Scientific theology: a new history of creation
Chapter 3: The Creation
1: Genesis
2: The Aristotelian world of Thomas Aquinas
3: Simplicity versus omniscience
4: Is the Universe identical with God's ideas?
5: Logic and principles
6: The modern universe
7: Intelligent design
8: The creation of Christianity
9: The origin of species
10: The Trinity: one to three
11: From Trinity to universe
12: Control versus creation
13. Action, energy, information and spirit
14: My creation
3.1: Genesis
Christianity, as we know it, started with the first words of the Book of Genesis:
1:1: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. . . .
[then the six days of creation.]
2:1: Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. 2: And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. 3: And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made (Gn 1:1 - 2:3). Genesis
In my childhood, about 3000 years after this was written, we rested on the seventh day in memory of God's work. God was a fast worker in those days and needed the rest. Today we believe it has taken the divine Universe some 14 billion years to go from its eternal primordial simplicity to the magnificent structure we now see.
This scientific dating took a while to emerge. When was the creation? How long did it take? The first calculations were taken from the Bible. A comprehensive estimate published by by Archbishop James Ussher in 1650 arrived at 4004 bce; other authors, including Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton, arrived at similar dates. Ussher chronology - Wikipedia
At the opposite end of the scale, Aristotle thought that the world and its first unmoved mover are eternal. This was one of the reasons for the condemnation of Aristotle's writings by the medieval Church, which maintained that the world began at the creation. Condemnations of 1210-1277 - Wikipedia
Modern estimates of the age of the Earth began with Nicolas Steno and are based on geological evidence. Steno first stated four principles of stratigraphy:
the law of superposition: ". . . at the time when any given stratum was being formed, all the matter resting upon it was fluid, and, therefore, at the time when the lower stratum was being formed, none of the upper strata existed;"
the principle of original horizontality: "Strata either perpendicular to the horizon or inclined to the horizon were at one time parallel to the horizon;"
the principle of lateral continuity: "Material forming any stratum were continuous over the surface of the Earth unless some other solid bodies stood in the way;"
the principle of cross-cutting relationships: "If a body or discontinuity cuts across a stratum, it must have formed after that stratum." Nicolas Steno - Wikipedia
These principles enabled geologists to judge the relative ages of geological strata. The next step was to assign absolute ages to the strata. This was made possible by uniformitarianism, the assumption that the rate of geological processes in the past was approximately the same as it is now. Observations of contemporary rates of erosion and deposition provide an estimate of the times it took to deposit or erode ancient strata. Applying the uniformitarian method developed in Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology Charles Darwin estimated that it would have taken 300 million years to erode the Weald, a chalk deposit in southern England. Darwin liked this result because it allowed plenty of time time for the slow evolution of species. Charles Lyell - Wikipedia
The physicist William Thompson thought Darwin's estimate was much too high and set out to use the cooling of the Earth as a time measure. He arrived at a much lower figure than Darwin, but his method was doomed to fail because radioactivity had yet to be discovered. Since that time, nuclear science has given us the means to estimate the age of the Earth with considerable precision. Matthew Rognstad: Lord Kelvin's Heat Loss Model as a Failed Scientifc Clock, Uranium-lead dating - Wikipedia
Modern observations and calculations place the age of the Earth at about 4.5 billion years. The Earth formed from the same cloud of material as the Sun. The Sun is about the same age as the Earth. The Sun lies toward the outer edge of the Milky Way galaxy and completes an orbit of the centre of the galaxy about once every 200 million years. Age of the Earth - Wikipedia, David Taylor: The Life and Death of Stars
Recent cosmological observations and calculations based on Einstein's general theory of relativity show that the Universe itself began a little under 14 billion years ago. Age of the universe - Wikipedia
Back to top3.2: The Aristotelian world of Thomas Aquinas
Traditional Western theology is principally a product of the Christian Churches. My dream is to replace the model of God developed by Thomas Aquinas based on the work of Aristotle with a model based on quantum mechanics as a theory of communication and computation. I am trying to develop a scientific hypothesis which identifies the traditional conception of God with the Universe as we know it.
The Bible, has very little to say about the nature of God. Almost all we have on this subject is the work of Greek Philosophers beginning in the time of Parmenides and culminating in the works of Plato and Aristotle. This ultimately became the foundation of medieval Scholastic philosophy and theology.
Aristotle begins with the idea that there must be an eternal immutable substance, as proposed by Plato. This form alone is not sufficient to cause motion however, so he proposes that the essence of this substance must be actuality rather than formality. After discussing more details of the first mover he concludes:
Such, then, is the first principle upon which depend the sensible universe and the world of nature. And its life is like the best which we temporarily enjoy. It must be in that state always (which for us is impossible), since its actuality is also pleasure. . . . .. If, then, the happiness which God always enjoys is as great as that which we enjoy sometimes, it is marvellous; and if it is greater, this is still more marvellous. Nevertheless it is so. Moreover, life belongs to God. For the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and the essential actuality of God is life most good and eternal. We hold, then, that God is a living being, eternal, most good; and therefore life and a continuous eternal existence belong to God; for that is what God is. Aristotle: (Metaphysics Book XII, 1072b14 sqq.)
Aquinas built his theology in the world described by Aristotle. By modern standards, Aristotle’s physical world was tiny. He had one dynamical principle, the theory of potency and act, and knew very little about how things worked beyond the interaction of four causes, matter, form, agent and end.
His mental world was much bigger, comparable to ours. His work is still alive in modern philosophy. He began with treatises on logic and the interpretation of texts. He then went on to speculate about space and time, the heavens, life and death, ethics, rhetoric, poetry and politics.
Christian speculative theology reached its most complete expression in the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, written between 1265 and 1274. Aquinas remains a core theologian in the modern Catholic Church. His presentation of God in the first part of the Summa is the starting point for this work. His principal contribution was to introduce Aristotelian philosophy to Catholic theology to produce a first draft of scientific theology which remains official in the Catholic Church.
Much of Aquinas’ theological argument is built on the six Aristotelian ideas listed above: matter, form, agent, end, potency and act.
The codification of Christian doctrine in the Nicene creed established the dogmatic root of the Christian faith: I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of Heaven and Earth. Nicene Creed - Wikipedia
Although belief in God is an article of faith, Aquinas goes on to prove the existence of God at the beginning of the Summa. The existence of God is obvious to the faithful, since the eixtence of the world implies the existence of the creator of the world. His proofs are more directed to showing that the world is not self sufficient, and that therefore the God which creates and sustains the world is outside the world and invisible to us. Aquinas offers five proofs for the existence of God. The first proof is best known, and repeats in detail Aristotle's argument for the existence of a first unmoved mover.
The firstand more obvious is taken from motion and explains both the relationship of potentia to actus and concludes with a definition of God: actus purus, pure action:
It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, . . . For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. . . . Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. . . . Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God. Thomas Aquinas, Summa, I, 2, 3
Aristotle believed that the unmoved mover is part of the cosmos. Aquinas, true to his faith, concludes that God is other than the world.
Having established the existence of a God, Aquinas goes on to discuss its nature. Here he notes an ancient opinion, which became a fundamental principle of traditional theology, that God is so far beyond our comprehension that we are completely unable to understand it. We cannot, therefore, say what God is, but only what it is not, denying to God inappropriate properties such as composition and motion. This via negativa, or apophatic theology owes its origin to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Corrigan & Harrington (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
Aquinas then goes on to derive all the other traditional attributes of God from pure actuality. These include perfection, goodness, infinity, omnipresence, immutability, eternity, unity, knowledge, power and beatitude. Aquinas, Summa: I, 4, 1: Is God perfect?
The story of creation in Genesis is simple and succinct, and has been elaborated by many authors since. Here our starting point is the description of God and creation provided by Thomas Aquinas in the first part of the Summa.
The Christian God, like Aristotle's unmoved mover, is eternal, having no beginning or end, existing outside time. Creation by an eternal God provides a logically satisfying explanation for the origin of the world. Given the axiom that nothing comes from nothing, the fact that there is something suggests that there has always been something, although in the context of eternity, the meaning of always is hard to understand. The question of when and how it all began is effectively dismissed.
The Fall of humanity is described in Genesis and blamed, to some extent. on Satan (in the form of a serpent) who is a fallen angel, one of the demons, whose current role is to lead people astray. The myth of the Fall provided a raison d'etre for Christianity and a foundation for the Christian History of Salvation which runs from the creation and the Fall to Redemption by the murder of the divine Jesus of Nazareth to the final Apocalyptic revelation of the last act of God's plan. God would repair the damage they did to their creation to punish humanity for their sin, people would regain their bodies, a last judgement would separate the good from the bad, and creation would settle into a future where the good enjoy an eternity of bliss in the sight of God and the bad an eternity of pain with the demons in Hell. Salvation History - Wikipedia
This story has very little scientific basis, but has had a massive and often detrimental impact on human history for the last few millennia. The story I wish to tell here is implicitly a critique of this fictional history.
This approach also provides a cover story for a lot of the magical leaps in theology: it is beyond your understanding, so just believe. Here we cannot accept this approach. The history of physics is a long story of impenetrable barriers to understanding being broken by new insights, and the notion that the world is in effect the mind of God suggests that the world itself had to understand how to build itself, and our own understanding must follow this path.
