Posts Tagged ‘Gods’

Gods are a matter of epistemology rather than theology

December 28, 2025

Gods are a matter of epistemology rather than theology 

or Why the boundaries of cognition need the invention of Gods

An essay on a subject which I have addressed many times with my views evolving and getting more nuanced over the years but generally converging over time. I suspect this is now as close to any final convergence I can achieve.

Summary

Human cognition is finite, bounded by sensory and conceptual limitations. When we attempt to comprehend realities that exceed those limits—such as the origin of existence, the nature of infinity, or the essence of consciousness—we inevitably reach a point of cognitive failure. At this boundary, we substitute understanding with “labels” that preserve the appearance of explanation. “God” is one such label, a placeholder for what cannot be conceived or described.

The essay argues that the invention of gods is not primarily a cultural accident or a moral device but a “cognitive necessity”. Any consciousness that seeks to understand its total environment will eventually collide with incomprehensibility. To sustain coherence, the mind must assign meaning to the unknowable—whether through myth, metaphysics, or scientific abstraction. “God” thus emerges as a symbolic bridge over the gap between the knowable and the unknowable.

This tendency manifests in the “discretia/continua” tension which arises from our inability to reconcile the world as composed of both distinct things (particles, identities, numbers) and continuous processes (waves, emotions, time). Different cognitions, human, alien, or animal, would experience different boundaries of comprehension depending on their perceptual structures. Yet each would face some ultimate limit, beyond which only placeholders remain.

The essay further proposes that “God” represents not an active being but the “hypothetical cognition that could perceive the universe in its totality”. For finite minds, such total perception is impossible. Thus, the divine concept is born as a projection of impossible completeness. Even an unconscious entity, such as a rock, is immersed in the continuum but lacks perception, suggesting that only through perception do concepts like “continuity” and “divinity” arise.

In essence, “gods exist because minds are finite”. They are conceptual necessities marking the horizon of understanding. The invention of gods is not weakness but the natural consequence of finite awareness confronting the infinite. Where the finitude of our cognition meets the boundless universe, we raise placeholders—and call them gods. “God” emerges not from revelation, but from the structure and limits of cognition itself.

Human finitude

Human cognition is finite. Our brains are finite, and we do not even have many of the senses that have evolved among other living species on earth. We rely primarily on the five traditional senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch), plus some others like balance, pain, and body awareness. But living things on earth have evolved many “extra” senses that we do not possess. Unlike other creatures we cannot directly detect magnetic fields, electrical fields, or infrared or ultraviolet radiation. We cannot either detect and use echo location, or polarized light or seismic signals as some other animals can. (See  Senses we lack). And for all those other detectable signals that must exist in the universe, but are unknown on earth, we cannot know what we do not have.  

I take the cognition of any individual to emerge from the particular combination of brain, senses and body making up that individual where the three elements have been tuned to function together by evolution. It is through the cognition available that any observer perceives the surrounding universe. And so it is for humans who find their surroundings to be without bound. No matter where or when we look, we see no edges, no boundaries, no beginnings and no endings. In fact, we can perceive no boundaries of any kind in any part of the space and time (and the spacetime) we perceive ourselves to be embedded in. Our finitude is confronted by boundless surroundings and it follows that each and every observation we make is necessarily partial, imperfect and incomplete. It is inevitable that there are things we cannot know. It is unavoidable that what we do know can only be partial and incomplete. All our observations, our perceptions are subject to the blinkers of our cognition and our finitude can never encompass the totality of the boundless.

It is this finitude of our cognition and the boundless world around us which gives us our three-fold classification of knowledge. There is that which we know, there is that which is knowable but which we do not know, and then there is that which we cannot know. Every act of knowing presupposes both a knower and what is or can be known. Omniscience, knowing everything, is beyond the comprehension of human cognition. To know everything is to remove the very meaning of knowledge. There would be nothing to be known. It is a paradox that as knowledge grows so does the extent of the interface to the unknown and some of that is unknowable. Any mind contained within the universe is a finite mind. Any finite mind faced with a boundless universe is necessarily curtailed in the extent of its perception, processing, representation and understanding.

