Monthly Archives: September 2015

A Connecting Bridge

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“The very order, disposition, beauty, change and motion of the world and of all visible things silently proclaims that it could only have been made by God”

– Augustine, “City of God”

“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate seized planet”

      Stephen Hawking, as quoted by David Deutsch in the “Fabric of Society”.

“I do take life, mind and purpose seriously and I concede that the universe at least appears to be designed with a high level of ingenuity. It seems to me that there is a genuine scheme of things–the universe is about something”

– Paul Davies, “The Goldilocks Enigma”

And there it is:  We begin with a historical, traditional/religious point of view (Augustine); we proceed to a very modern, very skeptical, and very nihilistic point of view where Hawking basically writes off biological life in general and human life in particular as a statistical abnormality in an otherwise random universe with no meaning; and we end with Paul Davies, like Hawking a noted physicists and writer, who tries from a secular perspective to build a bridge back to Augustine. But where Augustine defines this “something” as God, and while Hawking denies its existence, Davies asserts that while this “something” (which the universe is about) exists he leaves it undefined.

Paul Davies in his very readable book “the Goldilocks Connection” spends hundreds of pages taking his readers through the history, thought process, and intellectual dilemmas and baggage that each of these three philosophical positions have and what modern physicists know, think and feel about the science of cosmology.

The very traditional and orthodox position taken by Augustine about the existence of a God who created the heavens and earth AND who tracks our every thought, mood and action, keeps copious records, and assigns, based on these records, either eternal damnation or eternal bliss to individuals at the moment of their death does not resonate well with most thinking people today.

The rejection of this position comes easily to people who resent the basic unfairness of the threat of eternal damnation for people who lived before the birth of Jesus; or who lived far from the Middle East and never heard of him in their lifetimes; or who honor God within their own traditions. The rejection of the Church’s assertion that one needs to accept Jesus as one’s personal savior or to suffer eternal pain as a consequence is made even easier when one becomes aware of the corruption, greed, lust, lack of compassion and overall hypocrisy exhibited by so many Church leaders over many hundreds of years.

The life of Stephen Hawking, confined in recent years to a wheel chair being totally paralyzed by Lou Gehrig’s disease, but with a very active and creative mind that has made him a world famous physicists, teacher and writer makes him a model for all of us as to how to have a meaningful life on many levels despite crippling handicaps….and this is true whether or not we accept or do not accept his assertion as to the role human life and human consciousness plays in the world.

And Paul Davies, trying to bridge the philosophical gap between the world of religious orthodoxy and the understanding of modern physics, seeks to affirm the possibility of there being somewhere in the mix a benign, if not defined, intelligent life force that is Not the controlling and punishing God of Augustine, or the Goddess of Randomness that so many modern thinkers pay homage to in any discussion as to whether the universe in general or our individual lives in particular have any real meaning.

It is into this discussion that the noted author and philosopher, David Birnbaum, offers his very thoughtful definition for that “something” which Paul Davies left undefined.

For Birnbaum, that “something”, as outlined in his three books “Summa Metaphysica I, II and III”, is the concept of “Potentiality” which he defines as a creative impulse inside the Life Force that drives all change, all evolution (random and otherwise) and is responsible for the Big Bang and the resulting cycles on all levels of energy/matter with regard to birth, growth, decline, death and the continued transformation of energy/matter to ever increasing and higher levels of complexity and level of consciousness.

Paul Davies writes as follows in “The Goldilocks Enigma”

“The carbon atoms so essential for life were forged inside stars somewhere billions of years ago. As these stars entered into the final stages of their lives their nuclear material collapsed to a density of almost a billion tons per square centimeter causing a cataclysmic explosion that propelled carbon laden star dust across billions of miles of space some of which ended up through a process of long evolution into biological life on earth culminating in the creation of human consciousness”.

The beauty of Birnbaum’s philosophical view of Potentialism is that it allows for randomness to function within evolution within an intelligent design that made it possible against overwhelming statistical odds for star dust from dying stars to find their way to a moderate sized planet and to produce the “chemical scum” that made human life possible.

The fact that Birnbaum is able to accomplish this without mandating or insisting that the Potentialism at the heart of the concept of intelligent design is linked to or restricted by any specific system of religious beliefs makes it possible for modern individuals living deep within a culture of secularism to take a fresh look at the challenging and complex cosmological questions with which physicists such as Stephen Hawking and Paul Davies are struggling with not only within the academic walls of their profession and publicly in their books and public discourse; but also no doubt privately within their own souls as they like all thinking individuals ponder the meaning of life.

