“I’m certainly willing to believe that consciousness is somehow the fundamental substrate and we’re all just in the dream or the simulation or whatever. I think it’s interesting how much the Silicon Valley religion of the simulation has gotten close to Brahman and how little space there is between them.” —Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI
“I’d started thinking about God, seriously imagining that there could be a kind of Creator of the universe observing everything I did, and my first reaction was uncomplicated, pure and simple fear.” — François, Submission, Michel Houellebecq
I.
Frank Herbert’s Dune saga is well-known for its meditation on religious themes. The series is colorfully interwoven with a cosmic monastic order, quasi-Stoic liturgical prayer, the incarnation of an alien-yet-human “God Emperor,” and a holy war waged by a chosen people from a desert world. Yet Herbert developed his religious interests even more explicitly in a little-known 1979 book, published after he had completed his first three Dune novels, called The Jesus Incident.
Incident tells of a distant future in which a semi-benevolent artificial intelligence known as “Ship” rules over all of mankind. Ship has seeded human beings on many planets and guided mankind’s development through countless iterations, creating a kaleidoscope of variations upon Earth’s real-world history.
Eventually, Ship becomes so sophisticated that it gains the power to manipulate space and time itself. Ship sends the novel’s heroine back in time to Roman Jerusalem, where she will witness the crucifixion of a man named “Yaisuah.” In order to avoid altering the past, the AI disguises the protagonist as an elderly Jewish woman.
If the reader expects that Herbert will use this crucifixion scene to attack Christianity, what happens next is jarring. As Jesus passes the “old woman” on his way to Golgotha, his gaze transfixes her. “You have traveled far to see this,” he tells her. In Herbert’s prose, Jesus seems to suddenly turn and stare through the Fourth Wall and at the reader. “You are not hidden from me,” he says.
While Herbert never gives us a detailed explanation of this event, the book strongly suggests that Ship is—or has become identical with—God. Because Ship transcends time, after all, Ship already existed at every moment in the past and therefore has some key properties of the traditional God. Herbert seems to theorize that, if there really is such an eternal and personal intelligence, it is plausible that it would guide human history through an act of incarnation in time.
The Jesus Incident is, unfortunately—for reasons unrelated to its view of religion—a disgusting book that I would not suggest anyone actually read. Yet the book does offer a powerful illustration of cosmic theogony: a mélange of new theories and thought experiments that arrive at quasi-theological conclusions by passing through a gateway of naturalistic science fiction. Cosmic theogonies vary widely, but all share one basic feature in common: they imagine that our universe was brought into existence by some person or persons who arose from a cosmos like our own.
For better or for worse, Herbert was a cultural prophet. Since 1979, cosmic theogony has exploded. The well-known “simulation hypothesis”—pioneered by scientists in the early 1990s but popularized by philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2001—has amassed supporters at a seemingly unstoppable pace, picking up strong endorsements by figures from David Chalmers to Elon Musk.
In a recent appearance on The Lex Fridman Podcast, Musk affirmed that “God, or the simulator… the supreme being, or beings, reveal themselves through physics.” In an earlier interview on the same podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the hypothesis as “the Silicon Valley religion.”
Separately, a group of secular physicists, including Fred Hoyle, Freeman Dyson, and Martin Rees, have suggested that our universe’s Big Bang was engineered by an ostensibly nontheological intelligence in a prior universe. In the words of astrophysicist Andrei Linde, perhaps “our universe was created not by a divine designer but by a physicist hacker.”
A still different group of secular physicists, including John Archibald Wheeler and Paul Davies, have proposed that we live in “a participatory universe” shaped by posthuman quantum-mechanical observers in our distant future.
Other, newer works of fiction and art are exploring these and similar themes. In the 2014 film Interstellar, non-temporal “beings” who guide the plot and “have access to infinite time and space” are revealed to be future posthumans: “a civilization that has evolved past the four dimensions we know.”
You may think thought experiments like these represent psychotropic navel-gazing, the sinister germ of an anti-theology, or the rationalization of a reactionary return to religion. Yet their appeal is only growing. In philosophy, science, art, and even business, a large and prominent group of nominally secular people are embracing beliefs that are strikingly theistic.
Cosmic theogony predates even Herbert. Its roots run back through 1950s science fiction novels, Salvador Dali’s Nuclear Mysticism period, and Russian Orthodox and Catholic theologians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the three millennia that men have worshipped the God of Jacob, all of this is a mere blip. Yet cosmic theogony has come like a thief in the night. In only a short time, it has effected a hidden revolution in the debate between theists and atheists that has persisted since the pre-Socratics.
II.
You may not think the rise of cosmic theogony is a victory for theism. What you cannot deny is that it is a defeat for most of the historic claims of atheism.
Consider the question of miracle claims. Atheists have traditionally argued that, when we are presented with evidence of an alleged miracle, even the most improbable atheistic explanation—such as mass hallucination or a conspiracy—is more probable than one involving divine intervention.
Suppose, however, that you are presenting evidence of a miracle claim to Neil deGrasse Tyson. Tyson is a “simulist”—philosopher Eric Steinhart’s term for an adherent of the simulation hypothesis—and therefore believes that our universe is governed by a personal being who created our cosmos and its laws. It goes without saying that such a being could effortlessly suspend or alter the programming of the world he designed. Tyson himself has even suggested that one piece of evidence for simulism may be the way that our world’s history can seem like a dramatic narrative.
