God and the Theory of Everything

[Guest]

Hi AS,

Sure if one's belief in God and reading of scripture is reductive, a-historical, fundamentalistic, and puerile, then sure, it will affect one's belief in God.

I think this is very much what belief in God generally amounts to and I think this is especially true in Mormonism. Brigham Young claimed every truth in every domain to be property of the Gospel and I think his inspiration was Joseph Smith, who, for all intents and purposes, created his own theory of everything -- with Orson Pratt the scientist at his side to back him up at every step. The universe they created, from Kolob transmitting power through the aether, to the lost ten tribes hiding under the arctic ice and city of Enoch floating in space, to an anthropology rooted in the pure lineage of the white man, fused Joseph Smith's revelations with the day's best science and pseudoscience. Joseph Smith and his successors nailed it all, from astrophysics, to philosophy, to political science, history, and economics. They had it all figured out. And what have they left for the apologists?

A lot of work, that's for sure. For one, it's not as easy to rescue a self-proclaimed prophet as it is a pastor. Was Joseph Smith the only religious figure in the 19th century to fuse his religion with a scientific understanding that was either misunderstood or quickly outdated? No. But he's one of the few who did so with prophetic authority. And it would be wrong to understate this authority, given that it is the key distinction Mormons have always made between themselves and the rest of the world. My condolences to the apologists, but Smith's self-proclaimed authority makes his failures much more severe than the wrongheaded speculations of a mere pastor. Yet, so wrong was the world Joseph Smith created, that the apologist strategy has primarily been to undo the mess their prophet created; "he was only speaking as a man," "This was a common understanding of his day," "Let's focus on the the real message of the gospel (the parts science can't so easily come into direct conflict with)".

The first two responses are dismissed by Joseph Smith's own authority as a seer. However, if we can manage to back Joseph Smith out of everything but only his core religious ideas, can we rescue his world from the power of science? I don't think so. When I was a missionary, we told our investigator's that the gospel told us where we come from, why we are here, and where we are going. The answers include a tangible spiritual realm where we lived with a immortal humanoid we know as God. We will survive death, and live again to create planets, among other things. Independent of whether we believe Brian Greene or Woit and Smolin, the picture we do have of the universe is complete enough to make the answers the Church gives us ridiculous. To back Joseph Smith out farther, we are pushed back into logical possibility with little to no connection with science. None of what we know about the universe might justify Smith, but we can't rule out the logical possibility that an angel riding a unicorn will cut into our dimension with a sword and connect our world with the Celestial world that hitherto was unknowable. In other words, fairy tales may yet be true.

Aside from gospel as fairy tale, all that might be left are the dark corners of modal logic and existentialism. I think it's very hard to hide the Christian God here, but lets face it, we have centuries of theology exploring God as a result of logic prior to science threatening the Bible. It's nearly impossible to hide the Mormon God here though, as Joseph Smith and associates were expressly enemies of the abstract and impersonable God of Christianity and theology, and as are the current leadership of the Church.

The Mopologists have their work cut our for them.

[_subgenius]

...Theory of Everything is finally emerging....I am posting this in the Celestial Forum because I am interested in helping the apologists prepare for what will be a sea change in the strength and elegance of the science that they will be forced to contend with in the coming years.

talk about wishful thinking and an obligatory "ugh" for hard-line determinism rearing its ugly and outdated arguments again.
We are about as close as Archimedes was to a TOE. But i admire your enthusiasm, but i am confused how you make such extrapolations from a particle physics position??

Do not misunderstand me, i have no issue with the TOE or science in general, mainly because any mildly intelligent person can easily discern that there is actually no conflict between a faith in God and a belief in science. Though history has proven that a conflict can occur between theocracy and science, such conflicts are minimal today and likely just political manipulations.
"mathematical reconciliations" actually made me laugh out loud....because it affirms that the TOE is likely to be, as predicted, a consistent non-trivial mathematical theory must be "incomplete". In other words, the idea of "getting closer" is an illusion. If for any reason, it is because one will never actually "know" when the TOE is complete.

