Stephen Hawking: Theologian

[Tinker]

[Colonel Sun]

[Tinker]

is going apeshit.

Yea Colonel Sun, but generally if one delves into most religious theology, the anthropomorphic deity is the face shown to the huddled masses. The God of the Jews is not in fact Anthropomorphic, neither is Allah. Jesus is supposed to be an incarnation of YHVH but YHVH is not anthropomorphic. In Hinduism, the Atman is represented by any numbers of 'faces' which are masks for the ineffable grand intelligence beyond representation. I'm not even sure that Spinoza's deity can be considered even a consciousness.

[Colonel Sun]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Demon of Undoing]

[Colonel Sun]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Tinker]

The problem I have always had with the Big Bang is the notion that nothing happened and suddenly something happened. I think the notion of an uncaused cause is pretty much fantastic no matter how you derive it.

The only recourse I have to believe is that there was no beginning.

This is not to say I deny the Big Bang, only that I deny that the Big Bang was a 'beginning' in any meaningful sense. Certainly it's an event horizon beyond which, we cannot see. But that's about it. All the matter and energy in the universe must have been doing something before the Big Bang on into eternity.

[Tinker]

[AzariLoveIran]

.

IMO, here, 2 issues are relavant :

1) Prof. Hawkings and others arguing science proves God does not exist . .

2) If proven God does not exist, what's the consequence for faith.


For # 1 , scientist have to fight it out . . Prof. Hawkings argues " . . advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists . ."

Hawkings could not argue the above if it wasn't true .. his audience is not Joe the plumber, many other scientist dying to prove Hawkings wrong.

Meaning Hawkings could have a valid case.


Re # 2 , whether God's existence necessary for faith, am sure lots of literature exists for and con, IMO the answer is a definite NO.

.

[Nonc Hilaire]

A god that can not be viewed anthropomorphically can't be right, but a purely anthropomorphic god is wrong too.

Personally, I find the observation that God is love and that He exists within and between individuals is both accurate and useful.

The observation that Krishna looks a lot like Michael Jackson, not so much.

[Tinker]

[Tinker]

Generally I view consciousness as not a quality of individuals, but as an intersubjective mode of perception between all living beings. The zenith/totality of that consciousness is God. It is only anthropomorphic if we believe consciousness is a property of humans and humans alone, which I do not. I believe that consciousness underlies the entirety of the universe, that the universe would not have form without consciousness to bring form to it. That goes way beyond any sort of petty anthropomorphism.

There is no science bridging that gap...yet.

But I find the notion of an uncaused first cause to be extremely dubious regardless of whether we are talking about the Big Bang or God existing prior to creation. So my view on it is that eternity is infinite, there is no beginning of existence. Perhaps a beginning of the universe if we say that this universe is a limited thing that was created out of a large existence that infinitely regresses into the past.

[Endovelico]

A universe without a beginning is difficult to imagine. A beginning without cause is also difficult to imagine. On the other hand, a cause for the beginning would require "something" predating the beginning, which is certainly difficult to imagine. I don't think we will ever be able to solve this riddle. So, we are back to faith. We may even come to believe that Hawking has found the right answer, and that the universe appeared spontaneously. If that's so, we may also come to believe that consciousness has a material origin, that the increasing complexity of the universe will generate an increasingly complex consciousness, with increasing capacities, and that "god" is no more than such a highly complex consciousness, towards whom we all contribute with our individual nano-consciousness. Then, as we die we join that cosmic consciousness. Eventually it would be capable of controlling the whole universe, preserving or repeating it. At the end we would have the "god" we say we had at the beginning, inverting the process but making it more logical.

[I guess I'm ready for the straight-jacket...]

[Rhapsody]

I think the relationship between consciousness and the bigger reality it is part of (name this bigger reality BR... Biggie God or Other Murphy-Morphy depending on thy taste for tea), resembles the relationship that exists between a painting and the painter.

In isolation, consciousness is like a painting; a relatively passive reflection of the BR that is in the process on representing itself on a particular canvas, that in my case is 'me' and in your case, your 'me'.

However; canvas, painting, reflecting the bigger action of the BR while it is painting in and of itself... all that is part of what we are as individuals. We are thusly small and big, alone and together, painter and painted, personal and impersonal, known and unknown, all at the same time.

Consciousness is the very most personal part and it occurs in self-reflective isolation, ie enclosed in brainprocesses that occur only in individual skulls. It is just one painting. Much more Universal are canvas and paint plus the general dynamics of creation and destruction, most of which occurs in total freedom, unbothered by individual consciousnesses.

The concept of God being some super smart and hyper conscious creator does not make much sense. She is more like a Sleeping Beauty who talks, snores, occasionally sleepwalks and even sometimes makes love in her sleep. But, like everybody else, she also needs to eat regularly...

Our individual consciousnesses are like local wake-up kisses. Maybe we are here to save God from sliding back into Her coma. If you wake Her up though, you are never sure if She will eat you or make love to you. Therefore I prefer sitting by Her bed, observing and enjoying the beauty while being as quiet as possible just as to not wake Her up.

Nietzsche did a very dangerous thing by shouting: She is dead! (Technically God cannot die). I'm told She woke up and devoured poor Friedrich immediately. It is of course equally dangerous to send uncontrolled decibels into space saying: She is alive!

[Hoosiernorm]

Thought about posting something here but I personally don't think Stephen Hawking actually exists, so it would be pointless.

[noddy]

[AzariLoveIran]

[Tinker]

[Rhapsody]

An additional caveat (but also a blessing in disguise) concerning the Where and why did it all begin (and I would add How you squeeze something finit into infinity) conundrum, is the fact that our perception of reality is a translation, representation, emulation. The human brain has its own grammar, rules and routines to create the world the way we perceive it to be. It is, in a sense, a virtual reality.

Very little is known about how the brain does this. A problem is, of course, that the brain also only knows of itself via the same mechanism of representation, which means that we are severely limited in how we can study and understand the mechanisms that occur under, above and beyond the veil of conscious experience such as the experience-independent reality of the Universe.

To be on the safe side and for starters, it is better to for instance take finity and infinity primarily as properties of human brain processes, as well as notions like 3D space and 4D space-time, causality in a 4D context in general. These are translations.

It is poetical but thinkable for instance, that our 3-4D reality is in fact a translation of a 2D reality where the brain places 2D snapshots serially next to each other while processes in the brain with different clock speeds 'get out of 2D sync', which then enables 3D vision for instance as well as the experience of 'time' and 'a causal chain of events'.

Asynchronous synchronisation of 2D spacetime sheets is my ad-hoc toy name for this enigma machine that is the brain, and if its code can ever be cracked... we may better understand the nature of our Universe. But don't expect that Universe to have properties such as 'time', 'space', 'beginning' or 'end'. There even may be more victims like 'big' and 'small' that end up in the trashbin.

See also: to grock the idea.

[noddy]

[Rhapsody]

As long as speculations about the origins of the big bang have some scientific merit, meaning that the current understandings in physics and cosmology at least allow for such a speculation ... ie. that "given the knowns of a, b,c,d and e.... S is possible and to a degree likely", where the knowns a,b,c,d,e actively point to possibility S, it has more scientific value than say a proposed possibility G(od) being the cause of the big bang, where there are no scientic pointers a,b,c,d or any other available to begin with.

The question seems to be, what type of requirements does one bestow on God? Should He make scientific sense, have pointers in reality also available to science? Only poetic ones? Fantastic? Mysterious? Unfathomable preferably?

What do people want from G(od) before they think they can take him seriously?

[Colonel Sun]

[Rhapsody]