A key feature of human cognition is that we have the ability to distinguish “things” – things which are discrete, unique, identifiable and countable. We distinguish fundamentally between continua on the one hand, and discrete separate “things” on the other. We classify  air, water, emotions, colours as continua, while we recognize atoms and fruit and living entities and planets and galaxies and even thoughts as “things”. Once a thing exists it has an identity separate from every other thing. It may be part of another thing but yet retains its own identity as long as it remains a thing. To be a thing is to have a unique identity in the human perceived universe. We even dare to talk about all the things in the visible universe (as being the ca. 1080 atoms which exist independently and uniquely). But the same cognitive capability also enjoins us to keep “things” separated from continua. We distinguish, draw boundaries, try to set one thing against another as we seek to define them. Perception itself is an act of discretization within a world we perceive as continuous in space, energy, time, and motion. Where there are flows without clear division, the human mind seeks to impose structure upon that flow, carving reality into things it can identify, name, and manipulate. Without that discretization there could be no comprehension, but because of it, comprehension is always incomplete. As with any enabler (or tool), human cognition both enables inquiry but also limits the field of inquiry. Even when our instruments detect parameters we cannot directly sense (uv, ir, infrasound, etc.) the data must be translated into forms that we can detect (audible sound, visible light, …) so that our brains can deal with data in the allowable forms for interpretation. But humans can never reproduce what a dog experiences with its nose and processed by its brain. Even the same signals sensed by different species are interpreted differently by their separate brains and the experiences cannot be shared.

When finitude meets the boundless, ….

It is not surprising then that the finitude of our understanding is regularly confounded when confronted by one of the many incomprehensibilities of our boundless surroundings. All our metaphysical mysteries originate at these confrontations. At the deepest level, this is inevitable because cognition itself is finite and cannot encompass an unbounded totality. There will always exist unknowable aspects of existence that remain beyond our cognitive horizon. These are not gaps to be filled by further research or better instruments. They are structural boundaries. A finite observer cannot observe the totality it is part of, for to do so it would have to stand outside itself. The limitation is built into the architecture of our thought. Even an omniscient computer would fail if it tried to compute its own complete state. A system cannot wholly contain its own description. So it is with consciousness. The human mind, trying to know all things, ultimately encounters its own limits, of comprehension.

When that point is reached where finitude is confronted by boundlessness, thought divides. One path declares the unknown to be empty and that beyond the horizon there is simply nothing to know. Another declares that beyond the horizon lies the infinite, the absolute. Both stances are responses to the same impasse, and both are constrained by the same cognitive structure. Both are not so much wrong as of providing no additional insight, no extra value. For something we do not know we cannot even imagine if there is a fence surrounding it. Each acknowledges, by affirmation or negation, that there exists a boundary beyond which the mind cannot pass. It is this boundary which limits and shapes our observations (or to be more precise, our perception of our observations).

The human mind perceives “things.” Our logic, our language, and our mathematics depend upon the ability to isolate and identify “things”. An intelligence lacking this faculty could not recognize objects, numbers, or individuality. It would perceive not a world of things, but a perception of a continuum with variations of flux, or as patterns without division. For such a cognition, mathematics would be meaningless, for there would be nothing to count. Reality would appear as a continuum without edges. That difference reveals that mathematics, logic, and even identity are not universal properties of the cosmos but features of the cognitive apparatus that apprehends it. They exist only within cognition. The laws of number and form are not inscribed in the universe; they are inscribed in the way our minds carve the universe into parts. A spider surely senses heat and warmth and light as gradients and density, but it almost certainly has no conception of things like planets and stars.

We find that we are unable to resolve the conflicts which often emerge between the discrete and the continuous, between the countable and the uncountable. This tension underlies all human thought. It is visible in every field we pursue. It appears in particles versus waves, digital versus analogue, fundamental particles versus quantum wave functions, reason versus emotion, discrete things within the spacetime continuum they belong to. It appears in the discrete spark of life as opposed to amorphous, inert matter or as individual consciousnesses contributing to the unending stream of life. It appears even in mathematics as the tension between countable and uncountable, number and continuum. Continua versus “discretia” (to coin a word) is a hallmark of human cognition. This tension or opposition is not a flaw in our understanding; it is the foundation of it. The mind can grasp only what it can distinguish, but all of existence exceeds what can be distinguished.

Where discreteness crashes into continuity, human cognition is unable, and fails, to reconcile the two. The paradox is irreducible. To the senses, the ocean is a continuous expanse, while to the physicist, it resolves into discrete molecules, atoms and quantum states. Both views are correct within their frames, yet neither captures the whole. The experiences of love, pain, or awe are likewise continuous. They cannot be counted or divided or broken down to neural signals without destroying their essence. Consciousness oscillates perpetually between the two modes – either breaking the continuous into parts but then seeking a unifying continuity among the parts. The unresolved tension drives all inquiry, all art, all metaphysics. And wherever the tension reaches its limit, the mind needs a placeholder, a label to mark the place of cognitive discontinuity.  The universe appears unbounded to us, yet we cannot know whether it is infinite or finite. If infinite, the very concept of infinity is only a token for incomprehensibility. If finite, then what lies beyond its bounds is equally beyond our grasp. Either way, the mind meets different facets of the same wall. The horizon of incomprehensibility is shaped by the nature of the cognition that perceives it. A spider meets the limit of its sensory world at one point, a human at another, a hypothetical superintelligence elsewhere. But all must meet it somewhere. For any finite mind, there will always be a place where explanation runs out and symbol begins. These places, where the boundary of comprehension is reached, is where the placeholder-gods are born. “God” is the label – a signpost – we use for the point at which the mind’s discretizing faculty fails.