However, the TOE has much larger problems - which Gödel covers this quite well. The TOE can not demonstrate its own consistency. This is simply shown by the liar's paradox - wherein the liar states "this sentence is false"......
In other words a TOE is a different paradigm than anything supernatural, the OP is talking about apples in a forum about oranges.

after this i realize that the OP questions were nothing more than re-stating the
"what if we all had powers like spider-man" game.
ugh

[_DrW]

I believe Brian Greene makes a similar statement in his book The Elegant Universe, but I'm just too lazy and busy to look it up now.

Aristotle,

While Brian Greene may have stated something similar to the quote from the Wikipedia article you cited a decade ago (The Elegant Universe was published in 1999, as I recall) I doubt if he would make a similar or analogous statement today, judging from his treatment of the subject in his latest book as cited above.

While I do not work as a professional physicist (which should be pretty obvious), I do have a degree in physics and have maintained a good working knowledge of the math used in classical mechanics, relativity and quantum mechanics. I do not claim to have more than a conceptual understanding of the math used in String Theory.

I do not disagree with any of the clarifications that you made regarding the Higgs boson, its importance or lack thereof in the Standard Model, or the relationship of quantum field theory to string theory and general relativity.

What I do not appreciate is your implication that I might not know what I was talking about, at the level at which I was talking about it, because you did not agree with the sentence structure that I used.

This is a message board, not graduate course in physics. And as I believe I demonstrated, I can support the statements I made with references to work by recognized scientists who are leaders in the field. I would not have made them otherwise.

Now I hope we can get back to the main questions in the OP, which had to do with the implications of all of this Theory of Everything stuff as it relates to the unfounded beliefs of religion.

[_Gadianton]

Hello Subgenius,

"mathematical reconciliations" actually made me laugh out loud....because it affirms that the TOE is likely to be, as predicted, a consistent non-trivial mathematical theory must be "incomplete". In other words, the idea of "getting closer" is an illusion.

I've read these sentences several times and I am not sure what you mean. Do you mean that the TOE is predicted to be a consistent, non-trivial mathematical theory, but that it cannot, by its very nature be "complete?"

Can you explain this in light of the wiki definition of TOE:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything

A theory of everything (TOE) is a putative theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, and predicts the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out in principle.

Why is such a "mathematical reconciliation" not possible?

[Guest]

As I had linked that wiki article on TOE, I happened to glance down and discover from where subgenius nearly lifted the text of his arguments without attribution:

Stanley Jaki, in his 1966 book The Relevance of Physics, pointed out that, because any "theory of everything" will certainly be a consistent non-trivial mathematical theory, it must be incomplete. He claims that this dooms searches for a deterministic theory of everything.[15] In a later reflection, Jaki states that it is wrong to say that a final theory is impossible, but rather that "when it is on hand one cannot know rigorously that it is a final theory."

"mathematical reconciliations" actually made me laugh out loud....because it affirms that the TOE is likely to be, as predicted, a consistent non-trivial mathematical theory must be "incomplete". In other words, the idea of "getting closer" is an illusion. If for any reason, it is because one will never actually "know" when the TOE is complete.

Indeed, you misunderstood. Jaki did not say, as you wrote, that TOE is incomplete because we cannot know when it is complete, that's nonsensical. Rather, Jaki changed his position on the matter from "TOE cannot be complete" to "TOE might become complete, but we would not know when it is complete."

You then write,

However, the TOE has much larger problems - which Gödel covers this quite well.

Subgenius, you didn't even need to understand the sentences you were lifting to realize that Jaki's argument, per the heading it falls under in the Wiki article, is a subset of the Godel-related objections. In other words, when you say, "TOE has much larger problems...Godel," you misunderstood the article. Jaki's revised objection is in fact his reading of Godel into the TOE project.

Moving down in your commentary generated from the wiki article:

However, the TOE has much larger problems - which Gödel covers this quite well. The TOE can not demonstrate its own consistency. This is simply shown by the liar's paradox - wherein the liar states "this sentence is false"......

