The Pillars of Creation

I was born into Catholicism.
The Church promised me heaven.
I tried to be a priest,
But they rejected me for heresy.
Now, nearly 60 years later I see they are a fraud.

There is no afterlife.
There is no other world for us. Their promises are meaningless.
This Universe is our home for life

If there is to be any heaven
it must be here on Earth
and we must make it for ourselves.

How?

The Universe is divine
Divinity is pure action, Action is eternal delight. The drive to act is lust, lust for life

We are divine children of a divine world:
if we listen to our world with careful science we can learn to live together
securely and peacefully.

god is the cosmic lust for life

Contact us: Click to email

Science rejects false hypotheses

Science snd evolution

Science is part of evolution. Darwin's theory of evolution completely revised our understanding of ourselves and our world. We are not creatures of an omniscient and omnipotent creator, but inhabitants of a universe which has taken 14 billion years to create itself from almost nothing (the initial singularity) to its present state. Evolution works like science. Variation, like imagination, explores the role of possibility; selection, like science, picks out the species and the ideas that are destined to become part of the world world ecology and human culture. Charles Darwin (1859): The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

Many people may look back to the "good old days", but a but real history shows that they were not so good. The death of young child is comparatively rare in well managed modern societies. Long term historical data suggests that about half the general population died before the age of 15, an immense load of grief. Global Change Data Lab: Our World in Data

It is not surprising that in these circumstances religions developed that promised an eternal afterlife of bliss to replace this "vale of tears". My mother, a Catholic doctor with 11 children died at the age of 97 with the firm belief that she would see her children who died before her. My mother was a deeply committed Catholic, and my family tradition of Christianity stretches back to time immemorial.

The universe of action

An atom is a living organism, tiny but infinitely complex, as physicists have found to their horror and delight. Atom is Greek for uncut or uncuttable. The idea steps back to the Ancient Greek scientist Democritus. Atom - Wikipedia

We know now that atoms many smaller particles, some of which like the outer electrons can easily be broken free. As we go deeper into the atom the parts become more firmly attached. Mot of the mass of an atom is in the central nucleus of protons and neutrons. We know that there are smaller particles inside them, but any attempt to break them up simply produces more protons and neutrons.

Fundamental particles are invisible and have an interior visible life of their own which is described by quantum mechanics. All the business of the world is in fact carried on behind the scenes in Hilbert space by quantum mechanical processes. Every move we make in visible spacetime is transmitted to Hilbert space for processing and the result returned as a consequence of our move. My life is managed by about 50 trillion cells. An average cell comprises about 100 trillion atoms,and all these atoms, parts of atoms and cells are continually in motion managing my life. I (and you) are gigantic cosmic operations.

From cognitive cosmology to the lust for life

This site is a sequel to Cognitive Cosmology, which an attempt to unite physics and theology to develop a consistent picture of a divine universe. There I explain that the driving force of creation is gravitational potential that used the mechanism of quantum mechanics to create the world we life in. From this point of view, the attraction of gravitation is s physical manifestation of the divine lust to create. We feel it at every moment of our lives. To unite physics and theology, I presented the universe as the mind of god, and the quantum of action as the logical operator which is the foundation of the universal process . On this site I wish to explore the political and moral consequences of this picture of our life in god.

Many religious traditions separate God (good) from Satan (evil). Experience shows that good and evil are mixed and very difficult to separate. Divinity embraces both. Most of the old gods started life as warlords, killing people indiscriminately to consolidate their power. The Hebrew god Yahweh sentenced every human being to death, work and pain for some insult delivered to them in in the Garden of Eden. They and their followers still do not hesitate to kill people who displease them. Exodus 32: The Lord orders Moses to slaughter the worshippers of the Golden Calf

Yahweh set the rainbow in the sky as a witness to their promise that they would never kill everybody again:

I will establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all creatures be destroyed by the waters of a flood; there shall not be another flood to devastate the earth. God said: This is the sign of the covenant that I am making between me and you and every living creature with you for all ages to come: I set my bow in the clouds to serve as a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and every living creature—every mortal being—so that the waters will never again become a flood to destroy every mortal being.

