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Nanotwerp
Guest
Are you really limiting God? God created natural law, so obviously, he can ‘violate’ the law.
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yppop
Guest
Heresy sounds pretty strong; I’ll have to ask my son, a Monsignor and a Canon lawyer.
Define NOTHING??
Also, do you have a mathematical understanding of infinity??
Could you explain this statement?
Thanks for the response; I’ve been having trouble lately elicting responses to my posts.
Yppop
R
rinnie
Guest
Think of it this way, the cup you drink from, the clothes you wear, the car you drive. Everything came from the ground.
Now that’s overthinking, but true.
God made all things possible, and our life possible. Remember what our funeral says, from dirt you came and to dirt your shall return.
Philosophy is sometimes a way to try to explain something it can’t so its easier to reject. That’s just how I see it anyway.
And its also at times a way to confuse people and try to get them to see things your way instead of the truth.
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abucs
Guest
Hi, we are creatures formed in a world of cause and effect. That’s the way our minds have developed and evolved. The fact that is seems more sensible to us that the universe shouldn’t exist is a function of this cause and effect (in time) thinking of our brains. Don’t knock yourself out. I can’t lift 500kg’s of weights and I can’t have a clear understanding of a reality without time. It is just how it is. It is fun to think and speculate, but it shouldn’t disturb us to the point of exhaustion.
Secondly, when you say ‘everything’ from nothing you have to appreciate the very little we know about this ‘everything’. Our physical reality that we perceive is just the logical, coherent and systematic behaviour of something we think of in terms of ‘concrete’ reality because of it’s changing measured interaction with ourselves.
Consider the comments of famous physicists :
“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real. If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, you haven’t understood it yet.”
― Niels Bohr
The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.
---- James Jeans
We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.”
― Niels Bohr
simpletoremember.com/articles/a/science-quotes/
en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Jeans
goodreads.com/author/quotes/821936.Niels_Bohr
I believe that our ‘everything’ is only a created secondary reality. From the perspective of being fully enconsed in a secondary reality, we often think of it as the measure of all things. As you have expressed, this ultimately doesn’t make sense and gives us a mental block when trying to understand its origins.
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yppop
Guest
Your post intrigues me because I scanned your links and found that the general tenor that reality is non-material is found in these quotes:
from the first link:
“*It has occurred to me lately—I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities—that both questions [the origin of consciousness in humans and of life from non-living matter] might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality—**that stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff. It is mind that has composed a physical universe *that breeds life and so eventually evolves creatures that know and create: science-, art-, and technology-making animals. In them the universe begins to know itself.”
- George Wald, (Noble laureate and professor of biology at Harvard University) wrote this in an article entitled “Life and Mind in the Universe” which appeared in the peer-reviewed journal the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry: Quantum Biology, symposium 11 (1984): 1-15.
*“There is a wide measure of agreement which, on the physical side of science approaches almost unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter. We are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail mind as the creator and governor of the realm of matter—not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown, exist as thoughts.”
- Sir James Jeans knighted mathematician, physicist and astronomer who helped develop our understanding of the evolution of stars, wrote this in his book The Mysterious Universe And the *
*substance out of which this bubble is blown, the soap-film, is empty space welded onto empty *
This is the point that I make in the last paragraph of post 16. I take it one step further than the ideas found in the links by describing a specific way of interpreting “NOTHING”.
The first sentence in that paragraph “if you assume that objective reality is constructed from discrete space that emerged from an infinitude of continuous space…” suggests a way of explaining hylomorphism: discrete space forms the material that is subsumed by continuous space the represents the spiritual.
Yppop
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Gold_Star
Guest
Technically speaking, God created only the heavens and earth, that is, what is perceived on earth by our unaided senses. The doctrine of creation from nothing is philosophical only and has no direct reference in scripture. It has been useful from ancient times but with modern-day discoveries about the nature of matter it is becoming outdated.
