democrats in the United States
Conceptual Issues - Science and ReligionEven if the daily mechanics of our clockwork reality exhibit regular behaviors that we call laws, for some reason it is not difficult for most people to imagine that the clockwork was set in motion, even if from outside time, by a creator that we do not claim to fathom, who may continue to exercise a mysterious and boundless will at times within that creation. As for the details, we don't think God or the devil is trying to trick us with dinosaur skeletons or carbon dating formulas. We choose not to debate the literality of the Bible or be drawn into false debates to "prove" the existence of God within limited conceptual systems. God laid forth a world before us, and though we should not allow ourselves to be mesmerized by it, we should learn to appreciate it at every level, but we must let love temper our curiosity.
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Sunday, February 28, 2010
6:12 PM
Similarly, if some fisherman in Maine married a girl from Vermont or a girl from Rhode Island, my life might never coincide with relevant facts from theirs... so as far as I know, both are the case, or neither, since I haven't been fishing in Maine. So the fisherman's choice might exist in simultaneous states in the universe, and this would "map up" quantum uncertainty through transformation into 3-D macro dimensions. I could spend time researching random peoples' lives in Maine, and I might nail down concrete details, but the amount of detail over the expanse of the universe is infinite, and my time limited, so I could never coalesce the universe into one macro state.
If either of these levels of uncertainty are true, it may yet not lead the question of predestination either way. Certain general tendencies may be true, and similar patterns would likely evolve in any case in culture and biology based on the conditions in the environment, which have definite macroscopic causes at a much larger factor of time and space: the eon and the orbit. So the dinosaur age was a given, but other than a few bones and general deductions, we could never know for certain which individuals grazed where or whether they felt scared when they were dying out. Today, our increase of carbon in the atmosphere seems unavoidable, even though most of us don't want to melt down the poles and kill the penguins and polar bears, it looks as though it is going to happen, as it once did a long time ago after an increase of carbon. As for which of us are responsible for how much in some final divine accounting of how many molecules we each farted out of our lifestyles, we can't know exactly for certain, and this uncertainty may have metaphysical consequences. Perhaps in my view of the universe, person A is one of the fat executives in suits who belched out so much more than you or I, but in your view of the universe, person B sat in that chair. If you and I bump into each other on the street and pass on, how would we ever know the difference? When person C goes prosecuting polluters, it doesn't matter to the thought experiment: you see one headline and I see another, same difference: most polar bears drown and others adapt further south; most penguins starve but others adapt to new food and terrain. As for whether some species of penguin evolves a gold crest versus a red crest in your world or mine, it makes no difference.
This leads to deeper questions, such as, does the universe correct itself after the fact if our memories disagree about the color of the penguin's crest, as consciousness merges parts of the quantum multi-verse together as our personal communication and relationship changes? Haven't you ever remembered some minor detail like that one way, but then it is suddenly different and someone you know closely says it has always been that way? Most people simply adjust their brains to the new detail and move on, assuming it to be a quirk or minor error in their memory and if infrequent, nothing to worry about.
To what degree can this lead to anthropic deductions about the future, to say that "the show must go on" in terms of catastrophic events, such as the possibility of nuclear war? It might be that many possible branches co-exist, but all the ones that end in nuclear war terminate: so because all of us are drawn together by the spirit, so to speak, the multi-verse as a whole goes on without that happening, and we are drawn along inevitably with the tide of history toward a better day when this is not a concern.
If any multiverse theory is true, merged or separate, to reconcile quantum uncertainty, then there may be a degree of control of personal consciousness as to which path of details the world takes: such as a man who was said to be able to pull the experience of thousands of people around him from a probability in which they had no food, directly into a probability in which those multitudes had plenty of fish and bread, as if, essentially, by magic.
Continental philosophy or postmodernism seeks to whisper in your ear at this point of intellectual freedom to say, God is dead, and if there is no certainty to reality, then those people out there in uncertain states must not be real people, and thus morality is a waste of time: this is false. The Devil tries to tell you that because you don't know for certain that you watched the same water fall, therefore the waterfall is not real. But the waterfall is just as real, even more real, and more beautiful, after you abandon your preconceptions and the assumed rules that your mind learns to apply to reality.
Morality is still necessary for humanity to figure out, even if the particular situations differ from life to life. We are still compelled by our nature to try to figure out morality outside of government and we must, and we must try to bring government in line with ideals, or we would still end up with concentration camps and gulags. God challenges you to see beyond what you can see, to understand beyond what you can hear. The people who are real are the people in your life. Principles are real when you apply them to the situations that present themselves to you, and you still can find truth where you seek it, whether those are causal events or deeper underlying principles. Specific facts still cohere as uncertainty settles for your point of view, and they have as much meaning as you choose to find in them. If life as a whole is uncertain, and what you do not know is uncertain, then the only certainty is the love of friends and what faith you have in God.
