Scientific theology: a new history of creation
Chapter 7: The Human Network
7.1: Anthropic principles - the intelligent universe
7.2: Evolution I: The mechanics of humanity
7.3: Evolution II: Human cultural evolution
7.4: Power: warlords, monarchs and government
7.5: Human knowledge of the divine mind: Jesus
7.6: Power comes from below, not from above
7.7: Influencing god: work or prayer?
7.8: Sustainable development
7.9: Communication protocols in human space
7.10: Value, money and economics
7.11: Politics: Humanity as an organism
7.12: Grace
Chapter 7: The human network
1: Anthropic principles - the intelligent universe
The Catholic Church believes that its god made the world just for us. Their god felt a need to manifest its glory to some specially created intelligent creatures who might worship it. The Church thinks that this god, modelled on ancient emperors and warlords, needs us to stroke its ego. This view is perpetuated in the latest version of the Catholic Catechism. Catholic Catechism: The world was created for the glory of God
Despite widespread acceptance of the theory of evolution, there is still some strong support, even in the science community, for the opinion that the world is the product of intelligent design and construction by an omnipotent and omniscient being. One manifestation of this opinion is the anthropic principle: that the universe was designed to enable the evolution of humanity. If the world was not specially made like it is, we would not be here. Anthropic principle - Wikipedia, Barrow & Tipler: The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
The anthropic principle implicitly acknowledges that we belong in the world. According to Catholic dogma, the whole human species and the soul of every human individual is specially created by god. Additionally, we are in effect pilgrims or exiles in this world. We will ultimately reach our proper home after the Apocalypse. The damage done to the world by their enraged god will be repaired and the plan for our salvation will be completed. The good sheep will be rewarded with eternal bliss in the sight of god and the bad goats punished with an eternity of blind agony in Hell. Catholic Catechism: II Body and soul, but truly one, Catholic Catechism: The Church - perfected in glory
Here we replace this ancient anthropomorphic view with the hypothesis that the Universe is divine. We therefore have no problem with the idea that each human soul is specially created by god. The soul is just like everything else in the Universe, part of god. We cannot accept, however, that we are exiles or pilgrims on Earth, intended for a new life after the end of the world. We were created here by the nature of the world, we are part of the system and we will die here like all other creatures. As our population and global footprint increases, we are becoming very aware that not only did the world create us, but we have always depended absolutely on the resources of the world for our existence.
Assuming that we live in a world capable of creating intelligent creatures like ourselves, we should not be surprised to learn that it is divine. Since the traditional divinity is widely considered to be the supreme intelligence and we understand intelligence to be a property of the mind, it seems reasonable to interpret the universe through cognitive cosmology. The intricate complexity of our intelligent bodies exceeds the best things we can make ourselves by tens of orders of magnitude so we must face the amazing world that made us with the degree of scientific humility which used to be associated with Fear of the Lord. Unfortunately many of us have a tendency to wreck what we cannot understand.
The idea that we have an immortal spiritual soul goes back, in Western scientific tradition, to Plato and Aristotle. In his book On the Soul (De Anima), Aristotle introduces an 'active mind' which is ‘separate and unaffected and unmixed, being in its essence actuality’ . . . also ‘deathless and everlasting’. This idea was taken up by Aquinas, who called the active mind intellectus agens. Aristotle's felt that a material mind could not contain the huge variety of forms that occupy our intelligence. We now know that matter is not dead and passive, but active and alive. A grain of sand, weighing a microgram contains more processing power than all the computers in the world. Christopher Shields: The Active Mind of De Anima III 5, The computing power of a grain of sand: a calculation
From the scientific points of view, the physical foundation of our intelligence is our central nervous system which is an information processing system which exceeds the complexity of the global internet. Our knowledge is stored in the state of the synapses, so that the material nature of the brain is not such a constraint on its plasticity as Aristotle thought. A thousand terabytes of carefully structured information can go a long way. All our information handling processes are implemented by communications between neurons, modulated by the states of the synapses that connect them. Neuron - Wikipedia, Synapse - Wikipedia
2: Evolution I: the mechanics of humanity
Every living creature except the first is descended from other living creatures. This line of descent enables us (at least in theory) to trace our ancestry back through millions of generations to the first life on Earth. Evolutionary history of life - Wikipedia
We may establish a correspondence between biological species and layers in the transfinite network. From a formal point of view, we determine this using the genes of each species. The genome is a formal representation the symmetry corresponding to the species. This symmetry is broken to some degree in almost every individual of the species due to random mutations on the one hand and the mixing of genes resulting from sexual reproduction on the other.
Our own species, Homo sapiens, constitutes a peer layer in the tree of life. We are all individuals sharing the human genome and in the right circumstances we are all capable of reproducing with one another. Cody E. Hinchcliff et al: Synthesis of phylogeny and taxonomy into a comprehensive tree of life
Our genus, Homo, is about 2 million years old. Our closest relatives are the Neanderthals, who lived in Europe between 400 000 and 40 000 years ago. An earlier species Homo habilis lived between 2.4 and 2.4 million years ago. It seems clear now from genetic analysis that modern humans interbred to some extent with the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Smithsonian Institution: Human Family Tree, George Busby: Genetic studies reveal diversity of human populations - and pin down when we left Africa, Denisovan - Wikipedia
Since that time we have come to dominate the planet. In the old days, about 300 000 years ago, there might have been a few million of us. Each of us, like every other animal, lived on the matter and energy contained in our food, just a few kilos of matter and about 10 megajoules (MJ) of energy. These were the natural resources upon which we existed. Our resource consumption began to grow when we learned to control fire. Now, as we shall see, we consume millions of times as much. The health of our planet is beginning to fail because we have learnt to divert a large proportion of the resources for life on Earth to ourselves.
The first humans lived in the same of environment as other animals and faced the same difficulties. It was not an environment that they had created specially for themselves, although they had probably modified it slightly through their choices of animals to hunt and plant food to gather. Like all the animals, they had to find the resources to avoid death and injury, to grow and to reproduce if they were to survive.
Many of us now live in artificial environments, at the extreme in air conditioned high rise apartments in big cities. This has become possible because we are a very adaptable and creative species. We derive the power for our creation from the natural world. This first two steps in the development of this artificial lifestyle were the discovery of fire and the use of beasts of burden, including human workers and slaves.
To modern eyes, there is not much difference between fire and beasts of burden. Like all animals, we are controlled fires, oxidizing part of our food to provide ourselves with the chemical energy for the myriad microscopic processes of life. The modern industrial revolution started when we learnt how to use fire to do work, just like a horse or a donkey might do. Apart from the quantum electronic processes in photovoltaic cells, all the mechanical energy that supports our lifestyle comes from heat engines of one sort or another, steam engines, turbines, internal combustion engines and the winds.
