I am happy that Google did so. As a scientifically inclined person I am convinced that one does not need to have faith to believe in the existance of the spiritual. Its existance is demonstrable scientifically. My website reflects my effort to demonstrate this to myself. The reasonableness of this is hard without experiencing disharmony. I view the universe in such away. I live with that.
Today I illustrates this. Differences are constructs of our minds not reality. Letting them be a basis of internal disharmony is illadvised. As a basis of disharmony with others they bring murder war and destruction.
Astrophysics takes a Big Bang view of the Universe at its Origin. I say "at its origin" not "in its "origin". What was there before this singularity, from which we and all about us are derived ?
Tao
(The Way)
The way you can travel is not the actual Way,
The name given it is not its name
Heaven and our world born in the unamed,
name the mother of the infinite
Lao Tzu's Tao Ti Ching, 1st book, 1st chapter, 1st verse
(The Way)
The way you can travel is not the actual Way,
The name given it is not its name
Heaven and our world born in the unamed,
name the mother of the infinite
Lao Tzu's Tao Ti Ching, 1st book, 1st chapter, 1st verse
In my mind the last lines are entirely reconcilable with the preceeding paragraph. To me, they deal with the same thing. One is a scientific statement of it the other a spiritually based one.
With a high degree of scientific certainty the universe came into being very very quickly indeed. Calling that period 6 days, as does the Bible, if anything extends this period too far. It does not make it too short as scientifically orientated critics of creationism argue.
"But, but, but" I hear my reader say, horses, lions, us, our planet and its oceans and mountains did not come into being in that exploding fast expanding cloud of gasous matter, hydrogen(?)
Unfortunately, despite their training to the contrary, scientists are often far more literal than they really ought to be. There are often more so than creationists. Lao Tzu is never literal.
"The Way" by which Lao Tzu takes our hand to feel, understand and know is in its very being scientific. It is a process not a description. It is a process leading to understanding. In his work, as geology, hard mountains thrust up into our being and soft water gentles them down into valleys and the sea.
He leads us to wonder how soft completely pliable water can overcome the assertive strength of mountains. To immediately see, and feel, the scientific veracity of what he says one only has to go a heavily glaciated places on the planet. I have visited the Athabasca Ice Field in the Canadian Rockies. There ones see and feels the power and beauty of water overcoming rock.
At the beginning of the last period of big social and cultural change the key discovery apposite to most basic scientific analysis was Leibnitz's differential calculus, what Newton called fluxions. Newton's great insight was to refuse to follow Ptolemy. He did not try to make the geometric calculus then understood fit with observations of form. He set out to explain the processes by which the changes in that form thatcould be observed came about. He succeeded.
Bill Clintons once helped coin, "It is the economy stupid". His intent was to make his staff focus voters on the one issue important to his electoral victory. My equivalent is, "It is the process stupid". Embedded in Newtonian dynamics, a process, is the pattern of positioning and movement we see in our planets relative to the Sun. Newton's work with differential (changes) calculus (in what we can calculuate) gave humanity a never before achieved accuracy in predicting the movement of billiard balls, railway engines, planes, rockets and planets, i. e. masses relative to one another.
Newtonian physics got us of the Planet so we could see it and to the Moon so we could feel it. Our weight (relative mass) is different on the Moon as compared to the Earth. The masses of the Moon and Earth are hugely different. So our relative mass (weight) on each is hugely different. We know. We have been there. We have felt it. We have got the tee-shirt. We have conversed in the language of mass and this is gravity.
To re-focus back to our point. Six days to create our planet and all living things?
Gerard Debreu won the Nobel Prize in economics for a book entitled "The Theory of Value". In it he succeeded in using a very modern approach to the differential calculus to demonstrate what was necessary for the economic theory to be possibly true that price adjusted until in every market in an eonomy supply just equalled demand. He asked himself whither there existed ain that process a set of prices such, that if they were to prevail supply would exactly equal demand? The answer he derived was yes conditional on a very tightly defineds set of diffiuclt to credit circumstances.
