Intuitive trinity
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Trinity Without | Trinity Within
- The Genesis Garden of Eden and the Flood are Stories About Actual Events
- The Genesis Creation Story
- What is Science?
- The Trial of Galileo, Scientific Atheism's Anti-Religious Founding Myth
- The Scientific Atheist Trinity
- An Informal Proof of God
- A Physical Model For Understanding The Christian Trinity
- The Problem With Science
- Why Have Atheists Become So Anti-Christian
- Conclusion
- One More Thing
- Comments
Introduction
This article came out of the dissonance between my religious skepticism and my family's Christian faith. And also as an attempt to understand Christianity. I was brought up in a Protestant Christian household and always admired Christian moral values. But being raised in an analytic age I had difficulty with the idea of a god let alone a trinity. What does it mean to be god's son? What is the holy ghost? Although Christianity seemed to produce good people it was clear I wasn't going to be one of them. Many people including some Christians think the trinity is arbitrary, confusing and an embarrassment that should be done away with. But maybe it's not. After all it's lasted almost 2000 years, there must be something to it. Instead of accepting or rejecting it as the revealed teaching of the Bible, it occurred to me that a more intuitive approach might help shed some light.
This article came out of the dissonance between my religious skepticism and my family's Christian faith. And also as an attempt to understand Christianity. I was brought up in a Protestant Christian household and always admired Christian moral values. But being raised in an analytic age I had difficulty with the idea of a god let alone a trinity. What does it mean to be god's son? What is the holy ghost? Although Christianity seemed to produce good people it was clear I wasn't going to be one of them. Many people including some Christians think the trinity is arbitrary, confusing and an embarrassment that should be done away with. But maybe it's not. After all it's lasted almost 2000 years, there must be something to it. Instead of accepting or rejecting it as the revealed teaching of the Bible, it occurred to me that a more intuitive approach might help shed some light.
Trinity Without | Trinity Within
Ask yourself a simple question, what are the constant elements of your experience right know. Thoughts are coming and going, bodily visual and auditory sensations are arising and passing. What remains the same? For me it's 'I'm Here' where ever 'Here' may be. A Being in a World. But there is a third element 'Mind'. Because of our different minds, even if we were in the same physical place are overall experience would be very different. So take these three things, 'a Being in a World with a Mind' as your personal trinitarian experience. It seems irreducible, remove any one and no experience is possible. If there is no consciousness there is no experience, if there is no world to experience there is no experience and if there is no mind to interpret that world there is no experience. The Bible in Genesis says that God created man in his own image. But even if it didn't say it, it seems like a sensible idea. After all creating or at least trying to create things in are own image is almost a definition of what we do. So take 'a Being in a World with a Mind' and project it outward and what do you get? A God of Being, a God of the World and a God of the Mind. What is the Christian trinity? God the Father, God the Son and God the holy Ghost.Relate them.
Ask yourself a simple question, what are the constant elements of your experience right know. Thoughts are coming and going, bodily visual and auditory sensations are arising and passing. What remains the same? For me it's 'I'm Here' where ever 'Here' may be. A Being in a World. But there is a third element 'Mind'. Because of our different minds, even if we were in the same physical place are overall experience would be very different. So take these three things, 'a Being in a World with a Mind' as your personal trinitarian experience. It seems irreducible, remove any one and no experience is possible. If there is no consciousness there is no experience, if there is no world to experience there is no experience and if there is no mind to interpret that world there is no experience. The Bible in Genesis says that God created man in his own image. But even if it didn't say it, it seems like a sensible idea. After all creating or at least trying to create things in are own image is almost a definition of what we do. So take 'a Being in a World with a Mind' and project it outward and what do you get? A God of Being, a God of the World and a God of the Mind. What is the Christian trinity? God the Father, God the Son and God the holy Ghost.Relate them.
- God the Father - God of the World
- God the Son - God of Being
- God the Holy Ghost - God of the Mind
They match. This on the other hand doesn't make them equal. A good analogy would be as follows. Lets say that you had heard stories about a terrible hurricane having hit some location in the past and say that you had no meteorological data about it. How would you go about investigating this? You might go to that area and examine it for evidence. If you are skilled in the effects of hurricanes, you could estimate it's track and wind speed from the destruction on the ground.(fallen trees etc) and it's rainfall from flooding effects. But all of this would be general and could support a range of scenarios, especially if it happened a long time ago. Whereas the stories are very specific and what actually happened is very specific(Jesus lived at a specific place and time). But if the specific stories fell within the range of scenarios, that would be support for them. This is precisely what the INTUITIVE TRINITY does. PROVIDE SUPPORT for the revealed truth of the Bible. It can also provide additional insights such as helping answer two questions: WHY A TRINITY and WHY THIS TRINITY. Implying that they are FUNDAMENTAL not arbitrary. If 'a Being in a World with a Mind' is the subjective definition of a living person, what about the rest of life? Take as an example a primitive life form; the bacterium. In its primitive way it senses a world and chemically processes those sensations(mind) and acts in it's own interest(being). So it has in a primitive form the same trinitarian structure. The CHRISTIAN TRINITY is not just the greatest being, it is the DEEP STRUCTURE of all life. ALL LIFE IS CREATED IN IT'S IMAGE. You are a child of the trinity, whether you like it or not.