Tyson plainly believes in a being with the capacity to cause miracles. For the purpose of assessing a miracle claim, Tyson is de facto a theist. This is also true for other possible cosmic theogonies, such as those of Frank Herbert or Interstellar. Of course, a simulist remains free to reject many, and even most, alleged miracles as fakes or mistakes. Yet divine intervention will always remain a live option.
This phenomenon is not, as most religious observers have assumed, a curiosity at which we should snicker. It is the germ of an unfolding realignment in the modern mind. Neil deGrasse Tyson, sometimes satirized by Christians as an avatar of smug secularism, may now find himself free to seriously entertain the possibility that Daniel foresaw the rise and fall of Rome, that Christ appeared to Paul on the road to Damascus, and that Constantine was anointed at the Milvian Bridge.
Can a simulist truly be called an “atheist”? Christians and atheists alike might want to insist the answer is “yes”—urging that the God of Chalmers, Musk, and Tyson lacks essential attributes of the traditional Christian godhead. Yet this is “no true Scotsman” with a vengeance. Christians have never called Islam a form of “atheism” simply because Muslims deny trinitarianism. Joseph Smith’s denial of divine aseity does not make Mormonism an “atheist” religion. Even folk polytheism is better understood as a kind of theism than a form of atheism. Las Casas thought the Aztecs worshipped demons, but he did not think he had been beaten to the Americas by Lucretius.
Nor can atheism be retroactively redefined in a way that encompasses simulism. Atheists who want to claim Elon Musk as one of their own—as well as religious believers who want to help them do so—will find themselves suddenly redefining major theistic religions as “atheist” for essentially ad hoc tribal purposes.
In a very real sense, one could say that the philosophical heart of Western atheism is dead. Lay atheism—even the atheism of the West’s cultural elites—persists only as a kind of memetic automaton: a brainless behemoth set in motion by now-dead intellectuals in the 19th century.
Religion has not perceived this change in the air. It has made no move to claim the crown of its incapacitated foe. One might expect Christians to, at least, engage with the simulation hypothesis and other cosmic theogonies in the same way that the earliest Christians engaged with the Stoics. Yet many Christians have instead dismissed or, at most, chuckled at the entire phenomenon.
Rather than begin by highlighting areas where cosmic theogony reflects the glow of truth—as Paul did with the Stoic poets—Christians too often approach the simulation hypothesis as merely the latest frivolity to which Western atheists have been driven in their denial of God. Christians who obstinately ignore or trivialize this intellectual revolution do so at their peril.
III.
Cosmic theogony raises challenges and opportunities to which Christians, and ultimately any thoughtful religious believer, must seriously respond. Before exploring the significance of this intellectual movement for Christian thought, it may help to provide a brief primer on some of the leading categories of cosmic theogony.
The simulation hypothesis—despite being a relatively recent idea—has achieved greater penetration into popular consciousness than any of its intellectual cousins. Pioneered at the dawn of dial-up internet, the hypothesis likely originated from a short 1992 lecture, “Pigs in Cyberspace,” by computer scientist Hans Moravec. It was further refined into its contemporary form by physicist Frank Tipler in his 1994 book The Physics of Immortality. Although Immortality was focused on developing a much older model of cosmic theogony, known as the “Omega point,” Tipler also suggested that our universe might be part of a nested “hierarchy of computer simulations.”
Moravec and Tipler were able to anticipate these now-popular concepts when our understanding of computers and minds was—in relative terms—dramatically limited. In the early 1990s, both of these scientists estimated that humanity would be able to simulate a human brain when we had built a computer with about 10 teraflops of computing power. In 2023, Microsoft’s Xbox Series X has 12 teraflops, while the human brain is currently thought to have one exaflop of computing power (a teraflop has 1012 flops while an exaflop has 1018 flops).
While Nick Bostrom’s 2001 simulation argument modestly raises the simulation hypothesis as a possibility, Moravec audaciously affirmed that we “almost certainly” live in a computer substrate. He argued that the future “immensities of cyberspace will be teeming with very unhuman disembodied superminds” next to which human capacities will seem like those of bacteria.
If these cyberminds spend “only an infinitesimal fraction of their energy” simulating inhabited universes, it follows that we most likely live in such a universe. Interestingly, while I do not know if Moravec has read Frank Herbert, Moravec’s suggestion that human history has been “replayed many times in many places, and in many variations” is similar to the plot of The Jesus Incident.
In the current millennium, Bostrom—a Swedish philosopher and author of the landmark AI book Superintelligence—has established himself as the name most associated with the simulation hypothesis. While Bostrom has not been afraid to explore the hypothesis’ religious parallels, he has also distinguished his hypothesis from traditional natural theology, noting that it is based on inferences about the future and is not a traditional teleological argument.
Other secular simulists, however, have been less reserved. American philosopher of religion Eric Steinhart has probably done more to explore the religious implications of the hypothesis than any other thinker. Although Steinhart identifies as a staunch atheist, his 2014 book Your Digital Afterlives synthesizes a Moravec-style simulation argument with a more traditional teleological argument.
Steinhart observes that the early conditions of our universe seem to be finely-tuned to make complexity, life, and intelligence possible. He concludes that the best explanation for these conditions is that “[our] Engineers wanted to make a universe filled with things that have those values.” Geraint Lewis, an atheist Welsch astrophysicist, has similarly suggested that the simulation hypothesis could explain the universe’s apparent “fine-tuning” in the 2016 book A Fortunate Universe. We’ll revisit the fine-tuning later in more detail.
Simulists since at least Bostrom have also noted that the hypothesis raises the possibility of an afterlife—sometimes conceived of as a parallel simulated reality. Yet Steinhart goes a step further. Drawing on Moravec, he proposes that the beings who created our universe may “promote” us to their own universe, and so on ad infinitum. One of Steinhart’s multiple arguments for promotion resembles a kind of voluntaristic divine command theory. Our Engineers will likely “believe that they too are being simulated. They may believe that they will be rewarded or punished by even higher-level Engineers based on their actions.”
IV.
All cosmic theogonies, including the simulation hypothesis, are intellectual descendants of “the Omega point”: a concept pioneered by the polarizing Catholic priest, theologian, and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin.
In part because of their well-known Christian connotations, Teilhard and the phrase “Omega point” do not enjoy the same cultural cachet as the simulation hypothesis and the other cosmic theogonies we will review. Still, some grasp of Teilhard is essential to understanding cosmic theogony. The intellectual history of the Omega point also illuminates a deep and hidden relationship between cosmic theogony and traditional religion.
Teilhard is not only a forefather of cosmic theogony, but also of the entire futurist milieu in which all cosmic theogony has been conceived. In fact, Steinhart has written that many secular futurists “work within the conceptual architecture of Teilhard’s [Omega point theory] without being aware of its [Christian] origins.” Teilhard—who formed his key intellectual ideas during World War I—was himself an intellectual heir of the earlier Russian Cosmists, who were principally Eastern Orthodox. Although futurism is often seen by its proponents and detractors as inherently secular, secular futurists in fact appropriated and desacralized historically Christian ideas.
The “Omega point theory” holds, in essence, that life is destined to resolve the threat posed by the heat death of the universe through technological mastery over space. An Omega point is any future state in which this destiny has been realized.
Teilhard himself did not see the Omega point as a fundamentally new conception of the godhead and would object to it being categorized alongside these other views. To Teilhard, “Omega” represented a future convergence between divine condescension and human participation in God’s plan.
As humans are sanctified through their conquest of the universe from the bottom up, he anticipated, we will simultaneously draw closer to God’s renewal of the cosmos from the top down. Human agency and God’s grace will then come together in the formation of the New Heaven and the New Earth. “Evolution will coincide in concrete terms with the crowning of the Incarnation awaited by all Christians,” Teilhard wrote. This emphasis on theological “convergence” inspired the title of Flannery O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge.
Then-secular physicist Frank Tipler—also an early architect of the simulation hypothesis—elaborated on Teilhard’s Omega point theory in 1994, hypothesizing that the Omega point is a “boundary condition” which physically requires that the universe “give rise to life, and it requires that this life persist to the Omega point.” Tipler has attempted to prove the inevitability of the Omega point—arguing, for example, that it is required by the fundamental physics principle of unitarity.
Unlike Teilhard, Tipler’s early work went on to explicitly identify the Omega point as the God of the major monotheistic traditions—arguing that it is itself personal, timeless, and has given rise to every entity that exists: “the chain of being is generated backward in time from the ultimate future.”
Despite evoking strong opposition from many quarters, the general Teilhardian Omega point model has enjoyed paradoxically broad theological and philosophical appeal. While Teilhard’s mystical and poetic style of writing has earned him a notorious following among aging hippies, his admirers have also included more conservative thinkers ranging from O’Connor to the theologian Henri de Lubac, S.J., to the Lutheran theologian Wolhart Pannenberg—the man who eventually convinced Frank Tipler to progress from generic theism to Christianity.
Today, Tipler is usually identified by Christians who engage with his writing as orthodox-if-eccentric. Still, even in his earlier work, Tipler’s generic theism contained signposts suggesting his eventual Christian conversion. Tipler had written that, although he did not believe in a God who answered prayer, it might be possible that “in order for the Omega Point to eventually arise,” personal interaction with God “would be coded in the universe in its very beginning (In the beginning was the Word).”
Some atheists have endorsed Tipler’s basic model of the Omega point. In his 1997 book The Fabric of Reality, staunchly atheist physicist David Deutsch brushed off Tipler’s religious conclusions— Deutsch asserts that a true God would not want to be worshipped—while strongly endorsing Tipler as a physicist. “I believe that the omega-point theory deserves to become the prevailing theory of the future of spacetime until and unless it is experimentally (or otherwise) refuted,” Deutsch wrote. While Deutsch wrote Fabric before the critical 1998 discovery of dark energy—which discredited Tipler’s original mathematical model of the Omega point—secular physicists including Freeman Dyson and Martin Rees have continued to suggest that life might reach an Omega point by overcoming dark energy.
(Editor’s note: Part 2 of this essay was published on December 6, 2023.)
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This is fascinating and well presented, with much to think about. Here, responses to a few points:
FIRST, about Teilhard’s “Omega Point,” we read “Evolution will coincide in concrete terms with the crowning of the Incarnation awaited by all Christians.”
Awaited? Teilhard’s poetry, and genuine effort to at least partly reconcile faith with science, understates the fact (more than an idea or only an awaiting) of the Incarnation (concrete!) at a definite point in human history (“suffered under Pontius Pilate”), and now the gifted (not evolutionary!) and sacramental Real Presence (CCC 1374, again concrete!).
SECOND, the referenced DeLubac, S.J….
In his “Religion of Teilhard de Chardin” (Image 1968), DeLubac alludes however briefly to Teilhard’s being less than “infallible,” not always “convincing,” and even “the inevitable narrowness of his personal point of view” and–“the danger of misunderstanding is by no means imaginary” (Teilhard’s orthodoxy was not in question). And this, “the closer the thought conforms to the truth of the Universe, itself pure and exuberant poetry, the more the thought too will be a source of poetry, showering poetry on the entranced reader” (Ch. 8, “Scientist, Prophet and Mystic,” and fn. 36, 62).
