Scientific theology: a new history of creation
Introduction: life in god
This book outlines a scientific approach to theology and religion. It is built on the assumption that our word is divine, which means that we live in god. God is within us and around us and open to our senses every moment of our lives. This means that we can construct an evidence based scientific theology: every experience is evidence of god. We need no longer try to learn about an invisible god through difficult and unreliable ancient texts.
Scientific theology directs us toward democratic religion that respects human rights, the rule of law, respect for our divine environment and scientific truth. It directs us toward churches whose governance conforms to modern best practice, and whose intellectual products are based on a clear visions of reality. United Nations: Official UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights Home Page
This project is a work in progress. It is drawn from personal experience. I have thought like this for about fifty years since I broke from the Catholic Church and now my daily experience situates my own life within the overall life of God.
The Catholic Church is an imperial and authoritarian implementation of the Christian religion. It was established by the emperor Constantine and the bishops in Nicea and became the offficial religion of the Roman Empire. The Church is constituted on the ancient doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings. In theory at least, the Pope is the most absolute of absolute monarchs, and considered to be infallible. Code of Canon Law 333: The Roman Pontiff, Divine right of kings - Wikipedia
The Bible is historical fiction manufactured by many authors over thousands of years. This book is also work of fiction, a hypothesis, but I would like to think that its factual foundation is at least as reliable as the Bible. Our species has existed living and thinking for about 300 000 years but it is only in the last thousand years or so that we have begun to get a secure intellectual grip on our own nature and the nature of the world. Coyne: Faith vs. Fact, Klein: The Human Career
This book is a report of my thoughts and explorations since I realized that the Church is built on a fundamental error. It is intended to show that it makes sense to identify god and the universe. The root of this idea is that there is no way to differentiate the classical god and the initial singularity. Both are absolutely simple, both are pure action, and both are the source of our selves and our world.
This hypothesis has political consequences. The divine right of kings has long been the central to the political world. The sovereign controls the subjects with the power of life and death. In the absence of effective law divine right as between kings is usually decided in battle. Power is believed to flow from outside the Universe from the top down. The Catholic Church is a monarchy built on the dream that an infallible and omnipotent monarch is god's agent on Earth.
In the divine world power comes from within. Every person is a source of action. The universe works because every element of it, even the smallest, is alive, sharing the divine power which is distributed throughout the universe as quanta of action. We will argue that a society will most probably be stable if wealth and power are distributed evenly throughout the population. This is the practical implementation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Globally we see politics being reduced to business. Greed, lies and unfettered authorities are trampling the Christian message of love. The divine right of senseless violence is enjoying a renaissance. We must work hard to restore love, life and peace.
We move toward heaven on Earth by peaceful cooperation, looking for the divine power that has made the Universe a gentler place, taming the supernovas and black holes to provide the spiritual ingredients for the gentlest and most passionate of lovers' meetings. The path from violence to peace requires that dictators like Stalin, Hitler and Mao be controlled by the superior power of democracy, that is the power of cooperative discovery of the future. .
A primary function of gods and religions is to provide guidance. Unfortunately, if the gods are silent and invisible they cannot help us. We must listen to priests and other human agents. These intermediaries are often self-serving and unreliable. Their theology is often biassed by political considerations. We can no more navigate by an invisible god than we can navigate by invisible stars. Reynolds & Tanner: The Social Ecology of Relgion
We are in need of a visible god that everyone can accept. The most obvious choice is the universe that created us. The universe fulfills all the functions traditionally attributed to gods, creator, sustainer and judge.
If we experience god we can learn god's will by studying events and their consequences. We do this formally and industrially by the systematic collection, testing and interpretation of evidence. The historical application of this method to justice, science, health care and engineering has yielded enormous benefits. For many of us, poverty, disease and pain have faded into the past. Our goal is the universal extension of this success. It brings not only personal comfort but a healthy, wealthy population and cooperative population is good for business, a virtuous circle in stark contrast to the vicious circle built on dictatorship and short sighted selfishness.