The Genesis Garden of Eden and the Flood are Stories About Actual Events *
They are stories about one of the greatest changes in human history. The shift from being Hunter-Gatherers to Agriculturists. Genesis says the Garden of Eden was located below the a confluence of four rivers. The Tigris and Euphrates are known. But where are the other two? Hiding in plan sight it seems. To understand this we have to go back 8000 years. This period was called the neolithic wet phase. At that time Saudi Arabia and Iran were much greener and able to support flowing rivers. A wadi (a dried up river bed) still exists in Saudi Arabia, it passes across it's northern region and connects just below where the Tigris and Euphrates meet. This was the Biblical River Pison. The same is true on the Iranian side This was the Biblical River Gihon (Ethiopia is a King James mistranslation and makes no sense). Thus making up the four rivers that watered the garden. 8000 years ago Ocean levels were 200 Feet lower than they are now. Exposing a strip of land surrounding the Persian gulf. The area bellow the current delta would have been extremely lush and fertile with thick deposits of top soil. THIS may have been the Garden of Eden. It would have been a hunter-gatherer paradise. But eventually it was either given up for agriculture or they were pushed out by invading agriculturists, because the garden and that strip would have been the best agricultural land. Agriculture is literally a devils bargain. In the beginning when land is plentiful and populations are low it seems better, but populations quickly rise and land becomes scarce. Modern studies have shown that H/G is a much less strenuous lifestyle than agriculture. Add in class distinctions now imposed on captive populations, herding diseases and famine and it slowly or quickly becomes hell. So humans were punished for eating the fruit of the tree knowledge leading to short term gain and long term loss: a loss that was now irreversible. This choice could be viewed as are species original sin, which we now must bear. AND then the FLOOD CAME! Over the next 1000 Years ocean levels rose 200 feet. But it was not necessarily gradual. The problem with Canada is that it slopes to the north. When the last ice age was ending a vast inland sea formed because as the glaciers melted the water flow to the north was blocked by ice. This sea called lake Agassiz covered much of Canada, 1000's of feet deep. As the glaciers continued to melt it eventually found an outlet and the whole thing emptied into the ocean in less than a year. This may have happened more than once, I'm describing the last time. To add to this water absorbs a lot of sunlight, but it also dissipates it through evaporation. This moisture would have provided lots of snowfall to somewhat reduce the rate of melting. With the inland sea gone this stopped, plus the cool sea was replaced by a dry land hot-spot right near the glaciers, rapidly increasing melting. Rapidly rising ocean levels may have had an additional effect of unmooring glaciers causing them to flow into the ocean, further raising ocean levels, causing further unmooring and a cascading effect. This may seem speculative but similar events are predicted if global warming continues to escalate. It would be ridiculous to say it couldn't have happened then but it could now when then there was a LOT more ice! Flood myths from around the world tend to give independent conformation that a catastrophic flood event did occur. Within a generation, ocean levels may have risen 100's of feet! If humans in this area had still been hunter-gatherers, they could have just moved on. But a high population agricultural society had nowhere to go that wasn't already occupied. The resulting disaster was the second punishment for eating the 'fruit'. The Garden of Eden and the Flood stories are snapshots of events that happened around the world but because of the invention of writing, were recorded here. Also because most of the rest of the world had not yet eaten the 'fruit' the effects elsewhere were less severe. * The shift from being Hunter-Gatherers to Agriculturists, the location of the two fossil rivers and the garden come from the archaeologist Jaris Zarins
The Genesis Creation Story
In the early part of the Twentieth Century the Genesis creation story was not taken very seriously. The Steady State hypothesis was the generally accepted theory of the universe, so there was no BEGINNING. And birds were thought to have co-evolved with mammals so the basic order of Genesis seemed wrong. Then two major things happened, the Steady State hypothesis was replaced by the Big Bang theory and birds were found to have evolved from dinosaurs that then died out. If Genesis is taken as an explanation of how the world that existed at the time that it was written came to be, then it was starting to make sense. The third problem with Genesis is what does the word 'day' mean. If you take it literally then the timing is all wrong. But if God is an eternal being then what is a day to God. It need not be the same as it is to us. If you take it to mean 'era' then the timing of Genesis makes sense. Also the 'Earth day' was not created until the forth day of the story.(gen 1:14) Genesis was not meant to be a scientific treaties, but a story for a tribal people about how the world they lived in came to be. In that sense it does very well. Of all the ancient creation myths it's the only one that got it right. Most of the rest are either about fornicating gods or devolution. Although devolution has some validity in that the period from the rise of agriculture threw the bronze and iron ages was characterized moral decay and brutality. My point so far is that the Christian Trinity is a deep truth and that Genesis isn't a bunch of crazy stories. What is Science?
Science is the Pursuit of the Effective Approximation of physical reality. The first thing to understand is that reason is a relative process. Follow any line of reasoning backward to it's beginning and you will find an assumption1. In scientific reasoning this could be a theory, hypothesis, guess etc. and would include laws and conditions they contain that are assumed to be true. The reasoning process is therefore only as good as that assumption. To get around this science uses empirical verification. If a theory stands up to empirical verification it is considered an EFFECTIVE THEORY. But an effective theory is not about truth because new data may disprove it. For 250 years Newtonian Mechanics was wrongly considered the truth and then suddenly it wasn't, its starting assumption of pure determinism falsified. It was then replaced by two partial theories, Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, which are only effective in their respective realms. Science is NOT about truth. SCIENTIFIC ATHEISM is the PSEUDO-TRUTH that science IS or at least CAN BE about truth. This does not mean that science is somehow bad, in its relative role it is very useful.