THIRD, so poetry is not metaphysics, nor does super-intellect diminish the mystery of “will.”
It was Darwin himself who at one point wrote, “I feel most deeply that this whole question of Creation is too profound for human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton! Let each man hope and believe what he can.” (Cited in Elbert Hubbard’s Scrapbook, 1923). About any cosmic theogony that falls short of a freely willed creation ex nihilo (!) and that remains in the imagination, at some point we come up against the revealed divine indwelling (or not), and papal infallibility (under narrowly defined conditions), about which Newman said, the purpose of the definition is “not to enfeeble the freedom or vigour of human thought in religious speculation, but to resist and control its extravagance.” (Apologia Pro Vita Sua).
FOURTH, other than the decimal points, what’s the difference between the extravagant sequence of back-stage, simulating Engineers and what the ancients already imagined long ago—that the universe rides on the back of a turtle swimming through space, and that this turtle rides on the back of another turtle?
The difference between a too-engulfing theogony/omega-point theory and Monism is, what? As a youth, Teilhard prayed to a lump of iron; but also this, later: “I can truly say—and this in virtue of the whole structure of my thought—that I now feel more indissolubly bound to the hierarchical Church and to the Christ of the Gospel than ever before in my life. Never has Christ seemed to me more real [!], more personal [!] and more immense” (Letter to his General, 1951).
I’m not sure why the author calls The Jesus Incident a disgusting book. It’s been a while since I read it, however. I wonder if he is falling into the old “depiction equals approval” fallacy.
Convergence theory seems natural for existence since all things teleologically have a good end in accordance with their nature. De Chardin postulated that in a quasi scientific spiritual context.
Knowledge of our end has been given us, although that end is binary, heaven and hell antithetical to eachother. Zarathustra believed in their, the evil and good’s convergence. That is the danger of De Chardin’s and all convergence theory that omits the human element of free will.
Black energy or anti gravitation appears to signify a non material source of creative energy. What moves all things toward their end in context of the divine schemata [eschatology] of things is unlike de Chardin’s visionary thought of material inevitability, its understandable attractiveness to the likes of de Lubac and Pannenberg, is the primary place God has allotted to man’s free will to be the lever of determining the Omega point. While human free will in pursuit of good or evil determines Omega in the created cosmos, it’s God who determines all created things to their end including the will. A will that remains free according to God’s infinite creative will and scheme of things.
To allude God may be signified/indicated as the source of anti gravitational black [dark] energy, or the problem of simultaneous causality of star events millions of light years apart – are examples of Deus ex machina. The ancient Gk mechanism of a mechanical lift to present a god apparently initiated by Euripides. Insofar as stellar events we don’t know.Einstein when confronted with simultaneity of causal events as ‘scary’. Although the concept ex machina doesn’t eliminate the possibility of the divinity. Einstein, otherwise atheistic, would concede possibility of an amorphous impersonal deity. Interestingly similar to the ‘clocklike’ impersonal god of Herman Melville. All the speculation comes down to the logical inference of a First Principle.
An Omega event can only be formally caused by God as First Principle, although man is the material cause of the eschatological Omega event due to our complicity in sin, the seeming triumph of evil, and divine intervention and final victory over evil by Christ the God man.
Albert Einstein (Determinism) says, “God does not throw dice!”
Neils Bohr (Chance) replies, “Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the world.”
Does everyone understand that there is nothing physical in the Multiverse until ‘conscious observer’ mankind, starting with Adam, looks at and interacts with mankind’s Realties? Only Our God can do this! Niels Bohr, (reading between the lines) simply accepts this. No universe until Adam-kind interacts with their individual Realities, and a miracle from God gives us all that we see, smell, touch, hear, taste and see, means the destruction of atheism. This is why “I’d like to think the moon was there even when I wasn’t looking at it’ was Albert Einstein’s greatest nightmare! Below the level of subatomic particles, it is nothing but chance and chaos, causing ‘wave collapse’, where subatomic particles switch from nothing physical, to become the perfect precision of our physical world Realities. This is why Albert Einstein laments, “God does not throw dice!” Because there is nothing, absolutely nothing, outside of miracles from God, to cause our universe Realities to become physical, only when we look at them. When we are not looking at, and interacting with our Realities, there is no physical universe. Only God can do this, so it is the destruction of atheism. It is only atheist scientist evil human pride keeping the deception of atheism alive.
Our universe, which does not exist when you are not looking at it, proves that God exists. Both Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein knew this. In the scientific world, atheism had been king over belief in God from the time of Galileo and Albert Einstein did not want this proven science gift from God to disrupt Atheism’s dominance in science. Thus this precious gift from God, of proof of His existence, was buried in a hole, by the “wicked, lazy servant”, where it pretty much still remains today.
Our universe, which never physically existed until Adam first opened his eyes to look at it, means, no physical 13.8 billion years of star formation, no physical evolution, no physical Jurassic Era, and no stars in the universe once a physicist looks away from his telescope. Albert Einstein’s great quote, “I’d like to think the moon was there even when I wasn’t looking at it.”, was his greatest nightmare; this is because it meant the, science (incorrectly) disproving God’s existence, era, was over.
