Philosophical musings on Quanta & Qualia;  Materialism & Spiritualism; Science & Religion; Pragmatism & Idealism, etc.

   Post 107.  March 08, 2020 continued . . .

  The God Problem

   The No-God Problem

 To be perfectly clear at the outset, Bloom confesses in Chapter One, “There is no God” [as revealed by traditions & scriptures]. He became certain of that negation just in time to nix his own Bar Mitzvah. But, he was also pretty certain of something else by then, the creativity of the universe, as revealed by Science. So for the rest of his life, he struggled with one question : “how does a Godless cosmos pull off the tricks that every genesis myth tries to grasp?” In other words, “how does the cosmos create?” The rest of the book is a desultory excursion through the history of Science and Math, via Five Axioms, Five Heresies, Six Quarks, eight Ugly Ducklings, and a plethora of Semantic Entanglements. Hence, this book is his roundabout way of explaining Creativity without a Creator — explaining Fecundity without an Inseminator. I give him an “A” for effort, but the immaculate conception of a living universe stretches credulity. And Bloom is acutely aware of the no-god problem : “What the heck is space? What in the world is time? And what in the world is powering all this speed? Who in the world invented these peculiar things? And if they weren’t invented, how the hell did utter emptiness burp them out?”

After a brief review of the well-known philosophical problems with the bible-god concept, he states the title question again. “How does a godless cosmos make a heaven and an earth? . . . How does the cosmos create? That’s not just any question, it’s THE question. It’s the God Problem”. What follows is a historical review of how science has attempted to answer that question over the last few thousand years. But first, he introduces five “heresies” that have led to significant paradigm shifts away from divine explanations toward mundane mechanisms of creativity. Each heresy against the classical worldview has become a dogma of modern science. For example most of the early scientists, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton “believed in an intelligent designer”, but the majority of 21st century scientists are atheists or agnostics, who ridicule the “pseudo-science” of Intelligent Design. Each newly discovered “law” of physics replaced traditional divine interventions with mundane mechanisms. Until the Big Bang theory emerged in the mid-twentieth century, that is. Then, after a brief debate between the older “self-existent universe” assumption and the novel BB theory, “the struggle would eventually turn Hoyle from a staunch atheist into a believer in God”. If the world was not a never-ending cycle, but a one-way process, the BB was obviously an act of creation. But not so fast, says Bloom.

He asserts that evolution is simply the reiteration of a few simple rules, which he calls “axioms” : self-evident truths, necessities, laws, “ur” patterns, primordial facts — logical modules that can be built into magnificent structures and organisms2. For example, the basic rules of geometry were established as axioms by Euclid. Unfortunately, those ultimate facts were only true in a flat, two-dimensional world. Two thousand years later, his dominant paradigm was overthrown by non-Euclidean geometry. Likewise, Newton’s “law” of gravity was eventually demoted by Einstein to a special case of a more general law. So, while the laws may be eternal, our understanding of their application evolves over time. For instance, “Plato adopted and upgraded Pythagoras’ idea that the perfect forms underlie an imperfect material reality. . . . What is ‘logos’? It’s a number relationship, it’s ratio.”

                   Post 107 continued . . . click Next

Creativity
without
Creator?

 Laws of Cosmic       Creativity

Axioms : fundamental truths; natural laws

Archetypes : ideal Forms, concept of a thing

Relationships : mathe-matical relationships & ratios; geometry

Emergence : coming into being (implicit to explicit)

Iteration : repetition of same action over & over

Transformation : change from one form to another, or one context to another; phase change

Positive & Negative : attraction & rejection; recruitment strategies

Differentiation & Integration : division & addition; parts & wholes

2. Natural Laws :
   Bloom’s notion that mathematical patterns inherent in the universe can explain how Evolution has constructed the known world from an initial seed. But now he needs to explain the seed. Darwin’s theory explains the emergence of new species from previous species, but made no attempt to describe how living organisms emerged from non-living matter.    Apparently, Bloom thinks the laws that govern the interactions of matter & energy are like Axioms that must be simply accepted as facts without worrying about their ultimate origin.
   That’s similar to my own answer to the God Problem. Except that I go one step further back. My unproven assumption is that Creative Potential is eternal. G*D is the ultimate Axiom : the Lawmaker, the Mathmaker, the Geometer, the Enformer.  

The God Problem

How a Godless Cosmos Creates

Howard Bloom

Psychology; Sociology; Political Science

The Problem of Existence