I wanted to write a bit on contemporary topics of cosmology and economics. It’s a reasonable place to drop in a philosophical idea or two as well.
In a video titled “If there is a God, why are there atheists?” R.C. Sproul raised several interesting points that prompted me to review a few issues. Sproul quoted the New Testament book of Romans (cited below) to make the point that everyone knows God directly, in a sense through plain wonder at creation and existence. It is an innocent apprehension of being at all and the wonder of existence. Then people develop false explanations for why things existence, etc. That may be comparable to intuitively recognizing a good first choice move in a blitz chess game and setting it aside to overthink the position and with enough sophistication select a bad move.
Romans Chapter 1: 17 “For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith. 18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; 19 Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.
20 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are
clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his
eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:
21 Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as
God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and
their foolish heart was darkened.”
Verse 20 above relates that “the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are plainly seen, being understood by the things that are made”. Quantum mechanics at least is unseen to the naked eye, and I believe God’s spirit is deeper even than quarks or strings. Certainly each are invisible, yet God has made visible things from the invisible that humans may perceive or understand-with the term understand perhaps meaning to be aware of or to re-cognize. It may be an error to go too much further in that direction, for beyond the naive, primal perception and recognition of perceived objects lies the sophistication that effaces the first impression and its wonder.
Not to say though that scientific knowledge is wrong or an error. Mankind needs to work and physics and cosmology are work. One can learn a tremendous amount about the relationships among things that exist in the Universe. For instance, mass and energy are convertible and may be viewed as two forms of the same kind of thing that are in different states. It is somewhat remarkable to me that Einsteins formula E=mc2 was written before knowledge of the Higgs Field or of Higgs Field values if those are known very well, or are as familiar as the values of electro-magnetic fields. Light particles are nearly massless particles (photons) that exist in electro-magnetic fields I believe. Converting mass into energy at the speed of light squared plainly would seem to burn up all of the energy, or expend all of the energy, yet it can’t really do that. How can mass convert itself into a massless state, be neither created or destroyed and still exist? It might just be to reduce the mass to a massless form (a photon wave) that exits the Higgs field entanglement wherein two dimensional particles become three-dimensional and seem to have mass when they don’t really. Three-dimensional mass converting to spent energy becomes two-dimensional with the entanglement that made its mass shorn away.
Alternatively gluons that make the strong force between quarks, and are pure energy may transfer their energy to something else, like space-time itself. It may be that within an event horizon as quantum relations are annihilated and mass even at the scale of gluons and strings become energy in-self without relational form that some asymmetry in the process attaches itself to space-time and energy quanta with virtual entanglement effects on the event horizon creating the apparent, emergent effect of gravity and space-time expansion. I wonder if anyone has considered the issue of CP violation inside the event horizon as quanta are destroyed and converted to pure energy and virtual energy; could virtual anti-energy act as virtual anti-dark matter acting to push space apart on the event horizon Universe a concatenated anti-gravitational emergent field?
Other obvious questions arise concerning a four-dimension Universe located on the event horizon of a black hole in a five dimension Universe. One wonders if matter from the five dimension Universe continues to be taken into the black hole passing through the four dimension Universe. One wonders if the cosmic microwave background pattern at the earliest time that can be captured by the Webb Space Telescope was caused by the black hole drawing in mass or energy from the event horizon. One wonders if space-time yielded the energy that became mass after a burp from the black hole wherein a lot of virtual entangled particle pairs appeared outside the event horizon. Black hole belches could occur like solar flares perhaps at rare times as often as the appearance of a Majorana neutrino in a particle detector.
Sproul mentioned Kant and Sartre in a class he taught on atheist attacks on faith I believe it was, as atheists. He did so in the context of disagreeing with Kant that one can’t know certain things that are unseen. I believe Sproul and Kant are functioning in different categories and Sproul’s reasonable ideas on Kant and Sartre were misplaced.
I read most of Sartre and Kant’s works and don’t recall anything about atheism in them. Certainly they weren’t in Being and Nothingness or The Critique of Pure Reason. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is fundamentally an author’s intimate oversoul point of view of a human; nearly a first person narrative of what one mind experiences existing. It is like an authors’ examination of what a character in a novel perceives and thinks about what he perceives, feels, senses etc. It is a very subjective work rather than an objective philosophical examination of the Universe. Sartre tends to analyze social reality and social behavior rather than to seek scientific accounts of nature. Sartre infers the reasons why others behave the way they do in the reality of his experience on the basis of how he understands himself.
The Critique of Pure Reason was a great book that might probably was influenced not only by Hume and his ideas about cause and effect, what can be known empirically and so forth. Kant was probably heavily influenced by Descartes’ Meditations on a Method. French rationalism opened the door to a systematic examination of the relation between perception, mind and logic. Kant’s noumenon or unknown is not quite the same as the Apostle Paul’s invisible things made visible. The noumenal are things one doesn’t know and hasn’t perceived. It is possible that things like quarks are imperceptible, or that theoretically very small quanta of less than Planck length size are a reasonably classified as noumenal and cannot be seen or known beyond theory.