Our population is now about 7 billion and each of us consumes about 2000 watts of energy, some for food and agriculture and the rest in heating, transport and manufacturing. Some of this energy comes directly from the Sun, but we obtain much of it by burning fossil fuels which releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, a serious pollutant. Carbon dioxide makes the atmosphere less transparent to low temperature heat, so that the atmosphere is becoming a warmer blanket and allowing less of the heat that arrives from the Sun to be radiated back into space. As a consequence the Earth is warming. The pollution arising from every unit of energy we obtain from fossil fuel traps about ten times as much heat.
The resources of the Earth are not just animals, vegetables and minerals. Life also depends on the ecological processes that purify the air and water, transport matter and energy from one place to another, and the enormous population of microorganisms that recycle dead plants and animals, produce fertilizer, help us digest our food and deliver numerous other benefits to the living world. Many of the industrial pollutants we release damage these processes and reduce the health of the Earth.
Cells are the atoms of life. There are smaller organisms, viruses that have some claim to life, but they have to infect a cell and use its decoding mechanisms to reproduce themselves. A cell is atomic in the sense that if we do cut it in halves, we kill it and we no longer have a cell. Cell (biology) - Wikipedia
Nevertheless, cells reproduce themselves by dividing. This is quite a complex process requiring the duplication of the cell's genome, the separation of the two copies and the splitting of the cell into two daughter cells, each a clone of the parent cell. Cell division - Wikipedia
A cell contains all the molecular mechanisms necessary for decoding its genome and using this information to construct proteins. Proteins act both as as structural elements of the cell and tools to work the molecular biochemical processes that are essential for the life and reproduction of the cell.
Life began as single celled creatures, but early in the history of life multicellular creatures were created, probably by dividing cells staying connected to one another and evolving to serve different roles in the resulting multicellular creature. Complex organisms like ourselves comprise many different varieties of cell which nevertheless share the same genes. The differentiation of our cells and their response to changing conditions is managed by the expression of different genes from our common genome. The fact that all our cells share the same genome is the foundation of their ability to work together for their common good. A similar mechanism is at work when people with a common culture work together to create a stable society.
We grow by reproducing our cells, and many types of cell in our bodies can be replaced when they die from old age, injury or disease. This ability of our bodies to renew themselves is limited, however, and so eventually some fatal error arises in our system and we die.
In contrast to Plato, Aristotle held that all our knowledge comes through our senses. He felt that sense provided data and that intellect provided insight into the meaning of the data. This idea was developed by Thomas Aquinas in the middle ages, and further developed in the twentieth century by Bernard Lonergan. Aristotle - On the Soul, Bernard Lonergan: Insight: A Study of Human Understanding
Modern psychology and attempts to create intelligent machines have greatly increased our understanding of knowledge and memory, but the ancient idea that to know something is to contain a representation of it remains true. Aristotle thought of this in terms of his tabula rasa, a fresh wax tablet upon which anything could be written. He argued that the intellect must be immaterial because no material medium is versatile enough to contain all human knowledge. Tabula rasa - Wikipedia
Anatomical study of our sensory nervous system shows how it stores and processes information using billions of neurons. This system forms a very complex communication network. The senses derive information from inside and outside our bodies. Our nervous systems process this information and devise responses which are directed to muscles and other organs to be put into action. The effective relationship between stimuli and responses is central to our survival. We are moved to eat when we are hungry. We do well to look both ways when we are crossing a road. Sensory nervous system - Wikipedia
Our outstanding anatomical feature is a large brain which suggests enhanced information processing ability. The social, cultural, scientific and technical advances that we have made in the last few thousand years support this idea. Brain size - Wikipedia
Our growing brains correlate to some extent with the growing complexity and expressiveness of our language. Many parts of our brain perform functions like sensation and motor control which are common to other animals. The brain, like all our organs, evolved by natural selection. Cecilia Heyes: Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking
The central nervous system exercises overall control of the life of an animal. It has billions of connections to sensors which provide sight, sound, touch, taste, smell and many other details about the internal and external state of the animal. All this information is integrated and used to structure signals to muscles, glands and the other organs of motion and change within the body.
We communicate with other people and with our environment. We are born with a powerful ability to learn, and use this ability to integrate ourselves into the environment into which we are born. When we are young we cannot survive without help. We become more self sufficient as we grow, but we are still heavily dependent on other people for the necessities of life like food, shelter, security and companionship. As Aristotle noted, we are social animals. Aristotle: ὁ ἄνθρωπος φύσει πολιτικὸν ζῳ̂ον
Our social structures are a forest of communication networks mediated by body language of all sorts, including speech. This language is controlled by the central nervous system, and determines our individual personalities in the social network. We adapt naturally to express different facets of our personality in different contexts, whether we are at work or at home, with friendly or threatening people and so on.
Most of our networks have a layered structure. We are closest to our family, and from there our connections branch out into friends, fellow workers, clubs, teams, neighbours, businesses and organizations of every sort. Each of these is built on sets of people who organize themselves into a higher layer, the corporation. Corporations themselves have personalities, and can be united through further layers of communication.
At the higher levels in this structure we find towns and cities, states, nations and ultimately the international community. The foundation of all these networks is the plasticity of the human mind which enables us to cooperate in communication for our individual and common benefit.
7.3: Evolution II: the human cultural layer
The parent organisms in most species have little or no contact with their offspring. The children's heritage is completely represented by the cell from which they grow. Their genes are fixed for life, but as they grow different genes are decoded at different times depending on their stage of development and the environment in which they find themselves. The genetic inheritance of other animals endows them with memory which enables them to learn psychologically from their experience of their environment. Some of these can learn by watching other members of their species. In a human environment they may be trained like some birds, dogs and horses.
Human reproduction is probably the most complex process in the whole animal kingdom. People trying to get their offspring to leave home and become independent find that we are not really fully formed until we reach the age of thirty years. This is true in the professions that require extensive education and experience and it is generally true that we can continue to learn throughout most of our lives until our bodies begin to fail. Even then we have to learn to cope with our oncoming weaknesses by adapting our behaviour and recruiting help.
Our ability to learn is greatly enhanced by being embedded in social networks. Under normal circumstances we learn language and the details of nutrition, grooming, health care and domestic life within our family. Most children begin to spend time outside the family from the age of three or so and gradually become more deeply immersed in education and social activities until their teenage when they can navigate society by themselves and begin to work, gathering experience all the way.
Cultural evolution follows the same paradigm as the biological evolution of our physical bodies. The variation is provided by human imagination. The selection by the filter which enables some ideas to increase and multiply in the human community and leaves others to die out because they have not become popular enough or substantial enough to be considered worth passing on.The internet and its associated social media now give us an almost real time insight into the transmission of ideas untempered by editors or by the wealth required to spread ideas when hand copied manuscripts were the principal medium of widespread communication. Even in the old days when the transmission of ideas and techniques was slow, cultural evolution was much faster than physiological evolution. While each member of any generation carries the same genes for a lifetime, mentally active individuals can often change their minds in a lifetime, particularly under social pressure.