There are two theological paradoxes that have long been a mystery to me. The hypothesis that the world is divine renders them more intelligible. The first: how can completely simple divinity design, create and control every detail of our complex universe from beginning to end? The second: how can a divinity which is the fulness of being, that is occupying the whole space of possibility, create a universe which is other than itself?
Back to top3.3: Simplicity versus omniscience
A principal consequence of the hypothesis proposed here is that we can see and experience God so that theology may join the mainstream of empirical science. Moving in the opposite direction, Aquinas reinforces the difference between God and the universe by arguing that God is absolutely simple (omnino simplex). He does this by going through a number of the categories of complexity recognized in the philosophy he derived from Aristotle.
God is not a body, that is not spatially extended (and so potentially divisible); does not comprises matter and form; essence and existence (esse) are identical in God: Deus est ipsa deitas; God is not an element of any genus; there are no accidents in God. Having exhausted these categories of composition Aquinas concludes that God is absolutely simple, and that God in no way enters into composition with other things. Aquinas, Summa: I, 3, 1: Is God is a body?, Thomas Ainsworth (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy): Form vs. Matter
Most of the Gods of history have been invisible. Many people seem to have believed for a very long time that there are invisible forces in the world operating behind the scenes. This idea first appeared in myth and poetry and began to take a more scientific and philosophical form in ancient Greece, culminating in the work of Plato. Plato proposed existence of a fully real immaterial spiritual world which evolved in Christianity into the ideas of the universe in the mind of God. Aquinas, Summa I, 15, 1: Are there ideas?
In the previous chapter we have briefly discussed modern ideas of representation and communication. These are based around two statements: information is physical; and information is represented by marks of some kind. These statements are embodied in this text you are reading. It comprises physical marks, which may be printed on paper or represented on a computer screen by coloured pixels. If God as absolutely simple, it is, according to Aquinas, not only unphysical, but contains nothing that we could understand to be marks capable of encoding information. If the Universe is divine, on the other hand, it is its own representation of itself, but then we have to produce a new understanding of divine simplicity, whch we will reserve for chapter 5. Aquinas, Summa, I, 3, 7: Is God altogether simple?
The cybernetic principle of requisite variety tells us that a complex system can only be controlled by a system of equal or greater entropy or complexity. This establishes a relationship between the number of marks and the amount of information they can encode. Gregory Chaitin has shown that this principle is a consequence of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem:
Gödel's theorem may be demonstrated using arguments having an information-theoretic flavour. In such an approach it is possible to argue that if a theorem contains more information than a given set of axioms, then it is impossible for the theorem to be derived from the axioms. In contrast with the traditional proof based on the paradox of the liar, this new viewpoint suggests that the incompleteness phenomenon discovered by Gödel is natural and widespread rather than pathological and unusual. Gregory J. Chaitin: Gödel's Theorem and Information, W Ross Ashby (1964): An Introduction to Cybernetics
One of the simplest measures in physics and information theory is entropy which is just a count of the number of marks or states in a system Requisite variety tells us that one system can control another only if its entropy is equal to or greater than the entropy of the system to be controlled. Entropy - Wikipedia
Traditional theology maintains that the combination of the divine omniscience and omnipotence gives God the ability to completely know and control every detail of the future. Requisite variety invalidates this claim. Insofar as God is understood to be absolutely simple, its entropy is zero, and so its powers of knowledge and control are absent.
Back to top3.4: Is the Universe identical with God's ideas?
A common understanding of God's creation of the Universe is that God is like an architect or builder who had a detailed plan of creation in mind before they started creating. This understanding is related to Plato's theory of forms, which sees the definite features of the world resulting from participation in an invisible world of eternal forms. The world is a rather degraded copy of these forms, but they are the source of the true knowledge available to philosophers. Allegory of the cave - Wikipedia
Aquinas places these forms in the mind of God and calls them ideas. These ideas are the design which God used to guide the creation of the world. Since God is absolutely simple, everything in God is understood to be identical to the divine nature. In the previous section we have discussed the difficulty of encoding a plan of an enormously complex universe in a being with no means of representing information. Here we face another difficulty which arises from the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accidents. Aquinas, Summa I, 15, 1: Are there ideas?
In humans, although our intellect is considered to be part of our substance, particular items of intellectual knowledge are accidents whose presence depends upon the intellectual history of the person, whether they are a historian or a mathematician for instance. In God, however, simplicity demands that everything is part of their substance, including the ideas, which are therefore real. Since God is the pure act, the realization of all possibility, it would seem that there is no room for a real Universe outside God, since there is a perfect real copy of the universe in God's mind. This suggests an easy solution: let us assume that out universe is identical to God. We will discuss the relationship between simplicity and complexity further in chapter 5.
3.5: Logic and principles
Aquinas sees scientific theology as a deductive enterprise, beginning with principles either per se nota like the principle of contradiction, or revealed in sacred scripture. Often the meaning of the scriptures is not very clear, and the Churches reserve to themselves the right to decide what the true meaning meaning must be. Aquinas uses the Aristotelian principles and the official interpretations of the scripture as his starting points and deduces his conclusions from these. Many of his conclusions, like the properties of angels, cannot be verified. Where possible, however, he takes experience into account, most notably in his first proof for the existence of God, which begins with the observation that things move. His understanding of thought and intellect is obviously based on his own undertanding of his own genius. Aquinas, Summa, I, 1, 2: Is sacred doctrine is a science?
From a modern point of view, the trouble with this approach to science begins with his first proof for the existence of God. The key to Aquinas’ first proof is Aristotle’s axiom: no potential being can actualize itself. Modern physics rejects this axiom. Potential motion is just as real as actual motion, as we see in the motion of a pendulum. At the top of its swing, the bob has gravitational potential energy. As it swings down, this potential is converted to kinetic energy. On the upward swing the opposite happens, and in a frictionless world, this cycle of transformation from potential to kinetic energy and back would continue forever.
The world is in effect its own first mover. I will discuss below how quantum mechanics explains that energy is everywhere and is accompanied by ceaseless motion. As a result, Aquinas’ first argument for the existence of God fails.
Aquinas's proof relies very closely on Aristotle's argument for a first unmoved mover, which also depends on the axiom that no potential can actualize itself and concludes that the first mover, like Aquinas's God, is pure action. While Aquinas, true to his faith, assumes God to be a creator outside the Universe, Aristotle, who considered the Universe to be eternal, places the mover in the highest heaven, and understood the motion to be transmitted down through the celestial spheres to Earth.
Aquinas, on the other hand, see the presence and action of God to be everywhere at all times. This view is closer to the modern physical view, which postulates an energetic vacuum at the root of the system, driving it, in effect, from below. The vacuum is considered to be a product of the big bang, the very rapid emergence of the universe within the initial singularity. In this picture, the initial singularity, which outside space and time and therefore something like the traditional God, is considered to have have been at an infinite temperature and to contain all the energy of the universe. Since temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the particles in a system and the initial singularity stands all alone, this does not make much sense. Temperature - Wikipedia
Logic and mathematics have come a long way since the days of Aristotle and Aquinas. The ancient Greeks felt that mathematics was somehow a key to understanding the world. Galileo stated this belief very clearly and since then must of our fundamental physical understanding of the world is best expressed in mathematical form. In the major theories of quantum mechanics and relativity and then in the millions of applications of these theories to details of the nature of the world, things like superfluidity, superconductivity, transistors , lasers and so on and on. Wikiquote: Galileo Galilei
Beginning in the nineteenth century mathematics began to reflect upon itself and questions were raised about what it means and how far can it go. Two developments motivated this interest, one related to infinitesimals and the other to infinity. Newton introduced calculus to the study of dynamics. To find the instantaneous value of the velocity of a body, one takes the limit of distance divided by time as the magnitude of each variable approaches zero? Does this make sense. The consensus if that the limiting process is valid if we represent both distance and time by real numbers. Whatever we may think about the mathematical issues, from an engineering point of view calculus works and is an essential aid to the study of motion. Calculus - Wikipedia
It has been known since antiquity, motivated by the Pythagorean theorem, that some quantities, like the length of the diagonal of a unit square (the square root of 2) cannot be represented by a rational number, that is a fraction of one integer divided by another. This led to the invention of the real numbers which filled the gaps between the rational numbers and helped to make sense of calculus. The real number can give a numerical address to every point in a continuous line, and Georg Cantor sought to know how many such numbers there are, that is the cardinal of the continuum. His search to find this number led him to invent set theory and the transfinite numbers. We assume that the cardinal of the set of natural numbers is infinite, since we can always add another one. This cardinal, Cantor called the first transfinite number which he represented by the symbolℵ0 and proved that there was an unending hierarchy of even greater transfinite numbers ℵ1, ℵ2, ℵ3 . . . .. Cantor's theorem - Wikipedia
But, does this make sense? After all it seems unlikely that there are enough atoms in the universe to represent even the first transfinite cardinal, ℵ0. The solution to this problem, invented by David Hilbert, is called formalism. Let us divorce mathematics from the physical world and imagine mathematics as a game played with symbols. The only limit we place on mathematical creativity is that the symbolic structures it comes up with are logically consistent. Cantor's theory seemed to pass this test so it could be admitted to mathematics despite the misgivings of some who thought that only God could be actually infinite. Formalism (mathematics) - Wikipedia, Michael Hallett: Cantorian Set Theory and Limitation of Size
Formalism seemed to suggest that there was no limit to mathematics so that every mathematical problem would have a solution. This was not to be. Kurt Gö and Alan Turing showed that there were limits to consistent mathematics. Some problems cannot be decided; some functions cannot be computed. Kurt Gödel - Wikipedia, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem
From the point of view taken here these two discoveries place a logical limit on the power of divinity. Aquinas argued that the only limit on Gods omnipotence is that they can do anything that does not involve a contradiction. This suggests that it is not possible for a divinity to have the total deterministic control of the universe claimed by some traditional theologians. There are limits to God's providential control of the Universe and it would seem that the same limits apply when we guess that the universe is divine. As quantum theory demonstrates, there is uncertainty in the real world. This uncertainty opens the way for the the divine universe to create itself through evolution, as we shall see in chapter 6. Aquinas, Summa I, 25, 3: Is God omnipotent?, Aquinas, Summa, I, 22, 3: Does God have immediate providence over everything?