The Genesis Garden of Eden and the Flood are Stories About Actual Events *
They are stories about one of the greatest changes in human history. The shift from being Hunter-Gatherers to Agriculturists. Genesis says the Garden of Eden was located below the a confluence of four rivers. The Tigris and Euphrates are known. But where are the other two? Hiding in plan sight it seems. To understand this we have to go back 8000 years. This period was called the neolithic wet phase. At that time Saudi Arabia and Iran were much greener and able to support flowing rivers. A wadi (a dried up river bed) still exists in Saudi Arabia, it passes across it's northern region and connects just below where the Tigris and Euphrates meet. This was the Biblical River Pison. The same is true on the Iranian side This was the Biblical River Gihon (Ethiopia is a King James mistranslation and makes no sense). Thus making up the four rivers that watered the garden. 8000 years ago Ocean levels were 200 Feet lower than they are now. Exposing a strip of land surrounding the Persian gulf. The area bellow the current delta would have been extremely lush and fertile with thick deposits of top soil. THIS may have been the Garden of Eden. It would have been a hunter-gatherer paradise. But eventually it was either given up for agriculture or they were pushed out by invading agriculturists, because the garden and that strip would have been the best agricultural land. Agriculture is literally a devils bargain. In the beginning when land is plentiful and populations are low it seems better, but populations quickly rise and land becomes scarce. Modern studies have shown that H/G is a much less strenuous lifestyle than agriculture. Add in class distinctions now imposed on captive populations, herding diseases and famine and it slowly or quickly becomes hell. So humans were punished for eating the fruit of the tree knowledge leading to short term gain and long term loss: a loss that was now irreversible. This choice could be viewed as are species original sin, which we now must bear. AND then the FLOOD CAME! Over the next 1000 Years ocean levels rose 200 feet. But it was not necessarily gradual. The problem with Canada is that it slopes to the north. When the last ice age was ending a vast inland sea formed because as the glaciers melted the water flow to the north was blocked by ice. This sea called lake Agassiz covered much of Canada, 1000's of feet deep. As the glaciers continued to melt it eventually found an outlet and the whole thing emptied into the ocean in less than a year. This may have happened more than once, I'm describing the last time. To add to this water absorbs a lot of sunlight, but it also dissipates it through evaporation. This moisture would have provided lots of snowfall to somewhat reduce the rate of melting. With the inland sea gone this stopped, plus the cool sea was replaced by a dry land hot-spot right near the glaciers, rapidly increasing melting. Rapidly rising ocean levels may have had an additional effect of unmooring glaciers causing them to flow into the ocean, further raising ocean levels, causing further unmooring and a cascading effect. This may seem speculative but similar events are predicted if global warming continues to escalate. It would be ridiculous to say it couldn't have happened then but it could now when then there was a LOT more ice! Flood myths from around the world tend to give independent conformation that a catastrophic flood event did occur. Within a generation, ocean levels may have risen 100's of feet! If humans in this area had still been hunter-gatherers, they could have just moved on. But a high population agricultural society had nowhere to go that wasn't already occupied. The resulting disaster was the second punishment for eating the 'fruit'. The Garden of Eden and the Flood stories are snapshots of events that happened around the world but because of the invention of writing, were recorded here. Also because most of the rest of the world had not yet eaten the 'fruit' the effects elsewhere were less severe. * The shift from being Hunter-Gatherers to Agriculturists, the location of the two fossil rivers and the garden come from the archaeologist Jaris Zarins
The Genesis Creation Story
In the early part of the Twentieth Century the Genesis creation story was not taken very seriously. The Steady State hypothesis was the generally accepted theory of the universe, so there was no BEGINNING. And birds were thought to have co-evolved with mammals so the basic order of Genesis seemed wrong. Then two major things happened, the Steady State hypothesis was replaced by the Big Bang theory and birds were found to have evolved from dinosaurs that then died out. If Genesis is taken as an explanation of how the world that existed at the time that it was written came to be, then it was starting to make sense. The third problem with Genesis is what does the word 'day' mean. If you take it literally then the timing is all wrong. But if God is an eternal being then what is a day to God. It need not be the same as it is to us. If you take it to mean 'era' then the timing of Genesis makes sense. Also the 'Earth day' was not created until the forth day of the story.(gen 1:14) Genesis was not meant to be a scientific treaties, but a story for a tribal people about how the world they lived in came to be. In that sense it does very well. Of all the ancient creation myths it's the only one that got it right. Most of the rest are either about fornicating gods or devolution. Although devolution has some validity in that the period from the rise of agriculture threw the bronze and iron ages was characterized moral decay and brutality. My point so far is that the Christian Trinity is a deep truth and that Genesis isn't a bunch of crazy stories. What is Science?
Science is the Pursuit of the Effective Approximation of physical reality. The first thing to understand is that reason is a relative process. Follow any line of reasoning backward to it's beginning and you will find an assumption1. In scientific reasoning this could be a theory, hypothesis, guess etc. and would include laws and conditions they contain that are assumed to be true. The reasoning process is therefore only as good as that assumption. To get around this science uses empirical verification. If a theory stands up to empirical verification it is considered an EFFECTIVE THEORY. But an effective theory is not about truth because new data may disprove it. For 250 years Newtonian Mechanics was wrongly considered the truth and then suddenly it wasn't, its starting assumption of pure determinism falsified. It was then replaced by two partial theories, Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity, which are only effective in their respective realms. Science is NOT about truth. SCIENTIFIC ATHEISM is the PSEUDO-TRUTH that science IS or at least CAN BE about truth. This does not mean that science is somehow bad, in its relative role it is very useful.
