The World Created Itself. So, Logically....

mil • 8 hours ago So how do we know that "the big, beautiful world around us wasn't created by itself"? Isn't it just as likely that it grew itself spontaneously, out of a blizzard of loose parts? As in fact science would lead us to believe, and to explain in some detail? "God" is a very personal concept. So there are probably as many different ideas of what God is as there are people. Back when I was a kid I knew a couple of Catholic kids. And we got to talking about religion. And finally one of them said "You're lucky. You can believe anything you want to. Us? We have to either be Catholic or anti-Catholic."

greenpeaceRdale1844coop mil • an hour ago • edited "Created by itself" Well, work with that idea. You´re hypothesizing. Can´t scientists discover a Higgs Field cosmological generator? Truly, why forget mechanisms? Clocks are fun. "God" as a personal concept is part of any individual´s organismic reality, as a human, but anthropology indicates that shamanic talent is as real as talented toolmakers, artists, and hunter-warriors, or leaders, traditionally not least of all. Modern notions of human potential for any individual as a bio-psychosocial creature interested in the field and self-help books advance the notions of the Christian Enlightenment and American Civil Rights that have lead to US-UN human rights. Just, randomly? Or in Jesus´ legacy of loving integrity. Well, the Islamic leaders of the world have overwhelmingly rejected UN human rights, so you know. China, Russia, and Brazil have been bristling as well in the OECD. So, getting clear about the power and nature of Western science and empiricism more broadly is key. Individualism isn´t transcendental. Just like snowflakes aren´t rocks, clouds, or hydrological cycles that transcend them. The Big Bang and the inflationary Universe with Dark Matter and Energy are amazing developments in scientific knowledge, as is the subatomic world and Higgs Fields. As far as they go. UN human rights, however, not atom-smashers, are what Star Trek´s science fiction Prime Directive ultimately came down to, as far as they took it. Start with scientific laws of physical objects´ behavior. What is a "scientific law"? Well, lawful regularities. Down to the Higgs Field. And so, is the Higgs Field "self-generating"? Pretty cool. Except, how did the Big Bang happen, with those significant "Red Shifting Galaxies"? It splurged all its energy, say. Now comes the Big Crunch in googleplex of trillions of years. It´s a big cycle, like some ancient Hindus postulated. Except, science perceives conditions that all creep in and have to be answered. The expanding and accelerating Universe, in which space seems to be expanding with matter-energy´s expanding motion. It doesn´t look like it´s going to crunch. Just go splat and hiss, on a googleplex astronomical scale. So, we have to ask ourselves about relativity as a scientific philosophical principle. Do we know everything, all the principles involved? Are Dark Energy and Dark Matter indicators of more things we don´t know, that well or at all? But, that´s where paying attention to details starts to make a difference. I like Fritjof Capra, and have surveyed his work to some degree. I recommend him highly. He was involved in atom-smashing type physics, and started to meditate. He met Krishnamurti. Capra began to wonder about differences in perspectives. What is the significance of how Einstein, Heisenberg, and so on began to see the interconnectedness of energy and matter? Matter being converted into energy is one thing, and matter´s constituent energetic atomic structure is inherent in that. Electrons, Heisenberg uncertainly in orbit around protons, that are composed of whirling, swirling probability thingies. At the atomic level, those electrons and their electron clouds form standing waves and patterns. A standing wave, like a rope whipped, is energy in a packet, a particle out of a wave. So, stuff like that was what Capra began noticing as he meditated and noticed wisdom in Eastern religions, like Buddhist perception of emptiness and impermanence. The Buddha himself, when reflecting on two basic realities, perception and the sense-perceived world, thought about the question, Are they united or not? He identified a quality he called "spiritual" and the source of that unity as "Spirit." He perceived its dominating presence in the moral law that underlay the process of crude nature being transformed in humans into nirvana´s enlightenment, according to the Four Noble Truths. So, what is the world´s self that "created itself"? Is it driven by time? By space, matter-energy? The Universe has gotten big, and is getting bigger. Really big. Really, really big. What can do that? What can cause that? The Universe/the world itself doesn´t actually communicate to us. We study its physical and energetic processes and objects. Until we come to the human realm. When scientists start messing with the human realm, they can´t. Or else moral questions arise. The physical Universe, however, doesn´t broadcast "morality." When we know our History of Science, it is part of Religion. Our ability to formulate "scientific laws" reflects the basis of science itself in a moral network of people, how Christian monastic schools became Christian modern Universities using the Christian Enlightenment´s secular approach to non-denominational, non-religious scholarship. Yet, morality keeps creeping back into scholarship that tries to treat people, now animals and the environment, as merely "mechanistic." What is that would endow us with a sense of the moral and sacred like that? If not the physical world, then the cause of scientific laws? But, morality isn´t actually "scientific", but in the realm of the social empirical, not just social scientific, but philosophical and "properly basic," at least as far as Jesus´ two Commandments and the spiritual-religious experience of coherent Christian loving integrity following Jesus´ legacy for Moses and God. With resonance from every other spiritual-religious tradition, with the Chrstian-derived, pluralistically-agreed upon UN and human rights as a secular touching stone. The world didn´t create itself. A source capable of moral qualities that are more than just physical, that we know as "human," that emerged in Jesus´ legacy of loving integrity and resonate with other cultural traditions. Anthropologically, tribal cultures have had mythic insight into a Creator formulated that attains the transcendental character of God as logical necessity and providential Source informing prophets and relating to shamans. Something created itself. The physical world requires qualities that it doesn´t have as an effect of a transcendental cause. We gain insight into that not with scientific instruments, but the religious method: meditation, prayer, and so on. milo • 2 hours ago The realms of God and science do not intersect. Science can seek to explain anything for which there is evidence. But there is no evidence anywhere of God. It's just an a priori assumption people make. So I will just posit "stuff IS". That's all you can say. Or, as an Indian sage wrote around 500 AD, The world is infinite in every direction, It has no beginning and it has no end. As it has no beginning it cannot have been created, And as it was not created, there can have been no Creator. Neither can God be disproven. The notion that a God created us all is exactly as likely as there being, as the Igorot of Luzon once believed, 33 different realms-- heavens and hells-- each one with its own reigning monarch. I'm very comfortable with both views... although I consider the Igorot worldview to be more Swedenborgian, hence more charming. Well, you didn´t follow my reasoning, beginning with the OP. When you don´t refute, at least key points, you have already missed the boat. But, the truth has nothing to fear, and only love to share. Under every rock, and under any rug. That´s where the touches of UN Euro-American freedom and human rights come from in the first place. I made that point up a bit. But, it is clearly blinders that are at work, or I like the metaphor of muddied windows. Plato used the cave, as far as it went. "The realms of God and science do not intersect. Science can seek to explain anything for which there is evidence." First point: science seeks to evaluate physical types of evidence and provide explanations for physical events. Thus, medically attested but medically impossible physical healings are widely ignored by medical science. M Klepees was at the Mayo Clinic at age 20 suffering from cerebral palsy brain damage since 2 years old. She became Christian at 12, and at the clinic, was twitching so painfully she prayed, received a vision, and sought a church where she was healed. The Mayo Clinic registered her changed condition, but did not record the circumstances of the testimony. Larry Dossey MD has written about Catholics healed at Lourdes and certified as miraculous healings by the Lourdes´ board. Even those cases, he explains are not published in the standard medical literature because standard medicine has at best the term "spontaneous remission" that ignores non-organic, psychosomatic type factors. Bill Owens suffered liver failure on a hike, and at a Florida hospital defied doctors´ diagnoses. As he declined, his church minister organized a prayer for healing at his bedside. He recovered fully after the prayer. Thus, as far as direct forms of God´s divine interaction, there is medically attested, medically impossible healings with spiritual-religious testimony. L Mehl-Medrona MD works with cross-cultural healing techniques, and has testimonies of Native American shamans´ healing, among others. Your citation of an Indian sage rejects modern scientific understanding of Cosmology. The Big Bang indicates that the Universe had a beginning. Asserting "it cannot have been created....." by an Indian sage is dogma, and its premise of "no beginning" is refuted by scientific understanding, to repeat, and its conclusions a non-sequitor except for doctrinal confirmation bias. Your indulgence in Igorot of Luzon, or Swedenborgian ideas would have more empirical, and scientific, integrity if you understood the History of Science accurately alone. Science also provides metaphors that involve physical descriptions for concepts. Gravity, thus, was attraction at a distance for Newton as he philosophically reasoned about the basic way that an apple and the moon seemed to interact with the Earth by the math. As Einstein much later thought philosophically about his Field Equations, he came to propose his general relativity and geometric theory of gravitation. If you ever studied any History of Science, you simply can´t lose sight of the fact that "Science" was first called "natural philosophy." Newton was a natural philosopher as he worked through the 1690s. He is known now by the current expression "scientist," but in either case, was involved in studying physical phenomena. Some know he studied light, as with a prism, and designed an improvement for telescopes using a mirror with the lenses. He studied Galileo´s work, and Kepler´s use of Tycho Brahe´s low tech high quality astronomical data, as well as DesCartes´ analytical geometry that innovated math variables. As natural philosopher "scientists," they all studied natural physical phenomena in what became known as "physics." Robert Boyle, A Lavoisier, J Priestley, and others did work in what became chemistry with Lavoisier isolating oxygen. Again, physical phenomena in chemistry. In biology, A Vesalius and W Harvey studied blood circulation, again, physical phenomena. In the 1600s, also, DesCartes and Spinoza both talked about the emotions as "passions." By 1896, Sigmund Freud a neurologist had patients without identifiable organic causes of illness and pains. He started using early forms of simple hypnosis, asking his patients to relax, focus on the pain, and talk about any thoughts. As they shared memories focused on the pain, the pain would begin to diminish. The memories related to the pain led back to unpleasant childhood situations including sexual contact. Freud began to use the term "conversion" to describe the way feelings in unpleasant situations became repressed and then expressed as physical pain. In therapy, he used terms like "abreaction" to describe how the patient got better by talking and overall reconnecting with the repressed emotions. Freud wasn´t actually observing muscles and nerves, but talking with people, his patients. People, their thoughts, and their emotions can´t actually be treated objects dropped to test gravity or chemicals in test tubes. Yet, psychiatry and clinical psychology have developed conflicting groups of professionals, some focused on prescribing pills that address chemical approaches while others focus on communicative types of approaches. Sociology and anthropology also began to develop in the 1800s, with scholars like the US´s LH Morgan a pioneering social anthropologist who looked at kinship structures, and the relationship between material culture like technology and societal structure factors like property relations, governance, and intellectual development. Since humans are involved in all these subjects, "scientific philosophy" has had to develop empirical observations dealing with the complexities of human behavior. Experimentation has been extremely limited. However, many important concepts have been observed empirically and been useful. The sociologist Durkheim observed suicides, and developed the concept of anomie about the intense angst people can feel when there is social disruption as in the financial industry.