God doesn't exist - you can't touch Him - but he does - we are made of Him!

[David Pinnegar]

Hi!

Whilst asking whether God exists is started in another thread, because that thread started from a rather fundamentally Christian point of view http://www.organmatters.com/index.php/topic,1006.0.html it seemed appropriate to go back to something more basic.

On the St Paul's thread in Believers' Corner, the thread http://www.organmatters.com/index.php/topic,1038.msg4632.html#msg4632 ended with some exploration of the concept of God and the creation process.

By Creation, I do not mean that a Big Daddy decided to create the world in the nature, timescale and detail of Genesis, but it is so very interesting that the first chapter of Genesis paints such a beautiful concept of the creation of order out of disorder. Evolution is itself, from a primeval soup into strands of self replicating substance which has a built in refinement and experimental process leading to new strands and species, an inventive and ordering and creating process. To some, this might be so natural that, apparently doing it all by itself, clearly without a Big Daddy, that it's clear that "God" doesn't exist. God is not in the dimensions of up, down and sideways measurable by rulers nor of our perception of time measured by clocks.

But God is abstract. God is an abstraction of something else. God is an idea of something that we cannot see.

Are there things in the world we cannot see but which exist? Are we innocent of finding an idea of something which doesn't exist but which we experience? . . . and an idea of which is a useful description of our experience? Isn't time just such a concept?

Are there physical dimensions which we cannot see but which we can measure and make use of? In reading this on an electrical computer you are looking at how we have harnessed one of them . . .

What is the idea and the abstraction which we call God? Genesis defines God, perhaps not to be read in the literal language of words, but in the idea of Creation, the idea of order arising out of disorder.

It's in that sense and way that the understanding of God as a concept equates with the physical processes of reversing the increase of Entropy. It is wholly unnatural for Entropy to decrease. That it does, whatever we like to call it, is a miracle, and that miracle is what the religions . . . and physics . . . describes alike in different realms.

The religions based on a creator tell us how to handle that creation force - OK - atheists are telling me at this stage the mantra that there is no creator - I'm talking about the force of the reversal of entropy, and the religions tell us how to handle it. It has implications for how we fit into this universe, with our relations both to physical apparently inanimate matter and also to living matter, our neighbours.

It is possibly important to recognise that inanimate matter may be only apparently so.

Being unable to see God, God is a Mystery. So is the decrease of Entropy and why it should naturally decrease when this is entirely the reverse of the everyday experience of entropy.

So mysterious also are all the fundamental forces - we can see that they exist but not why they should exist . . . So too is the reason that there are only 100 or so arrangements of matter which makes up the elements of our universe - a load of use it would be if there were millions of possibilities - it would end up as an amorhpous goo out of which nothing could be made and as useless as if all the matter in the universe were made up of neutrinos. "Science" does not explain this, but the collection of matter into ordered building blocks itself is a decrease of entropy and thereby better understood as the work of God.

This force of arrangement, of the bringing of order from the chaos, of the sequencing of DNA, is an intelligence - we define intelligence not necessarily by the process of coming forth from a mind, but in the sequencing and connexion of ideas, of information, and the sorting of disorder into order is therefore a process of intelligence.

It is for that reason that in the initial stages of introducing the concept of describing ordering behaviour, we start to understand it through a form of personification by way of an anthropomorphic being. But that is only a descriptor of something abstract, a mystery. *

Are there dimensions of which mathematics exists but that we can't put our finger on . . . ? Probably at least 6 of them . . . and we don't know how to use them, although some people's brains are cross wired enough to pick up "something else". Messiaen was such a person. Sound translated into colour. I know personally others whose brains translate colour into sound, others translating letters on a page and words into colours, and others translating people into colours - not at random but characterising specificities and being clearly a measure of "something else".

There is more to our experience than merely engineering science explains, and atheism cannot help us to handle the forces of decreasing entropy, living within their laws and indeed being made of the substance ourselves of decreased entropy.

Best wishes,

David P

* It is for reasons of preserving the concept of "mystery" rather than allowing the childmind to continue along the lines of the illusion created by anthropomorphism that church services in Latin, with transcendental music such as Bach and Couperin are possibly to be favoured over kiddies' songs accompanied by guitars of "Jesus loves me". The latter approach can lead to a rejection, for it is shallow, possibly with equal probability to that of seeking the deeper . . .