…… the interface to incomprehension needs a label

The word “God” has always carried great pondus but carries no great precision of meaning. For millennia, it has served as the answer of last resort, the terminus at the end of every chain of “why?” Whenever a question could no longer be pursued, when explanations ran out of anywhere to go, “God” was the placeholder for the incomprehensible. The impulse was not, in the first hand, religious. The need for a marker, for a placeholder to demarcate the incomprehensible, was cognitive. What lies at the root of the use of the word “God” is not faith or doctrine, but the structure of thought itself. The concept arises wherever a finite mind confronts what it cannot encompass. The invention of a placeholder-God, therefore, is not a superstition of primitive people but a structural necessity when a bounded cognition meets unbounded surroundings. It is what minds must do when they meet their own limits. When faced with incomprehensibility, we need to give it a label. “God” will do as well as any other.

Each time the boundary of knowledge moves, the placeholder moves with it. The domain of gods recedes in a landscape which has no bounds. It never vanishes, for new boundaries of incomprehension always arise. As the circle of knowledge expands the boundary separating the known from the unknowable expands as well. Just think of an expanding circle. As the circle of knowledge grows the perimeter to the unknowable also expands. Beyond the line of separation lies a domain that thought can point to but not penetrate.

The mind must first collide with what it cannot grasp. Only then does the placeholder-God emerge as the marker of our cognitive boundary. This is not a deliberate act of imagination but a reflex of cognition itself. The finite mind, unable to leave an unknown unmarked, seals it with a symbol. The placeholder-God is that seal  – not a being, but a boundary. It does not describe reality but it provides a place for thought to rest where explanation collapses. As a placeholder, “God” is just a 3-letter label. The interface with the incomprehensible, and the placeholder it produces, are therefore necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for any God-being to appear in human thought. Without the interface, divinity has no function; a God invented without an underlying mystery would be a mere fantasy, not a sacred concept.

The paradox deepens when one asks what kind of cognition would not require such a placeholder. Only a mind that could know everything without limit would need none –  but such a mind would no longer be finite, and thus no longer a mind in any meaningful sense. To know all is to dissolve the distinction between knower and known. The infinite mind would not think “of” God; it would be what the finite mind calls God, though without the need to name it. Hence, only finite minds invent gods, and they must necessarily do so. The invention is the shadow cast by limitation.

The concept of God, then, is not evidence of divine existence but arises as a consequence of cognitive limitation. It is the sign that the mind has reached the edge of its own design. To invent gods is not a failure of reason but its completion. The placeholder is the punctuation mark at the end of understanding. It acknowledges that thought, to exist at all, must have limits. And within those limits, the impulse to name what cannot be named is inescapable.

The earliest people looked at the sky and asked what moved the sun. The answer “a God” was no explanation but it marked a boundary. It was a placeholder for the inexplicable. The label has changed. It was once Zeus, later Nature, now perhaps the Laws of Physics or even Science, but the function remains the same. Existence, time, causality, matter and energy are still fundamental assumptions in modern science and are all still inexplicabilities needing their placeholder-Gods. Let us not forget that terms assumed ro be very well-known, such as gravity and electric charge, even today are merely placeholder-Gods. We may be able to calculate the effects of gravity to the umpteenth decimal, but we still do not know why gravity is. Electrical charge just is, but why it is, is still just a brute fact in science. Every so-called brute fact invoked by science or philosophy is nothing other than a placeholder-God. Where comprehension ends, a placeholder is needed to prevent thought from collapsing into chaotic incomprehensibility. The idea of a placeholder-God, therefore, is not a primitive explanation but an intellectual necessity. It is the symbol that marks the limits of the cognitive map.

From cognitive placeholder to God-beings

(Note on my use of language. I take supernatural to mean supra-natural – beyond known natural laws – but not unreal. While the unnatural can never be observed, the supernatural is always what has been observed, and is therefore real, but is inexplicable. The rise of the sun and the waning of the moon and the onset of storms and the seasonal growth of plants, all were once considered inexplicable and supernatural. As human knowledge grew, each was gradually absorbed within the gamut of human comprehension. The supernatural is therefore not a denial of reality but a recognition of the incompletely understood. The unnatural is what I take to be unreal and fantastical or invented. The unnatural may be the stuff of fairytales and fantasy but being unreal, can never be observed).

As the placeholder-God gains social form, it must somehow rise above the human condition to retain meaning. A God limited to human capabilities would fail to explain what lies beyond it. Thus, gods become supra-human, but not unnatural, for they remain within the world but “beyond what humans can.”