3.6: The modern universe
Our current understanding of the large scale structure of the Universe is based on Einstein's general theory of relativity and astronomical observations, particularly of the cosmic microwave background. Cosmic microwave background - Wikipedia
The central pillar of general relativity is the classical idea that the universe is completely independent of any frame of reference we might use to measure it. In other words, the classical world is invariant under changes of viewpoint. Anybody anywhere in the Universe moving in any way will see the same Universe. All they have to know is how to compensate for the spacetime interval between themselves and what they are looking at. This is what general relativity does. When we look at a galaxy billions of light years away moving away from us at nearly the velocity of light general relativity enables us to transform what we actually see into what we would see if we were close to the galaxy moving along with it.
From Einstein's point of view, space-time is not a fixed background framework for the rest of the world. It is dynamic, probably one of the earliest and simplest layers in the dynamics of the Universe. Astronomical observations tell us the the Universe is expanding as time goes by. So, looking back through time, we see that the Universe was smaller in the past. Mathematical analysis of the general theory indicates that there was a point where the Universe had no structure at all. Space-time did not exist. It does not make sense to talk about before this initial singularity because there was no time and so no before. We might safely conclude that whatever came "before" (ie caused) it was eternal. Hawking & Ellis: The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time
There seems to be no formal distinction between the classical Christian God and the initial singularity: both are structureless sources of the Universe. Both also exist independently of time: they are eternal. At this initial point the hypothesis that the Universe is divine is consistent with the Catholic model of God published by Aquinas. Aquinas Summa, Is The simultaneously-whole and perfect possession of interminable life a good definition of eternity?
The eternity of the traditional God leads to a problem for Aquinas when we come to deal with the life of God. Life is self motion, says Aristotle. Motion is the transition from potential to actual. But he and Aquinas both agree that the unmoved mover, that is God, is pure action, so how can it move? Aquinas answers, as we have seen in chapter 1, that in spiritual beings like God there is a second form of motion, from actuality to actuality. The eternity of the classical God is consistent with the notion that there are no discernible events in God.
As a matter of fact, time goes by, inevitably. If the Universe is to be divine, we must understand how time can be an attribute of God. Time flows within and alongside every life. For each of us, our time is divided into past, present and future. We can only go forward in time, not back. The idea of time going backwards makes sense in some parts of physics, but not for us. As time goes by, things happen, or as things happen, time goes by. Locally, time orders events.
We mark time by events which act like the ticks of a clock. We measure an interval by the number of ticks from beginning to end. Intervals may be short, like microseconds, or longer, like days, years, or lifetimes. We might think of the life of the Universe as one big interval made of an infinity of smaller intervals. We may understand each tick of time as a quantum of action
Motion in the Universe, which we take to be the life of God, defines the relationship between action and energy. In physics, energy is the time rate of action. One of the ticking devices we use to measure time is the pendulum, to be found in old clocks. A pendulum works by changing the potential energy of the mass at rest at the top of its swing to the kinetic energy of motion at the bottom of its swing, and back to potential energy on the other side. Aristotle thought that no potential could actualize itself, but the pendulum shows otherwise. Potential and kinetic energy are exactly equivalent. From Aquinas' point of view, swing of a pendulum is a motion from actuality to actuality. The nomenclature is confusing, but the reality is clear. Modern physics is consistent with Aquinas' explanation of the life of God.
From this discussion, we might conclude that the first step in creation is the emergence of time and energy from the pure actuality of the classical God, which we take to be identical to the initial singularity, a quantum of action.
Time itself seems to have no special structure. What makes times (and places) different is what is happening in a particular interval of space-time. Physics tells us that the smallest possible event is measured by the quantum of action, measured numerically by Planck's constant. h. The execution of a quantum of action is the minimum tick in the Universe. Space-time and all the events in the universe are pixellated in quanta of action. Planck constant - Wikipedia
Ordinary events in the human world involve huge numbers of quanta of action. When we look at the world, we see that large events are networks of smaller events. As we watch a house burn down, we can see the macroscopic effect of huge numbers of atoms of inflammable material combining with oxygen and releasing energy.
The past is fixed, history. We only know history, however, by durable things like documents and carvings that were created in the past and still exist in our present. We have learnt a lot about the history of the Universe by observing the photons of the cosmic background radiation. These photons were created nearly fourteen billion years ago, about 380 thousand years after the Universe began to expand. They have been travelling to us through space-time ever since. Because they are moving at the speed of light their clocks are stopped from the point of view of any observer. More particularly, from a quantum mechanical point of view, the quantum phase of photons does not advance between their point of creation and their point of annihilation so they act as memories of the past state that created them.
We understand the creation of new fixed points in the divine dynamics as the breaking of symmetry. We understand time to be the first break in the timeless symmetry of the initial singularity. In the layered network model, as we shall see, the symmetries of lower layers underlie the layers above them. So we understood the symmetry of timeless action be broken by the creation of energy and time, which assume to be the first layer of the universal process.
Energy is conserved, which means that at any moment the sum of potential and kinetic energy remains constant. The most obvious potential in everyday life is the gravitational potential created by the Earth which keeps us glued to Earth's surface. As we climb a hill, the chemical energy in our food is converted into gravitational potential. If we fall we lose potential energy as we come closer to Earth while gaining kinetic energy as our velocity increases. Gravitation, it seems, determines the overall structure of the universe. One of our pressing questions, then, is how does gravitation relate to divinity?
3.7: Intelligent design
We represent the events of times past by histories and our knowledge comes from studying such histories, a record, for instance, of the social behaviour of chimpanzees. Scientific advances, on the whole, are the product of carefully contrived, patient and recorded observations, that is historical records. We cannot see the future. Such knowledge as we have of the future comes from our knowledge of the past, and is far from certain. The past is a guide to the future, but as the model developed here suggests, it cannot control it completely.
We cannot change the past, but as time goes by we can change how we represent it and understand it. This book is a history of my experience of sixty years in the theological milieu of the Roman Catholic Church. The relevant ticks in this story are the insights that occurred to me as I tried (and failed) to make sense of the Catholic history of salvation.
I have come to realize that these insights, like all other events, are acts of creation. A unique entity comes to be. This creativity is built into the divine Universe, not infused from outside as many of the old timers thought. Bit by bit I have seen that Catholic theology is a product of a long gone age that needs revision. The Catholic claim that the truth was established once for all time does not fit a creative Universe. It is an error introduced by concentration on the eternity rather than the life of God. This error may have been motivated by thoughtful people seeking peace in troubled times. It may also have been created by the powers that be seeking to consolidate their privileged position.
I fell away from the Catholic Church by denying its fundamental premise: that God lives in an eternal world, outside time. The Church's reaction to my opinion was quite strong. I was sacked. But I remained convinced that there is a fundamental problem in Catholic theology: how do we reconcile the eternity and the life of God? This book is my answer, rather scrappy but, I think, pointing in the right direction.
My mind has evolved by variation and selection. I have probably imagined millions of theological ideas by now, and a few of them have made enough sense to me to include in this story. They have made sense because they have fitted in with my view of the world. This image is the product 75 years of life experience and many thousands of books, articles and conversations.
My story is very much like that of anybody else who sets out to write a book. One takes a large body of experience, research and thought and tries to sculpt it into something interesting (and perhaps useful) that will attract readers. As the work progresses, ideas change and the texts gets rearranged, parts deleted and new bits written. Hopefully sculpting something like the product initially dreamt of.
One might like to call this process intelligent design, although this may not be exactly what the proponents of intelligent design have in mind when they use it to attack evolution by natural selection. An early version of the argument from intelligent design is Aquinas' fifth way to prove the existence of God:
The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God. Aquinas Summa I, 2, 3: Does God exist?
Thomas knew nothing of evolution, and one can imagine that, as he was true to his faith, he thought that God created the world exactly as it is in six days, without any mistakes or second thoughts. He thought this possible because his God is omnipotent and omniscient. Yet anybody who has designed anything, no matter how intelligent they may be, rarely achieves perfection at their first try. A brief look at history shows that products evolve, no matter how smart their initial inventors. Few (if any) remain as they were when they first left the drawing board. Human intelligence is clearly not equal to the imagined intelligence of the classical God.
