UNDERSTANDING THE NATURE OF GOD.

P1.          There is only one way in which the existence of a creator is explicable or conceivable, and that is as a first cause.

P2.          There is no science for how life began.

P4.          We do not know how life began and cannot guess how it might have began.

P4.          With no contrary proof it is exigent to suggest that life itself had a first cause.

P5.          That first cause is unknown and unknowable, which are the attributes we might accord to a god or creator.

P6.          The unknown origin of life itself leads to the conclusion that the originator of life must have been some such being that does not accord with the known laws of nature.

P7.          Psychic, or spiritual matters do not accord with the known laws of nature.

P8.          Psychic laws are attributable to the divine.

P9.          Some form of psychical law is required to understand the initiation of life onto a sterile backdrop.

P10.       Without the divine life cannot be understood.

P11.       God is a conscious originator and cause of life.

C.            God exists.

If the above is tautologist, it is so for a reason.  If god is a first cause, god proves its own existence.  There are two arguments I can conceive of that can be levelled at the above set of premises. 

First, it can be countered that life can have another cause, we just don’t know what it is.  It is hard to counter this argument except to say that for the theist it is already known what the first cause is.  Science in this regard is only playing catch up, but it cannot and will not discover the cause of life itself, for god is the first cause.

Secondly it might be argued that a psychic or spiritual phenomenon cannot be the cause of a physical or animate thing.  But this is uncertain.  Many theists believe that the mind can of itself cause certain things to happen.  So the greatest “mind” can surely make the one necessary thing for life to happen.

If the premises do not entail, but nonetheless give inductive reasons to believe the conclusion, then we might say certain other things which seem reasonable and which correlate with what has already been said.

It is not necessary that god has created everything on earth.  God only has to be the creator of life on earth.  And in this case it is necessary only that he be a first cause.  Everything else about science and its discoveries only strengthens this view of god.  God was the original effect.  Whatever he planted on earth, perhaps a single cell, contained within it all that was necessary, a blueprint if you will, of all possible life on earth.  God is not responsible for the things that happen in the day to day.  God is not even responsible for the dangers we dig up, for the pollutions we cause, for the diseases we acquire.  God did not create the earth, just a single life cell, the original DNA of life, a blueprint for everything living which was to follow.

So God does not reward in heaven.  As it were, God rewarded the empty cosmos with life.  We are already the reward of god.  And this places upon our shoulders a heavy burden, to do “on earth as it is done in heaven,” that is, “to be creators, not destroyers.”  For what is God in Heaven if not the original creator?  Perhaps God has only created one thing.  But how can he grow tired of that thing, when it itself evolves and changes, like a play continuously being written?

Indeed it might be argued that life is the union between God and the Abyss, that God is the difference between inanimate rock and flourishing life. 

The moon is a rock.  So is Mars.  Nowhere in the universe is it known that life exists except here.  What caused life here but not elsewhere?  The “conditions for life”?  But what are these remarkable conditions?  Are they not something we only know a posteriori?  There are no such “conditions for life” without a creator for life, that is how I would argue theism.

Further proofs.  They are looking on Mars for water.  To see if there are the proofs of life on Mars.  As if water of itself is a proof that the conditions for life exist.  But this is all a nonsense.  You can have rock and water and yet not have life.  The two do not magically combine to produce something other than what they originally are.  And can science believe in something so fanciful as that the sun beating down on inanimate rock for aeons beyond count or comprehension will one day result in life?  In what way?  How?  This is what you have to ask science.  You have to ask science what is going on in its head to have such a far fetched notion.  Science says that God is a far fetched notion.  I say that science cannot see itself.

Further proofs.  These are not proofs of the existence of a creator, but it is philosophical proof that science itself relies on far stranger fictions than imagining a creator of life itself.  The universe is vast.  It has been around for approximately six billion years.  Supposedly life must exist elsewhere, according to science.  If it can occur here, then the “conditions of life” must exist elsewhere.  Now our solar system is hardly the oldest solar system going around.  Some solar systems are indeed billions of years older than ours.  Presumably the life, if there is any, on their planets must be billions of years advanced from ours.  Now science tells us many remarkable things, the least remarkable is the idea of space travel.  Space travel makes sense.  It happens.  It’s like driving a car, all you need is the craft and the fuel and, presumable, you can go anywhere.

So where are the visitors?  Where are the Martians?  Where are the aliens?  We must suppose that science could bring them here.  Already science indicates how we might travel far beyond our solar system, the main limitation is the time it takes to travel anywhere, but these aliens have two billion years on us, surely in two billion years they would be here by now?  Or if not, then something, we are sending out waves and sounds to the universe, and searching the cosmos for anything resembling anything that might be being sent our way.  And yet there is nothing.  The universe really is empty.  And if the universe is empty apart from ourselves, what then?  How did life happen here but not elsewhere?  Surely the “conditions of life” must be rare indeed if it has happened only once in an almost limitless universe?

I think this is a very strong argument against “the conditions of life.”  If there is such a thing these “conditions’ must exist elsewhere, not just here.  Or the conditions must be so rarefied that science will never understand them, or replicate them, or explain them, or find them elsewhere.  Or we go back to the idea of a creator.  Why hasn’t the creator replicated this creation elsewhere?  And if this creation has been replicated, why is there no proof in the known universe?  But one thing we can be sure of and that is that we do not know our creator, we do not understand or comprehend the creator, therefore we cannot know the mind nor the powers of the creator.  This is important because the creator may have been able to create once and once only.  If this is the case even more reason why we on earth ought to take our responsibilities seriously for fear of disappointing our creator, of being the cause of the end of the creator’s vision.