The Christian Churches and many other religions have built their business plan about this original sin. According to them, this sin sundered us and our universe from God, so that it required the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth to placate the angry divinity and restore to us our right to eternal life and heavenly bliss.

This God is the dream of a ruling class of priests who tell us we are sinners so they can rule us and control our lives. The Catholic Church is a very ancient protection racket. It says "you will all go to hell unless you support us and do what we tell you".

Evolution and the problem of evil

In fact things are not that bad. The world was not created by a vindictive God, the one who killed their own Son to gain satisfaction for some fault they found in the first people. The world is God. It creates itself and we share this creative power.

This creative power comes at some cost that Aquinas and the Catholic Church are not aware of. They believed in the sort of determinism exhibited by Laplace's demon. Laplace wrote:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes. Laplace's demon - Wikipedia

The big problem with determinism is that if it really works because something entirely new would destroy it prediction. There is a similar problem with the Christian Gd:if they are the realization of all possibility, how can they create world other than themself? We must be at least part of God. But the biggest problem is that a singularity wth no sructure has no way to represent information for control, so that it must act at random. This random variation is the root of evolution. A random agent can control everything, but it cannot do things that are impossible. Darwinian evolution, and evolution in all its forms, can only make things that either last forever or can reproduce themselves. It is the lust of the omnipotent initial singularity, bridled by consistency, that has made the world.

Evolution is creative, but it is also a source of evil. The random world is full of accidents that are often bad for someone. We cannot totally prevent accidents, but evolution has another component which can be subject to control. Because we are all need the same resources for life, predation is an endemic component of an evolving world. While it is natural among wild creatures, civilized society is designed to control our predation on one another. This is where law, ethics and morality come into human life, the control of the lust for life.

All of our problems come down to our tendency to prey on on another, ranging from little acts of passive aggression to the ideological wars that are so common between human groups. Often the worst offenders are religious people who claim that their god requires them to slaughter unbelievers, a common theme in ancient texts. So the gods of fascism try to destroy of democracies because they hate to see intelligent people taking care of themselves. They would prefer to profit by enslaving, raping, pillaging killing them to take their property.

Our answer is the rule of law. Some say the Universe began with a big bang which looks like the most destructive event imaginable. Through the good offices of quantum theory this conflagration has been tamed to bring islands of peace in a Universe of supernovae. The only uncontrollable force is the creator itself, gravitation. Nothing can stop it if it concentrates sufficient energy to produce a black hole. Fortunately the Universe is big enough for us to live at a safe distance such events. Even our calm little sun eight light minutes away can get quite aggressive at times. We are fortunate to have been hundreds of light years away from supernovas for many billions of years.

The Cognitive cosmogenesis site is my attempt to explain the inevitability creation from an omnipotent but totally ignorant singularity. Despite this, logic prevails through the quantum mechanical mind of the Universe and we are here to enjoy the result.

On this site I am more concerned with exploiting the techniques that the Universe has used to create itself to bring peace on Earth. If we play our cards right, we can enjoy another five billion years of life on Earth before the Sun becomes inhospitable.

(revised Tuesday 4 June 2024)

Image: The Pillars of Creation are set off in false colour in NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s near-infrared-light view. This image is set within the Eagle Nebula, 6,500 light-years away. This is a region where young stars are forming – or have barely burst from their dusty cocoons as they continue to form. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Anton M. Koekemoer (STScI), Alyssa Pagan (STScI).


Copyright:

You may copy this material freely provided only that you quote fairly and provide a link (or reference) to your source.