One of our most fertile products of human imagination is the Hebrew Bible, a the founding fiction of Western civilization. The writers of Christianity coopted this Bible to form the backstory for their work and renamed it The Old Testament. Hebrew Bible - Wikipedia
The Bible is a story to explain how the human world came to be. We have dreamt up many such stories, myths of the origin of the world. On the whole these stories serve to support the position of the powers that be. History suggests that most of these powers first come into being by violent conquest. Dreamtime - Wikipedia
One of the realities of life noted in Genesis is the need to work. For many of us work is a pain and better avoided. This has led, over many thousands of years to institutions such as slavery, military conquest, rape and plunder, all aimed at reducing the workload of those powerful enough to command the labour of others. On the whole the ruling elite do not like to get their hands dirty or pay for the benefits they receive from the labour of others.
We might measure the power of a person by the aggregate amount of change they can produce in the lives of others. At one extreme all the subjects are slaves of a monarch who has an arbitrary power of life and death. At the other end we have an ideal society ruled by laws so agreeable that people are inclined to obey them without force because they understand the benefits inherent in the law. A benefit of effective democracy is to use the collective wisdom of a community to craft laws that are obviously just and necessary.
One important sphere of power is the upbringing and education of children, filing their minds with models of self control which may improve their chances in life. This why religions like to control education. The Catholic education I received was partly an abuse of power because much of the theology I was taught was known even then to be false.
There are two general approaches to truth. The first is faith: believe what you are told by the authorities; the second is observation. If you want to know what is actually happening, look. It seems true that truth is stranger than fiction. The sayings of the authorities, like the dogma of the Catholic church, are often fictions, made up to promote their political agenda and make certain that they maintain their authority. This battle between traditional authoritarianism and the modern search for evidence based opinions seems to have been with us forever. Shane: Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union
'And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.' (John 8:32, KJV). Conversely, error imprisons us. Scientists use the natural world as their touchstone, as Christian theologians use the Bible. Christians believe the Bible, and the task of theologians is to decode this information using the tools approved by their institutional masters. The Biblical ‘deposit of faith’ is less than a million words. Although Christian theologians allow that world teaches us something about God, they claim that this knowledge is severely limited and definitely not the full story of our existence.
There is a selective pressure toward the scientific approach, simply because it shows us how the world really works so that we can devise ways to help ourselves. Untested fictions lead us astray, tending to reduce the productivity of society, which we measure in human welfare.
The Catholic Church claims to have received the gift of truth from its God, but it is definitely wrong on one obvious matter: that women are precisely equal to men in the theological sphere and cannot therefore be barred from the priesthood. True education replaces these ancient fictions with facts about the nature of God. John Paul II: Fides et Ratio
Christianity is a meliorist religion. It would like to make things better. There is the ultimate betterment of eternity in heaven, but the doctrine of loving your neighbour as yourself has probably done much for good and benevolent government in those countries that take social security, health care and education seriously.
One valuable consequence of this approach is the peace and freedom that have allowed science and technology to flourish, leading to improvements in the physical sides of life, communication, transport, housing, food, health care and so on. A virtuous circle. In adverse political circumstances, these benefits may not be realized. Oppression leads to revolt, which leads to destruction and more oppression. The vicious circle is driven by free-loaders who seek wealth by plunder without thought or skill. One of the important roles of theological and political research is to determine the conditions that drive virtuous circles and propagate them as sources of hope.
7.4: Power: warlords, monarchs and government
Moses went up the mountain and met Yahweh. Yahweh said “I am the Lord Your God; you shall have no other Gods before me.” He carved this in stone so Moses would not forget.
Moses went down and found people worshipping a previous god. He ordered them killed. Thus did the divine right of sovereigns enter Western religious literature. In the name of god, sovereigns claim a monopoly on violence, the right to kill at will.
How did we get like this? Archaeological evidence shows that organised violence among humans is very old. Animals of course fight for dominance and mating opportunities and kill for food, but it seems that organized large scale killing, although occasionally found among chimpanzees, is a peculiarly human trait.Living things reproduce exponentially with random variations. On the other hand resources are limited, so times of famine are inevitable. The environment effectively culls the population. Those who cannot find the resources to live and reproduce drop out, leaving others better adapted to survive.
Initially this process may be unconscious, but as we become more aware of our condition, a terrible truth is revealed, the root of murder and war. Some see that it may be preferable to die actively fighting for more resources than to die passively from starvation. For them it may be reasonable to kill other people, rape, enslave and pillage their property in order to ensure their own welfare. This is the way of the warlord. In our wild days we lived off the land like any other species, hunting and gathering. For us, like all creatures, land is the source of life. The advent of agriculture increased the importance of territory: a crop is a fixed investment requiring settlement, open to pillage. A simple and effective survival strategy is invade territory, kill or enslave the occupants occupy it and steal their crops.
Little warlords fell before greater warlords and ultimately, about five thousand years ago, we came to an age of empires. Violence is attractive to thugs but it is unstable. Competition can go only so far. Cooperation is very much more powerful. The evolution of life had already established hundreds of millions of years before we came along, that diplomacy was more efficient than war. In multicellular life the key to local harmony is shared genes. I am a coalition of some 5 trillion cells all working together for their common good according to a common genetic protocol. A social equivalent of a genome is a set of religious beliefs. The genetic unity of Constantine’s empire was the Christian doctrine that he got the bishops to codify in the Nicene creed.
Like Moses, Constantine used religion to provide a unifying religious foundation for his empire. One can imagine that like Moses, and the human immune system, he found it necessary to eliminate dissidents. Religious belief controlled by lethal power has served to bind communities together since, as empires have come and gone. In the communities descended from the Roman Empire the Christian God became the source of the divine right of kings. Naturally this view was reinforced by the the theologians and priests employed in the imperial bureaucracy. This trend reached its apogee in the Papacy. The current Code of Canon law explains:
Can. 333 §1. By virtue of his office, the Roman Pontiff not only possesses power over the universal Church but also obtains the primacy of ordinary power over all particular churches and groups of them. . . .John Paul II (1983): Code of Canon Law§3. No appeal or recourse is permitted against a sentence or decree of the Roman Pontiff.
7.5. Human knowledge of the divine mind: Jesus
Historically god in one form or another, embodied in religion and culture, has been the soul of human communities. Specific communities of prophets, theologians and priests have developed to determine and explain the nature and desires of god to the general population. Since god is postulated to be in control of everything, knowledge of and obedience to god is clearly understood to be the best route to peace and prosperity. In particular heretics, who do not conform to the accepted doctrines about god, may be seen as a danger to the community by upsetting the divinity and bringing bad fortune. Aquinas, Summa, I, 22, 3: Does God have immediate providence over everything?
The Christian Churches believe that they have a special connection to god through Jesus who was both god and man. They claim a right to preach their Gospel because they believe it is true. The part about loving your neighbour is true, but the consumers of their message are often deceived, as I was. Jesus preached universal love, emphasizing his message with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Unfortunately, many of the Christian Churches that claim to follow Jesus are far from universal, dividing the world into us (the saved) and them (the rest). Like their divine judge at the end of the world, they like to separate people into sheep and goats.
Apart from the claim that he was the son of god, Jesus had very little to tell us about his father or god in general. Subsequent theologians have emphasized the mysterious nature of god, claiming that it is completely beyond our understanding. We can derive very little practical day to day guidance from the scriptures about how to live our lives. The Fathers of the Church and subsequent theologians have produced an enormous literature speculating on the nature and will of god. Very little of it can be called scientific and much of it is pure fiction. The Church, by claiming to speak for god, has arrogated to itself a magisterium and claimed the right to bless its fictions with an aura of infallibility, but from a modern practical social and political point of view, very little of this is helpful. First Vatican Council: IV: Concerning the Infallible Teaching of the Roman Pontiff, Magisterium - Wikipedia
Fiction is a wonderful thing. Children have an infinite capacity play games, to make up stories, and take up roles. This continues into adulthood for all those who write stories, create television series and make movies. But success in life also depends upon having a clear understanding of the facts. This is the role of science. We can make up languages, but if we are the only speaker it is fun but practically useless. Science is a mixture of fiction and fact. It seems that the best fictions are rooted in the facts, and we tend to praise authors and actors for the realistic foundations of their fictional creations. We try to make up fictions that comfortably fit the facts but carry us beyond them.
The scientific method applies across the board. If a language is completely unknown to us, as it is to a newborn baby, we must begin by listening closely and watching the speaker, to get clues to the meaning of the sounds the speaker is making and their relationship to the other information available.
Language learning is unconscious. Science is a conscious community effort to implement the same principles. Everything is trial and error. Even intelligent design is trial and error, as anyone who has tried to design something knows. From the first moment there is a continual flow of failures and better ideas until one arrives at a stable design. Even then, as soon as one starts production, new revisions will be found necessary. We learn from our mistakes. The history of engineering in a history of disasters. Boilers explode, planes crash, bridges collapse, dams burst. The causes are often unforeseen circumstances coupled with inadequate design, poor construction, and (quite often) corruption induced by greed.
Our survival depends upon practical skills, manipulating the world and ourselves to obtain food, shelter and security. This is not always an easy task, and most societies depend on centuries of experience shared from person to person and generation to generation to learn to make a living from their environment.
Learning the language of the world, like learning a human language, is labor both of love and necessity. It is made possible because the animals, plants, and physical conditions which we depend upon for our existence have certain relatively fixed features which we can use to predict and exploit their behaviour. These features of human life have analogies in all other animate and inanimate elements of the world.
On the traditional understanding of theology and religion only a fraction of the information passing through the human network deals with theological and religious matters. The position here is that the whole universe is divine, so all sciences and technologies and all human events and feelings are elements of theology and religion.
Christianity is founded on the notion that the material world is possibly evil and certainly not worthy of particular care or respect. However, given the position taken here, the injunction to love god embraces all aspects of our material and spiritual environment, and lays the foundation for modern approaches to caring for the environment, for the prevention and correction of pollution, the recycling of all materials, ensuring the survival of all species, making all industrial cycles closed so that they do not place unnecessary loads in the biosphere.
People are also elements of the divinity, and so should be treated as though divine, with the respect that we would show to show to Jesus, not simply as a particular person, but as a matter of respecting the human symmetry as embraced in general and specific statements of human rights and equality.
7.6: Power comes from below, not from above
Christianity has a long heritage deeply buried in the oral cultural traditions of the 'East', stretching from China to the Mediterranean. This culture entered the 'West' in written form in the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament. The writers of the New Testament did a masterful job of coopting the Old Testament as the backstory of the New Testament, drawing attention to myriad passages which could be interpreted as predictions of the coming of the Messiah. The prophet Isaiah said:
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counseller, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace (9:6). Isaiah: Chapter 9, KJV
Yahweh, the god of the Old Testament is essentially a narcissistic warlord, like many of the gods of surrounding nations, but he was upgraded in the New Testament to be God the Father whose Son Jesus became the Messiah. Yahweh and his prophet Moses prefigured the military career of the Catholic Church whose Crusaders were to conquer of Islam, destroy heresy and violently convert many to their 'true' god.
The New Testament is the constitution of the Christian world. Jesus of Nazareth summarized it in a few words:
Listen Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord, and you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. . . . You must love your neighbour as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:29-30).
Love god, love your neighbour is a formula for cooperation that accounts for the wide success of Christianity in the Roman Empire, a conglomerate of countries, captives, slaves, and refugees. The Christian claim to love has served it well politically, but there can be little doubt that it was greatly assisted by it ability to co-opt superior military force. Jesus’ command to convert the world was an imperialist’s dream (Mark 16:15-18).
In the early Middle ages Christian diplomacy strengthened the Church until it had sufficient political and military power to recover the Holy Land. There Europe confronted Islam and discovered the trove of ancient Greek literature that had been preserved in the East. Aristotle was widely translated and entered Europe just as monasteries were growing into universities and theology became the top science.Aristotle's work enabled Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) to rewrite the theory of god. It became the omniscient, omnipotent creator, present at every point in the world, controlling all, seeing all, past, present and future.
Einstein completed the general theory of relativity in 1915. In the next fifty years we learnt that the Universe is expanding and that it began as a structureless point, the initial singularity. The rapid internal expansion of the initial singularity (the “big bang”) built the universe we inhabit.This initial singularity is formally identical to the Christian god developed by Aquinas, our starting point for this whole essay. Both exist, both are absolutely structureless and both are the source of our world. Between then Aristotle, Aquinas and Einstein laid the foundations for a new vision of god.
Nevertheless these theological and cosmological discoveries seem to have created a bigger problem than they have solved. Without the old god, how could the Universe create itself? The root of the problem is captured by the cybernetic principle of requisite variety: no system can control something more complex than itself. Given the second law this principle shows that on the whole past cannot control the future, although the future may control simpler things from the past.
So, how is an absolutely simple god to build an enormously complex universe? We know it happened because we are here, but how?
Our chosen answer lies in the Trinity. Constantine wanted the bishops to provide a succinct summary of Christian doctrine. They produced the Nicene Creed (325-381):
I believe in one God . . .
I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ . . .
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life,
Who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
God, in other words, creates gods. The initial singularity grew into an immense cloud of particles, little gods, not just a threesome. Because the initial singularity has zero entropy, and therefore no power of control, this system was random. From an evolutionary point an enormous field of variation ripe for selection. Everything was possible. Only locally consistent systems survived.
Physicists imitate this process in machines like the Large Hadron Collider. Particles are bashed together at close to the speed of light to create little bubbles of energy which behave like micro big bangs. The bubbles of energy decay into a familiar forest of fundamental particles. How, we don’t exactly know, but it works.Historically most of our ethical input has come from religion. What does our new god, the universe, say about ethics? First we learn that power comes from below, not from above, from the people, not the sovereign.