Human designs proceed in a very evolutionary way from generation by generation, often making incremental improvements, sometimes becoming extinct, sometimes beginning whole new lines of development. We can see this process at work in the history of any technology from railways through vibrators to computers. History of rail transport - Wikipedia, Good Vibrations Antique Vibrator Museum, History of computing hardware - Wikipedia
The evolution of ideas follows a similar path. We have yet to get to a position where we have the last word on anything. It is very unlikely that we ever will. Every new discovery seems to ask more questions than it answers. Robert Crotty (2012): Three Revolutions: Three Drastic Changes in Interpreting the Bible
Back to top3.8: The creation of Christianity
The emergence of Christianity serves as a paradigm of creation. The lesson to be learnt here is that there is no pure knowledge. Evolution rewards what works which is not necessarily what we would expect an intelligent and compassionate god to do. Many religions separate the world into a good god and a bad devil. By assuming that the world is divine, we mingle the good and bad we experience in one being. The random element in evolution will provide us with an explanation of evils, such as our tendency to kill one another.
Although scientifically Christianity is significantly wrong, it's political power has made it the dominant religion on Earth. This is has not always been a good thing. It received this power in the 4th century CE when the emperor Constantine saw that it was the best candidate to improve religious harmony in his empire.
Theology and religion define the basic culture of our survival and wellbeing. Their value to us is political, since our lives depend almost completely on cooperation. We are inclined to see evolution as pure competition, but you cannot have competition without cooperation. It is through cooperation that competing structures are constructed. The organization and presentation of the Olympic Games, for instance, probably costs far more than the preparation of the athletes.
Christianity evolved from the religion recorded in the Hebrew Bible. We can imagine that the Hebrew religion itself was a descendent of a family of religions developed over the millions of years that our genus Homo has existed on Earth. The developers of Christianity interpreted the old Hebrew story very skilfully to set the scene for their own history of salvation. They provided a happy ending for a situation that probably looked quite grim to them during the Roman occpation of Palestine. We might say that Christianity is a new species of religion derived from Judaism by a series of mutations. Although it started very small, it now has about 100 times as many adherents as its parent.
The authors of Christianity took advantage of the Hebrew notion of the Messiah by casting Jesus of Nazareth in that role. They made Jesus both divine and human so coupling humanity to divinity to create a concrete human revelation of God to replace the old abstract and invisible version. This was something of a disappointment to those who thought the messiah would be a powerful military figure come to free Israel from the occupying Romans. Subsequent history shows, however, that it was a brilliant move. Messiah - Wikipedia
The Christians also increased the attraction of their religion by introducing the Holy Family, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. By bringing the Hebrew God into a domestic situation they softened their image. While still prepared to have their Son murdered to give themself satisfaction for the original human sin, the Trinitarian God was also able to project themself as the loving Son of a beautiful mother. The Holy Family, particularly Mary and Jesus, has inspired inspired thousands of Christian artists. Mary, the grieving mother holding their tortured Son's dead body (the Pietá) became a common and very moving image. Catacomb of Priscilla - Wikipedia
Christianity attracted a large proportion of the Mediterranean intelligentsia, and they produced an enormous literature as they explored the implications of Christianity and its relationship to their world. The dominant philosophical traditions in the early days of Christianity were descended from Plato. Plato's theory of a separate formal or spiritual world fitted nicely with Christian cosmology. Platonic ideas became the first theoretical foundations of Christianity. Patrologia Latina - Wikipedia, Patrologia Graeca - Wikipedia
The Roman Emperors knew that military might and religious unity are keys to political peace. Constantine saw the need to standardize Christian belief in his empire, so he called the Council of Nicea and instructed the Bishops to devise a succinct statement of Christian doctrine. They produced the first draft of the Nicene Creed.
This history tells us that the Nicene Creed is a political manifesto. By 313 AD, Christianity was well on the way to becoming the established religion of the Empire. In that year, the emperors Constantine and Licinius jointly promulgated the Edict of Milan, which legalised the Christian religion. First Council of Constantinople - Wikipedia
Sixty years later, in 380, the Edict of Thessalonica made Christianity the official religion of the empire. Christianity began to receive financial support, tax exemptions, and the political power necessary to enforce its doctrine, oppose the unorthodox and work for ecclesiastical unity. Edict of Thessalonica - Wikipedia
Since that time, the Catholic Church has enjoyed almost continuous growth in political and ideological power. In the medieval period, it nurtured the establishment of the first universities. It became the religious foundation for the modern Western world as we know it. The wealth and education enjoyed by its bishops, monks and priests contributed significantly to modern society even though the relationship between religious belief and science was tense, and remains so to this day.
In the early middle ages the European discovery of Aristotle began to displace Plato. Aristotle's work had been preserved for 1600 years in the Eastern Roman Empire. It had been studied extensively in the Muslim world. The First Crusade (1095) brought many westerners into contact with Eastern Arabic and Greek literature. The rate of translation of these texts into Latin increased in the thirteenth century, coinciding with the establishment of the first European universities. In the hands of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle's work inspired a comprehensive rewrite of Catholic theology. The image of God created by Aquinas serves as the starting point for this work. Maurice De Wulf (Catholic Encyclopedia): William of Moerbeke
Aristotle took a much more scientific evidence based view of the world than Plato. This led to a great step forward in theology which is reflected in the first part of the Summa theologiae. There Aquinas sets out to prove the existence of God using ideas taken directly from Aristotle and based on observation of the moving world. Unfortunately, theology still did not become a science in the modern sense because it was under the very close institutional control by the Church. Nevertheless the medieval reception of Aristotle seems to have played a significant role in the subsequent evolution of science.
During the medieval period, the Catholic Church increased its political activities and began to use military means to protect its territory against invading forces, to occupy "pagan" territory and to fight "heresy". The Crusades were a product of this policy. Some of the crusaders paid for themselves and others turned to plunder but the Church financed much of the operation. The Popes explored various means for raising funds. One of the favoured methods was the sale of indulgences. Christopher Tyerman: The World of the Crusades, Crusades - Wikipedia, Catholic Catechism: 1271 Indulgences
This practice ultimately led to the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther drafted a list of 95 theses questioning the marketing of indulgences and sent it to Albert of Brandenburg, the Archbishop of Mainz on 31 October 1517. This action led to a train of events which eventually split European Christendon into two camps, loyal Catholics and 'protestants'. Martin Luther
On 15 June 1520, Pope Leo X published the Bull Exsurge Domine which purported to document Luther's errors. This did not stop the movement away from the Church. Ultimately, the Council of Trent (1545 - 1563) became the vanguard of the 'counterreformation'. The Council condemned the "heresies" of the protestants and reasserted Catholic dogma. It also suppressed much of the abuse and corruption in the Church. It failed, however, to heal the breach between the Church and the protestants, which remains to this day despire many ecumenical initiatives. Pope Leo X, Council of Trent - Wikipedia
One of the theological effects of the reformation was to turn the Church more toward scripture and away from the theological speculation that had grown in university faculties of theology since the early middle ages. Apart from reasserting ancient doctrine, the Council added nothing new to the Catholic faith.
The Reformation was on element of a larger movement in Europe, the Renaissance. On the whole, it is a continuation of the medieval period, largely motivated by the rediscovery of ancient Greek and Latin literature and the cultural and artistic developments that sprang from the study and imitation of ancient works. Renaissance - Wikipedia.
One of its key features was the rapid expansion of the arts, motivated my wealthy patrons, particularly the Church, whose commissions supported many of the best known artists of the period. From our point of view, the most important consequence of this artistic development was the new relationship between artists, intellectuals, engineers and tradespersons. This promoted the technologies of war, architecture, and civil and mechanical engineering. Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) was both a superb artist and a designer of war machines for his employers. From a scientific point of view a key person was the instrument maker, mathematician and scientist Galielo Galilei (1564 - 1642), whose telescopic observations brought him into conflict with the Church. Leonardo da Vinci - Wikipedia, Galileo Galilei - Wikipedia
The Catholic Church has held two Ecumenical Councils in recent times. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Church was feeling beset by the modern developments of scientific thought. On 8 December 1864 Pope Pius IX published a list of all the 80 "modernist errors" that he had proscribed in previous statements: the Syllabus errorum. The Syllabus of Errors Condemned by Pius IX
Pius felt that the errors of the age were so serious that only condemnation by an Ecumenical Council would be sufficient to eradicate them. He therefore called the First Vatican Council which met in 1869 and 1870. This Council is famous for attempting to infallibly define the infallibility of the Pope when they define important matters of faith and morals. To further reinforce the purity of doctrine, Pius introduced the Oath Against Modernism which was required of all clergy, pastors, confessors, preachers, religious superiors and professors in the Church until 1967. Pope Pius X: Pastor Aeternus, Oath against modernism - Wikipedia
The Second Vatican Council (1962-65) was called by Pope John XXIII to bring the church up to date, a process he called aggiornamento. One of its most important works was the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium (Light of Nations) in which the bishops reflect on the role of the Church in the world. Second Vatican Council
In 1992 Pope John Paul II released a new Catechism of the Catholic Church:
11 This catechism aims at presenting an organic synthesis of the essential and fundamental contents of Catholic doctrine, as regards both faith and morals, in the light of the Second Vatican Council and the whole of the Church's Tradition. Its principal sources are the Sacred Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church, the liturgy, and the Church's Magisterium. It is intended to serve "as a point of reference for the catechisms or compendia that are composed in the various countries". John Paul II (7 December 1992): Address during the official release of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church
The Catechism provides us a clear, authoritative and easily accessible treatise on Catholic doctrine, elaborating on the Nicene Creed. The Catechism is roughly 1000 times longer than the Creed, an indication of the extent to which Catholic doctrine has evolved over the last 1700 years.
Christians believe that God has revealed things to them which cannot be known by ordinary human experience or science. This special knowledge is recorded in the Bible and can only be held by faith, since there is no evidence beyond the unsupported "word of God" recorded in the Scriptures.
Following the Apostle Paul the Catechism accepts the definition of faith proposed by Paul in his Letter to the Hebrews: Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. When discussing this definition, Aquinas notes that the object of faith must be things unseen, since if they were seen we would have knowledge of them and no need of faith. Catholic Catechism: The Obedience of Faith, Aquinas Summa: Is this a fitting definition of faith: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things that appear not?" (Hebrews I:11)
By faith, man completely submits his intellect and his will to God. With his whole being man gives his assent to God the revealer. Sacred Scripture calls this human response to God, the author of revelation, "the obedience of faith." Catholic Catechism: Mans response to God
The Church would like to think that very little has changed since its foundation two thousand years ago. It feels that its close connection to its eternal, omnipotent and omniscient God endows it with these same qualities. Our brief look at its history, however, suggests that it is subject to the same evolutionary pressures that have moulded everything else in the world.
The Church claims to have special knowledge of divine law. This knowledge is special because it has been revealed to the Church alone by an otherwise invisible and inscrutable God. Our position here is that the Universe is divine, so God is visible to us all. God is thus open to scientific inquiry.
The Catholic Church has painted itself into a corner by its claim that God has endowed it with the gift of truth and granted it the power of infallibility. It has become a dinosaur, apparently unable to adapt to the changing environment around it. We need not despair, however. Reality rules, even though delusion and misplaced faith may lead us astray for a while. The dinosaurs evolved into the birds which bring so much beauty to our world and are probably much easier to live with than ten tonne carnivores. Origin of birds - Wikipedia
Back to top3.9: The origin of species
The ancient doctrine of creation proposed that God planned and created the Universe at the beginning that that it has remained unchanged ever since. Darwin's theory of evolution, backed by the experience of plant and animal breeders and paleoontological discoveries showed that this is not the case. Charles Darwin (1875): The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication , Darwin (1859): The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection
The theory of evolution proposes that each of us is the product of billions of generations of variation and selection. This process has produced the enormously complex molecular mechanisms of our living bodies. Altogether we are a carefully arranged system of some four trillion cells, each comprising about a trillion trillion atoms.
Evolution works by descent with modification. We modern humans, who call ourselves Homo sapiens, have existed as a distinct species for about three hundred thousand years. Roughly fifteen thousand generations. Although very little has changed in our fundamental makeup in that time, the immense variety of racial types that we observe among ourselves have arisen through our evolutionary adaptations to different environments on our planet. Klein: The Human Career
How did this vastly improbable system come to be? The formal answer is that we were created by God. This sentence defines both 'created' and 'God'. They relate as creator and created. When we think about the details of creation, we can imagine two possibilities. The Christian theory that God is eternal and decided to create the Universe and the human race to demonstrate their power and glory. The Universe is a work of intelligent design by the most intelligent designer of all. Isaac Newton, theologian, mathematician and physicist, pays tribute to this Creator in the General Scholium to his Principia:
This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. And if the fixed Stars are the centers of other like systems, these, being form’d by the like wise counsel, must be all subject to the dominion of One; . . . We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion. For we adore him as his servants; and a God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but Fate and Nature. Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find, suited to different times and places, could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being necessarily existing. But, by way of allegory, God is said to see, to speak, to laugh, to love, to hate, to desire, to give, to receive, to rejoice, to be angry, to fight, to frame, to work, to build. For all our notions of God are taken from the ways of mankind, by a certain similitude which, though not perfect, has some likeness, however. And thus much concerning God; to discourse of whom from the appearances of things, does certainly belong to Natural Philosophy.' Isaac Newton: The General Scholium from Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica
The alternative, as here, is to identify God and the Universe. From this point of view, creation is not God's production of a Universe other than itself out of nothing, but the revelation of the Universe within God. History shows that this process did not occur suddenly in six days, but has proceeded gradually over the last fourteen billion years, each new step building upon the last.
So we are not talking here about creation out of nothing, but the emergence of the vast universe within God. Mathematically we understood creation (and annihilation) as the appearance and disappearance of fixed points in the divine dynamics.
In Catholic picture of reality the Universe that God created is not God. This is a difficult picture to understand as I have explained above. We hope here to do better than this by accepting that the reality we experience is in effect the knowledge of God, and that the process of imagination in God is similar to the our own imagination. The authors of the Hebrew Bible noted in the beginning that we are created in the image of God: "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." (Genesis I:26)
Our imaginations work by exploring all the different ways we can put our ideas together. In our dreams, this process may be a bit disjointed, but when we are conscious and trying to solve a problem, we mentally try all the possibilities we can think of in various arrangements to see which ones provide the most probable answer. A lot of this occurs subconsciously. New ideas often pop into our consciousness when least expected. This heart of the creative process we will model in chapter 5 with Cantor's transfinite numbers. On the premise that God is identical with the Universe, our creative ability is part of God's creative ability.
The evolutionary paradigm entered mainstream biology with the works of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Although Darwin knew nothing of genes and genetics, his wide experience from observations in the wild and the changes brought about in plants and animals by domestication led him to see that evolution was possible since creatures do not always breed perfectly true. Descent with modification could account for the origin of species. Because this process can be very slow, Darwin was pleased to learn from geologists that the Earth is very old. On The Origin of Species - Wikipedia, History of evolutionary thought - Wikipedia
Evolution proceeds by variation and selection. Famers and the breeders of vegetables, flowering plants, pigeons, dogs and other species practise artificial selection, selecting and breeding from the individuals that are most like the result they are seeking to achieve. Darwin became a pigeon breeder in order to learn more about the human selection of animal species. Courtney Humphries: Pigeon DNA proves Darwin right
Darwin saw that creatures may also be subject to natural selection by their their environment. Those better fitted to avoid predators, grow and reproduce in a particular environment were more likely to thrive there. Such selection could guide changes in species in response to environmental changes. The environment of any species includes other evolving species, changing landscapes and climates, creating a very complex intertwined system.
The first living organisms are single cells that multiplied by one cell dividing into two. About a billion years ago sexual reproduction appeared among multicellular organisms. There has been much debate, first about how and why sexual reproduction first appeared, and second about how it is maintained. Sexual organisms would appear to be at a disadvantage in an asexual population. Asexual organisms can, in principle, reproduce twice as fast as sexual organisms, since every individual is capable of reproduction, whereas the males in sexually reproducing species have only an indirect role. On the other hand, some fertile females, particularly egg layers, can produce produce thousands of offspring. The mechanism for the transition from asexual to sexual reproduction is not yet well understood. Evolution of sexual reproduction - Wikipedia
Two features of sexual reproduction which may account for its popularity are that it can serve to increase variation, and so speed up evolution, and that it can correct genetic errors, since one copy of the genome is available from each parent, and error correcting mechanisms can use the undamaged copy as a template to repair the damaged copy.
The evolutionary origin of sexual reproduction is a difficult problem. Even more difficult, because it is buried deeper in the past, is abiogenesis or biopoesis, the development of living systems from non-living systems. Understanding the transition from non-living to living systems requires a fair bit of trial and error and guesswork, partly because it is difficult to know what conditions existed on the early Earth. It is nevertheless generally believed in scientific circles that the transition from non-living to living is possible and in fact occurred. This belief implies the hope that the steps in the transition will eventually be discovered. Abiogenesis - Wikipedia
Darwin's ideas spread rapidly since they provided a natural explanation for the variety of life. They were opposed by many who believed in divine creation. Opposition remains strong in some jurisdictions. One of Darwin's early supporters was Thomas Huxley, who was keen to reduce clerical influences in science. Because natural evolution is so slow compared to artificial breeding, paleontological evidence showing the development of species over millions of years served to convince many naturalists of the validity of Darwin's ideas. Creation and evolution in public education - Wikipedia
A difficult point in the acceptance of Darwin's theory was the question of human evolution. In 1871 Darwin published The Descent of Man which applied the theory of the Origin to human evolution. This is a particularly difficult subject for the Catholic Church which maintains that human souls are both specially created by God and possess eternal life. Darwin (1871): The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
Pope John Paul II repeated the official doctrine in his address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on 22 October 1996:
'It is by virtue of his spiritual soul that the whole person possesses such a dignity even in his body. Pius XII stressed this essential point: if the human body takes its origin from pre-existent living matter, the spiritual soul is immediately created by God.
Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man. Nor are they able to ground the dignity of the person.' Pope John Paul II: The Origins and Early Evolution of Life
In his address, John Paul II reiterates the Church's view that we are very special to God, quoting the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World Gaudium et Spes: '[The Council] recalled that man is ‘the only creature on earth that God has wanted for its own sake’ § 24. He emphasizes this point by claiming that there is an ontological discontinuity between Homo sapiens and all the other species of life on Earth. On the present hypothesis, this is unnecessary, since all species are in God, stationary points in the divine dynamics. Pope Paul VI (7 December 1965)
Of course, if the Universe is divine, all this discussion about the special creation of the human soul is pointless. The emergence of human intelligence from divine intelligence presents no ontological discontinuity. We have here another example of the metaphysical fictions used by the Church to justify its hegemony of the human spirit.
Back to top3.10: The Trinity: one God to three
As we have seen, divinity is by definition creative. In our Western traditional story, God created the Universe giving it a certain nature that he had thought up beforehand, just as any builder would do. God could have made it differently, but they chose the drama that Christians see in the Bible. Christianity maintains that this choice, and everything else about God, is a mystery to us. The traditional God is an incomprehensible other.
A remarkable development in the history of Christianity (apart from God becoming human) is the doctrine of the Trinity. The Hebrew Bible ("The Old Testament") is the story of the God Yahweh and his Chosen People. The Hebrews were very proud of the fact that Yahweh was their only God, unlike the plethora of Gods worshipped by surrounding nations. The first of the Commandments emphasise this unity: I am the Lord thy God . . . Thou shalt have no other Gods before me. (Exodus 20:2-3).
The Old Testament contains many references to the "Spirit of God". The writers of the New testament, (later to become "Christians") introduced the "Son of God". Jesus of Nazareth was both divine and human. He became human to be sacrificed in satisfaction for an ancient human insult to God (the Father), so "redeeming" us as from mortgage or pawn. Among the early followers of Jesus, these three personalities, Father, Son and Spirit gradually became divine constituents the one God. Holy Spirit - Wikipedia
It took about three hundred years for the doctrine of the Trinity to become official, perhaps because it was a difficult problem for the theologians to reconcile this threesome with the traditional unity of God. Nevertheless, by the third century CE the doctrine of the Trinity was sufficiently well developed to become the foundation of the Nicene Creed which builds the Christian story around the Father (the creator) the Son (the redeemer) and the Spirit (the guide and sanctifier).
The struggle to understand the Trinity took a step forward when Augustine developed his psychological model based on human knowledge and love. This model was put into canonical form by Thomas Aquinas and revisited in the twentieth century by Bernard Lonergan. Augustine of Hippo: The Trinity, Aquinas, Summa, I, 27, 1: Is there procession in God?, Bernard Lonergan (2007): The Triune God: Systematics, Lonergan (2009): The Triune God: Doctrines
In a nutshell the model says God becomes the Trinity in the same way that the human mind comes to know another person, and to love the person known. We have noted above that things which are accidental in the created world are substantial in God. The Father's perfect knowledge of himself is God, the Son, the (mental) Word of God. The love between Father and Son is the Spirit. What differentiates these personalities is the set of relationships between them. These relationships are established by the genealogy of the Trinity. Logos (Christianity) - Wikipedia, Lonergan (1997): Verbum: Word and Idea in Aquinas
The Father and the Son are differentiated by the relationships of 'paternity' and 'filiation'. The Spirit is differentiated from the Father and the Son by the relationships of 'spiration' and 'procession'. This model of the Trinity, even though it carries great weight in the Catholic Church, is, from a biblical point of view, speculation. Aquinas, Summa, I, 28, 3: Are the relations in God are really distinguished from each other?
It is nevertheless quite brilliant speculation, and is one of the historical pointers to my hypothesis that the Universe is divine, since it is an initial attempt to explain the creation of new divine states. Here we take the view that the theological model of the creation of the Trinity is an ancient hint of the quantum mechanical and relativistic models that form the basis of our current understanding of the creation of the Universe.
The two substantial differences from the traditional view are that first we are inside God, so that we can see the processes of creation (birth) and annihilation (death) occurring all around us. The second is that we do not limit the procession of personalities in God to the three of the Trinity, but allow it to proceed without end, like an ever branching tree, to give us the complex Universe we inhabit.
Back to top3.11: From Trinity to Universe
According to the big bang model, the Universe began as a pointlike entity within which the Universe we now know expanded and complexified. How does the the Universe emerge within the initial singularity. The ancient model of the Trinity may provide a clue.
Perhaps the the initial singularity, knowing (interacting with) itself, broke symmetry to form a first generation of new particles, which gave rise to a second generation and so on. The evolution of new particles (which broad term includes ourselves) continues to this day and beyond. The relationships of these particles to one another is what gives the Universe its structure.
We now have a big stretch of creation to cover, from the time, long ago, when the initial singularity began to differentiate, until the the origin of life and biological evolution. As we go further back into the past reliable information about what happened becomes harder and harder to obtain and we are left with more room for speculation. Here I wish to follow up the clue suggested by the doctrine of the Trinity, starting with Aristotle and Aquinas and working toward a mathematical model whose foundations were laid by Georg Cantor at the end of the nineteenth century. This mathematical development provided the foundation for the development of quantum mechanics in the first quarter of the twentieth century. First we will fit ancient philosophical and theological opinions to this model, since it is intended to span all physical and psychological space and time. Then, in the following chapters, we will fit it to the modern scientific view of the world.
We have already noticed the ancient view, that the world has a perfect eternal heart, suggested by Xenophanes and developed by Parmenides, Zeno and Plato to become a philosophical foundation for early Christianity. Xenophanes thought that the anthropomorphic Gods of Greek mythology, celebrated in poetry by Homer and others, brought the name of God into disrepute. His approach, which remains with us now, was to understand God in very abstract terms like act and simplicity. Xenophanes - Wikipedia
The doctrine of the Trinity opened a way for us to think of God as a community of persons rather than simply an isolated monarch. Cantor's proof give us a formal model that suggests that creation is inevitable in a consistent formal system. How this is implemented in reality remains a question, but it perhaps suggests that since the multiplication of divine personalities only stops at three for dogmatic reasons, it may be that conscious systems, like Gods are supposed to be, reflecting upon themselves, can generate unlimited complexity.
Genesis noted that humans are created in the image of God. Human communications and relationships are capable of generating structures far more complex than any one of us. As we shall see, the network structure of fundamental particles creates the world we observe. Networks are invariant with respect to the complexity of sources that comprise them, so there is no formal difference between a network of fundamental particles and a network of people. This idea gives us a clue about the creative direction of a global human community.
Back to top3.12: Control versus creation
The transfinite numbers appear to grow explosively, and so we might use them as a paradigm for the big bang. Explosive growth brings problems, however, as our ever growing population demonstrates. It can be a source of chaos. Growth may be good, but we also need control. The theory of evolution provides control through selection, which is ultimately based on the interaction between exponential population growth and the limited resources available to support life in a particular environment.
It is common to contrast evolution and intelligent design, but here I see them as elements of a spectrum. Both are essentially matters of trial and error. Natural selection, we might say, is unconscious design, based on physical trial and error. The variation associated with reproduction produces a spectrum of individuals, some fated to reproduce and pass some of their characteristics on to their children. Others, for some more or less random reason, will fail to reproduce. Studies of evolution based on probabilities and statistics show that there is often enough control in these random events to enable a species to survive provided that the rate of change of their environment is not too fast.
Intelligent design, on the other hand, employs the same overall process, but it it is implemented abstractly in mind, that is by imagining variations and then calculating to see if they will work. Breeding of domesticated species occupies an intermediate position between natural selection and intelligent design. The exercise of imagination is implemented by selecting breeding stock in the light of some mental picture of the desired progeny. The breeder then has to await the outcome of a reproductive cycle to see the result. They can then choose the individuals moving in the direction they seek and repeat the cycle.
We get closer to the the ideal of intelligent design in the practical arts. I am trying to intelligently design this text. I have a particular idea in mind and a vocabulary of a few thousand words to choose from. I put them together in different orders in my mind, sometimes actually writing them out and staring at them for a while to see how they look. After many cycles of variation and selection, I produce a bit of text which is asymptotic to my idea. The traditional concept of divine creation takes this idea to the limit. Theoretically, God is able to imagine all the possibilities, select the optimum and execute it all in one transcendent move.
Traditionally, God did the intelligent design and we have to live with it. We have a long history of learning to survive in the environments given to us. First, like all the other forms of life, we learnt what is good and bad for us. Even bacteria have a tendency to seek food and shelter and move away from danger. When the photosynthesizers began to fill the atmosphere with oxygen, a chemical generally fatal to anaerobes, the anaerobic creatures of the world had to seek shelter by retreating to places where oxygen is rare.
Many human populations learnt to increase their chances of survival by agriculture, animal husbandry, exploiting beasts of burden, slavery and raping and pillaging the neighbours. Later the need for animal and human energy was reduced by the development of windmills, sails and water wheels. Then came heat engines, imitating animal metabolism by burning fuel to create heat and then using a thermodynamic cycle to transform the heat into mechanical motion. A disappointing feature of this plan was discovered by Sadi Carnot: only a fraction of the heat energy can be converted into mechanical energy. Carnot cycle - Wikipedia
The discovery and exploitation of fossil fuels gave us an new lease on life, marked, as is common, by successes and failures of imagination and execution. Many boilers exploded but lessons were eventually learned and embodied in standards designed to reap the benefits while avoiding the disasters. Much of the history or engineering has been motivated by the need to understand and prevent disasters that were initially unforeseen. Overall, we have done very well in evolutionary terms because our population and per capita consumption has grown to the point where we are beginning to seriously compromise our planetary environment. Unfortunately it is becoming clear (to some people at least) that as we kill the planet so we kill ourselves.
