Dear George and David,

By a non-divine driver I was alluding to self-organising physical properties allowing the universe to achieve (create is probably too strong a word) elements, celistial systems, life and counsciousness. Reality unto itself - non-divine. Yet, the observed universe (our macro realm back to the BB) might might not be all there is, just as visible light is merely part of eletromagnetic spectrum. Albeit, as with QM, different rules might apply, including those relating to time and position. Again, QM alludes to this case.

Organisation might be aided by open system trading entropy, e.g., our ability to think, in part, can be traced to plants receiving energy from the sun. Time is a big issue for developments in the observed universe, wherein, the superposition-decoherence nexus is a fair attempt at explaining how things that might otherwise woulde take quintillions of years appear in only billions of years.

More later on George's points.

Dear OUG,

I saw a small segment of "the chicken or the egg first?", this morning, on TV. I had assumed the egg, because birds said to have evolved dinosaurs. I need to learn more before being able to comment further.

Dear George,

I was being quite subjective in suggesting God as part of Creation. My atheism came in steps. I rejected the God of the Bible as being arbitrary and implausible even if we accept that the Bible was divinely inspired but made up of stories told by humans in the context of the knowledge of their times. However, I thought there still might be some kind of deity. I only rejected the God of the Bible analogously to the way believers in that god have implicitly rejected Thor and other gods without rejecting the concept of deity.

There might be a god who is not a Creator or differs in other ways from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Baha'i deity. I finally adopted a completely naturalistic philosophy which assumes that god, gods or any concept of the supernatural is merely a human invention to serve a human need.

That does not mean that I deny other's belief in a deity as being unreasonable. However, I see no reason to justify such a belief. I also cannot justify my naturalistic philosophy. It just seems right to me as your belief seems right to you.

I don't see the self-organising principle of matter proposed by Stuart Kauffman as answering any philosophical or religious questions. The post priori possibility of the existence of matter and life is 1 since we are here. If we assume that time started with the Big Bang (assuming there was a Big Bang) there is no a priori possibility of matter so it is unreasonable to assume a probability during non-existence of time, space and matter. I suspect any of the figures given for the a priori probability of life as being determined by the philosophical and religious predilections of those who are making or repeating the probabilities.

I have Stuart Kauffman's "Investigations" and plan to read it. I may feel differently about the implications of Kauffman's work after I've read his book.

Dear David,

"I don't see the self-organising principle of matter proposed by Stuart Kauffman as answering any philosophical or religious questions." - david f

The answer to the question, "Why are we here?", I think has a philosophic thread which can be derived from "how did we come into being?". Maybe, theories of self-orgisation have implications pertaining to "First Cause" and "Intelligent Design" enjoining religions.

I take it that sophisticated theists, like George, would accept the existence of God, even if science explained creation from a self-sustaining universe capable of complaex assemble, despite the second law of thermodynamics. Horses for courses.

George,

Not only in theistic matters, I tend to think in terms of Venn diagrams. Sometimes the circles don't overlap,yet, often, the circles do overlap, but to verying degrees.

Dear George,

By the two epistemologies, I meant two separate theories of knowledge as you I believe have suggested. The knowledge of science and the knowledge of religion.

Hawking has hinted that even if we can't go back further than the capacities of our particle accelerators, the findings might provide a good guidance as to what the very, very early univeese was like, prsumable before the capabilities of CERN and the Higgs boson.

Yes, physics needs mathematics the most. I believe I am correct in saying that Einstein needed help here from one of past polytech teachers. An animal will not jump off a cliff seems to have a sense of physics yet could not compute the acceleration from a height. A sense of physics appears programmed into nature. Maths is basically comprehendable only to humans. Some (Davies) would claim that mathematics (e.g, ratios and constants) is embedded into the physical universe.

God entering a temporal (finite) realm sets a limit some aspect of the divine entity. Jesus dying on the Cross is at the opposite pole to my having (hypothetically) an immortal humand blood cell that will out survive space-time

Dear David,

Thank you for a sincere and comprehensive exposition of your position. It seems to agree with what I wrote, namely that one can accept the OR position - i.e. that not all reality is reducible to physical reality - without accepting the biblical model of this extra reality.

So let me add something personal myself, knowing that you are a physicist:

As a student I tried to understand Einstein’s GR from physics textbooks that made me want to scream: tell me first what you want me to believe and then give me the arguments, not the other way around. My eureka came when I read a sentence by André Lichnerowicz, (which I still remember in its French original, although my French is very poor): “Je propose d’apeller un modèle d’espace-temps une varieté pseudo-riemannienne”, etc. (Lichnerowicz’s original contribution hidden in that etc).

Here pseudo-Riemannian manifold is a clear mathematical concept, that can be investigated “with pencil and paper”, whereas space-time is a concept from physics that is supposed to correspond to something from physical reality. One uses mathematical concepts and constructs to model physical concepts and theories. The latter try to model physical reality, looking for agreement with observations, but this agreement cannot be judged solely from within pure mathematics involved in the models.

The “eureka” extended also to my understanding of the belief system (of a particular religion) as such particular model not of physical reality but of that Reality - referred to as the Ultimate Reality - that is beyond the reach of science. Even more than in the case of mathematical and physical models of reality, the only way to “understand” Ultimate Reality is through models of it: mythological, scriptural, theological. There are many mythologies modelling Ultimate Reality on concepts from everyday life (that are to the followers of these mythologies as clear and noncontroversial as pseudo-Riemannian manifolds were for me). Less naive models are represented by various sacred texts, even less naive by philosophies/theologies. (ctd)

(ctd)
Again, the adequacy or not of these religious models cannot be judged from within these models, and the role of observations and experiments in physics is here played by personal experience, faith; but that is a different story.

Of course, Christian theologies (and I would presume Jewish as well) involve models of Ultimate Reality that have to be “concomitant” with those presented by the Bible, in the sense of being its extension, perhaps not unlike Einstein’s theory is an extension of Newton’s.

A better analogy might be the rotational ellipsoid model of the Earth as an extension of the flat model: they are concomitant in the sense that the tangent plane to the ellipsoid is a good approximation to the ellipsoid in the vicinity of the tangent point. For many purposes (e.g. when drawing a map of my garden) I can tacitly assume the Earth is flat, since the ellipsoid approach would be unnecessarily complicated. The same when e.g. dealing with Christians who for whatever (psychological) reasons have to take the Bible literally; only here “unnecessarily complicated” is replaced by “unnecessarily irritating”.

I am not sure whether I succeeded in making clearer the splitting of what I believe into

(a) my preference for the OR alternative, and
(b) my preference for the Christian model of the Ultimate Reality,

of course, without giving any arguments: a clear statement before (or without) any arguments in favour of this or that, that I missed in my physics textbooks.

>>I don't see the self-organising principle of matter proposed by Stuart Kauffman as answering any philosophical or religious questions<<
I agree. I only mentioned Kauffman because he made the term popular. Generally, “Self-organization is the process where a structure or pattern appears in a system without a central authority or external element imposing it (Wikipedia). I mentioned it only as an example of what I understaood under Oliver’s “non-divine driver”.