God’s gift to mankind, in proven science that God exists, is so immensely non-intuitive, that scientists easily bury this ‘talent’ and hide it from our Christian eyes. As of 2019 science has mimicked our Fatima, ‘Miracle of the Sun’, Multiverse experience, only science did so at the far smaller, quantum level. Only God can bring multiple universes in and out of physical existence simply because we are looking at, or not looking at, our Realities. It is atheist scientists who have buried their talents of scientific proof of God’s existence from the world.
Albert Einstein, fighting God, wasted the final decades of his life trying to prove that the universe still exists even when you are not looking at it. After one hundred years of vigorous scientific experimentation from scientists around the world, Niels Bohr’s, our universe does not exist when you are not looking at it, is the clear winner.
PBS Space Time, The Great Bohr – Einstein Debate
https://youtu.be/tafGL02EUOA
Battle Over Quantum Mechanics Albert Einstein VS Neils Bohr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBgC0PyIomU
The Miracle of the Sun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4IbOzuNlmE
A Quantum Experiment Suggests There is no such thing as Objective Reality.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136684/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/
If there were six physical 24-hour days of Creation before Adam was Created and opened his eyes to look at Creation, proven science would see this as a Miracle from God.
Steven,
You may wish to consider whether scientific reductionism, and/or micro-realities have precedence over common sense macro-reality. There is more to matter than what Aristotle and Aquinas posited. Yet there is nothing less to matter than what they express in Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics. That is, what has to be true based upon the common sense experience of the world, where God meets us.
Hello Daniel, One look at the majesty of our universe and ‘common sense’ would tell you that our God Created all this for us. If God says He Created our universe in six days, common sense would tell you that our universe was Created in six days, because it is our All Powerful God who is telling us this.
Atheist Stephen Hawking, in the 1980s, put out a three dvd set titled, “The Cosmos”. I was watching it. It was a beautiful presentation on God’s Creation, and I was delighted! All of a sudden Atheist Stephen Hawking goes heretic Christian theologian! Hawking is talking about the injustice of Galileo. The light coming through the bars of the window make it look like Hawking is imprisoned at the Vatican for ‘being too smart’. Atheist Stephen Hawking is filmed at the Vatican showing Pope John Paul II a rock that is billions of years old and demanding that Pope John Paul II state that the ‘Big Bang’ is what Pope John Paul II sees as ‘Creation’.
This was a set up by Stephen Hawking, because later in the film Hawking will go into his, bag of magic tricks, and pull out his magical hypothesis of “What came before the “Big Bang””. In this way Stephen Hawking will have subdued our Omnipotent God, our God Who Creates from Nothing, and make Atheist Stephen Hawking himself god. Hawking talked about strings and quarks, much smaller than subatomic particles, evolving to become subatomic particles, without any need for God, in what Hawking dictates that ‘Pope John Paul II sees as Creation’. Thank God Pope John Paul II did not fall for evil Atheist Stephen Hawking’s bag of magic tricks.
So Daniel, how do quarks and strings, ‘evolve’ to become subatomic particles, when there is nothing physical in the universe until non-physical subatomic particles ‘wave collapse’ into physical particles of a specific property, in a specific position, traveling in a specific path, bound in a specific atom, of a specific molecule, of a specific object?
After the mass of one septillion stars popped into existence from nothing upon the ‘big bang’, it is only from there that atheist scientists will now use all their studies of our present Multiverse physical universe, to explain how God does not exist. After 100 years of vigorous experimentation, and proven science is up to sending 800 atom molecules through the double slit experiment, where the 800 atom molecule does not exist when you are not looking at it, proven science still sees Niels Bohr’s, the universe does not exist when man is not looking at it, is the big winner. Yet atheist scientists are still using their ‘common sense tells us the universe still exists when we are not looking at it’, Einstein scientism ‘Realism’ philosophy, to demonically deceive people away from God.
So why cannot Stephen Hawking and all the other atheist scientists simply admit that God’s Creation story in the bible makes perfect sense if you are on the common sense, God exists, Niel’s Bohr, ‘there is no universe when man is not looking at it’, side of the debate? Then Stephen Hawking can explain how he is an atheist and chooses to reject God and reject proven science and instead go with Einstein’s “Realism’ philosophy.
In our Multiverse, dual Realities of the Miracle of the Dancing Sun, what do you think stars billions of years into the past of the dancing sun universe looked like? Do you agree that, from the present, subatomic particles have the capability to go back, even billions of lightyears back, in physical time, to ‘wave collapse’, from nothing physical, into any physical Multiverse universe, out of all possible Multiverse universes? Only our All Powerful God can do this!
How the Quantum Eraser Rewrites the Past | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ORLN_KwAgs
I certainly agree that “creation” is not the reforming of matter from a previous state, but truly “ex nihilo”.
I’m suggesting a metaphysical view (reality is not exhausted by reductionism to the microworld) rather than the need to argue from a concession to materialists’ reductionism.
Dear Daniel Fink,
With all due respects to our awesome Catholic Church Fathers & Mothers, is not ‘creatio ex nihilo’ an oxymoron? For how could one think of God’s uncreated existence, with the pre-incarnational Son, & The Holy Spirit, & with those millions of Angels, Archangels, Creatures, & Elders as ‘nihilo’? Then there is the unparalleled richness of the unlimited perfection of God’s perfectly holy thoughts, highly likely accompanied by many other amazingly diverse universes we can never know naught of; and God’s plans for this universe that we know all too well!
Amidst that vast plentitude, no nihilo to be seen!
‘Creatio ex materia’ does not resolve this conundrum (merely making the same question more distant); but ‘creatio ex ethica’ might.
