The Universe in Relation to The Reference Frame of God (a hypothesis)

The question is of course difficult to answer in some respects. Traditionally it might mean that some location of God would determine his nature. if he is everywhere such as Spinoza believed then one is a pantheist. Such ideas bring along subsidiary associated criteria. As in any set theory the subset must be formed from within the categories of the larger set. It is a principal of logic that it is possible to formulate some things such that they are exclusive of other things.

If pantheism means that there is some inference of a lesser responsibility for living beings to morally obey God's right deonotological details because they too are a little bit of God, then it has some repercussions upon everything we might believe about the protocols of being such as good and evil and so forth. With this initial denotation of the importance of the question about where God is potentially,we can move on to 'where is God?'.

A very modern context is string theory cosmology. A very old context is described by the 3rd century neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus. It may seem difficult to believe that both old and new theories have a similar cosmological paradigm of the Universe, yet essentially they have. The Enneads of Plotinus go a little farther in completing the answer of 'where is God?' than pre-big bang theory does. Pre-big bang theory does help to make the Universe seem like an emanation from at least one zero dimensional membrane before the big bang in some sort of 'without form and void' context. The primordial void experienced some sort of a fusion of strings or membranes that became highly ordered (its inferred) before expanding rapidly as an inflaton then big bang of space-time mass and energy. Modern astronomy has viewed gamma ray star burst events from the period when the Universe was only 650 billion years old (in the scale that its now 13.7 billion years old).

Wherever God was when the Word was spoken for the expansion of light quanta (strings, loops, quarks or whatever) and the extreme radiation and light of the primordial Universe, we can infer that a He still is. The frequencies of space-time that were spoken to given an initial endowment of power and purposeful destiny to the Universe was an act of God. Everything that came to exist occurred because of the Word.

Even the standard model of physics and the equations of the general theory of relativity reduce the Universe at it's origin to a near infinitesimally small size. String theory has a slightly different point of view. The Universe's origin is like the tight spot of an hourglass through which energy has flowed. The load of mass into the top part was believed to have started from a void with the appearance of virtual particles that drew together under a kind of gravity particle. I should point out that so far as I know (and that isn't much) there aren't adequate field equations for the order and appearance of virtual particles in a zero-degree void. never the less the size of the Universe was small. God created the entire structure and it was smaller than the period at the end of this sentence by orders of magnitude. It was a reasoned actuation of a Universe that increased in scale. To God it must still be very small though it seems large to us humans.

Where is God then we ask? Where is the Universe? Is that a good question? If the Universe is the size of a period at the end of a very small sentence...with a type font size of less than 10 to the minus 35th size, we could fill the planet with all the red ink of the U.S. Government and it would disappear to insignificance, unless we citizens were shrunken to a comparably small scale. Well, where would that period-Universe be? It would be in the midst of some tremendous void bigger than good U.S. job prospects for unemployed, undegree'd philosophers in their fifties. God would however know everything in it, having made aforementioned Universe. If the Universe scaled up in size billions of light-years in size it would for God, probably seemed to have increased not much. Surrounding the period-Universe is infinity in all directions.

At least we might believe that the Universe is surrounded by infinity. The pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides of Ionia considered the nature of everything, of God and where or what the Universe must be quite well. His inquiries were carried on by Plato and Plotinus. Today we can see Isaac Newton spinning bucket thought experimental criteria as continuities of the thought of Parmenides. He called the Universe a plenum, whatever was contained in it was a volume itself. Did it displace something or nothing? Where there was something nothing could not be. Substantial questions about nothing, yet it is from nothing that everything originated, with the Word of God.

Plotinus believed that The One is absolutely perfect. We can consider The One to be God. He is so perfect that He has no need to think foreknowing the answers to every possible question. The same goes for His physical existence; He is everywhere and yet nowhere. The Universe tat He emanated for some reason could just be an aspect of His continuing omnipotence in action actualizing all things. So we have a Being like that of Parmenides' style and simultaneously one such as another pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus might have described.

Heraclitus is the guy that said that one cannot step into the same river twice. He thought that everything is continually in change. Well, if God is actualizing all things forever as an omnipotent Being that is true, yet Parmenides is also right, because everything that is in change or being and becoming is of God. We would make a mistake to suppose that its all some sort of natural flow however, for God is about reason and good. Everything is known and inn order. All things that should be, are. God even seems to run close to the edge of deficit sometimes and allows apparent evil to occur within His divine economy of perfect goodness. Maybe that's to let some virtual evil exist that will be discontinued eventually in order to allow as much good and possible experience exist as is possible.

Plotinus believed that all things are a result of emanations from God's perfection. The Intelligence and The Soul are comparable to the Son and the Spirit somewhat, although the Soul cannot well be compared to the Holy Spirit of which Jesus and Paul talked. The Intelligence as creator of all forms and eventually of the material Universe seems well compared with Jesus Christ. In the beginning was the Word...