The exploitation of fossil fuel has given us the power to destroy forests, reroute rivers, and change the composition of the atmosphere so that it is trapping more of the solar energy that strikes the planet. This is causing a steady increase in temperature which is melting icecaps, raising sea levels and causing extinction by changing the environment faster than evolving species can follow, further compromising life on Earth. We are heading for a dead end.
This has become a theological issue. In the old days, people relied on a benevolent divinity to look after them. God knew best, even if things often looked bad. We are now aware that creation and control lies in our own hands. The good news is that we have the advantage of living within a system with predictable behaviour, and a growing fund of scientific knowledge to predict the future and plan ahead. The bad news is that many of us live by the notion that the general idea of loving our neighbour is for losers and that the true law of the jungle is that greed is good.
Cybernetics tells us that the way to prevent things from going wrong is to understand what is happening well enough to predict and prevent error. Prediction is a matter of science. Prevention is a matter of politics and control. The scientific approaches to public health and occupational health and safety have shown us the way forward. Communities which have taken these lessons to heart have greatly reduced rates of death and injury through accidents and preventable diseases. Other communities that have failed to act on the information available are plagued with plagues of starvation, disease, industrial accidents, domestic violence, civil unrest, the exploitation of children and poor people and many other foreseeable and preventable calamities.
Detailed solutions to all these problems are beyond the scope of this book, but the overall solution is clear. We must recognise that we are not damaged, blind and ignorant people under the control of capricious Gods. We can have control of our future by understanding and acting on the predictable features of the planet we inhabit.
Our actions are ultimately limited by the available resources, the most fundamental of which is energy. Earth is in the fortunate position of having almost unlimited energy available from the Sun. So far, however, we have been living on the capital created by the photosynthesising organisms that collected solar energy long ago, stored it in carbon compounds and laid it down as fossil fuel. This process also liberated oxygen into the atmosphere so that the ancient solar energy could be recovered by burning the fossil fuel. This has been cheap and easy, but it has done a lot of damage.
In addition to energy, we need material resources. Our enormous physical power, often embodied in heavy earthmoving machinery, has enabled us plunder the resources of the world, burn much of them for energy, and bury an enormous amount in our waste dumps. Since (on the whole) matter is neither created nor destroyed, the only way to guarantee sufficient material resources for the indefinite future is by total recycling.
The theological point is that it is now is the time to begin to respecting the divine creation that gave us our lives and begin living within our divinely mandated means. We must begin the enormous task of repairing the damage we have done to our planet. The key to this redemption is enlightened self control. Since its beginning the role of religion informed by theology has been to explain why we should control ourselves. For Christians, good behaviour meant gaining heaven and avoiding hell. Now it means adapting ourselves the the realities of a divine world.
Historically, most of the power of control has been in the hands of warlords and military forces. This situation reflects belief in the divine right of kings which reflects, in turn, the notion that power comes from above. So men are empowered to beat their wives, adults are empowered to beat their children, and dictators are empowered to kill anyone they do not like the look of.
The truth proposed in this book is the opposite. Power comes from below. The divinity proposed here is not an omniscient and omnipotent ruler, controlling every moment of our lives. Instead it is the pure and unconstrained action that lies at the root of creation, open to all possibilities. These possibilities, as we will see from the transfinite logical model to be developed in chapter 5, are limited only by local consistency. Global control begins with local control. Every person must learn to control themselves, as every atom controls itself.
The closest visible approximation to this concept of divinity is the Sun. To enable the free action of solar energy, we depend on a the religious equivalent of an immune system to detect and correct breakdowns in local systems before they spread and become dangerous to the whole community. Industries and activities that sicken our environment must be constrained. What is necessary is that this control should be based on scientifically established reality, not on the whims of aspiring dictators whose principal interest is their own welfare. Ultimately, theology and religion are tools for public health: psychological health by providing us with a true and reliable estimate of the nature of the world; physical heath by understanding controlling the diseases and dangers that compromise our personal health and the planetary environment from which we draw our lives.
Back to top2.13: Action, energy, information, and spirit
In section 3.2 above we made a guess about the emergence of energy and time within an initial singularity. Once we have energy, a consequence of repeated action, we have the hardware necessary to run quantum mechanics. The essence of quantum mechanics lies in relationships between energy and frequency mediated by Planck's constant. Each of these relationships is represented by the Planck-Einstein relation E = hf = dψ/dt, where ψ is phase, f frequency, E energy, and h Planck's constant. In quantum mechanics, each cycle is equivalent to a quantum of action. This is demonstrated by photons, whose energy is directly linked to their frequency by the Planck-Einstein formula. Planck-Einstein relation - Wikipedia
As systems become more complex we can understand them as networks. The simple number f becomes a vector, that is an ordered list of numbers each representing the energy of a communication source in the network. The energy E becomes a square matrix, an array of numbers which maps the rate of communication between each pair of sources.
An important feature of quantum mechanics is that vectors representing different frequencies are independent of one another. We think of them like the dimensions of ordinary space, where the dimensions such as north-south, east-west and up-down are at right angles to one another. North-south motion is independent of east-west motion. In flat land, no amount of travel north will take you east. In quantum mechanical language they are said to be orthogonal, which is simply Greek for right angle. In quantum mechanics, different frequencies (and therefore different energies) are orthogonal to one another and so, like north-south and east-west, are independent of one another.
The communication links between independent sources also need to be independent of one another, so that there are no crossed wires creating interference and error. We cannot wire more than three sources on a two dimensional surface in a way that they can all communicate with one another without crossed wires. In three dimensional space, however, we can wire any number of sources to each other without the wires crossing, which might be the reason why space is three dimensional. It could be four dimensional, but the fourth dimension adds nothing, and so is an unnecessary complication.
For us and many other animals, sight is one of the most informative senses and serves as a rich metaphor for knowledge: we see the meaning of a sentence; we are in the dark about the origins of life. One of the most transformative technologies in history is artificial lighting, which turns spaces of night into day. Photon - Wikipedia
Photons have no mass, travel at the velocity of light and are one of the principal channels we use to learn about the Universe. Photons carry the energy from the Sun to the Earth which makes the Earth habitable. One of the most important steps in the evolution life was the development of creatures which could capture solar energy and store it as chemical energy, for their own use or as food for other creatures. Essentially all our food comes from the Sun via photosynthesising plants.
Photons may have a vast range of energies from almost zero to such high energies that they can transform into particles with rest mass. They are our principal source of information about the Universe. Ancient cosmic microwave radiation is one of the most important inputs into the science of cosmology.
The cosmic background radiation that we observe originated about 380 thousand years after the big bang. The distribution of this radiation across the sky gives us clues to the structure of the Universe at that time. We can also use the discoveries of particle physics to speculate about the early stages of the formation of fundamental particles and the creation of hydrogen and helium. As the Universe expanded and cooled large clouds of gas began to contract under their own gravitational attraction. This contraction led to local heating, and eventually the formation of stars and galaxies. The enormous temperatures inside the large stars created the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. Many of these stars eventually exploded and distributed their material throughout the universe to once again condense and form a new generation of stars with greater proportions of the heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen and phosphorous, essential for life as we know it. Chronology of the universe - Wikipedia, Galaxy formation and evolution - Wikipedia, Nucleosynthesis - Wikipedia, Stellar evolution - Wikipedia
As systems become more complex, we say that they are becoming more spiritual, their material bodies are less important than their abilities, culminating in intellectually driven creatures like ourselves capable of observing patterns of behaviour in the world and exploiting them. Long ago, for instance, we found that some animals like sheep, goats, chooks and cattle can be managed in large mobs without much difficulty. Others, like horses and dogs are more independent but can nevertheless be trained to perform various tasks. Still others, like kangaroos are quite independent and cannot be farmed so easily. If we want to use them they must be hunted rather than farmed.
Probably the most important move people made toward improving their quality of life was to learn to control fire. Fire has many simple uses, for warmth, light, cooking, for protection from wild animals, and for hunting. More complex uses include mining, metallurgy and chemistry, making medicines, dyes, poisons, explosives and firearms. Control of fire by early humans - WikipediaCarbon based energy has been the basis of modern civilization, but we can no longer rely on it. Fortunately there are alternatives. First, the atmosphere itself is a heat engine driven by the sun, creating mechanical energy in the form of wind, waves and flowing streams. Windmills have been with us for thousands of years but in last few decades they have they have taken massive steps forward. Turbines are approaching two hundred metres in diameter. The electrical, heavy engineering and offshore oil industries have shown us how to make the generators and the structures to carry the turbines, on land and sea. The energy available in the winds of the Earth is very much more than we will ever need, but there is more. Wind Turbine - Wikipedia
Plants collect energy from the sun using photosynthesis, a complex biological process. Photosynthesis drives almost all life on earth. Now we are learning to collect solar energy for ourselves. We can concentrate it as heat, using curved mirrors, and we can convert it into electricity with photovoltaic cells. In the seventies, photovoltaic cells cost bout $100 per Watt. Now they cost less than a dollar. Efficiency (the proportion of solar energy converted to electrical energy) has increased from a few percent in the fifties to 20% or more at present. Photosynthesis - Wikipedia, Summer Praetorius: Dawn of the Heliocene, Photovoltaics - Wikipedia
Although the available amount of wind and solar energy is practically unlimited, it suffers from a major defect from the point of view of our 24/7 society. The Sun does not shine at night and is reduced in cloudy weather; wind is often quite intermittent. So energy storage is required. Many methods are available. Surplus electricity may be used to pump water from a low dam to a high dam, to be released later through turbines to generate electricity. Battery technology is improving at a fast rate, and surplus electricity can be converted into chemical fuels.