The Trial of Galileo, Scientific Atheism's Anti-Religious Founding Myth *
The enemy of science in the 16th and 17th Centuries was not Christianity but Aristotle. To see this we must go back to Classical Greece. At the time of Plato and Aristotle, Athens was still recovering from it's defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. It had managed to restore it's Democratic government but was still weak. It is difficult to imagine two more poisonous entities to come onto the scene. Plato hated Democracy and science, Aristotle hated Democracy and science but loved pseudoscience. To get a 'feel' for Plato, It would be useful to list the salient features of his major work 'The Republic'.It advocates:
The enemy of science in the 16th and 17th Centuries was not Christianity but Aristotle. To see this we must go back to Classical Greece. At the time of Plato and Aristotle, Athens was still recovering from it's defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. It had managed to restore it's Democratic government but was still weak. It is difficult to imagine two more poisonous entities to come onto the scene. Plato hated Democracy and science, Aristotle hated Democracy and science but loved pseudoscience. To get a 'feel' for Plato, It would be useful to list the salient features of his major work 'The Republic'.It advocates:
- Dictatorship
- lying/deception
- social caste
- pedophilia/forced homosexuality
- banishment of marriage
- suppression of freedom of thought/speech
- inferiority of women
The only thing missing that would make it perfect would be human sacrifice. A more poisonous political document was not written until Hitler bested it with Mien Knopf. In one sense Plato was worse. At least Hitler was honest about his hatred, he didn't hide it in clever dialog. Plato did most of his hateful writing while living in Democratic Athens under the protection of freedom of speech. When Saint Augustine created his extremist version of Original Sin, he supported it with Plato's ideas. Plato was a rabid pedophile, to him ejaculating into a boy was a metaphor for the transfer of wisdom. WOW! Although no one was crazy enough to actually try to implement 'The Republic', it was a stab in the back to Democracy at a time when it needed support and gave noble assent to Emperors like Alexander the Great. If Plato murdered Democracy, Aristotle raped science. Some consider Aristotle the opposite of Plato. He's not, he's the 'two' in a one two punch. The simplest description of Aristotle would be 'the man who got everything wrong'. He saddled Astronomy with his circular dogma that all celestial motion must be circular. He didn't believe in empirical verification so he made the most basic errors. Like believing that heavy objects will fall faster than lighter ones. Something that could be easily tested but he didn't bother. The one idea he may have gotten right, that the Earth is unique, he arrived at for all the wrong reasons. The Earth is not the center of the universe. It is precisely its quiet non-central location that makes its uniqueness possible. What he did do is become the teacher of Alexander. So when Alexander created his Empire, Plato/Aristotle became it's state religion. The result was that Democracy and science, the two greatest creations of Greek culture were wiped from the face of the Earth. Replaced by dictatorship and pseudoscience. The tragedy of this can be highlighted by one example. At this very time Aristarchus was proposing a Sun Centered Theory of the solar system but because of Aristotle's influence it died stillborn. But these two Dark Princes didn't stop there, their ideas ruled and poisoned western culture until almost the 18th Century. European science began where Greek science ended only 2000 years later. One shrinks in horror as to what might have happened to America if after the American Revolution, a similarly vulnerable period for us, we had had the likes of P/A instead of Franklin and Jefferson (Greek confederations were actually mentioned by Madison in the Federalist Papers as examples of what not to do). At the time of Galileo Aristotelian pseudoscience ruled and sadly had been adopted by the church, even though it has nothing to do with Christianity. Ptolemy's Earth centered system was an outgrowth of this. This is what Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo had to contend with. Its effect was on two levels. Externally they had to deal with there own colleges. But internally it effected their basic world view. Much of what you may have heard about Galileo or his trial, is DISTORTED or UNTRUE.The following is a short list of things he didn't invent/do:
- the telescope/the thermometer/the pendulum clock
- make any theoretical contribution to astronomy
- throw weights from Leaning Tower of Pisa
- suffer torture from the inquisition
- languish in its dungeon
- suffer life imprisonment
- say 'and yet it moves'
He was not a Martyr to Science. Galileo was an advocate for Copernicus' system. At the time there were three competing solar system models:
- Copernicus - Sun centered
- Ptolemy - Earth centered
- Tycho Brahe - Earth centered but intermediate, the other planets orbit the sun which orbits the Earth
- He made four important astronomical observations:
- the moons of Jupiter
- the mountains on the Moon
- the phases of Venus
- Sun spots
He claimed to be their discoverer but that's not so clear. The church was not the primitive institution it has been made out to be. It had it's own astronomers, with their own telescopes and had verified and accepted these observations. The phases of Venus were proof that Venus orbits the Sun so Ptolemy's system was untenable. This left Copernicus and Tycho. The church was willing to move to Tycho's intermediate system but no further, without proof. Galileo insisted on Copernicus's system but could present no proof and was reprimanded by the church. Incidentally Kepler did have proof but Galileo REFUSED to accept or present it. Then nothing happened for about 15 years until Galileo published a book in 1632 that caused his trial. Galileo was not an outsider, he was a personal friend of then Pope Urban VIII. Before he published his book, he had a personal consultation with the Pope about it. Shockingly he even used the Pope's recommendation for the title, 'A Dialog On Two Great World Systems'. The Pope previously had given him advice on how to proceed. His suggestion was this: 'assuming a hypothesis satisfactorily explains certain phenomena, this does not necessarily mean that it is true, for god is all-powerful and may have produced the said phenomena by some entirely different means that is not understood by the human mind'. In other words unless he had specific proof he should speak hypothetically. After all he would be asking the church to change a world view that had been almost universally accepted around the world for thousands of years. As previously stated the church was willing to accept Tycho Brahe's intermediate system. In order to disprove this Galileo had to prove that the Earth rotated and orbited the Sun. Did his Dialog do this? The answer is NO. Putting aside the legalities of the trial, what did Galileo's evidence rest on: two things both of them false.
