vol 3: Development
Theology
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This site is part of the natural religion project The natural religion project A new theology A commentary on the Summa The theology company
Theology: Table of contents
page 1: Theology
'Natural theology' is a tranformation of the Christian theology propounded by the Roman Catholic Church. This theology came to be from the fusion of Greek and Hebrew tradition which grew during the slow death of the Roman Empire. The medieval synthesis written by Thomas Aquinas put all the ancient wisdom in perspective, laying the foundation for the Galilean and Lutheran revolutions. The gulf between science and theology became so wide that it was proposed to divide science into natural and spiritual science, each with its own methods. Here we attempt a unification under the title of natural theology, and its countepart, natural religion.
page 2: Creation or evolution?
Christianity places us outside God, dependant on God for any mercies he might vouchsafe to bestow on us. Natural religion takes the more realistic view that we are inside god. Our lives are part of the divine life. The outside view conceives of God as the Creator, making all this so that we can see His glory (as if He needs it). All this is just for us. A dangerous position from a survival point of view. Here we have the inside story. We are watching the gradual unfolding of the divinity, and we are part of the process.
page 3: The Trinity
Early Christianity detected additional structure in the One God of Israel, and so invented the Trinity. Later Christians see the existence of the Trinity asserted in the New Testament. But how to make sense of One God and Three Persons? Aquinas presents a model, based on his adaptation of the Aristotelian psychology and metaphysics. 'The Father' represents the Hebrew God. 'The Son' is analogous to the (mental) Word of the Father. The 'Holy Spirit' is analogous to the love between Father and Son. The unity of God is maintained while the Persons are differentiated by a theory of relationships.
page 4: The Transfinity
The transfinite netork is a creative (and destructive) dynamic system. Its own internal logic, however, ensures that given certain conditions, creation outweighs destruction, so that the network expands forever. It is heartening to see that, according to the latest data and modelling, our universe is going to expand forever. NASA. It now seems unlikely that there will be a 'big crunch' to end the world mirroring the 'big bang' that initiated its creation. Let us call the transfinite network in action the transfinity,
page 5: The synthesis
Using the hypothesis that the universe is isomorphic to the transfinity, we take a very brief tour through both the natural and spiritual sciences and show that the transfinity provides an adequate model to synthesis the results of both these classes of science. This perspective takes us from quantum mechanics to theology, using the transfinite network to show how the spiritual world grows from the material world as the size, complexity and density of points in the universal network grow.
page 6: Completion, openness and freedom
Yahweh's petulant act of throwing our first parents out of the Garden of Eden because they disobeyed Him set the tone of the Hebrew and Christian thought for something like three thousand years. Now it is time for God to grow up. If we accept that the transfinite network is a model of both God and our universe, we can ue its properties to develop even further the caring personality that Christianity developed for God, not least detroying his complete isolation by inventing the Trinity. On this page, we use the mathematical properties of the network to establish that God is both complete and open, fixed and free.
page 7: The peace theorem
This project began as a search for peace. Here we state the 'peace theorem' and outline an heuristic proof. Informally, this theorem states that peace is possible. In other words, the nature of the world allows us to avoid loss, but their is a cost, analogous to an insurance premium. Viewed gobally, a transfinite network is most stable (that is most 'peaceful) when it pays the optimum level of insurance. The peace theorem, we propose, opens a way to calculating this optimum.
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Revealing Vatican attempts to propagate its religion by international treaty
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