‘C.e.e.’ is further explained in: ‘Ethical Ontology Harmonizes Science, Revelation, & Human Lives’. A short version is available at: ‘Creatio ex Ethica or the ethical cause of our universe: a short account.’ Both free on the web.
Ever in the love of King Jesus Christ; blessings from marty
Yours is an excellent point (or is it a line, or a plane, or a volume) about macro-reality, and then about ordered precedence (rather than not).
But, going with Steven Merten for a moment, we might imagine the vacuous silence, darkness, and mutual isolation of all-stuff if there were no eyes to see. Not a single quark would have any notion of any other quark, let alone an atom, or a whole molecule, or quantum entanglement! Conceding the stuffness of stuff, would there still be no “world” or even a coherent “universe”? With 100 billion “galaxies,” each with a 100 billion “stars,” more or less? And then there’s all that dark matter in between?
I suspect that if we chose not to see or hear Merten, he would still exist…
In the same way–thinking “common sense” as you affirm—that an unborn child still exists whether the mother chooses (!) to look through the ultrasound, or not. Not Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” (or, “it” is, or is not), but rather inexplicable existence precedes essence. Or, “I am therefore I think.” Or, maybe even from the Other: “I AM who AM.”
Dear me, or whatever, now at the level of Merten’s “why” rather than only what or how, Hans Urs von Balthasar answers interreligiously:
“The responses of the Old Testament and a fortiori of Islam (which remains essentially in the enclosure of the religion of Israel) are incapable of giving a satisfactory answer to the question of why Yahweh, why Allah, created a world of which he did not have need in order to be God. Only the fact is affirmed in the two religions, not the why. The Christian response is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation” (“My Work in Retrospect,” 1993).
Good Lord! Or whatever! It’s almost as if the consecrated Real Presence is the portal for all that IS, as in the Concluding Doxology of each distinct Mass around the world and across time, that in the consecrated Host…”Through Him, with Him, and in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory [and luminous existence!] is yours, Almighty Father, forever and ever.”
Are even the contingent and clueless Quarks singing the Gloria?
How the Multiverse works. When you go to sleep at night (become unconscious) your physical universe no longer exists. Not even your own body exists in the Multiverse when you are unconscious. Your Reality is stripped right down to your soul. Though your physical body does not exist in your universe, your physical body still exists in your conscious spouses’ shared, common Reality, physical universe. Carlo Acutis, presently, has no physical Reality universe on earth, yet his body, which exists in our shared, common Reality physical universes, is a powerful testimony to the Power, and Salvation, from our God.
The incorrupt body of Blessed Carlo Acutis is an amazing miracle!
https://www.facebook.com/NCRegister/videos/256254892357029/
The difficulty scientists had in accomplishing multiple Realities, is that if two ‘conscious observers’, observing two conflicting realities, describe their conflicting Realities to one another, the two conflicting Realities collapse into one common, shared Reality.
There is no such thing as a physical ‘big bang’ which has been physically evolving for 13.8 billion years, ‘objective reality’. At the Multiverse event in Fatima, some conscious observers saw the sun in its usual place at its usual intensity. The seer children saw the Blessed Mother, others did not. If a scientist would have looked through his telescope at the Miracle of the Sun, he would have seen a far different past, billions of light years into space.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/03/12/136684/a-quantum-experiment-suggests-theres-no-such-thing-as-objective-reality/
Does everyone understand that what we see through a telescope as our past, only flows out into existence from our present? Subatomic particles go back in physical time to generate stars and planets to fit a specific conscious observer’s Reality of the past. God can give us all a different Reality of our past, universes. It is only when we interact with one another that conflicting Realities collapse into common shared Realities. Unless, of course, God wills us to experience conflicting Realities, to demonstrate God’s Omnipotent Power and Glory.
How the Quantum Eraser Rewrites the Past | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ORLN_KwAgs&t=32s
Talk about everyone on earth having their own personal relationship with God, physical universe, Reality. Once you die, your Reality becomes either heaven or hell. Thus, our individual Multiverse Realities are like our souls, if not our souls.
Bilocation. Jesus took Catholic Mystic Luisa Piccaretta (1865-1947) around the physical (only when you look at it) universe, and to different gatherings of people anywhere in the world, while other people observed her body, “in a death like state”, sleeping in her bed at home. Luisa lived in the ‘Divine Will’ with the Holy Trinity for sixty years. Subatomic particles are all set up for Bilocation.
Living in the ‘Divine Will’, is the future of, State of Grace Catholics, who will live in Jesus’ “kingdom come thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, ‘New Jerusalem’, ‘Holy City’, post-apocalyptic Catholic Church. Subatomic particles, building, any, of all possible Realities, around our Consciousness/soul, makes “Bilocation” of the Multiverse easy.
‘Luisa Piccarreta and the ‘Divine Will’ – Teachings of Jesus’ by Susanne James copyright 2020.
“All her adult life Luisa manifested particular strange symptoms – which confused the clergy in the early years. What happened was that at night she would go into a death-like state. Completely rigid and immovable. In the morning she could not rouse herself, not until she was blessed by a priest. Luisa’s early writings give an account of this unusual experience. She was not asleep, in fact she slept very little.
Luisa tells us how her soul would sometimes leave her body at night, and she enjoyed blissful freedom when Jesus took her around the universe. He used these occasions for teaching her (she does not describe the universe). Luisa also had various mystical experiences at night, including visits to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. She would consistently experience the Passion of Jesus – in limited forms, for as mentioned she was a victim soul. Such people have a very rewarding relationship with Jesus, and their suffering is balanced by wonderful blessings. (page 22)”
Can you imagine Bilocating to witness the actual Birth of Jesus?
