This isn’t Diskworld.
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You seem to be following along well actually, I don’t think your age is a barrier to understanding.
They are all threads. What pulls them together is my point.
I agree with you that the world is reliable, but this is because of the reliability of God’s providence, through the sustaining power of his Word, testified to by the discovery of quantum physics that the universe is ultimately grounded not in physical clumps of matter but in nonphysical information, which has created and sustains in every moment a reality that is not merely physical but spiritual as well, that spiritual part having real physical effects on the word, in fact being the only cause of all physical effects, while our senses, being utterly unable to perceive this deeper reality, lead us to be confused like our friend @Roy here if we trust in them as true and reliable for fully informing us of everything there is to understand about our lives.
I’m not the one mixing up romantic comedy with quantum turtles.
The phrase stems from older, widespread myths, including Hindu cosmology (where elephants stand on a turtle) and Native American “Turtle Island” beliefs, which the expression “turtles all the way down” satirizes.
The point is an infinite regress of material causes is an absurd and unsophisticated thing to believe.
Luckily we don’t live in such a world. Science has discovered our world is information, but even many scientists haven’t fully thought that through yet.
Even Einstein, who saw so much that others could not, spent the last decades of his life resisting it.
That seems like a considerable overstatement. How do you think science went about distinguishing ‘our world is information’ from ‘our world can be described as information’?
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I’m reminded of an instance in my university days when a friend I was with got told by someone, “Well, that may be true for you – we each have our own truth”. He stomped on the guy’s foot; the guy exclaimed “You stomped on my foot! Why?!” My friend said, “That may be true for you, but I have my own truth”. When the other guy just stared, my friend said, “See how dumb your view is?”
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Funny how often Paul talks about one, then.
Your statement is like a blind guy saying, "There is no “visual dimension” to reality. Just because you can’t perceive it doesn’t mean it’s not there. All that can be said from the text is that we lack a spiritual equivalent to vision.
True, but that has nothing to do with our senses. A tongue cannot see, but it can’t tell the eye there is no visual dimension to life; an ear cannot smell, but it cannot tell the nose that there is no olfactory dimension to life. So that our physical senses cannot perceive the spiritual dimension does not mean that dimension isn’ there, it merely means that our spiritual sense is deficient.
That sounds like panentheism, long ago noted as a heresy. It also goes against Paul’s distinction between the physical and the spiritual, the natural and the spiritual.
You’ve got a good idea, but pushing it to this extreme leaves the realm of the Word.
But to then deny the reality of physical causes is equally absurd.
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It’s all words. There is no spiritual dimension in the sense that the spiritual is not a dimension of OUR universe and subject to it.
More appropriate would be that our universe is a result or dimension of the spiritual reality, or that both are a dimension or result of the Word of God.
Panentheism is not widely regarded as a heresy, never the less, that is not what I am even saying.
We are not in God (panentheism), but rather in his Word which created and sustains all things, physical and spiritual.
To say that physical causes then seem not “real” is getting hung up on the implicit assumption that a base physical reality is needed for something to be real. No…. “Real” is not defined as “existing apart from God’s sustaining power”. That’s just how it was defined by Aristotle, a Pagan, with a Pagan conception of God as part of the universe.
A base physical reality does not exist. Not even in physics (anymore). The reality of what we experience is “physical” in the sense that that is what we experience, but the reality is “sustained by the Word” which means it has no physical “essence” in itself… the Word is it’s only essence.
We can’t equivocate on this.
Any physical system could be “described” as information, even Newtonian mechanics. Especially Newtonian mechanics. So that’s not what we’re talking about.
Here is a crystal clear example: the changes in the world after the fall are the physical effects of the spiritual reality of our separation from God.
We’re not denying the reality of our experience, only denying that it is an experience of self-existent Aristotelian matter as opposed to an experience of the Word of God.
That doesn’t answer my question – what are we talking about?
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Are you sure you are awake as you read this?
Can you prove you are not being fed signals in a pod tended by optimus robots?
Might you be an avatar in a alien massive multiplayer online game?
I expect that God is capable of building a durable creation, but I do not know the relationship between Creator and creation. Of this I am certain however, you don’t either.
- I’ve mentioned the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies before, and do so now: Perceptual Studies Resources