Under the pressures of imagination, fear, and the need for coherence, the placeholder-God then acquires agency. The divine is invoked. The unknown becomes someone rather than something. A God-being, however, cannot be invented except from first having a placeholder-God. It cannot be created or invented directly, ex nihilo, because invention presupposes a motive, and without the confrontation with incomprehensibility, there is none. The human mind can understand the exercise of power only through will and intent and so the boundary acquires intention. In time, societies institutionalize these projections, turning the abstract placeholder into a God-being  and endowing it with purpose, emotion, and supra-human capacity.

This perspective gives the divine a new and paradoxical definition: “God is that which would perceive the entire universe without limit”. Such perception would not act, judge, or intervene. It would simply encompass. Yet a cognition capable of perceiving all would have no distinction within itself. It would no longer know as we know, for knowledge depends upon differentiation. To perceive all would be to dissolve all boundaries, including the boundary between subject and object. Such a consciousness would be indistinguishable from non-consciousness. The rock that perceives nothing and the god that perceives everything would converge, each beyond cognition, each outside the tension that defines life. Consciousness, poised between them, exists precisely because it knows but does not (cannot) know all.

The necessity of the divine placeholder follows directly from human finitude. The mind cannot tolerate infinite regress or complete ambiguity. It demands closure, even when closure is impossible. To preserve coherence, it must mark the point where coherence breaks down. That mark is the god-concept. It halts the chain of “why” with the only possible answer that does not generate another question. “Because God made it so” and “because that is how the universe is” perform the same function. They end the regress. In this sense, the invention of gods is an act of intellectual hygiene. Without a terminal symbol, thought would never rest; it would dissolve into endless questioning.

Understanding the god-concept in this way does not demean it. It restores its dignity by grounding it in the architecture of cognition rather than in superstition. Theology, stripped of dogma, becomes the study of where understanding fails and symbol takes over  –  a form of cognitive cartography. Each theology is a map of incomprehensibility, tracing the outer borders of thought. Their differences lie in what each places at the edge of their maps and the projections and colours each uses. Yahveh or Indra, Heaven or Hell, Big Bangs and Black Holes, and Nirvana or Nothingness, but their commonality lies in the inevitability of the edge itself.

Modern science has not abolished this pattern; it has merely changed the symbols. The physicist’s equations reach their limit at the singularity, the cosmologist’s model ends before the Big Bang, the biologist’s postulates begin after the spark of life and the neuroscientist’s theory marvel at the mystery of consciousness. Each field encounters an ultimate opacity and introduces a term  –  “quantum fluctuation,” “initial condition,” “emergence”, “random event”  –  that serves the same function the placeholder-God once did. Quantum mechanics has shifted the position of many placeholders but has replaced them with new boundaries to the inexplicable. New concepts such as fields and quantum waves and collapse of these are all new “brute facts”. As labels they provide no explanations since they cannot. They are “brute facts”, declarations that comprehension goes no further, that explanation stops here. Matter, energy, spacetime, and causality remain today’s deepest placeholders and there is no explanation in any field of science which can be made without presupposing them. The structure of thought remains the same even when the vocabulary has changed.

In this sense, the divine arises not from invention but from collision. There must first be an encounter with incomprehensibility  – the interface  – before any god-being can appear. Without such a frontier, divinity has no function. A god invented without an underlying mystery would be a mere fiction, not a sacred idea, because it would answer no cognitive or existential demand.

Thus the sequence when finitude is confronted by boundlessness is inevitable and unidirectional:

incomprehensibility → cognitive discomfort → placeholder → personification → divinity.

The Atheist–Theist Misunderstanding

When gods are understood not as beings but as boundaries of cognition, the quarrel between theist and atheist becomes a shadow-boxing match. Both speak to the same human need  – to name the edges of what we cannot (or cannot yet) know.

The theist affirms that beyond the boundary lies sacred divinity while the atheist denies the personality that has been projected upon that region. Yet both acknowledge, implicitly or explicitly, that the boundary exists. The theist says, “Here is God.” The atheist says, “Here is mystery, but not God.” Each uses a different language to describe the same encounter with incomprehensibility. In that sense, the death of God is only the death of one language of ignorance, soon replaced by another. Every age renames its mysteries. Where one century says “God,” another says “Nature,” or “Chance,” or “Quantum Field.” The placeholders persist and only their symbols change. The Laws of Nature are descriptions of observed patterns but explain nothing and do not contain, within themselves, any explanation as to why they are. All our observations assume causality to give us patterns we call Laws. When patterns are not discernible we invoke random events (which need no cause) or we impose probabilistic events on an unknowing universe.