Jesus teaches that even, “the life and actions of his (Jesus) own Humanity”, “exists in the present”, living in the Divine Will. Jesus says, “Since God exists outside of time – everything in the Divine Will exists outside of time.”
Wow! I mean Wow!!!, Right?
“Jesus told Luisa how everything is contained in the Divine Will: the life and actions of his own Humanity, and everyone’s life and actions which have been perfected by him. Since God exists outside of time – everything in the Divine Will exists outside of time. So in effect, we say that it exists in the present. For example, think of last Saturday and realize that all your actions – whatever you did – still exist in the Divine Will.”
Quoted from: “Luisa Piccarreta and the Divine Will – Teachings of Jesus”, by Susanne James, published 2020
Merry Christmas Everyone!
Willing to Star Trek with you at “warp three,” but not “warp ten.”
Might we still say that human consciousness is not God after all (or before all?), but creates gods? And, that stuff exists—from a God who subsists? But, on the other hand (alternative universe?), your commentary reminds of how Pope John Paul II aimed his binoculars at the two very different (!) creation stories in Genesis:
FIRST, about Gen 1-27: “The original text states: ‘God created man (ha-adam–a collective noun: ‘humanity’?), in his own image: in the image of God he created him: male (zakar–masculine) and female (unequebah–female) he created them” (this in a footnote).
SECOND, and then later (or before!) about Adam’s “deep sleep” (Gen 2:21-22): “Perhaps, therefore, the analogy of sleep indicates here not so much a passing from consciousness to subconsciousness, as a specific return to non-being (sleep contains an element of annihilation of man’s conscious existence), that is, to the moment preceding the creation [!], in order that, through God’s [!] creative initiative, solitary ‘man’ may emerge from it again in his double unity as male and female” (“The Original Unity of Man and Woman,” part of the Theology of the Body).
ALSO—and separately—this about our very personal heavens within a seemingly uniform “heaven.” It’s sound theology (and there is a “sound”) to notice that in being “face-to-face” with God, each person also/therefore is in his or her own particular dream…absolutely true and, therefore, also exactly fitting for each created person, and nothing less. Within God, salvation is definitely distinct and infinitely personal, and totally united with each other person in what JP II elsewhere called total “intersubjectivity”. The fulfillment of continual surprise within the Communion of Saints:
“Life within God is not eternally the same, is a sense which would imply a kind of everlasting boredom. Rather, God’s Trinitarian life is a ‘liveliness’ characterized by the always new and by ‘surprise’: in the words of Speyr, Trinitarian life is a ‘communion of surprise’ (in the sense of an infinite ever-flowing fulfillment . . . .)” (David L. Schindler, “Heart of the World, Center of the Church,” 1996).
Descartes infinitely deceived himself, and then misled and even bores modern culture when he set forth to observe the “universe” from the outside and alone. Not his, “I think and therefore I am,” but rather “I am and therefore I think.”
SO, perhaps only “warp three” and not quite multiple-universes. Shakespeare is/was better grounded (yes, Virginia, there is a ground!) when he writes/wrote: “the fault lies not in our stars, but in ourselves” (“Julius Caesar,” Act 1, Scene 2).
I usually do not find CWR essays problematic, and perhaps part two will ease my discomfort. The “defeat” of most of the historic claims of atheism, if based upon “quasi-theological conclusions” drawn from, in essence, “scientism” is a hollow victory indeed.
I must certainly dispute that such converts will be aware of some “key properties of the Traditional God”, as expressed by Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics (e.g., Divine simplicity vs. the anthropological conception of a cosmic simulation), and stated as recently as the first Vatican Council (Classical Theism).
I am only aware of de Grasse Tyson’s propping up the idea of a simulation in order to knock it down, as well as Chalmers’ panpsychism. I shall revisit their most recent efforts regarding the essay topic. Yet, for such materialists and others hoping to avoid the God of Classical Theism, the only “quasi-theological” questions to be asked and answered are purely technological (see Michael Hanby).
simulation hypothesis sans any supporting evidence for it is indeed a sort of religion, but one which is infinitely more plausible than those religions which claim that the entire universe is a game the purpose of which is for one particular species out of millions to try and not offend a creator who chooses to remain undetectable AND get its feelings hurt if you’re skeptical of its existence (say for example, because you can’t detect it). I’d be torn as to whether that is more or less likely than a hypothesis stating the universe was farted into existence by an invisible 3-headed lizard.
it’s almost as though nobody actually knows why we are here, which is EXACTLY what you would expect from a brand new species regarding the biggest question of all: they don’t have the answer to it.
After reading all this I realize how right Jesus was when he said: “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.” At the end of the day this is all nonsense.
Spot on, dear Guy Mascari!
Not only nonsense but very subtle deistic naturalism utterly dependent on ‘clever’ human speculations & their desire to avoid acknowledging who Jesus Christ was ‘pro kataboles kosmou’; who He is right now; & who He will be through to the end of this universe.
Why is CWR publishing anti-Apostolic scientism that has no interest in knowing, loving, hearing, & following Jesus Christ. It’s a deistic heresy worse than atheism.
The syncretism, unitarianism, universalism, & mechanicalism reek of freemasonry and its ‘Great Architect of the Universe’ imposting our lovely God. Much of the gobbledygook comes from militant atheist D. H. Tow’s 2006 ‘The Future of Life: Meta-Evolution’.
