Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Book Review: Max Tegmark's "Our Mathematical Universe" - A Taxonomy of Multiverses, Levels I - IV


Does the idea of parallel universes really describe reality? (Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Stolovy
Spitzer Science Center/Caltech)

When does multiverse speculation cross into fantasy?
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129520.900-when-does-multiverse-speculation-cross-into-fantasy.html?full=true#.UuEFVSko69J

by Mark Buchanan
January 21, 2014

Book information
Our Mathematical Universe: My quest for
the ultimate nature of reality, by Max Tegmark
Published by: Allen Lane
Price: £25

In Our Mathematical Universe, Max Tegmark tries hard to make the seemingly outlandish theories of multiverses sound almost obvious and unavoidable.

SOME years ago, the philosopher David Hull wrote a book entitled Science as a Process, in which he argued that science works through an evolutionary process. Imaginative scientists toss out ideas and hypotheses, creating and maintaining the equivalent of natural variation in biological populations. Then other scientists test those ideas, using evidence and logic to select out and eliminate the ones that don't measure up. Variation and selection, repeated: that's a form of evolution.

But there is a condition. This only works properly with a diversity of personalities and specialisms among scientists. Research would get nowhere if it were driven solely by the dour, hard-boiled sceptics who only believe on the basis of solid evidence. The sceptics feed off the raw creative material of the speculators, who imagine what might be possible and never stop dreaming about "what if". The speculators produce the diversity of ideas on which selection can act, and they require, in turn, the discipline of sceptics to stop them from running away into fantasy.

And yet fantasy is the very word that occurs to many – including some physicists – when they hear some of the ideas popular in cosmology, a discipline which aims to answer the big questions about the origins of the universe.

The fantasy trajectory started off gently enough when physicist Alan Guth proposed that many puzzling features of the observable universe – such as the extremely homogeneous distribution of matter within it – would be explained if the universe had undergone a short, early period of rapid expansion, termed inflation. Extremely rapid, as in expanding in volume by a factor of 1078 in a time of 10-30 seconds.

Since then, other inflationary cosmologists have opened the speculative throttle so fully that physicists now talk routinely of such things as an infinitude of parallel universes, or a "multiverse". In the multiverse, every conceivable world exists, and individuals identical to you and I live out parallel lives in places we cannot have access to.

Is this still science? Or has inflationary cosmology veered towards something akin to religion? Some physicists wonder. The enthusiasts, of course, see it very differently. Max Tegmark, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, certainly does. His new book, Our Mathematical Universe, is an impassioned defence of the theory, especially its implications for parallel universes.

The book is an excellent guide to recent developments in quantum cosmology and the ongoing debate over theories of parallel universes. Tegmark tries hard to make the seemingly outlandish sound almost obvious and unavoidable, and offers a taxonomy to help organise a zoo of imagined parallel universes.

As it turns out, the terms parallel universes and multiverse mean many things to different people. But Tegmark's taxonomy of parallel universes are all, he argues, implied by observed evidence and the laws of physics.

His first set, the Level I Multiverse, refers to an idea that many cosmologists already accept. Rapid early inflation would have created what Tegmark describes as "universe-sized parts of space so far away from us that light from them hasn't had time to reach us". These other domains – or "universes" – could well exist, although we currently have no observational evidence for them.

Tegmark's Level II Multiverse refers to a bolder idea, championed by physicist Alexander Vilenkin and others. There may be other domains of space also created by inflation that are too far away to see. These will forever remain out of our reach because continuing inflation drives them from us faster than the speed of light. This idea refers to real, distinct, physical universes that cannot ever be observed.

At this point in the taxonomy, however, Tegmark leaves cosmology behind. In reading, I began to feel that his aim is to see parallel universes in as many places as he can. Enter the Level III Multiverse. This turns out to be a language for talking about the mathematics of quantum theory using the many worlds interpretation of that theory, first proposed by physicist Hugh Everett in the 1950s.

This interpretation describes all physical processes as part of an ongoing, perpetual branching of the universe into many other universes. It is indeed possible to interpret quantum theory this way, but readers should know that many other interpretations, equally in tune with observations, don't invoke the idea of parallel universes at all.

Then there is the Level IV Multiverse. Again, this has nothing to do with cosmology, but is an ambitious thought about mathematics. Tegmark argues that reality isn't simply described by mathematics, as most physicists readily accept, but that it is, in fact, mathematical.

Furthermore, he believes that the mathematics of our universe is just one of an infinity of conceivable mathematical structures. He goes on to wonder: if this mathematical structure is a universe, why not all the others? And so he makes a bold claim – that all other mathematical structures should also exist physically as further parallel universes.

Of course, we don't really know. The history of science ought to have taught us that just because something sounds unbelievable, it doesn't mean it is. Human history, after all, is one long progression of people being surprised by what they previously thought was impossible. Isolated tribes learned of other islands and continents, and of the other peoples living there, for example. In modern times we learned of other planets, galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on. Why not universes? It might even feel quite natural for our universe to just be one of many, especially in the sense of the Level I Multiverse [where the revealing lights from other universes haven yet to catch up to us].

Even so, there does seem to be something a little questionable with this vast multiplication of multiverses. While the notion of the Level I Multiverse at least makes contact with real physics and possible evidence, it isn't clear that any of these other ideas ever could. Multiverse champions seem quite happy, even eager, to invoke infinite numbers of other universes as mechanisms for explaining things we see in our own universe. In a sense, multiverse enthusiasts take a "leap of faith" every bit as big as the leap to believing in a Creator, as physicist Paul Davies put it in an article in The New York Times.

In the end, this isn't science so much as philosophy using the language of science. "Inflation", Tegmark notes, "is the gift that keeps on giving, because every time you think it can't possibly predict something more radical than it already has, it does."

This quote is a good example of Tegmark as a creative, speculating scientist, churning out radical ideas as rapidly as possible. It suggests that prediction alone is the point and measure of science, whether or not those predictions turn out to be true.

But all writers overstate their position on occasion, and uninhibited speculation is only one side of Tegmark's brand of science. Much of his early work, which built his reputation as a physicist, wasn't of this kind at all. It was hard, empirical stuff, developing methods for analysing data from large-scale telescope projects to measuring fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.

Perhaps this book is proof that the two personalities needed for science – the speculative and sceptic – can readily exist in one individual.

Mark Buchanan is a visiting professor at the IMT Institute for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy





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Tegmark's Multiverse Taxonomy*

Level 1 - Light from more distant universes has yet to reach us in ours

Level 2 - Light from more distant universes will never reach us

Level 3 - Our present universe is part of a larger continuing process birthing more and more universes
                 both familiar and other-worldly

Level 4 - What we can imagine in our mathematics is not simply the discipline of mathematics,
                 but an infinity of nether-world universes imaginable and unimaginable

*Assuming multiverses cannot be explained in any other way
under the science of quantum cosmology.
- R.E. Slater






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