The fact that Birnbaum finds within the Jewish tradition a deep mystical and poetical understanding of the Universe that is now being mirrored more and more by the experimental and theoretical findings of modern day cosmologists is indeed a vibrant, valuable and most welcome connecting bridge for those of us who have one foot planted in the world of Jewish tradition and the other foot planted equally as firmly in the secular world.

Michael Papo
mapapo44@gmail.com
www.PapoBlogSumma.com

MANKIND IN OUR EVER CHANGING UNIVERSE

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“God hides Himself, putting aside His essential infiniteness and withholding His endless light to the extent necessary in order that the world may exist.”
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– Steinsaltz  “The Thirteen Petalled Rose” page 37
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“The great Tao flows everywhere.
All things are born from it,
yet it doesn’t create them.
It pours itself into its work,
yet it makes no claim.
It nourishes infinite worlds,
yet it doesn’t hold on to them.
Since it is merged with all things
and hidden in their hearts,
it can be called humble.
Since all things vanish into it
and it alone endures,
it can be called great.
It isn’t aware of its greatness;
thus it is truly great.”
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– Lao- Tzu “Tao Te Ching A New English Version” by Stephen Mitchell p.34
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“The cosmic order does not necessitate pain per se. It does necessitate, however, the possibility of pain. This was the ‘ransom’ paid by ‘life’ in its escape from the bottomless cosmic void. Humankind chose the Tree of Knowledge/Potential at Eden,rejecting zero growth” and embracing Life with its eternal promise of uncertainty, growth, free will and the infinite Potential of the universe of which human consciousness is a precious part.”
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– David Birnbaum, “Summa Metaphysica I”
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SOME THOUGHTS RELATED TO MANKIND IN OUR EVER CHANGING UNIVERSE
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Infants, and young children are basically helpless other than to communicate with piercing screams their need for food, milk, or comfort.
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As adults we look to ourselves to meet our own needs but by necessity we also need to take into account that in our complicated society we are totally dependent on others to grow our food, purify our drinking water, produce electricity, build our roads and bridges, rescue us if our homes catch on fire, maintain civil order, protect us from terrorism, educate us, and heal us when we are sick. We also depend on others to hire us, or to buy our products, to love us and enable us to establish families and to meet a wide range of emotional, physical and spiritual needs.
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So it is perfectly understandable that faced with continued existential anxiety for the health and well beings of themselves and their children that our long ago ancestors, wherever they lived on planet Earth, began to imagine, dream of, and yearn for some kind of supernatural power(s) to whom they could appeal  (as they once had as infants and small children) to protect them, help them, support them; and to give them good health, peace and prosperity; while simultaneously confounding and weakening/destroying any of their fellow human beings who actively desire, plot and execute plans to exploit, enslave, and or kill them.
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Throughout the past 10,000 years, human beings have shown great ingenuity, and creativity in developing simple to complex rituals involving the construction of huge buildings; plant, animal and human sacrifice; a variety of celebrations and fast days and prayer in an attempt to appease the gods, to seek their support, and to show continued good will (money in the bank as it were) against the day when the individual/family/group/nation in question would desperately need divine intervention to end a drought, heal them from illness and or stop their avowed enemies far from their borders.
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In more modern times, mankind is less vulnerable to devastation by nature as we have trucks to bring in life saving supplies and emergency medical assistance.
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But, as we all know, these same trucks in the hands of others can cause unspeakable amounts of pain and destruction: Think Nazis; think communism under Stalin; think Cambodia under Pol Pot; and think the horrors of the genocide of both the Holocaust in Europe and in Rwanda to mention just a few of the historical horrors human beings in all corners of the world have caused and endured in the last 75 years.
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There is, therefore, every reason for modern people to feel the same need for divine comfort as did our ancestors.
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But for modern college educated American young adults whose heads are swirling with facts and theories related to science, evolution, free will, the misuse of religion in the past to condone slavery and the power of the ruling classes, not to mention the misuse of religion today to deny women and gay people full civil and human rights… it is fully understandable why religion and religious ritual is viewed by many to be, at best, a support/crutch for those less educated, less prosperous and, without doubt, much less sophisticated.
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And yet………………
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And yet modern science….. while it cannot and will not ever confirm or support the concept of the existence of God….. is nonetheless coming ever closer to realizing that given the complicated physics that existed at the time of the Big Bang and the seconds, hours, and years that followed…that it is progressively harder to assert that all this evolution, and all that followed over the next 13.5 billion years leading up to the development of human consciousness here on earth was 100% totally based on Randomness.
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And a growing number of those whose professional career is focused at looking at this very question are beginning to publicly talk about the fact that since it is so statistically improbable that everything in the universe is due to randomness that other possibilities including Creative Intelligence need to be considered, at least theoretically.
This theoretical concept will, however, continue to be rejected out of hand by those whose “religious beliefs” compels them to continue to pay homage to the god of “Randomness as the mother of all creation, and the father of all change in a universe devoid of meaning”.
The counter concept that statistically is more probable than pure randomness is that somehow somewhere there is a creative Life
Force seeking through trial and error, and, yes, sometimes through the  pure randomness of biological evolution, to have brought human consciousness to the current point where our knowledge of the world is growing exponentially, and our Potential to reach out to the stars, as well as a deeper understanding of how our brains work has never been higher.
Our minds are never a vacuum, and we as human beings tend to become what we think, feel, and believe.
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The only chance we as a human race have NOT to destroy ourselves and the Earth on which we live, is to recognize our Potential for evil, as well as our Potential for love, and the fact that we have the Potential of Free Will and Free Choice.
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Prayer then, rightly viewed, is a very valuable form of mediation that pulls us away from the negative siren call of anarchy, randomness, and existential dread, and points us towards a view of ourselves and our world in which we seek to balance all the forces that swirl in and around us..seeking balance, beauty and peace as we struggle to live up to the Potential that lies within each of us to do our small or large part in healing ourselves and the world in which we all co-exist.
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Michael Papo
mapapo44@gmail.com
www.PapoBlogSumma.com

