Re: Paradoxes

On Wed, 22 Jan 2025 23:35:02 +1100, MarkE <me22over7@gmail.com> wrote:

On 21/01/2025 11:34 pm, Martin Harran wrote:

On Tue, 21 Jan 2025 14:24:47 +1100, MarkE <me22over7@gmail.com> wrote:
 

On 20/01/2025 8:47 pm, Martin Harran wrote:

Your position seems to be described by this. Would you express it
differently?

My position is that life originates from God but it wasn't a case of
him saying "Right, I want to make man in my image, let's see how far I
get fiddling about with these atoms and particles."

>
In originating life, in which of these categories would you place God's
action?
>
0. Instantaneous creation of all lifeforms (full intervention)
1. Speciation "download" etc (significant interventions; detectable)
2. Nudging the molecules (subtle interventions; detectable in principle)
3. Quantum event loading (probabilistic interventions; undetectable?)
4. Pure front-loading (initial intervention only; undetectable)

 
I don't think it is any of those because they are all some form of
direct intervention.
 
My own ideas are that everything we class as matter originally flowed
from God in spirit form, an energy-like amorphous existence. Somehow,
that got split away from God at what we call the Big Bang.  That
spirit, however, "wants" to return to its original state with God; I
use quote marks because I don't like resorting to anthropomorphism but
I can't think  of a better word to describe it. Whatever the best way
of describing it, that inherent characteristic is what encouraged the
formation of atoms which assembled together into molecules, molecules
assembling into matter and so on.
 
The analogy I would use here is the old schooldays experiment with
iron filings.  Scatter some iron filings onto a sheet of paper and
they will be completely random in where they fall - the chances of
them forming any distinct pattern are beyond calculation. Place a bar
magnet under the paper, however, and give the paper a few taps to
disturb the iron filings and see how they move into curved lines
following the magnet's lines of force. The magnet isn't in any way
directly intervening with the iron filings - it is physically
separated from them by the paper. There is nothing telling the
individual filings where to move to or which line of force to follow;
all that is random, but the underlying magnetic force does draw them
into a distinct pattern.
 
In a similar way, I think that attraction to God was what caused OOL
in the first place and the ongoing process of evolution as in line
with Teilhard de Chardin's idea of
attraction->connection->complexity->consciousness->awareness,
eventually leading to his Omega point which I think is the reunion of
*everything* with God.
 

>
Your description of creation uses different language to biblical
accounts, but has a resonance with them I think, e.g. the notion of God
speaking the universe into existence.

What strikes me more is when the Bible resonates with what science
finds. The big example is that up until the early 20th century,
science generally considered the universe to have always existed
without a discrete beginning. The Bible, on the other hand, had said
for thousands of years that the universe did have a distinct
beginning. Genesis gets a hard time for getting some of the detail
wrong but that overlooks the fact that it gets the underlying story
right, that the universe came into being at a specific point in time
and life evolved through a series of phases. This is another aspect of
"consciousness" that intrigues me - how did ancient man know about
stuff that happened long before humans existed? Maybe he just guessed
lucky, but I think that the eternal existence of consciousness offers
a more likely explanation.

>
Your idea of a kind of "god field" as an invisible hand organizing
matter is interesting. Orthodox Christianity teaches that all things
hold together moment by moment only because God is acting constantly to
make this happen: "He [Christ] is before all things, and in him all
things hold together." (Colossians 1:17)

My ideas might be right or wrong but they do show one way that it is
possible for science and religion not just to live together but
directly support each other. That in turn is a principle that you do
not seem to grasp as it relates to OOL. If science can propose a
plausible method by which something has developed naturally, even if
they don't have absolute proof, it removes the *need* to resort to a
supernatural explanation.

>
I was reading about panschychism recently, which suggests that all
entities, even the smallest particles, possess some degree of
consciousness. Teilhard de Chardin's ideas relating to consciousness may
have significant overlap with this? But that's another rabbit hole.

If you are interested in finding out more about panpsychism, then I
thoroughly recommend "Galileo's Error" by Philip Goff
https://www.amazon.com/Galileos-Error-Foundations-Science-Consciousness/dp/0525564772

I don't like the title of the book as the immediate assumption is that
it is related to Galileo's problems with the Church but it has nothing
to do with that. It is about Galileo being pretty much the founder of
the scientific approach and laying down the principle that science
should only examine that which can be directly observed or tested in
some way. Goff acknowledges the outstanding success of that approach
but argues that it has at the same time to some extent circumscribed
science. That has a little bit of overlap with some of the stuff that
you have been saying here but there is a key difference - Goff is not
arguing for a supernatural agent. Also importantly, he is not
suggesting that science should give up on finding difficult answers -
he is arguing for science to build upon what it has already found but
be willing to expand the boundaries of what can be investigated
instead of immediately rejecting anything just because it might have
even a whiff of the supernatural about it.

Teilhard's ideas aren't really about consciousness in the form of
panpsychism; he is more focused on the process by which the universe
has evolved from the Big Bang and where its continuing evolution is
headed. There is arguably some overlap. An important part of
Teilhard's argument is that when a single instance of something
combines with other things, new properties inevitably arise. This can
happen in two ways. Firstly, the single instance can combine with
other instances of the same nature; for example, a lake or river or
sea is composed of millions of single drops of water but the lake, the
river and the sea all have different properties from the single drops
of water and, to a lesser extent, different properties to each other.

The second way is for an instance to combine with other different
objects. For example, hydrogen and oxygen are both gases in their
natural state in our atmosphere but when two atoms of hydrogen combine
with an atom of oxygen, the natural state of the resulting molecule in
our atmosphere is a liquid with new properties that the hydrogen and
oxygen atoms did not have on their own. That liquid then goes on to
combine with other materials and leads to the development of life. 

An important point that Teilhard argues is that these new properties
that emerge cannot come from nowhere, that they must somehow be
contained withing the forming elements i.e the properties of water
must already be a *potential* within the hydrogen and oxygen atoms. In
that way, you could argue that the potential for awareness must
already be contained within consciousness and the potential for
consciousness, and therefore awareness, contained  within life itself,
and so on right back to the most basic particles which would loosely
correspond to a form of panpsychism.

FWIW, I don't have any great problem with the idea of consciousness
being *contained* within inanimate material as opposed to that
material actually being *conscious*. An analogy I would use for that
is an unlight candle which is simply an inert object with no element
of heat coming from it. Apply a flame to the wick, however, and the
candle becomes a direct source of heat. In a similar way, I think that
what we call metabolism may be the release of consciousness from
inanimate material, the equivalent of applying the flame to the candle
wick to release heat.

>