- That the rotation of the Earth is the cause of tides.
- That the changing angle and shape of rotation of Sun spots proves that the Earth is orbiting the Sun.
The first is clearly FALSE, Kepler had already demonstrated that the tides are caused by the Sun and Moon. The second would appear the same whether the Sun orbited the Earth or the Earth orbited the Sun. And so proves NOTHING. So the church did the same thing that any good SCIENTIFIC JOURNAL would do if presented with this book for review, they rejected it out of hand. Galileo also indirectly insulted the Pope by putting his above quoted advice in the mouth of the SIMPLETON in his Dialog. So what happened to the great Martyr for science? Surprisingly very little. His movements were restricted for a while and then he was allowed to return home. He then wrote his famous work 'A Dialog on Two New Sciences', which was about dynamics not astronomy and helped set the stage for Newtonian mechanics and the modern world. Having destroyed Greek Culture, hamstrung the West for 2000 years and almost destroyed Christianity, P/A's influence ended. With the arising of science in Europe and Democracy in America, the two Dark Princes of Dictatorship and Pseudoscience were finally expelled. Although Aristotle's ghost hung out in the Vatican basement for another hundred years or so until one sunny day the powers that be decided that maybe Copernicus wasn't so bad after all. But the Dark Lord is not so easily put off, he now had a new even more powerful Prince: 'Scientific Atheism'. Which now claimed the trial of Galileo as it's anti-religious founding myth. Where ever this new Dark Prince came to power Terror and Mass Murder followed. A short list:
- The French revolution
- The Russian revolution
- The Chinese revolution
- Pol Pot's regime
No case exists where an Atheist government that had the power do so, did not act like this. I would also include the Nazi's as they were at least effective Atheists. By the way Pope Urban VIII's above advice to Galileo is a good definition of an effective theory and the limits that should be placed on it.
* The general perspective on Galileo's trial and the list of things he didn't invent/do are from Sleep Walkers by Arthur Koestler
The Scientific Atheist Trinity
What is the Scientific Atheist trinity? It has three propositions:
The Scientific Atheist Trinity
What is the Scientific Atheist trinity? It has three propositions:
- There exists a theory of everything (from physics)
- Life is not a special creation and should exist throughout the Universe (from biology)
- You/your brain, is a computer (from computer science)
1) For a theory of everything to exist it must have no assumed laws or conditions. Nothing can come from outside it. This is equivalent to mathematical idea of completeness. Unfortunately Godel's Theorem proved that mathematics is incomplete. What this means is that there are true statements within mathematics that cannot be proven. This is the equivalent to saying that there is no theory of everything for mathematics. If there is none for math then there is certainly none for the physics which depends on it. Any attempt at a theory of everything for physics is thus forced to be based on assumptions outside of itself; from a Greater Everything. This would make it at best an effective theory. But physics has a Greater Problem, it can't even come up with a theory of 'MORE'. Since 1973 there has been no advancement in theoretical physics. That was the year that the 'Standard Model' was completed. It was an expansion of Quantum Mechanics. Many theories have been proposed since then but none verified. Two major and potentially testable theories are 'Grand Unification' and 'Super Symmetry'. In physics particles and forces are represented by fields. Grand Unification is the theory that the 3 atomic forces are one field. Super Symmetry that all forces and particles are one field. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN Switzerland is a particle collider used to test such theories. In 2012 it discovered the Higgs Boson the last undiscovered particle in the Standard Model. But that was predicted in the 1960's. The LHC was then shut down, rebuilt and brought back on line with twice the energy in 2014. It then ran for over four years. It's first task was to investigate the Higgs particle in more detail, which it did very successfully. It's second was searching for new physics beyond the Higgs. What did it discover? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Their two best theories are now in grave doubt and physics has nothing new to work with. The only theory left is String Theory, which is untestable and often derided as 'The Theory of Anything'. This is a CATASTROPHE for proposition one.
2) The basic view of evolutionary biology is that life is not special. The ultimate proof of this would be the discovery of alien life, particularly intelligent life. SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) has been looking for signs of INTELLIGENT LIFE for over 50 years and FOUND NOTHING. Even though with over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, by their view it should be common. The second problem is the Fermi Paradox. With so many stars many much older than our Sun, intelligent alien life should have developed long ago. Our planet has had an oxygen atmosphere for over 500 million years. For all this time it was there for the taking. So Were Are All The ALIENS? Obviously we weren't colonized and there is ZERO evidence for alien influence. The DNA on our planet is all boringly similar. But then it gets worse! The Kepler Space Telescope like the LHC was an amazing machine. It was designed to search for Earth like planets orbiting Sun like stars. While it was functioning it made a major contribution to the 4000+ planets in 2000+ solar systems so far discovered. Just about everything else you've heard about these discoveries is HYPE or UNTRUE. Not a single confirmed planet was discovered that could, by any honest assessment be considered habitable. Nor one solar system that looks anything like ours. There seems to be some deep enmity between Earth like planets and Sun like stars. Not one Earth sized planet was found orbiting a Sun like star anywhere near the habitable zone. Our solar system has two, Earth and Venus. Earth sized planets have been found around smaller stars but because of tidal locking and much higher levels of solar flares they are almost certainly uninhabitable. Larger stars don't last long enough and change to quickly to support habitable planets. Projections of millions if not billions of habitable planets in our Galaxy from a null result seems desperate if not fraudulent. The universe seems lifeless. This is a CATASTROPHE for proposition two.