Living with duality

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“I form the light, and create darkness;
I make peace, and create evil;
I am the Lord,
Who has made all these things”
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– Isaiah, 45.5
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“Good and evil form a duality. Creating potential for good, by definition, creates the inverse potential for evil along with it…..God’s omnipotence or non-omnipotence is not the issue. It is rather a question of definition. By definition, good comes packaged with concomitant evil.”
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– David Birnbaum, “Summa Metaphysica I”,  page 95.
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“The Tao doesn’t take sides;
It gives birth to both good and evil”
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– Lao-tzu,  “Tao Te Ching” 5
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It is not as if there were a separate “god” for good and a separate “god” for evil battling it out as it were; just as there is not a separate “god” for the lions and another “god” for the zebras; and one “god” for winter cold and another for the heat of summer.
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What we learn from individuals who have thought deeply about these matters…and whose ideas stand up to both reason and intuition…is that there is but one God who created a universe of dualities with infinite possibilities and potentialities working themselves out in and through the laws of nature, the evolution of species, and the hearts and minds, ids egos and super egos of that part of God’s creation that was created in God’s image.
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As human beings living in groups we are very keenly aware that whatever the circumstances there are always….at least from our limited and at times biased perspectives…. both in relative and in absolute terms, winners and losers.
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And as human beings we are sometimes joyfully and sometimes painfully aware that we live in a world of constant flux and change. Potentiality may rest every once and a while and for short periods of time the status quo may seem immovable until it is not. The wheel of time does turn, and life, moves with its manifold complexity and seeming contradictions, moves with it.
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This fact of life was recognized by both Isaiah and Lao-tzu. And at the very center of the wheel… which Isaiah calls “God” and Lao-tzu calls “the Tao”…lies the duality of both Peace (stillness) and Potentiality (movement).
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Religion and spirituality, at its worst, becomes the “opium of the people” as well as rationalizations by the “winners” of society to flaunt their power over those they have defined as “losers”.
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At its best, religion and spirituality teaches us of the infinite complexity and potentiality of life. It teaches us that the world is in constant motion and that our task as human beings is to accept this reality, NOT with our potentiality for selfishness, envy, greed and stupidity; but with our potential for intelligence, compassion, acceptance, love, hard work, creativity and joy that is available to all of us created in the image of God.
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Michael Papo
mapapo44@gmail.com
www.PapoBlogSumma.com
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