Notes and references

Further reading

Books

Darwin (1859), Charles, The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Cambridge University Press 1859, 2009 ' It's hard to talk about The Origin of Species without making statements that seem overwrought and fulsome. But it's true: this is indeed one of the most important and influential books ever written, and it is one of the very few groundbreaking works of science that is truly readable. . . . Darwin's friend and "bulldog" T.H. Huxley said upon reading the Origin, "How extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that." Alfred Russel Wallace had thought of the same theory of evolution Darwin did, but it was Darwin who gathered the mass of supporting evidence—on domestic animals and plants, on variability, on sexual selection, on dispersal—that swept most scientists before it.' Mary Ellen Curtin 
Amazon
  back

Hobbes (1651, 1985), Thomas, Leviathan: The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, Penguin Classics 1985 ' Written during the turmoil of the English Civil War, Leviathan is an ambitious and highly original work of political philosophy. Claiming that man's essential nature is competitive and selfish, Hobbes formulates the case for a powerful sovereign—or "Leviathan"—to enforce peace and the law, substituting security for the anarchic freedom he believed human beings would otherwise experience. This worldview shocked many of Hobbes's contemporaries, and his work was publicly burnt for sedition and blasphemy when it was first published. But in his rejection of Aristotle's view of man as a naturally social being, and in his painstaking analysis of the ways in which society can and should function, Hobbes opened up a whole new world of political science. Based on the original 1651 text, this edition incorporates Hobbes's own corrections, while also retaining the original spelling and punctuation, to read with vividness and clarity. C. B. Macpherson's introduction elucidates one of the most fascinating works of modern philosophy for the general reader.' 
Amazon
  back

Links

Aquinas, Summa, I II, 2, 8, Does any created good constitute man's happiness?, 'I answer that, It is impossible for any created good to constitute man's happiness. For happiness is the perfect good, which lulls the appetite altogether; else it would not be the last end, if something yet remained to be desired. Now the object of the will, i.e. of man's appetite, is the universal good; just as the object of the intellect is the universal true. Hence it is evident that naught can lull man's will, save the universal good. This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone; because every creature has goodness by participation. Wherefore God alone can satisfy the will of man, according to the words of Psalm 102:5: "Who satisfieth thy desire with good things." Therefore God alone constitutes man's happiness.' back

Aquinas, Summa, I, 3, 7, Is God altogether simple?, 'I answer that, The absolute simplicity of God may be shown in many ways. First, from the previous articles of this question. For there is neither composition of quantitative parts in God, since He is not a body; nor composition of matter and form; nor does His nature differ from His "suppositum"; nor His essence from His existence; neither is there in Him composition of genus and difference, nor of subject and accident. Therefore, it is clear that God is nowise composite, but is altogether simple. . . . ' back

Aquinas, Summa: I, 2, 3, Does God exist?, 'I answer that, The existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. . . . ' back

Atom - Wikipedia, Atom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The basic idea that matter is made up of tiny, indivisible particles is an old idea that appeared in many ancient cultures such as those of Greece and India. The word atom is derived from the ancient Greek word atomos, which means "uncuttable". This ancient idea was based in philosophical reasoning rather than scientific reasoning. Modern atomic theory is not based on these old concepts. In the early 19th century, the scientist John Dalton noticed that chemical elements seemed to combine with each other by basic units of weight, and he decided to use the word "atom" to refer to these units because he assumed that these were the fundamental units of matter. About a century later it was discovered that Dalton's atoms are not actually indivisible, but the term stuck.' back

Big Bang - Wikipedia, Big Bang - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model explaining the existence of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution. The model describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature, and offers a comprehensive explanation for a broad range of observed phenomena, including the abundance of light elements, the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, and large-scale structure. ' back

Democritus - Wikipedia, Democritus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Democritus (Greek: Δημόκριτος, Dēmókritos, meaning "chosen of the people"; c. 460 – c. 370 BC) was an Ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher from Abdera, primarily remembered today for his formulation of an atomic theory of the universe. None of his work has survived. ' back

Exodus 32, The Lord orders Moses to slaughter the worshippers of the Golden Calf, '27 Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbour'.” 28 The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. 29 Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day”.' back

General relativity - Wikipedia, General relativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'General relativity or the general theory of relativity is the geometric theory of gravitation published by Albert Einstein in 1916. It is the current description of gravitation in modern physics. General relativity generalises special relativity and Newton's law of universal gravitation, providing a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time, or spacetime. In particular, the curvature of spacetime is directly related to the four-momentum (mass-energy and linear momentum) of whatever matter and radiation are present. The relation is specified by the Einstein field equations, a system of partial differential equations.' back

George Orwell (1946_03_22), In Front of Your Nose, ' There is no use in multiplying examples. The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.' back