Perhaps "God" doesn't "exist" - because "God" may be nothing other than an "idea" - but that "idea" and its consequences, especially when summed up in Jesus' two commandments, are life changing. In his book "Music of the Spheres" (which includes sections on mathematics in music especially by Bach and by Mozart), Guy Murchie examines Pythagorean mathematics in terms of quantum physics and gives an intriguing example of "the idea" . . .

    In about every sense . . .the world is profoundly abstract. And not only the world but also the world's beings are made substantially of abstraction. A being is something like an idea or a song or an organised system. Where was the telephone in A.D.1800? Where were you and I? None of us had yet been born. All the elements of our future compositions were in the world but not organised into integral systems. And just as the right combination of thoughts and actions produced the telephone, so did the right combination of motivations and germ cells produce you and me. Thus an organism of life is basically much the same as an organism of systematic ideas - an abstraction, a new combination, a larger reality . . .

So it might be argued that because we can see the idea of what is good, what makes up matter and makes good things happen, and call it God, then in that same abstraction that leads from the idea of us in the arrangement of atoms which exist already to our existence, our reality, that abstraction of the idea of God leads to the "reality" of "God" in "His" existence. Because the idea is so profound, and life changing, the concept of "God" in "reality" as just an "idea" does not in any way diminish the concept of "God". This idea is supported in the concept of the Angel Gabriel's message to the Virgin Mary and the time when Jesus said (Luke 21) "And hee answered and said vnto them, My mother and my brethren are these which heare the word of God, and doe it."

Another way of looking at good and evil is possibly through the concept of entropy. In the creation of an ordered system of atoms to create life, entropy decreases, whereas when we die and our atoms go back into the earth, disorder takes over and is obvious for all to see, entropy increases. We become without the order that created us. . .

The Christian (or other believer) with a true sense or understanding of God (and bearing in mind the Delai Lama is not by definition "Christian" and that the protests and problems about which they resonate are now a global problem in a global perspective, I'm being deliberately non-denominational in suggesting an understanding of God) will have a purpose in mind that helps him or her to create a particular vision of order in their lives as they interlock with others' lives and the harmony created thereby, a decrease of entropy, whilst those without an understanding of "the idea" - the a-theist (of the sort Rifkind might have been referring to) - working against "the idea", however well meaning, without a view of the wider picture and the light which is "the idea" will wander around, some more directionless than others, in the darkness, bumping into things to a greater or lesser extent, and leading to the increase of disorder, the increase of entropy, the death of the system.

I referred elsewhere in these threads to seeing perhaps if there was a way in which one might look at the concept of God not in the usual terms and understanding of the word . . . and the thoughts above are perhaps an exploration . . . .

Such thoughts might seem abtruse, perverse or even a luxury of self indugence in contemplation, but somehow if the message of the protesters is to get through to the people whom they wish to influence, those who are to be influenced can only understand if the consequences of their actions in causing an increase in entropy and disharmony in their surroundings can be explained in a manner that is as clear as daylight and a clearer thought process becomes obvious. It's for this reason that an exploration into explanation of "reality" and "the idea" of the creation of order out of disorder (ignoring the specifics, that's the gist of the meaning of Genesis isn't it?) is worthy of refinement, if possible at all.

When above I referred to the concept of a "hole" in "nothing" being "something", again a problem posed by Guy Murchie, an intellectual atheist like Dawkins misses just that concept in ignoring the "idea" of the source of decreasing entropy. That "source" is beyond human description, which is why no one can, exactly, as it cannot be seen, but is all powerful, everywhere and all knowing . . . as to create order out of disorder it has to be . . . doesn't it?

Best wishes

David P

(Note to self or anyone else interested in doing so  . . . possibly on another thread as a continuation to this explore Entropic processes paralleled to "The Idea". We note that when "The Idea" takes hold there is a localised decrease in entropy which allows creation to take place and this is we recognise as unusual as entropy always increases: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/therm/entrop.html - http://www.nous.org.uk/entropy.html - If we recognise the creation process and this decrease of entropy and call it "God" new physics http://www.entropylaw.com/ suggests that the creation of order out of disorder is the naturally expected physics - so "God" is an expected consequence (!!!). The difference between those working "with God" or "against God" is the difference between people working with the natural laws of the environment around them, or those against. It's easier for individuals and the system to work within the physical laws than against them. In the entropic process in isolated systems entropy is conserved, so creation has to be matched by destruction. This is expressed in the Ying Yang contrasts, the recognition of Apollo as the All Powerful - the Creator the Destroyer, Mithras and the Mystery Cult, Death and Rebirth, being Born Again, Death and Resurrection, Christ upturning the tables of the money changers, the nature of Yahweh in the Old Testament - destroying, punishing those who did not follow him (this is a natural consequence of people working against the physics of their environment, a punishment which they bring upon themselves, but which is caused by the rules of their environment) . . . and no doubt other examples.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28order_and_disorder%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28information_theory%29
So calling oneself an atheist but understanding the consequences of the laws of the universe is the same as being a theist. What the teachings of "The Idea" do is to translate those consequences into relational terms for people. This is not to deny that people who have not come across those teachings can have a natural understanding of the laws of the universe to a random and varying degree . . . but the people of whom the Protesters protest . . .