For it to be true it is necessary that on the first day of Genesis one had to know what every single market would be at every future point in time. Not only this but that at what the price one could sell todays product for every future one. As an example at what price could we sell today's tomatoes in exchange for the bananas somebody might want to buy in 1000 or 10000 years time and every year in between. Observational this is clearly nonsense. It did win Nobel prize. Its "truth" thus bares thinking about.
Astrophysical observation with the Hubble Space Telescope found that the universe does not have a uniform distribution of matter. The basic theory surrounding the Big Bang would predict uniformity. For these diferences to be explicable it is necesary that at the time of the Big Bank the seeds of these observed differences existed. Subsequent work with the telescope has proved that "shortly"(?) after the Big Bang there were observable huge variations in the density of the expanding cloud that emanated from it. This pattern maps exactly onto the structure of the observable universe today. WOW! At the time of creation, 6 days?, the seeds of the current physical form of the universe was already in place to evolve to what we see now.
Astrophysicists tell us this is true. Why should we deny ourselves what we are told by such authority. If this is true then in that swirling mass of matter, plasma and energy there must have been the seeds that produced, horses lions, us, our planet and its mountains and rivers and seas. The evolutionary process creating these could easily be said to come to being in 6 days.
Without contradicitng oneself the veracity of evolution a process creating all this in those initial 6 days is hard to refute apart from s any precision about its definable length. As yet, no one has produced a story that convinces all of how the physical and chemical world evolved into the biological one or how single cell organisims evolved into multicelluar ones. However most are convinced of the processes by which multi-cellular oraganisms evolved to be lions, horse and us. A beautiful, detailed, description of the whole process including the doubtfull areas indicated is in Howard Bloom's The Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century"
So there we have it. We can be both creationists and evolutionists. This does leave open the question of intelligent design. The evolutionary process that generated us and the universe we can sense, so wonderfully, about us is very very simple indeed. It is simple but it can creat the huge variety of form we observe and feel. Can we not both as sceptical empirically driven scientists and "faith dream believers" not unite in accepting, as does Lao Tzu, that the Way was not the Way as we now name it because what it was and is must have been here before the Big Bang.
Thus, in the begining, the creation, was an evolving process. After its first few milli-seconds it began to develop scientifically inexplicable observable variations in structure. Imbedded in these stucture are the seeds that produced all we can sense about us today. Could the process that produced this be called intelligent design?
If you wish to say no then you have to explain where the process that produced such iregularities sprang from. Can you? If you feel you can where did that come from and so on? Neither science nor sprituality can bring closure to everything. The current conflict on these matters in the USA suggests Lao Zhu was wise not to try.
"But, but, but" I hear my reader say, horses, lions, us, our planet and its oceans and mountains did not come into being in that exploding fast expanding cloud of gasous matter, hydrogen(?)
Unfortunately, despite their training to the contrary, scientists are often far more literal than they really ought to be. There are often more so than creationists. Lao Tzu is never literal.
"The Way" by which Lao Tzu takes our hand to feel, understand and know is in its very being scientific. It is a process not a description. It is a process leading to understanding. In his work, as geology, hard mountains thrust up into our being and soft water gentles them down into valleys and the sea.
He leads us to wonder how soft completely pliable water can overcome the assertive strength of mountains. To immediately see, and feel, the scientific veracity of what he says one only has to go a heavily glaciated places on the planet. I have visited the Athabasca Ice Field in the Canadian Rockies. There ones see and feels the power and beauty of water overcoming rock.
At the beginning of the last period of big social and cultural change the key discovery apposite to most basic scientific analysis was Leibnitz's differential calculus, what Newton called fluxions. Newton's great insight was to refuse to follow Ptolemy. He did not try to make the geometric calculus then understood fit with observations of form. He set out to explain the processes by which the changes in that form thatcould be observed came about. He succeeded.
