God's architecture - Part VIII

I think potential is 'built' into the universe as I would say that a box of legos or tinker toys have a built-in potential to assemble into new shapes and forms. Perhaps we could call the 12 basic building blocks of the universe, a lego set. The standard package (in particle physics called the Standard Model): quarks and leptons with variations of up/charm/top down/strange/bottom e-neutrino/u-nertrino/t-neutrino electron/muon/tau. And the 4 fundamental forces. That's it! Maybe? But we have to acknowledge that these 'things' are different from one another in that one of the building blocks cannot be reduced and be found to be an assemblage of the other building blocks. They are each different. Yet with these 'legos' comes potential to produce EVERYTHING. Remove one, and? Potential halts? The tinker toy set with spools 'without' holes to insert the round sticks thereby reducing the potential for building to nil. Yet these basic building blocks (governed by four fundamental forces: strong/weak/electromagnetic/gravitational) create the entire universe. Of course we humans cannot peek behind the scenes and see if indeed the lego building blocks are actually constructed by Ole Kirk Christiansen in Denmark -- or if the lego building blocks just happened to be 'here' and each of the blocks just happened to be perfectly fitted to one another, and of course the forces just kind of fell into place and were too, miraculously (used in a non-metaphysical sense), 'there' ... and to top it off, we would have to believe that unguided, uncreated, unplanned, willy-nilly, these bits of magic (also used in a non-metaphysical sense) just kind of ... well, just kind of happened. For me, reason and logic alone 'demand' that something is afoot!

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.” --Albert Einstein

I think humans are birthed into this universe with, for the most part, a blank slate, blank in that none of us would instinctually begin building well constructed dwellings, as many animals do, without the input/teaching of other humans. And anyone who has raised or has been around infants and small children will attest to their 'natural' curiosity, their forever questing about their environment in order to fill their 'blank slates' with ever more knowledge that provides an ever increasing understanding of how their environment operates. This seems to be the human equivalent to animal instinctive behavior, or perhaps how instinctive behavior has evolved. Of course with age begins the shutting down of this 'natural' curiosity -- the imagination -- by authority figures, parents/society (and sadly for some, this shutting down begins at birth). But for those who were either sheltered from 'uncurious' and 'unimaginative' authority figures, or who where born with a 'natural' tenacity that defied those attempts to extinguished their curiosity and imagination, the world, material and mind, is forever opened for exploration, and almost child-like, these folks cannot accept what others believe, limits.

Pause

"Love all God's creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God's light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day."

--Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Brothers Karamazov)

God's architecture - Part VII

We may discover that this ALL is because the Designer designed a design that itself designs ad infinitum more designs that unceasingly design endless variations of ever more designs evermore.

God's architecture - Part VI

I believe 'God' is beyond the 'all' that we as humans can understand or comprehend or can touch or even imagine, for of course we are the stuff of this universe that is where we find ourselves encapsulated within and are defined by. 'God' is the 'placeholder' term that we humans use for that which is beyond, beyond not in a time/space sense, but beyond in an intellectual sense. As such, each human defines the meaning of this term --'God' -- and as such, this term defines that which we humans try so hard to do, to use words to define, to describe, to make real through our utterances. So I think 'God' (the word we create in order to have something to grasp on to) is within each of us as a strange longing for that which created us ('created' -- another human word that falls far short of something that happened beyond time/space/matter -- a paradox since 'happened' requires the dimension of time). And so 'religion' is the human means to make this strange longing real, something that can be understandable in this time/space/matter world. In Christianity this longing is made human by our story of Jesus, perhaps a 'placeholder' for that which is beyond us -- God. To understand God in human terms, we need a human vocabulary, and Jesus is that vocabulary. For me this story is not something that can or needs to be proven, for it isn't about solitary facts, but it is about community, it is the story that we again and again seek to understand in our quest to live our lives with others, with community, living a life that is defined by love -- loving our neighbor as thyself. And yes, that is right behind 'Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.' Proof? "Every event has a cause. Trace a sequence of events backwards in time and one must eventually arrive at an uncaused causal agency. That agency is God." Yes, that the 'first cause argument' and yes, that isn't proof. But I think a nice thought, perhaps a thought that reaches the limit of human deductive reasoning. What a place deductive reasoning to stop at, the instant of the Big Bang, the birth of time/space/matter, all before escape the best tool we have, the human mind.