This story begins with the ancient conclusion that the power behind everything is pure action. Aristotle came to this conclusion about 330 bce. 1600 years later it was incorporated into Catholic theology by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas used Aristotle's argument to show the existence of a god of pure action, actus purus. From this he went on to derive all the standard properties of god: life, eternity, infinity, omniscience, omnipotence and so on. Metaphysics (Aristotle) - Wikipedia
True to his faith, fortified by inquisitions and crusades, Aquinas placed this god outside the world, contradicting Aristotle. Modern physics sides with Aristotle, the power of the universe lies within. As a consequence authoritarian religions are obsolete and must be replaced.
Here I use Aristotle's idea, understood in the language of modern science, to identify god and the world. Quantum mechanics sees a world of continuous activity. Cosmology based on quantum theory and general relativity reveals a universe of unlimited size and power. The universe revealed by science plays all the traditional roles of the gods. All religions have worked to bring human activity into harmony with the will of god. This task is so much easier now that we can see god wherever we look.
It has taken me a long time to settle into this comfortable groove, but it is here. My story flows through ten chapters:
1: The gods of history
A persistent characteristic of young children is ceaseless questioning. In societies where children are controlled on the principle that they are to be seen but not heard, this behaviour is often suppressed. One adult strategy is to postulate a being, that embodies the answers to all questions and indoctrinate the children accordingly. The Catholic Church led me along this path.
We have had an enormous variety of opinions about what god is, what they do and what they want. A common trait, however, is invisibility. This has led to a Babel of Gods, often in conflict with one another. The result is uncertainty. No current theology can be tested by directly questioning its god. Conflicts in heaven lead to conflicts on earth. Religious differences cause wars and a wide spectrum of lesser evils at the boundaries between incompatible cultures. Rachael Woodlock, Antony Loewenstein, Jane Caro and Simon Smart: Doesn't religion cause most of the conflict in the world?
Many of the ancient gods failed to live up to modern ethical standards. In this they echoed the mentality of the monarchs and warlords who inspired their authors. Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, sometimes advised genocide as he led his Chosen People to their Promised Land. He was upset with Samuel when he failed to kill people Yahweh wanted him to kill. There is an unavoidable element of genocide in every colonial occupation. Samuel 1:15
A first step toward world peace is to agree on a common god based on our common occupation of one planetary habitat. Before we can tackle this question, however, we have to agree on how we are going to decide what to agree on. Here we come to an ancient epistemological dichotomy: the argument from authority versus the argument from experience, the status quo versus the evolving world.
Like many cultures, Ancient Greeks began with very human gods who mated and squabbled like the rest of us, although they possessed various super powers. Greek philosophers, beginning about 500 bce in the time of Parmenides, began to develop more abstract models of god. Parmenides felt that there must be an immortal power ruling the world. This idea continued through Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas and remains central to Catholic dogma 2500 years later. Parmenides - Wikipedia
People have long believed that we must get along with God to survive. In the old days, sacrificing valuable animals was a common way to seek divine favour. Christianity took this practice to the extreme when its god sacrificed their own son to satisfy their pique again after being insulted by the first people. Salvation History - Wikipedia
Here we accept many of the traditional ideas about gods, but reinterpret them in the light of modern science to draw a new picture of divinity. Our central claim is that there is no inconsistency between the classical view of god as pure activity and the teeming complexity of our world.
2: Language: our social bond
We want to talk about god, but many hold that god is ineffable, unspeakable. We can only proceed by the via negativa. This ancient mystical story denies that god and the world have anything in common. Here, of course, given that the Universe is divine, all language is talk about god. We have found, to our joy, that careful scientific studies of the ways of god often provide huge improvements in health and welfare. We find that much divine action is predictable, and can be exploited to construct useful products and techniques like electronics, antibiotics, surgery, agriculture and weather forecasts.
Science has also taught us that to talk about special things we need special languages. Latin and Greek provide thousands of words for life, anatomy and chemicals. These words make it possible to communicate without ambiguity. Naming also helps us to control things. Yahweh knew this when he invited the first people to name all the living creatures. Genesis 2:19-20
God is huge and complex. To find a naming system comprehensive enough to match it we turn to mathematics, following Galileo's intuition that mathematics is the natural language of the Universe. The only limit on mathematics, natural language and god is consistency. We intuitively laugh at things that push the boundaries of sense. The hard core of science is surrounded by the glowing halo of art and humour. Discussing the power of God, Aquinas concludes that god can do everything that does not involve contradiction. This also seems to be the way of the world, triumphs as well as disasters. The world evolves by trying everything. Things that do not work eventually die out by natural selection.Aquinas, Summa I, 25, 3: Is God omnipotent?
3: Creation
God is the creator. We first meet god when they made the world: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. (Genesis 1:1). Stories of creation paint our first theological pictures of god in many cultures. The ancestral creator of Christianity, Yahweh, rules our lives and is easily provoked to anger. So petulant in fact that they severely damaged their beautiful new creation because the first people disobeyed them. Since then many have thought that we are original sinners, bad no matter what. This idea is, of course, stupidly wrong but rulers like the idea that we are all sinners because then we can be treated badly without compunction. Miles: God: A Biography, Thomas Piketty (2020): Capital and Ideology
The mathematical discovery that consistent mathematics has limits opens a formal route to understanding uncertainty and creation in the world. The creative power is within us, exercised every moment of our lives because we are divine personalities. Gödel's incompleteness theorems - Wikipedia
The physics industry, motivated by the political power of nuclear weapons, has spent about a trillion dollars studying creation at its most fundamental level. Their basic technique is to use very expensive machines to arrange energetic collisions between fundamental particles. Their principal discovery is that where ever there is enough energy the world creates an enormous variety of new particles. Energy is the source of creation. Large Hadron Collider - Wikipedia
Creation does not stop with fundamental particles. In the fourteen billion years since the initial initial "big bang" creation has gone on to produce us, the children of stars, galaxies, supernovas, planets and the evolution of life. Science has opened our eyes to this long road from enormous energy to human peace, love and spirituality. We are just beginning. Our species in only 300 000 years old. Earth has billions of years life ahead of it. Other people in other parts of the universe may be billions of years ahead of us, but the universe is so big that we are very unlikely to meet them.
4: The scientific world view
Science is a disciplined attempt to understand ourselves and our world. Science is built on evidence obtained by observation and experiment. Once we know how things work, we can devise strategies to control them. Evolution tells that the fit are selected by surviving long enough to multiply. To be fit is to be able to extract resources for life and reproduction from one's local environment. Evolutionary history of life - Wikipedia
Science revealed the relationships between rats, fleas and the plague. Similar work convinced people that city dwellers, to survive, needed to separate their shit from their drinking water. Now we are learning that we must wean our energy economy off carbon based fuels. In the divine world these insights are messages from god, divine revelations that we learn to read through science.
We seem to be entering a political age of 'post-truth' but this cultural attitude to reality has really been with us for a very long time. Imagination is not only one of our greatest assets, it is also dangerous. Many people have lived and died by fairy stories and wishful thinking. The scientifically illiterate president of the United States has plenty of companions in his believe that the 2020 coronavirus pandemic will end miraculously. By far the biggest lies ever told with the greatest detriment to the human race are the stories about human nature propagated by the Roman Catholic Church. Tom McCarthy: 'It will disappear': the disinformation Trump spread about coronavirus — timeline
Michael J. L. Brown writes in The Conversation:
It’s critical that the broader community learns from the grim experience of scientists when dealing with these [preudoscience and character] attacks. Often scientists failed to appreciate that many public arguments about science are actually political battles, rather than evidence-based discussions. Raw political battle isn’t about seeking truth and reasoned argument. It’s about winning news cycles and elections. Michael J. L Brown: Trump has embraced pseudoscience and its deceptive tactics in a post-truth world
Many theologies, including Christianity, see the world as damaged and imperfect. Our scientific work indicates that it is as perfect as can be within the constraints imposed by consistency. Further, there remains much that can be improved from the human point of view. We have visions of technology that will enable us to live in peace and harmony with the Earth and one another, at least until the Sun engulfs us five billion years hence. Sun - Wikipedia