3) Computers have succeeded at many tasks associated with human intelligence. Surpassing humans at Chess, Jeopardy etc. These and other objective tasks have been termed the easy problems (obviously they're still difficult). The hard problem is subjective consciousness. To put it simply, how does one get from an OPTIC NERVE IMPULSE to the COLOR BLUE. This is called the mind/body problem and nobody has an answer to it. One idea about consciousness is that it is an emergent property. The usual example given for emergence, are the properties of water emerging from H2O. One H2O molecule has none of the properties of water. But there is a gradual change as you add more molecules, the accumulating mass tends to show more of the properties of water. But there is nothing gradual about an OPTIC NERVE IMPULSE becoming the COLOR BLUE. Also the first is a purely OBJECTIVE change. One argument against the idea of an immaterial soul is: how can it interact with the body? If it does then it's material, if it doesn't then it's not a soul, thus a paradox. But the same can be said about an optic nerve impulse becoming the color blue, yet we see BLUE! The problem isn't with BLUE it's the with the limits of reason. Before REASON can dismiss THE SOUL it must first dismiss BLUE, which it CAN NOT do! But again there's a bigger problem. Moore's Law was first stated by Gordon Moore, co-founder of INTEL. Transistors are the smallest component of computer hardware. Moore's Law states that the size of transistors will halve every 12 to 18 months. This has been true for over 50 years. The problem is that MOORE'S LAW IS DEAD! If you purchased a new computer recently, the smallest transistors that will EVER EXIST may be on your desk. This is because they are approaching the size where Quantum effects disable them. And nobody knows what to do. There has been a lot of HYPE about Quantum computers. Don't hold your breath. I like to compare Quantum computers with Nuclear Fusion reactors. In opposite directions they are about equally far from reality. The first is trying to bring the Quantum into our world the second the interior of the Sun. The problem with both is stability. And with both it seems unsolvable. Even if they could be made to 'work' in some narrow sense, they will never be made useful. So even if we could somehow solve the mind/body problem, we could never build a computer to implement the solution. For the third time reality comes to the rescue and the third proposition is a CATASTROPHE as well.
An Informal Proof of God
From the answer to proposition 1, we know that there can be no theory of everything. From 'What Is Science' we know that the best science can produce are theories that effectively approximate reality. They can be improved upon (maybe) but can never explain everything. This implies that there is an IRREDUCIBLE1 UNKNOWABILITY to reality that reason can't reach and about which it can say nothing. It implies that reality is COMPLETELY UNKNOWABLE in fact, just that some parts of it can be effectively approximated. This is nothing like the pathetic 'god of the gaps' idea, this GAP can never be filled in. Thinking of it in another way. Represent reality as an infinite plain. Represent what scientific reason can effectively approximate as an island on that plain, call this the known. That island of the known can be expanded but because there can be no theory of everything, can never cover the whole surface. This leaves an irreducible unknowable outside that island. But since what is inside can never be more than an effective approximation, it is all unknowable. Equating this UNKNOWABLE to God, it seems the only thing that scientific reasoning CAN prove IS God! Expressed positively God is freedom from the tyranny of the known. We can't say anything certain about this God but we can make a few guesses. Since reality is well ordered and functioning, this God is in some unknown way must be well ordered. And since reality is completely UNKNOWABLE, it could be highly personal, not limited to a 'Deist' creator role. Looking outward with reason leads to an UNKNOWABLE oneness. Looking inward with intuition leads to a IRREDUCIBLE Trinity. THREE AND ONE AT THE SAME TIME.
A Physical Model For Understanding The Christian Trinity
The Christian Trinity may seem like a paradox, but it's not. A physical model may be helpful. The traditional model across many religions/cultures for God is a mountain. Since we are talking about THE GOD not a god, lets choose the tallest mountain: MOUNT EVEREST. Mount Everest is interesting in that it has three very distinct slopes. So an abstract representation of it could be a tetrahedron (a three sided pyramid sitting on its base). We can now ask some simple questions about it. Firstly is it one mountain, and secondly does it have three sides? The answer to both is YES and there is NO CONFLICT between them. The hidden base could actually represent the unity of the three sides. It's also interesting that the tetrahedron is the simplest of the so called platonic(actually Pythagorean) solids. Incidentally I don't think it is a coincidence that Mount Everest has three slopes. It probably gave it the extra stability it needed to become the worlds tallest mountain.
The Problem With Science
Theoretical Physics experienced exponential growth for over 350 years after the time of Galileo. For the last 50 years, with more money and brains than ever: NOTHING. Are we at the end of that exponential cycle? Will the failure of the LHC be viewed by history as the beginning of the post scientific era? Are we entering a world with little technological/economic growth? That all these things are happening at once doesn't seem to be an accident. I think we are approaching the limits of effective approximation as an objective method. We should have seen this with Quantum Mechanics, the use of probability and statistics is always an act of desperation. But it worked, so shut up and compute became the answer to doubt. Some people think adding consciousness to the mix would help, the problem is that it's already there. The consciousness of scientists is the motivation for science. They are trying to get from 'their world' constrained by 'their consciousness' to an unconstrained 'The World'. But the limits of reason mean it's always out of reach. Beyond QM there seems to be nothing. The real problem is that science barely touches upon the problems of subjective existence. For LIFE all it offers is a DULL HEDONISM, a computer enabled NARCISSISM. For DEATH all it offers is what I call the SENILE SOLUTION. Keep people alive long enough so their minds become so weak they don't know their dying.