One might speculate about the qualities of God from what is seen or known from first impression of perceiving the world (such as He is omnipotent and Good), yet I don’t think one can know all of His qualities or Being at all, unless of course is purity of power and goodness cohere in on-the-surface apprehensible and perceptible impression anyone may have if they don’t hide their knowledge with false-consciousness and self-deception. Maybe understanding salient characteristics of God visible in nature, or direct inferences one may make from nature is as far as the faithful may go, and from that point they need rely on scripture and revealed knowledge.
Science tends to rely on evidence based knowledge, and on verifiable knowledge. One may verify that the Mona Lisa is made of select materials, and even analyze the brush strokes and order of composition, yet the painting’s aesthetic qualities are challenging to confirm scientifically such that one might verify that it is beautiful or somewhat less than comparable portraits, etc. What one finds beautiful may have different value to others. Human judgment and aesthetic values are made by creatures. God evidently recognized that His human creatures have the capacity for aesthetic and moral value judgments. Those judgments tend to surpass a scientific, evidence based criterion. Quantum mechanics itself is a kind of bootstrapped art form that is phenomenal and temporal referring to radiated waveforms in which they exist in an entangled state.
And that brings me to the idea of this Universe existing on the event horizon of an extra-dimensional black hole. The four dimensions of space-time could be located on the event horizon of a five-dimension black hole apparently. At least that’s one theory. The Universe would be on four dimensions around the black hole rather like a sphere around a black hole, or a kind of Dyson Sphere around a black hole.
A Dyson Sphere is like a giant basketball built around a star. People would live on the basketball. A universe located on the sphere of the event horizon may be referred to as a Basketball Universe I suppose. Well, enough of that metaphor.
The initial singularity would have been theoretically caused by information that was gulped by the black hole, or half of the information of entangled virtual particles gulped from a vast black hole inputting a tremendous amount of galactic mass, being refocused toward the event horizon and experiencing faster-than-light seeming redistribution from a starting point around the event horizon. Maybe virtual particles may be entangled in triples as well as pairs- who can say for sure. If they can it might cause faster area dispersion coverage during formation of a universe from a singularity.
Gravity may be an action of the vast black hole acting on the mass-energy of the Universe. It may equally well be the cause of the continuing acceleration of the universe being drawn into the black hole. Because of the time dilation the life span of the Universe on the surface of the event horizon that seems billion of years old may be far less if viewed from further toward the center of the black hole- even a few days. I suppose one might calculate the size and spacing of the Universe in regard to the mass and area of a black hole able to host the known or observable universe.
If a black hole has so much mass that it warps space-time that wraps itself around mass when there is enough of it, to form a black hole, it has also been suggested that quantum structures collapse inside a black hole at the singularity. Mass exists because the smallest known particles pick up a third dimension in the Higgs field that is a scalar field that works in all directions; unlike a charged magnetic field. Unanswered are questions like does the Higgs field exist within a singularity even if no mass does, and all mass is made into massless energy. One wonders how many dimensions energy needs to exist, or if strings are simply energy, in addition to what energy is in-itself...Is energy a wave, and are plain waves trapped at the singularity compiled into themselves?
If the singularity of a black hole is pure energy, or if the singularity rolls up space-time within itself to a singularity too what fills the space outside the singularity, and what force or field prevents more space-time from entering into the singularity even if it is mostly devoid of mass? Space-time cannot exist apart from mass-energy embedded in it?
If quanta are annihilated in the singularity or converted into energy and space-time combined, what is the primordial field thereat and is it charged inwardly, or does it have any qualities that allow it to radiate outward or tunnel through the hyper-density of a singularity. At the event horizon what pull might be made upon the Universe existing on the event horizon? Could the appearances of gravity or expanding space-time be a consequence of unknown fields within the area between the event horizon and the singularity that act upon quanta and space-time on the edge or dimensional surface?
If from the inflationary epoch the universe gradually slowed down while expanding for seven billion years that could have been a function of mass attracting itself to other mass though gravity, and that acting partially antipathetical to the direction of travel of all mass on the event horizon toward the black hole. It was discovered that the Universe renewed expanding about seven billion years ago and that could have been a result not of dark energy, but of the end of the consolidating, semi-salutary or beneficial effects of the energy of the initial Hawking radiation escaping information burst of particle pair singles forming mass and energy being attracted by gravity and resumption of the inexorable pull of the black hole on all of the Universe living on its edge.
God always was; He is eternal. So He may manifest whatever form of being in whatever way and within any form of space-time he selects. He may issue a singularity at any space-time like that of an event horizon with its own space-time relativity scales.
There are many things that are unknown in cosmology yet that are interesting to speculate about. Problems of quantum uncertainty and linguistic indeterminism and the non-translatability of language lexicons and space to other lexicons space-time locations make philosophy a valuable tool for working up theories. God is immutable fortunately so while human understanding may vary and evolve at least they have Him, through the Son Jesus Christ, to rely on for certainty.
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