The principal impediment to the realization of this technology is the self serving effort of politicians with eyes only for power and money. Since it teamed up with the Roman Empire, the Church has done very well out of its fictional view of the world. The only remedy for this lethal perversion is scientific theology, that is theology based on reality, not the dreams of murderous monarchs whose universal instinct is to kill the messengers of reality. Constantine the Great and Christianity - Wikipedia
5: A network model
God is one and the Universe is One. The Universe is both created and bound together by communication between its parts. The foundation of this binding is its divine source. The simplest way to understand this vast system is to apply our intuitive knowledge of communication. Like every creature in the Universe, from fundamental particles to galaxies, we are natural communicators. The last few centuries have seen the science and technology of communication developed to a point where its mathematical foundations may serve as a theory of everything, that is a theology. Claude Shannon: Communication in the Presence of Noise
A network comprises sources and connections. The unit of action in a network is {establish a connection; share information; break the connection}. The sources might be cities, or reservoirs, or people, and the connections may be roads, or pipes or the internet. Information is physical. All information is embodied in matter. Rolf Landauer: Information is a Physical Entity
Practical communication networks are built in layers to make them easier to design, construct and maintain. At the lowest level are the physical layers, signals flowing through wires, fibres or space. The higher layers are software, rather than hardware. The fundamental hardware of the universe is god, the quantum of action. Our human software (sometimes known as the soul) binds a huge collection of atoms into a human being. I am a community of about ten billion billion billion atoms. I am a local image of the vast cooperative unity of the Universe made, as Genesis tells me, in the image of god. Genesis 1:27: So God created mankind in his own image6: Constructing the world
Christianity took the first steps toward constructing the complex Universe out of a structureless God by inventing the Trinity, three persons in the one divinity. Aquinas explains how this works in scholastic terms. Here we put the same general idea into a network context which suggests that every source of information in the Universe is a divine personality. Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 1: Is there procession in god?
When we look at the world, we see a layered structure which begins with fundamental particles. These particles communicate with one another to form more complex systems like atoms, atoms communicate to form molecules, molecules to construct macroscopic objects like ourselves, the Earth, and the Universe. The layered network model represents this structure quite naturally and exploits our intuitive understanding of communication to provide useful insights into the nature of our world. These insights help us to conform to the divine nature and exploit it for our own salvation.
7: Human networks
Like the particles and cells from which we are built, we communicate and combine to form families, villages, towns, cities, and nations to fill the world. Despite the almost continual presence of war, disease and natural disasters, our enormous powers of intellect and creative cooperation have brought us to the point where we are overloading the planet and severely damaging the ecosystems which support us. Tree of life (biology) - Wikipedia
What we collectively think, feel and do is a product of our connections to one another. The network model proposed here provides a language powerful enough to model both the universe and our place with it. People have swapped ideas for hundreds of thousands of years, locally in their own communities and more widely through travel, conquest, writing and art. The internet has now made our communication effectively global and instantaneous, providing a platform to share all human knowledge.
The internet has also revealed to us that there are many people who enjoy spreading falsehood and hurting others under what they suppose to be a cloak of anonymity. Their reasons for dissatisfaction may be many, but much of it seems to derive from ancient fundamentalist beliefs that women are subhuman and that we and the world are defective. They represent a narrow and ignorant past which we must reject if we are to truly appreciate the magnificent system we inhabit.
8. From theology to religion
Science and technology are very closely related, since they form a cycle. Scientists yield knowledge of the world which technologists exploit to make new goods and services. New technologies, in turn, make new scientific investigations possible. With telescopes we learn about the planets and their moons, with microscopes we learn that many diseases are caused by bacteria and viruses. With molecular biology we leart the mechanisms of health and disease and gained the ability to design drugs and vaccines to treat many of our worst ailments.
Physics contributes to engineering and engineering to physics, biology to health care and health care to biology. Theology and religion are also related as science and technology. They feed each other to develop our mental attitudes to each other and the world.
The world has many named religions that come in thousands of churches and varieties, but one has often slipped under the radar. It is the secular, scientific or evidence based religion that I am describing here. It provides the political framework necessary for all other human development. Two very visible manifestations are the United Nations, devoted to peace and human rights, and the World Health Organisation, devoted to human health.