Bill Clintons once helped coin, "It is the economy stupid". His intent was to make his staff focus voters on the one issue important to his electoral victory. My equivalent is, "It is the process stupid". Embedded in Newtonian dynamics, a process, is the pattern of positioning and movement we see in our planets relative to the Sun. Newton's work with differential (changes) calculus (in what we can calculuate) gave humanity a never before achieved accuracy in predicting the movement of billiard balls, railway engines, planes, rockets and planets, i. e. masses relative to one another.
Newtonian physics got us of the Planet so we could see it and to the Moon so we could feel it. Our weight (relative mass) is different on the Moon as compared to the Earth. The masses of the Moon and Earth are hugely different. So our relative mass (weight) on each is hugely different. We know. We have been there. We have felt it. We have got the tee-shirt. We have conversed in the language of mass and this is gravity.
To re-focus back to our point. Six days to create our planet and all living things?
Gerard Debreu won the Nobel Prize in economics for a book entitled "The Theory of Value". In it he succeeded in using a very modern approach to the differential calculus to demonstrate what was necessary for the economic theory to be possibly true that price adjusted until in every market in an eonomy supply just equalled demand. He asked himself whither there existed ain that process a set of prices such, that if they were to prevail supply would exactly equal demand? The answer he derived was yes conditional on a very tightly defineds set of diffiuclt to credit circumstances.
For it to be true it is necessary that on the first day of Genesis one had to know what every single market would be at every future point in time. Not only this but that at what the price one could sell todays product for every future one. As an example at what price could we sell today's tomatoes in exchange for the bananas somebody might want to buy in 1000 or 10000 years time and every year in between. Observational this is clearly nonsense. It did win Nobel prize. Its "truth" thus bares thinking about.
Astrophysical observation with the Hubble Space Telescope found that the universe does not have a uniform distribution of matter. The basic theory surrounding the Big Bang would predict uniformity. For these diferences to be explicable it is necesary that at the time of the Big Bank the seeds of these observed differences existed. Subsequent work with the telescope has proved that "shortly"(?) after the Big Bang there were observable huge variations in the density of the expanding cloud that emanated from it. This pattern maps exactly onto the structure of the observable universe today. WOW! At the time of creation, 6 days?, the seeds of the current physical form of the universe was already in place to evolve to what we see now.
Astrophysicists tell us this is true. Why should we deny ourselves what we are told by such authority. If this is true then in that swirling mass of matter, plasma and energy there must have been the seeds that produced, horses lions, us, our planet and its mountains and rivers and seas. The evolutionary process creating these could easily be said to come to being in 6 days.
Without contradicitng oneself the veracity of evolution a process creating all this in those initial 6 days is hard to refute apart from s any precision about its definable length. As yet, no one has produced a story that convinces all of how the physical and chemical world evolved into the biological one or how single cell organisims evolved into multicelluar ones. However most are convinced of the processes by which multi-cellular oraganisms evolved to be lions, horse and us. A beautiful, detailed, description of the whole process including the doubtfull areas indicated is in Howard Bloom's The Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century"
So there we have it. We can be both creationists and evolutionists. This does leave open the question of intelligent design. The evolutionary process that generated us and the universe we can sense, so wonderfully, about us is very very simple indeed. It is simple but it can creat the huge variety of form we observe and feel. Can we not both as sceptical empirically driven scientists and "faith dream believers" not unite in accepting, as does Lao Tzu, that the Way was not the Way as we now name it because what it was and is must have been here before the Big Bang.
Thus, in the begining, the creation, was an evolving process. After its first few milli-seconds it began to develop scientifically inexplicable observable variations in structure. Imbedded in these stucture are the seeds that produced all we can sense about us today. Could the process that produced this be called intelligent design?
If you wish to say no then you have to explain where the process that produced such iregularities sprang from. Can you? If you feel you can where did that come from and so on? Neither science nor sprituality can bring closure to everything. The current conflict on these matters in the USA suggests Lao Zhu was wise not to try.