Theism and atheism, then, are not opposites but reactions to the same human predicament, the finite mind meeting the incomprehensible. One bows before it; the other pretends to measure it. Both, in their own ways, testify to the same condition  – that we live surrounded by the unknowable. If there is a lesson in this, it is not theological but epistemological. Gods are not proofs or explanations of existence. They are confessions of cognitive limitation. They mark the frontier between what can be known and what cannot, yet or ever, be known. To understand them as such is not to destroy them but to restore them to their original role  as signposts for, not explanations of, the boundaries of thought.

Our cognition may evolve but will remain finite for the length of our time in this universe. So long as it remains finite, there will always be gods. Their names will change, their forms will evolve, but their necessity will endure. They must endure for they arise wherever understanding ends and wonder begins.

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God or no-God? That is the wrong question

August 24, 2021

I find debates where one unprovable belief battles against other unprovable beliefs to be tiresome. Human cognition does not allow an absence of belief. A claimed non-belief is, of course, just another belief. I find statements of the kind “I do not know, but I know it isn’t that” to be self-contradictory and shallow. I find invocation of the scientific method, or of Divine Beings, without reference to boundary conditions and the limits of knowability, to be incomplete and invalid as arguments. This essay is just my attempt to marshal my own thoughts as to why I find it so.

(revised 26th August 2021)

The primal need to know

Human cognition demands that the world around us is ordered and rational and that it is capable of being understood. This is the fundamental and overriding assumption that pervades all thought and human endeavour. Science begins with this assumption of order in all parts of the universe and throughout all time. In addition, science assumes that causality, and the arrow of time, apply. The human brain is finite, and its attendant senses are limited. We do extend our sensory range with instruments but even these must convert their detected signals to be what humans can perceive directly by their senses and interpret with their brains. Even when looking at the same thing, what the eyes of a dog see as interpreted by a canine brain, is different to what a human eye sees as interpreted by a human brain. Whatever, and all, that humans observe are just their perceptions and are always subjective.

Human comprehension is “cabined, cribbed, confined, bound in” by the capabilities of the brain/sense combination. That some things are unknowable to the finite human mind is inevitable. Reason tells us that knowledge is whatever a brain can comprehend to be knowledge. Epistemology is a whole branch of philosophy dedicated to understanding the nature of knowledge. And yet we can do little better than concluding from all our analyses that knowledge is what knowledge is. Whatever lies beyond human comprehension is the realm of the unknowable. Observation is limited to what exists and is observable by the human brain/sense combination. Human reason and comprehension, though finite, can contemplate the unknowable, but without any hope of comprehension. Human language (including mathematics) can encompass both the real and the unreal. Language can describe things that do not exist. But when language addresses the unknowable it only deals in labels. The brain using that language cannot wrap itself around the unknowable which it labels. What we do not know, we seek and sometimes find. What we cannot know we can never find, and yet we seek. I cannot help but conclude that it is the seeking, not the acquisition, of knowledge, which is a primal characteristic (perhaps a purpose) of the human species.

But the ego of human cognition is such that it does not allow the inexplicable to remain dangling and unaddressed. That all mysteries must have, and require, explanation is a distinguishing characteristic of the human species. Human cognition abhors a mystery without an explanation. Anything mysterious or incomprehensible is always, eventually, explained away by an appropriate invocation of unknown, unknowable, imagined states or powers. It applies as much to science (metaphysics) as to philosophy or to theology. The explanations are often just labels for speculations which harness the unknown and the supernatural. Reason tells us that everything has a cause, but the First Cause problem defeats us. Our language allows us to formulate self-contradictory impossibilities. Before the beginning, we say and after the end. When our reason and our logic make recourse to infinite regress, it is often dismissed because it is incomprehensible. When we reach the unknowable, we invent new labels for abstract concepts such as divine or supernatural or infinity or forever. Never mind that they are unknowable. An infinite space or a forever existence are inherently incomprehensible and magical. We pretend that inventing a label brings us closer to understanding.

God Theories and the invention of Gods

In human discourse, the invention of God Theories and of Gods came about as we sought answers and explanations for inexplicable relationships observed in the surrounding physical world. The invocation of Sun-gods and wind-gods and weather-gods seems both obvious and inevitable in the early history of man. The invented explanations – again inevitably – required the existence of supernatural states and the exercise of powers beyond human capability. It was entirely logical and reasonable, then, that postulating the existence of supernatural or superhuman powers or states was entirely justified by the greater need to bring a perceived order to the observed world. To have a perceived order in the physical world was primal. The emotional human need for spirituality was also partly satisfied by the inclusion of the supernatural. With this world view, which allowed incomprehensible states and supernatural powers, these Great Explanations invoking the unknowable were quite reasonable, even if they were all merely labels for what could not be comprehended. Mysteries were replaced by labels which implied, but never actually bestowed, understanding. As human knowledge and sophistication increased, the need for the supernatural also adjusted to the new mysteries uncovered. It was not necessary for these supernatural states or powers to be invested in imaginary Beings, but some mediator was necessary for the exercise of supernatural powers. What the human mind considers reasonable is dynamic and shifts as learning occurs and knowledge increases. Given the existence of unknown, extra-natural forces, it was entirely reasonable, then, to imagine a living entity, a Being, as the mediator. Doing so certainly did improve the narrative. The first Sun God had the power to make the Sun rise every day. This explanation did not necessarily have to be invested in a Being, but it was convenient. It was merely for the ease of the narrative that these Beings took on forms and shapes and behaviours that were close enough to human forms and behaviours to be recognised and identified with. And so were born the Theories of Gods, the Gods, and the various pantheons of gods.