The development of democracy, the rule of law and human rights over the last few hundred years have been religious benefits that remain poorly reflected in theology. Unlike all the other sciences, theology still remains a captive of powerful political organizations like the Roman Catholic Church which take a rather dim view of human rights. This church is far more interested in its own welfare than the welfare of the world. Nothing demonstrates this interest more clearly than its ceaseless efforts to cover up the abuse of children which is inherent in its mission. The sexual aspect of this abuse has been widely publicised, but intellectual abuse by false indoctrination remains largely hidden.
We hope that truly universal (Greek: catholic with a small c) theology will eventually overcome this failing and yield theology and religions that are no longer sectarian but open to all who are prepared to learn about, respect, preserve and improve their divine reality.
9. A theory of peace
Everything human begins with an idea. Ideas are shared through space and time by records like images and writing. The modern answers to our ancient religious problems are combinations of science, democracy and the rule of law, all based in the doctrine of universal human rights.
We explain the creative process of the world using the theory of evolution, which depends on variation and selection. Variation arises because the world is too complex to be completely controlled. Selection arises because the possibilities of life are infinitely greater than the resources available to implement all the possibilities. This creates a competition for resources which selects those organisms better able to acquire and utilize the resources necessary for life and reproduction.
This situation is a cause of war. From a practical point of view, it may be better to die fighting for resources rather than to die passively of starvation. The alternative to fighting is to share resources, use them more efficiently and created new resources by exploiting the vast quantities of solar energy which read Earth every day.
These solutions are implemented in many places but are always under threat by three tendencies: for some people to use power to exploit others; for power to beget power; and for power to lead to corruption and ultimately the breakdown of the system. We have seen many civilizations fall by failing to understand the limitations imposed upon them by reality. They failed to respond warnings from the divine milieu. The prophets of old did their best to steer their lords in the right direction. Modern scientific prophets have a similar task, trying to warn governments of the dangers inherent in social inequality, overexploitation of nature and failure to pay attention to emerging diseases. Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel
10. Social software
Modern peaceful societies are governed by the rule of law. In principle we are all equal before the law. Justice must be blind to personalities. The foundations of this rule are the human symmetries expressed in Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Universal Declaration of Human Rights - Wikipedia (link above)
In democratic countries laws are generally made through parliamentary debate, by talking rather than fighting. The initial input to debate is usually drafted by lawyers looking for words which will define a political goal without loopholes and unwanted side effects. Their task is similar to the design of software for computing machines and networks.
Writing good software is not easy, which is one reason why the laws of the average democratic country are something of a self contradictory mess, employing a huge overhead of expensive lawyers to decide issues that should ideally have been dealt with explicitly by the legislation. Good law, like good computer software, needs to be designed to use efficient algorithms and to catch every possible error so that processes does not fail.
Every design effort needs to begin with a clear expression of the task to be achieved and systematic exploration methods available to hit the target. The clues to good design are built into the world we enjoy. We can see that the creative power of the Universe has taken it from a gas of photons to its present magnificent complexity via a network process evolving over 14 billion years. Our scientific exploration enables to imitate the creative power that brought us into being.
Conclusion: an open source manifesto
Many hands make light work, we say. Many people can only work together if they have a common goal and the methodology and communication necessary to work efficiently in parallel. Our chances of building heaven on Earth are improved if everybody sees a common goal. Our goal is to look after ourselves. This includes maintaining and enhancing the ecosystem services provided by all the other species and processes on the planet.
At present almost all governments are plagued by corruption. The ruling classes are in it for themselves and find it very difficult to see the big picture. Primitive organizations like the Roman Catholic Church are completely blinded to the big picture by their radical misunderstanding of the nature of reality. The salvation of the world requires that we overcome this falsehood. We need to teach ourselves to appreciate the true god by observing it with careful precision, in every situation from nuclear physics to falling in love.
This ideal can only be achieved by transparency. The old monarchical system where a single often defective personality secretly sets the conditions of life for millions of others can be destroyed by bringing its deficiencies into the open. Once the problems are clear, work on the solutions can begin. The open source software paradigm provides us with an example of collaborative problem solving. We would do well to introduce it into government.