Global Change Data Lab, Our World in Data, ' The historical record the authors investigated goes back 2500 years. What about prehistory when our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers? . . . . All but one of these studied societies are modern hunter-gatherers. The one study on mortality rates of paleolithic hunter-gatherers investigates the famous Indian Knoll archaeological site from around 2,500 BCE, located in today’s area of Kentucky. For this community the estimates suggest that mortality at a young age was even higher than the average for modern-day hunter-gatherers: 30% died in their first year of life, and 56% did not survive to puberty.' back

Hawking radiation - Wikipedia, Black hole - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Hawking radiation is dependent on the Unruh effect and the equivalence principle applied to black-hole horizons. Close to the event horizon of a black hole, a local observer must accelerate to keep from falling in. An accelerating observer sees a thermal bath of particles that pop out of the local acceleration horizon, turn around, and free-fall back in. The condition of local thermal equilibrium implies that the consistent extension of this local thermal bath has a finite temperature at infinity, which implies that some of these particles emitted by the horizon are not reabsorbed and become outgoing Hawking radiation.' back

John Paul II (7 December 1992), Address during the official release of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church , 'The Holy Church of God rejoices today because, as a special gift of divine providence, she can solemnly celebrate the promulgation of the new "catechism," presenting it officially to the faithful of the whole world. I give great thanks to the God of heaven and earth because He has allowed me to experience with you an event of incomparable richness and importance. . . . Most of all, it is a true gift, a gift, that is, which presents the Truth revealed by God in Christ and entrusted by Him to His Church. The catechism explains this Truth in the light of the Vatican Council as it is believed celebrated, lived and prayed by the Church and does so with the intention of fostering unfailing adherence to the Person of Christ.' back

Laplace's demon - Wikipedia, Laplace's demon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.' A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, Essai philosophique dur les probabilites introduction to the second edition of Theorie analytique des probabilites based on a lecture given in 1794. back

Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Nicene Creed (Greek: Σύμβολον τῆς Νίκαιας, Latin: Symbolum Nicaenum) is the profession of faith or creed that is most widely used in Christian liturgy. It forms the mainstream definition of Christianity for most Christians. It is called Nicene because, in its original form, it was adopted in the city of Nicaea (present day Iznik in Turkey) by the first ecumenical council, which met there in the year 325. The Nicene Creed has been normative for the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox churches, the Anglican Communion, and the great majority of Protestant denominations.' back

Planck constant - Wikipedia, Planck constant - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Since energy and mass are equivalent, the Planck constant also relates mass to frequency. By 2017, the Planck constant had been measured with sufficient accuracy in terms of the SI base units, that it was central to replacing the metal cylinder, called the International Prototype of the Kilogram (IPK), that had defined the kilogram since 1889. . . . For this new definition of the kilogram, the Planck constant, as defined by the ISO standard, was set to 6.626 070 150 × 10-34 J⋅s exactly. ' back

Talia Schaffer, "A Wilde Desire Took Me": The Homoerotic History of Dracula, ' Recent treatments of Bram Stoker’s novel analyze its homoerotic desperation, unconscious desire, and deeply buried trauma. Not one critic, however, has recognized that Stoker began writing Dracula one month after his friend, rival, and compatriot Oscar Wilde was convicted of the crime of sodomy. Wilde’s influence on Stoker has been neglected partly because much of Stoker’s biographical information has disappeared. Without knowing of Stoker’s corrosive long-term relationship with Wilde, critics have lacked a context for analyzing Wilde’s effect: an earthquake that destabilized the fragile, carefully elaborated mechanisms through which Stoker routed his desires. Stoker’s careful erasure of Wilde’s name from all his published (and unpublished) texts gives a reader the impression that Stoker was airily ignorant of Wilde’s existence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The two men had an intimate and varied history lasting for at least twenty years, precisely of the sort whose permutations have been mapped in reliable precision by Eve Sedgwick.' back

https://www.lust-4-life.com is maintained by The Theology Company Proprietary Limited ACN 097 887 075 ABN 74 097 887 075 Copyright 2000-2024 © Jeffrey Nicholls