Showing posts with label Creatio ex nihilo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Creatio ex nihilo. Show all posts

Saturday, March 16, 2019

WHAT IS GIMMEL? MY ANSWER.



IS THERE A CONNECTION BETWEEN GOD, CONSCIOUSNES AND GIMMEL?
© 2019 by Edward R. Close
The purpose of this post is to follow up on the discussion of the question “What is Gimmel”, Posted Wednesday, March 15th, which summarized the derivation that led to the discovery of gimmel, and ended with:

“Now, ask yourself: if gimmel is not mass or energy, exactly what is it? Everything physical is measurable in variables of content (mass and energy) and variables of extent (space and time). Gimmel cannot have even one unit of mass or energy. If it exists in space and time, what is it? There are clues in the quantum math and physics derivations that led to its discovery, but what do YOU think it might be? Please post your thoughts in “comments”. or send me a Facebook message”.

There were a number of good responses that tended to be in one of two forms: Responders thought gimmel might be either evidence of God or Spirit’s creation of a stable physical universe, - or gimmel might be some form of consciousness. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive; the form of the answer appears to depend of the belief system of the person responding. People with a belief in some form of organized theology tend to believe that gimmel is evidence that God created the universe. But that is a philosophical answer, not a scientific answer. People with personal experience of Spirit can make that leap, and that is wonderful. It is a clear answer for them, and provides a testimonial for others who seek answers, but I agree with Leibniz who said if something is real, there is a logical path to its discovery and validation. The discovery of gimmel validates the existence of something non-physical in the very most basic structure of the universe.

The discovery that gimmel exists in every particle of physical reality, from quarks to electrons to atoms, and the fact that the highest levels of gimmel are present in the elements and organic compounds that provide the basis for life and consciousness, tends to support the theory of intelligent design, especially if gimmel is consciousness, or the agent of consciousness that organizes the physical universe in a logical manner.

As pointed out in the previous post, gimmel clearly provides an answer to Leibniz’s question, concerning why there is something, rather than nothing: The derivation of quantum equivalence units (TRUE) proves there would be no physical universe without gimmel. It is worth noting that Leibniz’s answer was theological: In his view, there is something because, in the beginning, God created it. But this answer can only avoid the infinite regression of what was before creation of the universe, if God, then what is God, and what was before God, etc, if creatio ex nihilo (creation from nothing) is assumed as axiomatic.

As explained in the August 30 post, “QUESTIONS OF SURVIVAL AND REINCARNATION”, creatio ex nihilo was an ad hoc theory invented by early Christian theologians to protect the Catholic Churches from the Emperor Justinian I, who threatened to destroy them if the Christian scholar Origen’s interpretation of the Christian teaching of the pre-existence and post-existence of the human soul was not removed from their scriptures. Despite their frantic efforts to comply with Justinian’s brutal edict, some evidence of the original teaching remains in the scriptures today. For example, Jeremiah 1:5: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you”.

Origen, born in Alexandria, was the most prolific Christian writer of the third century AD, producing more than 6,000 treatises on Christian philosophy and theology, including commentaries on the Hebrew scriptures and the teachings of Jesus recorded in scriptures some of which became known as the New Testament. He wrote about the eternal existence of souls in “De Principalis” as follows:

"Each soul enters the world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defects of its past lives. Its place in this world is determined by past virtues and shortcomings."

If this is true, as conscious beings, we are finite sparks of infinite consciousness, evolving spirituality in a reality designed for that purpose. The illogical absurdity of creatio ex nihilo and the paradox of infinite regress are both avoided if all individualized consciousness, i.e., souls, are actually part of Primary Consciousness (traditionally anthropomorphized as God) which has always existed and will always exist. And, if Primary Consciousness is realized as the infinitely continuous substrate of reality, then gimmel is evidence of the intelligent design of the universe. While the discovery of gimmel is new, the conclusion it suggests is not. I think Max Planck, the father of quantum physics, saw where his discovery of the quantization of mass and energy was pointing. In an Interview published in 'The Observer', 25 January 1931, p.17, He said:

“I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

In 1944, in a speech entitled Das Wesen der Materie (The Nature of Matter), delivered in German, which was his native tongue, Max Planck said:

Es gibt keine Materie an sich. Alle Materie entsteht und besteht nur durch eine Kraft, welche die Atomteilchen in Schwingung bringt und sie zum winzigsten Sonnensystem des Alls zusammenhält. Da es im ganzen Weltall aber weder eine intelligente Kraft noch eine ewige Kraft gibt—es ist der Menschheit nicht gelungen, das heißersehnte Perpetuum mobile zu erfinden—so müssen wir hinter dieser Kraft einen bewußten intelligenten Geist annehmen. Dieser Geist ist der Urgrund aller Materie.