Why Have Atheists Become So Anti-Christian
One word: FEAR! When physics was streaming along full of hope, when the galaxy was still viewed as a place filled with life and Moore's Law was operating like clockwork resulting in ever smaller/faster computers, they could safely ignore Christianity. Kind of like a HEMORRHOID, unpleasant but something that could be tied off and left to die and quietly pass on. But because of the above TRIPLE CATASTROPHE they are VULNERABLE and full of fear and view it like a CANCER that must be done away with. Since CHRISTIANITY represents the moral values they DESPISE.
Conclusion
I wish that this was just a discussion about religion but we live in a dangerous time. The world may be entering a state that it will remain in for a long time. SCIENTIFIC ATHEIST hedonism is rapidly becoming the state religion of the United States. ATHEIST CHINA has already implemented one third of GEORGE ORWELL'S 1984. With the CHINESE COVID VIRUS scaring us into a PASSIVE NARCISSISM, SOCIAL MEDIA is, by banning discussion of its Chinese origin and other actions, rapidly becoming the MINISTRY OF TRUTH. Without resistance, 2024 is looking like a good date for full implementation. The Dark Lord never gives up, BETTER LATE THAN NEVER! My purpose for writing this is not to change Christianity but to reinforce it. A revealed truth backed up by an intuitive truth is more defensible in an analytic age. I have no wish diminish other religions, it's just that it's Christianity that's under attack.
One More Thing
Innovation has always been America's Lucky Star. It made us wealthy and helped win the Civil War, World War II, the Cold War and beyond. But with nothing new from Physics for technology to work with, that may be nearing an end. Giving an advantage to copy cats and thieves, who in the past we could out innovate. China is an enemy like no other. The USSR and the Nazis were military threats but not economic threats. China is both, plus a political threat in the sense of destabilizing our Democracy. I don't see any easy answers to this. But one might be 'The Three United States'. What is that? The three would be India, Brazil and the USA. All are large religiously tolerant Democracies; all were seriously harmed by the Chinese COVID virus. If they were organized by a NATO like treaty along with others, China could be contained.
Comments E-mail comments to: intuitivetrinity@yahoo.com
2) The basic view of evolutionary biology is that life is not special. The ultimate proof of this would be the discovery of alien life, particularly intelligent life. SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) has been looking for signs of INTELLIGENT LIFE for over 50 years and FOUND NOTHING. Even though with over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy, by their view it should be common. The second problem is the Fermi Paradox. With so many stars many much older than our Sun, intelligent alien life should have developed long ago. Our planet has had an oxygen atmosphere for over 500 million years. For all this time it was there for the taking. So Were Are All The ALIENS? Obviously we weren't colonized and there is ZERO evidence for alien influence. The DNA on our planet is all boringly similar. But then it gets worse! The Kepler Space Telescope like the LHC was an amazing machine. It was designed to search for Earth like planets orbiting Sun like stars. While it was functioning it made a major contribution to the 4000+ planets in 2000+ solar systems so far discovered. Just about everything else you've heard about these discoveries is HYPE or UNTRUE. Not a single confirmed planet was discovered that could, by any honest assessment be considered habitable. Nor one solar system that looks anything like ours. There seems to be some deep enmity between Earth like planets and Sun like stars. Not one Earth sized planet was found orbiting a Sun like star anywhere near the habitable zone. Our solar system has two, Earth and Venus. Earth sized planets have been found around smaller stars but because of tidal locking and much higher levels of solar flares they are almost certainly uninhabitable. Larger stars don't last long enough and change to quickly to support habitable planets. Projections of millions if not billions of habitable planets in our Galaxy from a null result seems desperate if not fraudulent. The universe seems lifeless. This is a CATASTROPHE for proposition two.
3) Computers have succeeded at many tasks associated with human intelligence. Surpassing humans at Chess, Jeopardy etc. These and other objective tasks have been termed the easy problems (obviously they're still difficult). The hard problem is subjective consciousness. To put it simply, how does one get from an OPTIC NERVE IMPULSE to the COLOR BLUE. This is called the mind/body problem and nobody has an answer to it. One idea about consciousness is that it is an emergent property. The usual example given for emergence, are the properties of water emerging from H2O. One H2O molecule has none of the properties of water. But there is a gradual change as you add more molecules, the accumulating mass tends to show more of the properties of water. But there is nothing gradual about an OPTIC NERVE IMPULSE becoming the COLOR BLUE. Also the first is a purely OBJECTIVE change. One argument against the idea of an immaterial soul is: how can it interact with the body? If it does then it's material, if it doesn't then it's not a soul, thus a paradox. But the same can be said about an optic nerve impulse becoming the color blue, yet we see BLUE! The problem isn't with BLUE it's the with the limits of reason. Before REASON can dismiss THE SOUL it must first dismiss BLUE, which it CAN NOT do! But again there's a bigger problem. Moore's Law was first stated by Gordon Moore, co-founder of INTEL. Transistors are the smallest component of computer hardware. Moore's Law states that the size of transistors will halve every 12 to 18 months. This has been true for over 50 years. The problem is that MOORE'S LAW IS DEAD! If you purchased a new computer recently, the smallest transistors that will EVER EXIST may be on your desk. This is because they are approaching the size where Quantum effects disable them. And nobody knows what to do. There has been a lot of HYPE about Quantum computers. Don't hold your breath. I like to compare Quantum computers with Nuclear Fusion reactors. In opposite directions they are about equally far from reality. The first is trying to bring the Quantum into our world the second the interior of the Sun. The problem with both is stability. And with both it seems unsolvable. Even if they could be made to 'work' in some narrow sense, they will never be made useful. So even if we could somehow solve the mind/body problem, we could never build a computer to implement the solution. For the third time reality comes to the rescue and the third proposition is a CATASTROPHE as well.
