Thursday, November 06, 2008

Science is Collective Effort 'To Read The Mind Of God'?

No, I didn't say that, but Michael Heller, the winner of this year's Templeton Prize, did.

"If we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about the cause of mathematical laws," he said in March when he received the Templeton Prize, a $1.6 million US award given annually to those who advance scientific discovery on "big questions" in science, religion and philosophy.

"By doing so we are back in the great blueprint of God's thinking about the universe; the question on ultimate causality: why is there anything rather than nothing?

"When asking this question, we are . . . asking about the root of all possible causes. Science is but a collective effort of the human mind to read the mind of God ..."


But why stop there? If it is fair game to ask where mathematical laws come from, and then how the universe came into being, which leads to the "ultimate causality", then it should also be fair game to ask how god came into existence! In other words, the so-called ultimate causality may not be that ultimate after all.

So there is a flaw in this chain of thinking. If we keep wanting to ask what causes each level of our understanding, then what is the rational that it should stop at "God", since the existence of God BEGS the question on what created it. If one were to answer "nothing created it and it has always existed", then why can't that be used earlier on to explain the existence of the universe? After all, one appears to be satisfied with a non-explanation of God, so why do we pick and choose at what stage to end the inquiry?

The assumption of the "ultimate causality" is not only untested, but also currently a myth.

Zz.

1 comment:

J. Anthony Sterrett, Jr. said...

There are only two or three possibilities. Leaving aside the ones that deny the existence of God, we must assume either an infinite cycle of Gods, or similarly an infinite chain of meta-Gods.

As far as I'm aware, there's only one religion that teaches something like this, and that's the Mormons. :3