Second, we learn that ethical improvement correlates with increase in entropy. The bandwidth of our communication is measured in entropy, bits per second. Entropy is closely related to equilibrium and stability. The state of maximum entropy for any system is also the state of maximum stability. Maximum entropy occurs when all states are equiprobable, a statistical statement of fairness, as in dice.
Equality is a local phenomenon. You and I are equal when you do not put me down and I do not out you down. The old gods put everybody down and killed the ones they did not like. The universal declaration of human rights says we are all equal. This is not an abstract dream in the sky. It is a condition of every human interaction, every where, all the time. It is the implementation of fairness,Entropy adds. The entropy of a system grows when the entropy of it parts grows. The entropy and stability of society grows when everyone is enabled to reach their full potential, to occupy their full space of possibility. It is in the interests of society to increase the entropy of its constituents by the implementation of education, equality, the rule of law, righteous policing, environmental protection, pollution control, renewable energy, material recycling, democracy, health care and disability support. In a divine universe we would do well to treat everybody and everything with the reverence and respect we show to god.
Notice also that all the cells in a living body enjoy a universal basic income. The body politic has much to learn from multicellular physiology. We too would find a way to work together if we shared a common understanding of fairness and the nature of the world.7.7: Influencing god: work or prayer?
If the universe is divine, we are all parts of God. Since God is not so much a thing as a process, we are all parts of the divine process. Our thoughts and actions are divine thoughts and divine actions. A widespread human mental activity is prayer. Aquinas tells us that prayer is basically beseeching a benefit from a superior. For Aquinas, the divine economy is a 'trickle-down' affair: 'for the Divine order is such that lower beings receive an overflow of the excellence of the higher, even as the air receives the brightness of the sun.' Aquinas, Summa, II, II: 83, 11: Do the saints in heaven pray for us?
The traditional view of prayer reflected by Aquinas is of powerless petitioners seeking a share of grace and glory from the ruling power which may (capriciously) give or withhold. Our prayers do not serve to change God's mind. Aquinas approves the words of Pope St Gregory (The Great ): '. . . by asking, men may deserve to receive what Almighty God from eternity has disposed to give.' ' . . . all our prayers ought to be directed to the acquisition of grace and glory, which God alone gives, according to Psalm 83:12, "The Lord will give grace and glory." ' Grace we understand as the addition of a supernatural dimension to a human person. The Greek word 'doxa' glory, is used to translate the Hebrew KBD which first means weight or heaviness and extends to importance, honour or majesty, very mundane qualities.
What does prayer mean in a divine world? Once again, we are seeking grace and glory but in a different context. The principal difference is that god is no longer to be viewed as a glorious 'king of kings' standing outside and above all human experience. God is now a fully engaged participant in our day to day life, or more precisely, god is our day to day life. Our thoughts are god's thoughts and our actions are god's actions.
The situation is analogous that envisaged in Christian beatitude, seeing God face to face. The action is not all one way however, and we are not completely dependent on a god other than ourselves. Our actions are part of the relationship and contribute to what happens.. When we move ourselves, we also move god. In the practical world, all our work, play and communication with other people is is part of our interaction with god.
We have been brought up to believe that the state of the saved in the afterlife is unbounded bliss. The life in god proposed here has pains as well as pleasures, the full spectrum of human experience. If we look at the pain dispassionately, it seems that much of it is self inflicted. The notion that we are all sinners gives many people a carte blanche to be nasty to one another. In particular many who rule by divine right feel they have a right to enslave and punish lesser beings. We learn, as we go on, that all our actions have consequences, although luck and chance play a significant role in our lives how we act is also significant.
The aim of prayer is to improve things. A first step in prayer is an attempt to control our own thoughts. When I was a child we were continually warned against 'dirty thoughts' which seemed to be anything to do with sensual pleasure. We were urged to use such mind control as we were capable of to banish these thoughts from our minds. We were assured that god would help us in this noble task, if we prayed enough.
There are limits on thought control, however. We have already noted that it is theoretically impossible for a simple system to control a complex system. It seems pretty clear that our conscious minds are a lot simpler that our subconscious minds, the source of our thoughts. Nevertheless we can use our conscious mind to select and classify the ideas that enter our consciousness. The situation is similar to any evolutionary system using variation and selection. The subconscious mind varies, the conscious mind selects.
Love is the most powerful force in human affairs and a subject much discussed is romance. It is the antidote to death in that it is an essential component of reproduction. Because we remain immature for a long period after birth, we need a closely bonded and durable environment to nurture us. Romance provides the motivation for such bonding. It has the selective advantage that those more romantically inclined are likely to bear and nurture more children. Romance (love) - Wikipedia
Many Churches and similar organizations try to control the path of romance by establishing strict controls. This exercise of power has led to an enormous tragic literature of true love versus social control, love occcasionally winning. Sometimes societies are so rigid that murder is to be preferred to some perceived social dishonour so that 'illicit' love is punished by death. Honour killing - Wikipedia
We observe that in practice, anyone can fall in love with anyone, and this reality applies in all situations, not just in reproduction. Authoritarian constraints on these natural inclinations lead to tension that can turn to violence. Human Rights Watch
So what should we pray for? Ultimately if we want to live, we pray for a mind tuned to reality, thinking and doing the will of god embodied in our world. One foundation of this harmony is the human symmetry embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. No one of us is inherently superior to any other. This is the foundation of our unity. We pray that the many current violations of human symmetry will gradually be eradicated when the realize the common humanity based in our common divinity.
We are each unique conscious individuals looking for roles in the system. The work of survival requires that we tailor our individuality to the community we inhabit, exploiting the full space of human symmetry to be ourselves. From a network point of view, each of us is a unique source contributing to the business of the human world. Ultimately the survival of the human network depends upon how we run this business. So we should pray for prudence, based on true understanding of our condition.
Many say follow your heart and your soul. These words point to the topmost layer of integration in a human being, the local space in which I am what I am.
What am I? From a formal point of view I am a subnet of the universal network. Humanity is the symmetry that defines this network, and we can model it by a certain layer of transfinite ordinal numbers. This formal view of myself is the result of fifty years of trying to replace the Catholic view of humanity with something formally broad enough to live in.
I am more than formal, however, I am real, which for me means I am a conscious flow of the processes I call experience. Experience comes from all directions, inside and outside myself. I have to deal with this process. I spend a lot of my time thinking about it and talking about it. In the old model, we pray for grace and glory by talking to god. In the divine world, talking to god becomes the same as interacting with everybody and everything around us. Prayer is communication with ourselves and our world.