The ancients were able to discriminate only between matter (composed of various kinds of atoms) and spirit, which was completely non-material. The two had little or no relation to each other, except that spirit, being active, dominated matter. So, matter had to come from nothing, since it couldn’t have come from spirit. Today, physicists know there is a sub-atomic world existing independently of the atomic or material world where strange phenomena occur (such as quantum entanglement) which violate all laws of the material world. In the sub-atomic world concepts of space and time are freer than at the atomic level.
The modern idea is that all matter is composed of particles in motion. A ghost or angel therefor, would be composed of highly rarified matter that isn’t subject to all the constraints of space and time applicable to the atoms of the material world. The material world has emerged from higher matter existing in higher dimensions which has combined together to form the protons and neutrons of the atomic world. A proton, for example, is composed of three quarks.
To the ancients, quarks would have no materiality and be about the same as nothing. Some persons would cite the “big bang” as the event when higher matter condensed into the material world we know of today. But the question is, where did this higher matter finally come from? I would say it came from the truly supernatural realm where no constraints or laws applicable to matter as we know it (atomic or sub-atomic) exist. As more knowledge of higher matter accumulates the doctrine of creation from nothing will be abandoned, similarly to the doctrine that the sun revolves around the earth.
The ancients were able to discriminate only between matter (composed of various kinds of atoms) and spirit, which was completely non-material. The two had little or no relation to each other, except that spirit, being active, dominated matter. So, matter had to come from nothing, since it couldn’t have come from spirit. Today, physicists know there is a sub-atomic world existing independently of the atomic or material world where strange phenomena occur (such as quantum entanglement) which violate all laws of the material world. In the sub-atomic world concepts of space and time are freer than at the atomic level.
The modern idea is that all matter is composed of particles in motion. A ghost or angel therefor, would be composed of highly rarified matter that isn’t subject to all the constraints of space and time applicable to the atoms of the material world. The material world has emerged from higher matter existing in higher dimensions which has combined together to form the protons and neutrons of the atomic world. A proton, for example, is composed of three quarks.
To the ancients, quarks would have no materiality and be about the same as nothing. Some persons would cite the “big bang” as the event when higher matter condensed into the material world we know of today. But the question is, where did this higher matter finally come from? I would say it came from the truly supernatural realm where no constraints or laws applicable to matter as we know it (atomic or sub-atomic) exist. As more knowledge of higher matter accumulates the doctrine of creation from nothing will be abandoned, similarly to the doctrine that the sun revolves around the earth.
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humble_catholic
Guest
Thank you my friendOooooooh! Great thought and words…
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abucs
Guest
Hello yppop,
yes my understanding is that ultimate reality is non physical and what appears physical to us is only a creation that allows us to develop as rational and emotional creatures.
There are a lot of scientists like the ones you’ve quoted that also believe this due the scientific evidence.
You might want to look at Bell’ Theorem also which pretty much proves that reality is non local. That means that while it appears to us that this universe works in a causal, physical manner, the science says it doesn’t - hence Einstein’s quote of ‘spooky actions at a distance’.
I also believe our created reality is broken into discrete periods of time and space.
Regards.
yes my understanding is that ultimate reality is non physical and what appears physical to us is only a creation that allows us to develop as rational and emotional creatures.
There are a lot of scientists like the ones you’ve quoted that also believe this due the scientific evidence.
You might want to look at Bell’ Theorem also which pretty much proves that reality is non local. That means that while it appears to us that this universe works in a causal, physical manner, the science says it doesn’t - hence Einstein’s quote of ‘spooky actions at a distance’.
I also believe our created reality is broken into discrete periods of time and space.
Regards.
J
JimG
Guest
Willpower.
God wills it, and so it is.
God wills it, and so it is.
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abucs
Guest
and God said, let there be light, and behold, there was light, and God saw that it was good.
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Viki63
Guest
Along with this question, goes another one: how can my mind affect physical objects? For example, I have only to think and my arm raises. This is a miracle in itself.
Totally separate, of course, from God’s creating the universe from nothing.
Totally separate, of course, from God’s creating the universe from nothing.
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abucs
Guest
The origin of thought Viki. What a complex question. 
Too hard for me.
Too hard for me.
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