I have seen two or three translations of this statement, none of which, in my opinion, fully capture Planck’s meaning. Here is my translation:

There is no matter in and of itself. All matter arises and endures only by means of a force which causes the atomic particles to vibrate and holds them together to form the tiniest solar system of the universe. But since there is neither an intelligent force nor an eternal power in all the physical universe – mankind has not managed to discover the passionately-desired perpetual motion — so we must accept that behind this force is a Conscious intelligent spirit. This spirit is the primary source of all matter.

What is Gimmel? My conclusion is that gimmel is real evidence of the existence of the Conscious Intelligent Spirit Planck spoke of; Gimmel is the fingerprint of God, if you will.

I’d like to end this discussion with one of my favorite Einstein quotes:


“Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe - a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

Friday, November 16, 2018

WHERE DID EVERYTHING COME FROM?




IN THE BEGINNING …
Where did everything come from? Was the universe as we know it engineered by a conscious intelligence to have purpose and meaning, or did it just happen by accident? Is this a question that can be answered within the scope of human intelligence? Many answers have been offered over thousands of years of human history by thinkers of all sorts: philosophers, theologians, scientists, and mystics. But, are any of the answers truly final and definitive? Or do they come with arguments convincing enough to compel you to live your life as if they were true? Apparently, many people have thought so, because over the history of life on this planet, bloody wars have been fought over some of the answers to this question, and many people have died defending their beliefs in what they considered to be the correct answer to this question.

If you have been reading my books, papers, and/or posts, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that I think there is a definitive answer to this question; and that I believe I have found it. Do I dare offer my answer for you and the rest of the world to consider? Why not? At my age and stage in life, it makes little difference whether anyone listens, agrees, disagrees, or simply ignores me. I am happy with my answer, and I find that that is enough for me. You are free to accept it, reject it, think about it, or ignore it. It’s completely up to you.

A Starting Point
I think we can agree that, without question, there is something real that actually exists, and you and I are part of it. Without this supposition of an existential reality containing at least you, me and the universe, we have nothing to talk about. So, given that there is something, how did this something come to be what it is now? That is the question, and there are three possible answers: 1) Something from nothing, 2) nothing from something, and 3) something from something else.

To believe that number 1 or 2 is the reality, you have to discount nearly all the evidence at hand. No one has ever seen something arising from nothing, or something disappearing into nothing. Even when it appears that way, a thorough investigation always reveals that one of the most basic laws of physics holds in every case: the law of the conservation of mass and energy. In all of the experiments ever conducted into the physical, chemical and biological processes of our universe, we see only change, never creation from nothing, nor total annihilation of anything. In even the most violent explosion, the sum total of all matter and energy before and after the explosion is always the same. In other words, the empirical evidence from our experience is for number 3, not 2 or 1. Something never arises from nothing, something never degrades to nothing and the something we have now came from something else, because it was different in the past, and, in our dynamic reality, it will be changed from what it is now into something else, but the sum total of mass and energy will remain the same.

Despite the evidence, historically, mainstream science and mainstream religion have both declared that 1, 2 or a combination of them is the true nature of reality. In the theory of a big-bang expanding universe, e.g., the equations of general relativity predict a mathematical singularity at the origin event and mathematical singularities in black holes, with the semi-stable world of our experience existing somewhere in between. The current scientific paradigm sees reality expanding from a mathematical singularity at the beginning of spacetime, with everything eventually falling into the singularities of black holes. This is a process of something from nothing (1) becoming nothing from something (2) unless you assume that the nothing is not really nothing, but some other form of the something we have now; but then, you have number 3, don’t you? In the current scientific paradigm, quantum field theory (QFT), with particles defined as quantized states of underlying fields which are more fundamental than the particles, is, in my opinion, closest to reality. But, QFT, using matrices with values subject to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle as perturbations of the underlying fields is more descriptive than it is explanatory.