7.8: Sustainable development
Our network model pictures the world as layered structure, each layer built upon the layer beneath and relying on this layer to provide it with the means to sustain itself. We may apply this image to the Earth itself, looking at it as gigantic onion. In the centre is a sphere of metal whose outer layers are fluid, as hot as the surface of the sun. The motions of this core generate the Earth's magnetic field and ultimately povides the force that drives the motion of the tectonic plates and the volcanoes that bring fertility to the surface of the earth. The core is surrounded by a thick mantle of almost solid rock, topped by the crust of solid rock, the lithosphere Structure of Earth - Wikipedia, Earth's mantle - Wikipedia
On the lithosphere we have further layers, the hydrosphere (water), atmosphere (air) biosphere (soil and life) and the noosphere (mind, spirit arts and sciences). Noosphere - Wikipedia
The ancients imagined that we are an amalgam of matter and spirit. The materials were dark, heavy, and doomed to death. The spirits were light, angelic and eternal. In time our material bodies would be transformed so that our spirits became free of the load of matter. We realise now that our mind is realised by the organization and operation of our matter. The matter is the layer that sustains spirit, and if we are starved of matter (which includes energy) we die and our spirit dies too. To sustain ourselves, we have to take care of all the layers of reality beneath us. Sustainable development - Wikipedia, United Nations: Sustainable development goals
Here we understand 'matter' and 'spirit' to be two aspects of the same reality which goes by the shorthand 'god'. Einstein showed that we can identify matter with energy. Energy is a measure of the rate of processing in the dynamic world. Earlier in this chapter we calculated that there is more processing going on in a grain of sand than in all the electronic computers on the planet.
As we all learn in life, we can only do so much, whether it be the physical lifting of weights or the mental solution of the problems that arise in daily life. Most of the processes on the surface of the Earth are driven by solar energy which is limited by the solar constant, the amount of energy delivered by the Sun to each square metre of the earth.
In the early days of our existence, our numbers and activities were limited by the energy that we could harvest from our immediate environment. Then we learnt to control fire, which enabled us to start consuming the energy capital that the planet had amassed before we came. The exploitation of fossil fuels enabled each of us in the developed world to consume about a hundred times as much energy as our early ancestors. We have learnt in last few centuries that this is not sustainable. No more sustainable than a business that lives solely by burning its capital.
A business is solvent as long as it can meet its commitments. This is not the case with our current management of Earth. Our only real income is solar energy, and we burning stored solar energy in the form of fossil fuel, our capital, at a much faster rate than our income. We are effectively trading while insolvent by continuing to plunder the Earth. This cannot go on.
The first step is to balance the energy budget so that our consumption of capital stops and we can perhaps return some energy to the biosphere by repairing the systems we have damaged. This balancing step has two dimensions: reducing expenditure and increasing income, that is energy efficiency and solar energy, captured by photovoltaics and wind. Other renewable energies sources like hydro and tidal energy require significant and possibly unacceptable modifications to the environment.
As well as consuming the energy capital of Earth we are degrading the systems which maintain the habitability of the biosphere. The most obvious form of degradation is the air pollution resulting from the production and consumption of fossil fuels. The transition out of fossil energy is the only prudent way to deal with this problem.
Atmospheric pollution is often visible and it can be smelt and felt. What we cannot detect without specialised instruments are the hundreds of thousands of other chemical and radioactive substances that we release into the solid and liquid environment. Some of these are tested for possible harms to people, and sometimes even restricted, but little notice is taken of the overall effect of countless chemical on the species and environments of the planet. Because the web of life is so complex and delicate, even tiny levels of some pollutants can cause serious problems in living creatures, including ourselves. The answer to this problem, of course, is that all our processes must be closed. Everything must be recycled within the industrial system and not be allowed to escape into the biosphere. A tall order, but a necessary one. Reem Shaddad: The 73-year-old taking on the tech giants, Endocrine disruptor - Wikipedia
We reduce the efficiency of ecosystem services by pollution. We reduce their overall power by destroying them, cutting down forests, draining wetlands, damming rivers, building on fertile land and cutting the landscape up with roads. The answer to this is to concentrate our populations, leaving more of the Earth to care for itself (and so us). The provision of services and recycling are also made easier by concentration. From this point of view the tendency for people to move to the cities is a good thing.
7.9: Communication protocols in human space
The Catholic Church is an imperial organization, descended from the Roman Empire, ruled by an absolute monarch with bishops as the local governors. It claims to have the gift of absolute truth, to have a infallible channel to its god. It is for this reason that it has difficulty accepting the modern idea of human rights. It believes, as all organizations that claim to rule by divine right, that power comes from above rather than below. The hypothesis animating this book suggests that power is distributed throughout the Universe because we live within rather than outside the divinity.
In legal terms, human communication protocols are enshrined in bills of rights, that is the protocols of communication which define a non-violent community. These protocols are generally expressions of the golden rule: treat everybody as you would like them to treat you.
From a modern point of view, the fundamental principle of human communication is the ideology enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights which establishes that we all share human symmetry. Human symmetry is formally identical to human rights which are ultimately embedded in our common genome.
The problem here is that violence and war are also widely practised means of communication. We see in totalitarian states that the the threat of violence and the use of secret police kill off the dissidents forces strong conformity on those who simply wish to keep their heads down and survive.
. . . the ability to make sense of one's life in the world is a function of freedom. The Soviet regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely but also the ability to understand fully what had been taken from them, and how. The regime aimed to annihilate personal and historical memory and the academic study of society. Its concerted war on the social sciences left western academics for decades in a better position to interpret Russia than were Russians themselves — but as outsiders with restricted access to information, they could hardly fill the void. Much more than a problem of scholarship, this was an attack on the humanity of Russian society, which lost the tools and even the language for understanding itself. The only stories Russia told itself were created by Soviet ideologues. If a modern country has no sociologists, psychologists, or philosophers, what can it know about itself? And what can its citizens know about themselves. Masha Gessen: The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia page 3
The creation of peace requires the elimination of violence. This turns out to be difficult task to achieve non-violently, but history shows that it can be done. Much of the violence is rooted in ancient ideologies like Christianity that see development in terms of human sacrifice. The argument for non-violence is simple: it is good for business, for the accumulation of capital in the form of a society that cares equally for all its members.
Those with a more moralistic view of life may attribute violence to malice, perversion, race or some other perceived defect in violent people. Our evolutionary history has placed us in all sorts of predicaments, and we represent the survivors from those miliennia of selection and adaptation. As a result we have a very wide behavioural repertoire from tender love to murderous violence and our responses on this spectrum tend to correlate with the benefit or threat we are facing. It is therefore to be expected that reducing the overall level of violence in a society tends to reduce the occasions of violence which reduces violence still further.
The spiral into increased violence follows a similar pathway in reverse. We see that whenever a leader of some sort disparages a group in the community, violence against them tends to increase. President Trump in the US seems to have a talent for inciting his more violent followers to act out their fears in violent reaction and he is one of many promoters of violence around the world. Their motive is to plunder the people they control. Hayley Jones
Violence in human interaction has a long history much of which has been supported by the religious notion of trial by ordeal. This is effectively a perverse application of the notion of divine providence. The idea is that god will judge disputed cases by assisting the party in the right to win a fight or survive an ordeal of some sort. From this point of view, victory in war is an indication that god was on the winning side. From a practical point of view the superior force in combat is likely to win, but this provides no ethical information since there is no reason why the forces of evil should not be stronger than the forces of good.