God has created every quanta of every structure, yet it does all have protocols and proper places that are in the process of change. People are creations of God yet not God. Perhaps people could be compared to being individual numbers without being all numbers (such as we could think about God being). Because each element is individual and finite they are not omniscient or omnipotent and can go wrong when they disobey the will of God. Presently some numbers want to change their number orientation-make their eigenvalues not what they should and at taxpayer expense. This is not appreciated by the protocols of the ordered quantum Universe. Just try to do what God wants and win bonus points in some future endeavor...they can be useful.

The Universe may be described as having reality, yet it is a contingent reality created by God even if one wants to describe it as a theistic evolution. It could be compared by analogy to an image in the mind thought intentionally,or even to vision seeing a view of the ocean perhaps. The view is how the mind interprets all of the waveforms striking the optic nerve and reaching the brain. The experience is different than the innumerable particles that make it occur. Our entire Universe can be said to have similar localized universal forces (localized in the Universe) that were created by God as our own brains and the environment of the Universe allow the creation of an experience of images of 'reality'.

The Universe is like a mist in the mind of God. God as absolute Spirit has created our Universe such that it appears material to us human beings in it. We thus exist to ask questions such as; 'where is God?'

Non-Self Philosophical Reference Points

Philosophers tend to use their natural logic in a somewhat more disciplined way than do most people. They may construct a theory of everything or just a theory about thought. Language and logic have themselves been the subject of philosophical investigation as well as the nature of the material or spirit perceived by the mind. When one strips down the methods of logic and language to its bare essentials we have an opportunity to process data that may be presented to mind and reasoning a little more constructively. There may be ten-thousand 'points of reference' or perhaps just one (allow that would be a very monistic criterion making the observer or user of one reference point something of a passive partner to the one point of reference perhaps).

Referred to points may be suitable for a particular set theory, yet of course we would prefer more than one point if we hoped to construct something meaningful. In systems of relativity at least three points of reference are required for directions of motion to be established. In language, one referent would be a one word vocabulary. Primordially even apes accomplish more than that with recognizable grunt referent meanings. The challenge for linguistics is to denote specific lexical ontology referents amidst others. Philosophically the challenge may be to reduce the possible plethora of words and objects to primary structures of meaning. Martin Heidegger pursued language in such a way looking for 'essents'. Modern analytical philosophers may exploit some of the ontological references of science for their cosmological criteria as well as neurological foundation for thought similes to epistemological phenomena subjectively.

Unreasonable points of reference are a little hoary, so we prefer reasonable ones if we are compelled to choose. So one must make a reasoned reasonable point to have a philosophy and eat it too, as if it were a cake. How might one argue with such fell logic as that? I think we must try.

A philosophy as an objective thing in itself seems something of a trivialization of the activity of the pursuit of wisdom. Yet moderns like to have sound bite reasoning and packaged products such as 'a philosophy' and then describe the contents it must have to be a marketable product. It needs a point of reference, and the point of reference must be reasonable. We cannot say who the judge must be of whether or not a particular point in a philosophy is reasonable or not. Certainly in ecclesiastical history there were those that de facto stipulated that 'a philosophy' was heretical and the authors would be burned at the stake or given unto the inquisition. At least Galileo learned to mind his p's and q's and was spared be burned at the stake. He knew when to assert a reasonable point of reference and when to kow-tow to the communist party ideologues of the day (a Chinese former communist professor was just given a ten year prison sentence for forming a political party. Only one party is reasonable in China).

We like to believe that in the many fields of philosophy including political philosophy virtually any approach regarding the mind or matter, spirit or social order, mass or energy might be taken with potential for good results. The French philosopher Descartes intentionally dispensed with any conventional points of reference in his quest to understand existence. His existential doubt was a result of the will to found philosophical knowledge upon first principles--things or ideas he could regard as direct knowledge in personal experience as true. He had no 'point of reference'. Cogito ergo sum was self-standing or self-evident. At least he believed it was and that belief advanced philosophy significantly.

Jean Paul Sartre's existentialist researches expanded French philosophical rationalism beyond the a priori, analytic thinking efforts of Descartes. Sartre's existentialism made the entirety of experience a self-aware cognitive field that was all that might be known. He recognized the heterodox nature of experience with the existence of other's in the cognitive event. The Critique of Dialectical Reason was an effort to describe the concatenated nature of that experience.