It is my contention that

  1. Human comprehension is finite and limited, and
  2. demands that order be perceived in the world.
  3. Incomprehensibilities and mysteries need to be explained to maintain the perceived order of the world, and
  4. invoking supernatural states and powers allows unanswerable questions and infinite regressions to be closed.
  5. Supernatural states and powers need a mediator, and therefore
  6. Beings invested with such states and powers have been invented as the mediators.

Inexplicabilities and mysterious events were most conveniently explained as the work of unknowable, supernatural or superhuman things. That these imagined things, labelled gods, were then imbued with the quality of being and of having forms and shapes and behaviour and families was, and is, mere embellishment. The fundamental reason for inventing any god was to be able to answer or explain the inexplicable. Every God ever invented was, at its core, a Theory of Explanation.

Religion, of course, is something else (see Notes).

The Great Mysteries

Where once we resorted to supernatural Beings, cosmology and metaphysics now resort to equally fanciful Theories. We have not had a new God invented for over a thousand years. We have had many Theories propounded though. The theories of today are consistent with the knowledge of today. They are as astute (or as ridiculous) as the God Theories of old.  The number of theories in cosmology about the origins of the universe are as numerous today as the multitude of ancient creator gods. The common feature is that these Theories, then as now, speculate about the incomprehensible and the unknowable. I observe that atheism today is very often all about debunking these God Beings, these deities in the image of man. They often focus on the attributes of the invented Beings. But this is superficial, and atheism rarely addresses the great mysteries which led to the invention of the God Theories in the first place.

What is considered inexplicable has changed over the years though many of the inexplicabilities have only changed cosmetically and in formulation. None of the great, deep mysteries about life the universe and everything have changed much or been resolved. The ultimate questions about the physical world regarding matter and energy and motion have not vanished either; they have just become much more sophisticated. We now say we know why the earth rotates around the Sun though we still have no clue as to how gravity is mediated. We know exactly how the effects of gravity can be calculated and we can traverse the distant reaches of space. But we have no clue as to why the perceived force follows an inverse square law and not the inverse cube law or something else. We can calculate the effect of electro-magnetic fields and can generate light and electricity and heat and motion almost at will. But we still have no clue as to how the earth communicates to a raindrop that it must move towards the surface of the earth. When we throw a ball in the air, we still have no idea of how the earth tells the ball it is time to change direction and fall. Einstein’s spacetime would say that the earth’s gravity distorts the fabric of the spacetime in which the ball exists such that it has no choice but to move down the spacetime slope towards the earth. But “down” is defined by gravity. To “move down” merely invokes another form of some kind of super-gravity, for there is no reason for any motion up or down a slope unless there is an overriding force. (When in doubt we can always just invent a new fundamental particle imbued with supernatural powers as the mediator. Let us call it a graviton). Nevertheless, we believe we now know why the earth orbits the Sun and have consigned the Sun-gods to the realm of the redundant. But the stark reality is that we still do not know how gravity is mediated.  It is noteworthy that the word gravitation could be replaced by the words magical attraction in any scientific text without any loss of meaning. (See notes). Admitting to magic, however, is not politically correct or acceptable. Instead, we now invoke the Theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics with spooky actions shrouded in mystery, except that we no longer label these metaphysical Theories as Gods.

Quantum mechanics dreams of a single all-encompassing quantum wave function, as just one particular instance of an incomprehensible infinity of possible wave functions. This Ultimate Wave Function which happens, by chance, to collapse to give all the other wave functions which in turn give us and the universe which we inhabit. One Ultimate Wave Function to rule them all. The quantum vacuum is not quite completely empty since it has the laws of quantum mechanics embedded within it. It is another Theory of Explanation which might as well be called the God of Quantum Mechanics. Though I am not clear if the God of Random Interaction is the Son or the Father. With the God of Gravity they make up a Trinity.

All the Great Mysteries – Existence, Causality, Time, the arrow of time, Life, Identity, Consciousness, Spirituality, Ethics, and Morality – have been great mysteries for at least 10,000 years and are still great mysteries. I do not include Mathematics in my list of Great Mysteries. I take the view that Mathematics is an invented language describing relationships in our observed world. Like all languages, it can also describe things that do not exist or are ridiculous. The beauty of relationships observed in the real world are not due to Mathematics, but due to the mystery of Existence and as described by Mathematics. Beauty lies in the thing not in the language describing the thing.

