On 03 Oct 2014, at 22:55, meekerdb wrote:
On 10/3/2014 10:20 AM, 'Chris de Morsella' via Everything List wrote:
>>A lot of evidence for some God (like the god Matter), is not a
proof of its existence, still less so in front of complex open
problems.
I have been having a very long argument -- on another list - with a
man whose intellect and mind I very much respect, but who is
irrationally attached to the notion of the god Matter. It has gone
on for over fifty back and forth posts and this person - who is
intelligent and very aware of events in the world and in the mind...
a man who has had deep spiritual experiences and is someone I
generally respect.
But my questioning of the "need" for actual real stuff in the
universe and my pointing out that fundamentally all we know about
the universe is information we can measure about it and that it is
information itself (and information processes - i.e. computation)
that seems to be - and arguably could be - fundamental... it hit a
brick wall in his brain. There is just no budging him on it and he
has become quite heated in his insistence on the existence of - as
you put it god Matter. It keeps creeping up in the arguments he
puts forth as a given.
It is a difficult problem to even get someone to question whether
or not this "god Matter" is even necessary for the formulation of
an explanation for reality.
Matter is something not very well defined, even in physics. It's
roughly fermions. But fermions are thought to be excitations of a
more fundamental field. That's why physicists like Max Tegmark are
led to propose it's math all the way down.
But it's pejorative to refer to it as "god".
Matter is not God, as a concept, but became a God, in the philosophy-
religion of the materialist or the naturalist.
Keep in mind that I have come back to the original notion of God,
which is whatever is the reason why you are conscious here and now. If
the answer is "because matter exists and behaves this way", then
matter is made into the God.
Nobody worships matter. Physics textbooks don't have moral
prescriptions derived from QED. To call it "god" is to give into
Bruno's desire to make all fundamental science "theology".
Because they are, in the greek sense of the term. It helps to even
understand the machine theology to come back to this sense.
Worshipping is private, and people can worship anything they want. I
know someone worshipping wine, and I worship myself a bit many plant
(coffee, tea, tobacco, hemp, mushrooms, salvia, etc for example, but
also some animals, like escherichia coli, amoebas, planarias,
cuttlefishes). Worshipping is not a problem, it becomes a problem
when you enforce it to others.
And if theology did not leave academia, there would be no moral
prescription in theology at all, only in some theological theories,
which you can or not tend to believe it applies too you, but that is
eminently personal.
Bruno
Brent
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