I grew up Catholic, but not religious. When I was young, I enjoyed studying, and wanted to know a reason for life, and a cause for suffering. I had built a website for personal use, as a tool to help me study. The technology permitted me to copy, paste, and catalog information. My primary interest was in the study of entropy. I wanted to know why life was an ordered complexity, that came from a process we understood as chaotic. An evolutionary process that over time provided us the reality we see and live today.
At about the age of 50, I concluded that the physical universe was deterministic. That the chaotic physical nature behind the ordered structure we apprehend, only appears chaotic due to our inability to do the math of complexity. What we perceived as chaos was an inability to comprehend large infinite sets, and the breakdown of the differential equations we use to define the complexity of physical reality.
Metaphysics will always be with us because there are limits to math and logic. We observe reality in terms of the future, past, and present. In a similar manner to how we forecast the weather, we have only a probabilistic view of reality because the equations required to truly understand the future and past are too large for us to solve, they can only give us probabilities. There is a limit to our logic, to our thinking, just as we can not ask a dog to understand calculus, we can not go beyond certain limits of understanding. This is why metaphysics, and an accompanying religion to explain the unknown, will always be with us.
My conclusion was that there was a definite order to chaos which we were not designed to comprehend. Reality is not chaotic or random but an ordered evolving super-deterministic system. Chaos only appears chaotic to us because our math is incomplete, and therefore we are unable to see order when measuring the complexity that underlies reality. The physical reality we live in is deterministic, which indicates that the future is as immovable as the past.
The only possibility for “free will” had to be through what we define as God. God became real to me, not by faith, but in fact.
There can be only one substance, God (E1p14), and everything else is merely a mode of God (E1p15). Baruch Spinoza
The following two facts supported my belief:
First: Religion, and our belief in God, is the algorithm that shapes our society, and builds our future. Although God can be denied, it cannot be denied that people believe in God, and that our belief in God has been responsible for the shape of human cultural evolution. God is the unknown causal factors of the Alpha and Omega, the incalculable stream of creation. Reality is an evolving system which increases in complexity with the passage of time, who’s underlying causality is the unknowable God. Evolution is an increasing complexity and means the unknown is increasing in scope. Since technically the unknown will continue to become greater, it cannot be denied that there will always be a need for metaphysics to make sense of the unknowable.
The realm of what cannot be known must be given words and form, thus we will always need some form of religion and faith to give meaning to the unknowable, call it God, or first cause, or any other term we wish to call that which we do not understand, that which is the underlying cause of human behavior, civilization, and reality.
Second: CLIP In a finite deterministic universe, entropy is the motive force for human behavior and its civilization. This is the force that will obligate an evolution far beyond our limited human capacity to participate or understand. We must recognize that we are a limited subset of a much larger reality which is constantly evolving and increasing in complexity. Life is an emergent layer of the physical universe, intelligence is an emergent layer of life, and civilization is an emergent layer of intelligence.
What we call life or reality has evolved for billions of years and has increased in complexity over time. It is therefore only a matter of time before the increase in complexity will effectively make any imagined ideals real, making each of us an integral subset of a single universal reality with a range we can call Alpha to Omega. Christianity would say a subset of Christ, for we are not eternal, and God is the Alpha and Omega.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Revelation 22:13
We have limited motivations and desires, we create surplus, and we can build any Utopian concept we may have imagined or attributed to our prophetic past, present, or future concepts of God.
Any God we can imagine will become a reality. It is without doubt that there will be a revelation, and all ideals conjured or desired will be fulfilled. Even if we may never know God, the prophecy we choose will become our reality. This future reality we build is of course dependent on our choice of prophecy, and it is this choice which is most crucial to our social reality.
Currently we are still mostly stupid hairless apes, with very poor manners. Therefore, the version of Utopia we produce may well be dystopian. This is why it is critical that we be truthful and educated enough, to care for and educate, not only our own kin, but everyone else that lives on our planet, otherwise fools will build hell, and we will live there.
We should note these wise words from the past -
“There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.” Socrates.
A proper education is the solution to our dilemma, therefore, we must provide a proper education for every living soul. Because we live on one planet, and are social animals who suffer due to our surroundings our well being is dependent on the quality of the education our neighbor was provided.
“…whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Matthew 25:40
It is absurd to have a society as we do today with an ignorant servant class providing leisure and wealth to an upper class of pointless ignorant consumers, all in an eternal struggle for sexual dominance. Religion must go further than just words and belief; it must actually take responsibility for the physical reality we live. Much too often priests washed their hands of the responsibility for the immoral, ruthless, corrupt, and unscrupulous aspects of society. “The devil did it” is an unacceptable excuse, the fact is that “we did it,” and religion must be held responsible for our acts. Religion cannot just be a structure for belief, and ideology, for the worship of God, but must also tend to the governance of the economy and community it ministers to.
Our priests and ministers must stop being complicit with the nobility which profit from war or subjugate their congregations. The accepting of blood money at the offering plate must stop and change into a process which builds an economy where the Church is a transparent financial institution operated by its parishioners, for the benefit of all. If the “chosen people” are to be our priest’s then this concept must be theirs to produce and administer, assisted by Christians and Muslims. Since Judaism has become Kabbalistic and the Kabbalah is Platonic, and Platonism is Christianity, then we could all agree to TIKKUN OLAHM.