Has anyone else ever felt this way? That it seems entirely unreasonable that anything should exist over not, like God, the universe, or any other conceivable thing?
Why does the universe exist? Because God created it.
Why does God exist? I cannot see any answer.
I have said before that the universe has meaning in relation to what meaning God gave it, but it seems that nothing could give God a meaningful existence. Does God give Himself purpose? Nothing in the world gives itself an ultimate purpose; that purpose is bestowed on it by another. Is God exempt from human logic?
In all, it is more reasonable for nothing to be, than for anything to be.
I can’t do justice to your questions, nor can I do justice to Chris Langan’s ideas in this post, but I will just leave a couple of quotes from his primer on the CTMU and then leave you with a couple of links to his site which you can explore at your leisure:
Holotheism is the theological system implied by logical theology. Its fundamental premise is that the Mind of God is the ultimate reality…that is, reality in its most basic and most general form. It is thus related to panentheism, but in addition to being more refined, is more compatible with monotheism in that its “mental” characterization of God implies that divine nature is more in keeping with established theological traditions.
What is Logical Theology?
Theology is ordinarily understood as the study of God and the relationship of God to the world, usually in the context of a specific theological system and a related body of theological opinion. It is considered to embrace the investigation of spirit, the human soul, teleology and divine qualities such as omniscience, omnipresence and omnipotence.
Traditionally, its preferred methods of inquiry have been rational rather than empirical, and have thus relied on a combination of faith and logic rather than observation. Logical theology shifts theological inquiry in the direction of logic and mathematics, seeking to reposition it within the domain of modern analytical tools including model theory, the theory of formalized systems, and the logical theory of reality.
Whereas standard theology takes the existence of God as axiomatic and then attempts, often naively, to characterize the relationship between its assumed definition and a more or less concrete model of reality, logical theology explores a logical formulation of ultimate reality for any divine properties that might naturally reveal themselves; given that divine law (if it exists) would necessarily incorporate the laws of logic and mathematics on a basic level, it seeks evidence of divinity in the context of a reality-theoretic extension of logic, the CTMU. The implied convergence of theology, mathematics and science yields a reality-based theological framework with the strength and capacity to support realistic solutions to various real-world problems.
Chris Langan’s site
The CTMU Primer (at the bottom of the linked page above, and the place I took those two quotes from)
To be very crude, (my words now) the ground of all
possible being, both constructive and destructive, logical and illogical, consistent and inconsistent, nothingness and non-nothingness, would be God. That which
can erupt into reality (quantum reality, logical reality, mathematical reality, physical reality, etc.) must interfere constructively and not destructively, or to put it differently, it must be self-consistent. In other words, this is yet another version of the “nothingness is unstable” argument which we see with the physics of the big bang, but this time it goes all the way back into the ground of all possible being, or God.
That’s really terribly terribly crude, but it’s the hyper-condensed nickel version of what I got out of reading the
CTMU (Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe).
Take your time, you will need it. I doubt if I can do any better than you can yourself by just reading what Langan has written. That’s pretty much all I can contribute here.
