"There is but one god."
There are lots and lots of ways in which to worship him/her/it/whatever, and to pay homage. Catholicism is the way I have chosen, Islam is the way some others have chosen, and blowing up buildings is the unfortunate way that some not very intelligent people have chosen. Pantheism is way chosen by lots of people in the past and a few people today. But, regardless, of our methods, the acknowledgment is there.
I'm not going to try to convert you Dan (even if that was possible, I think it would take a more eloquent locutor than I and you'd have to already want it which you don't seem to), but I'll ask you to indulge me for just a moment so that I can provide one possible way that your logical paradoxes might be resolved. I'm gonna get a little more metaphysicky than usual, but that's pretty hard to avoid in a discussion of this type.
In the Atemporal Universe thread I brought up the concept of an amazingly complex structure sitting on God's workbench. This structure contains within it every possible pathway through our self-contained universe. It is, in fact, our universe. Time is just another dimension, visible now as a direction since we are standing outside looking at it. Every particle in the universe is represented, and each one branches off every Planck length along the time axis into all the states it can exist in in the next Planck length.
You pick up a special tool from the workbench and look through it at the structure. Its lenses allow you to focus on one of the nearly infinite configurations and there you see a planet populated by people. The whole structure was built by the guy who is loaning you the lens, so he built this planet and the people on it. (Of course, he also built all the other planets and anything or anybody who might be living on those as well. Nothing special about this particular planet - only that it looks familiar and you realize, of course, that you are looking at Earth.)
Do you know what's going to happen to all these people? Of course you do: Everything that possibly can. You can use the lens to see any of it. Each of them will only experience that potion of it that they happen to travel down, but they are all traveling down all the paths - their very consciousnesses are splitting to follow them all. We (you and I, here inside the structure) only remember the path behind us even though we can see the many pathways approaching. When we hit a fork in the road we go both ways and split into another state for each of the ways we go, and each of those states will only remember the one behind them.
It took a lot of effort for the guy who built all this to put it together. He did it as a labor of love, and when he takes a look inside and sees all those creatures he wants the best for them. So he gives them a rich environment in which to live. There are paths they can take that he doesn't mess with at all so that they are free to go away from him, and there are paths where he has reached in and edited things to his liking. There are places where he has inserted his voice, and even one place (a place we remember as a little more than 2000 years ago) where he infused a bit of his own self so he could check out his creation from within for a few decades. He may have done that in lots of places, but we only know about one. (Two, if you're Mormon.)
He also built into these denizens of his giant ant farm the ability to recognize the times that he intervenes. And, in his wisdom, he knows that they couldn't understand an unchanging god because it would be too different from themselves, so he even built into this structure places where he gives different instructions. Without that, he might as well be an inscripted stone. He's not a stone, though, so he has what we might think to call a personality (though that's admittedly not a very apt word for it). Over time the creatures in his creation perceive him as having changed his mind, even though it's all still just part of the same big blueprint.
All of this, of course, is parable. I could say the same things calling him a gardener pruning an amazing Bonsai Tree. Or whatever. The visual is unimportant. The important thing is the concept of a designer able to create all possibilities and allowing us to take all those paths, and this designer having the desire to make himself known and to show his love for his creation and to not be known as an unchangeable rock.
Why do some people insist that prayer or mediations or mantras or repeated affirmtions or other focusing techniques work to bring about the things they want? I think it's because those things both come about and don't come about, and we happen to be living in the instance of time where they did come about and where they were prayed for (or meditated on, or whatever). Would they have come about anyway? Yes (and no). But, living in the time instance where they were prayed for, the one who did the praying feels rewarded for it. Now they have what they prayed for AND a feeling of reward. That's way better than only having what was prayed for.
I think free will is the ability to surf the probability wave and choose which paths we take. And I think that the focus that comes with prayer and meditation helps us increase that innate skill. So when we pray or meditate or do whatever else we do to give us focus on our desires, we are more likely to be able to choose the paths through the universe where those desires are realized.
So there it all is: My strange and unique blend of homogenized quantum physics and religion.
I could go on for days, and you no doubt feel like I already have, but that's the whole bit in a nutshell. I have no doubt you will find what seem to be contradictions and inconsistencies in the above summary, but if I tried to iron them all out then this already too-long post would be far too much longer. The wrinkles are what happens when you pack a full set of clothes in a shoebox.
(To tie this in more closely with Quantum Mechanics, I could also describe how the "Many Worlds" theory fits in, and how the discovery of a real tachyon particle would prove beyond a doubt to me the validity of Many Worlds and also strengthen all the stuff talked about above. But that's a whole 'nother essay.)
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Last edited by Wayne Zeller; 03/21/07 06:29 PM.