The second principal perversion of communication is deception. Like violence, it has roots in our evolutionary history which provide some evidence for the idea that we are original sinners. As Gessen explains above, deception coupled with violence is an exceedingly potent tool for oligarchic control of human populations.
10: Value, money and economics
Capital has been given a bad name over the centuries, largely due to the activities of so called capitalists, that is the people that 'own' the capital. We are inclined to think of capital in terms of money, but this is largely a consequence of mistaking the measure for the reality.
Realistically, capital is fixed structure which makes certain actions possible. From this point of view, a horse is capital which makes it possible to travel longer distances than we can on foot. Cars, buses, trains and planes are capital which help us perform the same task, moving ourselves from place to place. The roads, rails, airports, and the control systems that make these systems work safely are also capital. Houses and offices enable us to perform delicate tasks out of the weather. The capital invested in the manufacturing and retail industries makes it possible for us to enjoy an enormous number of different goods.
Cooperation is the key to human survival and the social structures and language that make cooperation possible are part of the capital of human societies. This enables us to work together and accumulate the further capital necessary to increase our productivity so that on the whole we can live better lives with less effort. Conflict has the opposite effect, reducing capital by destroying both physical and human capital, reducing people to poverty, misery and despair.
Looking in the opposite direction, our bodies are capital from the point of view of the cells that comprise them. The life of a single celled organism is nasty, brutish and short. By forming themselves into cooperative units, cells can improve their chances of survival. I am a society of some five trillion cells which form a community of hundreds of tissues and processes which serve to provide all the cells in my body with a pretty good life. They are fed, their wastes are removed and they are protected from attack by an immune system designed to keep out intruders. They are supported by a gigantic cellular information collection, communication, processing and execution system centred in the brain which supports the life of the whole. The cells in my body live many times longer than most of their their unicellular forebears.
By studying the way the world is made, we can learn something about how we should run our own lives. Left to itself, the world, through evolution, tends to increase its capital. Catastrophic events like cyclones and the misguided activities of the human race can set this process back, but it will continue as long as the Sun shines.
11. Politics: humanity societies as organisms
Action is, on the whole, more laborious than thought. It is therefore economically rational to think before we act. This does not always happen, and random actions have random consequences which may not contribute to success. Prudence suggests that we think before we act. The purpose of this book is to introduce a few new thoughts into our decisions.
Collectively deciding what to do is the subject of politics, the talk before the action. If the talk fails, common consequences are waste, destruction, war or some other failure. Discussion and planning are essential elements of providence and are made possible by capital investment to gather information from everybody affected by community decisions.
Political attitudes and values are the subject of much study by politicians and political parties, sociologists, psychologists and theologians, all of whom see the political elephant through different eyes. The elephant itself is vastly complex. We are all born with the ability to absorb and conform to the cultures in which we find ourselves but we all do it our own way. This is a basic survival skill.
One comprehensive source of information about the distribution and change of values around the world is the World Values Survey. Analysis of the data from this survey suggests that much of the variation in human values may be distributed on a two dimensional spectrum. One spectrum runs from 'traditional' to 'secular-rational', and the other from 'survival' to 'self-expression'. World Values Survey - Wikipedia, Inglehart-Wlzel cultural map of the world - Wikipedia
Politics, like engineering, can learn from its failures. Political systems become unstable when a small coterie of oligarchs exploits the larger population for their own benefit. This situation effectively breaks the human symmetry embodied in our sense of fairness and leads to dissatisfaction and revolution.
In contrast, the recipe for stability is maximum entropy in the society which is a consequence of fairness and respect for human symmetry. This is possible in a society which is close to the secular-rational and self-expression corner of the distribution of human values. Motion toward this corner is to some degree a product of more modern science based education which reduces the power of traditional values that depend more on hard work and obedience. Acemoglu & Robinson: Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty
To become real, social fairness must be embodied in legislation and funds appropriated for its implementation. Such legislation is often opposed by populations concentrated in the traditional-survival corner of the values spectrum. Members of this group often see social security, free education, unemployment benefits and similar social initiatives as a waste of resources on free-loaders. It may be however that the resulting peace and social capital rising from such expenditure pays a handsome return. We note that the cells of multicellular organisms enjoy a universal basic income and protection by the immune system of the organism they inhabit. Rutger Bregman: Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-hour Workweek
Historically, education and religion are closely related. Educators may strive to produce obedient servants or creative leaders, to realize the potential latent in their students. our train them to be useful drones in the service of a ruling class. The history of education suggests that it began with the ruling classes training literate slaves and servants to provide military force and to manage the taxation of their subjects. The most violent form of control and taxation is slavery. At the opposite end of the spectrum we have people who are free to act in their own interests within a framework of just law.
Education is closely related to politics. No amount of violence can establish stable rule over completely unwilling subjects. The survival of the society ultimately depends upon the choices of its population. Choices based on human rights, equality and fairness tend toward survival. Partisan, parochial, and populist choices lead away from survival, toward national failures.
Historically an important source of the content of education, apart from practical reading, writing and arithmetic, has been religion and theology. It is probably still true that a majority of the schools in the world have a theological and religious component in their teaching, even if it is not explicitly acknowledged. This may always be so. Hence the need to develop a scientific theology, to make sure that our children learn how to survive and prosper by understanding the true nature of divinity.
Paul of Tarsus, aka the Apostle Paul introduced the idea that a number of people can form a body, in his case the body of Christ. The members of Christ's body are all equally human, differentiated by their roles in the Church: Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church. Paul, Colossians 1:24
The concept was further developed by Pope Pius XII in his encyclical, Mystici Corporis Christi published on the 25 June 1943, in the midst of the Second World War. He used Paul's words quoted above to justify the claim that the notion of the mystical body came from Jesus Christ himself. He repeats the old story that the our salvation is built on the blood of Christ, rejoicing, like Paul, that Jesus and his church are both victims and beneficiaries of the evils introduced into the world by sin.
2. For We intend to speak of the riches stored up in this Church which Christ purchased with His own Blood, and whose members glory in a thorn-crowned Head. The fact that they thus glory is a striking proof that the greatest joy and exaltation are born only of suffering, and hence that we should rejoice if we partake of the sufferings of Christ, that when His glory shall be revealed we may also be glad with exceeding joy. Pius XII: The Mystical Body of Christ
Fortunately it is becoming less common for people, other than members of perverted organizations like ISIS, to glory in thorn-crowned heads. Here we reject the doctrine of orignal sin and its concomitant claim that Jesus redeemed us from the anger of god by becoming a human sacrifice. The encyclical continues to rejoice in the torture of Jesus and to claim virtue because it is hated: We are also aware that the Church of God not only is despised and hated maliciously by those who shut their eyes to the light of Christian wisdom and miserably return to the teachings, customs and practices of ancient paganism . . .. The Catholic Church is a massively sadistic and masochistic organization whose claim to preach a gospel of love is deeply mired in contradiction.