Mathematics started in prehistory with counting and the study of shapes

The metaphysics of existence remain mystical and mysterious and beyond human cognition, as much today as in prehistoric times. Nevertheless, it is the cognitive capability of having the concept of a unique identity which enables the concept of one. ……. Numbers are not physically observable. The concept of one does not, by itself, lead automatically to a number system. That needs in addition a logic system and invention (a creation of something new which presupposes a certain cognitive capacity). It is by definition, and not by logic or reason or inevitability, that two is defined as one more than the identity represented by one, and three is defined as one more than two, and so on. Note that without the concept of identity and the uniqueness of things setting a constraint, a three does not have to be separated from a two by the same separation as from two to one. The inherent logic is not itself invented but emerges from the concept of identity and uniqueness. That 1 + 1 = 2 is a definition not a discovery. It assumes that addition is possible. It is also significant that nothingness is a much wider (and more mysterious and mystical) concept than the number zero. Zero derives, not from nothingness, but from the assumption of subtraction and then of being defined as one less than one. That in turn generalises to zero being any thing less than itself. Negative numbers emerge by extending that definition. The properties of zero are conferred by convention and by definition. Numbers and number systems are thus a matter of “invention by definition”, but constrained by the inherent logic which emerges from the concept of identity.

We have discovered and can enumerate more Laws of Nature now than we ever could. But why these particular laws exist and none other, remains a Great Mystery. The existence of the natural laws, of matter, of energy and even of space itself remain as answers to unknown questions. We do not know what compels them to be what they are. The spark of life remains elusive. If nothing else the apparent purpose of all living things to survive, grow and replicate has appeared from Chance knows where. A purposeful chance is to delve into the unknowable. 

They all boil down, in my view, to two fundamental Great Mysteries. I find that they can be grouped either under Existence or under Life. Causality, Time, and Identity all emerge from the Great Mystery of Existence. It seems logical to me that Consciousness, Spirituality, Ethics, and Morality are mysteries which follow from the Great Mystery of Life. I used to subordinate the Life Mystery to the Mystery of Existence, but I think the injection of an apparent purpose elevates Life to be as great a mystery as Existence.

The fundamental questions

What leads to life the universe and everything?

God or no-God? is, in my view, a rather shallow question. There is no great mystery in the invention of gods. Every God ever invented was, at its core, a Theory of Explanation. And even if we get to find the God of the Theory of Everything, we would still have to reach for the unknowable to comprehend Existence and make sense of Life.

The fundamental Great Mysteries have always been, and still are:

  1. Why existence? and
  2. Why life?

Note 1.

Gods need to be distinguished from religions.

My take on religions is that they came later, after beliefs in gods had caught the human fancy. They came together with, or because of, an increasing need for human societies to organise themselves. They provided a way for the exercising of political power by utilising the human need for spirituality and exploiting the established beliefs in gods. All organised religions, whether they admit to it or not, are attempts to influence the behaviour of others and are all, unavoidably, cases of exploiting belief for the exercise of political power. I find the lip-service paid to the separation of state and religion rather meaningless since all organised religions – as all states and political parties – are involved in the business of influencing the behaviour of others.

Note 2.

Take, for example, this text from the Wikipedia article on Gravity where I have replaced the words “gravity” and “gravitation” with “magical attraction”.

Gravitation Magical Attraction, is a natural phenomenon by which all things with mass or energy—including planets, stars, galaxies, and even light —are attracted to (or gravitate toward) one another. On Earth, gravity magical attraction gives weight to physical objects, and the Moon’s gravity magical attraction causes the tides of the oceans. The gravitational magical attraction of the original gaseous matter present in the Universe caused it to begin coalescing and forming stars and caused the stars to group together into galaxies, so gravity magical attraction is responsible for many of the large-scale structures in the Universe. Gravity Magical Attraction has an infinite range, although its effects become weaker as objects get further away.

Gravity Magical Attraction is most accurately described by the general theory of relativity (proposed by Albert Einstein in 1915), which describes Gravity Magical Attraction not as a force, but as a consequence of masses moving along geodesic lines in a curved spacetime caused by the uneven distribution of mass. The most extreme example of this curvature of spacetime is a black hole, from which nothing—not even light—can escape once past the black hole’s event horizon. However, for most applications, Gravity Magical Attraction is well approximated by Newton’s law of universal gravitation Magical Attraction, which describes Gravity Magical Attraction as a force causing any two bodies to be attracted toward each other, with magnitude proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them

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Gods and devils and something from nothing

August 8, 2020

No science and no philosophy or theology has still got its head around the something from nothing problem.