Relevance to organ - the instrument is an expression of order, order in sound, order in mind, and Bach and other composers especially with 18th century masonic connexions were writing music to express the Divine Order, a constant quest for the Pythagorean Music of the Spheres
)

[David Pinnegar]

Hi!

On http://www.organmatters.com/index.php/topic,1006.0.html there was reference to people who are positive and people who are negative.

On http://www.organmatters.com/index.php/topic,819.msg3946.html I referred to evolution as the process of a DNA computer which preferred the positive over the negative:

In Darwinistic Atheism this starts to be obvious, for the positive multiplies positively, multiplication being an additive process repeatedly. This leads to success but negative patterns don't add and therefore cannot multiply and therefore, die out. They might not be seen to die out immediately, but patient watching reveals them to do so in the longer term.

Sometimes one is tempted to say bad things. It becomes obvious from the above that bad things don't need to be said, because bad things will die out as long as good things multiply. So it's necessary to say and do good things.

The corrolary is the saying that "It only requires a good man to do nothing for evil to multiply".

The injunction about doing nothing is not an encouragement to fight evil, for fighting is evil, it causes argument and unhappiness. But by doing positive things, by saying positive things, good things will simply outnumber the bad and a state of heaven endures.

On http://www.organmatters.com/index.php/topic,840.msg4106/topicseen.html#msg4106

Positive people always add collectively but negative people only destroy themselves in negativity, as numbers below zero don't exist.

In terms of this thread, we see a force within Entropy which is contrary to normal entropic behaviour, in decreasing entropy by creation - by an idea coming into the material world (as in the example of "the telephone" in its history from 1800 above) - or by an idea being made flesh in all living things . . . So contrary to the normal experience of disorder, this creative force is a special peculiarity but it happens and it has an inevitability about it. One can either work with it or against it . . . and we see within evolution that "ideas" that are unsuccessful die out and are confined to the rubbish bin - as also is the teaching of the religions with regard to ideas of "hell" and the fiery furnace for those who disobey God, the force of creating order out of disorder. So whether from an atheist or a deist point of view, one either works with order to create order or one is in the rubbish bin . . .

From the playing of the organ, to the construction of its sound with harmonics, the organ possibly exhibits the most elements of order of all the instruments. And the writing of Bach . . . ?

Best wishes

David P

[Michael H]

I've said before, I don't believe God exists, but that doesn't mean I don't believe in God, for God is beyond existence, therefore cannot be defined, for any attempt to do so is like trying to restrict the infinite, which is a nonsense. Nowhere in this forum can I find anyone going along with the idea that the Universe is a creation of consciousness, i.e. consciousness (brought into creation by God) brings the Universe into creation the other round from conventional belief that the physical universe came first. I think the physical Universe came last and is just a crystallisation of the higher levels of creation. in that context the physical Universe is just a tiny drop in the ocean of total creation.  this idea shouts at us through the concept of the Big Bang theory but cosmologists and other conventional scientists do not seem prepared to look deeper  into this possibility, even though the idea of time and space seems to virtually force us to reconsider our conventional approach to understanding.

[David Pinnegar]

Dear Michael

I think that both of us are saying the same thing from opposite and the same directions at once, perfectly allowed by quantum physics of course . . . "Universe is a creation of consciousness" and I like your definition that "God is beyond existence" . . .

Elsewhere I have tried to explore the thoughts that
God is an idea - the spirit of god is the conveyance of the idea
God is a reversal of the something that creates order out of a tide of increasing disorder

The interesting thing is that all who have had contact with a church organ have been influenced by the idea, even if they reject the idea of God and declare themselves atheist, the teachings of Jesus in how to handle the machinery of order creation within the forces of the tides of increasing disorder sow a seed inside all whether or not allegience to god is admiitted to or not. Outside of the groups of people who have had contact with that seed, whether ,"atheists" or believers is it merely my perception that we see more jungle-like animal behaviours?

Best wishes

David P