In Catholic theology, creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing), is a doctrine invented by early Roman Catholic theologians after the original teachings of the pre-Christian Judeans, Jesus and the first Christian theologian, Origin, were subverted by the Emperor Justinian in his anathemas against Origin, in 553 AD. Justinian realized that the teachings of the Jewish Gnostics and the followers of Jesus constituted a serious threat to his power because in his interpretation of early Christian teachings, Origen had written:

"Each soul enters the world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defects of its past lives. Its place in this world is determined by past virtues and shortcomings."

Such teachings were in direct conflict with what Justinian saw as his divine birthright as a Roman Emperor to rule the world, so he seized on this statement and related ideas in early Christian doctrine, as documented by Origen, that undermined the exclusivity of the Roman Emperors’ claim of divinity. If people were allowed to believe that by being virtuous, they could rise to the level of an Emperor, i.e., to the status of a god, or even sons and daughters of God, then the power of the Emperors would be seriously threatened. He decided that he must declare this idea to be heresy and take strong measures to stamp it out. The anathemas, an edict that he prepared for this purpose, read in part:

"Whosoever teaches the doctrine of a supposed pre-birth existence of the soul, and speaks of a monstrous restoration of this, is cursed. Such heretics will be executed, their writings burned, and their property will become the property of the Emperor."

This was, of course a powerful incentive for Christians priests and monks to remove any such references from the scriptures from which they taught. Without the teaching of the eternal nature of the soul, theologians were free to shape the doctrine of the church in a way that ensured that the masses had to depend upon the Church of the Holy Roman Empire for salvation. It was a way to control the masses, pure and simple, and perpetuate the power of the Holy Roman Empire. Most other major religions, with the exception of Islam, which, like Judaism and Christianity, is also of Abrahamic origin, are not encumbered by this illogical assumption of creatio ex nihilo.

OK, you may say, so what does it mean if number 3 is the real answer? In my opinion, it changes things very profoundly: With no absolute beginning or end, we must look at human history in a completely different way. No longer burdened by the misconception that everything was created out of nothing and that consciousness is something emerging from organic neurology evolving only a short time ago, we begin to see that our simplistic linear view of things was very misleading. The cyclic nature of things taught by the philosophies of the orient begins to make more sense.

Researchers who claim there is evidence that some of the ancient stone structures scattered around the planet are much older than mainstream archeologists believe, may not be as wacky as they seem. When viewed through the lens of belief in answers 1 and/or 2, their claims can’t be right, but if you drop the irrational belief in a linear progression from nothing to something, and accept the evidence for the eternal existence of something, you have to take their evidence seriously, because civilization, just like everything else, undoubtedly progress in cycles. Our fixation that we are the epitome of the development of sentient species for all time, due to the illogical belief in answers 1 and 2, is as egocentric and as wrong as the idea widely believed a few hundred years ago that the earth was flat and the center of the universe.

I have found that the logical structure of the universe is reflected in the logical structure of pure mathematics, and vice versa. This finding, combined with recognition of the endless process of something from something else, means that physical reality is a quantized logical structure embedded in the infinitely continuous multi-dimensional field of consciousness, and the illusion of beginnings and ends is only meaningful in relation to the amount to which we are identified with finite physical bodies. Identification with the undifferentiated field of consciousness allows us to see time in the same way we see space: three dimensional. Once freed from the illusion of being limited to finite three-dimensional objects evolving in one, unidirectional dimension of time, and rising into the perception of 3-D time, we see that everything exists eternally, and only appears to evolve in cycles of finite duration.

So, the answer to the original question: “Where did everything come from?” is everything has always existed. There is no absolute beginning or end, only endless cycles of change. This answers a lot of otherwise unanswerable questions, including Leibniz’s question, the first question natural science should answer: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” There is something because there has always been something, and there will always be something. Nothingness is an illusion. The illusions of absolute beginnings or ends are perpetuated by certain traumatic changes, like the birth and death of the physical body. So, everything that is something came from something else that existed before the beginning of the process or processes that changed it into the something we have now, and the something we have now is already being transformed into the something else that will exist in the future. But awareness expanded into the 3-D time and 3-D consciousness predicted by pure mathematics, becomes awareness of the reality behind the illusions of 3 space- 1 time.

In the beginning of one cycle, we find the end of the previous cycle, but they are not the same. The new cycle is one of greater awareness than the previous one, because we have learned and expanded our awareness; and thus we rise in a progressive spiral from the finite into the Infinite.



ERC 11/16/2018