If one has a reasoning mind it is important to keep free the criteria of investigation with which one might construct a philosophical lexicon of ideas. If one doesn't have a reasoning mind then find a point of reference and make that your philosophy. Be an elephant that grasps hold of the tale before thee and waddle along to the beat of the same drummer booming through the speakers of your brain housing unit. Otherwise break down those ideas into workable size and use a little symbolic or even classical logic to analyze the meaning they have. Remove all of the adjectives and such to get to the salient proposition if it may be approached that way. Determine like Hume did what is sophistry and what isn't. Determine what is actual rather than some sort of actually meaningless metaphysics or passing the buck refer to a point of reference next that is just one of an infinite series of points in some order along a meaningless path of unnatural numbers representing computer generated phrases. Think for yourself but read those great ideas worth learning in order to not reinvent the wheel each day.

Philosophy is more than an epistemology or theory of knowledge. A theory of knowledge is implicitly referential to something other than the immediate self-awareness; that is it must explain itself preferably within its own terms and context. Of course to do so is in a way self-defeating. Theories of knowledge naturally tend to be propositional ontologies other than self. If one is referring to a theory of knowledge as a theory of mind, which one presumably has, then it must always be a kind of alienation of idea as experience from self. It is a reductionism from mind to an ossified phrase and inert, or dead.

A point of reference does seem to a prior assume that points exist, and that a particular point-do we mean geographic or linguistic coordinate reference points- has some ordination from which all other inferences and deductions are made. A philosophy would seem in this context to be contingent upon a prime meridian for meaning, placing the meridian at a higher level than the egalitarian context of the rest.One may reasonably assume certain axioms within any given ontology to induct and construct the remainder of the composition members of the element set. In matters of life and experience referring to the world as it appears we find it improbable that a single reference point-a most obscure assumed premise-might adequately serve to anchor a theory of either monism or pluralism. it is instead a kind of social myopia that fails a criterion of pragmatism.

W.V.O. Quine's 'Word and Object' and 'Ontological Relativity' of course are linguistic and logic based philosophical analysis of the meaning of language and of how it is used. It especially considers how the philosophical uses of language and symbolic logic are structured. Life itself has a self-standing reality about which people talk. Talk and words to refer to present and not present things or events are primordial in the history of mankind. Perhaps one-hundred thousand years ago more or less simple human languages existed. Language has as many objects or referents potentially to talk about as there are objects in the Universes of experience and imagination. Words refer to objects. It is a wonderful fact that words can refer to themselves. They are address points of meaning. The Universe itself is the one primary referent, and of course we include ourselves within this Universe. Human beings even refer to their own being, and self, in self-reference.

Philosophically we prefer to consider knowledge of what is experienced, and of knowledge beyond one's personal being, and of course of existing at all as activities or investments of our time worth the pursuit. Some element of wisdom seems to exist in learning all one can about life. Of course we also pursue these most general yet intimately important of concerns is philosophical activities. Philosophy is a method of inquiry. Knowledge continually should advance without ever reaching a conclusion in some sort of omniscience. Theologically our interests are developed in learning about the Ultimate Designer of the Universe1 and of any potential other Universes. In such concerns our metaphysical inquiry becomes an alternate ontology rather than the self-evident one into which we are born, live and die.

It is somewhat fashionable nowadays more than a 150 years after Darwin's theory for many in society to regard themselves as liberated from hoary church dogma of creation. So many were oppressed by corrupt ecclesiastical neo-theocratic relationships with feudal lords that history did not refer sufficiently to the role that the Catholic Church played occasionally in opposing rising national imperial powers. Following the Inquisition such neglect was perhaps well deserved in the popular realm. At any rate following the Darwinism many were concerned that the disbelief that a scientific explanation for the origin of the species could not be anything besides a contradiction and even a negation of the Genesis story of creation. The last forty years have shown us that a theistic evolution of the Universe is consistent with the Bible, yet without modern scientific knowledge there were few that could interpret the book of Genesis in such a light.

The 'incredible lightness of being'; the giddiness of disbelief in God was feared by some authorities as leaving mankind rootless and adrift in a meaningless mechanical Universe. Of course the assumption that the Universe as it is cannot be a self-evident ground for being philosophically grounded isn't too valid. Cicero's natural law and a myriad other systems are able to provide an ordination for morality inferred from the criterion of being in-the-world. Kant's categorical imperative is a deontological inference from logic and being. Kant believed in God yet his moral law is axiomatic. The 'point of reference' a mariner might have wanted in the era before the invention of the compass isn't too applicable to philosophy. The Universe of experience exists for-itself; the 'reference' is all around us. We believe also that God exists transcendentally though we have no material point of reference for that faith. The ungrounded with hysterical 'philosophies' requiring a 'point of reference' have existed throughout history even before Darwin or the reformation. The Dionysian choice may itself become an ethic for a majority of ruling elites. A point of reference is no assurance of the existential validity of a particular philosophical ontology.

Philosophers did not first invent an a priori language such as found in Descartes cogito and then construct reality from it; they simply have tried to learn more and more about the actual world experienced. Perhaps some could miss it. Take the first right...