An Informal Proof of God
From the answer to proposition 1, we know that there can be no theory of everything. From 'What Is Science' we know that the best science can produce are theories that effectively approximate reality. They can be improved upon (maybe) but can never explain everything. This implies that there is an IRREDUCIBLE1 UNKNOWABILITY to reality that reason can't reach and about which it can say nothing. It implies that reality is COMPLETELY UNKNOWABLE in fact, just that some parts of it can be effectively approximated. This is nothing like the pathetic 'god of the gaps' idea, this GAP can never be filled in. Thinking of it in another way. Represent reality as an infinite plain. Represent what scientific reason can effectively approximate as an island on that plain, call this the known. That island of the known can be expanded but because there can be no theory of everything, can never cover the whole surface. This leaves an irreducible unknowable outside that island. But since what is inside can never be more than an effective approximation, it is all unknowable. Equating this UNKNOWABLE to God, it seems the only thing that scientific reasoning CAN prove IS God! Expressed positively God is freedom from the tyranny of the known. We can't say anything certain about this God but we can make a few guesses. Since reality is well ordered and functioning, this God is in some unknown way must be well ordered. And since reality is completely UNKNOWABLE, it could be highly personal, not limited to a 'Deist' creator role. Looking outward with reason leads to an UNKNOWABLE oneness. Looking inward with intuition leads to a IRREDUCIBLE Trinity. THREE AND ONE AT THE SAME TIME.
A Physical Model For Understanding The Christian Trinity
The Christian Trinity may seem like a paradox, but it's not. A physical model may be helpful. The traditional model across many religions/cultures for God is a mountain. Since we are talking about THE GOD not a god, lets choose the tallest mountain: MOUNT EVEREST. Mount Everest is interesting in that it has three very distinct slopes. So an abstract representation of it could be a tetrahedron (a three sided pyramid sitting on its base). We can now ask some simple questions about it. Firstly is it one mountain, and secondly does it have three sides? The answer to both is YES and there is NO CONFLICT between them. The hidden base could actually represent the unity of the three sides. It's also interesting that the tetrahedron is the simplest of the so called platonic(actually Pythagorean) solids. Incidentally I don't think it is a coincidence that Mount Everest has three slopes. It probably gave it the extra stability it needed to become the worlds tallest mountain.
The Problem With Science
Theoretical Physics experienced exponential growth for over 350 years after the time of Galileo. For the last 50 years, with more money and brains than ever: NOTHING. Are we at the end of that exponential cycle? Will the failure of the LHC be viewed by history as the beginning of the post scientific era? Are we entering a world with little technological/economic growth? That all these things are happening at once doesn't seem to be an accident. I think we are approaching the limits of effective approximation as an objective method. We should have seen this with Quantum Mechanics, the use of probability and statistics is always an act of desperation. But it worked, so shut up and compute became the answer to doubt. Some people think adding consciousness to the mix would help, the problem is that it's already there. The consciousness of scientists is the motivation for science. They are trying to get from 'their world' constrained by 'their consciousness' to an unconstrained 'The World'. But the limits of reason mean it's always out of reach. Beyond QM there seems to be nothing. The real problem is that science barely touches upon the problems of subjective existence. For LIFE all it offers is a DULL HEDONISM, a computer enabled NARCISSISM. For DEATH all it offers is what I call the SENILE SOLUTION. Keep people alive long enough so their minds become so weak they don't know their dying.
Why Have Atheists Become So Anti-Christian
One word: FEAR! When physics was streaming along full of hope, when the galaxy was still viewed as a place filled with life and Moore's Law was operating like clockwork resulting in ever smaller/faster computers, they could safely ignore Christianity. Kind of like a HEMORRHOID, unpleasant but something that could be tied off and left to die and quietly pass on. But because of the above TRIPLE CATASTROPHE they are VULNERABLE and full of fear and view it like a CANCER that must be done away with. Since CHRISTIANITY represents the moral values they DESPISE.
Conclusion
I wish that this was just a discussion about religion but we live in a dangerous time. The world may be entering a state that it will remain in for a long time. SCIENTIFIC ATHEIST hedonism is rapidly becoming the state religion of the United States. ATHEIST CHINA has already implemented one third of GEORGE ORWELL'S 1984. With the CHINESE COVID VIRUS scaring us into a PASSIVE NARCISSISM, SOCIAL MEDIA is, by banning discussion of its Chinese origin and other actions, rapidly becoming the MINISTRY OF TRUTH. Without resistance, 2024 is looking like a good date for full implementation. The Dark Lord never gives up, BETTER LATE THAN NEVER! My purpose for writing this is not to change Christianity but to reinforce it. A revealed truth backed up by an intuitive truth is more defensible in an analytic age. I have no wish diminish other religions, it's just that it's Christianity that's under attack.
One More Thing
Innovation has always been America's Lucky Star. It made us wealthy and helped win the Civil War, World War II, the Cold War and beyond. But with nothing new from Physics for technology to work with, that may be nearing an end. Giving an advantage to copy cats and thieves, who in the past we could out innovate. China is an enemy like no other. The USSR and the Nazis were military threats but not economic threats. China is both, plus a political threat in the sense of destabilizing our Democracy. I don't see any easy answers to this. But one might be 'The Three United States'. What is that? The three would be India, Brazil and the USA. All are large religiously tolerant Democracies; all were seriously harmed by the Chinese COVID virus. If they were organized by a NATO like treaty along with others, China could be contained.
Comments E-mail comments to: intuitivetrinity@yahoo.com