In the seventy or so years since Pius wrote these words, the entrenched evils of the Church have become much more manifest. Those of us who oppose it for what it has done to us in the name of salvation can see more clearly that it is in desperate need of radical reform. In this it differs little from all the other authoritarian regimes that we have inherited from the past. Its only hope is to become evidence based and democratic like the best of modern societies. Andrew West: Worst of Catholic sexual abuse scandals still to come in developing world: report
Here we follow Einstein's path, seeking to understand the whole by studying the local scene. Einstein used the special theory of relativity, which holds in local inertial frames, to extrapolate to the whole universe. Here we use local human communications to understand the whole human network.
Things are held together by communication. Glue is a form of communication, atoms bonding to one another to bind two parts together. We, like all living organisms, are in continual communication with our environment and one another. Breathing in and out, eating and excreting, talking and listening, so that we readily bind together into larger organisms. The closest ties are related to reproduction and bind families. Looser bonds bind us into businesses, tribes, nations and ultimately the whole human layer of Earth.
Perhaps the defining characteristic of an good organization is that all its components are better off in the organization rather than out of it. The natural course for an element of an organism which feels that it is not getting value for value is to leave.
Personality is partly determined by upbringing. Our genetic heritage is relatively fixed, so that there is little we can do to change our 'hardware' during a lifetime. Nevertheless our minds are capable of storing a vast quantity of operational data which determines how we respond in every situation, what we call our personality. Personality is thus a superposition of natural traits and day to day experience.
We know, for instance, that as babies we are all capable of learning any human language, so that a baby born in any cultural environment will grow up imbued with that culture. On the whole, most people accept their cultural heritage without question. It is the best bet for a good life, to fit in with one's surroundings and learn all the protocols necessary to attract the benefits of living in a complex human society.
All living things die, so that species can only maintain themselves for long periods by reproduction. Life is cyclic. The basic cycle is creation, reproduction, death. Each act of creation is the outcome of an act of reproduction.
Reproduction corrects errors, as does community schooling. The stores of information used in reproduction are carefully curated to maintain their integrity. Additionally, in sexual reproduction, the errors may be cancelled in different assortments of the genes available from both parents. Nevertheless, our reproductive age window is limited. Also, we get old and die despite the fact that there are many error correcting mechanisms within us. Some errors are beyond the reach of the available corrective mechanisms.
This is a necessary constraint on a complex structure. Errors occur because ultimately only an infinitesimal fraction of what happens is computable, that is determinate. So things can go differently, and in a suitable context, this means that things can go wrong. If we are alone and something goes wrong, we are likely to be in trouble. If we are in a community, help is available. In a properly organized society, unlimited health care is available to everybody, so that no matter how badly one is hurt or disabled, the best possible treatment will be provided.
As we noted above, the cells in a multicellular organism differentiate to take on different roles in the nutrition and protection of the whole system. Such structures evolve and remain stable because all the participants are working for their own benefit. This is a network feature, and we emphasise again and again that network structure is indifferent to complexity, so what is true of cells forming a composite organism is also true of people assuming different roles to nurture and protect their human community. A key to self esteem and sanity is to know that one's social role is valued.
7.12 Grace
The existence of the Christian Churches is based on the idea that God rejected humanity at the Fall and we needed to be "redeemed" if we were ever to be admitted to heaven. Genesis describes the human crime and lists the punishments meted out to us by god:
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. 17 And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; 18 Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; 19 In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. . . . 22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: 23 Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. 24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
The writers of the New Testament cast Jesus as the Redeemer, making him both human and divine, and decided that his cruel murder by the Romans should be a sacrifice to the Father, analogous to the animal sacrifices that the Hebrew priests were accustomed to offer to their god. The crucifixion, then, was assumed to have appeased god for the original human crime, opening the possibility of heaven once more to us. The words were placed in Jesus' mouth: He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned (Mark 16:16).
The modern Catholic Catechism lists the effects of baptism the most important of which are:
1263 By Baptism all sins are forgiven, original sin and all personal sins, as well as all punishment for sin. . . .1266 The Most Holy Trinity gives the baptized sanctifying grace, the grace of justification: - enabling them to believe in God, to hope in him, and to love him through the theological virtues; - giving them the power to live and act under the prompting of the Holy Spirit through the gifts of the Holy Spirit; - allowing them to grow in goodness through the moral virtues. Thus the whole organism of the Christian's supernatural life has its roots in Baptism. Catholic Catechism §§ 385-412: The Fall
Sanctifying grace is granted by god to humanity in return for the sacrificial murder of Jesus. It is given to a defective person by baptism, making them once more satisfactory in the eyes of god and qualified for entry into heaven.
This is a comprehensive and well established story for which there is no shred of evidence. There was no fall and there is no need for redemption. The whole raison d'etre of Christianity is a fiction, although the notions of love, service, charity and justice which have become associated with it are beneficial, offset by the psychological damage done to people from childhood on by telling them that they are tared with original sin.
The Christian theological understanding of grace does not exhaust the meaning of the word. I the divine universe we and every other entity are glorious elements of the divine whole, full of natural grace. Here I think of it technically as headroom, colloquially as the capacity for play.
God created the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested. He may have spent the rest day playing with his friends, but the Bible is silent on this. Most of us make a fairly clear distinction between work and play. Work, we might say, is disciplined behaviour aimed at achieving some goal. But this definition might serve equally well for play. So what is the difference?
To deal with this problem, we can imagine a spectrum, running from work to play. Work is the human role that corresponds to the traditional divine work of providence. It is defined by the existence of deterministic processes that must be followed to get the results we need to facilitate our lives. Such procedures, like manufacturing a solar panel, must be performed in a controlled and testable manner so that the completed product does what it is supposed to do. Aquinas, Summa, I, 22, 1: Is providence suitably attributed to God
Near the other end of the spectrum are the imaginative games that children play, dynamically negotiating roles and playing them out, limited only by imagination and sufficient consistency to make an interesting story. We might say that pure play is grace, unnecessary activity performed purely for the pleasure of acting. Some might feel that an omnipotent and omniscient god cannot tell jokes, play games or have fun because it knows too much. This is not the case in the model proposed here. Because the entropy of the world is always increasing, the past, which is the source of all our knowledge, cannot control the future.
The logical extreme of the spectrum in the complete absence of external control on a system of interest. Insofar as it is all that there is, the divine universe meets this criterion, so it may be thought of as pure play limited only by consistency. This book is written in a similar spirit, letting the imagination roam to transfinite dimensions.
In real life, one might define work as what we get paid for. We do it for money or some other tangible benefit. This approach covers a small fraction of the work done by human agents on Earth. More than half the basic work of human survival is voluntary, often motivated by necessity. We maintain our family homes not for cash, but for the living. They are capital goods requiring maintenance, washing clothes and dishes, cleaning, cooking, children off to school and so on, ad infinitum.
Whether paid or voluntary, maintenance is essential for survival, and when it fails in our ageing bodies, death follows. From this point of view, living is work and death comes when the operations of survival can no longer be executed due to accumulated errors.