A correspondent: 'You wrote:”But you are both incorrect and foolish if you think the universe, is or can be, proven logically to be created by God.” I quoted a proof in my blog, which proves the existence of a Creator of this universe. Up to you to disprove it, not to assume that I am foolish.'
I'm not assuming you are foolish. I am saying your actions are not thought through. Science is based on the sceptical principle. Nothing is proved until natural evidence, which could refute it, is actually found to be consistent with it in every case. Your 'logic' is based on the reverse religious principle that your claim is true unless someone proves it false. This doesn't work in nature, or reality, and it sullies the water of truth.
Correspondent: "You wrote: “You are also wrong about the cosmos depending on the rule of order. Chaos is essential to the emergence of new order, to the evolution of living diversity, and to the subjective experience of consciousness.” On what scientific premises is this based on? All observed scientific phenomena follow the laws of nature, i.e. the universe is orderly. The burden of proof is on the person stating something contradicting to science.'
The laws of nature are not just orderly, they are also chaotic. They give rise to both order and chaos as complementary manifestations of how complexity arises. Stop for a minute and think about how impossible your postulate is. If what you say is true chaos couldn't exist. Neither in the weather, nor in the primal condition. It would have never been heard of. We wouldn't know there was such a thing. You wouldn't even know there was something called disorder or tohu vohu standing at the very source of genesis. Worse still the laws of nature are specifically predisposed to both chaos and uncertainty. Your fallacy comes from assuming law implies order. It doesn't.
The universe is full of examples, not only of chaos, but the necessity of chaos for new order to emerge, for the weather to change, for us to have new ideas, and for the diversity of life to flower. It is manifest in the equations governing the weather, in the dynamics of atomic nuclei and in the processing of the human brain. The phenomenon of "Eureka" is a transition from chaos to order as the answer is discovered and without the chaos that preceded it the solution would never come. Chaos fully explores the space of reality while order becomes stuck in the rut of fatal attraction. Chaos is ultimately sensitive so it results in unpredictable instabilities in the butterfly effect. Chaos is also coupled to quantum uncertainty in ways which science is in the process of discovering - that quantum chaos leads to quantum entanglement.
Now the Torah is a human account of God acting in history. You can pretend that the Pentateuch was written by Moses if you like but we all know that Deuteronomy was 'discovered' by the Yahwists only 23 years before Jerusalem fell to Babylon, in a subversive coup against the Host of Heaven and the older regional worship in the tabernacle. Most of it dates from the exile. The Bible also clearly bears the editorial stamp of many older authors from both Northern Israel and Judea. No matter how much we try to say it's God's book and therefore that God created the universe, this is fundamental error. In Genesis 1 the plants and animals and the sun and moon were all made out of order in a completely illogical manner that can't survive. It is a beautiful archetyopal but allegorical account, not an actual, or natural, description of creation.
This idea of God, although abstract and 'faceless' is still manifestly a male personality - a jealous lover of Israel in the Old Testament and a father who sacrifices his own son in the New. This idea of God is both wrong and dangerous, and Kabbalists knew this from before the time of Jesus and this is why we have the idea of the Shekhinah - the feminine face of reality - retreating after Adam and Eve were thrown violently out of paradise - and even further as the Fall continued into the tumult of apocalypse. In the Kabbalistic tale, the Shekhinah will return to grace reality in matrimonial concord only in the final unveiling, as reintegrating shattered sparks or shards , along with the Tree of Life. This is the tree of our long-term survival and the diversity of life.
Now everyone knows that the Song of Songs is not just a dirty little love poem that Rabbi Akiva mischievously inserted into the Torah, but the Holy of Holies - the very inner sanctum of our relationship with the mysterium tremendum. This tale is the tale of burgeoning fertility between the Mashiach in the person of Solomon and the Shulamite bride. Thus the inner truth of 'creation' is not a stand alone 'creator' but a complementarity, just as Wisdom crieth out from everlasting in the Proverbs that she was there with Him before his works of old - before the sun and earth were born. This is exactly the same story as Tao and Tantra tell.
This complementarity is clearly at the root of existence in wave-particle, boson-fermion, and space-time complementarity and it is in the existential condition in the complementarity between conscious mind and the physical body and brain. It is also manifest in the complementarity of sexuality without which we could not exist.
To suggest that God created a sterile, ordered universe which cannot evolve is an insult to the Shekhinah, to nature and to common sense. It is a violation because life is the crucible of transcendent awareness and it HAS to be able to evolve to fully flower and manifest the transcendent realization which the universe is here to witness. We now have the genetic codes of a large number of species and the traces of the evolutionary process are clear for all to see.
The Gnostics likewise thought of the male deity as a demiurge - a legislator - Samael or Saklas, who had usurped the cosmic condition, leading to the war of dark and light.
Jesus was not just a kosher conservative Rabbi in Galilee. There is abundant evidence from Josephus, the Talmud itself, and the gospels that Jesus was integrating all the religious and cultural traditions of his time including the fertility tradition, which is why he was anointed by a woman rather than a priest and why he was supported by the women out of their very substance and why they remained with him when the disciples fled as Zechariah wrote (see previous blog).
So I am asking you to reconsider your journey. We don't further our own fulfillment or the future of the universe by trying to force a mythical reality in the shadow of our own industrial manufacture and our ideas of morality and law on natural processes. Nature may be capable of evolving moral consciousness, but neither deterministic causality nor moral law can generate nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment