vol 7: Notes
2000
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... to restore theology to the mainstream of science
[Notebook NAKEDICAME, DB 53]
[Sunday 1 October 2000 - Saturday 7 October 2000]
[page 22]
Sunday 1 October 2000
Monday 2 October 2000
[omission]
We have an 'inner' life and an 'outer' life and a 'hidden' life. The inner comprises all conscious events that I alone am privy to. My outer life comprises all
[page 23]
my interactions with my environment including my interactions with you.
The hidden life connects the inner to the outer. It is the immensely complex set of processes, guided but not determined by the 'laws' of physics, which are the subject of biology. We think here of the hidden life as the language that links consciousness to the world.
Conscious though we may be , we know that our biology has been shaped by natural selection. The fundamental problem for a conscious agent, we shall say, is to maximize the state of wellbeing, that is to maximize the proportion of our lifetime that each of us feels to be 'in heaven'.
[omission]
The consistency of religion requires consistency of environment, which means the unity of human understanding expressed through theology.
A fortunate life. By that I mean that I have followed a trajectory through good fortune and bad to the view of the world that I am trying to capture in this project.
Step 1 I was born into the RCC, an organization with very definite and powerful views about life. As five year olds, the nuns terrified us into prayer by telling us that the Communist Chinese would invade and torture us with bamboo slivers under the fingernails and other unspeakable horrors if the Blessed Virgin was not motivated by our prayer to stop them. We were taught also that the 'Brown Scapular' would protect us from evil, which I interpreted to mean that
[page 25]
it was safe to do anything on the monkey bars. Above all, a Catholic Education convinced me that my sensual body would lead me to Hell unless I did something drastic, which led to
Step 2 I entered the Roman Catholic Dominican Order, an 'institute of consecrated life' founded in 12?. In its time the order was an innovative mixture of monkish contemplation and Christian activism designed to produce a force powerful enough to combat the heresies of the age. In other words, the Domini Canes (dogs of god) were trained for relatively non-violent holy war. They were close to the hot wars, nevertheless. Famous Inquisitors such as ... were Dominicans. In the Order I first began to feel the might of ancient literature and studied it avidly. In particular, we were introduced to the writings of Thomas Aquinas. Thomas wrote one of the single most influential works in the Catholic Church, The Summa Theologiae. I also discovered the modern writer, Bernard Lonergan, who has done much to bring Thomas alive to modern readers. Leading to
Step 3 I fall out with the Church by questioning the nature of god. The Catholic Church believes in an eternal omnipotent being that existed before it created the universe and will continue to exist after the universe is gone. Aquinas proved the existence of such a god by showing that the universe is defective, so that the fact of its existence shows that there must be some other, non-defective, behind the scenes. Lonergan introduces as a modern model of this defect 'empirical residue' data without meaning. (Lonergan 1992) Because we would expect anything existing in its own right to be fully meaningful, he says, the fact that parts of the visible universe are not meaningful implies that there must be a fully meaningful being (traditionally called God) behind the scenes, as the Catholic Church would wish. The Catholic Church believes it has a monopoly on reliable communication with God, which monopoly would be broken if the divinity was directly visible to all of us. I wrote a paper called 'How Universal is the Universe' and was soon asked to leave the order.
Then I see it. Lonergan's conclusion depended upon his model of the world. His model merely assumed that there was meaningless data in the universe, but it could easily be wrong.
TRAGEDY - impact of dream and reality
COMEDY - impact of dream and dream
HYPOCRISY - CORRUPT ENVIRONMENT
The age of fantasy is over. Long live fantasy. But not in our physical relationships with the universe.
With every bit of business goes a set of 'paperwork' maybe in someone's head, or in a computer.
NAKEDICAME
We are aware of the proverb that money cannot buy love, but it can
secure many of the
[page 28]
natural outputs of love such as food, shelter, human contact and blissful oblivion that many people are in need of.
Tuesday 3 October 2000
Wednesday 4 October 2000
Thursday 5 October 2000
[omission]
[page 29]
Greenpeace: Testing for evolutionarily stable strategies.
Friday 6 October 2000
Saturday 7 October 2000
Theology implies complex = high entropy dynamics.
Theology is the dynamics of the whole.
Expanding Lonergan's misunderstanding of dynamics to non-analytic functions [functions with incompressible representations]
One is trying to gain a wider and wider spectrum. Look back to Reformation/Renaissance. At the same time as the idea of dynamical explanation of the world was being produced by future oriented Renaissance Men, the Reformation men were harking back to ancient ideas and ancient texts. These positions reflect two attitudes to life, one the good old days leading to a decadent present and the other the glorious future to come where the evils of the present will be overcome.
[page 31]
I feel that I am a victim of party discipline rather than literary incompetence and wish to formally complain about the administration of THEO 628 as I have experienced it.
Life: Data - pleasure/pain
PHYSICS TODAY: What is the difference between physics and theology?
THEOLOGICAL STUDIES - Wherein the great L published. Another failure at the ACU, but will protest this one. Prepare a brief. The excitement is not just to win, but to keep pushing a point of view that gains depth and consistency as it comes across each difficulty.
[page 32]
The time has come to cut away the scaffolding, that is the historical path to my position ( = my life so far) and let the abstract structure shine. But it needs a little bit of history. The story. We start with Aristotle.
Physics and Theology (for Theological Studies and Physical Review)
It has been a bit like making a road, first finding an optimum line, the clearing away the past, building bridges, earthworks and finally surfacing and embellishment. See the human signage growing on the mountain road.
Here it is intended to embrace both these senses.
When the Greeks first began speaking scientifically about the world they came across the difficulty of reconciling motion and stillness in the world.
Some fragments of Parmenides set the scene: (Parmenides)
[page 33]
goddess.
Further reading
Books
| Lonergan, Bernard J F, Insight : A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '... Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding' Amazon back |
Links
| Burnet Parmenides of Elea: The Poem back |
Click on an "Amazon" link in the booklist at the foot of the page to buy the book, see more details or search for similar items
Related sites:
Concordat Watch
Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
