Then, after speaking in many and varied ways through the prophets, "now at last in these days God has spoken to us in His Son" (Heb. 1:1-2). For He sent His Son, the eternal Word, who enlightens all men, so that He might dwell among men and tell them of the innermost being of God. Jesus Christ, therefore, the Word made flesh, was sent as "a man to men." He "speaks the words of God", and completes the work of salvation which His Father gave Him to do. Pope Paul VI (1965): Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum §4
In 1963 I entered the Australian province of the Dominican Order as a novice. I very soon fell in love with the work of Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican, one of the leading Medieval theologians in the Church. Aquinas worked at a time when the medieval recovery of Aristotle revitalized medieval science and philosophy. He was instrumental in introducing Aristotelian theology to the Catholic Church. His greatest (unfinished) work is the Summa Theologiae. The Summa is written in easy Latin and I fell in love with it. Thomas Aquinas - Wikipedia, Recovery of Aristotle - Wikipedia
I dreamt that the Council could reform theology in the same way that Aquinas had done. He had put it on a scientific basis using the work of Aristotle. We could do the same thing using modern science. Further, in response to the scientific developments of the nineteenth century, the Church had retreated from the world, hiding behind the doctrines of Papal infallibility and a constitution, the Code of Canon Law, which gives absolute autocratic to the the Pope in all matters concerning the governance and doctrine of the Church. My ideal, therefore was (and remains) a scientific and democratic Church.
Here I ran headfirst into dogmatism and autocracy. If theology is to be a science we must assume that the Universe is divine. Such a view is anathema to the Church, whose whole business plan revolves around its claim to be the only trustworthy channel of communication with God. Further, since its God is essentially invisible to us, we must place absolute trust in the dogmatic pronouncements of the Church.
As the Council progressed, I saw that it was going backwards. Aquinas had opened a door to science, but his vision had become institutionalized and reduced to a dogmatic skeleton. During the reign of Pope Pius X the Sacred Congregation of Studies reduced the vast corpus of Aquinas's work to 24 theses which were defined to be 'safe directive norms' (tutae normae directivae) expressing the genuine teaching of Aquinas. This "scholastic" approach to Aquinas had become established in the Church and it was thought necessary by the Council, in the name of aggiornamento and ecumenism to reject medieval theology entirely and follow the Reformation trend toward absolute dependence upon scripture and the Fathers of the Church. Creativity in theology was dead and the Church continued to wallow in the apocalyptic dreams of ancient prophets, bishops, cardinals and popes. A great disappointment. The only bright spot, from my point of view was that I was expelled from the Order for heresy and set free to listen to the voice of a new God. Fundación Tomás de Aquino: Corpus Thomisticum, Pope Pius X (27 July 1914): The 24 Thomistic Theses
The corrupt sale of indulgences attracted the attention of Martin Luther and eventually led to the Protestant Reformation and a long period of war in Europe. The Church responded to the Protestant Reformation with the Council of Trent, which condemned the heresies of the reformers and reaffirmed Catholic doctrine. Indulgence - Wikipedia, , European wars of religion - Wikipedia, Council of Trent - Wikipedia
A consequence of this activity was a new spectrum of ideas about the nature and action of God which tended to weaken the rigid dogmatic position of the Church. Science began to appear, beginning with people like Leonardo da Vinci and leading to Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. Renaissance - Wikipedia
The Renaissance merged into the age of enlightenment and brought new challenges to the Church. Friedrich Nietzsche felt that the Enlightenment had killed the traditional God which had supported European theology for two thousand years. He wrote:
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?Age of Enlightenment - Wikipedia, , Friedrich Nietzsche - Wikipedia
The Bible is said to be the word of God, but apart from the words of Jesus of Nazareth God has very little to say. In the Bible God sometimes speaks through an Angel, cloud or in the mind of a prophet. At the Baptism of Jesus . . . heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” Theophany - Wikipedia
In 1965 the Second Vatican Council issued the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum on Divine Revelation. This document makes two important points. First, the Bible is the inspired word of God:
The second point is that the Church reserves to itself the exclusive right to interpret the meaning of the Bible, whose text is often rather allegorical and obscure:
But the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether written or handed on, has been entrusted exclusively to the living teaching office of the Church, whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. This teaching office is not above the word of God, but serves it, teaching only what has been handed on, listening to it devoutly, guarding it scrupulously and explaining it faithfully in accord with a divine commission and with the help of the Holy Spirit, it draws from this one deposit of faith everything which it presents for belief as divinely revealed.Pope Paul VI (1965): Promulgation of the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum
The Catholic Church maintains that it is the sole trustworthy channel of personal communication between God and us. This channel is necessary, it claims, because there is an absolute divide between God and the World. God is totally beyond our ken and can be known only insofar as it chooses to reveal . This revelation, the Church’s raison’detre, is principally embodied in the Bible. The Church claims the right to produce definitive and even infallible interpretations of the Bible Infallibility - First Vatican Council: English text.
At best the voice of God is rarely heard. What we hear, loud and clear, is the voice of a Church claiming to speak for God. There is no scientific evidence for this claim. If the world is in fact divine, we are all children of God in exactly the same sense as Jesus of Nazareth was God.
On Cognitive Cosmology I have provided a comprehensive alternative to the Roman Catholic hypothesis that God is other that the visible Universe with its opposite God is identical with the visible Universe. Given this hypothesis, God lives and reveals themself in every moment of our lives.
Further, if this alternative is to be true physics and theology must be mutually compatible. I explain that this change may be made logically possible by quantum theory and draw the conclusion that if this is the case, the way is open for theology to become a science in the modern sense of the word. I will proceed on this site to elucidate the differences in theology that follow if my hypothesis were true.
