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Read Aloud OLD VIDEO Outline ANGELEA NEW VIDEO 8/9/2014 D:\VIDEOS\Chapter-one PDF Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein
The idea of God involves a purpose beyond what we can aspire to or imagine, but our concepts of heaven are within the realm of possibility.
Wittgenstein's Tractatus concludes with the idea:
"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Demonstrating that human logic has limits which are inherent in our nature. Understanding God, is the realm of imagination, speculation, or faith, but not truth, on the other hand, heaven on earth can be real, and we can build it ourselves.
The Tractatus can be summarized by seven statements that define what constitutes a proposition and what can be truthfully said.
We know that reality is relative to our language. The Tractatus aims to define the limits of language and what can be meaningfully said. Since we use a finite set of words to define concepts that often have an infinite or speculative nature, it follows that much of what we say and think is inherently imprecise. Therefore, it is crucial to base our assertions on the most stable foundations possible.
For further reading I have added links in the description
I point to Wittgenstein because he came to his Tractatus through the study of mathematics and logic, which are the two primary tools we use to understand reality.
The Tractatus, delineates the relationship between language, and logic. It states that language is what we use to describe reality and that our view of reality is governed by the language we use and the culture we live in.
Everything we do originates from the words we use to explain what we believe. In turn, what we believe dictates how society will behave.
What we believe is influenced by our language and culture, which in turn are shaped by the specific time and place we inhabit. Beliefs are heavily influenced by trends, propaganda, and religion. Since beliefs can be shaped by propaganda and religion, the manipulation and control of sociological behavior might be the primary reason for the existence of religion.
An unknowable God
Merriam-Webster defines God as : the supreme or ultimate reality: such as, the Being perfect in power, wisdom, and goodness who is worshiped (as in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism) as creator and ruler of the universe.
The reality we know is all we know, and if tomorrow is the same as the next moment, then both are real, determined and must have a cause, we can call that cause God.
Wisdom? In an ideal sense of course, although no one has a clue why we exist, there must be some wisdom behind the mess we call humanity.
Goodness? That is a personal value. If God is good, we must question the vast amount of suffering.
Creator and ruler of the universe?, ok sure, although unknown, there must be something behind all this, something that creates all the complexity we see.
We use words like "infinite" and "limitless" as properties of God, but when we use these words we find they are unknowable.
We have a limited quantity of brain cells that make us conscious of a reality that is almost limitless. It is a task to know what each of us know, and although there are some very clever people, we are stretched to our limits, and were not designed to know the great complexity reality offers.
The set of what we know is a small subset of what we don't know, and it is obvious that we can not know the unknowable.
If we agree to truthfully define God, then we must accept God is limitless and unknowable.
It is for this reason that "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
Speaking of God or infinity can never be more than speculation, that being so, anyone attempting to tell you they know God is either incompetent, unstable, or wishes to take advantage of you.
It is appropriate to use the word "God" to describe our belief in God, but not an actual being, unless used only as speculation.
Nonetheless, God is the most important aspect of human civilization, for it has been our belief in God that has formed the society we live in. Accordingly, what we can know about God can only be inferred by looking truthfully at our history, and understanding the physical nature of matter.
Proof there is a God
The word "God" refers to the nature of infinite creation in relation to mankind, and is the only word we can use to describe the incomprehensible, or metaphysical, under, and over laying properties of reality. There is a God, as there is a vast unknown, and to be honest we must leave it at that.
Only some aspects of our physical reality are comprehensible, and metaphysics is the word we use to describe things we imagine, but are not physical.
What is Reality
Entropy propels time and energy, and life is an ordered cream that forms from the chaos of entropy.
Reality in its simplest form comes to us from these two interconnected forces, entropy and life. Other than our metaphysical speculations, life and entropy are responsible for most all that concerns us.
Our civilization evolves, and today is the latest iteration in the continuous interaction between entropy and life - energy and matter in the universe builds atoms into simple molecules, they combine into more complex molecules, which become biology, biology then produces intellect, and intellect produces a civilization. When interactions become sufficiently complex, a new stratum emerges.
The process has come to be known as "emergence from complexity," an aspect of evolution.
Step by step, with each step more complex than the next, we have evolved from infants into adults, and over many years we evolved from primitive man, to a modern culture filled with technology. If there is a tomorrow, it will have greater complexity than the day before.
Once there were only single cells on this planet. Then cells began working together, and more complex creatures appeared. Then man came along, and began civilization.
There are approximately 37.2 trillion cells in our body. Cells evolved into greater complexity to make mankind, we are an emergent property of cells. Although cells make us who we are, cells have no clue what we are.
When the next stratum emerges, we will be part of something new and unknown, and we may have no clue what it actually is, or will do. There is a good chance we will not even be aware of it.
No one expects the universe to stop any time soon. Entropy will continue to fuel life, and life will continue to create greater, and greater complexity.
If the past gives us any clues, we should expect the next step, the next layer of emergence to be something that is far more different from us. We can expect to be left behind, just as when man came along we became something very different to all the other species.
Our understanding of this process could be called, Alpha and Omega, what some call God.
God has been described in a variety of story like accounts of Alpha and Omega and many cultures have beliefs that are based on similar beginning and end accounts. Creation and end days accounts, are tribal stories, that come from the particular logic behind the language of the civilization that creates them. They are lovely as stories, but do not give us a true understanding of the process of creation.
What we know is "true" about God, is that creation is still being created, and it is becoming more, and more complex.
We know that Santa Claus is fiction. I don't wish to offend anyone, but how can we expect our people to believe in God, and understand reality, based on a Biblical concept of creation.
Creation is an ongoing process that we can think about, and participate with.
When we think about creation we should notice that we are one small aspect of a much larger, and expanding universe.
Like the Demiurge, we are deterministically creating a pre-designed world. Apparently, mankind was given the task to build civilizations, without full knowledge of why we do so.
It was not long ago, that there were no cell phones, fuel injectors, or rocket ships. Complexity means that, tomorrow there will be more for us to understand than yesterday.
Not all humans understand algebra, and no one expects a dog to understand it.
If our recent history is any indicator, complexity will continue to increase at a faster rate, and since our minds are finite, we may never understand the world we live in. God must be limited to our reality, to what is comprehensible to us.
As life gets more complex, things still work well, yet fewer people understand how things work. The world we once thought we created, and were at the center of, will become more incomprehensible to us.
End Times
We once thought we were at the center of the universe, then we discovered we were insignificant by comparison. We should notice we are becoming insignificant to our own civilization.
Biology is no longer consequential to the process of evolution, the brunt of natural selection is now a social process, and a society unknowingly in the business of natural selection is dangerous. We have no adequate societal structures to protect from the effects of our own negative attributes.
Our species has done its work, we are at an inflection point, a transition into something that will become the new dominant being.
Transhumanism could be a choice for some of us, we could upload our minds to the cloud, we could then tune personalities like we adjust the volume of a song, and that would be the end of human beings.
Before our dystopian human existence ends, maybe we could fix the society we currently have. Provide ourselves with a belief that is appropriate to our reality, something designed for enhancing the quality of human life, not one dedicated to enslaving 95% of the population, or one expecting God to come from heaven to save us.
What we believe should be designed to attend to human suffering, and the quality of life.