Something from nothing:

This is a very handy subterfuge often used in science and mathematics. When looking for something unknown, zero can always be converted into the sum of something and not-something. So it is always possible to imagine what the something is, evoke it from zero and claim that the not-something exists but cannot be found.

0 = X + ~X

Anything can be derived from nothing provided its negative counter-part can also be tolerated (in absentia if necessary).

We observe matter.

We haven’t a clue as to where this matter came from. So we devise the concept of matter and an equivalent amount of anti-matter at the origin of everything. But we cannot find this anti-matter in sufficient quantities to negate all the matter we observe. The global nothing is not preserved. That leads to the next subterfuge. It was all energy to begin with. Some of that energy converted itself into matter. That does not quite explain where that energy came from. Of course “nothing” might have decomposed into lumps of energy and of not-energy. The energy, it is then surmised, is that which is driving the expansion of the universe or the inflation of the universe or both. The lumps of not-energy are more elusive. Where that might be is not yet part of the next subterfuge.

nothing can be anything

This is a powerful technique but still a subterfuge. The existence of matter here in our universe can always be balanced by antimatter somewhere else such that a total nothing can be maintained. But matter and antimatter when they meet annihilate each other creating energy (according to E=mc2). Now that creates the puzzle of where energy came from. But that is easily solved by creating the concept of negative energy. Energy here can be balanced by negative energy there. Negative energy is a concept used in physics to explain the nature of certain fields, including the gravitational field and various quantum field effects.

Modern physics and cosmology are based on the fundamental premise that the Greater Universe is a Great Big Zero.

Of course some resolve the something from nothing problem by invoking a Creator. The same technique (or subterfuge) is also available to theology. But just as resolving the matter/antimatter created energy then leads to negative energy, the invoking of a Creator needs the conjuring of anti-Creators. A Creator here balanced by a Destroyer there. In Hinduism, for example, Brahma is the Creator balanced by Shiva the Destroyer. (Vishnu is the preserver and is in balance anyway). One problem for most religions and theologies is that they must create Devils subservient or inferior to their gods. Theologies collapse if devils are taken to be equally powerful, but negative, gods. Satan, for example, is a fallen angel where the angels were created by God. Thus Satan is more a balance for the Son of God rather than a balance for God. (I ignore the inconsistencies of all-powerful gods incapable of controlling subservient devils).

Heavens need Hells. Gods lead necessarily to Devils. And,

Gods + Devils = Zero.

Related:

Antimatter (CERN):

In 1928, British physicist Paul Dirac wrote down an equation that combined quantum theory and special relativity to describe the behaviour of an electron moving at a relativistic speed. The equation – which won Dirac the Nobel Prize in 1933 – posed a problem: just as the equation x2= 4 can have two possible solutions (x = 2 or x = −2), so Dirac’s equation could have two solutions, one for an electron with positive energy, and one for an electron with negative energy. But classical physics (and common sense) dictated that the energy of a particle must always be a positive number. Dirac interpreted the equation to mean that for every particle there exists a corresponding antiparticle, exactly matching the particle but with opposite charge. For example, for the electron there should be an “antielectron”, or “positron”, identical in every way but with a positive electric charge. The insight opened the possibility of entire galaxies and universes made of antimatter.But when matter and antimatter come into contact, they annihilate – disappearing in a flash of energy. The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So why is there far more matter than antimatter in the universe?

Antimatter:

… In theory, a particle and its anti-particle (for example, a proton and an antiproton) have the same mass, but opposite electric charge and other differences in quantum numbers. For example, a proton has positive charge while an antiproton has negative charge.

A collision between any particle and its anti-particle partner leads to their mutual annihilation, giving rise to various proportions of intense photons (gamma rays), neutrinos, and sometimes less-massive particle-antiparticle pairs. The majority of the total energy of annihilation emerges in the form of ionizing radiation. If surrounding matter is present, the energy content of this radiation will be absorbed and converted into other forms of energy, such as heat or light. The amount of energy released is usually proportional to the total mass of the collided matter and antimatter, in accordance with the mass–energy equivalence equation, E=mc2.

Antimatter particles bind with each other to form antimatter, just as ordinary particles bind to form normal matter. For example, a positron (the antiparticle of the electron) and an antiproton (the antiparticle of the proton) can form an antihydrogen atom. The nuclei of antihelium have been artificially produced with difficulty, and these are the most complex anti-nuclei so far observed. Physical principles indicate that complex antimatter atomic nuclei are possible, as well as anti-atoms corresponding to the known chemical elements.

There is strong evidence that the observable universe is composed almost entirely of ordinary matter, as opposed to an equal mixture of matter and antimatter. This asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe is one of the great unsolved problems in physics. The process by which this inequality between matter and antimatter particles developed is called baryogenesis.

 

On the matter of matter (or how something came from nothing)

 

 

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