'If you could reason with the faithful, there would be no faithful!'
So said one sage because, by definition, believers in a God follow a tradition of imagining what cannot be perceived as being the fount of all things. Their authority for doing so, in most, if not all, cases, rests on the interpretation of ancient scripts. By this means they are able to resist all arguments to the contrary, especially from empiricists or other scientists, and insist that their God is above all worldly constraints. Normally, in the practice of philosophy, the onus is on the proposers of a God to prove their case beyond doubt rather than to prove the opposite but such is their resistance to reason and logic, their resort to semantics and sophistry, it is impossible to properly debate the issue. It seems that their omnipotent Divinity cannot be relied upon to persuade all of mankind to accept His existence. The very existence of atheists ought to be enough to convince the faithful of God's impotence and therefore the fallibility of the argument but even this doesn't work because the believers say that God gave man 'free will' to commit, for instance, evil. So is there a way to settle the issue once and for all? Probably not but we'll give it go using the Davies Hypothesis.
One of the first ever books on cosmology is Genesis, part of the Bible. It opens with the sentence: 'In the beginning God created the heavens and earth.' According to the Davies Hypothesis (DH) this is a clear and unambiguous statement of the duality of the universe. This duality was recognised in ancient time in Taoism, Manicheanism and Zoroastrianism to name a few. Indeed the Tao (fount of all being yet without being) emblem, the Taijitu, encapsulates this idea perfectly.
That the universe was brought into being from nothing has been postulated from ancient times from civilisations that preceded Christianity. The hebrew tribe, the Maccabees, for instance, held this view. But what do we mean by 'nothingness'?
We do not mean here the vacuum of space, inhabited by one atom of hydrogen per cubic metre, criss-crossed by neutrinos and other cosmic rays every second. The place is teeming with energy and forces such as that of gravity. No, the DH holds that 'nothingness' can be represented by 'zero', where it is defined as a state of absolute emptiness. It can be mathematically formulated as x-x = 0. That is, where there is a quantity, x, and the exact same is removed there is nothing, no remainder or residue. If x = y, then we can also state that x - y = 0.
It is worth stating here that the DH does not value zero as a normal number since one can't sensibly divide or multiply by it. It acts, simply, as a balance between negative and positive entities.
The state of absolute nothingness is called the 'Pleroma' in the DH and we see in the diagram, below, this state and the emerged dual universe depicted by the taijitu. This dual universe also sums to zero in every aspect.
If we accept that any creator of the universe must 'exist' outside of his creation, then this existence must be in the Pleroma. But since we have defined the Pleroma as a state of absolute nothingness, no remainder or residue, then there is no place for a Creator, actual or conceptual. Reductio ad Absurdum.
For more detail of the argument please read my book, Spiritual Man: An Introduction to Negative Dimensions'
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spiritual-Man-Introduction-Negative-Dimensions-ebook/dp/B00HU1H7SA/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1471596420&sr=1-2&keywords=kevill+Davies
or listen to my series of short talks on you tube: 'The Davies Hypothesis' by clicking on the link above.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLpThiz2UeBeEI9MwGjChZ04j8XulU78uZ
Friday 19 August 2016
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment