“It’s not fair that I have to spend eight hours a day at a job I hate just to survive!”
“It’s not fair that my job at McDonald’s doesn’t pay enough for me to afford a two bedroom apartment all by myself!”
“It’s not fair that the CEO of the company I work for is a millionaire when I only pull in $30,000 a year!”
These are all common complaints made by people who are demanding that the government give them free shit (which is a euphemism for demanding that the government take shit from other people to give to them). When I hear such complains, I can’t help by acknowledge that we live in an indifferent universe that hosts an unfathomable number of things that could kill any one of us in less than a heartbeat for no other reason than because we, entirely unaware of what the immediate future held, chose to occupy a very specific space at a very specific time.
Knowing this I find people who whine about things being unfair rather obtuse.
Hi, Christopher Burg. You wrote that “we live in an indifferent universe”. On the contrary, the known laws of physics (viz., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics) require the universe to diverge to infinite computational power (in terms of both processor speed and memory storage). For the details on that, see my following article on physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler’s Omega Point cosmology, which is a proof (i.e., mathematical theorem) of God’s existence per the aforesaid known physical laws, and of which has been peer-reviewed and published in a number of the world’s leading physics journals: James Redford, “The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything”, Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Sept. 10, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), 186 pp., doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708, https://archive.org/download/ThePhysicsOfGodAndTheQuantumGravityTheoryOfEverything/Redford-Physics-of-God.pdf . The foregoing article also addresses the societal implications of said Omega Point Theorem.
I’ll leave the argument over whether the universe was created and is managed by a higher being to the theologists and atheists who seem to enjoy engaging each other. However, I do not recall any theological argument from my Catholic upbringing that implies or overtly states that the Christian God created a universe that is itself in anyway sentient.
Hi, Christopher Burg. Have you never heard of angels in your Catholic upbringing? In Catholic doctrine, what I am describing is called the Great Chain of Being. Nor do I see what your Catholic upbringing has to do with anything in reality external to yourself. At any rate, perhaps your Catholic upbringing was not a particularly good Catholic upbringing. Hardly is it the case that every Catholic is brought up exactly the same way.
Further, given any sentient being within the universe, then the universe has sentience, in the literal sense that the universe quite literally possesses sentience. I am made from the universe, and I am sentient. Hence, the universe itself is sentient–the nonsentient parts of the universe can simply be regarded as a support-structure required to create my sentience. But eventually all matter in the universe will be converted into superintelligent computers, a.k.a. the New Earth and the New Heavens.
My aforecited article “The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything” details how physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler’s Omega Point Theorem uniquely conforms to, and precisely matches, the cosmology described in the New Testament.
It really wasn’t. I grew up in a small town and the Sunday school teachers were all volunteer parents who were pretty weak on Catholic doctrine so I fully admit that just because I haven’t heard of something, doesn’t mean it’s not official doctrine (hence why I’m careful to point out that I don’t recall it instead of saying it isn’t the case).
However, the Great Chain of Being is, from what I’ve just read, reliant on there being a higher being (the Christian God specifically) that created the universe and everything in it, which puts it firmly in the realm of theology. Again, I prefer to let people who actually enjoy debating theology debate it.
I did take the time to look up the idea of Omega Point and skim through some of the linked paper (I don’t currently have time to do a thorough read). It, like all theological work, is based on the assumption that the universe was created by a higher being. Nowhere does the paper prove through the scientific method that such a higher being exists. That isn’t to dismiss the Omega Point but it is based on theology, not purely science, so it cannot be proven and hence cannot be confirmed through experimentation. If the universe can be proven through experimentation (i.e. can be proven through a mechanism that I can observe and even reproduce myself if I so desire) to be sentient, then I will happily change my mind. Until then I will go on with the suspicion that it is not itself sentient.
Hi, Christopher Burg. You’re making the false assumption that God’s existence cannot be proven via science. Yet mathematical theorems (i.e., proofs) do exist within the field of physics, such as with the Penrose-Hawking-Geroch Singularity Theorems which proved that the Big Bang initial singularity necessarily exists per General Relativity and given attractive gravity. Likewise, the Omega Point/Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity theory is a mathematical theorem if General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are correct. General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have been confirmed by every experiment to date, and so the only way to avoid the Omega Point theory of quantum gravity is to reject empirical science. As Prof. Stephen Hawking wrote, “one cannot really argue with a mathematical theorem.” (From p. 67 of Stephen Hawking, The Illustrated A Brief History of Time [New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1996; 1st ed., 1988].)
Within the Omega Point Theorem, God’s existence isn’t an assumption, but rather a mathematically-unavoidable conclusion given the standard physics that have been empirically confirmed by every experiment conducted to date.