This is a restatement of Jaki's position, it is not a "larger problem." It is important to note because it shows you are lifting your material.

ugh

You are not in a position to say, "ugh."

[_Aristotle Smith]

Now I hope we can get back to the main questions in the OP, which had to do with the implications of all of this Theory of Everything stuff as it relates to the unfounded beliefs of religion.

Fair enough. I'm still waiting for any reason to think that this should affect my belief one way or the other. Like I said, unless you think that the Bible is just science done badly, the findings of science (at least in this area) have very little to say about my beliefs. There are historical and archaeological findings that have and do inform and modulate my beliefs, but these are unrelated to a theory of everything.

[_DrW]

Now I hope we can get back to the main questions in the OP, which had to do with the implications of all of this Theory of Everything stuff as it relates to the unfounded beliefs of religion.

Fair enough. I'm still waiting for any reason to think that this should affect my belief one way or the other. Like I said, unless you think that the Bible is just science done badly, the findings of science (at least in this area) have very little to say about my beliefs. There are historical and archaeological findings that have and do inform and modulate my beliefs, but these are unrelated to a theory of everything.

Fair enough.

Thanks for participating.

[_bcspace]

I would be interested to hear what apologists have to say about the status of belief in God if the Theory of Everything, as physicists are now coming to understand it, continues to hold with only minor modification and clarifications.

I don't see why God shouldn't have (and possibly have created) and operate within a "theory of everything". I don't see how it makes the location of direct evidence for God exist in an ever shrinking box. By your own logic (science) the possible "locations" for evidence of the existence of God recently increased exponentially into multiple universes and dimensions though I believe if we relegate Him to this universe alone, it is still far too big for science to shrink down and eliminate.

Already we know that you may have missed God in evolution. We are a loooooong way off from being able to account for the locations and motions of every atom on the earth. And when we do account for a couple of them, we cannot say what put them into that condition in the first place. There will never be a scientific discovery that precludes God. Man has yet to even be able to conceive of such a thing and they never will.

[_Buffalo]

I would be interested to hear what apologists have to say about the status of belief in God if the Theory of Everything, as physicists are now coming to understand it, continues to hold with only minor modification and clarifications.

I don't see why God shouldn't have (and possibly have created) and operate within a "theory of everything". I don't see how it makes the location of direct evidence for God exist in an ever shrinking box. By your own logic (science) the possible "locations" for evidence of the existence of God recently increased exponentially into multiple universes and dimensions though I believe if we relegate Him to this universe alone, it is still far too big for science to shrink down and eliminate.

Already we know that you may have missed God in evolution. We are a loooooong way off from being able to account for the locations and motions of every atom on the earth. And when we do account for a couple of them, we cannot say what put them into that condition in the first place. There will never be a scientific discovery that precludes God. Man has yet to even be able to conceive of such a thing and they never will.

There is no room for God in evolution. Natural selection and mutation run all by themselves.

[_sheryl]

In my tradition, we are very excited about the new scientific findings, for they point to what Wisdom Traditions have been teaching orally for 1000s of years. Holy Teachers have known about black holes and the big bang - and this recent discovery about the speed of light - for a very long time, and with each discovery of science, humanity is getting closer to understanding creation and the source of creation.

My Teacher or Tzaddik was speaking the other night about Stephen Hawkings' recent discoveries, which he has in his head and is presently trying to communicate or write down in these last years of his life. It seems that Stephen now sees that there are multiple universes superimposed upon one another. And while there are universes like ours with black holes, where information is lost, there are universes overlaying these black hole universes without black holes themselves, so while information is lost in some universes, it is never lost in others, so nothing is ever completely lost.

This matches Wisdom Traditions' teachings on universes that have been around for thousands of years.

I offer that while outer limited religious organizations seem to be at odds with science, there are Wisdom Traditions, that are more hidden, smaller, who rejoice with each scientific discovery as it draws humanity closer to a real understanding.

Now I am a physics layman and so apologize for any lack of clarity in my words. If we do not have a knowledge base with which to communicate, it is difficult to do so without any cloudiness or distortion.

Blessings!
Sheryl