The other proof I was thinking of was to do with time travel.  Science tells us that time travel is possible.  But philosophy requires more than this.  We need to know that it is logically possible.  It is possible for my kin in the future to come back in time and kill my only daughter, thereby causing the cessation of their existences.  Nothing about time travel makes sense.  As I asked in class last week, why aren’t these distant kin close by advising me now as I write this so that I don’t get it wrong?  Why isn’t there our future kin here now in the same way that we might expect aliens to be here now?  Isn’t it the same problem?  That their non existence is proof, albeit only inferential, that they cannot exist?  Moreover, if time is the fourth dimension, and a time slice here is as solid as a time slice ten thousand years ago, then it is also true that a time slice ten thousand years in the future already exists today and but a step through the door will take us there.  Perhaps there are no missing people, just people who have stepped through a door into the future?  But doesn’t this imply that the future is being added to, that the past is being subtracted from?  So there is less here than there was, because some of it has gone somewhere else?  But this seems to be a nonsense, doesn’t science itself preclude adding to or subtracting from the total mass of the universe?  Isn’t this necessary?  Doesn’t Einstein himself insist that the totality of all existent energy is constant?  So if science is wrong about time travel, and about aliens, what else can it be wrong from?

I have a feeling that the plan was not conceived in an instant, that not everything was decided, that not everything has happened, and if this is true it is perfectly in accord with a creator that was the first cause of life, which is after all all we can require of our god, to be our first cause, the reason for our existence, the purpose of our lives…

Considerations on the origins of life.

Arguing the case against identity theory.

Our technology is insufficient to know everything about us, but we are simply a product of physical being and neurons firing, according to physicalism.  Human consciousness seems to follow the rules of physics like the spinning of the globe.  Everything seems to be phenomenological.

Counter arguments.  There is insufficient evidence of the laws of consciousness to conclude that they are nothing other than neurons firing.  Physicalism denies the existence of free will, which is an experiential component of everyday life.  Unless there is evidence to deny the existence of an independent consciousness Smart fails to prove his case.

We are concerned with life and its properties.  There is no greater requirement in understanding the nature of life and consciousness than to know its origins, how it began, how it is formed, what it is made from.  When we acquire knowledge of the origins of life we will be in a position to determine if it is simply a construct of cells, or whether it has other properties that it cannot be broken down into.  What is life, that is the question.

The other point is that physicalism implies being able to predict behaviour based upon full knowledge of all the composite parts.  If you cannot know the beginning of something, what it is or what it is made of, it suggests you will not have full knowledge for predictive purposes.  Moreover if life itself contains a component that we will call consciousness, or awareness of self, then that component may well be unpredictive, and not physical but psychic in nature.  So unless the creation of life can be demonstrated in terms merely of the physical cosmos that we know, then physicalism is a misnomer.

Physicalism claims that the mind is composed of things identifiable by physics, but if the laws of physics do not explain life then how can they explain the mind?

I have begun a strange journey to discover the origins of life.  If the origins of life itself are unknown and unknowable philosophy that relies on physics to comprehend the laws of life are a nonsense.  Physicalism, that relies entirely on the laws of physics, laws which themselves fail to explain how life originates, cannot be the whole story.  Consciousness may be a product of the brain, but what is the brain a product of?  Organic matter?  But what is organic matter?  Organic matter comes from organic matter, but where does organic matter originate?  If it is a product of physics we don’t know it.

Awareness of our awareness of things seems to be an awareness unlike our awareness of things.  This unlikeness means that mind correlates with the brain, but is not the brain, it does not correlate with itself, it correlates with what it is not.  The mind, or consciousness, or awareness, accords with the brain but is not it, it is not only something else, it is something more.  This is something psychic, that is non physical, that is, that does not reside in physics and does not equate to the laws of physics.

What changes something from inorganic to organic?  Tell me that and you will have the first nature of god.  Unless you can explain the creation of life in terms of physics you cannot claim physicalism, or what you have is an implausible physicalism, a half-baked physicalism, a far-fetched physicalism.  The laws of nature are physics plus something, just as the mind is the physical geography of the brain plus something, and it is the kiss of this something with the physical brain that is consciousness, or awareness of self, it is the id, the idea of self, the comprehension of comprehension itself.

The relevance of the nature of identity to the origins of life are clear.  The theory of mind dovetails nicely with ideas of god, self and freedom, and the questions of causation and determinism.

Determinism insists that everything is explicable.  But for everything to be explicable you must have a start, a beginning, a first cause, or instance, if you will, from which everything follows.  If you don’t have a first instance, or cause, then how can something follow?  How can life be caused or determined?

It’s important here not to get confused with ideas about the existence of a creator.  There may have been  a creator for all that we know, but if there was a creator, the creator is solely the creator of the first instance.  The creator did not reveal himself to Moses, or speak to Moses, or write the good book, or part the sea and free a people.  That is all a nonsense.  The first cause is something else, the kiss of life, the lips of Christ, the first cell, the seed of life itself.

We can be free.  If there is indeterminism there is freedom, and there is certainly indeterminism.  There is freedom in the sense that life is unpredictable and uncertain.  It is not known or knowable.  For there is something that is more than inanimate inorganic rock and water to life, it is infused with a certain something which gives it self and awareness.  Even if awareness is a product of our neurons, our neurons are something else, they are products of as living organism, and can’t just be reduced to atoms or structures.  As … said, there is a ghost in the machine.  If the first cause is inexplicable it is also indeterminate.  If it is not inexplicable then I can’t wait for the science that explains it.  In fact – wait for it, this gets grandiose – I want ten billion stars expended so the one person in the future can come back from their far away place and tell us now the explicable nature of life itself, and while they are here they can explain away the paradoxes of time into the bargain.  In fact if we are going to expend ten billion stars – how many does the universe hold? – then I hope they come with quite a few interesting tales to tell, and explanations aplenty.