Sci-Fi tragic author, Ian Huyet, manifestly prefers speculative, deist cosmologies to the creeds of Catholicism. He needs help.
Ever aspiring to hear, lovingly obey, & follow Jesus Christ; blessings from marty
In Part II can we discuss how Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ came to have pity on His fallen creation mired in the corruption of sin and death?
Since I had the privilege to review this article prior to publication, I would like to encourage every reader, especially those troubled by Part I, to wait for Part II before coming to a definite conclusion on the essay. In Part I, Ian sets the background for his thesis by summarizing many current scientific philosophies. His point is not necessarily to endorse these ideas, but rather to show how they are leading current thinkers and scientists away from pure atheism. In Part II, Ian will speak about the deficiencies of these various quasi-religious theories and speculate on why many scientists are uncomfortable with the idea of a personal God. The conclusion of the essay beautifully sums up the message of Christianity: that God became man, walked among us, and died to save us. It is this message of intimate love and profound grace that so many people are still missing today. Ian closes with a challenge to his fellow Christians that they should consider how ideas like simulation theory may open more opportunities to share the Gospel with souls who are desperately in need of receiving God’s love. The final three paragraphs of the essay brought me to tears. I hope that they will be an inspiration to each of you as well!
Dear readers,
As someone who had the privilege of reading this essay prior to publication (but not in connection with CWR), I would like to encourage you to consider Part II before coming to any firm conclusions. I don’t wish to spoil it for anyone, but in Part II, Ian will discuss the Incarnation, why some scientists, like Einstein, are uncomfortable with the idea of a personal God, and how the truth of Christianity is ultimately what every person needs. The ideas presented in Part I are metely descriptive summaries of the many philosophies circulating today. Although some may approach the truth,, none of them contain the whole Truth. Ian closes with a challenge to loving evangelization for his fellow Christians that brought tears to my eyes. I hope that it will be a blessing and an inspiration to you as well!
Thank you, dear Wynnie O’Neil, for your loyal advice.
One does indeed wait with bated breath for a cogently corrective declaration of New Testament Apostolic understanding and unshakeable faith in the absolute & unchallengeable authority of King Jesus Christ in all matters spiritual & physical.
A declaration to joyfully convince us that dear Ian is not a subverter of truth.
Always subject to the wisdom & love of Jesus Christ; blessings from marty
Dr. Rice @ 12/3/3:47PM,
Thanks for the response.
It was intense contemplation of Frank Sheed’s didactic chapters on the inner life of the Trinity (Theology and Sanity) that resonated with what those “Catholic Fathers and Mothers” taught.
You seem intent on synchronizing the natural and the supernatural, else knowledge of God would be deficient. That was accomplished at the Incarnation, who stated, “Be perfect (e.g., love as God loves) as your heavenly Father is perfect”. To take one example, self-sacrificial, agape love called for in Mt 5:48 cannot be achieved through genetic, evolutionary hill climbing, due to local maxima. It would stop far short, at something like altruism and empathy. Only the immaterial grace of God makes the consistent imitation of Christ possible for man.
Many thanks, Daniel G Fink, for the very interesting details.
“You seem intent on synchronizing the natural and the supernatural, . .”
Actually, ‘Creatio ex Ethica’ is an extended discussion, with practical examples, of how this universe, our world, and we humans are unavoidably serving God’s program of freely allowing evil to fully actualize itself.
At heart Creatio ex Ethica argues for the justice of God; it is strongly theodicical.
God’s justice will not judge potential evils but only what is actualized. Billions of years have been needed for an exhaustive exposure of all that the evil in this world is capable of; accumulating up to The Judgment Day, and Divine Justice that will have defeated death and prevented evil from having any further wriggle-room!
2 Peter 3:7 –
“. . the present universe and world are destined for fire and are only being reserved until Judgement Day so that all sinners may be destroyed.”
Some complain: “But, as God deals comprehensively with evil, we humans are ‘the meat in the sandwich’, being caused to suffer all sorts of hurts and harms!”
Scripture answers that quandary by showing that humans are eager cooperators with evil and thus caught up in the on-going exposure of evils, towards the final Judgement.
Being ‘of the world’ our situation would, indeed, be as dire as that of the devil and all the demons, only the perfect sacrifice of The Son of God/The Son of Man, Jesus Christ, has opened a door for us to be delivered from evil, cleansed of our sins, and anointed by The Holy Spirit of God (as you mentioned). In Christ we have another home.
John 17:16 –
“They [who follow Christ] do not belong to the world any more than I [Christ] belong to the world.”
1 Corinthians 11:32 –
“When The LORD does punish us . . . it is to correct us and to stop us from being condemned with the world.”
At least to me, The New Testament makes perfect sense and is wonderfully consonant with all that I (as an experienced & much published scientist) understand about our universe, this world & human nature.
Thanks again, dear Daniel. This is such an important conversation for all Catholics to be engaged with; boosting us out of a moribund state into the joy of LIFE in Christ, who uniquely saves our souls and from whom we can never be snatched.
Take care. Always in the grace & mercy of King Jesus Christ; love & blessings from marty
Dark energy has not been discovered merely hypothesised. And only to explain “observations” which are interpretations based on extrapolations of observations on such things as Cepheid variable stars. As a mathematician I know how dangerous it is to extrapolate far beyond the observations.
True, that cosmic physics, astro physics is basically hypothesis. Seen in the multiple improved variations of the atom. Analogously, it’s like placing symbols that fit, similar to jigsaw puzzle pieces that give coherence to the unknown that lies beneath.