We are in intimate contact with our divine world, God is in us and around at every moment of our lives. This is exactly the same as the situation described by Aquinas in the two articles of the Summa referred to here. God is everywhere by essence , power and presence, and this property is specific to God. Aquinas, Summa, I, 8, 3: Is God everywhere by essence, power and presence?, Aquinas, Summa, I, 8, 4: Does to be everywhere belong to God alone?
This presence of God extends to our own minds, imaginations and dreams, which means that all the inspirations received by the authors of the Bible are also the work of God. The only difference is that, as quoted above, the Church claims the right to step in between out personal experiences of the divinity and interpret them for us in a way which suits its own agenda.
This interference has deep political significance. My indoctrination into the Catholic Church started long before I was consciously aware of it. Sometime in the first few weeks of my life I was taken to the church and baptized, cold water poured over my head while a priest said the words I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. This ceremony is believed to remove the stain of original sin from my soul. Baptism - Wikipedia
Baptism admitted me to the Catholic Church and me the grace of salvation granted by the Father to the human race because he had made a human sacrifice of his Son. Baptism did not, however, correct the alleged defect in my nature that Augustine called concupiscence God's decision to confirm our role as sinners by breaking the harmony between spirit and flesh as part punishment for the original sin..Concupiscence - Wikipedia, Paul: Epistle to the Galatians 5:16-17
As Nietzsche so perceptively notices,the old Catholic God is dead. They were only ever a literary and corporate fantasy, a confidence trick designed to control people for the benefit of the clergy.
As with the interpretation of the Bible, the history of science shows that interpreting the world is not easy. As with every species, the survival of the first people depended on learning the language of their environment to obtain the necessary, food, shelter and security. Our understanding of the initial stages of our struggle for existence comes from archaeology, anthropology and paleontology. Human history from the archaeological point of view begins with the the study of stone tools manufactured at Lomekwi in East Africa 3.3 million years ago. Archaeology - Wikipedia, Anthropology - Wikipedia, Paleontology - Wikipedia
Some of the animals currently known to use tools may have begin this behaviour long before our human ancestors, but material evidence is not available. Tool use by animals - Wikipedia
From the general point of view presented here, all the knowledge, either genetically encoded or learnt comes under the general category of theology, acquired by listening to and learning how to deal with the enveloping divinity. The evolution of life in the first place, and the preceding 10 billion of years of cosmic history that produced the elements and environments for life must also to be included in this overall vision. Theology, listening to the divinity and trying to understand it therefore serves as the discipline unifying all we know about the universe, the full scale theory of everything.
All of the experience of elements of the universe in their interaction with one another is therefore, from this point of view, the world of God, uttered by the voice of God. God speaks a vast range of languages, all body languages. Not just all forms of human speech and song, but all the languages birds and animals, the communications of all the elementary articles, atoms, molecules and cells that make up the world.
We accomodate this universal point of view by considering the universe as a whole as a hierarchy of communication networks beginning from the initial singularity and growing through time to the present, where every new moment is the product of messages generated in the immediate past of that moment. This structure is described in some detail on Cognitive Cosmology, beginning on page 16: Network I: Cooperation
The voice of god speaks at all volumes from one quantum of action to supernovae and black holes. This enormous sale is bridged by he transfinite network described in cc18_trans_minkowski.
If the universe is divine, every event, ie every quantum of action, is a word from god. Physics studies publicly observable events, things that everybody can see and agree on, like the mass of a hydrogen atom and the orbit of the moon. there are also many other events, like the process of printing a book, which have a physical foundation but carry meaning well beyond the orbit of physics.
Written literature is a product of imagination. Imagination itself is a product of the complex networks of nervous tissue that constitutes our brains, the physical foundation of our minds. We now understand quite a bit about the physiology of the brain, right down to the atomic and molecular level, and we know that at this level every activity is measured in quanta of action, the universal atom of action. It is hard to imagine that amount of action that goes into the functioning of a synapse, one of the smallest operating units in our brains. A simple dream, a simple word, is the work of trillions of synapses, and the ordering and choreographing of these process is the dynamic foundation of ever dream, every world, every thought, and all this is to part of the world og the universal divinity.
The production of these strings of words lies many levels of complexity above the electrodynamics foundations of our thought. Beginning with light microscopes, moving through electron microscopes to the of the biggest microscopes of all, huge devices like the Large Hadron Collider, we have spent the last century digging down deeper and deeper into the microscopic struccture of the universe and leaning the appreciate the immense complexity of the systems which underlies our existence.
Physics studies the basic tules of this immense construction, basically 60 or so elementary particles from which everything is constructed. On the one hand we have the brick, collectively know as fermions, which occupy space and form the skeletal structures of the world, and the bosons, whose role is to communicate between the fermions, binding them into large and larger structures, from protons and neutrons to atoms, molecules, cells and multicellular living bodies.
A;; this structure is physical, and all this structure carries information, for information is itself physical. The stercture is devised by two complementary processes. The first is the universal analogue of imagination, the random assemblage of different components to rom different structures as we assemble coloured paints to make a picture, or the atoms of metals and plastics to create motor vehicles. The evolutionary exploits random variation to try al the possibilities. Some possibilities are durable and survive. Others are not, have an ephemeral existence and their materials are recycles to try again
Writing is itself is an evolutionary process. As most writers know, good writing is an endless round of trial snd selection, ultimately revealing sentence that expresses the thought. ' A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.' Everything written is as good as it s dramatic. It need not declare itself in form but it is drama or nothing.' All human literature, all human art is the evolved word of a god, just as humanity itself is the evolved word of the divine universal god.Robert Frost (1929): Drama
As life feeds on life, so literature feeds on literature, creating generation after generation of new work, new species in an old genus.
(revised Wednesday 5 October 2022)
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