We have gone through a period of upheaval and it is not threatening to end. Some institutions and ideologies will survive this, while others will fall by the wayside.
Science as a method will obviously make it through. The question I would like to ask all of you is: do you think the standard scientific worldview makes it through? What I mean by that is the basic theories of physics, chemistry, biology, et cetera. Even if it’s fuzzy at points, tere does seem to be a consensus worldview there: we start with the Big Bang, particles fly about randomly and evolve into humans, and so on.
Is this worldview something that makes it through this turmoil unscathed? Raise your hand if you think maybe there’s some problems but that viewpoint works pretty well.
If you think it will fall as outmoded institutions do raise your hand.
These people are correct. The standard scientific worldview is a mechanical corpse, and I am here to help bury it.
Rare is the practicing scientist that understands the fission of God and science to be partly a political act. Likely you are aware that the Church was not always so meek as it is today. At the time of the Enlightenment it is this juggernaut. To push God out of the Universe is to push against the Church’s ability to dictate what is accepted thought. This gives a space for the likes of Newton and Descartes to build the foundations of modern science.
Despite being a pious man, Descartes strikes a major blow in separating Man and God in conceiving of the Universe as a grand mechanism that God has built and set in motion. Over the hundreds of years since Descartes, we have gradually pushed God out of the picture entirely. Darwin apparently eliminates any intentionally to nature. There are no divine forms, rather everything that is is merely the outcome of random processes.
Further, more and more we have come to describe the Universe in a formal, mathematical language. Take the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics for example. At the limit of our ability to interact with the Universe we find our actions make it impossible to find exact values of certain measurements. Instead we must use probability distributions to describe behavior at quantum scales. Bohr and Heisenberg propose that, lacking the ability to speak more exactly, we should take these probability distributions to be our best description of reality. At the smallest scale, we begin to view the Universe as math.
Decades later, Turing and Church discover an equivalence between math and computing machines. Not long after, at a conference in the 1950s, an automated theory prover program is demonstrated. Mathematics was assumed to be an activity that only humans could perform. This and the continuing rise in ability of machines cements the computer as the dominant metaphor for understanding ourselves.
The scientific worldview is one of materialism, mathematics, and mechanism. The organic, in which God is most clearly seen, has been subsumed by computation. Man is thus subject to technological control, being viewed as a cybernetic object to command. It is this system that has forcibly signed us up for immunization as a service.
We must take this closed mechanical Universe and hew it open with our daggers before it performs more gain of function research. No man of God researches the production of poison!
Perhaps you are thinking, Adam, these metaphysics are nice and all, but science is about hard, testable predictions. Well, I mean this opening of the Universe literally. Today we conceive of the Universe as a closed thermodynamic system. No energy nor material enters, nor may it leave. Yet, when we look at organic systems, we find that their boundaries are open to the flow of material and energy. In fact, these systems only exist because they are able to dissipate energy in service of maintaining their structure. To believe in an open Universe is to believe it is like organisms in this manner. Here God’s energies drive a primal, transcendental flow from which the material emerges.
Systems theorist Paul LaViolette starts with the assumption of an open Universe and ends with not only testable but confirmed hypotheses. He returns us to the idea of an ether that permeates the cosmos, but one that is active and transmuting like a chemical system, rather than the previous conception of a purely mechanical space-filling substrate. I’d like to review his cosmology, which I find inherently more pleasing and intuitive than the Big Bang model.
In the beginning space is filled with a homogeneous ether. There is no matter here yet, only the elements of the ether constantly interacting and transforming. This homogeneity is not perfect, the concentration of ether elements is constantly fluctuating, but usually these fluctuations quickly return to equilibrium. With just the right fluctuation, a structure forms, the first neutron.
In classical physics particles, or quarks or whatever, simply are in the world. In LaViolette’s theory they are dissipative structures in the same way we are. They exist due to this primal, transcendental flow continually rejuvenating their structure. The first seed neutron makes it more likely for other particles to come into being– Priligione’s order from fluctuation in action. Hydrogen atoms begin to form, until we have a primordial gas cloud. This gas condenses, becoming a star. Stars beget not only planets, but stars, and after many generations we have a galaxy, with the original mother star in the center. Galaxies beget galaxies and the Universe grows in a process of continual matter creation.
This cosmology explains why we see organic-looking filaments of matter throughout space, why we see isolated stars that are not parts of galaxies. It explains the red-shifting of distant stars not as an acceleration away from us that would lead us to Heat Death, but rather as photons losing energy as they travel through space. It unifies gravity and electromagnetism, unifies particles and fields, and more.
Certainly this theory is very incomplete relative to existing scientific beliefs as far as data and experimentation go. These claims are aspirational in the same way Galileo’s were. If nothing else I want to make you aware that outsiders yet explore the frontier beyond mechanical science, beyond the academic Church.
As long as one is willing to step outside secular materialism, truth-seeking will lead one to God. As the cyborg oligarchy crumbles we will see God and science united once more. Thank you.