In sum if we manage our world with wisdom and prudence we can be assured of plenty of renewable energy to power all our creative social and spiritual development: food production, transport and communication, housing, and the construction of schools, offices, factories, and sporting and recreational facilities.
Back to top3.14: My creation
I was started in the theology business by being born into a Catholic family toward the end of the Second World War. When I was about 4 years old I went to school and learnt, among other things, the Australian version of the Baltimore Catechism. We had to learn this by heart, and were tested regularly. The first few questions give the flavour:
1. Q. Who made the world?
A. God made the world.2. Q. Who is God?
A. God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.3. Q. What is man?
A. Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image and likeness of God.6. Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him for ever in heaven. Archdiocese of Baltimore: Baltimore Cathechism No. 1
Since then my theological ideas have evolved until I have arrived at a position almost diametrically opposed to the religion that nurtured me. Point by point, I have seen that the Catholic Church is often weird and sometimes downright evil.
What are we to make of the Fall, for instance? That the newly created humans listened to a snake, succumbed to curiosity and ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge? Did this event establish that we are now all sinners? Are are all in need of redemption? Do we remain forever children of a God who makes us slaves to an ideology that believes in human sacrifice, eating its own God and treating women as subhuman. Like carbon based energy production, this religion is a technology due for radical revision
But how should we revise it? My inclination is to take guidance from science. If we are to create scientific theology we first need an observable God, since the whole point of science is to conform our mental pictures to the reality of the world through observation and experiment. Science is a messy business, but it gives us better guidance that unfettered fiction. Unfortunately, the number of people with the courage to face reality seems to be diminishing. Big business like the manufacturers of tobacco and coal have promoted outright lies as a fundamental business strategy, probably taking their cue from those politicians who are forever scaling new heights of mendacity. This attitude is threatening the life and integrity of the world. Fortun & Bernstein; Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the Twenty-First Century
By far the most effective pusher of falsehoods about reality on the planet is the Roman Catholic Church. The Church claims to govern human morals on the basis of doctrines held by very blind faith, but despite this is has a heart.
The God the Church has invented, whatever its faults, is no less powerful for its fictional nature. Its power is political. It serves as the foundation of a communication protocol that has brought it immense benefit: God says love your neighbour, cooperate.
The Gospels record that Jesus, when asked Who is my neighbour? replied with the story of the good Samaritan. Everybody is your neighbour. More specifically, . . . to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. . . Parable of the Good Samaritan - Wikipedia, Luke 6:27-36
Not everybody loves their enemies, and we can attribute many disagreements and wars to religious differences. The schism in the Catholic Church which we call the Reformation led to wars and massacres in which millions died. This was not long after the Papacy financed the Crusades to use military force to encourage people to join the Church. Join us or die. Other religions traditions with similar injunctions to communal peace have also experienced periods of war and destruction, usually chronic. Protestant Reformation - Wikipedia, Thirty Years War - Wikipedia, Karen Armstrong: Holy War: The Crusades and their impact on today's world
At the present time we can see the hand of fundamentalist Christianity in the murder of a million or more non-Christians by the military machinery of Western Christian nations particularly the United States. Physicians for Social Responsibility: Body Count
Since we cannot duplicate historical events, it is difficult to determine whether the peace arising within religious groups outweighs the conflicts between them, but it is clear that the elimination of religious war requires the unification of religion, and that this unification must be based on a unification of theology.
In the secular domain, the principal progress in this direction has been the epression of human rights enshrined by the United Nations in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This document serves as a formal expression of the Christian injunction to love one's neighbour. It outlaws acts by any person natural or corporate which breaches the rights of other people.
The Church's view that it is the agent of God and above the law has left it lagging behind modern secular views of humanity and social goods. As a nation state, the Holy See has yet to sign most of the international human rights treaties. University of Minnesota Human Rights Library
Although the Church has a lot to say about human dignity, its rather arrogant decision to put itself above the law and outside the international rights regime has been severely threatened by the revelation that its hierarchy has been responsible for hiding tens of thousands of cases of child abuse by Church employees. It has tried to maintain that this secrecy is justified by its own Canon Law. This issue is discussed in detail in Kieran Tapsell's book, Potiphar's Wife. Tapsell: Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse
How did such an apparently noble organization come to such a terrible state? The answer, I believe, lies in the imperial political role that the Church inherited from the old Roman Empire. It remains committed to an outdated authoritarian approach which mistakes the fantasies of old and powerful men for reality. The only way for it to survive is to rebuild its foundations on reality itself, in other words, to embrace scientific theology.
The ancient religions are now facing a new global heresy, science. Science questions many of the orthodox beliefs of traditional religion. Science deals in knowledge acquire by observation, not by faith. It directly undermines all the popes, bishops, ayatollahs, dictators and others who would like to claim that their word is law based on the divine law written in their sacred texts.
One thing that is very clear is that we all die. Denial of death is a fundamental plank of many religions, but it has no grounds in reality. A first step toward rebuilding theology and religion is to recognize the reality of death.
The next step is to explore why death happens, why death is an integral feature of our divine Universe. Clearly we are not the only inhabitants of the Universe to die: almost everything has a finite lifetime.
In the divine Universe proposed here, science is the means we use to discern the divine law, and it is this law we must obey if we are to survive in peace, not some fiction we have made up for ourselves. The text of the divine law is the Universe itself. All our experience is experience of God.
History and contemporary events demonstrate the very close relationships between theology, religion and politics. Our survival as a community depends on our cooperation. Cooperation depends on shared views of the nature of the world and what we need to do to survive. These views are provided by theology and religion.
Social cohesion is ultimately a matter of life and death, and so it is not surprising that we have a tendency to kill heretics of one sort or another. They deviant views can be seen as fracturing the social contract and weakening the cooperative bonds of society.
In general, we can see societies becoming larger and more complex as time goes by, so that there is a natural tendency for heretical forces to increase and threaten social cohesion. The survival of the growing society society requires it either to expand its theological vision to embrace the heresies, or to suppress them in some way.
There are two approaches to suppression. One, which seems to be very appealing to conservative social tendencies, is to use violence. The Christian sects have often turned to this remedy through inquisitions, military crusades and other violent reactions to individuals and groups who threatened their views of the world. We have seen centuries of war in Europe between Christian sects, and, as Islam becomes more militarized with Christian weapons, we are seeing similar wars breaking out in the Islamic world. The second approach, proposed here, is to broaden the church in a way consistent with reality. It is clear form the complexity of the world we inhabit that no amount of violence can ultimately prevail against the creative power of the divine Universe. The first step toward the new heresy is scientific theology.
Theology is the foundation of all science. It is the traditional theory of everything. It tells us who we are and what we are doing here. For a long time we have been hooked on the idea that we are the special, exceptional children of God; that the world was created just for us; that we have a mandate to do what we like with it. These ideas are leading us into danger. It is time take the divine Universe seriously. Theology - Wikipedia
Distrust arises when there is insufficient content in the tacit dimension underlying the communication. God is the universal tacit dimension, hence the role of theology. At present much theology is fragmented rubbish immortalizing ancient warlords and providing no realistic foundation for unity and communication. Michael Polanyi:The Tacit Dimension
If my story is true, every event in the Universe is a revelation of God. At the fundamental scale, measured by the quantum of action, these events are very small, so that even the blink of a fly's eye requires trillions of elementary events, all choreographed like the logical events in a computer to give the observable blink.
On a larger scale, my life is an enormous number of quanta of action, all working together to make me what I am. These days we know quite a lot about how our bodies work, and we know that even a simple everyday thing like speaking and listening require the work of billions of nerve and muscle cells. Each of these cells is itself a coordinated process of billions of molecules. At the scale of the Universe, the number of quanta is much greater, even infinite, but every one carries meaningful information about the life of God.
The huge success of Christianity is an example of evolution. Evolution proceeds by variation and selection. From what we know of the history of ancient Israel, there was no shortage of variations on theological themes. The politicians and prophets of Israel continuously battled against what they considered to be false prophets, false Gods and the ideas that strayed from orthodoxy that were later called heresies. Every now and then the leaders had to turn to the sword to maintain orthodoxy. There have been many crusades.
Our cultural evolution is much faster than our genetic evolution, even though, as John Macquarrie noted, century is a short time in religion. The rate of evolution is determined to some extent by the selective pressure operating on the evolving organism. The increasing disparities between ancient religious belief and modern Western culture are putting the Catholic Church under extreme pressure. Perhaps the most significant focus of this pressure is the Church's claim to be a law unto itself. A serious problem with this position has been the Church's reaction to revelations of its sexual abuse of children: it has tried to hide its crimes. John Macquarrie: A century is a short time in religion, James Hancock: Victorian child sexual abuse survivor wins second chance to sue Catholic Church in 'landmark' case