If one were to seek personal power by letting go of the certainty that we assume about the universe around us, the instinct to control would attempt to lock down common reality into one causal continuum or another to the extent we can perceive. Such choices would shift the multiverse of experience toward terminal endings, so they could never be sustained, and are not worth the effort. The man with the fish and bread also recommended that we abandon those instincts, that we put aside our viewpoint and allow the universe to be moved for us from within by a power beyond our understanding, because the benefit is more than we can imagine. Maybe he was onto something.
quantum uncertainty in macro dimensions
Maybe quantum parallels work out spatially distributed... if we look at a waterfall, the net result is some amount of water falls over in a given time, generally in the same places, but that's all each of us knows - you may have seen the water molecules fall a different way, but we would not know the difference. Even if we both recorded video and compared it, we could determine that both tapes were pictures of the same water to some degree of accuracy, but never with enough precision to know that the molecules were not re-arranged in different ways as they fell over the top. And while we were busy comparing tapes like crazy people, the rest of the universe proceeds without us.Similarly, if some fisherman in Maine married a girl from Vermont or a girl from Rhode Island, my life might never coincide with relevant facts from theirs... so as far as I know, both are the case, or neither, since I haven't been fishing in Maine. So the fisherman's choice might exist in simultaneous states in the universe, and this would "map up" quantum uncertainty through transformation into 3-D macro dimensions. I could spend time researching random peoples' lives in Maine, and I might nail down concrete details, but the amount of detail over the expanse of the universe is infinite, and my time limited, so I could never coalesce the universe into one macro state.
If either of these levels of uncertainty are true, it may yet not lead the question of predestination either way. Certain general tendencies may be true, and similar patterns would likely evolve in any case in culture and biology based on the conditions in the environment, which have definite macroscopic causes at a much larger factor of time and space: the eon and the orbit. So the dinosaur age was a given, but other than a few bones and general deductions, we could never know for certain which individuals grazed where or whether they felt scared when they were dying out. Today, our increase of carbon in the atmosphere seems unavoidable, even though most of us don't want to melt down the poles and kill the penguins and polar bears, it looks as though it is going to happen, as it once did a long time ago after an increase of carbon. As for which of us are responsible for how much in some final divine accounting of how many molecules we each farted out of our lifestyles, we can't know exactly for certain, and this uncertainty may have metaphysical consequences. Perhaps in my view of the universe, person A is one of the fat executives in suits who belched out so much more than you or I, but in your view of the universe, person B sat in that chair. If you and I bump into each other on the street and pass on, how would we ever know the difference? When person C goes prosecuting polluters, it doesn't matter to the thought experiment: you see one headline and I see another, same difference: most polar bears drown and others adapt further south; most penguins starve but others adapt to new food and terrain. As for whether some species of penguin evolves a gold crest versus a red crest in your world or mine, it makes no difference.
This leads to deeper questions, such as, does the universe correct itself after the fact if our memories disagree about the color of the penguin's crest, as consciousness merges parts of the quantum multi-verse together as our personal communication and relationship changes? Haven't you ever remembered some minor detail like that one way, but then it is suddenly different and someone you know closely says it has always been that way? Most people simply adjust their brains to the new detail and move on, assuming it to be a quirk or minor error in their memory and if infrequent, nothing to worry about.
To what degree can this lead to anthropic deductions about the future, to say that "the show must go on" in terms of catastrophic events, such as the possibility of nuclear war? It might be that many possible branches co-exist, but all the ones that end in nuclear war terminate: so because all of us are drawn together by the spirit, so to speak, the multi-verse as a whole goes on without that happening, and we are drawn along inevitably with the tide of history toward a better day when this is not a concern.
If any multiverse theory is true, merged or separate, to reconcile quantum uncertainty, then there may be a degree of control of personal consciousness as to which path of details the world takes: such as a man who was said to be able to pull the experience of thousands of people around him from a probability in which they had no food, directly into a probability in which those multitudes had plenty of fish and bread, as if, essentially, by magic.
Continental philosophy or postmodernism seeks to whisper in your ear at this point of intellectual freedom to say, God is dead, and if there is no certainty to reality, then those people out there in uncertain states must not be real people, and thus morality is a waste of time: this is false. The Devil tries to tell you that because you don't know for certain that you watched the same water fall, therefore the waterfall is not real. But the waterfall is just as real, even more real, and more beautiful, after you abandon your preconceptions and the assumed rules that your mind learns to apply to reality.
Morality is still necessary for humanity to figure out, even if the particular situations differ from life to life. We are still compelled by our nature to try to figure out morality outside of government and we must, and we must try to bring government in line with ideals, or we would still end up with concentration camps and gulags. God challenges you to see beyond what you can see, to understand beyond what you can hear. The people who are real are the people in your life. Principles are real when you apply them to the situations that present themselves to you, and you still can find truth where you seek it, whether those are causal events or deeper underlying principles. Specific facts still cohere as uncertainty settles for your point of view, and they have as much meaning as you choose to find in them. If life as a whole is uncertain, and what you do not know is uncertain, then the only certainty is the love of friends and what faith you have in God.
If one were to seek personal power by letting go of the certainty that we assume about the universe around us, the instinct to control would attempt to lock down common reality into one causal continuum or another to the extent we can perceive. Such choices would shift the multiverse of experience toward terminal endings, so they could never be sustained, and are not worth the effort. The man with the fish and bread also recommended that we abandon those instincts, that we put aside our viewpoint and allow the universe to be moved for us from within by a power beyond our understanding, because the benefit is more than we can imagine. Maybe he was onto something.
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