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Hi Brian,
You will probably have considerable disagreement with what I think is going on in the big picture, but you and I seem to acknowledge the same starting point, so for what it's worth, here's what I think.
In the beginning, all there was was god with the ability to think. His thinking abilities were probably at least as powerful as ours, so it is reasonable that he thought about mathematics. In particular, he dreamed up the Peano axioms and their consequences and developed all the numbers we have come up with (natural, integer, rational, and complex). He probably also experimented with various subsets of large sets of numbers.
Along with this activity, he probably thought a lot of things that would be completely foreign, unfamiliar, and incomprehensible to us. I am just positing that his thoughts were at least as robust as ours.
So, he probably stumbled onto Dick Stafford's discovery that any and all subsets of numbers from a population of numbers must obey a specific differential equation. And, that the solutions to that equation are the familiar laws of modern physics.
Next, he thought about the consequences of packing a lot of energy into a small space, establishing a number of arbitrary constants, and thinking about the consequences. The consequences were the big bang and the resulting space-time continuum we see.
The laws of physics are indeterminate when the numbers get small enough so there was some wiggle room left to tweak what was happening. Above this small scale, the macro behavior of the universe was not tweakable because it has to obey that equation.
But down at the quantum level, there is wiggle room to coax the right molecules together, given the right environment and enough time, to produce the evolution of life as we know it.
The consciousness that we experience as organisms, is simply that one consciousness of god's looking out through our eyeballs and hearing with our ears. Filtered and processed by our brains, however, which imposes a huge limitation on what can be thought, or perceived while staying "inside" one of these organisms. Nothing prevents god's consciousness from taking a break and leaving for a while. After all, our dimension of time is simply an arbitrary ordering of subsets of god's thoughts.
I'm getting into more detail right now than I intended, so let me just give you a couple of generalities about what I think is going on and let it go for now.
I think that god and everything he has thought (created), although enormously and unimaginably huge, and growing, it is nonetheless finite. I also think that god is not omniscient and has been continually surprised at the outcomes of the logical consequences of his thought (his creations). I also think that god is not omnipotent; he does not have the ability to violate Dick's equation, and he can't tamper with the ongoing evolution of the physical universe without destroying it -- except, as I said, at small enough scales that it is within the range of the uncertainty inherent in the solutions to Dick's equation. On the question of omnipresence, I guess he would qualify for that, but, while his mind is preoccupied in the moment-to-moment conscious activity of one of us organism's brains, he is unaware of much else.
Why is it that I think you might have some disagreements with what I think is going on, Brian? As I said, just take it for what it's worth.
Warm regards,
Paul |
