Table of Contents
Preface: is the Universe divine?
Chapter 1: The Gods of History
Chapter 4: A scientific world view
Chapter 6: Creating the divine world
This essay is dedicated
to all people,
past and present,
who have been harmed
spiritually, mentally or physically
by the Catholic Church
or its agents:
invaded, murdered, burnt, tortured,
raped, abused, molested,
beaten,
deceived, deprived, disrespected, denied or abandoned.
Personally, I sadly regret having been systematically indoctrinated as a small child with a heavy load of false and politically motivated fiction. Matt Dinan (2021): Maxima Culpa: Catholic complicity and Canadian residential schools
Abstract
Most current theologies are based on the assumption that God is outside the world, an invisible mysterious other. It is impossible to know something we cannot see, so we have a jungle of arbitrary and competing theologies.
This book assumes that God and the Universe are identical. On this hypothesis, the Universe performs all the roles traditionally assigned to God: creator, guide and judge.
If the Universe is divine all our experience is experience of God so theology can become a real evidence based science. Since there is but one God, true knowledge of God will put us on the path to the unification of theology, as science has unified other disciplines like physics and biology.
The definitive description of the classical Christian God is given by Thomas Aquinas in the first part of his Summa Theologica. This God is pure actuality (actus purus) and absolutely simple (omnino simplex). How are we to reconcile the classical God with the enormously complex Universe we inhabit?
The answer proposed here begins with the mathematical theory of fixed points, which establishes the conditions under which we find fixed points in dynamical systems. From this point of view, a god of pure simple dynamism can consistently generate the fixed points which we identify as the world we see. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is an ancient precursor of this process.
We follow this trail from the physical fixed points of quantum mechanical wave functions to a picture of the Universe as a whole modelled as a transfinite network of computers.
Cover image: Michelangelo's Pieta, St Peter's Cathedral, Rome. Image: original: Stanislav Traykov
Modifications: Cornischong at Luxembourgish Wikipedia
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license.
Matt Dinan (2021), Maxima Culpa: Catholic complicity and Canadian residential schools, ' “Residential schools,” the Canadian euphemism for boarding schools that separated Indigenous children from their families and communities, were designed to take away Indigenous language and culture—“to kill the Indian in the child.” These schools existed from the late nineteenth century until 1997, and about 70 percent of them were operated by Roman Catholic missionary orders and dioceses. Residential schools were not only explicitly imperialist in their aims, but, unsurprisingly, were the sites of much emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. back |